The new year has started, with it comes one of the last opportunities to look back at 2010. So what happened, what did I try out, what did I like and what didn’t I like. I also want to have a short look at what you liked, based on the number of visitors.

This post will nog contain new technical stuff, only old stuff 🙂

Statistics

On average I get 500 visitors each day. Some of the posts got a lot of attention and reached 1000 visits a day. The posts with the highest amount of visits are old ones. A lot of them are coming from my old blog and are about spring web services. The biggest link of 2010 is a blog from June 2009 about Roo : Why Spring Roo is not my thing. I think that is pretty funny but also sad. Of course I would like my new blog items to be on top. The first post in the list is from June 2010 and is about jmx and spring Using JMX within a spring application. The last one I want to mention is a blog item from november 2011. This post is somewhere around number 25 in 2010. Which is nice if you take into account that it just had less than 2 months to reach this position. The post is about the spring-social project: Connecting to Linkedin using spring-social

Where did all these people come from? Well most of them came through Google, a lot came through DZone and quite a few came through multiple project websites of spring-source [mostly spring-flex and spring-integration].

Most people use Firefox, and Google Chrome is rising. Internet Explorer is still twice as big than safari on my blog. But Firefox is 4 times the size of internet explorer.

Top Countries are Unites States and India followed by Germany and United Kingdom.

Enough statistics, let us move on to the content. What did I write about?

What did I write about

Januari

In Januari I wrote two blog posts about grails. The results can be found in the MyScheduling sample over at Github. At my employers blog I wrote a piece about Logging to the syslog from a java application.

Februari

In Februari I wrote more on flex. I discovered the Parsley library and I wrote a sample for the Axon framework. The blog post I wrote is Creating a sample for axon using flex and parsley. The sample is part of the axon distribution. Another blogpost was about creating an rss feed with spring 3 and the Rome library. This post was coming from the work I did for a customer.

April

In march nothing really happened. In april I wrote about using groovy and I wrote a sample that combined Axon and Grails. This sample is still maintained and is a nice example of what you can do with groovy and axon. Three posts of April from my hand were axon and grails related. You can find the sample over at Github.

The reason for the quiet month of March was a very busy project. We went live in April, I wrote about it on the JTeam blog.

June

For the project I was working on I needed monitoring. I decided to use groovy for its flexibility and the integration with spring jmx for easy remote access and exposing beans through jmx. I wrote two posts, Using JMX within a spring application was a post with some screenshots and a lot of code.

July/August

These are traditionally the months that Ben gives us a few blog posts. Especially his post Yes! REST really is not the same as HTTP!! was received very well.

I wrote a blog post on JTeam blog. Again about jmx and groovy. This time I wrote about Monitoring Hippo Connection Pool using jmx and groovy. Some ideas of this blogpost were used in the actual implementation of hippo repository connector.

September

This was the month for new things. Two blog posts about MongoDB. Together with Allard I created the EventStore implementation for Axon based on MongoDB. Sample project is available on Github:https://github.com/jettro/Axon-trader. The other blog post was about gradle. I am trying to find better build tools than maven.

October

The month of the JAOO or GOTO conference. No blog items on gridshore. But one post about Git that was read very often and had a lot of dzone votes. Git Tips That I Learned From The Master. Had a lot of inspiration during the conference and some good drinks as well.

November

November was a very succesful spring month. I wrote two blog posts about two new spring projects. Spring-social and Spring-mobile. Both posts were received very well. I got some very positive feedback, especially by Keith Donald. He mentioned that parts of my blog post were an inspiration for new functionality in the M2 release of spring-mobile. He also wrote a very nice blog post about using Git and he used the patch I could have created as a red line for his post. Fun to read. Code for the samples is again available on Github: https://github.com/jettro/GridshoreSamples

Other things I did

I reviewed a book about Apache Felix (more on this later). I gave a presentation at the Hippo Gettogether that is available online. Of course I gave some presentations at JTeam tech evenings. I also read a lot of books, the book that made an impact on how I look at presentations: Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds.

The last thing I want to mention in this chapter is that I bought myself some toys. Of course the iPad, but now I am also owner of Lego Mindstorms. I even did some java programming on the robot. More on that later this year.

Highlights

So a well spend year with blog posts about Axon, Grails, Groovy, Flex, JMX, Spring, Git, MongoDB, logging. I am sure 2011 will be as inspiring as 2010. To all of you, have a very good year and hope you will come back to read some of my posts.

Happy New Year, Jettro

Recap of the year 2010
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