Raible Designs

Life as an Open Source Developer, One Year Later

It's been a little over a year since I wrote about life as an open source developer. I'm happy to say I still haven't written a single line of proprietary code. Of course, things have changed a lot in the last year. I thought going full-time would bring stability to my career. Instead, six months into it we joined forces with Okta.

The transition was rough at first. At Stormpath, we had full-featured SDKs and a great relationship with developers that used our service. We were able to port many of our SDKs to work with Okta, but we discovered that Okta didn't have a great relationship with developers. In fact, their developer blog hadn't been updated in over a year when we arrived.

On the upside, Okta's API supported standards like SAML, OAuth, and OpenID Connect. Open standards made it possible to use other frameworks and not have to rely on our own. I was pumped to find that Spring Security made it easy to integrate with SAML and OAuth. In fact, I was able to leverage these standards to add OIDC support to JHipster.

Okta's new developer console and open pricing are just a couple examples of improved happenings since we arrived. The Okta Spring Boot Starter and JavaScript libraries for Node.js, Angular, and React are also pretty awesome.

I'm happy to say my contributions on GitHub almost doubled in the last year!

As far as stress is concerned, that hasn't changed much. I've learned that the stress I feel from work is still causing me to have high blood pressure. When I measure it in the mornings, or at night, it's fine. When I measure it during the day, it's elevated. I believe my high blood pressure is caused by doing too much. Sure, it's great to be productive and accomplish a lot for my company, but it's killing me.

Therein lies the rub. I get to create my job. All I'm asked to do is write a blog post per week and speak at a conference (or meetup) once a month. Yet I'm doing way more than that. Since this time last year, I've delivered 33 presentations, in 13 different cities. I keep a page on this blog updated with all my presentations.

Next year, I still plan to speak a lot, but I plan on toning things down a bit. I'll be concentrating on US cities, with large Java user groups, and I'll be limiting my travel overseas.

Outside of my health concerns, I'm still loving my job. The fact that I get paid to speak at great conferences, write example applications, and discover new ways to do things is awesome. It's also pretty sweet that I was able to update the JHipster Mini-Book and upgrade 21-Points Health during work hours. The fact that I got featured on the main Okta blog was pretty cool too.

The good news is my overseas travel isn't done this year. Today, I leave for Devoxx Belgium, one of my favorite conferences. It'll be my first time in Antwerp without Trish. However, I'm speaking with friends Josh Long and Deepu Sasidharan, so it's sure to be a good time. Traveling to Devoxx Morocco should be fun too. I've never been to Casablanca before.

In December, you can catch me at SpringOne and The Rich Web Experience. Next year, I'll be speaking at Denver Microservices meetup, Utah JUG, Seattle JUG, and JazzCon. I plan to do a JUG tour in the northeast US too.

You might've noticed I don't write a lot of technical content here anymore. That's because I'm doing most of my writing on developer.okta.com/blog. I'm still writing for InfoQ as well. I really enjoyed attending the JavaOne keynotes and writing up what I saw.

• Oracle Announced Plans to Open Source All Features of Their JDK and Address Shortcomings in Java EE
• JavaOne Keynote: Oracle Talks Blockchain, Bots and Serverless
• JavaOne Keynote: IBM on OpenJ9 and Open Liberty; Java Community in The Matrix

I'll leave you with this, a project I'm working on actively and plan to finish before Devoxx Morocco.

Viva la Open Source!

The JHipster Mini-Book v4.0 Now Available for Download!

The JHipster Mini-Book v4.0 is now available as a free download from InfoQ. Get it while it's hot! You'll also be able to buy a print version in a week or two. You can read all about what’s changed since v2.0 on the JHipster Mini-Book blog.

The source code for the application developed in the book (21-Points Health) is available on GitHub.

Thanks to the InfoQ publishing team, Dennis Sharpe for tech editing, and Lawrence Nyveen for copy editing. And most of all, thank you Asciidoctor for making the publishing process so easy!

Devoxx Poland: A Huge Conference in a Beautiful City

It's been a little over six years since I first ventured to Kraków, Poland. I have fond memories of that trip, mostly because Trish was with me and we explored lots of sites. Last month, I visited Kraków for GeeCON, but only stayed for one night.

Last week, I had the pleasure of visiting a third time for my first Devoxx Poland. I was excited to travel internationally again with my favorite travel shirt on. This caused a funny conversation with TSA just before my departure.

I arrived in Krakow on a beautiful day and took an Ubër to my hotel next to the venue. I took a stroll along the Vistula River to enjoy the sunshine.

Life as an Open Source Developer

It's been a little over a month since I started my new gig at Stormpath. I gotta say, life is great as an open source developer! Yes, I did start working for them as a consultant in April, so it's not a huge change for me. However, I only recently realized I haven't written a single line of proprietary code the entire time. My GitHub contributions look pretty good this year. They're nothing like @mojavelinux, or @dsyer, but I'll get there.

It's also been a bit more stress than I'm used to. I think this comes from a couple things: 1) turning my hobby into my job and 2) I've set a lot of high expectations for myself. As a developer evangelist, I get to create my own job. That means I can speak at the conferences I want to, write the code I want to, create the blog posts I want to, and everything else in between.

At the end of September, I finished updating the JHipster Mini-Book for JHipster 3.x. It's gone through tech editing and it's being copy-edited right now. I hope to release it within a week.

In early October, I said I'd commit to writing one blog post per week, develop a JHipster module for Stormpath, and help get their Angular 2 support good enough for an alpha release. I'm happy to report I've been able to accomplish most of these and I hope to show off our Angular 2 support soon.

I then channeled my efforts into integrating Stormpath's Java SDK with their AngularJS directives. You can read about how I did that in Get Started with AngularJS, Spring Boot, and Stormpath. Unlike my previous AngularJS tutorial, this one connects to a backend and shows how to communicate with Spring Boot cross-domain.

If you like to read code more than words, you can look at the example project's commits on GitHub.

1. Create an AngularJS UI: search and edit features
2. Create a Spring Boot app with Stormpath: app from start.stormpath.io
3. Develop an API to CRUD people with Spring Data REST: /api/people
4. Integrate AngularJS and Spring Boot apps: cross-domain
5. Integrate Stormpath into AngularJS for login, registration and forgot password: Stormpath Angular SDK

Last week, I released a JHipster module that integrates Stormpath. This exercise was good because I was able to identify some gaps in Stormpath's SDKs and fix them. Getting something to work made me feel good; having the ability to improve the developer experience was even better! Of course, I blogged about what I learned.

This week, I edited and code reviewed some posts from Karl Penzhorn on React with Spring Boot and using webpack with React. I also got to bang my head against the wall writing Angular 2 tests. If you're writing a module for Angular 2, generator-angular2-module provides a nice starting point.

Last, but certainly not least, I'll be speaking at a few events about Microservices, JHipster, Angular 2 and Stormpath in the near feature.

• Rocky Mountain Software Symposium, November 19
• The Rich Web Experience, December 9
• A joint talk at Denver JUG with the infamous Josh Long, December 14

If you have any questions about developer evangelism, the technologies I mentioned in this post, or Stormpath, please let me know. Otherwise, I hope to see you on the road soon!

A Delightful Trip to Devoxx UK and GeekOut 2016

I had the pleasure of traveling to London, England and Tallin, Estonia this past week. In London, I spoke at Devoxx UK. In Tallin, I spoke at GeekOut. I took my mom (or mum, if you prefer) and we explored the sights, enjoyed local cuisines and savored a few beverages. Our trip started with a direct flight from Denver to London. We arrived on Tuesday, June 7, around noon.

We were only in London for two nights, but it was enough time for us to savor excellent Indian food, fancy a walk through London, and order a bow tie. I forgot the bow tie for my JHipster outfit. Luckily, I found a good replacement and was able to order it for next-day delivery. I had to order it by 5pm and the site declined both my credit cards with time running out. I ended up using PayPal and got my order placed in the nick of time: 16:59:51.

The big news announced at Devoxx UK is that Devoxx is coming to the United States in 2017! I'm on the program committee for this conference, so I look forward to helping make it spectacular.

Moving AppFuse into the Attic

In mid-February, I decided to stop working on AppFuse. My reason was simple: I was no longer getting any value from my contributions to the project. I sent a message to the developers mailing list the next day:

Hello everyone,

Last night, I started working on AppFuse 4.0, with the following features from the roadmap:

• Remove XML wherever possible
• Java 8
• Spring Boot
• Spring Data
• JSR 303 (might require removing or developing client-side support)

As I started removing XML and integrating Spring Boot and Spring Data, it quickly became apparent that it’d be a lot of work to make all of these changes. My guess is it’d take over 100 hours of my time to do everything. This is time I’d be taking away from my family and personal time.

At the end of last year, I wanted to make AppFuse 4.0 happen because I thought it’d help me stay up-to-date with Java technologies and learn some things along the way. As I dug into the codebase last night, I realized it’d be more of a headache than a learning experience. It seems there would be little reward for all the work.

Because there’s little-to-no activity on the mailing list these days, it seems like it’s the right time to shutdown the project and dedicate my free time to other open source endeavors. As you might know, I’m a big fan of JHipster (http://jhipster.github.io/). It combines AngularJS and Spring Boot and has all the features that AppFuse has - but with a more modern technology stack.

If we had everything hosted on GitHub, I think it’d make sense to add a line to the README that says “This project is no longer maintained”. However, since there’s a lot hosted on appfuse.org (with Confluence), it might not be that easy. Maybe it’s possible to export everything from Confluence to static HTML pages and host them somewhere with the same URLs so there’s not a bunch of 404s from shutting down the project.

Thank you for your contributions over the years. AppFuse was pretty cool back in the day, but now there’s better solutions.

Cheers,

Matt

The good news is I've worked out a deal with Contegix to keep appfuse.org up and running for the next year. The demos, documentation and bug tracker will be available until April 30, 2017. Bamboo and FishEye will be discontinued in the next week since they're too memory intensive for a smaller server. I'd love to figure out a way to export all the documentation from Confluence to Asciidoctor so everything can be on GitHub for years to come. However, there's something to be said for just letting a project fade away rather than holding onto nostalgic artifacts.

On a related note, Java.net will be closing in a year from today. AppFuse started on SourceForge, but moved to appfuse.java.net shortly after. Today, the only thing left on java.net are AppFuse's mailing lists. I suppose it makes sense that both projects will cease to exist around the same time.

AppFuse's source code will remain on GitHub. I have no plans to delete it.

Thanks to everyone that used and contributed to AppFuse over the years. It was a pretty wild and crazy ride from 2003-2007!

Devoxx France 2016: Springtime in Paris

I had the good fortune to visit Paris last week for Devoxx France. When traveling to conferences in exotic locations, I like to bring a travel partner. This time, I asked my daughter, Abbie, to join me. She gladly accepted. Springtime in Paris can be a beautiful event. The grass is green, the flowers are blooming and the sun's rays blanket the city.

We arrived in Paris on Tuesday, April 19 and quickly found our way to our hotel. Its location was ideal: across the street from Le Palais des Congrès de Paris convention center and mall. Since the conference was at the convention center, it made logistics for my talks very convenient. We grabbed a quick bite after settling in, then took a 15-minute stroll to the Arc de Triomphe.

That evening, we joined Ippon developers and friends at a special event for Java Hipsters. Their rooftop location had great views, cold "Java" beer and I met a lot of enthusiastic developers. I especially enjoyed talking with the original Java Hipster and founder of JHipster, Julien Dubois.

The sunset over Paris provided a splendid backdrop for the festivities.

Devoxx 2015: A Java Hipster Visits Belgium

I've been excited to show people JHipster and what it can do ever since I started using it in September 2014. I've been using its core frameworks (AngularJS, Bootstrap and Spring Boot) for a few years and believe they do a great job to simplify web development. Especially for Java developers.

When my JHipster talk was accepted for Devoxx Belgium, I told Trish we were headed back to Belgium. She smiled from ear-to-ear. Belgium is one of our favorite countries to visit. In an effort to live healthier prior to Devoxx, I stopped drinking beer a month beforehand. I mentioned this to friends the week prior.

One month ago, I stopped drinking beer. I hoped it'd help me with www.21-points.com and weight loss. Unfortunately, it did not.

I told myself I'd start drinking beer again when 1) The Bus was finished or 2) Trish and I arrived in Belgium for Devoxx. Looks like #2 will win (we land on Tuesday).

We arrived in Brussels late Tuesday morning and hopped aboard a train to Antwerp. After arriving, we were hungry so we stopped at Bier Central for lunch. The mussels and beer were splendid.

The JHipster Mini-Book: How We Did It and What's Next

Last Friday, the JHipster Mini-Book was published on InfoQ. I wrote about this milestone on the book's blog. I'm pumped to see this release happen, and I'd like to give you a behind-the-scenes peak at how it went from idea to production.

The Idea
At the end of last year, I wrote down my goals for 2015:

• 21 Point Fitness App
• JHipster Mini Book (InfoQ)
• Finish Bus
• New House
• Good Blood Pressure

My reason for wanting to write a JHipster Mini-Book was simple: I knew AngularJS, Bootstrap and Spring Boot quite well. I'd used them on several projects and I really liked how JHipster married them all together. I often ran into people that used these technologies, but hadn't heard of JHipster. I was hoping to make more people aware of the project and market my development skills at the same time.

RE: Customizing an Asciidoctor PDF so it looks like an InfoQ Mini-Book

Last week, I wrote about customizing an Asciidoctor PDF so it looks like an InfoQ Mini-Book. Shortly after writing that blog post, Dan Allen responded to my questions and showed me how to customize Asciidoctor's PDF generation. I ended up using both techniques he described: creating a custom theme and using Ruby to override methods. To recap, here are the changes I was hoping to make:

1. The colophon is not aligned to the bottom of the page.
2. The title page (first one after the cover) and colophon pages should be merged.
3. The dedication and acknowledgement headers are not center-aligned and underlined like InfoQ's format.
4. The main sections don't have whole-page delimiters.
5. The table of contents comes right after the title page, rather than after the dedication and acknowledgement.

I'm happy to report that I was able to fix most these issues, except for the second one and last one. There is a pull request to allow changing the location of the table of contents, but I was unable to make it work. I spent a good hour building the asciidoctor-pdf gem and trying to modify AsciidoctorJ to use it. In the end, I decided to mark this as a bug in the JHipster book and we'll fix it when Asciidoctor supports moving the table of contents.

To customize the output, I created an src/main/ruby/asciidoctor-pdf-extensions.rb file and added the following code to it:

require 'asciidoctor-pdf' unless defined? ::Asciidoctor::Pdf

module AsciidoctorPdfExtensions

  def layout_title_page doc
      # no title page
  end

  def layout_chapter_title node, title
    if node.id == "dedication" || node.id == "acknowledgements"
      layout_heading_custom title, align: :center
    elsif node.id.include? "mini-book" # colophon
      move_down 470
      layout_heading title, size: @theme.base_font_size
    elsif node.id.include? "jhipster" #chapters
      puts 'Processing ' + node.id + '...'
      move_down 120
      # set Akkurat font for all custom headings
      font 'Akkurat'
      layout_heading 'PART', align: :right, size: 120, color: [91, 54, 8, 13], style: :normal
      move_up 40

      part_number = "ONE"
      if node.id.include? "ui-components"
        part_number = "TWO"
      elsif node.id.include? "api"
        part_number = "THREE"
      end

      layout_heading part_number, align: :right, size: 120, color: [42, 1, 83, 1], style: :bold
      layout_heading title, align: :right, color: [42, 1, 83, 1], style: :normal, size: 30
      move_up 30
      start_new_page
    else
       # delegate to default implementation
       super
    end
  end

  def layout_heading_custom string, opts = {}
      move_down 100
      typeset_text string, calc_line_metrics((opts.delete :line_height) || @theme.heading_line_height), {
          inline_format: true
      }.merge(opts)
      move_up 5
      $i = 0
      underline = ''
      while $i < string.length do
          if string == 'Dedication'
            underline += '/////'
          else
            underline += '//////'
          end
          $i += 1
      end
      if string == 'Dedication'
          underline += '////'
      end
      typeset_text underline, calc_line_metrics((opts.delete :line_height) || @theme.heading_line_height), {
            inline_format: true, color: 'B0B0B0', size: 8, style: :italic
      }.merge(opts)
      move_down 20
  end

end

Asciidoctor::Pdf::Converter.prepend AsciidoctorPdfExtensions

Then I modified build.gradle to use this file.

asciidoctor {
    backends 'html5', 'pdf', 'epub3'
    attributes 'sourcedir': '../../../main/webapp',
            'source-highlighter': 'coderay',
            'imagesdir': './images',
             toc: 'left',
             icons: 'font',
             linkattrs: true,
             encoding: 'utf-8',
            'setanchors': true,
            'idprefix': '',
            'idseparator': '-',
            'docinfo1': 'true'
    requires file('src/main/ruby/asciidoctor-pdf-extensions.rb')
}

After getting this to work, we're very close to publishing the JHipster Mini-Book! Thanks to Dan for creating Asciidoctor and supporting this great open source project. It's been a pleasure to write with it and the editing process with Git and pull requests has been wonderful.

Update: The JHipster Mini-Book has been released!