Web Frameworks Jam

Heading off to Crested Butte

I couldn’t stay away. Bruce Eckel is offering an Open Spaces Web Framework Jam in Crested Butte next week, and I am really looking forward to it. Yes, I was just in Crested Butte in March (for Programming the New Web), but this is a hands-on experience and I think that it’s going to be a great learning experience and incredibly fun too.

In addition to meeting new people, I’m looking forward to hanging out with some familiar faces from the last conference as well (three of us are returning). I hope to post some updates from the web framework jam here.

The “It” Thing …

Some kind of event in Crested Butte, CO, July 18-21

Bruce Eckel was going to do a “Thinking in Java” Open Spaces conference in Crested Butte, CO in July, but interest (or at least enrollment) didn’t seem to be there. After a flurry of email between several of the people that were at his Programming the New Web Open Spaces conference (held in March), he is re-working it as potentially an even cooler event. Check out the link for more details at:

http://mindview.net/Conferences/ThinkingInJava

I really trust Bruce when he says, “We'll find something interesting to do even if we don't know exactly what it is yet. It's in the same vein as an Open Space — where you have a basic topic but you don't know what sessions will appear until people start putting sticky notes in time slots — but taken up a notch. Here, we're not sure what the topic will be, but we assume that something will appear by the time we actually convene.”

I hope that I can be a part of it. My attendance, right now, is only limited by family obligations. If I can work out those details, I will be there. If I can’t make it, I will be really bummed and anxiously awaiting news on how it all turned out.

To be able to go and build something for the fun of it (and for the educational experience)! It would be like summer camp!

BTW, there’s a hostel in Crested Butte. I hear it’s pretty nice and you sure can’t beat the price!

Conference Information
Summary of Potential Topics
Open Spaces
Discussion of Open Spaces Technology
Crested Butte Hostel
Best Value in Crested Butte
Other Lodging/Travel Info
Where to stay and how to get there

Teen mosquito repeller?

Turnabout is fair play

Interesting turn of technology against the adults!

An inventor in the UK developed a device to discourage teens from loitering outside shops by emitting pulses of a sound that teens can hear, but that most adults over the age of 20 cannot. Hmm, but then the teens turned it into a ringtone at a slightly lower frequency that they could hear in classrooms, but that most of the teachers (over the age of 30) cannot, and they’re using it for text messaging indicators in class.

You can hear an NPR interview with the inventor of the initial device and his teen daughter (who admits to having used it in class), at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5434687

The link on the NPR website also has an MP3 of the sound. And of course, curiosity got the best of me, and I had to try to see if I could hear the sound. My well-past 30 year old ears cannot really detect it as a sound, but I felt a weird sensation while it was playing. Not really irritating, just odd. But maybe I’ll keep the file around … never know when it will come in handy.

LaraBars

A quest for good food and even a Python reference.

When I was in Crested Butte for Bruce Eckel’s Programming the New Web conference (and therein lies the only hook that this will have to a technical topic), I picked up some Larabars at the local grocery store, for a quick snack. And since then, I have been on a quest.

Larabars taste great and they meet my “rules”. I’m one of those pretty wacky people who reads food labels before buying anything. And larabars totally meet my criteria … no added sugar (and no CORN SYRUP), no partially hydrogenated oils, no preservatives. So what DO they contain? Fruit and nuts. That’s it. They’re NOT cooked; they’re NOT processed. Naturally occurring Omega 3’s! Omega 6’s! Oleic acid! This is good stuff!

And with decadent names that will make you feel GUILTY! Cherry Pie, Cashew Cookie, Chocolate Coconut! And for the programmers among us, try CherryPy (sic, sneaking in another technical reference!).

Luckily for me, our local grocery store carries them. Otherwise, we would have had to move to Colorado. My favorite larabar flavor that my local store doesn’t sell: Ginger Snap. My husband would go NUTS for Ginger Snap (but I ate the only one I brought home from CO so he’s gonna have to wait to try it).

(My other food hangup: Styrofoam cups. They freak me out. In Crested Butte, Camp4Coffee has paper cups. Ah! Heaven!)

Back to programming … snack time is over.

Larabars website
All the yummy details
Larabars in the news
An article about larabars
Styrofoam cups
Or why I love paper cups

A Plethora of Web Development Tools

TurboGears, Ruby on Rails, Atlas, Google Web Toolkit: Embarking on a journey with Web Application Development Tools

I’ve got to get my mind around all of these tools. What are their strengths and weaknesses? Who competes with whom? Where’s the overlap? What are the differences?

TurboGears and Ruby on Rails seem to meet the needs of the same audience. They both provide the means for Rapid Web Application development. Atlas lets .NET programmers use the language and environment that they are comfortable with to develop web applications, while the Google Web Toolkit enables Java programmers to continue to use Java to develop web applications.

But … the big question is … do we NEED all of these things? Can we do what we need to do with TurboGears and/or Ruby on Rails? It’s fairly well accepted that TurboGears and Ruby offer us productivity advantages, but do Atlas and the GWT offer us something functionally that TurboGears and Ruby do not?

So, I embark on my journey to play with software. I like this part!

Professors Banning Laptops in Classes

Interesting. Students were taking notes with laptops and a professor thought that this was getting in the way of active debate in class, so she banned them.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060503/ap_on_hi_te/colleges_no_laptops

I totally agree. When I was at Bruce Eckel’s Open Spaces conference a month or so ago, we all left our laptops in our bags. I think that this was a HUGE factor in our interesting, interactive discussions. Face it. Computer laptop screens provide a barrier between people (we used to just have our sneakers to state at; now we have laptops). And they are INTERESTING barriers too. With the proliferation of Wi-Fi, you can often surf the web under the guise of “taking notes”. But even with that aside, the simple task of notetaking on the computer DOES get in the way, in my opinion. Somehow, paper and pencil doesn’t form that barrier between you and other people in the room, whereas the laptop screen does. Hmm. Interesting.

RFID Chips Record Recycling

Big Brother Knows How Much You Recycle

Just read an interesting article in the Great Lakes IT Report (http://www.wwj.com) detailing an interesting use of RFID chips, for determining how much trash/recycling individual households put at the curb. The full article is available at http://www.cascadeng.com/press/pr/20060405.htm and I won’t repeat it all here, but the basic idea is that a trash company is embedding RFID chips in trash bins and rewarding customers for recycling. Ultimately the “stick” approach may be used to charge people for how much waste they produce. Cool idea.

Live isn’t always best

Getting Spoiled by Podcasts?

Did I mention that I REALLY liked the talk that I went to on Tuesday night, by Owen Taylor from Gigaspaces, for the Ann Arbor Java User Group? Yeah, I guess I did. Anyhow, as I was sitting there, in the talk, I was thinking what a GREAT podcast it would have made, and how I wished that the talk had been recorded so that I could listen to selected parts again but mainly so that I could share it with a few other people who I knew would be interested (but weren’t in attendance). Sheesh, who would have thought that I would PREFER a podcast to a live meeting? OK, I can’t go that far. It was definitely better, in person, where I could see what was going on and eat pizza and have a chance to win an IPod (still bummed about not winning that). But it definitely occurred to me that it would have been great to have had a recording in addition to the live presentation. And, with 2 small children at home, I can listen to WAY more podcasts than attend live meetings. Funny how technology sometimes changes our perspective a bit …

Distributed Computing

Ann Arbor Java User Group: Meeting on Distributed Computing

I snuck out of the house last night to attend the Ann Arbor Java Users Group meeting. Topic was Space Based Computing. It far exceeded my expectations.

OK, I’ll confess. I’m a distributed computing geek. I spent a great deal of time (from like 1988 until well into 2001) working on distributed computing applications and research, using rudimentary tools. First applications were on a Motorola “grid” of several 68000 boards. I no longer remember how the thing parallelized. I was just an application programmer. Went back to grad school in 1990 and loved playing around with hypercubes and other parallel processing machines. Did my masters thesis on parallel programming, with an object oriented bent.

My first job out of grad school was at Computational Biosciences, in Ann Arbor where initially we were working on a massively parallel array (human genome applications) but later transitioned to a processor farm, using PVM. Yes, PVM … out Oakridge National Labs. Did anyone else REALLY use this? It was GREAT, but the configuration was pretty rough.

Then, I did some consulting and ultimately started working on a Decision Support System, using a distributed processor farm as well (using CORBA). I left that company in the early 2000’s, but they’re still doing a great job of distributing the workload, as far as I know. I’m not sure if they’re still using CORBA, but they deal with huge datasets … and quickly.

Ah, anyhow, back to the meeting. Owen Taylor did a GREAT job of describing how Gigaspaces has built a foundation on top of JINI for space based computing. He even mentioned Linda (ah, my heart beat faster thinking of way back when)! Furthermore, Gigaspaces provides a community edition of their software, free (even for production use).

Oh, and Gigaspaces even raffled off an IPod. There were only 10 eligible attendees at the meeting, so I figured I had GREAT odds of winning one. Sigh, wasn’t my night. Guess I’ll have to continue to listen to IT Conversations on my laptop for a while longer.

I’m anxious to dig down and play with Gigaspaces a bit, but alas … I have paying clients right now who are totally NOT interested in distributed computing. I’ll have to save it for a rainy day (soon, I hope).

Notes on Linda

Gigaspaces

Ann Arbor Java User Group

Cool Tools

Java Tool Recommendations

Many of our customers come to us, asking for tool recommendations. Choosing and evaluating tools is an incredibly time consuming endeavor. But I got some GREAT recommendations at the Programming the New Web conference, hosted by Bruce Eckel last week in Crested Butte, CO. I’ll try to capture some of those that I found most interesting here, and will try to fill in the blanks as time permits.

In my opinion one of the most intimidating things about Java programming is choosing tools. Microsoft programmers have it easy. Yeah, they’re shoe-horned into their tool selection, but at least they don’t have to go out and evaluate a bunch of (ill suited) tools on their way to creating that first project! Of course, they’re free to choose tools outside of Visual Studio, but do they? Really? Probably only the really stubborn ones!

Yeah, Linux and Java programmers are a stubborn bunch. We like our tools and we like the flexibility to choose them. I so strongly prefer the Unix command line that I run MKS on my Windows box (and will admit to a preference of VIW over WordPad, ssshhhh). But for NEW programmers on the block, it’s a lot to deal with.

So here’s a shortlist of software to use for Java development …

Development Environment: Eclipse (no surprise here)

Unit Testing: JUnit (another given)

Code Coverage: EMMA (use Maven plugin)

Functional Testing: FIT

Quickstart WebApp Development: AppFuse

Version Control: Subversion

Continuous Integration: CruiseControl

Detecting Duplicate Code: PMD’s Copy/Paste Detector (CPD)

I’ll add more as I come across them in my notes.