Gridshore software engineering weblog - News

Last entry ...

nospam@example.com (Jettro Coenradie) — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 20:58:56 +0100

Welcome to the last entry of this blog. No I am not quitting, I am just moving. I just installed a new blog software framework. I was starting to dislike the way to interact and I wanted something that contained more out of the box. I am in the middle of moving to wordpress software. There is a very good reason to do this. I had found a great tool on the mac called MarsEdit. And again this could not be used with serendipity. I hope I did make a good choice. Since there is a lot of information in the old blog, I did not take this blog offline. It will stay to exist, but I will not make changes there anymore.

I hope to see you at the new version of the blog (check the page at http://www.gridshore.nl). You can attach you feedreader to the following url: feed://www.gridshore.nl/feed/

Spring Experience 2007

nospam@example.com (Jettro Coenradie) — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 21:20:01 +0100

Spring Experience 2008

It feels like a year ago, actually it was last year, that I went to Miami, Florida, USA together with two colleques. There we were able to follow a lot of presentations about the springframework. These presentations were given by the contributors of all different springframework modules. For us three it was a three day learning experience. In this article I want to give you an impression of these days.

I started of my presentations with a presentation about Full Stack Web Frameworks. What is a Full Stack Web Framework? To be honest, I did not really care about that question, but it was a nice presentation about the current status of Spring web projects and the future. The separation between Spring webmvc and Spring webflow is going to disappear. It is going to be one fully integrated web project. I think this is a good think, it will became easier to use webflow when you need it and not make the choice to do webmvc or webflow. Some important things in the presentation were:
- Using REST like urls for web resources.
- Support rendering of different views (xml, html, json) by state of the request (REST as well)
- Convention over configuration resulting in easier spring config files (or annotations)

The next presentation was about the new features in Springframework 2.0/2.5 by Jürgen Höller. There are three big groups of changes:
Platforms : There is now support for Java 6 and Java EE 5, better support for JCA and JPA. The most important platform improvement is out of the box support for OSGi modules. Every springframework module is now an OSGi module. This does result in some name changes, so beware when upgrading. Another thing I like a lot is that there is finally officially support for spingframework on websphere. So finally you can do threading and transactions on websphere with support from IBM. The catch? You need websphere 6.0.2.19+ or 6.1.9+.
Annotation Configuration : more and more xml type of configurations can now be replaced by annotation driven configuration. These annotations can be market standard annotations like @PersistenceUnit or @TransactionAttribute or special spring framework annotations like @Controller and @Autowired. The Test framework is also completely annotation driven. You can switch between junit 3.8, 4.x and TestNG without really making code changes.
AspectJ support : There is still a lot of proxy based aspects, there is however a new kid on the block. It is called load time weaving. The good part, you can use aspectJ without a change to the jdk your server is running on. There are some buts, have a look at the reference documentation to find out the specifics.

After this tough Jürgen presentation I had a presentation about Ajax integration guide for 2008. Nice but not a lot of new things. I did learn about an ajax framework called jQuery. A very nice and lightweight ajax framework. I will an article about jQuery in the future. I did use it for a demo application, more on that later. You can also check the web page of course. Another presentation about ajax was actually about JSF or Java Server Faces. If you like the idea of Java Server Faces, then this framework is a must see. The framework is called icefaces and there is a very good integration between icefaces and springframework. Its all looking very sharp and there is a nice petshop implementation with icefaces available.

Back to more springframework, well actually it can become more springframework. The next presentation was about Useful Spring Extensions. This presentation is about the spring-modules project, sorry it is renamed to spring extensions. This project has some extensions to the springframework that sometimes become part of the springframework. It has a lot of different modules. There are three modules I want to bring to attention right now:
Caching - Should be as non intrusive as possible, do not think about caching when creating your business logic. The caching solution as provided by spring extensions is an abstraction of multiple caching solutions. So it is not a caching provider, it integrates with EHCache, JBoss cache, JCS, Gigasoaces and OCache.
DB40 - This is an object database that makes extensive use of the data layer as defined by the springframework. So very good integration with spring. There is a Template and a support class available just like for jdbc, jpa, jms, spring-batch, etc. A very nice way to start experimenting with an object database.
Validation - Nice integration with validation frameworks like: Commons validator, Valang and Bean Validation. The bean validation is now enhanced with some nice annotations to specify which beans to validate and with what rules.

Another presentation is about Grails for spring developers, I am not going to talk about this very long. If you are interested in stuff like ruby on rails, check this out. Without any prior knowledge Allard, Roel and me were able to create a complete application in a few minutes while waiting for the plane. Maybe I will write something about this as well, but the available documentation is already pretty good.

In the past I have done a lot with acegi security, now called Spring-security. Therefore I was curious to find out about the direction of the 2.0 release. So I went to Whats new in Spring Security 2.0. It was a nice presentation. The morale can be described in one sentence. More convention, less configuration (if you want). The amount of necessary configuration lines decreased from around 120 to around 20. Not bad is it? Due to the name change all the package names have changed as well. There is the possibility (for backwards compatibillity) to keep using your old configuration, you do need to do a find replace on package names.

Another presentation I attended is RESTful web services. One thing I can tell, this is going to be big according to the springframework people.

The last presentation I would like to mention is the Spring Dynamic Modules. Some of you will think, what no OSGi? Well, they had to change the name of spring-osgi into Spring Dynamic Modules for OSGi(tm) Service Platforms. To be honest, this was the main reason why Allard and me wanted to go to miami. Not the nice weather, not the everglades, not the florida keys. We wanted to learn about the next release of spring dynamic modules. Along the way we got Roel in there as well. Why? Well, OSGi is all about SOA. Yes, so there is a very nice bridge between cool custom development and commercial architectures. When talking about OSGi, you are talking about services. These services come with a certain version, dependencies and visibility. Using a light weight BPM framework (available using the Spring-extension project I mentioned) you can create a very light weight Service Oriented Architecture using components instead of web services. The fact that each component in itself CAN be a web service is not important anymore. This is all very hot and cool technology. Hope to be blogging about this in the future as well.

Concluding, it was a great event, very good talks, good atmosphere. Hope to be there again next year.

New blog writer

nospam@example.com (Jettro Coenradie) — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 09:08:57 +0200

Today I agreed with Allard buijze (Some of you allready know him due to our osgisamples initiative) that he will also write down his knowledge in this blog. So welcome Allard and I hope we will find a lot of interesting posts from you in this blog.

greetz Jettro

Where have I been

nospam@example.com (Jettro Coenradie) — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 23:18:22 +0200

Hai All,
just a short non technical message. It is quiet around this blog. Not that nothing is happening, but it is temporarily happening somewhere else. Together with a colleague of mine I am working on knowledge and samples around OSGi. We are creating a nice sample that proves we can create web service versioning within one application. So we deploy (at runtime) multiple versions of the same component (or bundle) in a way we can set multiple versions of the same web service live. Sounds interesting? Go to our website http://www.osgisamples.com.

see you next time

Profict Java Summer Camp

nospam@example.com (Jettro Coenradie) — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 07:13:22 +0200

Yesterday I attended the Profict Java Summer Camp. And what a camp it was. The first surprise was the location, what a nice environment to do your work. In introduction of profict, "we are hiring". Then the real camp started. 4 hours head on with Greg Murray. Greg is working for more then 10 years with java, mostly for sun. The last years he has been busy with AJAX. He gave a very enthousiastic talk about a ajax and some frameworks. Just to give you some pointers:
Dojo framework, jMaki frameowork, ajax blueprints, netbeans.
He showed a lot of examples, a few I liked very much.
http://www.javaserver.org/jmaki/
https://blueprints.dev.java.net/ajax.html
http://www.isoma.net/games/goggles.html (Oops not ajax)
In Brief, a very nice presentation with a lot of information. It could have been a little bit shorter. Some nice pointers to start new research into java

The next presentation was by Bram Smeets of interface21. We allready know him, read one of the other posts about dwr on my blog. He gave a very good introduction to the powers of dwr and what it can do if you combine it with spring. I guess I allready knew, still, it was interesting to see and hear Bram talk about it and put some stuff into perspective. I am curious about the next step of dwr and the use of spring 2 stuff within DWR.

After the presentations there was a nice barbeque, had some good conversations with Greg, Bram and others. It was a very nice camp, thank you profict.

Google code

nospam@example.com (Jettro Coenradie) — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 23:23:16 +0200

Last week I started experimenting with google code. What a simple thing it is. Nice to have a svn repository and have some very small project toolset as well. There is an issue list, you can add developers, have some mailings. No to much, but it is working. From now on you can find my sample code in this location:
http://code.google.com/p/gridshore/
Have a look, and if you find issues, please report them via the tool.

Doing development with Eclipse

nospam@example.com (Jettro Coenradie) — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 21:03:49 +0200

By accident I came on this page:
http://www.eclipse.org/callisto/

I was supprised I never heard of it before, still it seems to be very interesting if you are developing with eclipse. This is a project that is going to release about 10 large projects of eclipse at the same time. So no dependencies on old versions of other projects. Since I am using eclipse WTP and want to do more with performance testing, this sounds very interesting to me. Now I am using wtp 1.0 and I would like to upgrade. THis should be very easy now. I have to wait about 2 days, then I can have a look at maven integration. I am afraid this is going to be the hardest part I think.

Stay tuned

Springone was nice

nospam@example.com (Jettro Coenradie) — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 07:12:16 +0200

Last week I have been to the springone conference in antwerp (belgium). It was a nice conference with a lot of very good presentations. I heard a lot about domain driven design, aspects and webservices. Not sure what I liked most. The coming weeks I am going to read a lot about aspects. I ordered some books and started using the aspectj library and eclipse ide to check the possibilities. Very nice.

I am also looking into the webservice stuff that spring is providing. After the aspects I want to have a look ar spring webservices project. There should be a release somewhere in august. Curious to see if it can help us on the project I am on at the moment.

A lot of stuff to learn and write about. Be patient, there are some interesting articles coming.

- Eclipse aspectJ and spring opportunities
- Spring security with acegi update including acegi access control lists
- Spring webflow quick intro
- Spring webservices

Is Gridshore addressing James Dobson statements?

nospam@example.com (Freddie van Rijswijk) — Sat, 19 Nov 2005 18:09:36 +0100

Lots of conventionally-managed software projects do not include reliable execution by deadline, or are on budget, or to all features of the specification; it's a rare `managed' project that meets even one of these goals, let alone all three. Those projects do not appear to be market conform when it comes to cost, and those projects misses most of the time the ability to adapt to changes in technology and economic context during the project lifetime, either; the open-source community has proven far more effective on that score.

I was wondering if James Dobson statements could be backed up with our Gridshore thinking which is based upon the Open-Source community process and it can in my opinion.

Lets sharpen the saw by reacting on this post.

Continue reading "Is Gridshore addressing James Dobson statements?"

JavaPolis 2005

nospam@example.com (Freddie van Rijswijk) — Sat, 19 Nov 2005 17:21:30 +0100

JavaPolis 2005 will take place on December 12th untill the 16th 2005 in Antwerp, venue MetroPolis.

I will attend with 10 of my Java group. This Blog entry can be used to comment on the JavaPolis.

JFall 2005

nospam@example.com (Freddie van Rijswijk) — Sat, 19 Nov 2005 17:05:43 +0100

The Dutch Java User Group has organised a succesfull JFall meeting.

I have attended this event with 20 people of my Java Group. And this blog will contain some of their observations.

This is the group attending the conference.

Who is Freddie van Rijswijk

nospam@example.com (Freddie van Rijswijk) — Sat, 19 Nov 2005 16:22:27 +0100

Freddie van Rijswijk is manager Custom Software Development (J2EE & Web). His main interest is improving people performance and to make their and his life better by looking for ways to be better prepared for the job (education, coaching) and to avoid unnessary traveling. He's doing this by encourage Continuous Improvement by coaching and education and by applying agile and lean programming principles. The Open-Source Community Model of working his it's main inspiration.

Continue reading "Who is Freddie van Rijswijk"

And now there is Google

nospam@example.com (Jettro Coenradie) — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 13:15:30 +0100

There are people that name their kids Google, I just use there products. This time I have included the google search and adds to my page. There are a number of reasons why I actually have done it:

To see how it works.

Try to earn some money

To see which links are presented to you, probably some interesting stuf.

If it becomes to annoying I will think about removing it, but the search is handy and the links don't take to much space. And if there is something interesting why not click it and in the process give me a dime or so.

In the process of doing this I installed the latest release of serendipity. I am now at version 0.9. I have been using it now for about a week and I feel very good about it. So if you do need your own blogging software and want to use an of the shelf opensource product consider this one. Very easy to setup with mysql and php.

greetings Jettro

New blog

nospam@example.com (Jettro Coenradie) — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 00:05:08 +0200

Hi all,
I have just taken a new blog into production. I was using bblog, but that just did not do the trick for me. Now I am using serendipity. It has a much better admin part, better plugin integration and must of all better spam protection, oke at least it looks like better spam protection. Try out the comments and trackback sections.

Most of all, a good start for a new blog. Hope you like it. I will give a few new articles in the coming days. Among them an improved version of the Spring rss view class, a description of an improved tag library for the acegi security framework. Keep on reading my blog

If you subscribed to my rss, you probably need to redo it. The fun part is, you can now subscribe to different categories as well. See the left bar.

greetings Jettro Coenradie

NLJug, presentation about spring and acegi

nospam@example.com (Jettro Coenradie) — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 20:53:00 +0200

12 October 2005 I am going to talk about Spring and security on the nljug. Of course I am using acegi, but I am going to put it in a wider perspective. I am working on the presentation as well as on a demo that I will give during the presentation. After I have given the presentation I will post a summary here as well. I also opened a project at Javaforge. Here I have stalled the sources I am going to use for the demo. Don't tell anyone, or else everyone knows what i am going to talk about. In a while I will produce some installation guide.