The Angular Mini-Book is a
guide to getting started with Angular. You'll learn how to develop a bare-bones application, test it, and
deploy it. Then you'll move on to adding Bootstrap, Angular Material, continuous integration, and authentication.
Spring Boot is a popular framework for building REST APIs. You'll learn how to integrate Angular with Spring Boot and use security best practices like HTTPS and a content security policy.
For book updates, follow @angular_book on Twitter.
The JHipster Mini-Book is a
guide to getting started with hip technologies today: Angular, Bootstrap, and Spring
Boot. All of these frameworks are wrapped up in an easy-to-use project called JHipster.
This book shows you how to build an app with JHipster, and guides you through the plethora of tools, techniques and options you can use. Furthermore, it explains the UI and API building blocks so you understand the underpinnings of your great application.
For book updates, follow @jhipster-book on Twitter.
I have a 60 GB firewire drive that we resurrected from Julie's dead PowerBook, but I'm interested in getting a bigger one to start regular backups. CNET recommends the Maxtor OneTouch II (300GB), but there's lots of bad reviews. 200 GB should be enough for the next year or two. Any recommendations? Is there one that can be used to backup OS X, Windows and Linux?
I think I have a serious case of OS Rot on my PowerBook. Despite the fact that it's been extremely slow lately, I went ahead and used it to deliver my Comparing Web Frameworks talk at Java in Action. I was a little hesitant when I agreed to do this talk - mainly because it required me to stretch a one-hour presentation into a 3-hour presentation. I figured the best way to take up all that time would be to do some live coding. So I recorded a whole bunch of "Live Templates" in IDEA and went in to the talk thinking I could pull it off. To say the least, my Mac didn't cooperate and the "live coding" I did failed miserably. JR Boyens hits the nail on the head in his review. Cameron only attended the first part (before the live coding started) and it looks like I did pretty good in the first hour.
Lessons Learned: 1) Have a backup plan and 2) don't do Comparing Web Frameworks as a 3-hour tutorial. I've never had a backup plan in the 2 years I've been speaking at conferences. I've been pretty lucky though, my demos have always worked. I was due for a failure. For my afternoon session about Ajax and Spring, I moved all the live coding stuff to the Dell laptop I had with me. This worked much better, but I was again spat on by the Demo Gods and over half of my demos failed to work. Oh well, I guess it just wasn't my day.
The good news is that all the demos are available online. The master/detail applications I developed are already part of Equinox, and the Ajax demo is available at http://demo.raibledesigns.com/equinox-ajax. Features include an ajax-ified Display Tag with AjaxAnywhere, an editable text with script.aculo.us (click on a user's first name in the table), in page updates with DWR (on the detail screen) and a zip-code autocomplete/city-state auto-populate with script.aculo.us and DWR. If there's any interest, I can write up a tutorial on how each feature was constructed. In the meantime, you can download the equinox-ajax project from java.net.
After my Ajax talk, I was approached by a couple of the AjaxTags developers, and they showed me some very cool widgets they're working on. I definitely plan on digging into this project in the very near future.
I just arrived at Disney's fancy "Yacht Club" for the Java in Action show. Today was a fun day - Julie and I took Abbie and Jack to Magic Kingdom and had a great time. Abbie got to meet Mickey Mouse, Winnie the Pooh, Eor and Tigger. She was scared of Mickey, but warmed up to Pooh and friends pretty quickly. It was weird - it kept raining off and on throughout the day, but it didn't seem to put a damper on anyone's spirits. Unlike Colorado, rain doesn't cool anything down. In fact, the humidity seems to crank the temperature up a notch or two.
Tomorrow is a full day - I have a 3 hour tutorial on web frameworks in the morning, followed by an hour of Ajax + Spring in the afternoon. After that, it's back to vacation-mode until I return to Denver next Tuesday.
I'd post the slides from my talks, but they're starting to make less and less sense (in downloadable form) as I add more images and less bullets. Besides, I plan on coding and conversing for most of the talks. That's the fun part of speaking at conferences - who wants to listen to a presentation anyway? Why does the good conversation have to take place in the hallways? Can't it happen right in the room?
From beyond bullets:
Larry Lessig has been called a PowerPoint virtuoso, and his approach recently inspired Dick Hardt, Founder and CEO of Sxip Identify, to use a similar film-inspired approach in his recent presentation, "Identity 2.0" at a conference called OSCON 2005.
You can view his presentation at this link.
It's very creative, visually interesting, and makes great use of visual humor. You're sure to be inspired to try some of the techniques he used on your own storyboards; and it's a good example of a completely bullet-free presentation.
Woah. I'm blown away. This is a great example of what your presentations can be. To be honest, this looks very hard to do. You basically have to know what every word you're going to say is, and you have to have a new slide for every 2-3 words. It sure would be fun to deliver this kind of presentation.
I dig the new auto-save feature in Gmail. It seems to fire off about every 20 seconds and I can already tell it's going to be a life saver. This is something we need desparately in Roller. There's nothing more frustrating than having your browser crash when you're writing a long post. Of course, the easy solution to that problem to that problem is to use an offline editor to author the post. However, I much prefer using my web browser.
I never thought the 4th Quarter would be the busy season, but it is for me this year. Tomorrow marks the beginning and it won't end until after The Spring Experience is over. My current schedule is that I'll only be in Denver 2 weeks in the next 2 1/2 months! Of course, I'll be home on the weekends, but I'll be on the road the rest of that time. Most of the travel is for conferences, but a few weeks is for clients, as well as a couple weeks of remote work/vacation. I'll be traveling to Florida (twice), Keystone (Colorado), San Francisco and New Jersey.
In that same time span, I'll be speaking 15 times. 2 times at Java in Action next week, 6 times at the Colorado Software Summit (in two weeks), twice at Denver's No Fluff, at the Gator and Orlando JUGs in November/December, and 3 times at The Spring Experience. Phew! That's a lot of talking. Conferences are fun though, especially since you only have to really work for the hour or two while you're talking.
The last part of the whole roadtrip should be a really good time. We're heading down to West Palm Beach (Florida) for Thanksgiving and staying for 3 weeks. I'll be working remotely, swimming in Julie's Mom's pool, speaking at the JUGs and ending it all at the Spring conference.
If you're going to any of these shows, let me know. I'm always up for a beer. 
When I saw Russell's Why I Might Switch Back... post a couple of weeks ago, I found myself wanting to write a response. My response was going to be I completely agree and I was going to bitch about how slow my PowerBook is (once again). Then, later that day, I was doing something with iPhoto and I thought - I really do like OS X. It's the Mac hardware that I don't like. And it's not the look of the hardware (I love that), it's the fricken speed!! Most PowerBook users I know don't switch b/w computers a whole lot - whereas I spend 50% of my time on a fast Windows desktop. When I go from something that's so fast to something so slow, it's quite painful.
Last week, I started working with a new client - developing an application with Spring, Hibernate, WebLogic and Eclipse. Installing WebLogic on OS X was pretty easy, thanks to this article. Even remote debugging with Eclipse was pretty easy to setup. However, when I started running WebLogic locally and trying to debug it with Eclipse, it was extremely frustrating. I've never seen the spinning beach ball so much in one day. When other developers would watch me work, it was embarrassing how slow my computer was. And it's not like I had a whole lot running: Mail, Safari, Eclipse, WebLogic and iTerm.
Over the past couple of months, I've started debating if my next laptop should be a PC. It's not like I hate the Mac or don't like my PowerBook - but Java development on a Mac is far slower than on a PC equivalent. The problem is that I really like the PowerBook's form-factor. I'm so comfortable using the keyboard, right-clicking with the Control key, and all that jazz - that I'd probably have a hard time adjusting. I realize that a lot of my PowerBook bitching might seem unfair - as I'm often comparing a Desktop to a Laptop.
What I'd really like is two laptops: a PowerBook for doing all non-Java stuff and a PC for doing Java stuff.
My dreams came last Friday when my client handed me a brand new Dell Latitude D610. It's got Windows 2000, a 1.6 GHz CPU and 1 GB of RAM. To be honest, I expected it'd have a lot bigger processor. However, the fact that it doesn't makes it easier for me to show you how fricken slow my PowerBook is.
I used AppFuse for this test and ran ant clean war 3 times on each. I had ANT_OPTS set to -Xmx256m, JAVA_OPTS set to -Xmx512m and I'm using the latest 1.4.2 JDK available for each respective platform. It's possible my PowerBook suffers from some OS Rot, but it's still amazing how much faster the Windows laptop is.
Holy ass-kicking batman!
My PowerBook has a 1.33 GHz CPU and 1 GB of RAM. It'd be interesting to do the see the numbers for a PowerBook with a 1.67 GHz processor. Here's to hoping OS X with a 1.6 GHz Intel processor can keep up with Windows for Java development.
Now that we're basing the next Virtuas' website on Drupal, we have to make a decision about which blogging engine to use. Is anyone out there using Drupal for blogging? Does it support multi-author blogs? I'd much rather use Roller for our blogging engine. However, if we have two different engines powering our website - there won't be a way to search both sites. We can make http://virtuas.com/blog look just like http://virtuas.com, but if searching one doesn't grab results from the other - it seems like it might not be worth it. Anyone know of a way to integrate Drupal's search index with Roller's?
From Stephen O'Grady:
For the Colorado residents in the audience, I'm pleased to inform you that I've finally scheduled the first of what will hopefully be many Denver Tech Meetups. The theory behind this is simple: there are meetups for just about every possible group out there, be it a company, database, development language or operating system, but nothing that I'm aware of that that brings folks from all of those different areas together, in one place. This is my attempt to rectify that particular problem, while having a few beers in the process.
If you'd like to attend, drop your email in a comment and I'll shoot over the Evite (you can join Larkin in laughing at me for using one of those), but otherwise it's Thursday, October the 13th, 6:30 PM at the Wazee Supper Club.
Bruce and I talked to Stephen about this a few months back. It's great to see the idea coming to life. Well done Stephen! I especially like the part about skipping the meeting and going directly to beers.
In related news, the Great American Beer Festival is in town this weekend. We're going tonight. 1,669 beers on tap is too good to pass up...
I love the idea of Mike Stenhouse's CSS Framework. It's so simple: name the elements in your XHTML with a specific set of names, and then create your CSS to match that. The only problem with this framework is I haven't seen any good-looking designs on top of it. For good-looking design examples, see the CSS Zen Garden or Open Source Web Design.
While the CSS Zen Garden is nice, most of the designs are not useable for web applications. They're more of a showcase of what CSS can do, and often contain too many images for a real-world application or website. The designs from oswd.org, on the other hand, are perfect for web applications. However, the underlying HTML is different for each design.
So how do we marry the two? Maybe we should lobby some designers at oswd.org to use the CSS Framework for their designs? I think this would be a great asset to many communities - imagine what you could do with your Drupal theme if you didn't have to change your template files (only CSS). That'd be pretty cool.
