Raible Designs

20 Years of blogging!

Matt Raible — Tue, 2 Aug 2022 13:09:09 -0600

This blog was started on August 1, 2002 — 20 years ago yesterday! It's amazing to look back at my first month of blogging and see how many times I'd post per day. Most posts are only a sentence or two with no comments because Roller didn't have that feature yet.

Other fun facts:

This blog has used Apache Roller and Tomcat from day one.
I've had the same hosting provider, KGB Internet Solutions, the whole time.
I've authored 3,284 blog posts over the years and received 13,970 comments.
Stats show I still get around 5K visits per day, serve up 30-40 GB per month, and receive over a million hits per month.

Thanks to all of you that have read this blog over the years. I appreciate you!

2017 - A Year in Review

Matt Raible — Wed, 31 Jan 2018 16:16:39 -0700

2017 was a year with many changes. We changed presidents, Stormpath joined forces with Okta, our daughter started high school, and we lost two of our precious pets. On the upside, I traveled to many beautiful places, talked to developers around the world, and became a Devoxx Champion. Not only that, but our two classic VWs ran like champs the whole year. We put upwards of 10K adventure miles on our Syncro, and another couple thousand on Hefe the Bus.

I'm going to look back on 2017 using the following categories.

Professional

2017 was the first year I started with a full-time job in January since the turn of the century. I'd been an independent consultant for most of my career. Stormpath enticed me enough with their people and vision that I became a full-time employee with them in September 2016.

January started slow, but I started to hit my stride in February when I traveled to Sweden for Jfokus and skiing. Coincidentally, it was shortly after the conference that I found myself negotiating with Eric Berg about joining forces with Okta. I remember it well: I was sitting in the hotel lobby, with James Ward and Ray Tsang, when it all happened. Shortly after, we were sitting in the back of the bus on our way to a skiing adventure.

A week later, I was back in the states and the deal with Okta was happening. Throughout January, I thought the possibility was 20%. When I returned home from Jfokus, it was full-on happening. In fact, I was one of the last ones to sign the deal, causing panic and a few phone calls in the process. Most of the folks at Stormpath became Okta employees on February 27.

The awkward part was we knew about the deal when we traveled to Devnexus. We had a Stormpath booth there, and we were unable to tell everyone there would be no more signups after Friday, February 24.

The following week, we had a massive onboarding with everyone. There was excitement in the room and many high spirits, so it was a fun day. Shortly after, we entered into a 90-day quiet period for Okta's IPO. It was strange to start a new job with a new company and not be able to talk about it.

Okta didn't have much for SDKs when we started writing blog posts in March. However, it supports standards like SAML and OAuth, so I was able to put together some posts using Spring Security.

I wrote about my anticipation for Devoxx US and France in mid-March.

Towards the end of March and early April, I had some luck integrating with Angular, both with Okta's Sign-In Widget and OpenID Connect.

In early April, I hosted an Angular Workshop and spoke about Cloud Native Progressive Web Apps with Josh Long at Devoxx France.

We're about to kick off the part deux of our Cloud Native Apps series with @mraible @DevoxxFR pic.twitter.com/0GCSAiUgs4
— Josh Long (???, ???) (@starbuxman) April 6, 2017

On my flight home from that trip — on April 7 — Okta had its IPO. Things started trucking along after the IPO. I wrote a plethora of blogs posts in April and published them over the spring and summer months.

Speaking

This year, speaking became a part of my job, so I spoke frequently. According to TripIt, I took 29 trips, to 41 cities, and 14 countries. I traveled 115,456 miles and spent most of my time on United. By my count, I spoke at 22 events.

I wrote about my experiences at J-Spring, Devoxx UK, GeeCON, and Spring I/O in May, and Devoxx Poland in June. Spring I/O was especially fun because Trish met me in Barcelona.

I was featured on the main Okta blog in late September in Developer DNA: A Day in the Life of Matt Raible.

As the year was waning, I wrote about life as an open source developer and my adventures to Devoxx Belgium and Devoxx Morocco.

In my blog post about SpringOne and The Rich Web Experience, I included a picture of my 2017 conference lanyard collection.

To end the year, I published some popular posts on the Okta Developer blog:

Devoxx4Kids

We held two Devoxx4Kids Denver workshops in 2017: MIT App Inventor - Anyone Can Build Apps and Fruit Ninja with Scratch. These classes were taught by Regina Peyfuss and Melissa McKay, respectively. I'm happy to announce they've both since joined the board for Devoxx4Kids Denver and have been doing a great deal to help organize things.

I ?? the smell of learning in the morning. #Devoxx4Kids Denver in full swing w/ @rpeyfuss at @ThriveWorkplace. Awesome space and instructor! pic.twitter.com/a6Ac1qAJh0
— Matt Raible (@mraible) June 3, 2017

Our next meetup will be on March 10 and will be taught by Melissa's daughter, Kaitlyn! I think it's pretty cool we have an opportunity to have kids teaching kids. I've also been working with Jay Zimmerman and UberConf to have an UberKids this summer.

Projects

AppFuse is no more, so I primarily work on JHipster and the JHipster-Mini Book these days. I refactored JHipster's OAuth authentication in September to use an external identity provider (e.g., Keycloak or Okta) instead of an embedded one. I wrote about how to use OpenID Connect with JHipster on the Okta Developer blog in October.

With the help of InfoQ, we released v4.0 of the JHipster Mini-Book on September 22nd. It's hard to believe, but it's still up-to-date!

Personal

I wrote down my goal at the beginning of 2017: to drive Hefe up the California coast. In July, I wrote about why that goal got moved to my bucket list:

I wanted to spend our summer vacation driving our VWs up the California coast, on a mammoth 3500-mile road trip over two weeks. However, when a landslide happened near Big Sur, I knew it was probably best to move this road trip from my yearly goals to my bucket list. Instead, we opted to drive to Montana and spend a couple of weeks vacationing in my childhood playground.

We had a blast road-tripping, hiking, and rafting in Montana. A highlight for me was hiking to Rumble Lake, somewhere I hadn't been to since I was a kid.

The drive home through Jackson Hole and the Flaming Gorge was pretty nice as well!

My only other personal post in the first half of 2017 was Farewell to the 2016-17 Ski Season.

I had a blast skiing in Winter Park, Copper, Crested Butte, Sweden, Steamboat, Tahoe, and Montana.

The highlight of the season was skiing at Big Sky Resort in Montana. We're super pumped that next year's ski pass includes Big Sky!

In early August, we rafted the Salmon River in Idaho with our rafting family and had an epic trip.

Jack turned 13 in late August and we had a splendid weekend with my folks in town.

Abbie and Tucker won their division at the SummerFest Horse Show in September!

Abbie didn't want a birthday party this year, so we surprised her with one instead. It's hard to believe she's a freshman in high school. She's even driving us around with her learner's permit these days! Her birthday was a bittersweet celebration since we had to say goodbye to Jake earlier that day.

We welcomed a new Australian Shepperd-Border Collie mix puppy into our home in December. Her name is Daisy.

A post shared by Matt Raible (@vwsforlife) on Dec 2, 2017 at 3:24pm PST

Stout and Hefe

Stout 5.0 and Hefe 3.0 were released in early May. Stout had his hood painted and Hefe got a kick-ass stereo system installed.

For Hefe's stereo, I tried going phone-only for a controller. This turned out to be a bad idea, mostly due to bit Play HD and its terrible mobile app. Also, Hefe is lowered and a bit bumpy in the front, so trying to use a touch screen while driving doesn't work very well. He's in the shop now getting a new deck installed.

We drove Stout over 5000 miles this summer and he's been super dependable. Now that he's reliable, we often marvel that he really is the greatest car ever built.

2018

Professionally, I'll be speaking at a lot of Java User Groups in 2018. The Developer Relations team at Okta is focusing on large US cities this year, so you won't see me overseas as much. This is nice because it means I get to spend more time with my family. I have received offers to speak in other countries where they'll pay for all my expenses. If expenses are covered, Okta will allow me to travel overseas. However, I've been telling people I'm only willing to speak if they'll pay for a family member's flight too. It seems to be a win-win so far: most conferences have declined, and I don't have to travel as much. If I find a conference that is willing pay, I'll get to travel with someone from my awesome family!

I'll be coding loads of example apps and writing heaps of tutorials for the Okta Developer blog and I'm super excited about our Iterate Conference next month. I'll also continue to help organize DJUG and Devoxx4Kids Denver.

Romantically, Trish and I hope to never stop dating with the 2-2-2 rule. I look forward to a year with running VWs, long dog walks, and disconnecting to connect. As for goals, I'll go for the ol' standby: to be happy and content with what I have. 😊

2016 - A Year in Review

Matt Raible — Wed, 1 Feb 2017 17:46:59 -0700

When I wrote my 2015 year in review blog post, I was certain my '66 VW Bus would finally be finished. AND IT IS! Do I need to even write this year's post? Yes, because I want to tell you how awesome it is to own this incredible-looking, awesomely-fast, mean machine.

But first, let's review the year using the following categories.

Professional

I had two different clients in 2016: CA Technologies and Stormpath. I worked full-time for CA in January and February, helping them adopt AngularJS. To help them learn about Angular 2, I rewrote my AngularJS getting started and testing tutorials for Angular 2. The first versions were published at Getting Started with Angular 2 and Testing Angular 2 Applications. I refactored both tutorials to use Angular CLI in August and published Getting Started + Testing with Angular CLI and Angular 2 (RC5). Since then, I've been maintaining an up-to-date version on GitHub.

In April, I started working half-time for CA and half-time for Stormpath. For Stormpath, I worked on their Java SDK and helped them launch their Java SDK 1.0. I really enjoyed working with the team at Stormpath. This led to me think about my priorities in life. I realized that I wanted to work remotely, get paid to speak at conferences, and get paid to work on open source. Stormpath provided me with all of these opportunities and I started working full-time for them on September 26, 2016.

In May, I joined the board of the Denver Java User Group. I've been helping organize meetups, find speakers, and secure location sponsors. If you're interested in speaking at DJUG in 2017, please let me know!

I wrote about life as an open source developer in early November. At that time, I mentioned being more stressed than I was used to. My stress levels continued to be high through the end of the year because I get to create my own job. I get to choose the conferences I submit too, the talks I create, the example apps, the blog posts, everything. There's so much I want to do that I've had to learn to scale back and not try to do so much at once.

I didn't blog much on raibledesigns.com in Q4 of 2016, but I wrote a bunch of technical posts on the Stormpath blog.

According to TripIt, I flew 59K miles in 2016.

Speaking

I spoke at nine different events in 2016. You can find links to my presentations on my presentations page.

February: Denver Open Source Users Group
April: Colorado Springs Open Source Software Meetup Group and Devoxx France
June: Devoxx UK and GeekOut
August: HTML5 Denver Users Group
September: vJUG24
November: Rocky Mountain Software Symposium
December: The Rich Web Experience

My most memorable conference in 2016 was Devoxx France because I took Abbie and we experienced springtime in Paris together.

Becoming a Java Champion at Devoxx France was certainly a surprise too!

I really enjoyed taking my mom with me to Devoxx UK and GeekOut. It was my first time speaking at both conferences and I was impressed by both personnel and venues.

Devoxx4Kids

We only had two Devoxx4Kids Denver workshops in 2016: Introduction to Object-Oriented JavaScript using Bitsbox and Exploring JavaScript. The second one was taught by the world-famous Venkat Subramaniam.

The great @venkat_s teaching #Denver kids about JavaScript. So awesome! #Devoxx4Kids pic.twitter.com/CqOW5ma6Cq
— Matt Raible (@mraible) September 10, 2016

I'd like to plan a few Devoxx4Kids Denver events in 2017, so please let me know if you have a topic you'd like to present.

Projects

I stopped working on AppFuse in February and announced I was mothballing the project in April. Reminder: the demos, documentation and bug tracker will cease to exist on April 30, 2017.

I spent many late nights in July through October updating the JHipster Mini-Book for JHipster 3.x. On the book's blog, I wrote about what's changed and how to buy a print version.

Personal

I wrote down my goals at the beginning of 2016:

Finish the bus
Win a trophy
Ski a lot
Raft a lot
Stay in shape
July in Montana
Happy Trish
Ionic/Angular2 app
Learn how to make a good dirty martini

I'm proud to the bus is finished and it won Best in Class at VWs on the Green.

Today was a great day! Won best in class Bus, Camper, Pickup Custom 1949-67 Split Window. #vwbus

A photo posted by Matt Raible (@vwsforlife) on May 15, 2016 at 2:41pm PDT

We skied a lot, but never took our own raft on river. I stayed in shape and have records to prove it thanks to 21-Points Health and dailymile. This summer, I spent seven weekends in a row away from home; with three weeks in Montana. Not quite a month, but close. Trish was happy because we journeyed to Hawaii to celebrate her parents' 50th anniversary.

Her happiness continued when she found her dream home in July. We moved into The Raible Ranch in September.

Weeks later, she and Abbie bought their dream horse named Tucker. I wrote about him in Abbie's 14th birthday post.

I learned how to make an excellent dirty martini, but did not find the time to create an Ionic/Angular2 app.

The Ski Bus (aka Stout)

Stout the Syncro spent a couple months getting upgrades in late 2015: transmission rebuilt, fridge installed, Propex heater installed, and new headlights. We leveraged these improvements on an epic family road trip to Jekyll Island (Georgia) for my Dad's 70th birthday.

We made it back to Denver just in time for the AFC Championship game and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves tailgating beforehand.

Watching the Broncos win Super Bowl 50 was definitely a highlight of 2016.

We took Stout on a bunch of ski trips and winter camped several times. The Propex heater and Reflectix insulation worked great and kept it around 50°F even when it was 0°F out.

I bought a new mountain bike (Yeti SB 95) in May and Trish and I drove the van to Syncro Solstice in Moab. We were hoping for a weekend of mountain biking and 4-wheeling, but Trish had a bad crash and stabbed herself in the chest with a handlebar. That ended our 4x4 aspirations for the weekend, but the van ran great!

The other major road trip for Stout was when I drove from Colorado to Montana over four days. I drove to Grand Junction on Monday evenning, worked during the day on Tuesday, went mountain biking in the afternoon, then drove to Jackson Hole that night. Wednesday, I worked in Jackson Hole, went mountain biking, then drove to Montana that night. I woke up early on Thursday and made it to Missoula to start working promptly at 8am. That evening, I drove to Seeley Lake and setup camp at the first annual Bob Marshall Music Festival. Trish flew in on Friday and we danced and celebrated my birthday all weekend.

The Porsche Bus (aka Hefe)

Hefe's debut at VWs on the Green was a wild success and we had a lot of fun that day. In June, we showed him at Colorado Concours d'Elegance and won a blue ribbon. We trailered him to Montana and drove him in the Swan Valley parade and the Seeley Lake parade.

We hauled him back in Denver to be in the Colorado Bug-In at Bandimere Speedway, where he got second in the custom/radical class.

On the way home from that event, one of the rear shocks blew up from rubbing against the axle. That was the beginning of the end for my air suspension. I drove Hefe to Kustom Coach Werks in early August to have fix the doors (they had gaps) and tune the suspension. When they finished, I called it "release 1.5".

I drove Hefe for a month without rear shocks and didn't have too many issues; it was just bouncy in the back. Buses at the Brewery in Colorado Springs was a fun event and the first time that Hefe went viral on Facebook. This has happened a few times since then. He gets thousands of likes from being featured on a VW fan page.

Before the drive to Colorado Springs, I noticed the rear suspension was missing bolts, causing the rear end to shimmy. I was able to find a new bolt and fix it, but the problem with bolts falling out continued in September. I tried smaller wheels (15" Fuchs), but the suspension was still really stiff in front. Because of the suspension issues, I shipped it back to KCW in October. They ripped out the air suspension and replaced it with coil over shocks, making for a much better ride. It now can cruise at 90 mph easily and looks great all the time! After these repairs, it's now Hefe 2.0.

If you're interested in reading about the suspension decision process, or to see pictures, see this thread on KCW's forums.

2017

Professionally, I'll be speaking at a lot of conferences and meetups this year. As a Developer Evangelist for Stormpath, I'm expected to speak at least once a month. I did a webinar on Getting Started with Angular in mid-January and I'm traveling next week to Jfokus in Stockholm. See my future engagements for more scheduled events.

I suspect most of the coding I'll be doing will be related to Stormpath's SDKs, both Angular and Java. Of course, I'll help out on JHipster as much as I can too. With JHipster 4 on the horizon, there will be a lot of work to update the JHipster Mini-Book.

Hefe 3.0 will be released this spring after I get a sweet sound system installed. As far as personal goals for 2017, I have only one: to drive Hefe up the California coast. With a new house, two running VWs, and a job that's a helluva lot of fun, life is pretty awesome right now.

2015 - A Year in Review

Matt Raible — Tue, 12 Jan 2016 16:21:15 -0700

2015 was the year The Bus was supposed to be finished. If you read my year in review from last year, you'll see I was certain of it. To be fair, I did have estimates from people that had me expecting it to be done in July. The good news is the interior was finished in July. Since then, it's been back at Reincarnation getting the finishing touches applied. I believe if it was worked on for a week straight, it could be finished. It's that close. So close I can taste it. THIS will be the year!

For this Year in Review post, I'll same the format I've used the last few years.

Professional

I had four different clients in 2015. The first was in the healthcare industry, the second in the API hosting space, one in the fashion industry and one in computer software. For the first client, I wrote about integrating Node.js, Ruby and Spring with Okta's SAML support. I also helped them adopt and learn AngularJS. Learning about Foundation and Angular was a nice treat too.

In March, I revisited how to setup your own software company. In that post, I wrote about how I felt when valuing time over money.

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to work 20 hours per week instead of 40. It was one of the greatest work-life experiences I've had to date. I was still able to pay all my bills, and I had time during each-and-every-day to do something fun. When working 40 hours per week, exercising and cooking dinner were somewhat of a chore. When I flipped to working less, work became the chore and exercise and cooking became the fun parts of my day. I read somewhere recently that if Americans valued health over wealth, we'd be a lot better off. I felt like I did this when working less and that I was rich in time.

The second client asked me to do a research project where I tried a bunch of API platforms (e.g. Apigee and 3Scale) and wrote up an analysis about five different stories they provided. It was a fun project where I learned a lot.

In April, I went to work at a fashion industry startup in downtown Denver. I wrote JavaScript, CSS and HTML for them for most of the year. The location afforded me the ability to discontinue my office at Thrive, a co-working space in Denver. While I missed having kombucha and local craft beer on tap, I loved the standup desk and the office environment with conversations, banter and laughter between desks.

In November, I picked up a new client that I'm currently working with. They've recently adopted Angular and I've enjoyed the experience of working with a team of UI developers. We're putting a fresh UI on a legacy product and the team has been able to move really quickly. They're also in the Bay Area so it's been fun traveling to Silicon Valley once a month. My contract with them ends this spring.

Speaking

I spoke about Angular at Denver's Open Source User Group in February and about JHipster at Denver's Java User Group in April. In the second half of the year, I re-joined the conference circuit, starting with UberConf in July. September brought me to SpringOne 2GX in Washington, DC and the Angular Summit in Boston.

Trish and I giggled with glee as we returned to the Devoxx Belgium in November.

My JHipster talk was a hit and we loved our brief tour of Brugge.

As always, the people and the memories were the best part.

To end the year, I journeyed to Fort Lauderdale for the Rich Web Experience. After speaking, I worked remotely and networked for a few days. The networking lasted until the wee hours of the morning and good fun was had by all.

Devoxx4Kids

I didn't plan any Devoxx4Kids events until later in the year. The Denver Chapter watched Arun and Aditya Gupta speak about modding Minecraft in August. I also presented on setting up a Minecraft server in the cloud. In October, the talented Kellyn Pot'Vin-Gorman taught a class about coding simple games with the Raspberry Pi. It's always fun to see the kids' faces light up when they solve a programming problem.

This year, with the help of Tuliva, we hope to host one Devoxx4Kids class per quarter. If there's a particular topic or speaker you'd like to see, please let me know.

Projects

I released a new version of AppFuse in February and started working on the JHipster Mini-Book in March. To help provide updates about the book, I created a blogging app with JHipster and started www.jhipster-book.com. I wrote the book and created 21-Points Health as its example application. I open-sourced 21-Points on GitHub during my Devoxx presentation. Because of my writing and speaking about JHipster, I was invited to join the JHipster Team. I happily accepted; it's been a great group to work with.

The JHipster Mini-Book 1.0 was released on October 30, 2015. I wrote about how I wrote it a few days later.

Personal

I wrote down my goals at the beginning of 2015:

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

I'm proud to say I accomplished three out of five. The Bus didn't get finished and we failed to sell our house. I did create 21-Points Health, wrote The JHipster Mini-Book and maintained good health all year.

We weren't planning on selling our house this year; we wanted to find a new house and rent out our current one. However, we found a house we loved (small house, lots of land) in the heart of DTC and putting our house on the market was the best way to try and get it. Our offer failed and we endured the house-is-on-the-market dance through July and August. It was pretty sweet living in such a clean house, but we got tired of living in a de-personalized abode. We took it off the market in September and plan on renting it once we find our next home.

The worst part of the year started with a phone call from a friend in the early afternoon on October 7. My good friend, Cletus, called to notify me that he'd found our friend, Jason Miller, dead that morning. Jason was a pledge class brother of Cletus and mine in the Chi Phi Fraternity at DU. You might remember Jason from my trip to Oktoberfest in 2008. He was one of my best friends.

Jason was a heckuva guy and an awesome friend. He always inspired laughter and smiles with his witty humor. He will be missed, but not forgotten. Jason had a zest for life and a good time that we've resolved to remember annually with a brother's trip to an exotic gambling destination. This year, we'll be traveling to Las Vegas for St. Patty's Day and March Madness.

The Ski Bus

The Syncro Ski Bus had a pretty good year. We took it on many skiing adventures, with trips to Steamboat, Crested Butte, and Telluride.

We enjoyed a couple overnights and tailgated a few times at our favorite ski area: Mary Jane.

I took Jack and we met my parents in Moab in May for Syncro Solstice 2015. We took it for some off-roading, busted a cooling hose a couple times, and almost made it back to Denver.

That next weekend, we took it to VWs on the Green and showed it alongside The (under construction) Bus.

In July, we journeyed to Montana for the 4th of July. We drove our Westy in the Swan Valley parade while the kids rode on top and threw water balloons and candy to the crowd. We drove back from Montana in a single day (900 miles). I remember Wyoming well. Sirius XM was broadcasting the last Grateful Dead concert from Soldier Field and Trish was driving. She sang for hours, driving through the rain and fog while I dozed periodically.

Sewfine finished The Bus's interior in July. I wrote about this and many other things in Life Update: The Bus Project, New Gigs, New House and More.

A week later, I won a runner-up trophy for the Syncro at The Colorado Bug-In at Bandimere Speedway. On my birthday, July 16, we drove it to Dinosaur National Monument for a week-long raft trip, starting at Gates of Lodore. I hit my first deer that night, driving at 3am and doing minimal damage to our German-engineered RV. The deer broke the headlight, but not the bulb.

We had some more camping/rafting adventures with it in the fall, but eventually had to take it to the shop for a transmission rebuild in November. While it was getting repairs, we upgraded a few things. It now has a South African grill, modern headlights, a new fridge and a Propex heater. It's finally become the ultimate camping vehicle, for summer or winter.

2016

Professionally, I plan to continue speaking at conferences this year. I've submitted a few proposals to Devoxx France, Devoxx UK and I've agreed to speak at Geek Out. And did you hear that SpringOne 2016 is in Las Vegas?!

I suspect this will be the year of Angular 2 and microservices. Watch this project to see how JHipster implements microservices. I plan to pump out a release of AppFuse in the near future, implementing #NoXML and moving to Java 8.

Trish and I hope to move into a new house this year, but won't be disappointed if we don't find the right one. We have another year before Abbie starts high school at 7am.

I have no real big projects planned, except for driving The Bus. We do have a few fun vacations planned. In fact, I'm writing this while riding in the back of our Westy. My parents and I are road-tripping from Denver to Jekyll Island, Georgia. We're taking the scenic route to see some places we've never been and staying at RV Parks with the top popped. We arrive in New Orleans this afternoon and will be staying two nights to enjoy the culture and cuisine.

My Dad turns 70 this weekend and we planned a family vacation to celebrate. His brother and sister are joining us and Trish and the kids are flying in this weekend. We figured a road trip across the country was appropriate since we've done so many together and I happen to own the ultimate vehicle for car camping. Below is a map of our route.

In June, we'll be celebrating Trish's parents 50th wedding anniversary in Kauai. With Trish's brother, sister and children joining in, everyone is sure to have a fantastic vacation. I hope to continue the fun by working remotely from Montana in July.

When I drive the finished bus in the Swan Valley parade on the 4th of July, I'll be smiling from ear-to-ear. 2016 is the year! The long wait will be over soon...

2014 - A Year in Review

Matt Raible — Sat, 31 Jan 2015 09:37:43 -0700

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.

I should've known it'd be an interesting year when the Broncos flopped in the Super Bowl.

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

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.

I continued leveraging Spring Boot in my client projects and wrote about Building a REST API with JAXB, Spring Boot and Spring Data at the end of that engagement.

In November, I had time off between clients. I visited my parents and their awesome retirement home in Montana. I also took some time to refactor AppFuse to be a bit leaner and meaner. I signed up with a new health care client in December. It's been an enjoyable experience so far, especially since I'm only working 20 hours per week this quarter.

I'm currently booked with clients through the end of March, but hoping to find one with a challenging project in April.

Speaking

To optimize cash flow towards the bus project, I didn't submit any talks to conferences in 2014. However, I did talk about Comparing JVM Web Frameworks at the Denver Open Source Users Group and vJUG in February. I also spoke at local user groups (DeRailed and HTML5 Users) about The Art of AngularJS in the first part of the year. In the fall, I participated in panels on unit testing at Denver Startup Week and building a personal brand at AirConf.

I hope to attend and speak at more conferences in 2015. To help facilitate this, I've published a list of talks I'd like to present.

Devoxx4Kids Denver

2014 was the inaugural year for Devoxx4Kids Denver. In April, I announced our first meetup. It was an Introduction to Server-Side Minecraft Programming, taught by Denver's own Scott Davis. It was a wild success and the kids had a great time hacking.

I didn't plan any events during the summer, but we held a couple workshops in the fall: one on littleBits and a second on Greenfoot. The kids had a lot of fun with littleBits thanks to Juan Sanchez of Tack Mobile.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to attend the Greenfoot workshop with Steve Pousty, but I heard it was awesome. Thanks again to Dan Allen for assisting with this class.

I haven't scheduled any Devoxx4Kids Denver meetups for 2015 yet. If you're interested in speaking, please let me know!

Projects

AppFuse: I didn't have many posts about AppFuse in 2014, but I did work on it from time to time. Upgrading its dependencies was a good way to stay up-to-date with open source frameworks, in addition to lots of reading. InfoQ covered the AppFuse 3.0 release and I continue to write for them.

In December, I removed 10,000 lines of XML from the project without affecting any functionality. In the past month, I've added support for generating CRUD for all its web frameworks (including AppFuse Light's). This includes Spring + FreeMarker, Stripes and Wicket. GWT support is still in progress. I hope to do a release soon; there's only 10 issues left as of this writing.

Roller: I didn't contribute any code to Apache Roller in 2014, but I upgraded this site to the latest release, upgraded to Java 8 + Tomcat 7, and integrated Wufoo Forms. I hope to make some scalability improvements to how I've deployed Roller in the near future.

Personal

I started off the year with a trip of a lifetime: Heli Skiing in British Columbia with CMH Gothics. An excerpt from my blog post:

Everyday was awesome, but Wednesday was incredible. It snowed 10 cm on Tuesday night, which turned into knee-deep powder and face shots. The hoots and hollers from everyone floating down forced my face into a sorta perma-grin. For many of us, it was the best skiing day of our entire lives. The video below tries to capture how much fun we had throughout the week, but ultimately fails. It's one of those things you have to experience to really appreciate. I ended up skiing around 80,000 vertical feet in four days.

After returning from British Columbia, Trish and I skied Breckenridge and Copper before taking the kids to Aspen for three feet of powder on Super Bowl weekend.

We skied all over Colorado in February and March. We even did some winter camping in the Syncro for Valentine's Day. It snowed a lot that night.

I wrote about all our skiing adventures in Farewell to the 2013-2014 Ski Season.

On April 10th, I reminisced that 10 years ago today, I bought a VW Bus. In that post, I explained some body-work quality issues the current restoration shop found. Nevertheless, I still thought it would be done in just a few more months.

We journeyed to Florida with Abbie and Jack for Spring Break. We relished in a super-fun family vacation where we golfed, swam and even spent a day frolicking with their Mom and fiancé (now husband), Dave. We're pretty proud that we're all still a family even though Julie and I are divorced. I wrote about our vacation in Spring Break in Florida: Golf, Beaches and Boats!

The hospitality from Trish's parents was like no other. I especially enjoyed a fishing trip with her Dad Joe in the Everglades. I love these people!

Our winter activities in the Syncro were incredible. Trish sold her Nissan Xterra (the one with the sick bass) in December. Yes, that's right - we only had one vehicle during ski season last year. The fact that it worked so well is amazing. In May, we kicked it up a knotch and drove it to Moab for Syncro Solstice. My parents went with us and we experienced fabulous weather and met a bunch of super-cool Vanagon owners.

We made record time from Moab back to Denver (5 hours). The next day is when things started to go downhill. I washed the engine for the VWs on the Green show. On that Monday, the engine started "lurching" where it seemed like it wasn't getting gas (it turned out to be caused by a lack of air). We drove the lurcher for several weeks, journeying to Campout for the Cause and a exhilarating raft trip down the Yampa River.

We had the lurching examined in mid-June by Rocky Mountain Westy; we also had them install some bumpers (for a better trailer hitch) and refreshed the tires.

The ol' van looked pretty good when our Dads arrived in Denver for some whitewater on the Arkansas.

In July, we skipped the annual road trip to The Cabin in favor of a romantic road trip to see old friends in Santa Fe. The Syncro's engine seized on that trip and I experienced my favorite breakdown ever. The engine froze at a gas station near our Ski Shack and I was able to walk home. Luckily, Trish's Dad had recently (over Father's Day weekend) gifted his Nissan Maxima to us. After a train ride to fetch our other car, our road trip continued and we celebrated our first anniversary at The Broadmoor.

After we returned from Santa Fe, I turned 40 years old. We rocked out a Journey concert to celebrate and Trish surprised me with a birthday visit from my kick-ass sister. The following evening, a bunch of friends took me on a Craft Brewery Tour in a school/prison bus. Both nights were epic.

At the end of July, Trish had one of her favorite photos featured on the cover of Whisky Magazine.

In August, we flew to Boston to celebrate Trish's Dad's 75th birthday. My parents joined us, we visited my Dad's family in New York and took the kids to the Big Apple. They loved the Statue of Liberty.

Abbie started middle school (6th grade) in mid-August and Jack started 4th grade. They looked great on their first day of school.

We were pumped about our new engine in the Syncro when we left Denver for Rafting the Green River through Desolation Canyon. We celebrated Jack's 10th birthday on that trip and had a very memorable expedition with some really cool people.

Trish's photo from our last night on the river makes me want do it all again.

In October, I started considering health over wealth when we embarked on a 21-day Sugar Detox. I'm proud to say that, as a result, I'm off blood pressure medication and continue to lose weight and feel better. We're cooking at home more than ever, exercising daily and I've lost almost 20 pounds in the process.

Medallion, the horse that Trish and Abbie were leasing (and almost ready to buy) got sick with colic on Friday, October 10. I remembered the day without looking at a calendar because Trish called me to tell me about his illness. She was out of town on a business trip and was absolutely distraught. She told me about the situation and asked me to visit Medallion while he endured extreme pain. I worked out of my van at the stables that day, checking on him every couple hours. They had to put him down that evening. Abbie took it pretty well when I told her a couple hours later, but there were heaps of tears later that night.

Our little girl turned 12 a few weeks later. The kids put on some dark costumes for Halloween.

A week later, I visited my parents in Montana. We played cribbage, ate scrumptious meals and trounced around the woods looking for bucks. I marveled at the beauty of my parents' retirement home.

I neglected to blog or tweet about my self-caused Syncro accidents in Q4 of 2014. Long story short: it's been getting body work done for quite some time (two accidents!) and I look forward to getting it back in tip-top-shape next week. Thank goodness for USAA insurance.

The biggest event of the year happened just before Christmas: THE BUS IS PAINTED!! HOLY CHRISTMAS PRESENT BATMAN!

2015

It's hard to believe that 2015 could possibly top 2014. I started the year heli-skiing and ended it with a painted bus. However, the bus isn't done yet. Last year, I wrote:

My goal for 2014 is singular: finish The Bus.

I continue that mission this year. I've negotiated a deal with ReinCARnation to have it done by April 1st. Yes, it seems strange that April Fools is the finished bus delivery date. However, I'm confident they'll make it happen. This could be the year I've dreamed about since I was in high school. It was in 1991 that I first fantasized about putting a 911 engine in a VW Bus.

This year, I hope to be cruise around Colorado in two running VW Busses. From there, I plan to surround myself with the laughter of our children, the enthusiasm of our border collies and the warmness of Trish's love. It's gonna be a really great year!

This site now powered by Java 8, Tomcat 7 and Wufoo Forms

Matt Raible — Wed, 9 Apr 2014 07:37:59 -0600

I recently upgraded this site to use the latest version of Apache Roller. It was a minor release (5.0.3), but I figured I'd document the steps in case "early onset" comes soon. First of all, to download raibledesigns.com and get it running locally, I perform the following steps:

Backup everything using ~/bin/backup.sh on raibledesigns.com
scp backup file to local hard drive and expand
Copy ROOT, skins and repository directories to local webapps
Make sure activation, mail, mysql and jta JARs are in $CATALINA_HOME/lib
Copy roller-custom.properties from raibledesigns.com's $CATALINA_HOME/lib
Copy context files from hosted $CATALINA_HOME/conf/Catalina to local directory
Import database and change roller-custom.properties to match local credentials

Next, to upgrade to the latest Roller release, I do the following:

Download latest Roller release and expand
Copy JARs (from WEB-INF/lib) to existing install (to upgrade dependencies)
Delete any lower-versioned JARS from WEB-INF/lib directory
Copy JSPs (from WEB-INF/jsps) to existing install
Run database migration scripts from WEB-INF/classes/dbscripts
Use a diff tool (like SmartSynchronize) to compare new vs. existing
Test and troubleshoot (if there's startup errors)

This process has worked well for the last 10 years, and it's been in my head the whole time. It's bound to escape someday.

Contact Form Enhancements
In addition to upgrading Roller, I also upgraded Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7.0.52. In doing so, I found Jakarta's Mailer Taglib doesn't work with Tomcat 7. As you can tell from the aforementioned thread, I've known this for several years. That's the only thing that's stopped me from upgrading Tomcat the past couple years.

Rather than using my own code to send email, I figured I'd explore my options. I looked into Kontactr, EmailMeForm and Wufoo. The first two allowed me to customize their colors, but Wufoo was the only one that had a transparent background feature. Because Wufoo form's are transparent, and I'd copied their CSS for AppFuse's forms in the past, I decided to use it. To make it work with both of this site's themes (light and dark), I did need to create two forms on Wufoo and do some local JavaScript modifications. You can see the results on my contact page (view-source to see the JavaScript). If you switch the theme (by clicking the little rectangles in the top-right corner), you can see how the form is redrawn with the proper color scheme.

If I'd found it sooner, I likely would've used Brace Forms for my contact form.

Theme Improvements
Ever since I switched to a new look and feel, there's been improvements I wanted to make.

The stylesheet switching doesn't happen as fast as I'd hoped (there's a flash even if using cookies), so I'll likely be converting some theme-setting logic to the server-side. The HTML5 version of the FaceBook Like Button requires you to specify the "data-colorscheme" in markup so this further supports moving to the server.

To fix this issue, I tried creating a cookie-reader plugin for Roller. This worked, but not as well as I'd hoped. The theme cookie was read the first time the page loaded, but then cached for subsequent requests. If a user changed their theme, the new value would not be read by the cached page. My solution now is putting the JavaScript set-default-theme logic right after the stylesheet to set it before the body loads.

Powered by Java 8
To make this site run on Java 8, I had to move to a new server. Keith did a bunch of work on my old server to get Java 8 working, but found Linux JDK 7 code has dependancies on the 2.6 kernel. If you're reading this post, the DNS changes have propagated. This means I have my first Java 8 app in production!

Secured by SSL
The last change I made was to start using my SSL certificate on this site. You can read about the challenges I encountered on the Roller mailing list. The final solution involved changing my Absolute URL to use https and then changing my theme to use the following for its base.

<base href="$absBaseURL.replace('https:', '')" />

I also had to change a number of iframes to use src="//..." instead of src="//...". To force HTTPS for the admin pages, Keith configured Apache to do the redirect. Using Roller to redirect resulted in infinite loop errors.

This means you can now access this site using https://raibledesigns.com or http://raibledesigns.com, whichever you prefer. Speaking of SSL, you might wonder if this new server is affected by The Heartbleed Bug. According to Keith, it is not.

This server is still running openSSL 1.0.0 which was shipped with Centos 6.1, and the Heartbleed vulnerability appeared in OpenSSL 1.0.1 which shipped Centos 6.5.

Summary
This site has undergone quite a few updates this month: Roller 5.0.3, Tomcat 7.0.52, a Wufoo contact form (+ recent tweets on the same page), Java 8 and optional SSL. If you see any issues, please let me know.

May 8, 2014 Update: I decided to revert to "http" for the absolute URL instead of "https". However, I've updated all "src" attributes on <iframe> and <img> tags to use schema-less URLs (// instead of http://). This means that both secure and non-secure URLs should work.

2013 - A Year in Review

Matt Raible — Fri, 31 Jan 2014 08:53:10 -0700

2013 was an amazing year: Trish and I got married, celebrated on a 'round-the-world honeymoon and invested in a new 4x4 VW Bus. I finally achieved my goal of vacationing 25% and I got to spend more than two months in the presence of my wonderful parents.

For this Year in Review post, I'll use the same format as I did last year:

Professional

For the last few years, I've generally had one client per year. That changed this year when my contract with Oracle ended in May. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to develop a cool dashboard application before I finished. I wrote about it in a four-part series.

I engaged in a month-long contract with Travelport to keep me busy in June. They hired me to develop a portal consolidation prototype, which I did with AngularJS, Grails and LDAP. I showcased that application at Devoxx in November.

In September, I started a new gig with John Muir Health. I was hired to help with their mobile architecture, and spent my first couple months doing front-end optimizing and helping get their MyJMH product released. Once the release was complete, I proposed a mobile architecture and started assisting with the development of their mobile application.

We're developing the Mobile API with Spring Boot. I wrote about my initial experience in A Webapp Makeover with Spring 4 and Spring Boot. My contract with John Muir Health is through the end of March and I hope to start something new shortly after.

In October, I started Writing for InfoQ and I've really enjoyed it so far. You can see the articles I've written on my author page or by clicking the links below:

Speaking

I spoke at five events in 2013:

Denver JUG on The Modern Java Web Developer and Java Web Security
Devoxx France on Comparing JVM Web Frameworks and Play vs. Grails
HTML5 Denver on Bootstrap
JavaOne: I spoke for the first time and received a Rock Star Award
Devoxx and a Nordic Countries Speaking Tour on The Modern Java Web Developer

It seems that folks liked my presentations since they were in the top 1% of most viewed on SlideShare in 2013.

Trish took many beautiful photos as part of our trip to Devoxx France.

We stopped in Iceland on the way home to see the Northern Lights.

Projects

AppFuse: I released AppFuse Light 2.2.1 in January and switched AppFuse from JSF's MyFaces to PrimeFaces in February. I blogged about AppFuse's GWT integration in March and celebrated the project's 10 year anniversary in April. AppFuse 3.0 was released just before Christmas.

Roller: I didn't contribute any code to the Roller project in 2013, but I did make this site responsive with CSS media queries.

Personal

Trish and I started our world travels in March with a trip to Magnificent Mexico. We had a wonderful time playing with old friends and renting a house on the beach.

Our trip to Paris and Iceland was a dream come true for Trish. Watching the Aurora Borealis dance in the sky is something I'll never forget.

To end the ski season in April, we completed the trifecta (3 ski resorts in 3 days) with a fun family weekend.

The last week of the ski season was epic, as I described in a life update.

The last week in Winter Park was the best skiing of the year. The first (Tuesday) afternoon, I started skiing around 1pm and it snowed all afternoon - resulting in several inches by the end of the day. The next day was smooth and empty, followed by a day of deep powder and knee-deep runs down Eagle Wind. I had one of the best runs of my life that day.

I wrote about the '66 Bus Project and how I removed it from Motorworks Restorations after six years.

We spent the first weekends in June on the Colorado River. One of the biggest highlights for me was catching a 16" Trout, right after Trish saw it jump and told me exactly where to cast my line. The fact that I was able to cast it to the precise spot was cool enough, but getting the fish on my line moments later was exhilarating. Shortly after, a majestic Bald Eagle flew over us and we all dropped our jaws in amazement.

Trish and I started a two month sabbatical in July to get married in proper fashion in the town I grew up in. She looked absolutely stunning.

During the ceremony, I surprised her with a 162-page book I built with my words and her pictures.

When asked if I'd take her as my lawfully-wedded wife, I shouted as "YES!" at the top of my lungs. Trish agreed enthusiastically and we were pronounced husband and wife.

Our wedding week was an unbelievably fun experience with many, many friends and family. We look forward to celebrating it over and over again as long as we live.

We had a day of rest following the wedding, then drove back to Denver to begin our 'round-the-world honeymoon without phones. We spent a month traveling to Ireland, Italy, Thailand and Fiji. It was a wonderful journey and we greatly enjoyed all the people, places and experiences.

We arrived back in the US at the end of August, just in time to celebrate Jack's 9th birthday.

In September, we got loud at the Broncos Home Opener, and experienced beautiful Colorado fall weather with trips to Estes Park and Aspen. In October, we traveled to Minnesota for a best friend's wedding. We also visited Pennsylvania to spend some time with Trish's parents.

We Bought a Ski Bus in October and celebrated Abbie's birthday in November. Shortly after, we departed on a whirlwind six-country speaking tour in Europe. We visited 14 countries in 2013.

In early December, we flew to Idaho to pickup our new Syncro. We anticipated a few VW Adventures when we bought the bus and haven't been disappointed.

The Syncro drove back to Denver just fine, but started experiencing cooling issues driving around town. We got it fixed and drove to Montana for Christmas. We broke down on Christmas Eve in Bozeman, tried to fix it, but eventually gave up and rented a car. Straightaway Motors replaced the thermostat over the next week and we were able to drive it back to Denver with no issues. It started overheating again a couple days later. We've only recently got it running smoothly, with help from Rocky Mountain Westy. You can read the full story on thesamba.com.

Christmas Vacation was spent at The Raible Homestead, enjoying my parents new retirement cabin and a sweet sledding hill.

We finished the year skiing at Big Mountain, where I learned how to downhill ski in grade school.

2014

My goal for 2014 is singular: finish The Bus. I finally found the restoration shop I wish I would've found years ago. They're very quick and efficient, and send me daily (picture) updates of their progress. With any luck, it'll be done in a couple months (sound familiar?).

Last year, I wanted to slow down and I feel like I did that on our honeymoon. My wife scoffs at that notion. This year, I hope to simply take more time to do things, instead of trying to cram many things into tight timelines.

I plan to spend less time traveling and speaking at conferences and more time at Volkswagen shows. With our 4x4 VW Syncro, we hope to camp, raft and spend quite a bit of time in the Rocky Mountains. We also hope to take the busses to a few art shows to show off Trish's majestic photos.

Professionally, I hope to continue developing HTML5 apps and APIs with JavaScript, CSS, Java and Groovy. I might dive back into Scala and I'm intrigued by Node.js and Spring Boot. Since I won't be doing as many conferences, the technologies I use will likely be driven by client engagements. I expect 2014 to be a big year for HTTP/2.

Last year, and the year before, we watched the Broncos fail miserably in the NFL playoffs. This year, they're in the Super Bowl. With a kick-ass Ski Bus, a Porsche Bus on the way, awesome kids and a great wife - 2014 is destined to be spectacular. I hope the Broncos are too!

Responsive Design with CSS Media Queries

Matt Raible — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 11:38:12 -0600

In preparation for my upcoming talk on Bootstrap and CSS3, I figured it was high time I made this blog responsive. Making my new theme mobile-friendly has been on my todo list ever since last year's redesign. I also took the opportunity to 1) remove the geolocation lookup and associated sunset logic for theme selection and 2) change the default theme to the "light" one. If you prefer dark, just click on the black rectangle in the top-right.

I started by refreshing my knowledge of media queries by reading CSS Media Queries & Using Available Space. This led me to John Hick's site, where I grabbed a couple of his rules. Most notably, I started optimizing for iPhone, smartphones and any screens less than 1000px wide. I also decided to widen things a bit for larger screens.

/* Smartphones */
@media handheld and (max-width: 480px), screen and (max-device-width: 480px), screen and (max-width: 1000px) {

}

/* Large Desktop */
@media screen and (min-width: 1200px) {

}

When I started hacking away, I noticed a lot of the elements had "width" hard-coded in pixels, so I changed a lot of these to use "max-width" instead, as well as "width: 100%". This allowed me to only have a few elements that controlled the width and I was able to take advantage of larger screens with the following simple rules.

@media screen and (min-width: 1200px) {
    #site-container, #body-content, #header-inner {
        max-width: 1170px;
    }

    #body-content #left-column, .next-previous {
        max-width: 808px;
    }
}

For smartphones, I started by hiding the right column and menus with display: none. Then I decided the navigation menu might be useful if I ever wanted to manage the site on my phone. I found Create an Absolute Basic Mobile CSS Responsive Navigation Menu from the treehouse blog and went to work. 20 minutes later, I had the menu I was looking for and everything was looking pretty good in iOS Simulator.

At this point, I discovered that rotating to landscape mode caused the content font to become quite a bit larger. So I added a rule for the iPhone in landscape mode.

/* iPhone Landscape */
@media screen and (min-width: 321px) and (max-width: 480px) and (orientation: landscape) {
    #body-content #left-column .article .contents {
        font-size: 9px;
    }
}

I'm still not sure why this happens. I also noticed that rotating back to portrait causes some empty whitespace to show up on the right. The empty whitespace was a problem I spent most of my time solving. I ended up using web inspector with iOS Simulator to figure out which elements were bleeding past my desired width and then adjusted their width, or used overflow: hidden to hide them.

I enjoyed this mobile design experience, even with the many "why is there whitespace there!" moments. I especially liked it when I found I didn't need any rules for the iPad. I'm sure there's a few issues that still exist. For example, I haven't tested it on an Android device. Also, the Facebook button's "color-scheme" is still hard-coded in my templates. I hope to fix this by patching Roller to allow reading cookies on the server-side. If you notice anything that looks funny, please let me know.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy squishing and stretching your modern browser to see how this new responsive design works.

2012 - A Year in Review

Matt Raible — Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:15:24 -0700

I wrote my first year in review blog entry way back in 2005. That means this year's is number 8. Since they keep getting longer every year, I figured I'd try something different this year and use sections similar to Remy Sharp.

Professional

I spent the entirety of the year with one client: Taleo. Oracle bought them in February. In June, the transition to Oracle happened. My tasks and projects haven't changed much since the transition, but it has been a real pain to get paid on time. My contract with them is through the end of May. I hope to take July off (to get married) and August off (to honeymoon) and start a new gig in September.

I did minimal Java work throughout the year and spent most of my time doing CSS and JavaScript. I love doing front-end work much more than back-end, so day-to-day, it was very satisfying.

Business

Raible Designs had a great year, our best ever financially. I hired Trish as an assistant in January, doubling the size of the company. We had our Annual Shareholders Meeting on a Disney Cruise in April. I have no plans to do increase the size of the company in 2013, mostly because I enjoy not having the responsibility of employees. I've employed sub-contractors in the past and it always seems to create more of a headache than it's worth.

We moved our offices from downtown Littleton to Thrive (in LoDo) last April and I plan on staying there. It's an easy 6-mile bicycle commute and the guys there have been great to work with. I highly recommend it if you're looking for co-working space.

Speaking

I spoke at 5 events in 2012:

Silicon Valley Spring User Group on What's New in Spring 3.1.
JFokus on Comparing Web Frameworks and HTML5 with Play Scala.
Spring I/O on Comparing JVM Web Frameworks.
JavaPosse Roundup on How to build a Shot-Ski.
ÜberConf on Play vs. Grails.

Traveling to Stockholm and Madrid for JFokus and Spring I/O was spectacular.

I took the 2nd half of the year off from speaking, celebrating my temporary retirement at a Def Leppard concert in June. When I decided to do this, I was planning on my VW Bus being finished. I was planning on switching from Java Conferences to VW Shows as a hobby. Unfortunately, now it's January and The Bus still isn't done. I have high hopes for it being finished in 2013.

I paid for 2 conferences in 2012, the JavaPosse Roundup in March and Monktoberfest in October. While I enjoyed both, Monktoberfest will likely become a tradition.

Projects

AppFuse: I started the year by refreshing AppFuse's UI with Twitter Bootstrap and blogged about the Twitter's Summit on Bootstrap shortly after. At the same time, I was overhauling Taleo's UI with HTML5, Bootstrap and CSS3, but waited until August to blog about it.

In the fall, the AppFuse Team migrated to GitHub and integrated Hibernate Search. AppFuse 2.2.1 was released in December.

Happy Trails: In May and June, I worked on Happy Trails with James Ward as part of our Play vs. Grails Smackdown. This was a very enjoyable experience and I learned a lot about GitHub, Cloudbees and Heroku.

Play More: In June, I wrote about Upgrading to Play 2: Anorm and Testing. A couple weeks later, I wrote about integrating Validation and Secure Social into Play More. In the aforementioned post, I also posted my ÜberConf presentation, the source code and my thoughts on Play 2.

I found Anorm and Scalate to be huge time sinks and don't know if I'd recommend using either one in a Play 2 project. I'm sure Scalate will be easier to use as its Play 2 integration gets more refined, but I don't know if there's any hope for a JDBC abstraction that doesn't produce error messages when things go south.

Roller: Although I didn't contribute much to Apache Roller in 2012, I do continue to use it frequently. This site celebrated its 10-year anniversary in August. It got a new look and feel shortly after.

Personal

Last year was a fantastic year for family time. Our cruise around the Western Caribbean was money well spent.

My goal was to spend a month with my parents this year and we satisfied that by July. In total, we enjoyed their company for 8 weeks in 2012.

The worst ski season on record ended in April and Trish and I headed for wine country in May.

Abbie and Jack's school year ended on June 5th and we celebrated Father's Day on the Oregon coast.

Raible Road Trip #17 began in late June and we spent two weeks parading, rafting and golfing in Montana. From there, we flew to Maui for two weeks. I wrote about it all in Summer Vacation 2012 in Montana and Maui.

After returning from Hawaii, we dropped the kids off at their Mom's and headed to my cousin's wedding in Beacon, NY for the weekend. From there, my parents, Trish and I rode the train to Boston, spent a few days in Cape Cod and returned home in time for the beginning of school.

The kids started the school year in mid-August and we celebrated Jack's 8th birthday a couple weeks later.

My lack of speaking engagements and work-related travel gave us more time to frolic in the Colorado mountains, so we bought a boat for Labor Day weekend. That Saturday, we took it on its Maiden Voyage on the Colorado River, floating from Radium to Rancho del Rio. I guided and rowed the boat most of the time while our 7 passengers (and 2 dogs) enjoyed cold beverages, great scenery and relaxing in the sun.

The next day, Abbie played her first game of golf.

In October, I finished our deck project and work continued on our kitchen remodel (started in July by Ted Pepper). Our kitchen was far enough along for us to host our 1st Annual Halloween Party.

Abbie turned 10 the first week in November. That Friday, we headed to Kauai to celebrate my parents' 40th Anniversary. We spent Thanksgiving in Wenatchee, Christmas in Boston/Vermont and New Years with good friends in Fraser.

2013

My goals for 2013 are to be happy and to slow down. I don't plan on traveling any less, or spending less time with my family. I'd just like to walk slower, smell the good ol' Rocky Mountain air more and enjoy life. I believe our raft will help us facilitate this and we're already planning trips to the Green River in Utah and Schafer Meadows in the Bob.

The big event for the year will be Trish and my wedding this summer. We'll be doing it in my hometown in Montana and we expect it to be quite the shindig. Afterward, we plan on traveling the world for our honeymoon.

Of course, if the bus gets finished, that's a huge bonus too.

Professionally, I'm starting an exciting project at Taleo that will involve heavy JavaScript, CSS3 and maybe even Canvas. I have speaking engagements lined up at Denver JUG in February and HTML5 Denver in April. Also, I just submitted a couple talks to Devoxx France.

For AppFuse, I'd love to get 3-4 releases out this year, but 2 is probably more realistic. The AppFuse Roadmap shows our future releases + features. I'd also like to work a bit more on my Play 2 app; finishing the mobile client and possibly switching from Anorm to Slick or Spring Data.

While Oracle has been good to me, I look forward to finding and working for a new client in September.

Last year at this time, we watched the Broncos execute the Mile High Miracle over the Steelers. With tickets to both this week's game (vs. The Ravens) and next week's game (vs. The Patriots), I wouldn't be surprised if January turns out to be a great month. However, with the Powder Days, The Super Bowl, the raft trips, the Bus Shows and The Wedding, there's a good chance that all the months in 2013 are epic.

New Look and Feel, Designed by Gillen's Army

Matt Raible — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 22:58:11 -0600

As part of my 10-year blogiversary, I was hoping to refresh this site with a new look and feel. A few months ago, I contacted my friend Mark Waggoner to see about getting his design help. We promptly worked out a logo/business card/website deal and Gillen's Army went to work.

I picked a logo from numerous choices in late June, finalized a business card for printing in July and received the HTML and CSS for the site on August 2nd. I started converting it to a Roller theme last week and did a whole bunch of other modifications in the process.

Upgraded to Roller 5.0.1.
Upgraded wro4j to the latest version (1.4.8.1) to workaround using a → (\2192) in CSS.
Changed to use jQuery and Lightbox2 for pictures.
Upgraded to the latest version (3.0.83) of SyntaxHighlighter. You might notice there is no longer a toolbar in this version. However, you can still double-click on code and easily copy/paste it.

In addition to these upgrades, I made a few enhancements. I converted to HTML5 (by switching the doctype), added Modernizr and a feature that detects if the sun is up in your location. If you allow your browser to send me your lat and long, I'll give you a dark theme when the sun is down and a light theme when it's daylight. I used Preston's Hunt's JavaScript Class for Sunrise and Sunset Calculations to determine isDaylight. You can also change the theme to light or dark using the small rectangles above the search box on the right. This sets a cookie and overrides the HTML5 Geo check. You can see the implementation of this logic in site.js.

The stylesheet switching doesn't happen as fast as I'd hoped (there's a flash even if using cookies), so I'll likely be converting some theme-setting logic to the server-side. The HTML5 version of the FaceBook Like Button requires you to specify the "data-colorscheme" in markup so this further supports moving to the server.

I have other minor adjustments I'd like to make, but more importantly - I wanted to get it out to you all. Tell me what you like and don't like. Among other things, the form inputs for comments and contact forms have backgrounds that might not be great for those color-impaired. Also, you can see how the iframe on the contact page has a white background instead of one based on the theme.

Here's some stats comparing my old andreas08 theme to the new darklight:

Metric	andreas08	darklight
Size and Speed	167 requests, 3.6MB, 9.89s	148 requests, 3.2MB, 7.34s
YSlow	76	87
PageSpeed	91	96

Sweet! It looks like this site is faster than ever. Cheers to Mark and Gillen's Army for the new design. I dig it!

10 Years Ago...

Matt Raible — Thu, 2 Aug 2012 12:47:19 -0600

Wouldn't you know it, I missed my 10-year blogiversary. 10 years ago yesterday, I wrote my first blog post. This was shortly after reading Dave Johnson's article about Roller. I originally started this blog to share a bunch of tips and tricks I'd learn while doing web development, particularly with Java and Struts. Since then, I've written 3,086 entries and received 13,462 comments.

I found that writing technical blog posts was a great way to remember things and share knowledge. According to Google Analytics (which doesn't track my RSS/Atom feeds), here's my most-visited blog posts since 2006.

Tips for Productivity and Happiness at Work - April 14, 2006
Play 2.0, A web framework for a new era - November 16, 2011
Ajax Framework Analysis Results - April 23, 2009
RE: Moving from Spring to Java EE 6: The Age of Frameworks is Over - October 16, 2010

I also started it to document my life, so I could remember the details of significant life events and fun family vacations. I wrote about Abbie's and Jack's arrival. I penned a story about growing up at the cabin, twice. In April 2004, I wrote about buying a 1966 21-window VW Bus. Yes, I'm still restoring it. No, I don't know when it'll be done. This year I hope.

I blogged about Abbie and Jack's first day of school, I wrote about almost all of Abbie's birthdays; Jack's 5th, 4th, 3rd and 1st. Some of my favorite comments are on Jack's got a bead stuck in his nose! I blogged about getting a divorce 5 years ago. I wrote about visiting the real Oktoberfest the next year.

I wrote about my Dad's retirement, my sister's wedding and my Mom's retirement.

I met Trish in June of 2010 and mentioned her name for the first time in September 2010. I introduced her to the kids in November and we started traveling the world together. We journeyed to Antwerp/Amsterdam, Fort Lauderdale/Key West, Crested Butte, Alta, Las Vegas, a hut trip in the Rockies and Kraków. And that was just in the first 6 months! We got engaged last November.

I summarized the years several times, in 2005, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011.

Last, but certainly not least, I'd like to thank the ones that made the last 10 years possible:

Keith at KGB Internet. Hosted here since day 1, for $20 month*.
Dave Johnson, for creating Roller and continuing to maintain it all these years.
Java and Tomcat, for your rock-solid stability through the years.
The Open Source Movement, for providing so much to write about.
My Family, for giving me with so many adventures and memories.

* Thank goodness he doesn't charge me for bandwidth. It's a little heavy on the bits.

Update: As part of this 10-year celebration, I've updated the look-and-feel with help from Gillen's Army.

2011 - A Year in Review

Matt Raible — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 09:45:20 -0700

2010 was an awesome year, but 2011 rocked the house! At the end of last year, I kept my goals simple:

In 2011, I plan on doing two main things: keep rockin' it with Trish and finishing The Bus. Everything else is gravy.

As predicted, it was a spectacular year, but I only accomplished 50% of my goals. That is, Trish and I had a great time skiing (especially in Utah), moving in together, traveling the world and getting engaged in Versailles. I even satisfied some 5-year goals: building a sauna in my basement and getting a ski shack in the mountains.

However, I didn't get much done with The Bus. Or rather, the guys at MotorWorks Restorations didn't drain me for all I'm worth in 2011. We did make good progress with estimating the final cost and obtaining many hard-to-find parts though. I now have a Porsche 911 Engine (1983 3.0L 6 cylinder), a Porsche 901 5 speed transmission, Porsche "Turbo Twist" wheels and a Custom Air Ride Front Beam from Franklin's VW Works. The thing that slowed our progress the most was the custom beam, as it took almost 6 months from order to delivery. When it arrived in September, I decided to put things on hold. I didn't want to get my bus back in the midst of winter and not be able to drive it.

In January, I started working at Overstock.com and flew out to Salt Lake City the first two weeks to ramp up. In setting up my development environment, I discovered some inefficiencies and wrote about how I fixed them in Making Code Generation Smarter with Maven. I also discovered that JRebel slowed my build process down by almost 50% and stopped using it as part of my daily process. Now I simply run in debug mode or use fancy frameworks that allow instant reload.

At the end of the month, I skied Alta for the first time on a blue bird day. That night, I flew back to Denver, had a gorgeous lunch ride in 70°F weather on Friday afternoon, then picked up my lovely girlfriend, Trish, and drove to Crested Butte for a weekend of skiing with James Ward and friends. It was my first time visiting Crested Butte and I can see why people call it Paradise.

As of February 1st, Trish and I both had 17 ski days. As I'm writing this, we're both up to 14 for this season and very proud to say Abbie and Jack each have 10. Both kids are shredding like I've always dreamed they would.

My parents (both retired) came to visit for the month of February and helped me start building a sauna in my basement. This was something I've wanted to do for years, so it was a lot of fun getting things started. While we didn't finish construction, we did get the plumbing/electrical done, stove installed and walls framed. We also had a fun night with Chef Navarro and Friends.

The rest of my posts in February were purely technical. I wrote about how I implemented extensionless URLs with Tapestry, Spring MVC, Struts 2 and JSF. Then I started delving into security-related topics, largely motivated by a new feature I was working on at Overstock. When I wrote about Implementing Ajax Authentication using jQuery, Spring Security and HTTPS, I explained what I was trying to accomplish.

The feature hasn't been released yet, but basically boils down to allowing users to login without leaving a page. For example, if they want to leave a review on a product, they would click a link, be prompted to login, enter their credentials, then continue to leave their review. The login prompt and subsequent review would likely be implemented using a lightbox. While lightboxes are often seen in webapps these days because they look good, it's also possible Lightbox UIs provide a poor user experience.

I was able to get everything working, posted a demo and wrote about upcoming conferences in Las Vegas and Kraków. In that article, I described a new talk I was going to create: Webapp Security: Develop. Penetrate. Protect. Relax. I ended the month with a post on how to fix XSS in JSP 2.

On February 25th, I experienced The Greatest Snow on Earth with thigh-deep powder and face shots on every run.

That night, we saw Hot Buttered Rum and woke up early for 27" of fresh powder at Alta. The picture of Trish free-heeling at Alta is one of my favorites of the year.

In early March, we experienced a suite night at the Avs game, then I kept it technical and upgraded this blog to Apache Roller 5.0, RC4. I upgraded AppFuse to JSF 2, wrote about JSR 303 and web framework support and added search to AppFuse using Compass. When writing about JSF 2, I mentioned replacing Ajax4JSF with RichFaces. 9 months later, it seems like PrimeFaces has more momentum, so I may try that instead.

For St. Patrick's Day, we flew to Vegas for TSSJS and had a blast. Not only did my talks go well, but we had a bunch of friends in town and had much success gambling the nights away.

After delivering my Comparing JVM Web Frameworks talk, I had a very interesting conversation with James Strachan. He recommended I take a look at CoffeeScript and Jade. A couple months later, when I was thinking of talks for Devoxx, I added these to my list of technologies to learn and submitted a talk about HTML5 with Play Scala, CoffeeScript and Jade.

That Friday, we returned to Denver, got a good night's sleep then headed on a hut trip in Colorado's High Country. The name of the hut was Peter Estin Hut and it was a bit of a hike to get to. My friend, Joe, set my expectations correctly when he warned me it'd be a 5 hour death march. It took us 4 hours, 30 minutes and we skied up 2200 vertical feet of switchbacks.

Trish and I started off April with a bang by moving in together, then embarking on a whirlwind trip of two opening days with a stopover in Kraków. We flew Business Class from Chicago to Munich (releasing AppFuse 2.1 just before departing) and were very impressed with Kraków's Old Town upon arrival.

On that trip, I especially enjoyed meeting Trish's brother for the first time and watching the Red Sox win their first game of the year.

After returning, I realized I lost a lot of data in my Roller 5 upgrade and wrote about what happened and how I recovered it. Then we bid farewell to the 2010-2011 ski season and got ready for mountain bike season.

For next year, I think I'll keep my goal at 30 days. If everything works out as planned, we'll have a place in the mountains this fall and it'll be a bit easier to hit the slopes without sitting in traffic. For now, I'm pumped about the beginning of mountain bike season.

May arrived and Trish and I started looking for a place in the mountains. We found an very cool cabin, but later decided it was too nice and we'd rather have a condo. I finished The Basement Sauna Project and wrote about Java Web Application Security: Java EE 6, Spring Security and Apache Shiro.

On May 21st, we again visited Winter Park and Fraser to look at condos, then drove back to Denver for U2 at Mile High Stadium. I'm not a big fan of U2, but this was quite possibly the best concert I've ever been to. The experience of 70,000+ fans, all screaming, doing the wave, and loving life was epic. We decided that night that we liked one of the condos more than the rest and put in an offer the following week. The kids headed off to Florida for a month with their Mom and we drove to Utah for Desert Rocks and mountain biking in Moab.

I Upgraded to Roller 5.0 in June and showed how to add a Facebook Like button. Next, I transcribed a couple more Java Web Application Security articles: programmatic login APIs and penetrating with Zed Attack Proxy.

The kids returned to us just before the annual Father's Day Camping Trip. We drove to Lake Granby and stayed at Stillwater Campground for the weekend.

From my Father's Day post:

I really enjoyed spending so much time with my family this weekend. The good news is we get to do it again when I meet them at The Cabin in Montana next week. In the meantime, Trish and I are off to Jazoon for a few days of fun in Switzerland.

A few days later, we were in Zurich for the first time, enjoying our accommodations and marveling at Switzerland's excellent transportation system. I experienced an interesting situation while speaking, but quickly forgot when we visited Rhine Falls, celebrated our anniversary at Gruelich and played in the Swiss Alps.

We arrived back in Denver at 6pm on Sunday, June 26th and I flew to Montana at 8am the next morning. I worked from The Cabin that week and wrote a book review for Agile Hiring.

I think Sean [Landis] does a great job in showing how you can apply agile principles (people over process, tracking tools, failing fast, continuous improvement, constant feedback) to improve your hiring process. As a person that interviews often, I think it also gives great insights into how companies interview and what they're looking for. I've often thought that being honest about my skills and what I'm looking for is a good tactic and this book seems to confirm that.

That weekend, it was the "90s Reunion" for the Seeley Swan High School, which I attended my freshman and sophomore year of high school. There were several highlights of the trip, but one of my favorites was our float in the Swan Valley Parade. Abbie came up with the idea (Happy Birthday America) and we decorated an old trailer with streamers, balloons and a birthday cake to celebrate. Abbie made up a song and sang it throughout the entire parade (with a portable microphone and amp).

I went swimming with my iPhone 4 that Sunday and Trish and her Dad showed up a few hours later. On the 4th, we had a blast celebrating the holiday with mine and my parents' old friends. The next day, we adventured to Glacier National Park, where Trish shot an awesome sunrise at Lake McDonald. She also captured a beautiful picture of The Cabin at sunset that week.

In between vacationing in Montana and writing about it, I wrote some technical posts:

We returned to Denver in mid-July and shipped the kids off to Florida just before my annual Birthday Golf Debacle. We teed off at Wellshire Golf Course and had one of the most well-behaved rounds in a few years. The next weekend, we closed on our "Ski Shack" in Fraser and I penned Another Dream Realized: Mountain Views. Trish's October Sunset photo is one of my favorite glimpses of our view.

Next, I blogged about How do you get started in programming? and we headed to the airport a few hours later for a whirlwind trip from Oregon to Cape Cod. That was a wonderful trip and it took me almost a month to write about it. We flew into Portland and spent the weekend hiking in Silver Falls and drinking good beer at the Oregon Brewers Festival and Edgefield. We stayed with my good friends Clint and Autumn (married in Costa Rica in 2008), who had their first child only a few weeks after our visit (August 26th).

We had an awful early flight out of Portland to Boston that Sunday. On Monday afternoon, we picked up Abbie and Jack from the Boston airport. They flew up from West Palm Beach on their first unaccompanied minors flight. We drove them to Cape Cod and settled into Trish's parents house near the water. The rest of the week, we had a blast with our friends Chris and Julie and the entire McGinity clan.

We spent the rest of August going to concerts at Red Rocks, beer festivals in Winter Park, mountain biking, hiking, taking the kids to the Ski Shack and playing with Crazy Sagan. In my only August post, I talked a lot about the Broncos, Hawaii, Devoxx and leaving Overstock.

That pretty much catches you up-to-date with the goings on in my life. As you can tell, it's been a great summer so far. I'm really looking forward to the fall too. Broncos season, a trip to Hawaii, learning new technologies, talking about them at Devoxx and a new gig.
...
Tomorrow is Jack's birthday. I gotta run ... it's time to go buy a bike, play a little golf, hit the pool and go to the BBQ before tonight's CD Release Party.

We watched proudly as Jack turned 7 the next day and loved his excitement when he got his first mountain bike.

September started with mountain breezes and fishing at Lake Granby. Lots of friends, family and delicious food make for a heckuva 3-day weekend. Jack was the only one to catch a fish and you couldn't wipe the smile off his face for the rest of the day.

I described my Digital Diet and wrote my first article related to my Devoxx talk: Integrating Scalate and Jade with Play 1.2.3. The 2nd weekend in September, we enjoyed a September Sports Weekend, going to two Rockies games and the Monday night Broncos Opener before heading to Kauai. While the Broncos didn't win that game, Trish's shot of Brett, Joe and I sums up many-a-game this season.

As expected, Kauai blew our minds. We saw several spectacular sunsets, did some Stand Up Paddling (it's harder than it looks), played golf, took a doorless helicopter ride and kayaked along the Na Pali coast.

We never got bored of the view from our room.

Upon our return, I tried to make CoffeeScript work with Scalate and integrated HTML5 Boilerplate with Play.

October was a quiet month on this blog. I only wrote two articles, one about increasing my developer happiness and another about developing with HTML5, CoffeeScript and Twitter's Bootstrap. Watching the Broncos in October was painful at first, buy many rejoiced when Tebow started against Miami (10/23) and we had the amazing comeback to win. We went to the next game against the Lions and were quickly shown they had a long ways to go. We dressed up as the Scary Family for Halloween and had a ball.

I made up for October's lack of writing by writing 9 articles in November. I started with complaints about Play Scala's Anorm and PostgreSQL, then celebrated Abbie's 9th Birthday with a Magic Show.

The next week, I wrote about my new MacBook Pro and iMac and more Scalate goodness for Play. At this point, I was scrambling to finish up my Play More! application for Devoxx and worked a lot of late nights. That weekend, I used PhoneGap to turn my webapp into a native app and finished everything in the nick of time. We flew to Paris that Monday, took the train to Antwerp on Tuesday and settled in for a memorable week of interesting talks.

That Saturday, we took the train back to Paris and checked into our hotel for a few days of romance. I proposed to Trish at Versailles on Sunday at sunset and we rolled around in our joy for a few days before we told any of our friends.

We flew back to the US the Wednesday before Christmas and spent the weekend in Boston with Trish's family. For full details of that trip, see Our Engaging Trip to Paris and Antwerp.

To end the year, I kept it light and only spun up one blog post in December: What have I been working on at Taleo? A week after writing that post, we moved to the Ski Shack for 3 weeks and enjoyed a wonderful holiday break with many visitors.

Yes, 2011 was a spectacular year. We traveled to four different countries, did a lot of camping and mountain biking and accomplished 2/3 of my 5 year goals (basement sauna and mountain views). I wrote a lot of technical blog posts in the 2nd half of the year; most inspired my extracurricular activities. I plan to continue that this year as I learn more about HTML5, Play Framework, Scala and CoffeeScript. At the end of last year's Year in Review, I wrote:

In 2011, I plan on doing two main things: keep rockin' it with Trish and finishing The Bus.

I think I can safely say I kept it rockin' with Trish - we're living together, engaged and still amazed we found one another. As for The Bus, I think MotorWorks Restorations and I are in a good position to make a final push and finish the sucker. My hope is to have it done by May so I can start driving it and taking it to VW Shows. In the meantime, Trish has started working on McGinity Photo full-time and loving it. We have trips planned to Stockholm (for Jfokus), Madrid (for Spring I/O) and Paris (for Devoxx Paris).

Last weekend, we witnessed one of the greatest playoff games ever when the Broncos beat the Steelers. I think the picture of Trish celebrating the final touchdown pretty much sums up 2011.

I look forward to all the skiing, celebrating, camping, traveling and bus rides in 2012. It's gonna be a fantastic year.

Upgraded to Roller 5.0 and added a Like Button

Matt Raible — Thu, 2 Jun 2011 14:21:58 -0600

Apache Roller 4 was released in December 2007. After 3.5 years, Roller 5 has landed!

The major new feature in Roller 5.0 is Media Blogging, a set of enhancements to Roller's file upload and management capabilities. Also included in 5.0 are simple multi-site support, OpenID and OAuth support for Roller's AtomPub interface. All major dependencies have been updated and Roller now uses Maven for build and dependency management. You can find a summary of Roller 5.0's new features on the Roller wiki.

I upgraded to Roller 5.0, RC4 back in March and experienced a few issues. This morning, I upgraded to the final release and everything appears to working nice and smooth. To celebrate, I added a Facebook Like Button to each entry. Adding it was pretty straightforward. Below is the code I added to my _day.vm template:

<span id="fb-root"></span>
<script src="//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#appId=226411374036019&xfbml=1"></script>
<fb:like href="$url.entry($entry.anchor)" send="false" show_faces="false" font="verdana"></fb:like>

I tried removing the <script> tag and putting it in my wro4j configuration file, but this caused the Like button to disappear. I also experimented with adding Twitter and LinkedIn buttons, but decided not to add them since it was difficult to get them all to align and look good together. However, if you'd like to add either of them to your Roller blog, you can do so with the following code:

<a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" 
    data-url="$url.entry($entry.anchor)" data-count="horizontal" data-via="mraible">Tweet</a>
<script type="text/javascript" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>

<script type="text/javascript" src="//platform.linkedin.com/in.js"></script>
<script type="in/share" data-url="$url.entry($entry.anchor)" data-counter="right"></script>

Kudos to Dave for all his hard work on Roller throughout the years.

Be careful when switching MySQL to UTF-8

Matt Raible — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 20:11:40 -0600

Earlier this week, I noticed a couple strange issues on this blog and sent an email to the roller-user mailing list. I figured both issues were caused by my upgrade to Roller 5. Basically, my tag cloud wasn't working and I noticed a bunch of blog entries that had truncated data. I'd provide links to the truncated posts, but I believe I've fixed them, so links would be useless. This post is to make others aware of something I wasn't: be careful when switching MySQL to UTF-8.

The first issue, 404s from my tag cloud links, was something my theme was missing. It seems the tagIndex action is new in Roller 5 and required for tag clouds to work. To fix this issue, I had to add the following XML to my theme's theme.xml file.

<template action="tagsIndex">
    <name>TagsIndex</name>
    <description>Tag index page</description>
        <link></link>
    <navbar>false</navbar>
    <hidden>true</hidden>
    <templateLanguage>velocity</templateLanguage>
    <contentType>text/html</contentType>
    <contentsFile>Weblog.vm</contentsFile>
</template>

Since I wanted to replicate Roller 4's behavior, pointing the contentsFile to Weblog.vm worked just fine. The nice thing is I can always change it to another page and customize it to show more information about the selected tag.

The 2nd issue, data truncation, was a bit trickier. I thought it might've been something Roller did when upgrading my database from Roller 4 to 5. I didn't suspect upgrading from MySQL 3 to 5 would cause it. From my previous upgrade post:

At this point, I figured my database might be slightly hosed, but since it was simply creating tables, I was probably OK. I restarted Tomcat and left the old version in place while I waited for a MySQL 5 database instance from my hosting provider, KGB Internet. Once I got the new instance, I imported my backed-up database, ran the upgrade script and everything worked just peachy.

Keith at KGB looked into my issue and thought the problem was the charset. My old MySQL 3.x database used latin1 while my MySQL 5.x database uses UTF-8. The symptom looked familiar:

Be careful when switching to UTF-8. Once you have converted your data, any program/webapp that uses the database will have to check that the data they are sending to the database is valid UTF-8. If it isn't then MySQL will silently truncate the data after the invalid part, which can cause all sorts of problems.

Luckily, I had a backup of my pre-upgrade database and was able to convert and recover everything successfully with a little iconv, perl and numerous mysqldump and mysql import commands. Of course, it's possible there's still some jacked entries and comments. If you noticed any truncation, please let me know and I'll get them fixed.

Upgraded to Apache Roller 5.0, RC4

Matt Raible — Thu, 3 Mar 2011 11:39:37 -0700

Last Sunday, Dave Johnson released Apache Roller 5.0, RC4. Since I'm an Apache Roller committer, and I've been seeing issues with comments throwing exceptions on this site, I decided to upgrade. In doing so, I discovered a number of issues. Hopefully by documenting them here, you'll be able to upgrade from Roller 4 to Roller 5 without any issues.

To upgrade, I took a snapshot of my existing site and database and copied them locally. After getting everything setup locally (importing existing database and upgrading it), I started Tomcat and began solving problems.

Database settings - JNDI vs. Properties
With Roller 4, I configured by database settings in a ROOT.xml so they'd be read using JNDI. With Roller 5, I got the following error when I tried to do this.

<openjpa-2.0.1-r422266:989424 fatal user error> org.apache.openjpa.persistence.ArgumentException:
A JDBC Driver or DataSource class name must be specified in the ConnectionDriverName property.
       at org.apache.openjpa.jdbc.schema.DataSourceFactory.newDataSource(DataSourceFactory.java:76)

I was able to get around this issue by adding the following to my roller-custom.properties:

database.configurationType=jdbc
database.jdbc.driverClass=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
database.jdbc.connectionURL=jdbc:mysql://localhost/rollerdb
database.jdbc.username=root
database.jdbc.password=
mail.configurationType=properties
mail.hostname=localhost

After making this change, I received an error when Planet tried to startup:

ERROR 2011-03-02 09:56:08,502 DatabaseProvider:errorMessage - ERROR: unable to obtain database connection. 
Likely problem: bad connection parameters or database unavailable.
FATAL 2011-03-02 09:56:08,502 RollerContext:contextInitialized - Roller Planet startup failed during app preparation
org.apache.roller.planet.business.startup.StartupException: ERROR: unable to obtain database connection. 
Likely problem: bad connection parameters or database unavailable.

I don't remember why I enabled planet, but turning it off in roller-custom.properties seemed to solve the problem.

planet.aggregator.enabled=false

Password Encyrption
The next thing I tried to do was login. When this didn't work, I figured it must be related to password encryption. With Roller 4, I had to have "passwds.encryption.enabled=true" in roller-custom.properties. In Roller 5, I also had to add the encryption algorithm.

passwds.encryption.algorithm=SHA

GZip Compression
In November 2009, I optimized this site and used Roller's CompressionFilter and wro4j to gzip and concatenate JavaScript and CSS. With Roller 4, I used the CompressionFilter to compress *.css and *.js instead of using Wro4J's built-in gzip compression. The Roller 5 CompressionFilter seems to have issues with wro4j, so I had to disable it for *.css and *.js and use wro4j instead.

At this point, I figured I was good to go, so I zipped up my local WAR and scp'ed it to raibledesigns.com. I stopped Tomcat and attempted to upgrade my production MySQL database (version 3.23.56). Below is the error I received.

$ mysql -u raible -p raible < 400-to-500-migration.sql
Enter password:
ERROR 1064 (00000) at line 42: You have an error in your SQL syntax near 'as w set
   lastmodified = lastmodified,
   datecreated = datecreated,
   cr' at line 1

I generally upgrade Roller by coping the new codebase over my old one. This is because I have a lot of symlinks and other files in my "ROOT" directory and like to keep those. In doing this, I found I had to do a couple things after copying everything over:

Delete WEB-INF/lib and recopy from RC4's WEB-INF/lib.
Delete WEB-INF/classes and recopy from RC4's WEB-INF/classes.

I then experienced some issues with JARs not being present for Roller's JSPWikiPlugin. I enabled this long ago, but don't use it anymore. However, to keep old posts still working, I wanted to enable it. The downloads for the plugin seem to be gone, but luckily I found a copy and put all the JARs into my WEB-INF/lib directory.

After starting Tomcat and browsing around a bit, I discovered two more issues:

Search doesn't seem to work. For example, there are no results for jQuery.
My Archives page's calendar didn't work. It showed the following:
```
$calendarModel.showWeblogEntryCalendarBig($weblog, $cat)
```

I was able to fix issue #2 by changing #showBigWeblogCalendar() to the following.

#showWeblogEntryCalendarBig($model.weblog "nil")

The first issue with search seems to remain.

If you notice any other issues on this site, please let me know. I'll try to get them fixed asap.

Update: I entered an issue for my search problem in Roller's JIRA. I also managed to figure out that the problem is due to the old version of oscache that's needed by the JSPWiki plugin. Hopefully we can get the plugin upgraded to avoid this issue for other users.

2010 - A Year in Review

Matt Raible — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 11:42:01 -0700

2010 was a heckuva year, possibly one of my all-time favorites. It started with lots of anticipated fun and ended with lots of travel, skiing and relaxing and I'm only just now finding time to write this post. I had a lot of goals when I started 2010; the top two being my favorite:

Happiness
Girl

The rest of my goals involved running, skiing, mountain biking and finishing The Bus. I also had some professional goals that involved open source, conferences, publishing articles and learning new technologies. I accomplished about 75% of my personal goals and 50% of my professional goals. I'm pretty happy with these percentages considering how much fun I had last year.

In December 2009, I started working with Time Warner Cable as their Chief Architect of Web Development. I was hired to help them build a team of hard-working developers that could quickly build their online video presence. In January, we started getting our ducks in a row with some Agile Training in Virginia, followed by hiring some Agile Coaches. The only technical post I had during this process was about development infrastructure stacks. Both at TWC and my current gig, I've found myself enjoying the following stack:

Source Control: SVN
Source Viewer: FishEye
Wiki: Confluence
Bug Tracker: JIRA
Continuous Integration: Hudson

We tried Git for a couple months at TWC, but ended up reverting to SVN after we had "code deleted" issues during one of our most intense development cycles. When the kids and I weren't skiing, we worked on documenting How to be a Super Hero and The Adventures of Upside Down Man.

In February, I refreshed my Grails knowledge, later learning that it was tough to teach Grails to developers that didn't know Java. First of all, a lot of Grails and Groovy books are targeted at Java Developers. Secondly, the developers I was trying to sell it to had more interest in learning Java. Since I failed to sell Grails, we ended up using Spring + jQuery to build our app. I don't think was a bad decision as most of our development ended up being UI: ActionScript/Flex, Objective-C and jQuery/HTML.

My laptop was stolen from my living room in early February. It worked out nicely in the end since I didn't lose any data (thanks to good backups) and my business insurance covered the loss. My parents came out and helped me finish remodeling my guest room. I posted about My Future of Web Frameworks Presentations and became a proud father when "Jack was flying past both Abbie and I and giggling while doing it".

By the beginning of March, we'd hired a team of 10 at TWC and I took a trip to Jackson Hole to celebrate.

The thing I enjoyed the most about this trip was how well the group jelled. Kudos to Chris for assembling such an awesome group and putting such a spectacular trip together. Can't wait for next year.

The next week, I flew to Las Vegas for The ServerSide Java Symposium and enjoyed sessions on Cloud, Web Service APIs, Flex, Spring 3 and Cameron's Lessons Learned from the Internet Age. I posted my Future of Web Frameworks and GWT vs. Flex Smackdown presentations after the conference.

I ended March with The Trifecta.

For Easter, I purchased an iPad and reviewed it a few days later. Seven months later, I'm not enthralled with the iPad, but I do think it's a heckuva lot better than the Galaxy Tab. I don't use it much, except for movies when traveling. My kids are its primary users, mostly using it for games and Netflix.

We visited my parents in Oregon and celebrated my Mom's retirement.

The picture I took of my Mom and Abbie that weekend is one of my all-time favorites.

At the end of April, I said farewell to the ski season, getting in 25 days; a personal best. I'm happy to report I have 10 days in so far this year, so my goal of 30 days looks to be well on track. No helicopter attempts yet, but hopefully soon.

I ended the month with a work trip to Seattle and painting the town red with my sister and Mya.

I returned to Denver and turned off my TV for a month. I wrote about my experience in early June. For Memorial Day Weekend, I went mountain biking in Moab and had a blast at the Desert Rocks Music Festival. The Porcupine Rim ride took us 4.5 hours and we tracked 26.75 miles. The several points in the trail with "death on the right" were truly epic.

June started with our annual Ride to Red Rocks. I slept six hours and did the 25-mile off-road Elephant Rock ride the next morning. The next morning I hopped on a plane to Ireland for the Irish Software Show. My sister joined me and we had an incredible time with Jamie, Rob, John and Josh.

Upon returning to work, I got to have an awkward conversation with my client about all the vacation I was taking.

For Father's Day, my parents drove to Denver and we packed up the camping gear for a fun weekend at The Great Sand Dunes. After The Dunes, my parents and kids drove to The Cabin, camping out and touring Yellowstone along the way. That Thursday, June 24th, I attended my good friend Jason's birthday party in Lodo.

That's the night I met Trish.

I saw her switch from a Martini to a Guinness and I knew I had to talk to her. I introduced myself and quickly found myself conflicted with having a soon-to-expire iPhone 4 reservation at the Apple Store. I rushed out to grab the phone, returning because there was something special about Trish. We talked for a couple hours that night ... me mesmerized, her smiling a lot. I was dumbfounded to find such a cool person existed in the world. At the end of the night, I got her number and drove home with a feeling that my life was about to change.

The next day, I began a road trip to The Last Best Place for a Montana Summer Vacation.

During that trip, Trish and I exchanged occasional text messages and I told many friends about the kick-ass girl I met. It was another great Montana vacation.

My favorite part of this year's trip to The Cabin was seeing it as a home again. My Mom retired in April and my parents moved back to Montana shortly after. Seeing how happy they are there is truly magical. I especially enjoy the thought of visiting them and all the wonderful folks in the Swan Valley many, many times in the future.

The kids and I drove like bats out of hell and made it back to Denver (950 miles) in 14.25 hours. I quickly scheduled a first date with Trish that Wednesday, and went back to work at TWC with a renewed energy. After our first date, I formed a sort of perma-grin. That Friday was my birthday. I've been having a blast with Trish ever since.

July ended with a trip to the Lost Coast for Jess and Lili's Wedding.

The reception afterwards was a truly spectacular party that lasted well into the evening. Clint and I vowed to go to bed early, but we ended up having so much fun we closed the place down. Jess and Lili were an instrumental part in creating a spectacular night, especially with their wedding dance and infectious happiness.

In August, I celebrated this blog's 8th birthday and we started our "60-Day Push" at work. The goal of our 60-Day Push was to re-write our Video Portal, iPad and Sony Blu-ray apps from scratch, without politics dictating their features. We hired Method for design, chose our own features and went to work. I wrote about the success of this effort in October.

I neglected to write about the Denver Cruisers Saints and Sinners ride or how much fun we had listening to B.B. King at Red Rocks.

Abbie and Jack's first day of school was on August 16th.

At the end of August, we celebrated Jack's 6th Birthday and attended my Cousin Amy's Wedding in Missouri.

September rolled in, we finished the majority of the work in our 60-Day Push and Trish and I drove up to Estes Park for an epic weekend at the Scottish-Irish Festival. We rode our bikes in the parade (by accident), enjoyed a few pints and even did a bit of fly-fishing near our riverside accommodations.

We listened to the 1st 2010 Broncos game while driving back from Estes and slipped into a Rockies game shortly after losing. Our sadness over the Broncos loss was erased within a couple hours as we celebrated Jason Giambi's walk-off home run. Unfortunately, the Rockies didn't make it to the post-season, but the Broncos looked good at their home opener.

October came quickly and I wrote How's the ol' Team Doing and defended the Age of Frameworks. At the end of October, we moved into TWC's Lodo Office on Wynkoop. That weekend, we dressed up as superheros for Halloween.

November started off with Abbie's birthday and Trish got to meet the kids for the first time. From there, we went into traveling-like-madmen mode. We enjoyed suite seats at the Broncos vs. Kansas City game, then flew to Amsterdam for Devoxx the next morning (performing an AppFuse release along the way). I presented on Thursday and posted my Comparing JVM Web Frameworks presentation shortly after. I wrote about our trip while at The Cabin for Thanksgiving.

I flew back from Montana, stopped in at the Lodo office for a couple days, then hopped on a plane to the Rich Web Experience with Trish. My presentations went well, sparked some controversy, and we raced to Key West to celebrate the end of the conference season.

I returned to Denver for my last week at TWC, enjoyed a couple days of skiing, then headed to Utah for an interview with Overstock.com. While I enjoyed my time at TWC, my contract duration was up and being a full-time employee didn't give me the vacation time I tend to enjoy. My interview with Overstock.com was two days, with the 2nd day on the slopes at Snowbird. I was very impressed by the company, people and interview process and agreed to work there on the way to the airport.

I returned to Denver for Trish's Birthday Weekend at Breckenridge, then flew down to Naples on Wednesday to spend Christmas with her family. It was my first time meeting her parents, but that didn't stop us from having a great time talking, beach-going, golfing and relaxing.

We returned to Denver, I tried to get AppFuse 2.1 finished and then we celebrated New Years with friends in Steamboat.

As I reminisce about last year, I can't help but smile. While I've been a happy person for a while, having someone to share your life with is a special thing. I feel like I dreamed up Trish a couple years ago. I was looking for someone that liked to do my favorite activities: mountain biking, skiing, traveling the world and enjoying good beer. I found that and more in Trish and couldn't be happier.

I didn't write as many technical posts on this blog as I'd like to, but I attribute that mostly to the lack of learning new things at TWC. At Overstock.com, I expect that to change and hope to have more technical articles in the coming year.

At the end of last year's Year in Review, I wrote:

I hope to speak at (or attend) 3 conferences, finish up The Bus and do a whole bunch of skiing and mountain biking.

I accomplished all but one goal: finishing The Bus. In 2011, I plan on doing two main things: keep rockin' it with Trish and finishing The Bus. Everything else is gravy.

It's gonna be a spectacular year.

Happy 8th Birthday to this blog!

Matt Raible — Sun, 1 Aug 2010 15:48:38 -0600

Eight years ago today, this blog was born in the wee hours of the morning. I was inspired to start it after reading Dave Johnson's article on Roller. I have to say, it's been a great ride and I remember the early days like they were yesterday. Many of the Java bloggers wrote daily and shared short tips, tricks and snippets on their blogs; much in the same way we do on Twitter today.

A lot has happened in my life since this blog was started: Abbie was born, Jack was born, I started AppFuse, wrote Spring Live, had some really cool gigs and gained a whole new perspective on my life.

For those long time readers, you might've noticed the vacation posts have picked up recently and the technology posts have subsided somewhat. The good news is this indicates I'm having a lot of fun; the bad news is I'm not learning as much as I'd like. Hopefully that'll change soon and I'll be writing about developing apps for the online video space in the near future. There's a good chance the posts about my life and how much fun I'm having will continue, especially as Abbie and Jack continue to grow into world-class skiers.

As usual, I have many ambitions for this fall, including helping Apache Roller, finishing AppFuse 2.1 and learning how to play the guitar. Along the way, I'll be helping build/release some kick-ass software for a major cable provider, building a sauna in my basement and enjoying the hell out of Devoxx 2010. You can sure I'll be blogging about these along the way, as well as many years into the future.

Thanks for reading all these years, it's been a fantastic experience.

2009 - A Year in Review

Matt Raible — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 10:06:09 -0700

I wrote my first "year in review" post in 2005 and continued the tradition in 2006 and 2008. This year, my December was filled with unplanned circumstances, a new job and a houseful of family for the holidays, so I never had time to sit down and write this post. As things are returning to normal, I figured it's about time I kicked off 2010 with one of my favorite writing reflections.

2009 started off with a bang: I wrote about my Mom nailing a bear's nuts to a tree after she killed it. My new gig (at Evite) started out fun with choosing an Ajax framework and a Tech Meetup in LA. My bike got stolen, I started running to work and traveled to Tahoe without an ID.

February started off with an epic weekend at Silverton. I went to Web Directions North and attended many good talks:

I wrote my first GWT-related entry and a few posts related to independent consulting.

I ended February with a couple more GWT-related entries.

In March, I bought a new 15" MacBook Pro and shipped it back shortly after to get a 256 GB SSD. I still have nothing but good things to say about the machine. I discovered Nexus is awesome and the kids and I went on our first hike of the year.

My GWT Journey continued with GXT MVC, modularization and optimization. I got a new office and new bike and proudly witnessed my Dad's Retirement.

April came and I got Drunk on Software, had a blast at Holly and Jason's Wedding and published our Ajax Framework Analysis Results.

At the end of April, I started building the kids a treehouse and inspired smiles with two new kittens. On May 7th, I had PRK eye surgery and wrote about my experience in early June. I continue to be extremely happy with the results.

May ended with Ryan and Breanne's Wedding in Playa Del Carmen. Having so many great friends around and the Nuggets vs. Lakers playoffs the same week made this one of the best vacations of my life.

June brought the news that the Colorado Software Summit was over. There's been several times in the past few months that I've missed the annual experience. Can someone please start a conference at a Colorado mountain resort in the near future? Pretty please! I've always experienced this conference with Bruce and we continued another tradition (riding to Red Rocks) with 2nd Row seats at Big Head Todd.

My GWT posts continued with a Facebook-style Autocomplete, Implementing OAuth, JSON Parsing with JavaScript Overlays and a preview of GWT 2.0. I wrote about implementing SOFEA with GWT and Grails at Evite.com and had a blast at the Great Sand Dunes on Father's Day.

My job hunt began and I started a month-long vacation in Montana with Raible Road Trip #13. Vacationing for a summer month in Montana has been one of my goals for several years. Accomplishing it this year made me extremely happy and I hope to make it a summer tradition.

July was an awesome month in 2009. Granted, April and May were special with tropical weddings, but Montana in July is a particularly tasty treat. My Summer Vacation in Montana attempts to capture how much fun we had. It was particularly enjoyable because my parents, children and many life-long friends were involved.

As summer began to set, I decided to get back into speaking at conferences, starting with the Rich Web Experience. I wrote about initial GWT work at my new client, which included an interesting experience with Java REST Frameworks. The month ended with one of my favorite holidays: Jack's Birthday.

September was nice and uneventful. I learned about Concurrency on the JVM Using Scala, started using MVP with GWT and learned how to do more with less. I also ran in a 10K.

October started out with a family trip to Washington for my sister's fabulous wedding. People flew in from all over the US and we had a sweet condo on Lake Chelan for the week. Playing golf, wine tasting and celebrating with good people made for a great start to the fall season.

In November, I started writing more, mostly because I was gearing up for upcoming talks and thinking about / working on AppFuse. I celebrated Abbie's Birthday, did some website optimization and chuckled at the comments about my hunting season adventure.

Right before Thanksgiving, I got a call from my client letting me know that their budget had run out my contract would end soon. Luckily, I had an interview setup the next day and had great success in finding a new gig.

I ended November with a trip to Oregon for Thanksgiving and ran in the Oregon Mid-Valley Road Race. The followed week, I flew with my kids and parents to The Rich Web Experience and learned about Objective-J and Cappuccino. I had a near-perfect (high 70s, no lines) Disney World experience with my family, watched the Ducks with the Civil War and compared kick-ass web frameworks.

In December, I didn't do much blogging - mostly because I arrived home from Florida to discover a waterfall in my guest room. The water pipes were routed through the ceiling, had busted from the cold, and water was pouring everywhere. Dealing with that and starting a new job occupied most of my time and I never got a chance to write much down. I ran in the Jingle Bell 5K and watched the Broncos lose a lot. Shortly after, my family came for Christmas and a good time was had by all.

As I reflect back on last year, my biggest surprise is that I got into running. I ended up running in 5 races last year and even enjoyed doing it a few times. It's still not my favorite activity (skiing and mountain biking win that title), but I enjoy it enough to do it a couple times each week. The goals I wrote down for last year were: visit 3 foreign countries, take 3 months of vacation and spend 1 month in Montana. I only made it to 1 foreign country (Mexico), but I did take 2 months of vacation and got my month in Montana. I'll take that.

In 2010, I hope to speak at (or attend) 3 conferences, finish up The Bus and do a whole bunch of skiing and mountain biking. More than anything, I plan to continue having a lot of fun with my family and implementing a lot of cool technologies along the way.

It's gonna be a great year.

Adding Expires Headers with OSCache's CacheFilter

Matt Raible — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:17:05 -0700

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how I improved this site's YSlow grade by concatenating JavaScript and CSS with wro4j. Even though I loved the improvements, there was still work to do:

I'm now sitting at a YSlow (V2) score of 75; 90 if I use the "Small Site or Blog" ruleset. I believe I can improve this by adding expires headers to my images, js and css.

Last Monday, wro4j 1.1.0 was released and I thought it would solve my last remaining issue. Unfortunately, it only adds expires headers (and ETags) to images referenced in included CSS. Of course, this makes sense, but I thought they'd add a filter to explicitly add expires headers.

Since I still wanted this feature, I did some searching around and found what I was looking for: OSCache's CacheFilter. It was surprisingly easy to setup, I downloaded OSCache 2.4.1, added it to my WEB-INF/lib directory, and added the following to my web.xml.

<filter>
    <filter-name>CacheFilter</filter-name>
    <filter-class>com.opensymphony.oscache.web.filter.CacheFilter</filter-class>
    <init-param>
        <param-name>expires</param-name>
        <param-value>time</param-value>
    </init-param>
    <init-param>
        <param-name>time</param-name>
        <param-value>2592000</param-value> <!-- one month -->
    </init-param>
    <init-param>
        <param-name>scope</param-name>
        <param-value>session</param-value>
    </init-param>
</filter>

<filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>CacheFilter</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>*.gif</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>
<filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>CacheFilter</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>*.jpg</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>
<filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>CacheFilter</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>*.png</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>

After restarting Tomcat and clearing out my Firefox cache, I was in business.

I did experience one issue along the way when I tried to remove the oscache.jar from my WEB-INF/lib directory. I'm using the JSPWiki Plugin and it seems to rely on a class in oscache.jar. I'm not sure which version oscache.jar is, but the packages got moved around somewhere along the way. The good news is it seems OK to have both oscache.jar and oscache-2.4.1.jar in Roller's classpath.

After discovering the duplicate JARs issue, I got to thinkin' that EhCache would probably have a solution. Sure enough, it has a SimpleCachingHeadersPageCachingFilter. Since I already had a working solution, I didn't bother trying EhCache (especially since my Roller install uses EhCache 1.1 and the filter is only available in a later version). However, when I implement expires headers in AppFuse, I'll definitely try EhCache's solution.

As for my YSlow score, it didn't improve as much as I'd hoped (low 80s instead of mid 80s). Some of this is due to my embedded presentation from Slideshare. There's also some external images I'm using in my Lightbox JS implementation. So if I can find a better Lightbox implementation (supports rel="lightbox" syntax), there's a good chance I'll switch. In the meantime, I'm lovin' how much faster this site loads.

In case you're wondering, I do plan on adding css/js concatenation and expires headers to both AppFuse 2.1 and Roller 5.

Update: FWIW, I did try to configure expires headers in Apache, but the AJP 1.3 Connector doesn't seem to allow this to work. To quote Keith from KGB Internet:

I added an expires directive and it didn't touch the header for anything served from Tomcat, but does for content served directly by Apache. This might have to be set up in Tomcat.

JavaScript and CSS Concatenation with wro4j

Matt Raible — Mon, 9 Nov 2009 10:44:44 -0700

This past weekend, I decided it was about time to fix my YSlow score on this site. I did the easiest thing first by moving all my JavaScript files to the bottom of each page. Then I turned on GZip compression using Roller's built-in CompressionFilter. These changes helped, but the most glaring problem continued to be too many requests. To solve this, I turned to wro4j (as recommended on Twitter) to concatenate my JS and CSS files into one.

I have to say, I'm very happy with the results. I'm now sitting at a YSlow (V2) score of 75; 90 if I use the "Small Site or Blog" ruleset. I believe I can improve this by adding expires headers to my images, js and css. More than anything, I'm impressed with wro4j, its great support and easy setup. I was looking for a runtime solution (b/c I didn't want to have to rebuild Roller) and it seems to be perfect for the job. Furthermore, wro4j minifies everything on the fly and they'll have an expires header filter in the next release.

JAWR and the YUI Compressor are other alternatives to this filter, but I'm currently sold on wro4j. First of all, it passed the 10-minute test. Secondly, it didn't require me to modify Roller's build system.

At this point, if I'm going to implement JS/CSS concatenation and minification in AppFuse and Roller, wro4j seems like the best option. If you disagree, I'd love to hear your reasoning.

TIP: See Javascript Compression in Nexus for information on using YUI Compressor with Maven.

2008 - A Year in Review

Matt Raible — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 16:56:32 -0700

In 2005 and 2006, I did "A Year in Review" entries. 2007 was the year I got divorced, which probably motivated me to write a bit less. This year I'm back and ready to spend the next few hours writing, copying/pasting and linking like a madman. Hope you enjoy!

2008 was the year I traveled the world and developed a true passion for skiing. In January, my good friend Jason Miller moved back to Denver after quitting his job at Bear Stearns in NYC. We spent the first weekend in Nebraska working on Cletus's feedlot. The next week, my car stereo got stolen and I wondered if my bad knee would make it through the ski season (the good news is not only did I ski the rest of the season, but my knee healed itself over the summer).

At the end of January, the kids and I hiked to the top of Green Mountain and Don Brown made Maven not suck. Then I wondered if there was room for both Rails and Grails at a company and quickly learned both.

February started fantastically with a 14" Powder Day at Steamboat. I wondered if there is no "best" web framework and reviewed Grails and Rails books. After spending an awesome weekend in Tahoe, I took the kids on The Ski Train and learned more about Selenium at Google.

This brings us to one of my favorite posts of all time. On February 28th, Jack got a bead stuck in his nose. After taking him to the ER and paying $800, we found out magic recipe for bead removal is to "hold one nostril and give him a CPR-type breath/blow into his mouth". The reason I love the post so much is it's solved the problem for other frantic parents when they Google for "bead stuck in nose". Whenever I get a new comment, it always makes me smile.

March started out with a Powder Day at Whistler. I thoroughly enjoyed the rest of the weekend with good friends Jarvis and Korn Dog. After returning to Denver, I was allowed to blog about building a UI Frameworks Team at LinkedIn and posted my thoughts on Grails vs. Rails.

In mid-March, I achieved an all-Mac family and traveled to Lake Chelan for my sister's birthday. Shortly after, The AppFuse Primer was released. At the end of the month, I attended TSSJS in Vegas and moderated a Web Framework Smackdown.

In April, the LinkedIn Denver office opened and we all celebrated by attending the Rockie's Home Opener. The ski season came to an end and I wrote a howto for configuring Apache with mod_proxy and SSL on OS X. Then I discovered the JavaOne parties and wrote about running Spring MVC Web Applications in OSGi.

April ended with 82°F and May started with snow. I attended JavaOne (or at least the parties), released AppFuse 2.0.2 and figured out how to do extensionless URLs with the UrlRewriteFilter. The kids and I spent an afternoon in Rocky Mountain National Park and I did some coding in my backyard.

On Memorial Day, I enjoyed a liver-wrenching, Rockies-filled weekend with my sister her girlfriend Mya and Mr. Miller. I also contemplated making AppFuse Struts 2-specific.

June started with some mountain bike riding, planning some excellent vacations and getting a dream machine. I rode the annual trip to Big Head Todd at Red Rocks with Matt and Bruce. I took the kids on their first camping trip for Father's Day and had a blast. It took us several hours to find the campsite and my car kept starting all night long. It's sure to be a family tradition from now on.

The next weekend, I attended the American Craft Beer Fest in Boston. To end the month, I embarked upon Raible Road Trip #12 with Abbie, Jack and my Dad.

In July, the bus project began and I posted pictures of the trip to Montana. This year, I hope to spend the whole month of July at the cabin. I bought an iPhone (one of my best technology-related purchases to date). OSCON was fun but the week after wasn't.

August revealed my favorite birthday present. I didn't blog much the rest of the month, revealing why later.

Jack's Birthday Weekend was an outstandingly fun mixture of old friends and good Colorado beer. In September, I went to see the bus at MotorWorks, Abbie lost her first tooth and co-workers and I performance tested Memcached.

What followed was wonderful. Miller and I headed to Oktoberfest for the Best. Vacation. Ever. We still talk about how much fun we had on that vacation. October finished with the Colorado Software Summit and a hunting trip to the cabin.

November was a crazy month. I got laid off and celebrated Abbie's birthday on the same day. Jack got a mohawk and I traveled coast-to-coast in the same week. To close the month, I announced what's next and headed to Costa Rica.

I had a fantastic time in Costa Rica and was impressed to see Abbie is a blue skier shortly after. I did a Dojo/Comet Research Project for a week and enjoyed the location of my newest client last week. A small adventure turned into a scary adventure and I enjoyed telling my stories to fellow Java Enthusiasts in Portland.

Phew! It's been quite a year. For 2009, I'm still hoping for what I tweeted shortly after Costa Rica. I'd like to visit 3 foreign countries, take 3 months of vacation and spend 1 month in Montana. I have technology goals too, but those aren't nearly as much fun to dream about.

Happy New Year!

Added a Tag Cloud

Matt Raible — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 22:04:07 -0700

I added a tag cloud to this site tonight. Thanks to Rich Sharple's Hacking Roller : Tag Clouds, it was pretty easy. It's currently located in the bottom-right corner. Here's a glance at this site's most popular tags:

acegi appfuse denver grails gwt hibernate ibatis java jsf maven maven2 myfaces rails roller skiing spring springmvc stripes struts struts2 tapestry tomcat travel webframeworks wicket

Enjoy!

All my favorite Feed Readers are now free!

Matt Raible — Wed, 9 Jan 2008 16:09:14 -0700

I've been using NetNewsWire ever since I started subscribing to feeds back in October 2003. A year or two later, I bought FeedDemon for my Windows box and synced them up using their online sync feature. When I got a BlackBerry Pearl almost a year ago, I bought NewsGator Go!. While the online sync hasn't worked very well between all these applications, I've generally been very happy with them and haven't been inclined to switch.

Now there's no good reason to ever switch:

NetNewsWire 3.1 is free!

By free I mean both that we've released it from its cage and that it costs no money. Zero dollars.

Upgrades are free. It's free for new users. It's freeware.

You can download it right away. Here are the change notes.

NetNewsWire is not alone -- we've also made FeedDemon, NewsGator Inbox, and NewsGator Go! free.

Thanks NewsGator!

Tech Meetup in Silicon Valley next week?

Matt Raible — Wed, 9 Jan 2008 15:16:40 -0700

Dave's going to be in California next week:

I'm going to be traveling to California next week (Jan 13-18) to sync up with my co-workers at Sun HQ in Santa Clara. I'll be in town Sunday through Friday and though my days will be pretty busy, I'll probably have some free time in the evenings for a meet-up or two.

Coincidentally, I'll be out there as well (Tuesday - Friday @ LinkedIn). Sounds like an excellent excuse to meetup and have some beers. Wanna join us?

Upgraded to Roller 4.0

Matt Raible — Sun, 9 Dec 2007 21:40:25 -0700

This site is now running Apache Roller 4.0. If you see anything funky, please let me know. As part of the upgrade, I did a bunch of spring cleaning, so it's possible I deleted some files I shouldn't have. As far as upgrading, the only issue I know of is this one where my categories are no longer in the same order. Since it didn't seem possible to fix easily, I decided to not worry about it and go ahead with the upgrade.

If you'd like to take Roller 4.0 for a test drive, you can use the Test Blog on this server. Username is test, password is roller.

I dig the new entries and comments counter:

This is the Hottest Blog on Programming

Matt Raible — Thu, 6 Dec 2007 09:46:59 -0700

I received an e-mail this morning that said the following:

Congrats! Your blog has made it into the TOP 50 of The All Night Coder blog community, powered by SocialRank!!!

Then I clicked on the link they supplied and discovered I'm #1! Since I know it won't last, I figured I'd better take a screenshot.

Apache Roller, Acegi Security, LDAP and JA-SIG CAS

Matt Raible — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 01:38:40 -0600

Earlier today, I delivered my talk on Apache Roller, Acegi Security and Single Sign-on. As part of this talk, I put together a couple of tutorials you might find useful:

NOTE: These tutorials are using Roller's trunk as we found some things to simplify LDAP integration tonight.

You can download a PDF version of my presentation from my publications page.

During the presentation I did a number of demos:

Installing Roller on Tomcat
Integrating Roller with Apache Directory Server
Integration Roller with CAS
Integrating CAS with LDAP

Rather than saving the demo for the end, I did it as the first part of my presentation. This worked extremely well - especially since I didn't have to worry about running out of time.

If you're using Roller, have you integrated it with LDAP or another SSO solution? If so, is it working well for you?

Roller Themes

Matt Raible — Fri, 3 Aug 2007 12:26:56 -0600

Eugene Strokin has been doing an excellent job migrating Free CSS Templates to Roller Themes. So far, he's done 10 and it doesn't look like he's stopping any time soon. Well done Eugene! IMO, nice-looking themes for Roller has been one of its biggest missing features.

Now if we could only use Roller to power the Apache project site...

Webinar on Wednesday: Introduction to Apache Roller

Matt Raible — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 16:13:28 -0600

If you're not doing anything this Wednesday, you might want to checkout my Introduction to Apache Roller Webinar. It's sponsored by Covalent and has the following agenda:

11:00: Introductions
11:05: What is Apache Roller 
11:10: Installing Roller
11:20: Roller Architecture
   - 11:25: Blog Customization
   - 11:35: Server Customization
11:40: Other Features: Using Weblog Clients and Planet
11:50: Q & A

Heck, even if you are doing something, you should still check it out - especially if you're planning on installing Roller for yourself or for your company. Here's the details and how to signup:

Cost:	Free!
When:	Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Time:	11:00am PDT (2:00pm EDT)
Where:	From the comfort of your home or office
Technical Level:	Intermediate Technical Track

To register, click here and follow the provided steps.

About Covalent and Roller
Covalent recently announced it is offering full commercial support for Apache Roller, the open source blog server from the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Apache Roller drives the Covalent blog, Sun Microsystem's blogs.sun.com blogging site, IBM DeveloperWorks blogs, the Javalobby's 10,000 user strong JRoller Java community site, and hundreds of other blogs world-wide. Roller is a Java Web application that is run on any Java EE server and any relational database.

<Sidenote/>
I think it's important to point out that JRoller and Roller are not the same thing. JRoller is a service provided by JavaLobby that provides free blogs, whereas Roller is the software that powers it. There's been a lot of negative press about JRoller in recent months and from talking to folks, it sounds like most of it is well-deserved. The service is down a fair amount and when it's up, it's extremely slow.

The good news is these problems should go away in the near future. From Matthew Schmidt in a recent JavaLobby Newsletter:

DZone Network Server Upgrades Coming
Over the weekend, Rick and I started the long and painful process of finally upgrading our three-year-old servers to some hardware that should let us scale and meet the needs of the network for the foreseeable future. With these new servers, comes some upgrades that many of you have been trying to beat into my head for months now, including an upgrade to a recent a version of Roller (powers JRoller) as I can find, and an upgrade to the latest and greatest Codebeamer (powers JavaForge). In addition, there's also going to be a much-needed make over to Javalobby and EclipseZone. Of course, these changes won't happen immediately and we'll be migrating to the new hardware first, but keep your eyes open for some nice updates to nearly all our communities. These upgrades have already started and we'd appreciate any feedback you have on whether things like Javalobby and EclipseZone are working properly. Drop me a line if you notice anything not working properly or feeling slow.

IMO, JavaLobby has been mostly mute about its stance on JRoller, and I've heard from folks there's virtually no support. My guess is this is because they've been concentrating on DZone so much. Maybe they need some volunteers to make JRoller more robust? Or maybe it should be moved to other servers that can make money off the service and re-invest it (like wordpress.com)? Hopefully nothing has to change and JRoller can become a higher priority for JavaLobby in the near future.

Update: The webinar went quite well - thanks to everyone who attended! You can download the PowerPoint (or PDF) and audio from Covalent's Webinars. Also, I mentioned a couple of Dave's presentations in my talk. You can download those by clicking on the links below:

RE: 5th anniversary of Blogging Roller

Matt Raible — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 09:27:41 -0600

From the Blogging Roller himself:

Today is the fifth anniversary of this blog, which I started on April 11, 2002 to promote the Roller blog software that I had just finished writing.
...
Now, five years later, Roller has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become Apache Roller, blog-tech is my full-time job at Sun and I'm still Blogging Roller. Thanks to Roller users and contributors everywhere for helping to make this possible.

Congrats Dave - 5 years is 20 years in Internet Time isn't it?!

It's hard to believe I've been reading Blogging Roller for that long. Thanks to Dave for getting me into blogging and creating Roller. It was his article that got me interested in blogging and inspired me to setup this site. Thanks to Roller, I met Lance, who got Dave and I the Pro JSP deal, which lead me to create AppFuse.

Thanks Dave! I owe you a beer or 12 for all the good things you started.

It's funny to think back when there was only a handful of Java Bloggers: Russell, Dave, Lance, Erik and good ol' Mike. Remember Mike and his "Java blogs" blogroll?

Upgraded to Roller 3.1-rc3

Matt Raible — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 17:13:55 -0700

This site is now running Roller 3.1-rc3. It took me a few hours to upgrade my theme yesterday, but everything appears to be working correctly. Let me know if you see anything that's out of whack. The only thing I don't like so far is how it displays "Main | Next page »" on the main page. I'd rather it not show anything, but this macro is needed to show next/previous links when browsing by date, individual entries, or search results. If nothing else, it seems to me like it should display "« Previous page | Main" since » implies forward in time.

I did make one enhancement to this theme. Now, the colors for the category is shown when viewing a single entry. Before, the colors where only shown when you were viewing a particular category. The new $model objects make this pretty easy to do. Another feature I really like is the "Full Preview" feature. Rather than just previewing the entry in the author screen, you preview how it will actually look with your theme. Just remember to click on Save as Draft before Full Preview or you'll lose your post!

Update: It looks like I spoke too soon when I said everything is working correctly. I'm currently experiencing some feed duplication and category issues. Sorry about that.

Roller as a Photoblog

Matt Raible — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 11:12:47 -0700

Discovered on the roller-dev mailing list from Richard Jones:

For the last 6 months I've been turning Roller into photoblogging platform - you can see the most up-to-date version @ www.pixyblog.com.

I really like what Richard has done with Roller - especially this entry.

In job-hunting news, the market seems to be pretty hot in Denver right now. While I haven't accepted any offers, I have been replying to 4-5 inquiries per day, as well as shooting out 2-3 resumes per day. I had a couple interviews yesterday and another one this afternoon.

The most intriguing interview so far has been with Sun. I'm jazzed about it because of the work opportunities there, but I'm not-so-jazzed because 1) it's a full-time position (which typically pay a lot less than contracting and 2) it's working for a big company. That being said, it does seem that Sun is really turning things around and it's probably an exciting time to work there.

For those folks out there that have worked for Sun - what's it like? Is it a good place to work these days? Would you recommend it for a passionate open source developer like myself that likes to make contractor rates and take lots of vacation?

2006 - A Year in Review

Matt Raible — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 15:05:56 -0700

Looking back at 2006, it's amazing to see everything that happened. One of the main reasons I started this blog was to provide a history of my life. Now it's time to cash in on that cool feature and look back at the last 12 months.

In early January, I finished working on the Vongo project. I eventually had to shut off comments for my post on Vongo because there were so many complaints. The good news is I didn't work on the UI or service part of it, just the Spring/Hibernate/XFire backend. A week later, Apple announced the MacBook Pro and I purchased one immediately. I still have the same machine and couldn't be happier. A week after that, I quietly released AppFuse 1.9, went to the Broncos vs. Patriots game, then left the next morning for Cancun to celebrate my dad's 60th. I got to watch the Broncos season end after returning from Cancun. January 2006 is one for the books - I scored good tickets to two playoff games and spent a week in Cancun! I'd relive that month without hesitation.

In February, I began playing with Maven 2 , figured out how to use Tiles with WebWork and did a fundraiser for the CSS Framework design contest. I even posted some pictures of my ride to work. Prior to freezing my ass off, Jack had a rough week with Rotavirus and ended up in the Emergency Room.

At the end of February, I received my MacBook Pro and fell in love with everything but the wireless. My posts on the MacBook Pro and wireless issues still get comments weekly from other folks having similar problems.

On February 22nd, Daniel Steinberg's daughter Elena died of bacterial meningitis. Julie made me stop reading Daniel's Dear Elena blog because I was such an emotional wreck. I saw Daniel at a couple of conferences this year, but didn't talk to him until The Spring Experience in December. I didn't know what to say to him. He erased all my apprehensions with a simple "Thanks", a smile and a handshake. It's good to see you're still writing about Elena Daniel. I still have a hard time reading your posts.

February ended with a beautiful 72°F day.

In March, I started the CSS Framework design contest, rode to work in the rain and flew to Boston and Vegas. Memories of St. Patrick's Day in Boston with friends still brings a smile to my face. TheServerSide show in Vegas was a lot of fun and it was the first BOF I hosted with free beer. I later got to meet Mike Stenhouse (the inventor of The CSS Framework) in December and hosted two more "BOFs with Beer" at the Colorado Software Summit and The Spring Experience. Cost difference? Vegas: $800, Keystone: $350, Hollywood, FL: $220.

At the end of March, I came down with a nasty case of Carpal Tunnel. After seeing a specialist that massaged the hell out of my arm, everything was back to normal. I haven't had any issues since - but I also haven't had many multiple-no-sleep-night coding sprints in a while either.

In April, I quit working on AppFuse and moved to Rails. I posted my Tips for Productivity and Happiness at Work (my most popular blog entry of all time), shipped my bus off to the shop and celebrated Julie and I's 6th anniversary. Then I rebooted this site and lived it up in New York City.

May brought CSS Design Contest winners and a 2-week trip to San Francisco for The Ajax Experience and JavaOne. The highlight of that trip was the weekend I spent in Wine Country.

In June, AppFuse 1.9.2 and Seam 1.0 were unleashed. Tim O'Brien had an interesting post titled What Web Application framework should you use?. I responded and Struts became a more focused project. Shale moved to a TLP shortly after. We started planning Raible Road Trip #10 and I began traveling to Washington, DC for a project. Going for beers at Brickskeller was the highlight of our trip that week.

July introduced me to cancelled flights and redeyes and Jason Carreira started JSR 303. AppFuse 1.9.3 was released and Julie sold her house to the first people that looked at it. At the end of the month, Jim Goodwill and I drove to OSCON in Portland. Having beers with Bryan and Scott at The Kennedy School was a highlight of that trip. Following OSCON, the family and I headed to Montana for a week.

August was great, probably because I'd just hit 7 states in 7 days. I published an article on IBM developerWorks and had a device-free weekend (which I definitely need to do more often). I began working on AppFuse 2.0, a new sushi restaurant moved into our neighborhood and I got a new EVDO card (which I later lost in November). Jack turned 2 on August 28th.

In September, we got a new puppy. I traveled to the drunkest city in America, Las Vegas and New England. Julie met me in Boston and we had a blast at our good friends' (Chris and Julie's) wedding.

October brought the release of Spring 2.0 and a 2-week project for me at OpenLogic. Abbie and Jack got their pictures taken at school and I spent at week in Keystone at The Colorado Software Summit.

In November, my sister Kalin brought some hard cider to Abbie's 4th birthday. I attended Denver's NoFluff and hugged my kids. Jack and I had a boys weekend and we headed to The Cabin on Raible Road Trip #11.

To end the year, I did a bit more travel - first to Boise then to Florida for The Spring Experience. After a week of vacation in Florida, we returned to Denver for The Blizzard of 2006. Finally, we drove up to Steamboat for Christmas and took the kids skiing.

All in all, it's been a fabulous year. Watching the kids grow up, start to play together and even have conversations with each other has been very cool. I traveled more than I wanted to, but I also got to visit a lot of cities that I'd never been to. My goals for the year? To be happy, ski more and enjoy a few car bombs with family and friends.

Apache Roller 3.0 RC1

Matt Raible — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 14:02:44 -0600

From the roller-dev mailing list (with minor edits for HTML readability):

Finally, we have a release candidate for Apache Roller 3.0 (incubating). I've provided links to all of the release files, what's new information, updated docs and Roller Support project downloads.

Please test out the new release and provide feed back here on the list in our JIRA bug tracker. I expect that there will be a least a couple more release candidates.

The Roller webapp (the binary release)

The Roller source (the source release)

*** New features

This is a major new release of Roller with these new features:

* The front-page blog
  Front-page of a Roller site is now an easy-to-customize weblog

* Completely new URL structure for weblogs and feeds
  Old URLs are HTTP 301 redirected to appropriate new URL

* Completely new macro system
  With complete documentation. Old system is deprecated but still supported

* Non-core themes and plugins moved to Roller Support site
  For development, support and maintenance by wider Roller community

Find our more in What's new in Roller 3.0

*** Updated documentation

http://people.apache.org/~snoopdave/roller30-user-guide.pdf
http://people.apache.org/~snoopdave/roller30-template-guide.pdf
http://people.apache.org/~snoopdave/roller30-install-guide.pdf

*** Roller Support project sources

Roller Support project now responsible for development, support and maintenance of non-core Roller themes, plugins and other add-ons.

Roller Support project: home page, additional themes, additional plugins, required JARs.

Nice work Roller dev team! I didn't contribute much to this release, but I sure am looking forward to using it.

Upgraded to Roller 2.3

Matt Raible — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 22:49:35 -0600

I spent some time today and upgraded this site to the the latest Roller release (version 2.3). Let me know if you see anything out of order. In addition to the upgrade, I made a couple of improvements:

Improved titles: now they change based on page, category and individual posts.
Fixed search paging: previously, you couldn't page through search results.

Hope you're having a good weekend - Happy Father's Day to all the Dads out there.

Roller Comments

Matt Raible — Wed, 10 May 2006 12:04:52 -0600

The default comment form in Roller is pretty ugly. Not only does it use a <table> to layout the form, but it has invalid XHTML and JavaScript as well. With the new theme on this site, I re-worked much of the comments.vm macro and created a much prettier form. I was hoping to contribute a variation of this theme to Roller for 2.3, but it looks like it'll have to wait until 2.4. Rather than adding new macros for this theme, I'll be fixing all the themes to have a prettier comment form. You can track my progress on this issue using ROL-1131.

As far as this theme, I've named it "andreas08" after its designer. I hope to contribute something similar to what's on virtuastravels.com as part of 2.4. If you'd like to use this theme in your own Roller installation (before 2.4), let me know and I'll try to package up a download.

New Colors (again)

Matt Raible — Mon, 8 May 2006 00:47:42 -0600

I've just completed another round of re-working the colors and header images on this site. If you click on the different category headings (i.e. Java, Mac OS X or Open Source), you can see the other color schemes. If you like one of the category theme's better than the default one, let me know.

I also did some tweaks to get everything working in IE. What a pain in the ass that browser is. For some reason, if anything in the "main" part of the website (where the blog entries are) is too wide - IE shoves everything down the page, including the top nav bar and the right sidebar. It's so bad that a simple paragraph with "margin-left: 10px" doesn't work. With Firefox and Safari, it moves over properly and overlays the sidebar if that's what it takes. Because of this, there's a potential that wide posts in this site will make the sidebar drop to the bottom of the page. For the nav bar, I changed it to be absolutely positioned, so it should always be present.

Other IE issues include: 1) the calendar icon is a transparent .png (I'll probably have to change it to a .gif) and 2) the nav bar's "selected" items are up a pixel or two and contain a bottom border. While these are minor issues, I would like to figure out how to make IE more tolerant of item width's in the #main section. Let me know if you have any tips or tricks.

Upgraded to Roller 2.2

Matt Raible — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 18:26:02 -0600

I spent some time this afternoon and upgraded this site to the soon-to-be-released Roller 2.2 (release notes). Please let me know if you see any issues.

Upgrading Roller is the first step in preparing for tomorrow's CSS Reboot. I don't know if I'll have time to create a new theme and use it on this site, but I hope to give it a try. I'm on the plane for 4 hours tomorrow, so I should be get something done.

As part of the upgrade, I fixed search for this site. The problem was caused by using $dateFormatter when viewing search results. My guess is that variable is not in Velocity's context after searching.

Upgraded to Roller 2.1

Matt Raible — Sun, 5 Mar 2006 20:43:42 -0700

I upgraded this site to Roller 2.1 yesterday. I did encounter a few issues while upgrading, but nothing too major. If you see any issues let me know.

For the record, this blog has had 2244 entries and 7380 comments since I started it in 2002. I wonder what the highest numbers are on a Roller-based blog?

Roller on Geronimo

Matt Raible — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 16:23:30 -0700

Jeff has posted a nice tutorial showing how to run Roller on Geronimo. Note that he's using a HEAD build of Geronimo, so you might have to build Geronimo yourself or wait for the next release. I've heard rumors the next release will ship with a Web-only version (i.e. Tomcat and JMS), so that might be a good fit for Roller. As for pre-compiling JSPs, that's on my to do list.

There's been a few "how to run Roller (or AppFuse)" on X server lately. IMO, the best howto is no howto - it just works. I recently tried AppFuse 1.9 on JOnAS and it ran w/o any changes. Since it uses a Spring-managed connection pool and doesn't require any server configuration, this is how things should work. I've had similar results with AppFuse on Jetty and JBoss (and Tomcat of course).

2005 - A Year in Review

Matt Raible — Fri, 30 Dec 2005 12:13:25 -0700

2005 was quite a year for me. I found my dream job, after contemplating what's next in my career only a few months earlier. I attended TheServerSide Symposium in March and created some great memories with James Goodwill. There's nothing like losing all your money and then winning it all back at 6 in the mornin'.

Other March highlights include:

Geert Bevin saying Laszlo is a waste of time, then rescinded his statement two weeks later.
Heading to Microsoft for the Competitive Influentials Summit.
Getting my nuts cut off.

April was a fun month, and started off with a me heading to work for Microsoft. The joke worked so well it was picked up by news.com. DU repeated as NCAA Champions (again). The MySQL Conference and wine-tasting with Julie (for our 5th anniversary) rounded out the month.

May was a whirlwind month, where I headed to Norway after barely renewing my expired passport on time. My PowerBook died on the way over, but I still had a great time. I was featured on TheServerSide and started planning AppFuse 2.0.

The summer flew by: I got biled by Hani, toured with the "Bomb Squad" at JavaOne, drove through Yellowstone, bought a new bike, learned more about Ruby and Rails at OSCON (and learned how much fun a smackdown can be), and watched Jack turn 1.

Then things got busy: I had a great time at Java in Action, started The Bus Project, and enjoyed the beauty of Keystone with Bender and Snyder at the Colorado Software Summit.

To round out the year, I traveled and attended conferences like I was possessed (New Jersey, NFJS, San Francisco and Florida). Abbie turned 3, Roller 2.0 was released and the WebWork joined Struts after a multi-year rivalry.

Phew, it's been quite a year folks. Here's to 2006 being even better! My goals for the year? Happiness, health and more car bombs with family and friends.

Roller 2.0 Hidden Feature: Different Editor Themes

Matt Raible — Sat, 26 Nov 2005 22:15:51 -0700

Roller 2.0 has a pretty cool feature that doesn't seem to be documented. You can apply different looks to the editor UI by passing in a "look" parameter to one of the editor URLs. Below are three that ship with Roller 2.0:

Looking in the theme directory, there appears to be two other options: lavender and blueslate. However, they appear to render the same look and aren't nearly as pretty as the other three.

I discovered this parameter by looking in theme/banner.jsp. Looking at this file, it appears you can change the default by defining a "editor.theme" property in roller.properties.

Roller gets some respect

Matt Raible — Sun, 16 Oct 2005 13:03:54 -0600

From A Baggins Under the Hill (nice looking theme BTW):

There's a surprising (or perhaps not so surprising) number of PHP programs, intricate ones at that, that have developers who didn't bother to abstract away the database layer, and wrote DB-vendor-dependent queries. That's a pretty horrible thing to do, since it ties you quite firmly down to one DB (in many cases MySQL). The SQL code is often very tightly integrate with the display code; it's bad enough in the business layer, but the view layer as well? Good gods.
...
Roller, on the other hand, uses things like Hibernate to abstract away queries from the underlying DB implementations, and Velocity to separate out the display logic from the business logic. And blogging software does have business logic, or a model; blog entries and categories and tags and authentication and the manipulation thereof are not simple. As a result, I see features being added to Roller that I'm surprised to see happening so quickly.

As far as solving the issue with Tomcat 5.5, that's just a matter of updating your $CATALINA_HOME/conf/Catalina/localhost/roller.xml file. Here's what I use for Roller on PostgreSQL:

<Context path="/roller" docBase="roller" debug="99" reloadable="false"
    antiJARLocking="true" antiResourceLocking="false">

    <Realm className="org.apache.catalina.realm.JDBCRealm" debug="99"
          driverName="org.postgresql.Driver"
       connectionURL="jdbc:postgresql://localhost/roller"
      connectionName="postgres" connectionPassword="postgres"
           userTable="rolleruser" userNameCol="username" userCredCol="passphrase"
       userRoleTable="userrole" roleNameCol="rolename" />

    <Resource name="jdbc/rollerdb" auth="Container" type="javax.sql.DataSource"
              maxActive="20" maxIdle="10" maxWait="100"
              driverClassName="org.postgresql.Driver"
              username="postgres" password="postgres"
              url="jdbc:postgresql://localhost/roller"/>

    <Resource name="mail/Session" auth="Container" type="javax.mail.Session"
              mail.smtp.host="localhost" />
</Context>

Gmail's New Auto-Save Feature

Matt Raible — Tue, 4 Oct 2005 11:03:41 -0600

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.

Trackback Spam

Matt Raible — Tue, 4 Oct 2005 10:42:45 -0600

Roller seems to have done a pretty good job of suppressing comment spammers. The math question seems to trip up automated scripts and I only get about 1 or 2 spam comments per month. At least, I only see 1 or 2 per month - many get marked as spam and just sit in the database - never to be displayed. However, recently I've started to notice a lot of Trackback spam.

I dive into my "comment" table a few times a week to format comments so they look like their author intended them to look (I never alter wording). In the past couple of weeks, I've noticed a buttload of spam trackbacks (up to 10-20 per day). Here is an example. How do we go about stopping trackback spam? I'm guessing the easiest way is to disable trackbacks.

Drupal's Blogging Engine vs. Roller

Matt Raible — Sat, 1 Oct 2005 12:52:11 -0600

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?

Roller 2.0 looks good!

Matt Raible — Tue, 16 Aug 2005 09:32:11 -0600

Dave has posted some screenshots of Roller 2.0. I have to say, the new UI is a big improvement, both with colors and fonts. I hope to try 2.0 out today and hopefully get it installed at Virtuas in the next week or two. I can't wait until this release is installed on JRoller - it'll be very cool when many people can participate in a SourceBeat blog. Nice work Dave!

FWIW, I plan on hanging out in #appfuse and #roller on irc.freenode.net this week. Stop by and say hi if you have questions about either project.

Site Status

Matt Raible — Fri, 29 Jul 2005 10:29:02 -0600

Last weekend's crash made me change a few things on this site - all for the better. Instead of having a single server for hosting the AppFuse Wiki, there's now a read-only mirror at http://appfuse.org/wiki. Keith (of KGB Internet) has been kind enough to setup an rsynch cron that synchronizes from raibledesigns.com daily.

As part of the "fixing", I upgraded Roller and JSPWiki. Roller's search is still broken for the most part, but it seems to be due to some orphaned records, which I can hopefully fix soon. When upgrading JSPWiki, I broke the print as HTML feature, which I hope to fix today.

Last, but not least, I've enabled Roller's Planet feature. If you have a blog where you talk about AppFuse or it's related technologies, let me know and I'll add you. As far as contributing to Roller, I'm ashamed to admit that I haven't committed any code in months (maybe even a year). Integrating Acegi Security has been on my todo list for a couple of months now - and I hope to find some time soon. Unfortunately, life, AppFuse and Spring Live keep getting in the way.

5 minutes later: Print as HTML is fixed.

Down all weekend - what happened?

Matt Raible — Mon, 25 Jul 2005 10:05:03 -0600

Some of you might have noticed that this site was down all weekend. I didn't notice it until Saturday morning, at which point I was so beat from traveling last week that I didn't care. I tried to fix it for 5 minutes, then gave up figuring Keith (at KGB Internet) would be able to fix it. I sent him an e-mail asking for help - hoping he could kill a stray process or something. I didn't do any more investigating until Sunday - when it was still down. This site has been extremely stable for the last few months, so the fact that it all just stopped working really had (and still has) me puzzled.

I spent about an hour trying to get things to startup again, to no avail. The problem seemed to be related to the fact that the first time I'd try to hit Roller - it would peg the CPU and the number of database connections would start to skyrocket. Within seconds, the connection pool would become exhausted and Hibernate stack traces would begin to litter my logs. I spent hours doing this dance. At one point, I suspected a DOS attack - why else would the connections skyrocket for no reason?

While I was doing the site-fix dance, I created a read-only copy of the AppFuse Wiki at http://appfuse.org/wiki. When I tried to restart Tomcat on appfuse.org, I got stack traces from the JSPs. Upgrading to the latest stable release of JSPWiki (2.2.28) fixed the problem. However, when I'd start the "wiki" app, it would hang when I tried to request pages. Guessing that this was related to the data volume of pages (11.5 MB gzipped), I cleared out the wiki pages directory and started the wiki context with no data. That worked. I was then able to copy the pages back in and get everything back to normal.

Back to this site. I tried several things last night, including upgrading Roller to 1.2, upgrading Tomcat to 5.5.9 and upgrading the JDK to 5.0. Nothing worked, so I gave up and went to bed. This morning, I decided to try JDK 5 with Roller 1.2 and the instance of Tomcat (5.0.28) that's been working so well for the past few months. Still no dice. But I did manage to get the wiki to spit out the errors it did on appfuse.org. Remembering that this was caused by JDK 5, I went ahead and upgraded JSPWiki to 2.2.28 and did the empty directory dance to get the wiki started. Voila! - everything was fixed!

So that's my story. I still don't know the root cause, but I think the JDK 5 + JSPWiki 2.2.28 combination fixed the problem. I also suspect that something is different today than yesterday b/c the number of database connections didn't immediately spike like it did yesterday. I turned the search feature off as part of my site-fixing dance, so that's still off. I've been afraid to touch anything since I got it all working again. I'll try to turn it back on tonight. In the meantime, I need to figure out how to fix the startup problem with JSPWiki.

Update: I think I figured out the problem - particularly with JSPWiki. I was using JSPWiki's PageViewCountPlugin to track page hits. This file had grown to be just over 59 MB! Deleting the file allowed JSPWiki to start problem-free.

Remember Me works on JRoller!

Matt Raible — Mon, 21 Feb 2005 16:55:18 -0700

JRoller has upgraded to Roller 1.0.1 and Remember Me is finally working! Since I'm the one who added this feature - please let me know if you find any issues with it. The last time we deployed it to JRoller, it ended up being a huge security hole and you could log into other people's accounts. Doh! Sorry about that. Hopefully it won't happen this time.

If you want to know how this feature is implemented, see AppFuse's Remember Me documentation.