Blog

For you code lurkers out there, the news that RabbitMQ is now available in CloudFoundry should come as no surprise. But, it's finally here! This is very exciting. One thing I've always loved about RabbitMQ is its ubiquity. It is more widely used than any other message broker on the cloud, and on Amazon Web Services in particular. The AWS tidbit's a bit more awesome when you realize that AWS already has a message broker service called SQS! ;-) Anyway, it's now available on CloudFoundry. You should definitely check it out. The news overall seems good, too! Messaging middleware is the critical component for scale. Cloud-scale is a way of life, not just a switch to be turned on and off. Specifically, an architecure that scales is going to enjoy temporally decoupling, or asynchronism, and RabbitMQ is the perfect vehicle to enable that asynchronous coordination.

Steve Mayzak and I have just finished a book for O'REILLY, Getting Started with Spring Roo. The book's a very quick introduction to Spring Roo, and includes information about the many useful addons (including support for Vaadin - a powerful, alternative web framework, and Neo4j - an alternative, powerful NOSQL data-store), as well as the in-built Spring Roo addons. If you're interested in Spring Roo, I hope you'll check this out.

I'm excited to announce that I'll be speaking at JavaZone again this year. I must confess, I was a little worried that I would not be accepted this year! My talk last year - on business process management and Spring Integration - seemed to garner puzzled looks. Perhaps I just misread the amazing Norwegian audience? The conference (and the technical presentations, to boot) were both wonderful.

Hi guys. I'll be speaking at OSCON Java. I'm giving two talks, one on Spring Roo and on using Spring to bring your application to your customers (through a web application, through Flex, through GWT, and through mobile clients like Android).

If you've ever read about Spring's powerful AOP support then you've probably heard about the canonical example of introducing logging functionality - a cross-cutting concern - to your beans. The example goes like this: you want to log the start and stop time for every method invocation. You can either modify every method and introduce logging, which is tedious and error-prone, or you can simply use AOP to wrap every method invocation. With AOP, you'll get a chance to perform logging every time a method is started and finished, or both! This is a common example, but it doesn't even begin to illustrate how powerful AOP can be. The most powerful example of AOP is perhaps the Spring framework itself. It uses it every where! Let's look at some common examples:

Just watched a recording on JavaEE6 and JBoss AS7. JBoss AS7's looks like it's evolved by leaps and bounds! I wonder if it's as mature as Glassfish now... Some of the new features in JBoss AS 7 seem to just be bug fixes.

What a couple of months! I've been running around like crazy. I attended Geecon, the Spring S2G Forums, and then the JAX San Jose conference, all in fairly short order. I'll try to put up roundups of my trips a bit more consistantly, starting with Geecon. I've been to many European conferences, but this one is now among my favorites. The conference has the unique combination of excellent speakers at a low price, like the SpringSource S2GX Forums or SpringOne.

Dear Lazy Webs, I just had to unplug my secondary monitor and follow the procedure outlined here to get a wayward OSX window back on my display.

Started today pretty impressed that Interoperability @ Microsoft was a sponsor at EclipseCon, which kicked off today. So, score one for community and interoperability. Then, I see that Microsoft is suing Barnes & Nobles and others for their use of Android in their tablet environments. Huh. They almost went an entire day without being ... Microsoft. One for the history books.

I just hit a good 'ol fashioned segfaulting bug! For reasons I'm not proud of, I had cause to write some C++ code. I downloaded Eclipse CDT (And before some sadist comes along suggesting I should've stuck with vi or butterflies, I've tried just about every C/C++ environment out there. I'm one of those guys that just doesn't understand writing C or C++ code without an editor. I'd sooner write Java than C or C++. Far too many things that can go wrong, it seems.)