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Red Sox vs. Rangers

I'm not a fan of sports that require balls, but I had a great time at the Red Sox game Tuesday night. It was my first major league game and a doozy with an apparent rout, rain but no delay, a nail biter and finally victory. Here are a couple of snaps from my iPhone. All thanks to my buddy and co-worker with the season tickets (and a serious case of Red Soxoholism) Bobby Bissett. Thanks Bobby!

Green Monstah Ortiz at bat

re: How the Shindig REST API works

Here's a diagram I worked up over the weekend to explain Shindig REST API internals to my team mates. See the Project SocialSite blog for the full story.

diagram of key classes and interfaces of Apache Shinding REST API

Boston this week

red sox logo

I'll be traveling up to the Boston area this week and specifically Burlington, MA to meet with my Project SocialSite team mates, my boss, his boss and who knows who else -- working on a such a distributed team, sometimes I don't know who works where.

I'm going to a Red Sox game Tuesday night (thanks to Bobby) and Thursday night I'm getting together with an old friend, but Wednesday night looks to be open. So, if any blog buddies, twitter followers and/or Roller fans want to meet-up then send me an email (dave.johnson at rollerweblogger.org).


RESTful JSF in the works?

JSF spec lead Ed Burns just pointed out that some of my Sun-internal comments about JSF have made it outside the firewall and into an issue on the JSF specification project:

On Wed, 19 Mar 2008, David M Johnson said:

I think the goal should be to make JSF applications RESTful by default, with proper use of GET and POST, i.e. only use POST when application data is changing, not for component state. Another goal should be clean, book-markable URLs that only carry path-info and parameters needed by the application logic.

That's easy and the default situation with Rails, Grails, Struts, etc. How hard would it be to redesign JSF along those lines? Would it require EJB2 -> EJB3 level changes to JSF?

I suspect work on JSF 2.0 is too far along for this kind of change now, but it's nice to hear that the idea of a truly RESTful JSF is at least under consideration.

Project SocialSite opens up!

My teammates and I have started a new blog over at blogs.sun.com to cover Project SocialSite and to break the big news: we're open!

We are very pleased to announce that source code is now available for Project SocialSite (under a CDDL/GPL license) and the project is now operating as an open source project following the Glassfish governance policy. We're working in the open and welcome contributors of all stripes. Read more...

Big thanks to all for BarCamp RDU 2008!

To the campers, volunteers and sponsors of BarCamp RDU 2008,

Thanks for making BarCamp RDU 2008 a wonderfully successful event! We brought together around 150 of the best and brightest developers, web technologists, designers, scientists, entrepreneurs, social media experts and open source advocates in the Triangle area and surrounding regions. Anybody who wanted could pitch a session and we ended up with 41 sessions on topics of software development, business, social media, science, education and even cross step waltz. We learned a heck of a lot from each other and had a lot of fun in the process.

Below is the session grid that the attendees put together.



You can find a list of the sessions, broken down by category and room size here:

Thanks to our generous host Red Hat, we were able to provide excellent facilities with a variety of rooms, white boards, projectors, a public address system. Thanks to our financial sponsors, we enjoyed a pre-party at Tyler's Tap Room in Durham, NC on the Friday evening before camp. And we enjoyed a breakfast of bagels, fruit and coffee. We had lunch from NeoMonde restaurant and provided plenty of sodas and water throughout the day. Clearwire was on site to ensure we had sufficient Wifi coverage for attendees.

We took time to thank our sponsors at the event, on the events web page, in our blog posts about the event, on the back of the t-shirts and on signs placed prominently around the venue. Below is an example.



In past years, BarCamp RDU led by Fred Stutzman.
This year the organizing committee was:
  • Dave Johnson (coordination and sponsors)
  • Wayne Sutton (t-shirts and technology)
  • Greg DeKoenigsberg (facilities and coordination)
  • Andi Johnson (budget and vendors)
  • Kipp Bodnar (voluneer coordinator)
  • Matt Frye (Coffee and sound)
  • Scott Morningstar (Badges)
  • Fred Stutzman and others monitored our mailing list to make sure we didn't panic
And we had help from a dozen or so volunteers on site. There were a couple of hiccups and things to be improved next year, but overall we think this was the best BarCamp RDU yet and Fred agrees. We're looking forward to doing it again so it won't be too long before you're hearing from us about the next BarCamp RDU.

Thanks again for your support!

PS. here are some more links about BarCamp RDU 2008

Pictures at Flickr.com:
Blog posts and articles tagged with barcamprdu2008:

And a lot of folks were Twittering about BarCamp RDU too:

BarCamp fun for the whole family

BarCamp RDU was great fun this year and I'll probably blog a bit more about it later, but for now here's my favorite picture from the event; taken by Fred Stutzman, who led the event in 2007 and 2008. It's my son Alex (11), using Wayne Sutton's cell-phone to stream video of me giving the opening intro:

Alex really enjoyed helping out and he attended sessions on his own including iPhone development and file system encryption, and he got to play werewolf for the first time.


ROME v1.0 RC1 available for testing

ROME logo

I've been meaning to blog about this for a while now: thanks to Alejandro Abdelnur, the long awaited ROME v1.0 RC1 is now available for testing.

I've already updated ROME Propono (changes in CVS only) to work with the new release and I've done some testing, but more is needed. I hope to test with Roller and with Blogapps once BarCamp RDU is over.

Links: ROME 1.0 RC1 downloads and change notes

Triangle is hopping!

Ginny and Wayne in cartoon form
Joe Gregorio: Wow, the local area is really hopping these days, check out the 14 upcoming conferences, camps, workshops and events. Here's some video from the just passed RTP Startup Weekend, we've got coworking sites popping up, and of course a blog to cover it all.

That blog that Joe mentioned is new, NBC 17's 30threads.com, which launched last night at a very well attended blogger, beer and BBQ bash in the Edge Office coworking space in downtown Raleigh. The site is both a community aggregator and a blog authored by local/social media superheros Wayne Sutton and Ginny Skalski. Congrats to Ginny, Wayne and NBC 17 on a great launch and what looks to be a great new community site like no other in the Triangle.


BarCamp RDU 2008 pre-party

If you are one of the 250 lucky folks registered for BarCamp RDU 2008, then you are invited to a party! BarCamp RDU attendees, please join us at Tyler's Tap Room (map) in Durham's American Tobacco Historic District this Friday night to meet, greet and celebrate BarCamp eve with us. We'll be providing beverages (beer, wine, sodas, etc.) and light snacks (chips and salsa). See you there!


tylers logo

BarCamp RDU Pre-party
Friday August 1, 2008 from 7:30 - 9:00PM
Tyler's Tap Room
324 Blackwell St
Durham, NC 27701

And of course, the party would not be possible without the generous support of our most excellent sponsors: BlueStripe Software, Canonical, Carborro Creative Coworking, Design Hammer, Edge Office, IBM developerWorks, iContact, Lulu.com, Montie Design, OpenNMS.org, Red Hat, rPath and Viget Labs.


1 week 'til BarCamp RDU!

BarCamp RDU logo

BarCamp RDU 2008 is one week from today and it's shaping up the be the biggest and I hope the best BarCamp RDU so far.

Here are a couple of notes for attendees:

Check the attendee list! On July 21, we decided we had budget and space to register everybody on the waiting list. If you were on the waiting list you are now registered to attend.

Remove yourself if you can't attend. If you registered but cannot make it, please remove your name from the list. For planning purposes, we need to have as accurate a count as is possible.

Propose sessions in advance. If you are interested in initiating or attending a session on a specific topic, then go right ahead and add your topic to the Proposed Sessions list.

Oh, and if you are interested in helping out with preparations or on the day of the event, then please let us know (dave.johnson at rollerweblogger.org or wayne at wayne-sutton.com)

And one final note. BarCamp RDU would not be possible without the very generous financial support of our sponsors and our host. So...

Thanks to the BarCamp RDU 2008 sponsors!

See you next Saturday at BarCamp RDU 2008!


Roller Mobile with iUI


Roller Mobile
Originally uploaded by snoopdave

After spending a couple of hours with iUI this week, I've put together the beginnings of an iPhone style interface to Roller. So far, I've been able to do everything I need to do by making a couple of changes in Roller's struts.xml and adding two new JSP pages -- no Java code required (yet). This screenshot shows two of the three screens I have created so far.


RSS and Atom Reference Card

RSS and Atom reference card

I wrote and illustrated a detailed reference card covering RSS 2.0, Atom, AtomPub and the MetaWeblog API for the DZone RefCardz project. The six page "card" includes diagrams of the elements in the feeds, a synopsis of AtomPub protocol and coverage of ROME -- the same stuff you'll find in my book RSS and Atom in Action.

It's a free download, but you have to register with DZone.com to get it. While you're there check out the other reference cards they have. They've got some great ones, including great one for Glassfish.

Here's the link:
http://refcardz.dzone.com/refcardz/rss-and-atom


Test post from iPhone

Via Roller web UI. It's not the most pleasant experience, pinching and scrolling around to move from title to content and then down the page to find the post button, but you can post to Roller from an iPhone. Seems like you could throw together a pretty nice iPhone interface for Roller using iUI. Who needs Android, J2ME, etc. when you can just use the web?


Sixteen days until BarCamp RDU 2008

BarCamp RDU logo

Just a gentle reminder that BarCamp RDU 2008 is coming soon. And one request. We've got 209 people registered and 31 on the waiting list so please help us out and if you registered but cannot make it, please remove your name from the list.

If you are interested in helping out with preparations or on the day of the event, then please let us know (dave.johnson at rollerweblogger.org or wayne at wayne-sutton.com)


My personal iPhone 3G debacle

I'm sorry to say that I participated in the iPhone launch debacle yesterday. I wrote up the frustrating and somewhat embarrassing timeline for a buddy of mine. You might find it interesting, so here it is:

Friday, July 11, 2008

6:45AM I arrive at AT&T store at Triangle Town Center mall (Raleigh, NC)
7:50AM 33 people ahead of me, ~150 people behind me in line
7:55AM AT&T rep tells us that they have 15 iPhones, but they'll take orders
8:00AM I leave for Apple store at Crabtee Valley Mall
8:20AM I arrive at said store, line looks to be greater than 200 people
9:00AM The line moves and is making slow progress
10:00AM line stops moving for over an hour because "activation servers are down"
10:05AM I've got my laptop, so I sit down and start coding (w/free Apple WIFI)
11:30AM The line starts moving again. scoot, code, scoot, code...
12:50PM I stop coding because laptop battery power is dead
1:00PM I attend a half-hour meeting via telecon
1:40PM I finally get into store, Apple rep helps me
1:50PM Apple rep helps me, gets "IRU account not supported error message"

I call AT&T, they tell me that I have a special "flag" on my line and they are not allowed to remove it via phone, and I MUST to upgrade my iPhone at the AT&T store -- i.e. wait 5-7 days for delivery from AT&T.

So, I call AT&T again and get another rep who tells me that they CAN remove the flag over the phone, mumble, mumble and then my cell phone connection drops.

2:20PM Apple puts me in a special AT&T problem line
2:40PM Apple rep calls AT&T, gets them to remove flag
2:50PM Apple rep will hold my iPhone until AT&T calls me to confirm flag removal
2:55PM Cheers erupt as the customer who was 1st in line at 8AM finally gets activated
3:00PM I leave empty handed but with a promise that AT&T will call within 24 hours

I'm not going to try to analyze this; I'll leave that up to you, dear reader.


Update: Saturday, July 12, 2008

10:00AM Call AT&T to ask about status, they blame Apple for problem saying only Apple stores had problems yesterday.
10:25AM AT&T tells me they are now issuing a "billing ticket" to ensure that all flags were dropped from my account. They say I'll have to wait up to 4 hours before it has taken effect.
2:25PM Apple store won't test the activation process over the phone so I make the half-hour drive to store only to get the same "IRU account" error.
2:45PM Call AT&T from parking lot, they tell me sorry things are taking longer than expected, we'll call you ASAP. I drive home empty handed again.
5:00PM Call AT&T to complain to a manager about the broken 24 and 4 hour promises. He tells me problem is on Apple side and if I ordered a phone at the AT&T store everything would be fine (in 5-7 days). He says there is no telling when they'll finally clear the flag on my account, so just keep on waiting.

Update: Sunday, July 13, 2008

11:30AM Still no word from AT&T so I called them and they said the flag problem had been resolved. I asked how I could be compensated for all the wasted time they caused me, misdirection and multiple broken commitments they said "we're not offering any compensation for iPhone problems." The AT&T rep also blamed Apple for all problems and said I should have bought from the AT&T store
12:20PM Arrived at Apple store, got my phones


Updating RSS and Atom in Action?

Check out Tim Bray's Atomic Monday post for a summary of recent developments in the world of AtomPub protocol and Atom format. With the uptick in interest in Atom and especially AtomPub protocol's usage in mainstream APIs from Google and Microsoft, I wonder if if would make sense to update RSS and Atom in Action.

Cover of RSS and Atom in Action

The bulk of the book is up-to-date, for what it covers. RSS and Atom haven't really changed and, though the book came out before the spec was finalized, the AtomPub material is basically sound. The ROME material is still current too.

What's missing are all of the new developments: a dozen or more new AtomPub based APIs from Google (GData and OpenSocial) and Microsoft (Live and Astoria) and new tools like Apache Abdera (incubating). Not to mention Windows RSS Platform 2.0 and ROME 1.0 (which is coming soon). Updating the book to cover all of those topics would be quite an endeavor and I'm not sure it's the right approach to covering AtomPub. What do you think?


Latest Links


JSPWiki vs. XWiki

via Jim Grisanzio: Chris Phelan has done evaluations of JSPWiki and XWiki for use on the OpenSolaris.org site. Based on his 32 requirements, XWiki came out on top.

On balance, XWiki wins by virtue of having better support for management, searching, page taxonomies, virtual servers, content export and language translation/localization support.

JSPWiki has slightly better support for identifying orphaned pages and accesskey support (XWiki 1.4 will have support for access keys).

Confluence was not considered because requirement #0 is "the software must be free and open source," which seems like a reasonable request when selecting software for an open source community site.

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