THE WORLD FROM A FREELANCER POINT OF VIEW - THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY!

Liferay in Action & Portlets in Action

2011-10-10T11:21:00.000+02:00

Finally, the books arrived. Nice! The best books about portlet development (JSR286-/MVC-/Spring-MVC-Portlets) ever... if you are a serious portlet developer, these books are must haves! If you want to save 30-50% on the book, just add your email address to their newsletter and you'll retrieve discounts...

Netbeans 7.0.1 & JDK 7 EA Developer Preview @ OSX

2011-10-10T11:17:00.000+02:00

Like the years before, the JDK is present at Windows machines first and after some months it arrives on OSX. On its way to a final release, I tested the early access version with the latest Netbeans version. It is of course possible to use it for your projects - e.g. some web projects with Tomcat / Liferay etc., but it is not usable if you configure Netbeans itself to use the latest JDK. The functionality of the IDE is there, but no text is displayed. If you are a really skilled developer and have memorized your code, maybe you can try to develop this way : ) for all those other guys who need to see the code they write - hold on for another few months... (or switch and use Windows)

GOTO CPH 2011

2011-05-19T11:16:00.000+02:00

For the first time, GOTO CPH took place in the capital city of denmark. With 350 attendees, it was a nice crowd. The conference started with two training days. I joined "A programmatic introduction to Neo4J" with Ian Robinson & Jim Webber. It was fun to dive into the fundamentals of using a graph database and with Neo4J, there is a nice one available. My second training "Just enough upfront design" with Simon Brown was fun too. Instead of providing tons of slides, we paired up and the different teams built solutions based on given user stories. At the end, every team presented their solution... Two great, entertaining and well prepared training days.

The next three days, the conference was like expected - a lot of interesting talks and some inspiring keynotes. Patrick Copeland (google) presented the innovation at google and how they measure the worth of an idea.

Nokia presented some interesting numbers about the OVI-Store and how successful it is. At the same time, they tried to convince the audience, to develop Qt apps... but, Qt apps will not run on a WP7 based phone. It looks like Nokia is going to use Meego as a replacement of Symbian as there foundation for Qt apps. An interesting move - isn't it? Especially if you realize, that the car industry tends to use Meego instead of Android as an in-car-entertainment OS... Nokia is not a dead fish and maybe the time is right to buy some shares ; )

John Nolan gave an interesting talk about Frameworks - the devil's work. He explained how developers tend to use a framework instead of our brain no matter what.

An interesting new thing was the live coding session for different languages. One of the super programmers paired up with someone from the audience and than they tried to solve a problem.

Over all, a good first start of GOTO CPH.

Fixing the the Eclipse JS Editor Encoding

2011-05-06T15:37:00.002+02:00

Ever used the Eclipse JS Editor and wondered about the strange encoding? Instead of UTF-8, able to handle Umlaute e.g. ä ö ü, Eclipse uses the default OS encoding for JS-Files. In case of a mac, this might be MacRoman... Currently, there is no option to set the Encoding only for the JS-Editor, but you can change the default encoding: Preferences | General | Workspace => default text encoding

Syncing the hardway

2011-04-30T17:53:00.000+02:00

I was really impressed by the free sync capabilities M$ provides these days with Windows Live Mesh - 5 GB for sync services and 20 GB for other services - NICE! When I started using the sync service, everything works like expected the first time. I was able to sync a project folder easily between 2 computers, using skydrive as a buffer instead of P2P. But today, I want to sync again and it took hours without syncing anything... as it turned out, this slow behavior is a common problem. To me it is time to move on and replace the M$ sync service. Maybe the good old rsync is a more proper tool. Running my own server anyway, I can make sure I can access and sync my data when I need them. M$ Sync Service => failed.

How to spend 59.999,00 € with a single click at AppleStore

2011-03-28T14:29:00.000+02:00

If you are bored, buy some apple support for your company...

Java related doc and src on OSX

2011-02-28T18:00:00.001+01:00

If you install an IDE like Netbeans or Eclipse (...) you may want to provide your Path to the documentation or sourcecode. Because Apple has some fancy Java structures, it is not easy to find them. Here is where to look:

/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0_24-b07-330.jdk/Contents/Home/

By the way, at connect.apple.com you can get early access JDK versions - e.g. the latest version is

java version "1.6.0_24"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_24-b07-330-10M3321)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 19.1-b02-330, mixed mode)

SonyEricsson X10 Mini Ant+ PART II

2011-02-26T00:42:00.000+01:00

Finally I got the X10 mini update and was able to download some sample apps provided by Dynastream Innovations Inc., the company behind ANT+. It was pretty straight forward - start the app, scan for your heartrate belt - done. The detection was fast and I could use the heartrate monitor without any issues. It seems like there is a new kind of equipment going to redefine the heratrate sport industrie. Now, vendors like Polar are forced to develop mobile apps too, if they don't want to miss the new market opportunities.

An interesting hardware note: Trek/Bontrager are going to build framesets ready to be equipped with ANT+ hardware. This implies, that these companies need a software/platform where there customers can use there data for further processing... we will see, if they all run more or less something similar or if we will see some real innovation, too. 2011 is the year of the ANT+ sensor!

Portlets in Action / Liferay in Action

2011-02-13T18:35:00.002+01:00

After waiting years (!) for a really good book about portlet developement, Portlet in Action and Liferay in Action by Manning publications are the ones... they are currently accesible only through the early access program, but it seems like they are both more or less chapter complete. I read both and both use Liferay as the main portal server for demonstrations (code&screenshots). The main difference is that the author of Portlets in Action (Sarin) tries to always provide a solution for a given task that is as much as JSR 286 compliant or portable between different portal solutions as possible.

If you are going to rely on Liferay anyway and need a faster way of learning the development approaches Liferay/SDK/IDE provides, Liferay in Action is the right shortcut for you.

I highly recommend these two books to all serious web/portlet developers!

SonyEricsson X10 Mini Ant+ PART I

2011-02-13T18:19:00.000+01:00

SonyEricsson launched an Android based device called the X10 Mini, part of the Xperia series a couple of month ago. It is very compact - similar to the Motorola flipout, which makes it handy for tracking your activities like running or biking. Anyway, the really new, big thing this small device provides is the ability to communicate via ANT+ with a lot of other fitness devices. Therefore I bought it (149€) a day after the announcement of SonyEriccson to deliver this functionality through an Android patch... now, I'am checking for this patch everyday, but still have not received it ...

In the meantime I bought a MaxPro (99€) watch produced by o-synce, including a heartrate monitor - of course, with ANT+ support. The watch provides the basic functionality, you would expect from a mid range heartrate monitor watch. As soon as I know, if the ANT+ support is worth spending the money, I will let you know... END of PART I.

Liferay + Amazon RDS remote => no way!

2011-01-23T15:58:00.001+01:00

Impressed by the announcements of amazon beanstalk I tried to deploy the liferay.war ... but the Liferay installation did not succeed. The logfiles did not show the exact reasons and that's why I was not investigating any further.

Than there is this other service, a MySQL Instance running as a so called amazon RDS. Nice, it should work with your tools and JDBC drivers out of the box. Therefore, I set up an instance, configured a firewall rule to allow external access and launched my local Liferay installation on my Laptop, after setting the according properties within the portal.properties file. First, I started Liferay from within my Eclipse IDE, which caused a timeout after 300 secs... that's why I decided to start it again from the terminal. Everything worked fine - the auto table creation and the default data initialization. After a couple of minutes, I was actually able to access the portal! Success!

But it is really slow. In production, this kind of scenario is not recommended. Maybe, if Liferay is running deployed at AWS Beanstalk, or on an EC2 instance, maybe, the network latency/network throughput is no issue. Till than, my root server is doing the trick : )

PrefPane issue on OSX

2011-01-18T18:21:00.000+01:00

MySQL on OSX - the PrefPane problem. I thought they fixed it over the years, but still, the PrefPane is not working on OSX by default. It is just a naming issue and if you run into it, you only need to change the access rights for the group to wheel ( chgrp wheel /Library/StartupItems/MySQLCOM/ ) and after that, you might want to fix the install path ( vi /usr/local/mysql/support-files/mysql.server ) by setting the basedir to basedir=/usr/local/mysql. Done. There is already a good blog entry at http://jaykhimani.blogspot.com/

Symbian 3 on Nokia C7

2010-11-26T19:32:00.002+01:00

My first Nokia ever! To be honest, I won it at the Telekom DevDays in Bonn : ) With Symbian on board, I was really not expecting much. In the past, I used a few Nokias at work and I never felt comfortable with all of its submenus and options... but this device is as good as an Android device. Symbian 3 seems to be a total different thing. The apps ran fast and I was instantly able to make/playback videos, photos etc. The apps really responded fast. Still, do I really want to develop for this device? There are a few options like J2ME or Qt etc. but we all know, that Meego is going to replce Symbian on the Smartphone side and currently, the Windows Phone 7 still seems to be more apealing than Symbian. MS has a great developer plattform (VS) and with Silverlight there is a powerful UI-framework out there ready to run on WP7... ebay, I've got something for you!

SQL Azure via JDBC PART I

2010-11-20T22:03:00.001+01:00

With Azure Microsoft provides a bundle of cloud services. With a Java background, I'am interested in how I can use SQL Azure in conjunction with JPA. Because there is a JDBC Driver available, it should work...

Indeed, I managed it to connect to SQL-Azure and create a DB from within Netbeans. The only thing you need to take care of is the username. The username provided must include the domainname:

@.database.windows.net mcahornsirup@wef32h2.database.windows.net

With Netbeans, this leads us to a JDBC-URL like this one:

jdbc:sqlserver//wef32h2.database.windows.net:1433;databaseName=master;ssl=required

This was simple. Now its getting more interesting in PART II ...

GIF/PDF/... + JAR - a widely adopted security hole

2010-09-04T18:33:00.001+02:00

The more and more I dive deeper into java security, the more I fear its power... for example, it is really easy to upload a jar file to a site allowing you to upload a gif. All you have to do is build a gifar... you append the jar to the gif file and you are done.

cp photo.gif gifar.gif | cat evil.jar >> gifar.gif

That's simple - right! That's a nice way of decentralizing your infrastructure ; ) It seems like e.g. liferay (even the latest version 6.x) is not taking care of this kind of issues yet.

Froscon 2010 Review

2010-08-27T11:26:00.000+02:00

Again. A great conference with a lot of passion about OSS. Beyond the passion, "agile" has reached the OSS community. It seems like projects with a specific size of committers are actually trying to apply a lot of agile patterns. But the global development process is not able to fit perfectly. E.g. the daily scrum is not possible due to the different timezones ; ) Froscon 2010 - five stars again.

Motorola Flipout Test

2010-08-13T13:22:00.002+02:00

I just received the brand new Motorola Flipout. It is compact in size like expected and after a couple of hours, it feels familiar to work with. I primarily bought it because of its form factor. With 6,7cm x 6.7cm it is possible to carry it with you during a workout (running) without loosing your pants.

According to its price of 289€ it is well equipped. Even the WLAN Draft N is supported. Additionally, it is based on Android 2.1 with all its fancy features.

The only downside I discovered so far is the call handling. You can not receive or make a call when the device is closed. You always need to flip out the keyboard. This is related to the position of the microphone. As you can see on the pic, the mic is on the keyboard itself. Let's see how long I can live with this issue...

Google Earth - the missing speedcontrol for historical data

2010-07-14T12:34:00.000+02:00

With Google Earth you can do great things like display animated 3D objects e.g. if you want to build a replay for some sailing events. All you need are the track data sets of the different sailing boats (lng/lat) and the according timestamps. Google Earth is able to interpolate and animate your Placemark (2D/3D) over time. This means, you do not see a jumping boat, but a moving boat - nice! (I would love to show you a pic, but it is prohibited to make pics of GE and distribute them - as soon as the playback is online, I'am going to embed it here : )

Google did a great job, but there is a problem with the timeslider. The timeslider is the control element for interacting with your tracks. You can start / stop it or change the path length following your Placemark.

The problem is the playback speed. Because there is no fine grained speed control, you might see your tracks animated in a to fast way. And therefore, it is sometimes hard to follow. Because this behavior is vital to me, I built my own speed control. This was not that easy, because there is no official way of building custom controls for the Google Earth Plugin.

You need to place some screenoverlays (png/jpg) on top of the Google Earth using the Google Earth API and listen to some up/down/move/click events in order to figure out wether or not a button was hovered, pressed or clicked etc. Besides, it is not possible to place your own controls on top of an existing control, e.g. next to the plus sign of the timeslider to make it look more integrated. That's why I pseudo integrated it only.

If you are interested in code etc. drop al line.

Team America - go home

2010-05-16T10:50:00.001+02:00

It seems like a lot of people out there disagree with the best practices of our world police #1. This video is just fiction, but it reminds us. born free.
M.I.A, Born Free from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo.

Symbian is dead and replaced by Android, isn't it?

2010-05-02T16:24:00.001+02:00

Going back in time, Symbian was the number one Phone OS. Nokia, Motorola, SonyEricsson etc. all big brands used Symbian as there OS of choice. But, it wasn't open or intuitive, it was a kind of hack and some kind difficult to work with. One of the big problems was the vendor specific adoption and customization.
As a developer, it was a lot of work to port your app from one vendor to another vendor. E.g. if you developed a game on the SonyEricsson device, equipped with Symbian, you still need to test and fix your app to make it work at a Nokia device.

Currently, Android is the new kid on the block and a lot of vendors dropped or at least reduced there Symbian support like Motorola, SonyEricsson and Samsung. Only Nokia seems to be stupid/arrogant enough to ignore this OS.

But is Android doing everything better? Currently, there are more than 5 different OS versions already on the market Android 1.5, 1.6, 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 was just announced. All these OS versions come with additional, vendor specific, APIs equipped. It seems like we will run into a similar developement process than with Symbian. And from a functionality point of view, Symbian 3 seems to be powerful again.

=> Yes, Symbian is dead, but Android needs to take care of not becoming a wide spread, fragmented OS, too. A clean automatic update cycle could be a solution to fight the fragmentation named FOTA (Firmwareupdate Over The Air).

Sony Ericsson announced not to build any Smartphones with Symbian anymore ... 25.09.2010

Google Charts API fixed my IceFaces image flickering

2010-04-13T21:40:00.001+02:00

With IceFaces, the most unreliable UI-Framework I know, images start flickering if you have them generated dynamically in conjunction with Ajax-Push. E.g. if you have a countdown, that refreshes every second, everything except the IceFaces charts are starting flickering... ok, they look ugly anyway and therefore, the google charts can do the trick for you.

Instead of using the chart tag itself like

< ice:outputchart ... />

try this one:

< h:graphicimage alt="chart" url="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=200x125&chd=t:48.14,33.79,19.77|83.18,18.73,12.04&cht=bvg&chart=chart.png"/>

HAVE IN MIND: THE ENCODING IS KEY! Encode all chars like & etc. within the URL!

Team America - go home

2010-04-10T14:31:00.000+02:00

Now, with the more technology found in modern warfare, everything looks like a computer game... All you need are some kids love to play these games, put them into a uniform and let them shoot with high tech toys. Maybe you need to cover these actions with some official blabla - that's it. Cheap, legal and fast collateralmurderer in gods name. Is the US becoming the 4. Reich in a larger scale? We "had" the jewish they "have" the terrorists! By the way, are you able to tell me what a terrorist actually is?

Move your money - a great idea

2010-02-01T17:36:00.001+01:00

I just stumbled over a post about moving the money to smaller, local banks... it's our money - we should decide carefully to whom we give it. This is not only true for the US but also for germany... but historically, the Sparkasse is not the best choice. Often they are really too close to the local politicians ; ) - you know what I mean... There is a niche movie about this topic:

Google App Engine and JEE6 - JAX-RS (Jersey)

2010-01-24T15:18:00.001+01:00

The last few days I played with GAE and tried to figure out how well it works. To be honest, it works pretty well. You can develop and test your service locally and deploy it hassle free to GAE. But what about JEE 6 capabilities... a lot of the JEE stack is currently not part of it but Jersey 1.15 now works with GAE. Jersey is the reference implementation of JAX-RS and it is pretty simple to work with. Have in mind, the current version of Jersey bundled with Netbeans 6.8 is not the latest one! Just download the latest version 1.15 or above and add it to your project - and it works! Of course, you need the GAE plugins... have fun! Take a look at this video about GAE itself:

Layered Coding wit annotations

2010-01-11T16:00:00.003+01:00

With the more and more popular approach of annotating classes with meta information, the code is not getting more readable - that's for sure. With codefolds, we have already a mechanism of hiding information like the implementation of a method. Maybe we need a different kind of view, like most visual designers provide, that enable us to switch between the annotation view and the pure code view?!

26C3 - Leyen-Rhetorik - looks like an early alpha

2009-12-27T21:50:00.002+01:00

Have some fun with the simplified rethorik of our former Familienministerin at the 26C3 Link.

Growing display size vs. Program menus

2009-12-26T14:01:00.003+01:00

I received my 27 iMac a couple of weeks ago and it is a great machine. The display is huge and I don't want to use a smaller one again... but there is one thing, I came across - the program menus are still positioned as left as possible... this is the default behavior, and in the past this was fine for me. But with this kind of displays, we may need to rethink the position of the menu.

Why? Because of your natural boundaries... your eyes are limited to a specific focus/spot like your camera. If you want to see the whole display, you need to increase the distance between you and the display. If your desk does not support a depth of 100cm (like mine), you need to move your head to actually discover all the areas... and that's true for the menu too.

As a result of this, I realized myself splitting the screen into two areas (2/3 - 1/3) and moving my position to the more left of the iMac. Now, I have the menu in focus again and my main program as well. The rest of the 1/3 of the right screen is used for the less frequently used stuff like notes or the finder etc...

=> Maybe we need an option that allows us to center the menu on the screen. Than we could sit in front of the iMac even without buying a new desk : )

//Update: I just discussed this kind of issue with a friend and it seems like Windows/Linux is not having this problem because of the missing global menu bar - there is a menu for every program, bound to the corresponding window... maybe apple should provide a "switch" to toggle between these kinds of menus.

IceFaces - a sad story continious

2009-11-27T18:53:00.008+01:00

We all know how difficult it was in the beginning using Javascript in the past. These days, with all those fantastic JS-Libaries in place, this is not an issue anymore. At least, that's what I thought. IceFaces is having difficulties again and again and again... the latest bug I discovered today was the not working ability to pass the parameter from a selection (radio/dropdown) during a valueChangeEvent to the BackingBean. Maybe IceSoft has a different definition about what cross browser compatibility means...

ICEFaces - please do not use it.

2009-11-18T19:15:00.005+01:00

I just learned again how software quality is NOT part of the icesoft developement cycle. With Opera, the radio buttons do not submit changes and therefore, my chart did not change. Of cource, they might focus on the transition to JSF 2.0 - but if even the simple stuff is not working like expected how much "enterprise grade" is left? Additionally, they announce things like horizontal rendering of charts e.g the bar chart... let's take a closer look... hm?

IceFaces - argh§%$"$§

2009-11-07T22:45:00.005+01:00

Another creepy IceFaces story... As I have learned, if you want a tabset, you need to wrap it by a form element. If you need to place a simple form within a tab, you are forced to use the outer form element because it is not valid to nest form elements:

<ice:form>
  <ice:tabset>

    <ice:tab name"tab one">
      <ice:inputText/>
      <ice:commandButton value="submit" type="submit" actionListener="#{bean.al}"/>
    </ice:tab name"tab one">
      ...
  <ice:tabset>
<ice:form>

If you take a look at the form, it only conatins a simple input text field and a submit button. The problem occurs if you add a validator and try to switch between tabs - the fields are validated! This forces you to a) remove the validators b) to write the validation logic again in your BackingBean... => IceFaces messed up again!

IceFaces is a fix

2009-10-23T21:24:00.005+02:00

I need to say it loud "I HATE ICEFACES"... I'am not sure wether to blame IceFaces or JSF, but with IceFaces, the so called Enterprise JSF implementation, I did not save a minute in development time. I spent hours and sometimes days to get things to work. Even simple things do not behave like expected. Yes, there are many workarounds in the forum for various issues... but often they are useless. After a few month with IceFaces, I want to warn everyone thinking about using it - don't! You are much more productive using JQuery-UI/YUI and do it by hand or use DWR or JAXWS. Just one last time: "I HATE ICEFACES!"

IceFaces - pain in my brain PART III

2009-09-23T10:54:00.009+02:00

ICEFaces, ICEFaces, ICEFaces... this is another said story. Here is the use case: I have a tabbed set and need to generate dynamically a couple of forms within those tabs - that's it! Sounds simple. But there are constraints. The tabbed set provided by IceFaces needs to be wrapped by a form element itself. Therefore, it is not possible to have multiple forms within a tab! This does not only sound rediculous, this is rediculous!

Netbeans - the wrong idea

2009-08-30T13:15:00.005+02:00

Netbeans is a great tool and it is equipped with a lot of stuff from different kind of editors to visual editors... it is a great tool - yes, it is. But beginners, trying to learn e.g. JSF and how to use it in a common, IDE-independent way may get the wrong expression. Actually, I used the generated code to get an expression about how things should work myself... but the generated code is not always the best starting point. Therefore I do not recommend to use the visual tools if you are new to a technology like JSF and want to know how actually the technology really works. In the case of JSF, how to use the components is not that difficult... but as soon as you try to couple the M with the V with the C, you are looking for some good code samples.

FrosCon - short review

2009-08-24T16:28:00.002+02:00

This year, I attended not as an "odinary" visitor - I was part of the crew : ) It was interesting to see how such a conference was organized by people with a passion for open source software. The atmosphere was familiar and compared to bigger (comercial) conferences it was a really relaxed atmosphere - less buzzword bashing but code! The talks focused on general free open source software solutions and therefore not specific (commercial) products were propagated by the speakers(!).

For the first time there was a Java (sub-)conference taking place. Maven, Gradle, J2MEPolish, Java7, JBoss, Portlets and some more, to name the topics... 5 stars!

Livetracking with KML Part II

2009-08-21T22:27:00.005+02:00

Here you can see how it looks like to display a GPS-Position in nearly "realtime" on a web page using the google earth plugin. To achieve this, I configured a GPS-GSM-Tracker to send its position every second to the server via a raw TCP/IP socket. On the "other end" the web browser loads the page, the google earth plugin and a KML file. This KML file tells the Google Earth Plugin to update the KML file content every second. According to the update request, the server sends only the delta - the new GPS-Position - back to the Google Earth Plugin.

If you consider buying a GPS-GSM-Tracker, you could consider buying one of the google phones, too. They come equipped with GPS functionality buid in, and there are tons of GPS-Tracker applications available and it is easy to program for it, if you want to build your own GPS-Tracker software.

Netbeans Platform Training Review

2009-08-17T12:28:00.016+02:00

Last weekend I had the chance to attend at a Netbeans Platform (not Netbeans IDE!) 2 day training course. Geertjan, Toni and Josh did a great job and I highly recommend this course to anyone thinking about implementing a Desktop or RIA Application... the course itself was organized by a student driven consulting organisation (aurelius consulting) part of the universitiy in Bonn. Due to the fact that holiday season is still running, the course was not overcrowded and it was possible for the instructors to support everyone during coding sessions. But now the interseting parts - the topics covered:

The Netbeans Plattform - The Netbeans Plattform is the foundation for a lot of software projects and the Netbeans IDE is the best example. But there are others like CRM, MusikPlayer, FotoAlbum, etc. If you are familiar with Eclipse, you can think of the Netbeans Plattform as something like the Eclipse Rich Client Plattform. The biggest benefit you get with the Netbeans Plattform is the provided programming model. It enables you to avoid or get rid of your spaghetti code applications. You are more or less forced to think in modules instead of packages. Packages are nice and handy but with a large codebasis, modules give you another level of abstraction that enable larger teams to split into groups and focus on module developement. If something breaks - it is easier to blame one : )

The Nodes-API - this is a great abstraction API. It is not only usefull to display a file system, it is usefull for displaying any kind of structured data like objectgraphs etc...
The Visual-API - this API is usefull if you try to visualize some relaed data like a UML datagram.
The Lookup-API - this API is somehow similar to the linda system - a global object storage - a big hashmap... it is a convinient way to store and access objects from everywhere within the application.
Matisse - is a Swing-Builder with great layout capabilities.
... and many, many more.

IceFaces - pain in my brain PART II

2009-08-11T15:44:00.007+02:00

Quartz +IceFaces - Again, some pain during developement using IceFaces... this time in conjunction with Quartz; which is a great and widly adopted Task/Job/Trigger Scheduler maintained under the hood of opensymphony. It enables you to execute specific tasks at a given time and interval. But due to the fact that IceFaces uses an old version of commons collections, you need to make shure the version provided with Quartz is picked up. Just remove the verison, bundled with IceFaces. It is a small issue, but another one I do not really want to take care of.

How to save streamed DIVX files - on OSX

2009-08-08T13:49:00.008+02:00

Streaming videos are popular these days and there are a lot of tools out there to grab e.g. flash streams. If you are a OSX user and you have DIVX streams to capture - you do not need extra tools - the files are allready there - in a folder. Just go to your home folder and you will find a folder structure called: Movies / DivX Movies / Temporary Downloaded Files All you have to do is copy it to a "save" place to make shure it will not get deleted. To make the video be picked up by the Videoplayer, you may need to change the file extension to the appropriate file format.

IceFaces - pain in my brain PART I

2009-08-06T10:59:00.006+02:00

According to the marketing guys, IceFaces provides a JSF component libary with fantastic capabilities... and even Sun replaced there component suite Woodstock with IceFaces. And yes, there arre companies using it and yes also Liferay is providing support for it... but after a couple of weeks, using IceFaces, I found out for myself, that I would never ever use it again. Why? The reason is simple, with over 1100 (onethousendonehundred) open issues at Jira, it is likely to run into one or another kind of unpredictable behavior.

Yes, the promised AjaxPush is somehow great, if you understand the mechanism and how to use it. I was impressed, when I used it the first time. But as soon as things are getting more complicated, you will find yourself lost. If you do not want to start fixing components yourself - use something more reliable - maybe ZK or some Flex components ... or try to build some JavaFX or Silverlight components yourself ; )

Livetracking with KML Part I

2009-07-03T10:41:00.015+02:00

As we all realized, geo data based apps has changed the world. A hot topic in this area is real time data visualization. With Yahoos Fireeagle and Googles Latitude services, it is already possible to share the location. This is achieved by e.g. the G1 phone or the Iphone due to the hardware capabilities - the built in GPS (and compass and 3D sensor)...

My first experience related to GPS tracking itself grew with the WLANdscape project, which is a WLAN-Network mapping application. We were able to map the signal strength of our WLAN card to a map by walking around with a laptop and a GPS mouse.

Due to the lack of rich geo exchange formats, we used our own to store this information. Today, we have a couple of formats to exchange geo data. My favorite is KML. Especially with the new version 2.2 it is possible to use the network link feature in conjunction with the update feature.

This means, you are now able to provide a KML with some geo data (and a time stamp) and also the updates if e.g. a car has moved. With this simple scenario, it is possible to build a live tracking application. On the left side, you can see a regatta we measured during a competition you can download and replay the files here.

In general, what you need is a GPS/GSM-Tracker or a phone with a GPS receiver. Your phone needs to update its position e.g. every 1 second or if it has moved e.g. 1 meter and send the location measured by the GPS device to a server. The server needs to update the KML delta by providing the update KML file.

Those, who are interested, are able to use e.g. Google Earth to watch the movement by pointing Google Earth to the main KML file. The main KML file provides the information about the updated KML file too and no further interaction is necessary. Just relax and watch the movement.

2009-07-02T19:02:00.004+02:00

This year will be the first time I'am going to the State of the map conference in Amsterdam. Due to the fact that I had and have to deal with geo data and realtime tracking, the map and all the related topics play a vital role for me. The conferences main focus are OpenStreetMap related topics. But not only from a community point of view, but also from a business cases point of view. There are some companys (beyond the typicall web 2.0 companys) using the OpenStreetMap as there business model foundation like e.g. CloudMade. But also hardware manufactures like ublox (they are building the best GPS receivers currently available) are present. The conference itself will take place in Amsterdam from 10.07-13.07.20009. Further conference related infos can be found here and OpenStreetMap related infos here.

2009-07-02T18:33:00.003+02:00

Froscon, 22.08-23.08.09. In the past, this conference was always a good experience. Not many business suits around, and a lot of enthusiastic people! St. Augustin, the location, is next to Bonn / Cologne. Even if you think about traveling with the airplane, the airport is not far away. This year, Froscon is also the host for a subconference focusing on Java. But again, open source software and its related projects are the main focus of the Froscon conference. You can find the whole program here. CU!

A TOR to the world

2009-06-28T15:26:00.005+02:00

With Mr. Wolfgang Schäuble (Stasi 2.0) and Mrs. Ursula von der Leyen (Zensursula) we have two politions that are responsible for the NG of Überwachung. Therefore I decided to setup a TOR relay for my friends and the public. I'am not going into detail about why I believe our democracy is in danger, but want to forward you to the NGO AKVorrat... they have a lot of background informations for you!

Beginning Java EE6 Platform with Glassfish 3

2009-06-17T09:50:00.004+02:00

This book is really hot stuff. I just received it via US-Mail and I could not resist start reading... A few days after JavaOne 2009 JEE 6 gains a lot of attention. The good thing about the author Antonio Goncalves is his JCA-JEE 6 expertgroup membership. That's why the whole book is packed with insights and I never felt lost. All the changes and the new stuff is covered and explained in detail. Some highlights:

JPA 2.0: JPA is more and more gaining momentum and supported by all major players like Sun, Oracle, IBM, Google - yes, even googles app engine is using on top of their "bigtable" JPA! With the verion 2, it is now possible to define an OrderColumn for persistent ordering, the JPQL is now richer and a new kind of caching is introduced. Also Orphan removal is now possible - somehow similar to cascade for saving an object tree, it is now possible to delete an object tree

EJB Light: With this kind of EJB, it is even simpler to develope the business logic without the need to have the full feature set available. It is only providing a subset of the full EJB 3.1 version. E.g it does not himplement the RemoteInterface anymore. If you know allready EJB, you still can use the more comlex version.

Pruning: This represents a process like declaring an API/method deprecated. Because some APIs are not usefull anymore, they'll be removed in the future (JEE 7).

Summary: It seems like EJBs are back. The wide spread Spring framework is getting bigger and bigger, the JEE framework is getting smaller and smaller. To be honest, I think they are somehow equal today. If you have a full featured application server in place (like Glassfish) you should use JEE 6 and its EJBs. I f you have a WebAppServer only like Tomcat or Jetty, you should rely on Spring...

2009-06-02T22:33:00.003+02:00

After 2 years of using glssfish mostly in conjunction with Liferay, I thought it might be a good idea to read a book about the appserver itself... and yes, the book is a good introduction and it wraps up the fundamentals. If you are new to Java EE 5, the main topics will be discussed and explained in detail. If you are allready familiar with JEE 5, there are some aspects, you may be not aware of - like when to put businesslogic into the database layer (!). This is some how radical, especially if you are a java guy, talking only to java guys... very often you hear the opposit - "Do NOT store business logic into the DB at all!"... nice shot, Yuli Vasilev!

Identity Conference 2009 - Keynotes - Conference

2009-05-09T10:51:00.003+02:00

Nach dem die ganz Großen (Oracle, CA, Novell) ihre Produktpaletten und Warstories erzählt hatten, gab es auch inspirierende Vortäge...

Eva Maler (SUN): Ein vielversprechendes Zukunftsmodell stellt Eva Maler vor. Die Grundidee besteht darin, dem Einzelnen Individuum wieder mehr Selbstbestimmungsrechte einzuräumen. D.h. jeder sollte die Möglichkeit haben bestimmen zu können, welche Daten er einer Webseite oder einem Webdienst zur Verfügung stellt. In diesem Zusammenhang wurde daher von einem Company Relationship Management gesprochen; also der Umkehr des heutigen Customer Relationship Mangements... ein interessanter Ansatz, der auch durch das Projekt Kantara Ausdruck findet. Hier ein kurzes Video dazu:

Michael Gartner (Deutsche Telekom): Nach einem kurzen, historischen Abriss, wurde auf die Rolle der DT als OpenID-Provider eingegangen. Vor allem für Entwickler interessant, dass vorraussichtlich diese Dienste auch über das developer.telekom.de Portal zur Verfügung gestellt wird.

Stina Ehrensvärd (Yubico): Einen sehr flachen USB-Key, der u.a. Einmalpasswörter generieren kann - zu einem Preis von 25$, stellte die Schwedin Stina Ehrensvärd vor! Darüberhinaus unterstützt der Key auch die gängigen Authentifizierungsverfahren wie OpenID, OAuth und SAML. Über eine API, die sich jeder in seine Webanwendung einbinden kann, besteht auch die Möglichkeit für Onlinedienste, Ihren Kunden eine weitere, sichere Methode zur Authentifizierung, zu einem sehr günstigen Preis, zur Verfügung zu stellen.

Identity Conference 2009 - Open SSO Day

2009-05-09T10:07:00.004+02:00

Mit der Unterstützung des OpenSSO Days durch Kuppinger Cole im Rahmen der Identity Conference 2009 in München, hatten auch die Community Mitglieder eine Plattform erhalten, sich über den aktuellen Stand aber auch über die Projektzukunft zu unterhalten.

Ein sehr viel versprechender JSR 196 - "Java Authentication Service Provider" ermöglicht es standardkonform Authentication Services einfach in der web.xml zu definieren. Noch wird dieses Feature leider nur durch den Sun Glassfish Application Server unterstützt.

Mit OpenDS wurde ein LDAP v3 konformes Projekt vorgestellt, dass sich sehr einfach (angeblich in wenigen Sekunden) aufsetzen lässt. OpenSSO selbst nutzt für die Speicherung von Konfigurationen/Policies OpenDS.

Auch interessant war der Vortrag über die GUI der Adminstrationsoberfläche. Hier wurden ganz konkrete Fragen und Wünsche diskutiert. So zum Beispiel ob es sinnvoll ist, Wizards einzuführen um die Konfigurationsaufgaben zu vereinfachen oder ob CLI Tools doch wichtiger sind als die GUI usw.

Identity Conference 2009

2009-04-27T14:51:00.007+02:00

Mit der Identity Conference 2009 wird ein häufig stiefmütterliches Thema behandelt. Zwar ist jedem Entwickler bewusst, dass es wichtig ist, Benutzer-daten uniform zu speichern, häufig sieht die Realität aber anders aus. Besonders durch den Einsatz unterschiedlichster SW-Systeme unterschiedlicher Hersteller, werden implizit auch entsprechend unterschiedliche Identity-Lösungen eingekauft. Wer hier Ordnung schaffen muss, stösst ohne entsprechende Software schnell an die Grenzen. Daher werden spezielle IDentity-Lösungen wie OpenSSO/Sun Access Manager (etc.) immer wichtiger.

Wer also auf der Suche nach dem richtigen Quantum an Fachinformation bzgl. Identity Management ist, sollte diese Veranstaltung nicht verpassen!

2009-04-27T14:42:00.003+02:00

Es ist soweit! Der OpenSSO Tag in München findet nach dem erfolgreichen Auftritt in NYC auch auf dem alten Kontinent statt. Mit den Bestrebungen Suns eine offene Identitylösung zu etablieren zieht auch das Single Sign On in die tägliche Projektarbeit ein.

Das Produkt: Relativ leichtgewichtig lässt es sich sehr einfach als WAR deployen und steht sofort zur Verfügung. Die Konfiguration findet über eine Weboberfläche statt. Aus meiner Sicht sehr lobenswert ist die Integration von WebSpace und Liferay. D.h. eine Anbindung an SSO ist bereits vorgesehen und es existiert auch ein entsprechendes Portlet, dass es dem Anwender erspart, die eigentliche Anwendung zu verlassen um einen entsprechenden Single-Sign-On-Token zu erhalten!

Gerade wer vor dem Problem steht bestehende Anwendungen unter einen Hut zu bekommen, kommt an einer solchen Lösung nicht vorbei.

After the Sun comes Rain again...

2009-04-20T14:48:00.005+02:00

I still do not believe it "Sun taken over by Oracle". This is a real black monday for the OOS community. I really do not trust Oracle. They're definitely going to monetize every piece of software... but maybe it "forces" a lot of developers to switch to e.g. Ruby ; )

Part 1 - JavaFXPortlet vs. JavaFX within a portlet

2009-04-18T17:15:00.008+02:00

In the past months I played with Liferay and WebSpace and it was interesting to learn how portlets are developed and what kind of limitations they have. Additionally, JavaFX grows in popularity and I thought of a JavaFX Portlet as a big step in frontend developement. Currently, there are a lot of Frameworks you can use for your portlet and the frontend developement (DWR, JQuery, GWT, MooTools ...). But really often it does not feel "correct"...

Because JavaFX is pretty much the same as an applet in terms of integration, I took an JavaFX app example and wrapped it with portlet code. Now, you can see JavaFX within a Portlet! It's still not that fast compared to flash or silverlight, but it is a good first start.

The next goal is the developement of a real JavaFX Portlet. Running JavaFX within a portlet is fine, but we need to take care of the MAXIMIZE, MINIMIZE, HELP, CONFIGURE (...) buttons as well. (I hope I can show you a real JavaFX portlet instead of only a portlet that wrapps a JavaFx app in my next blog entry)

The war file can be downloaded too. The portlet should run within the latest Liferay/WebSpace builds - in my case, I used the great glassfish bundle.

Hinter jeder Wolke steckt auch eine Sonne

2009-03-21T17:07:00.003+01:00

Mit der angekündigten Cloudinitiative kann Sun AWS richtig Druck machen. Vor allem da es ja ein ganzes Portfolio an Anwendungen gibt, die es ermöglichen sollen nicht nur Clouddienste zu nutzen (API) sondern z.B. auch direkt in eine Cloud zu deployen; bzw. sich eine virtuelle Infrastruktur zusammen zu klicken (Ich brauche einen Loadbalancer, 2 Apaches, einen Switch ... usw.)! Ob das auch alles funktioniert wird sich zeigen. Gerade mit den JEE-Apps könnte es bzgl. der Portabilität doch einigen Ärger geben, wenn man wie so oft, containerspezifische Konfigurationen hat - dann viel Spaß.

AWS, Azure und jetzt Suns Cloud ... das wird ein spannendes Battle! Ähnlich wie zwischen Adobe Air, Silverlight und JavaFX ... hoffen wir, dass Sun wieder auf die Beine kommt und nicht auch hier wieder abgehängt wird.

WebSpace aka WebSynergy - das bessere Liferay?

2009-02-20T17:11:00.006+01:00

Sun ist ja mittlerweile bei Liferay mit an Board und es scheint einen regen Code austausch zu geben. Um so interessanter ist die Tatsache, dass Sun Liferay als Basis für die eigene Portalsoftware einsetzt. Betrachtet man WebSpace bzw. WebSynergy wie Sun seine Portalsoftware jetzt nennt genauer, stellt man fest, dass im wesentlichen KEIN Unterschied zur aktuellsten Liferay-Distribution besteht. Das einzige was auffällt ist der Applikationserver. Liferay setzt hier auf den schlankeren Tomcat, während Sun auf den etwas mächtigeren Glassfish v2 setzt. Ansonsten hat Sun einfach nur ein rundes Paket geschnürt... aber nichts, was man nicht auch mit der regulären Liferay-Version zusammengebastelt bekommt... Es wird sich zeigen ob sich Sun wirklich von Liferay absetzen kann und mit irgendwelchen Extra-Features punktet. Vielleicht ja mit einer guten Dokumentation : )

Mehr zu WebSpace: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/theaquarium

Liferay Training - verdammt gut!

2009-02-20T17:00:00.003+01:00

Nachdem ich mich in den letzten Monaten intesiv mit Liferay auseinadergesetzt habe, konnte ich vor kurzem an dem offiziellen Entwickler-Training teilnehmen. Einer der Entwickler, nämlich Scott Lee hat nicht nur 'Folien aufgelegt' sondern mit etwa 25 Teilnehmern einen großen Teil des Liferayuniversums beleuchtet und auch systematisch programmiert - Hands-on!

Interessant dabei ist, dass keine 'fancy IDEs' zum Einsatz kamen und kommen sondern sehr vieles über simple ANT-Tasks gesteuert wird. So gibt es z.B. unter Netbeans 6.5 ein PortalPlugin, dass auch mittels eines ServiceBuilder-Wizards es dem Entwickler ermöglicht eigene Service (im Sinne von Entitäten / Informationen die in einer DB gespeichert werden) umzusetzen.

(Fazit: Empfehlenswert)

JavaFX + JSF + Portlets = ?

2008-08-14T11:24:00.001+02:00

Mit JavaFx kommt mal wieder ein bisschen frischer Wind in die WebAnwendungsentwicklung mit Java. Die große Frage ist, ob früher oder später alle JSF-Komponenten auf JavaFX anstelle auf Ajax setzen werden. Langfristig sicherlich ein logischer Schritt. Geht man davon aus, wird auch die zukünftige Portlet-Entwicklung davon beeinflusst werden. Mehr Interaktivität führt aber auch wieder zu mehr Komplexität... ein kurze Einführung zu JavaFX gibt es hier (Farben, Formen, Animationen, Zeit):

Interactive IPTV Award 2008

2008-07-16T23:46:00.001+02:00

Geschichte wird hier leider keine geschrieben. Eher wird ein weiteres, trauriges Kapitel fortgeführt. Es wurde sich auf den kleinsten gemeinsamen Nenner verständigt und im wesentlichen Altbackenes in neuem Gewand präsentiert. Wer sich die Finalisten und die leider nur spärlich bechriebenen Konzepte anschaut wird nicht vor Begeisterung in die Hände klatschen ... Mit dem Angebot der Telekom, auf der IFA ein weiteres mal auf Entwickler zuzugehen wird sich zeigen, ob noch ein Entwickler die Telekom und vor allem das tote Entwicklerportal (developer.telekom.de) ernst nimmt. Bislang stimmen die meisten Entwickler aber eher in ein Klagelied ein. Wer sich in einschlägigen Foren umhört wird schnell die Enttäuschung spüren, die sich in der Entwicklergemeinde breit macht. Leider versäumt es die Telekom auch den offenen und ehrlichen Dialog zu suchen. Statt dessen wird versucht auf Diskussionen einfluss zu nehmen und alles marketingtauglich und weichgespült in ein besseres Licht zu stellen. Fazit: Chance(n) vertan, Vertrauen verspielt.

Frosca - die Namenssuche hat ein Ende : )

2008-07-06T23:01:00.001+02:00

"Dank Eurer regen Beteiligung sah sich unser Organisationsteam vor der schweren Aufgabe, unter zahlreichen originellen, witzigen und sympathischen Vorschlägen den zukünftigen Namen für unser blaues Maskottchen zu wählen. Zuletzt standen die sehr ähnlichen Vorschläge "Froscar" und "Frosca" zur Wahl. Da eine Abstimmung keine Mehrheit brachte, fiel die Entscheidung schließlich durch Los auf den Namen "Frosca". Wir gratulieren Steffen Schuler, der diesen Namen vorgeschlagen hat, zum Gewinn eines FrOSCon-Shirts und des freien Eintritts zur diesjährigen FrOSCon. Wir möchten uns bei allen Einsendern für die Mithilfe bei der Namenssuche bedanken. Have Fun Frosca!"

Neben Frosca gab es noch die Vorschläge Frosty und Vertebra (von: vertebratus) ...

Computer Forensic mit dem Mac

2008-07-05T16:35:00.001+02:00

Apple bietet nicht nur ein echtes *nix Betriebssystem sondern auch eine gute Plattform für Computer Forensik. Eine sehr gute Einführung hierzu gibt es hier. Hier diskutieren einige Profis über die Mac Plattform als Basis für Ihre Arbeit.

Java Forum Stuttgart 2008

2008-07-04T20:21:00.001+02:00

Auch dieses Jahr gab es wieder eine gut organisierte und mit 1200 Besuchern ausgebuchte Veranstaltung. Am besten gefiel der Vortrag von Andy Bosch zum Thema "JSF und Portlets". Hier merkte man sofort, dass jemand Ahnung hat (Leider wird sein Buch zu diesem Thema wohl doch erst im Herbst und nicht schon im Sommer erscheinen). Die Folien zu den Vorträgen findet man hier.

2008-03-20T18:16:00.004+01:00

Genial! Nach langem wünschen habe ich soeben erfahren, dass unter dem Dach der Telekom Laboratories ein Entwicklerportal eingerichtet wurde. Ich habe mich schon länger gefragt, warum man z.B. auf die WebServices von BT oder Vodafons Betavine zugreifen muss, um so simple Dinge wie SMS/MMS zu versenden... unter der Subdomäne developer.telekom.de findet man jetzt wie bei allen Großen der Branche dieses Portal. Noch sind die Angebote beschränkt, aber wenn alles so weiter läuft, haben wir vielleicht in naher Zukunft so tolle WebServices wie EC2, S3, und Payment wie Amazon sie anbietet (http://aws.amazon.com) aus deutschen Landen :)

Zero configuration Networking

2008-03-17T12:22:00.002+01:00

In diesem englischsprachigen Buch wird ausführlich beschrieben, wie sich mit bestehenden Technologien, standardkonforme IP basierte Netzwerke automatisch konfigurieren lassen.

Im WWW gab es zu diesem Thema lange Zeit nur Fragmente, die es den Entwicklern erschwerten von dieser Technik gebrauch zu machen.

Technologisch bilden Link-Local Addressing, Multicast DNS, and DNS Service Discovery die Basis. Daher macht ein Großteil des Buches diese Themen aus. Die Implementierungsbeispiele sind hilfreich, beziehen sich aber auf meist auf die Implementierung durch Apple (=>ObjectiveC).

Mittlerweile hat sich einiges getan und so geht das Buch nicht auf Avahi, eine Opensource Implementierung, ein. Ebenfalls würde man sich einen Vergleich zwischen konkurrierende Ansätzen mit z.B. APIPA, der zwar nicht RFC konformen aber verbreiteten Microsoft Problemlösung, wünschen. Sehr Interessant wäre auch eine Betrachtung von UPNP (Universal Plug and Play) in diesem Zusammenhang, das UPNP auch auf Zeroconf zurckgreifen kann.

Anwendungsbeispiel: Als bekannteste Anwendung die Zeroconf (Apple nennt sie Bonjour) einsetzt, muss iTunes aufgeführt werden. Befinden sich in einem LAN meherer Rechner, die iTunes und Music-Sharing aktiviert haben, so finden sich diese "automatisch" Dank zeroconf und ermöglichen den Zugriff auf die Musik/Podcast/Videodateien des anderen...

Fazit: An den technologischen Grundlagen hat sich nichts geändert, weshalb dieses Buch einen guten Einstieg bietet, grundsätzlich ist aber eine aktualisierte Neuauflage überfällig.

Google Maps Applications with Rails and Ajax

2008-03-13T10:07:00.005+01:00

Mit diesem englischsprachigem Buch wird der Leser Schritt für Schritt an die Entwicklung auch komplexer Mashups am Beispiel von Google Maps herangeführt. Selbst wenn noch keine Ruby on Rails Kenntnisse vorliegen, ist man in der Lage die Beispiele nachzuvollziehen und den von Kapitel zu Kapitel komplexer werdenden Codebeispiele zu folgen.

Grundsätzlich ist es aber kein Fehler ein Buch wie Beginngin Ruby oder Beginning Ruby on Rails zuerst zu lesen...

(Sehr gefreut habe ich mich über die Tatsache, dass Sam Aaroon CoAuthor ist, den ich 2007 auf der JAOO in Dänemark kennen gelernt habe - ein echter Rubyfreak!)

Glassfish Applicationserver

2008-03-12T14:39:00.006+01:00

Mit Glassfish 2 UR1 steht ein genialer Applicationserver zur Verfügung. In Verbindung mit Netbeans klappt auch das "Remotedeployment" problemlos. die Administrationsoberfläche gefällt auch und ist mir lieber als die des JBoss.

Auch die Verwaltung der Resourcen gefällt und erleichtert einem das Leben. Das Anlegen neuer Connectionpools o.ä. ist nur ein paar Klicks entfernt - fertig. Gestandenen J2EE-Entwicklern wird es nicht schwer fallen einen JBoss hintersich zu lassen.

Meine ersten Versuche mit Ruby/JRuby Anwendungen und diese in Glassfish zu deployen klappten ebenfalls auf Anhieb. Vieleicht sehen wir in Zukunft ja immer mehr Mongrel2Glassfish Switcher : )

Linux Server mit Debian

2008-03-12T14:14:00.005+01:00

Dieses Buch richtet sich an Administrator oder solche die es werden wollen. Wer mehr als Klickibunti Suse möchte kann sich unter Zuhilfenahme dieses Buches einen kompletten Server einrichten.

Neben den Linuxgrundlagen wie Benutzerverwaltung, Rechte, Filesystem, Bash, werden auch die eigentlichen Themen wie Installation, HDManagement, Backupstrategie, Datenbank (MySQL), Email(Postfix), Web (Apache2.x), Firewall (iptables) sehr, sehr gut beschrieben. Desweiteren finden auch Themen wie die Härtung, Einbruchserkennung und Desaster Recovery ihren Platz im letzten Kapitel.
Ein sehr empfehlenswertes Buch für alle angehenden Sysadmins.

Mastering JXTA

2008-03-12T14:02:00.003+01:00

Mastering JXTA gibt einen guten Einblick in die grundlegenden P2P-Technologieansätze. Leider ist es sehr Mühsam einen schnellen Einstieg in die Materie zu finden. Dies liegt nicht allerdings nicht an dem Buch sondern den Technologiestack. Der Author Joseph D. Gradecki geht sehr ausführlich auf die JXTA Specifikation ein. Dies kann einen dazu verleiten, das Buch wieder zur Seite zu legen. Leider ist es mittlerweile nicht mehr auf dem aktuellen Stand der Implementierung und es wird daher auch nicht auf die existierenden Abstraktionslayer, die zur Vereinfachung der JXTA basierten Anwendungsentwicklung hinzugekommen sind eingegangen. Definitiv fehlt auch der Bezug zum Enterprisecomputing. Hier gibt es bereits sehr gute Clusterlösungen, die einfach in bestehende J2EE-Infrastrukturen integriebar sind.

JXME, mein Favorit wird in diesem Buch mit keinem Wort erwähnt. Dies ist deshalb schade, da die vorliegende Implementierung mittlerweile keine sogenannten ProxyPeers benötigt.

Einsteiger sollten um dieses Buch einen Bogen machen und sich das JXTA Tutorial ansehen.

IPTV Entwicklertreff auf der Cebit 2008

2008-03-12T13:43:00.006+01:00

Es ist soweit, die Telekom hat die Rahmenbedingungen konkretisiert und das Köpfezusammenstecken beginnt...

...auf der Cebit wurde man freundlich in Empfang genommen und zunächst in den Loungebereich geführt. Hier gab es eine Vorführung des Entertainangebots, unter dem IPTV durch die Telekom vermaktet wird. In der Pause wurden wir dann offiziell in Empfang genommen und mit einem leckeren Buffet begrüßt.

Der eigentlich interessante Teil, wurde dann im offenen Gespräch gesucht. Hier traf ich nicht nur auf kompetente, sondern auch wirklich interessierte Telekommitarbeiter, denen dieser Wettbewerb wirklich am Herzen liegt. So konnte man einiges über das ADK, die Infrastruktur und natürlich die Grenzen des technisch umsetzbaren wie "strict XHTML/kein Flash und Silverlight/WinCE 5/SingleSignOn (LibertyAlliance) etc." erfahren.

Der Weg nach Hannover hat sich daher gelohnt!

Ruby Fools

2008-03-12T13:20:00.003+01:00

Klasse statt Masse! "Leider" werde ich wohl dieses Jahr auf der re:publica in Berlin sein und daher nicht den Sprung zur Erstauflage der Ruby Fools sein. Wenn das Programm (und danach sieht es aus) genauso hervorragend ist wie auf der JAOO Konferenz der vergangenen Jahre, dann hat man hier richtig Spaß. David Heinemeier Hansson, der bereits als Student auf der JAOO gearbeitet hat, bleibt Trifork, dem Veranstalter wohl nicht ohne Grund treu (wie ich auch). Wer das ganze nochmals in abgespeckter Version erleben möchte kann dies auch vom 3-4.April in Oslo tun.

FrOSCon 2008

2008-03-12T13:00:00.000+01:00

Die FrOSConn ist eine kleine, feine Konferenz, die ich zum ersten mal 2006 besuchen konnte. Gegenüber den großen Veranstaltungen läuft hier vieles familiärer ab, und nach den Vorträgen werden auch fleissig Fragen gestellt, die auch wirklich im Dialog beantwortet werden (wenn möglich). Bei einem Eintrittspreisen von 5,00 € (ja 5!, keine 50 und auch keine 500) kommt man vieleicht auf den Gedanken, dass es nichts "Richtiges" sein kann - zu billig... aber weit gefehlt! FrOSCon rockt! Für alle die aus NRW eine Pflichtkonferenz!

QCon London 2008

2008-03-12T11:32:00.000+01:00

Mit der QCon steht wieder eine professionelle Konferenz im Zeichen von Java auf der Tagesordnung. Die Firma hinter QCon (Trifork) ist die geiche wie hinter der schon fast legendären JAOO Konferenz in Dänemark. Hier trifft man nicht nur auf alte Hasen sondern auch auf Newbies der Szene. Da mir einige aus dem Orgateam bekannt sind, kannman auch für diese Konferenz von einer erstklassigen Organisation/Programm ausgehen.

re:publica 2008

2008-03-12T11:21:00.001+01:00

Die re:publica ist mal wieder eine Veranstaltung für den kleinen Mann. Hier kann man nicht nur Informationen konsumieren sondern auch selbst mitmachen. Hoffen wir auf reichlich Zuspruch! Auf nach Berlin!

Netbeans 6.1

2008-02-16T10:42:00.003+01:00

Nach langem Warten wird alles gut. Eigentlich bringt Netbeans alles mit was man so braucht. Neben der guten JPA Integration und dem Arbeiten mit WebServices werden eigentlich alle Technologien die Sunauch nur angehend mit Java in Verbindung bringt über Plugins unterstützt. Empfehlenswert!