Blog

I did a webinar with Quinton Wall, the Developer Evangelist for Salesforce.com and specifically on the VMforce collaboration. The talk went very well (thanks for all the questions and good feedback, guys!) and we have the recorded webinar, code and slides up here. This first webinar was more about introducing developers to the Spring framework, and establishing basic skills to enable developers to use VMforce.com. Stay tuned for the next webinar, coming Sept 9, that will expand on the details of VMForce.com as an opportunity for Spring developers.

I'll be speaking at JavaZone in Oslo, Norway on using Spring and Activiti together. If you want to learn a bit about Business Process Management using Activiti in conjunction with the Spring framework, then this talk is for you! We'll explore using Spring from Activiti's BPMN 2 engine, and we'll explore connecting your business processes to other interesting systems and offloading work using Spring Integration, SpringSource's framework for building event driven applications and connecting your applications to your data and services.

I've recently posted a piece on using the file-transfer adapters in Spring Integration 2.0 on the SpringSource blog. Check it out and leave a comment!

Whew! Time sure flies!

Hello, world! Nothing to see here, simply conducting a few tests of the software. Move along...

Often times, a message queue is used as a way to publish "events" to other services in the enterprise. The publish/subscribe architecture decouples clients from the senders and alleviates the publisher from specific knowledge of the consumers of the messages. This, plus the asynchronous nature of a message queue - the publisher does not block while clients consume the events - makes it ideal for publishing events to keep other systems aware of the state of a given system.

I've just posted a blog on Artima.com called SOA, 5 Years In. In it, I talk about some of the core value principals behind Thomas Erl's excellent Service Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology, and Design. Check it out!

I'm in my hotel room thinking about the last 3 days here at The ServerSide Java Symposium. I've had a fantastic time. I gave and/or participated in two talks: one was a talk on jBPM and Spring, the other was participation (representing Spring Integration) in a panel with Jeff Genender (representing ServiceMix) and Ross Mason (representing Mule) on ESBs. I enjoyed that process and enjoyed talking to Jeff and Ross gentlemen to the last. The 400+ people in the audience were invigorating too. Im pretty sure anybody would tell you this year was a welcome, marked improvement over previous years, especially in attendance numbers. It also heralded the introduction of a new editorial lineup, with Cameron Mckenzie taking the lead-editors position. Hes got his work cut out for him, but Im confident hes up to the task.

Hello, world! I've been utterly and completely drowned in lake-busy these last few months. Updates may be a little slow for the next month, too. I've started working as an editor for Infoq.com's Java Queue. Work is progressing apace on my next Spring book, and some exciting things are happening in my personal life pretty soon. Plus, I'm working on an opensource side-project that'll unveil hopefully pretty soon here. Anyway, check out my updates on Infoq.com if you want good old fashioned news, and on Twitter if you want commentary in 140 character chunks. Sorry I can't say more, but I will when I can! If you're going to The Server SIde Java Symposium next month (March 17-19), don't forget to say hi, and attend my sessions!

I read a very good article on breaking the crossdomain wall for Ajax requests. It's presented here, as an entry on http://www.wait-till-i.com. In it, Chris Heilmann talks about using a Yahoo service and JSON-P requests with Ajax to load any site's contents. You should most certainly read his article - it's fantastic. I post here the most salient bit (for me) since it genuinely knocked my socks off. To re-use this in your own code, copy the parts I've highlighted in bold. You can use your own version of jQuery, naturally, as the most interesting aspect is the bits inside the ajax function (which itself is pretty trivial. I created the wrapper function so that the code could be stashed away and re-used more readily). I demonstrate its use in the script fragment below that, where I load the HTML for this very site.

I can't tell you how powerful overcoming the leap-before-looking temptation is when building a system. Have an object model? Model it using UML or ERD. Have a workflow? Draw a workflow diagram (an activity diagram). Have a webflow? Draw a webflow diagram (looks like a state diagram, or in more sophisticated scenarios, like an activity diagram). Have a site map? Map the site using a site planning tool like Denim. All of these tools facilitate VISUAL feedback. They are cognitive, high level disciplines, and for good reason! Your mind interprets things visually differently than it does when coding from the left brain - it is able to "see" associations between related concepts when it's fed ideas through feedback that ends up in the right brain.