Raible Designs

2018 - A Year in Review

In 2018, I spoke at several fantastic meetups, traveled a bit overseas, and enjoyed some fun family vacations. We had the time of our lives driving Hefe in the Denver St. Paddy's Day Parade!

We traveled to Crete for JCrete and had a blast with the Java community. We journeyed to Ireland with my folks, and I thoroughly enjoyed a speaking tour of Ireland JUGs and the Dublin JHipster Meetup. Our classic VWs had a great year with only minor repairs needed.

I'm going to look back on 2018 using the following categories.

• Professional
  • Speaking
  • Community
  • Projects
• Personal
• 2019

Professional

For those stumbling upon this post with no context, I'm a veteran open source developer that works at Okta as a developer advocate.

This year I focused on blogging more than speaking. I still spoke a fair bit, but I tried to focus on meetups more than conferences. The DevEx Team at Okta released a slew of SDKs at the end of 2017, so I had plenty to write about. Over the year, I found more and more developers had heard of Okta during my talks. I even found users in most audiences! This was quite a change from 2017, so it seems my team's advocacy efforts might be working.

Angular Summit 2015

I was in Boston this week, speaking and attending the very first Angular Summit. I had the privilege of delivering the opening keynote on Monday. I spoke about the Art of Angular and used a slide deck similar to last time. I did update the presentation to show the astronomical growth of AngularJS in terms of candidate skills (on LinkedIn) and job opportunities (on Dice.com)¹.

I mentioned the recently announced good news for Angular 2:

• We're enabling mixing of Angular 1 and Angular 2 in the same application.
• You can mix Angular 1 and Angular 2 components in the same view.
• Angular 1 and Angular 2 can inject services across frameworks.
• Data binding works across frameworks.

In related news, Craig Doremus recently posted a state-geo-angular project that shows how you can develop an Angular 1.x application that will be easy to upgrade to Angular 2.x. Thanks Craig!

After my keynote, I attended Pratik Patel's session on High Performance JavaScript Web Apps. Pratik pointed out mobitest.akamai.com for testing an app's performance and seeing its blocking resources. He also mentioned speedgun.io (currently unavailable) for capturing performance numbers as part of a continuous integration process. Finally, he recommended Addy Somani's JavaScript Memory Management Masterclass.

My second presentation was about JHipster. Near the end of the presentation, I mentioned that I hope to finish the JHipster Book this month. Writing presentations for SpringOne 2GX and the Angular Summit occupied a lot of my free time in September. Now that it's October, I'll be dedicating my free time to finishing the book. In fact, I think I can finish the rough draft this week!

For the last session of the day, I attended John Lindquist's session on Angular 2 Components. John showed us how everything is a component in Angular 2. He also said "now is the time to learn ES6" and built an Angular 2 ToDo App using ES6 and a bit of TypeScript. You might recognize John's name; he's the founder of egghead.io, an excellent site for learning Angular with bite-sized videos.

Tuesday morning started with a Angular 2.0 keynote from Peter Pavlovich. I really enjoyed this session and received lots of good tips about getting ready for Angular 2. The tweet below from Ksenia Dmitrieva shows his advice.

My biggest takeaway was to start following John Papa's Angular Style Guide ASAP.

The first session I attended on Tuesday was Judd Flamm's Google Material Design & Angular. I'm using Material Design for Bootstrap on a side project, so I was interested in learning more about its inspiration. We learned that Google Design has everything you need to know about why Material Design exists. We also learned about Angular Material and spent most of the session looking at its components. Judd recommended Angular Material-Start for those looking to get started quickly with both frameworks. Judd was a very entertaining speaker; I highly recommend you attend one of his talks if you get the opportunity.

After being dazzled by Peter's knowledge of Angular 2 in Tuesday's keynote, I attended two more of his talks: one on Meteor and another on Aurelia. I've known about Meteor for a while, but have become more intrigued by it lately with its 1.2 release and Angular support. Meteor's command line tools that auto-inject CSS and JS demoed very well, as did it's installable features like a LESS support and Facebook authentication.

After hearing all the good things about Angular 2 from Peter, it was interesting to hear him downplay it in his Aurelia talk later that day. When he started showing code, it was pretty obvious that Aurelia is doing a great job of simplifying JavaScript MVC syntax for developers. You can develop components with almost half the code that Angular 2 requires, and it uses ES6, jspm and SystemJS. If you're developing JavaScript, learning these tools will help prepare you for the future. It's cool that Aurelia encourages learning things you should learn anyway.

Aurelia and Angular 2 are both still in Alpha, so I'm not sure it makes sense to use them on a project this year. However, I do think it's important to track them both. I especially think it's interesting that the founder of Aurelia, Rob Eisenberg, left the Angular Team in November 2014 and announced Aurelia in January 2015 (Hacker News thread). Peter mentioned several times that Aurelia wants to help developers write apps, while AngularJS is more tied to helping Google write apps.

There were around 400 people at Angular Summit, which I think is pretty good for a first-run conference. As with most No Fluff Just Stuff shows, it ran smoothly, had plenty of time between sessions and was filled with knowledgeable, entertaining speakers. It was fun doing my first keynote and I look forward to speaking again in November (at Devoxx) and December (at The Rich Web Experience).

1. I know Dice.com is probably not a great site, but it makes sense to use it since I've been tracking JavaScript MVC framework job stats on it since February 2014.

SpringOne 2GX 2015: My Presentations on Comparing Hot JavaScript Frameworks and NoXML

Last week, I had the pleasure of traveling to Washington, DC to speak at the annual SpringOne 2GX conference. I was pretty stressed for the last few weeks because I had to create two new presentations from scratch, and both had to be 90 minutes long. I was also hoping to finish the JHipster Book before the conference started. I was able to finish both presentations in the nick of time, but did not find the time to write the last chapter in the JHipster Book.

The first presentation was titled Comparing Hot JavaScript Frameworks: AngularJS, Ember.js and React.js. I started by revisiting the Comparing JVM Web Frameworks talk I did at vJUG last February. I explained how I think traditional web frameworks are no longer relevant in 2015, but I do believe server-side rendering is still very relevant. From there, I used Yevgeniy Brikman’s framework scorecard (from his Node.js vs. Play Framework presentation) to rank each framework by a number of different criteria. You can see the final results on slide 160. Since the scores were so close, I believe you could tweak some scores a bit (or add weights to the different criteria) and make any of the frameworks come out on top.

You can click through the presentation below, download it from my presentations page, or see it on SlideShare.

I started writing the second presentation a week before I had to deliver it. On Thursday, September 10th, I stayed up late, trying to figure out how to create a good presentation on NoXML and finish the last part of the JHipster Book. Then it came to me, I needed to parallelize and do them both at the same time. I decided to compare AppFuse (which is similar to a legacy Spring application with lots of XML) to JHipster (which hardly contains any XML).

I wrote a 10-page Google Doc on how I planned to do this, then went rafting and camping with my family for the weekend. I finished most of the presentation on Monday night, but then realized the presentation wouldn't be long enough to fill 90 minutes. So I hunkered down at midnight, created a new AppFuse application and removed a bunch of its XML. This took me until 3:30am, and I was able to accomplish the following tasks:

• Spring XML to Java
• Spring Security Configuration to Java
• web.xml to WebApplicationInitializer
• Spring MVC to Java
• Migrated to Spring Boot
• Maven to Groovy

I was pretty pumped when I completed my final goal: converting to Spring Boot and getting a test to pass. I made commits to an appfuse-noxml project on GitHub as I accomplished each step. You can see all the changes in the project's commit log. While I'd figured everything out, I still needed to complete the presentation. Luckily, I found time to do this the night before, the morning of, and in the final hour before I had to deliver the talk. You can imagine my relief when I was done delivering both talks.

You can click through the presentation below, download it from my presentations page, or view it on SlideShare.

While I didn't get to spend much time at the conference, I did have a lot of fun while I was there. I got to meet some new folks, reconnect with old friends, and enjoy beers and dinner with a smiling crew on Thursday night. The Broncos victory late that night was the icing on the cake.

Getting Hip with JHipster at Denver's Java User Group

Last night, I had the pleasure of speaking at Denver's Java User Group Meetup about JHipster. I've been a big fan of JHipster ever since I started using it last fall. I developed a quick prototype for a client and wrote about solving some issues I had with it on OS X. I like the project because it encapsulates the primary open source tools I've been using for the last couple of years: Spring Boot, AngularJS and Bootstrap. I also wrote about its 2.0 release on InfoQ in January.

To add some humor to my talk, I showed up as a well-dressed Java Developer. Like a mature gentleman might do, I started the evening with a glass of scotch (Glenlivet 12). Throughout the talk I became more hip and adjusted my attire, and beverage, accordingly. As you might expect, my demos had failures. The initial project creation stalled during Bower's download all JavaScript dependencies. Luckily, I had a backup and was able to proceed. Towards the end, when I tried to deploy to Heroku, I was presented with a lovely message that "Heroku toolbelt updating, please try again later". I guess auto-updating has its downsides.

After finishing the demo, I cracked open a cold PBR to ease my frustration.

I did two live coding sessions during this presentation; standing on the shoulders of giants to do so. I modeled Josh Long's Getting Started with Spring Boot to create a quick introduction to Spring Boot. IntelliJ IDEA 14.1 has a nice way to create Spring Boot projects, so that came in handy. For the JHipster portion, I created a blogging app and used relationships and business logic similar to what Julien Dubois did in his JHipster for Spring Boot Webinar. Watching Josh and Julien's demos will give you a similar experience to what DJUG attendees experienced last night, without the download/deployment failures.

You can click through my presentation below, download it from my presentations page, or view it on SlideShare.

You might notice my announcement on slide #32 that I've signed up to write a book on JHipster.

I haven't started writing the book yet, but I have been talking with InfoQ and other folks about it for several months. I plan to use Asciidoctor and Gradle as my authoring tools. If you have experience writing a book with these tools, I'd love to hear about it. If you've developed an application with JHipster and have some experience in the trenches, I'd love to hear your stories too.

As I told DJUG last night, I plan to be done with the book in a few months. However, if you've been a reader of this blog, you'll know I've been planning to be done with my '66 VW Bus in just a few more months for quite some time, so that phrase has an interesting meaning for me.

The Art of AngularJS in 2015

I've been tracking statistics on jobs and skills for JavaScript MVC frameworks ever since I Compared JVM Web Frameworks at Devoxx France in 2013. At that time, Backbone was the dominant framework.

Last year, I updated those statistics for a presentation on AngularJS at Denver's Derailed. Angular had a similar amount of jobs as Backbone and a lot of people added it to their LinkedIn profiles. I found that Ember had grown around 300%, Backbone 200% and Angular 1000%!

Before presenting on AngularJS at last night's Denver Open Source Users Group, I updated these statistics once again. The charts below show how the number of jobs for Angular has doubled in the last year, while jobs for Ember and Backbone have fallen slightly. As far as skills, developers learning Ember and Backbone has increased 200%, while skilled Angular folks has risen 400%.

Yes, AngularJS has experienced huge growth in the last couple of years. You might even say it's the Struts of the JavaScript world.

For the presentation I delivered last night, I made a number of improvements over last year's. I added a live coding demo based on my Getting Started with AngularJS tutorial. I used IntelliJ's live templates to make it look easy. However, since the audience was quiet, and some were falling asleep, I skipped over the testing demo.

2014 - A Year in Review

2014 was destined to be a spectacular year. When I wrote my thoughts down last January, I thought the Broncos would win the Super Bowl and my VW Bus restoration project would be finished by summer. To focus on finishing the bus project, I didn't submit any talks to conferences. Instead of traveling to exotic locations, we opted to visit a bunch in our own backyard instead.

For this Year in Review post, I'll use the format I've used the last couple of years.

• Professional
  • Speaking
  • Devoxx4Kids
  • Projects
• Personal
• 2015

Professional

I had three different clients throughout the year, all in the health care industry. I continued working on a project with John Muir Health where we developed a hybrid mobile app. I wrote about what I learned in Documenting your Spring API with Swagger and Developing an iOS Native App with Ionic. Since I wrote the article about Swagger's Spring MVC support, it has become much easier to integrate; now it only requires an @EnableSwagger annotation.

In April, I started consulting with a small company in Alabama. I helped them modernize their tech stack and implemented a number of web services with Apache Camel. I wrote about this in a four-part series in September and October.

Getting Started with AngularJS

I was hired by my current client in November to help them choose a technology stack for developing modern web applications. In our first sprint, we decided to look at JavaScript MVC frameworks. I suggested AngularJS, Ember.js and React. Since most of the team was new to JavaScript MVC, I decided to create a tutorial for them. I tried to make it easy so they could learn how to write a simple web application with AngularJS. I thought others could benefit from this article as well, so I asked (and received) permission from my client to publish it here.

What you'll build

You'll build a simple web application with AngularJS. You'll also add search and edit features with mock data.

What you'll need

• About 15-30 minutes
• A favorite text editor or IDE. I recommend IntelliJ IDEA.
• Git installed.
• Node.js and NPM installed.

AppFuse, Reduced

In November, I had some time off between clients. To occupy my time, I exercised my body and brain a bit. I spent a couple hours a day exercising and a few hours a day working on AppFuse. AppFuse isn't used to start projects nearly as much as it once was. This makes sense since there's been a ton of innovation on the JVM and there's lots of get-started-quickly frameworks now. Among my favorites are Spring Boot, JHipster, Grails and Play.

You can see that AppFuse's community activity has decreased quite a bit over the years by looking at its mailing list traffic.

Even though there's not a lot of users talking on the mailing list, it still seems to get quite a few downloads from Maven Central.

I think the biggest value that AppFuse provides now is a learning tool for those who work on it. Also, it's a good place to show other developers how they can evolve with open source frameworks (e.g. Spring, Hibernate, JSF, Tapestry, Struts) over several years. Showing how we migrated to Spring MVC Test, for example, might be useful. The upcoming move to Spring Data instead of our Generic DAO solution might be interesting as well.

Regardless of whether AppFuse is used a lot or not, it should be easy to maintain. Over the several weeks, I made some opinionated changes and achieved some pretty good progress on simplifying things and making the project easier to maintain. The previous structure has a lot of duplicate versions, properties and plugin configurations between different projects. I was able to leverage Maven's inheritance model to make a number of improvements:

Building a REST API with JAXB, Spring Boot and Spring Data

If someone asked you to develop a REST API on the JVM, which frameworks would you use? I was recently tasked with such a project. My client asked me to implement a REST API to ingest requests from a 3rd party. The project entailed consuming XML requests, storing the data in a database, then exposing the data to internal application with a JSON endpoint. Finally, it would allow taking in a JSON request and turning it into an XML request back to the 3rd party.

With the recent release of Apache Camel 2.14 and my success using it, I started by copying my Apache Camel / CXF / Spring Boot project and trimming it down to the bare essentials. I whipped together a simple Hello World service using Camel and Spring MVC. I also integrated Swagger into both. Both implementations were pretty easy to create (sample code), but I decided to use Spring MVC. My reasons were simple: its REST support was more mature, I knew it well, and Spring MVC Test makes it easy to test APIs.

Camel's Swagger support without web.xml
As part of the aforementioned spike, I learned out how to configure Camel's REST and Swagger support using Spring's JavaConfig and no web.xml. I made this into a sample project and put it on GitHub as camel-rest-swagger.

This article shows how I built a REST API with Java 8, Spring Boot/MVC, JAXB and Spring Data (JPA and REST components). I stumbled a few times while developing this project, but figured out how to get over all the hurdles. I hope this helps the team that's now maintaining this project (my last day was Friday) and those that are trying to do something similar.

Getting Started with JHipster on OS X

Last week I was tasked with developing a quick prototype that used AngularJS for its client and Spring MVC for its server. A colleague developed the same application using Backbone.js and Spring MVC. At first, I considered using my boot-ionic project as a starting point. Then I realized I didn't need to develop a native mobile app, but rather a responsive web app.

My colleague mentioned he was going to use RESThub as his starting point, so I figured I'd use JHipster as mine. We allocated a day to get our environments setup with the tools we needed, then timeboxed our first feature spike to four hours.

My first experience with JHipster failed the 10-minute test. I spent a lot of time flailing about with various "npm" and "yo" commands, getting permissions issues along the way. After getting thinks to work with some sudo action, I figured I'd try its Docker development environment. This experience was no better.

JHipster seems like a nice project, so I figured I'd try to find the causes of my issues. This article is designed to save you the pain I had. If you'd rather just see the steps to get up and running quickly, skip to the summary.