Raible Designs

Maven's ibiblio repository: nicely out of date

I have a feeling that Maven and I will never quite get along. I live on the bleeding edge, because you have to if you want to keep up with open source. I'm using Hibernate, Spring and JSTL in my Maven sample app. Hibernate is pretty up to date - ibiblio has 2.1.3 and 2.1.4 is the latest. Spring's JARs aren't too bad - 1.0.1 vs. 1.0.2 being the latest release. So much for getting spring-mock.jar quick and easy - since it's part of 1.0.2. JSTL is one version behind too.

Lesson learned: if you want to stay on the bleeding edge, don't use Maven. I suppose another option is to become the guy who uploads these new versions. That job looks rather complicated though. I'm guessing that most folks are simply maintaining their own repositories (or staying away from the bleeding edge).

The First Day

Today was a great first day on the new job. I rode my bike in - which took about an hour - and arrived around 10:00. The commute is beautiful - mostly on a bike path, and mostly along a river. It's too bad I won't be doing it more (I'll likely be working from home a lot). Most of the day was spent exploring Blue Glue, source code and the sample apps. I found out that Blue Glue (which is basically a development environment installer and configurer) on Windows has gotten much better since Out-of-the-Box 2.x. Now it skips most of the Windows installers and everything is installed through OpenLogic's Swing app. It was a fun day talking about open source and how things integrate together. I'm not used to talking with folks about my open source experiences and enthusiasm - so it was a nice change.

The best part was when I received my assignment for the next couple of days: upgrade the Maven sample apps to the latest version and enhance one to include build/deployment examples. I'm also responsible for writing documentation on the sample apps for developers who use them. While I'm not a huge Maven fan, I know that some people like it and it'll be cool to create a "how to" for those folks. On the ride home, I realized that I'm really enjoying what I do right now. I'm basically developing and writing for developers. I have no "business" clients per se - most are developers: both with Spring Live and Blue Glue. The downside is that developers tend to be a pretty smart lot - and if I screw up - they'll let me know about it. Oh well, open source rocks - it's cool to be working with it full time.

The worst part of the day was coming home to over 1000 e-mails - from not checking my e-mail all day. I've got a major spam problem since about 200 of those are from mailing lists and I was only interested in 20-30 beyond that. I'm thinking of changing my e-mail address. Rather than adding more junk filters - I need to eliminate the sheer volume - it's choking both Mail.app and Outlook - and I have a 2 MB connection!

EJB Solutions is now Open Logic

EJB Solutions has changed their name to Open Logic and Out-of-the-Box has become Blue Glue. Why do I care? Because I start working for them (as a contractor) tomorrow! It'll be cool to work for a company that's just changed their whole website and released a new version of their product. Sounds like my kind of environment. It's kinda strange that their press releases have next Monday on them - I guess to coincide with JavaOne?

JavaOne - do you have a plan?

I've never been to JavaOne before, but this year I'm attending thanks to SourceBeat. I was planning on attending this conference as I do most - show up, look at the sessions and attend the ones that sound interesting. If it's anything like the MySQL Conference I attended in April, I won't be attending many. There were a lot of PHP and clustering sessions that just didn't interest me, so I only attended a few sessions each day. Compare that to NFJS, where there were many interesting sessions that same time and I hated choosing one over the other.

JavaOne is approaching fast and we'll all be there in 10 days. There seems to be a lot of folks planning what they're going to see each day. Is this a good idea, or can I get away with wingin' it? What about the parties - I've heard about them, but I have no idea what they entail? Are they corporate sponsored - or just a bunch of guys going out drinking together?

Google Ranking: Now at #20

I did a little navel gazing this morning after reading this post and its links. As of today, I'm the 20th result for "Matt" on Google. If I had the word "matt" in my domain name, I wouldn't be surprised, but the fact that I hardly have it anywhere probably means a lot of folks are linking to me. Maybe it's because my Google Number is almost to 50,000.

It's funny that in 1 and 1/2 years, I've gone from #213 to #20. Matt Croydon was #45 when I was #213. Now he's #30. How's that for a bunch of useless information?! ;-)

Mailstore seems to be based on AppFuse

An interesting post titled "Project and Build Structure" showed up on javablogs.com today. As I began reading the project structure layout, I thought, "that looks good." It wasn't until I viewed the build.xml file that I realized that Seyed had copied AppFuse and modified it to his needs. This is fine and the license allows you to do this. However, Seyed's post seem to indicate that he is coming up with all of this stuff on his own. It seems, to me, that Seyed is (so far) in violation of AppFuse's license. Of course, if he'd merely give credit to AppFuse, he'd be free and clear! ;-)

AppFuse Logo Contest - win an iPod

I need a logo for AppFuse. I don't care if it has the name "AppFuse" in it or if it's just an icon sort-of-thing. I'm primarily looking to replace the default icon on java.net - but good project logos are always cool. Hopefully it will imply what AppFuse is (a jumpstart kit for java webapps), but I'm more keen on a good-looking design that anything. I'll buy the winner an iPod mini. If you have a logo you'd like to submit, please upload it to my wiki using the "Attach File..." link at the bottom of the page.

Update: Wow - there's already 8 entries in 24 hours! Sweet! I think I'll end the contest next Thursday, (the 24th) and announce a winner on Friday evening.

Colorado JUGs

The last two nights I gave talks at the Denver JUG and Boulder JUG meetings. On Wednesday night, I presented AppFuse in the basic concepts meeting and Thursday I was the main speaker at BJUG. Both meetings were great and my presentations went pretty well. Denver had about 50 attendees and Sue Spielman gave a very informative talk on J2ME. To me, J2ME seems like the equivalent of Swing for the Desktop. Building mobile-friendly websites seems like an easier route - then you don't have to worry about how the phones differ. Maybe I don't know enough about J2ME - why should I write a J2ME app when I can write a webapp? To me, it seems that I should stick with what I'm familiar with - and if I do choose to get into the mobile space, websites would be the way to go. My phone (a T68i) was very helpful last week in San Deigo. I used it's internet access and go2.com to find directions to several locations in San Diego. I just told the website to "auto-locate" me, then I'd type in an address and voila - it spit out a list of directions. Bruce and James also wrote about the Denver meeting.

Last night was the Boulder meeting, where Scott Davis kicked it off with a talk on Struts. My AppFuse presentation could've been much better if I based mine off of Scott's. I do some live coding of a DAOTest and a DAO in my presentation - and I think the audience would've gotten a lot more out of it if I'd showed them how to develop Actions and JSPs with AppFuse. Oh well, that's what the tutorials are for. I also like showing the DAO stuff because it shows the power and simplicity of the Hibernate+XDoclet+Spring combination. It's pretty cool to mention that integrating Spring into AppFuse only took a few hours. During integration, I remember deleting 5 or 6 classes/files and reducing my LOC count by about 75%.

After the meeting, I talked to one guy who was interested in adding a Swing front-end to AppFuse. I told him it shouldn't be too hard since the dao and service layers are already packaged as JARs. From a Swing app, you could easily reuse the business delegates and DAOs to talk to a database. The hard part would probably be mimicing authentication and authorization. I'm guessing that JAAS could probably provide a nice standards-compliant solution for this. I'm sure Spring's RCP project could make developing this front-end even simpler. I also talked to Kris about helping with the WebWork version of AppFuse. Hopefully he can help me out and make that happen sooner than later. I'm still targeting the end of July for a WebWork/Sitemesh-enabled release, as well as lots of enhancements to IDE friendliness.

Both meetings where followed by beers and good conversation. Last night, the tavern we were at lost power after about an hour. That didn't stop us from spending another hour in the dark telling old war stories. Good times - thanks to all who participated!

Technical Confidence vs. Fitness Confidence

It figures, just as I'm about to do a major push to get some writing done on Spring Live, I wake up with a cold. It was bound to happen since Abbie and Julie are already in the midst of it. For some reason, I thought I could avoid it.

Three years ago, as I was entering into independent consulting, I could've avoided it. Back then, I was in shape and riding my bike all the time. When I first started as an independent, I had no time to exercise, but I was in such good shape that it took me well over a month to start gaining any weight. That summer was awful - I had no time to exercise and the commute was around an hour. But the pay was awesome and the technology was even cooler. It was summer 2001 and because of my new contract, I was learning all about JUnit, Ant, TDD and Struts.

Reflecting back on that summer, and the past couple of years, I seem to go through various levels of "confidence." There are two extremes for me, and I tend to reside in one or the other. The first is "technical confidence" and the second is "fitness confidence." When I'm coding like a madman, learning new stuff, and deploying release - I'm very technically confident. I don't feel like I need to learn anything new. I feel like I'm on the right track, and I'm generally pretty happy. This is, until I leave the computer. When I start interacting with my family and friends, I start to realize how out of shape I am. In order to get things done, I tend to give up exercising. Part of it is because its easy to give up, and sometimes I just feel guilty leaving Julie to run off and exercise - especially when she's pregnant with a sick kid in her arms.

In order for me to get in shape, it takes quite a bit. In the past when I've been in shape, I usually ride my bike 6 days a week. This is a time consuming effort, averaging about 2 hours per day. However, after I've done this for about a month, my "fitness confidence" starts to rise and I really enjoy being outside or working out. The downside is that when I find time to sit down at the computer, I see a flurry of e-mail and blogs about cool new technologies. My technical confidence plummets.

It's weird. I wish I could find a balance. I wish I had more drive to improve my fitness confidence right now. Unfortunately, many deadlines are looming and I need to sit here in front of the computer to get them done. I definitely need to turn this around. Health is one of the most important things in the world, and I'm so out of shape its pathetic.

The Java Community - its strength is in its disunity

Charles responds (in a comment) to Ted's accusation that .NET's community is better than Java's.

Actually, the strength of the Java community lies in its disunity. Unity is a false strength: it's safety in numbers, but it's also a herd mentality. I suspect the drive for "strength in unity" is a reflection of Microsoft's philosophy of dominance: that the best thing for the world is if everyone just Does Things Our Way: A computer on every desk running Microsoft software. The Java community has competing infrastructure vendors. We have a raft of competing web frameworks, competing AOP frameworks, competing persistence frameworks, competing IDEs, competing heavyweight and lightweight containers. And it's this competition that makes Java such a vibrant community. Nobody's quite satisfied with what the other guy's doing: everyone wants to do better. It's also what makes us, at times, a bunch of bickering children. That does us quite a bit of harm, but I think in the long run things work out for the best.

Well said.