JavaZone report, day 1, half-done

Updated with hyperlinks

Was at Bruce Johnson's talk on Google WTK. Cool stuff, Google, nuff said. Will have to try it out.

Then on to Jevgeni Kabanov's talk on Arenea. Interesting ideas, but I don't really think this is anything ready for prod. I'm an OO guy, so I can really see the use of using more OO in webapps. Might try this out next year if it's still alive.

Took a one session break.

Now in Bruce Tate's Java/Ruby integration talk. So far doing very well being diplomatic towards java (perhaps very wisely). Alotta RoR demonstration, and the ReST stuff was of course impressive. Tate is by the way one helluva talker. Sounds a bit like an American president (scaringly smoothly convincing type), but I think he's Texan, after all :)

Now I've stumbled into Ross Mason's Mule/JavaSpaces . The nickle in his shoe is handling meta-data for web services. but ESBs, or was it WSDLs, don't provide this too well.

Now normally I like to stay clear of the service layer, but I don't think I can too much longer. Will remember stuff like ReST and JavaSpaces if I ever journey into such landscapes. Quite simply. Mule seems like a bus. This I will have to try soon as well. Too many beer-talks about remoting I want in on these days!

Had a quick discussion with Rickard Öberg earlier, trying to explain him the benefits of having a standardized content repository (JSR-170). Now from his point of view, most of the requirements (migration, search and even versioning) is handled by the transport/data layer format, RDF. Why standardize beneath that (other than making it more developer standard)? Now I just had a qiock look at the spec, and there's one use case I didn't think of during discussion, and that is events.

I also talk to Alex Popescu for a tiny bit, figured me and him could gang up on Rickard. Anyhows, Rickard was gonna show him a quick SiteVision demo, and I guess that would get him rolling (heard he can pick quite a verbal fight, according to the tales of speakers' night out yesterday). Looking forward to his talk about InfoQ.

Afterwards it's onto Bjørn's talk on some ORM performance stuff. Will try to update when the beer's out.

Comments

Open source CMS evaluations

I have now seen three more or less serious open source CMS reviews. First guy to hit the field was Matt Raible ( 1 2 3 4 ), ending up with Drupal , Joomla , Magnolia , OpenCms and MeshCMS being runner-ups. Then there is OpenAdvantage that tries out a handful ( Drupal , Exponent CMS , Lenya , Mambo , and Silva ), including Plone which they use for their own site (funny/annoying that the entire site has no RSS-feeds, nor is it possible to comment on the articles), following Matt's approach by exluding many CMS that seem not to fit the criteria. It is somewhat strange that OpenAdvantage cuts away Magnolia because it "Requires J2EE server; difficult to install and configure; more of a framework than CMS", and proceed to include Apache Lenya in the full evaluation. Magnolia does not require a J2EE server. It runs on Tomcat just like Lenya does (maybe it's an idea to bundle Magnolia with Jetty to make it seem more lightweight). I'm still sure that OpenAdvant

Considerations for JavaScript in Modern (2013) Java/Maven Projects

Disclaimer: I'm a Java developer, not a JavaScript developer. This is just what I've picked up the last years plus a little research the last days. It's just a snapshot of my current knowledge and opinions on the day of writing, apt to change over the next weeks/months. We've gone all modern in our web applications, doing MVC on the client side with AngularJS or Ember , building single-page webapps with REST backends. But how are we managing the growing amount of JavaScript in our application? Yeoman 's logo (not necessarily the conclusion of this blog post) You ain't in Kansas anymore So far we've just been doing half-random stuff. We download some version of a library and throw it into our src/main/webapp/js/lib , or we use it from a CDN , which may be down or unreachable when we want to use the application.. Some times the JS is minified, other times it's not. Some times we name the file with version number, other times without. Some

Git Stash Blooper (Could not restore untracked files from stash)

The other day I accidentally did a git stash -a , which means it stashes *everything*, including ignored output files (target, build, classes, etc). Ooooops.. What I meant to do was git stash -u , meaning stash modifications plus untracked new files. Anyhows, I ended up with a big fat stash I couldn't get back out. Each time I tried, I got something like this: .../target/temp/dozer.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/temp/core.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/temp/joda-time.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/foo.war already exists, no checkout Could not restore untracked files from stash No matter how I tried checking out different revisions (like the one where I actually made the stash), or using --force, I got the same error. Now these were one of those "keep cool for a second, there's a git way to fix this"situation. I figured: A stash is basically a commit. If we look at my recent commits using git log --graph --

Managing dot-files with vcsh and myrepos

Say I want to get my dot-files out on a new computer. Here's what I do: # install vcsh & myrepos via apt/brew/etc vcsh clone https://github.com/tfnico/config-mr.git mr mr update Done! All dot-files are ready to use and in place. No deploy command, no linking up symlinks to the files . No checking/out in my entire home directory as a Git repository. Yet, all my dot-files are neatly kept in fine-grained repositories, and any changes I make are immediately ready to be committed: config-atom.git -> ~/.atom/* config-mr.git -> ~/.mrconfig -> ~/.config/mr/* config-tmuxinator.git -> ~/.tmuxinator/* config-vim.git -> ~/.vimrc -> ~/.vim/* config-bin.git -> ~/bin/* config-git.git -> ~/.gitconfig config-tmux.git -> ~/.tmux.conf config-zsh.git -> ~/.zshrc How can this be? The key here is to use vcsh to keep track of your dot-files, and its partner myrepos/mr for o

Leaving eyeo

Thirteen blog posts later, this one notes my departure from eyeo after 4 years and 3 months. I joined eyeo around the headcount of 80 employees, and now I think there's just over 250 people there. My role coming in was as operations manager, doing a mix of infrastructure engineering and technical project management. I later on took on organizational development to help the company deal with its growing pains . We introduced cross-functional teams, departments (kind of like guilds), new leadership structures, goal-setting frameworks, onboarding processes and career frameworks. And all of this in a rapidly growing distributed company. I'm proud and happy that for a long time I knew every employee by name and got to meet every single new-hire through training them on company structure and processes. At some point, we had enough experienced leaders and organizational developers that I could zoom back in on working in one team, consulting them on Git and continuous integration