Chariot Tech Cast

Chariot DevNews Episode 4 - Grails, Rails, Roo, Java and Haiku!

techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com — Mon, 8 Feb 2010 22:32:00 GMT

We have a bevy of good links this week. As usual, Brent and Ken put together their favorite web links on delicious. Review them here: delicious.com/developernews/4

Sponsors from this episode include SpringSource, Sun, and EngineYard.

Chariot DevNews Epsiode 3 - Rails 3 online seminar, NoSQL, Grails and Flex, Grails Testing, and more!

techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com — Mon, 1 Feb 2010 21:48:00 GMT

Chariot Developer News episode #3 - February 1 2010

News Links:

You can follow all of our links on Delicious. Head over to delicious.com/developernews/3 for the details.

Disclaimers:

The opinions expressed by Ken and Brent do not necessarily form policy decisions at Chariot, for the US State department, or in the Federation of Planets...

Ah, disclosure law. Partners discussed in the podcast:

SpringSource
EngineYard (forgot it in the audio stream but we talked about Rails 3)
Sun (discussing the Oracle merger)

Feedback:

Brent Baxter can be reached via his blog: brentbaxter.com or twittered at @brentbaxter
Ken Rimple can be reached at the all-encompassing rimple.com, or via @krimple
Send us feedback publicly using #techcast on twitter, or leave a comment on the blog, or privately via email (techcastfeedback at chariotsolutions.com).

Upcoming Events:

Philly Emerging Tech - early bird special, save $$$ before February 15!
Philadelphia Spring User Group Meeting - February 11th - at Chariot Solutions, 515 Pennsylvania Avenue, Suite 202, Fort Washington PA. Details at the Philly Spring site.

Episode 51 - Brian Sletten on the Semantic Web and what it means for developers

techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 15:49:00 GMT

On this techcast, Brian Sletten describes how the Semantic Web helps to define relationships between interconnected data, discusses the various tools and APIs, and how it is already being used, even without our knowledge.

Services like Friend of a Friend (FoaF), tools like RDFa, query tools like SPARQL, are discussed. If you don't know what the Semantic Web is or why it exists, Brian gives us a good overview and it's worth time listening to. Today, the US Government, wikipedia, and other systems are making data available via these mechanisms, as well as online retailers like Best Buy and Tesco.

Sponsor - Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise April 8-9, 2010. Still time to register for the early bird special and save! Details at phillyemergingtech.com

Brian Sletten's articles on Semantic Web, REST, and more:

http://www.infoq.com/articles/roa-rest-of-rest

http://www.infoq.com/articles/roa-resource-metadata

Linked data project:

http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web.html

http://linkeddata.org/

http://www.data.gov/

http://data.gov.uk/

http://freebase.com

http://dbpedia.org

Best Buy - blog about using RDFa:

http://jay.beweep.com/index.php/category/rdfa/

Some open source tools:

http://jena.sourceforge.net

http://mulgara.org

http://openrdf.org

http://clarkparsia.com/pellet/

SPARQL tutorial:

http://jena.sourceforge.net/ARQ/Tutorial/

A couple of good SemWeb Twitter lists:

https://twitter.com/bblfish/semweb

https://twitter.com/puredanger/semanticweb

Brian Sletten twitters as @bsletten, and works for Riot Games, and is part of the League of Legends team.

Chariot DevNews Episode 2 - Languages galore!

techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 22:26:00 GMT

Developer NewsCast #2 - January 25, 2010 Hosts: Brent Baxter and Ken Rimple Our news links can be found at http://delicious.com/developernews/2 Disclosures related to show content: Chariot Solutions is a SpringSource, Sun and JBoss Partner.

Episode 50 - Jeremy Grelle on SpringSource's WEB and RIA APIs

techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 22:15:00 GMT

For our 50th episode, I sat down with VMWare/SpringSource's Jeremy Grelle, an Open Source developer who works on the Spring WebFlow project, among others. Jeremy will be speaking about Spring's BlazeDS integration library when he comes to town for the Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference in April. We talk about Spring 3.0, and about the following APIs: Spring MVC Spring WebFlow Spring Faces Spring JavaScript Spring's BlazeDS Integration library for Rich Flex applications Thanks to Jeremy for coming on the show and taking the time to talk to us.

Episode 49 - Venkat Subramaniam on Groovy and Dynamic Languages

techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 13:00:00 GMT

Venkat Subramaniam is a widely acclaimed speaker, author, professor, and creator of Agile Developer, a mentoring and training company.

He joined us on the techcast to talk about programming using dynamic languages. He is well known for his talks and book on the Groovy language, has just published a book on Scala, and discusses his philosophy for applying languages in our talk.

Mr. Subramaniam is speaking at the 2010 Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise show, to be held on April 8-9 in downtown Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. To register, head over to phillyemergingtech.com.

Links:

Venkat's web site - http://www.agiledeveloper.com
Examples of Testing with Groovy - http://www.agiledeveloper.com/presentations/testingWithGroovy.zip
A great book by Venkat on Programming Groovy
Venkat's Scala Book
Java world Article on DSL

Music today was provided by FreePodcastThemes.com (free theme #3 is our opener) and by Music Alley. The takeout music was "Jazz Breakfast" from "Gecko 3". Warning - if you download it has a few explicit words mixed in, but it's got a great groove! Artist Information.

Chariot DevNews Epsiode 1 - Spring 3 ripple effect, facebook friends and more

techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 22:11:00 GMT

This is our first Developer News podcast episode. We hope you like it. Links can be found by browsing our Delicious tags. Head over to www.delicious.com/developernews/1 for the links that made up today's show. Leave us feedback on twitter with #techcast, or email techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com.

Episode 48 - Google Wave interview with Joe Gregorio

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 11:00:00 GMT

Joe Gregorio, Google Developer Advocate and member of the Google App Engine team, is also working on Google Wave, a new collaborative environment that mixes concepts from IRC, Mail, IM, and document sharing.

APIs http://code.google.com/apis/wave/
Example bots: builtins: Linky automatically makes links of text typed in to the wave.
For more examples, look at wave-samples-gallery.appspot.com
Developers can sign up for sandbox access here https://services.google.com/fb/forms/wavesignupfordev /
Non-Developers can request a preview account here https://services.google.com/fb/forms/wavesignup/
No public client/server API yet, waveprotocol.org has links to wave protocol forum

Episode 47 - Jonas Boner on the Akka framework, Scala, and highly scalable applications

Mon, 7 Dec 2009 15:51:00 GMT

Today's podcast features Jonas Bonér, the creator of the Akka framework. If you've been listening to the podcast, especially to Episode #37 with Alex Miller on Java Concurrency, here is an alternative approach to providing scalability on the Java VM.

Akka features an implementation of Actors, Software Transactional Memory, and Transactors, a hybrid approach to working with STM inside of Actors themselves. Jonas also provides a mechanism for writing these components inside of the Java language as well.

Actors are not a direct part of the Scala language. Rather, they are implemented as a library. There are, in fact, at least three implementations. Jonas Bonér's Akka framework includes actors as well as access to Software Transactional Memory. In this episode, my colleague Jamie Allen and I interview Jonas to try to pull apart what Actors and Software Transactional Memory are, and how they can help developers write highly scalable, concurrent applications.

Links:

The Akka Mountain in Sweden (Akka is named after the mountain)
The Akka framework homepage is www.akkasource.org (or www.akkasource.com or even www.letitcrash.com)
A good blog entry about Akka
The high level overview of Akka from the akkasource site
Jonas' home page and the Akka twitter handle

Episode 46 - Guillaume LaForge on Groovy and Gaelyk, an App Engine Groovy platform

Wed, 2 Dec 2009 16:43:00 GMT

Today's interview features the Groovy luminary Guillaume LaForge. Guiallume's work on improving the Groovy language paved the way for the innovative frameworks such as Grails and Griffon, and showed a whole generation of Java developers to stop worrying and love dynamic programming.

Guiallaume is the Groovy project lead, and is constantly improving the language. One of his newer efforts is the App Engine framework Gaelyk. Running on top of Groovy, this framework allows developers to build Google App Engine web sites with very little effort. We talked to Guillaume about the project, and about his thoughts on Java 7 as well. This week we took questions from the 'twitterverse', and I started using Google Wave to edit my show notes.

Upcoming Groovy 1.7 features...

Support for anonymous inner classes (before suggested you use closures)
Providing an AST Builder, to make it easier to provide AST transformations (such as @Singleton, @Delegate). AST transformations are compiled into bytecode.

Gaelyk - The Google App Engine framework

Groovlets, small groovy web scripts - just write a script!
Templates - separate Groovy code from view
Injects Google features into scripts, not abstract them too much
Sitemesh templating: Guillaume is researching sitemesh integration but likely not including it directly (providing instructions at some point)
Question asked by @wmacguyver on what Groovy
1. DataStore was easy to wrap with a thin veneer - is hoping to more groovify and add a DSL around it
2. Mail - added ONE method to enrich base class to make it eaiser to use from scripting
3. Route support in 0.32 - was more work but not complex to do...
Asked about what projects running in Gaelyk - early days... but check out groovyconsole.appspot.com - a way of executing Groovy code online and sharing snippets. Written by Guillaume. Another one out there is a javascript toolkit for writing iphone web apps iui - demo app is built on Gaelyk (no link avaialble)
Also hosted on Gaelyk: Gaelyk project itself
Community feedback - will drive some enhancements, obviously Guillaume is very committed to Groovy language too!
Users have become contributors - submitting suggested changes / patches, these are very welcome.
Future feature: Querying support on deck potentially for datastore, simple SQL queries don't work on a NO-SQL database.

Question from twitter user @HamletDRC: @techcast Which JDK7 feature will effect Groovy the most: Closures, Jigsaw, or something else? (question for @glaforge)

Java 1.7 Closures -

The working document - mentions dynamic interfaces for closures, groovyc compiler could create same interfaces under the hood - could be interoperable POTENTIALLY...
Could we pass groovy closures to a java class? No implementation yet, so we need to see how languages work together...
Java closures - cannot access non-final vars, etc... Shouldn't replace Groovy closures with Java closures...

Jigsaw (JDK modularity)

Interesting to investigate. Would be nice to modularize Groovy a bit - maybe pull pieces into modules (groovlets, etc)... OSGi is an option as well, need to evaluate.

Thanks also to lucaxtex for his tweet: lucastex @glaforge incredible work on #gaelyk UrlRoutes! This is getting sweeter each day :)

Episode 45 - SpringSource's Ben Alex on Roo, a Java-based agile framework

techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:26:00 GMT

Ben Alex carved out some time to talk to me about the SpringSource Roo project, a very interesting and different take on Convention over Configuration Frameworks.

All of the major prior frameworks seem to use dynamic and meta-programming tricks to get work done. Ben's team focused on taking advantage of the Java platform, and hence Roo is a fast, java-and-AOP solution for getting things done using existing APIs like JPA and Spring's APIs. Applications are built using a command-line shell (even with code completion, just hit tab!) but in the end, they are just maven-based Spring projects.

You can find out more about Roo itself by visiting
www.springsource.org/roo

Mentioned in the podcast is the book "The Humane Interface" by Jeff Raskin. Ben says that reading that book helped him form the basis for his ideas about Roo.

Ben Alex can be reached via twitter as @benalexau, and the #roo hashtag gets quite a workout. We also suggest visiting the forums, as JIRA issues posted there are generally answered promptly.

Chariot Solutions is a SpringSource education and consulting partner.

Episode 44: Manik Surtani on JBoss Infinispan Distributed Data Grid and Cache

techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 21:34:00 GMT

Today's guest is Manik Surtani, from the JBoss Infinispan project.

Infinispan is a data grid project that grew out of JBoss Cache, and is able to dynamically ramp up and down cache nodes at will. Manik discusses the various features of the engine, including querying, monitoring, scalability, and more.

Visit the Infinispan project site at www.jboss.org/infinispan

Infinispan tweets on the @Infinispan username, and you can watch all tweets related to Infinispan at #infinispan.

If you are in Antwerp, Belgium attending DEVOXX '09, head on over to the announcement page and register with this URL.

JBoss is a Chariot Solutions partner.

Episode 43d: SpringOne / 2GX - Dmitry Sklyut and Brent Baxter

techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:00:00 GMT

A recap of the events of the last two days of SpringOne, with Brent Baxter and Dmitry Sklyut. Show notes will be available soon. Chariot Solutions is a SpringSource partner.

Episode 43c: SpringOne / 2GX - Gordon Dickens show reflections

techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:35:00 GMT

Gordon Dickens is a consultant and trainer with Chariot Solutions. We caught just before the wrap-up on Thursday to see Gordon's impressions (ask him to do Charlie Chaplain)… Gordon discusses Spring 3.0 & Java 6, JPA 2 support, Spring Integration, Spring Roo, Grails, and more. Chariot Solutions is a SpringSource consulting and training partner.

Episode 43b: Brent Baxter on SpringOne Day 1

techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:17:00 GMT

Here is another perspective on SpringOne from Chariot Solutions' Brent Baxter.

Episode 43a : SpringOne / 2GX Day 1.5 Recap - Gordon Dickens

techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:53:00 GMT

Gordon Dickens is a consultant and trainer with Chariot Solutions. We caught up in the early afternoon on Tuesday to catch up on Rod Johnson's keynote and topics around Spring 3.0, Grails, and some other things. Chariot Solutions is a SpringSource consulting and training partner.

Episode 42 - Chariot's Eric Snyder on Apache CouchDB

techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:28:00 GMT

Chariot's Eric Snyder works in both Java, Spring-based applications as well as with dynamic platforms such as Ruby on Rails. He brought CouchDB to our attention earlier this year, and we thought we'd share some information about it with our listeners. Apache CouchDB is a RESTful web-centric document-based database system written in Erlang. It can be used either directly using RESTful mechanisms or via a wrapper API in a number of languages.

Resources:

http://couchdb.apache.org - project website
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESDBM9-U804 - CouchDB: Relaxing Offline JavaScript (Google Tech Talk)
http://books.couchdb.org/relax - CouchDB: The Definitive Guide

APIs (small subset)

http://github.com/jchris/couchrest- ruby API
http://github.com/langalex/couch_potato- ruby API (higher level layer on top of couchrest)
http://couchdbkit.org - python API
http://github.com/mbreese/couchdb4j - Java-based CouchDB API

Episode 41 - Andres Almiray on Groovy Griffon, THE Swing UI Framework

techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 18:20:00 GMT

Our guest on this episode is Andres Almiray, key contributor to the Groovy Griffon project at CodeHaus. Griffon is an MVC framework and application development platform for building Swing-based applications, and can be configured to execute Applets, Java Applications and Web Start projects.

Andres talks about the Griffon MVC framework, plugins, Addons, event dispatching, and a lot more.

Resources

Griffon home http://griffon.codehaus.org
Griffon Mailing Lists
The Grails project, the starting point for the core of Griffon

The Griffon Team
Andres Almiray - http://www.jroller.com/aalmiray
Danno Ferrin - http://shemnon.com/speling/
James Williams - http://jameswilliams.be/blog/entry/index
Guillaume Laforge http://glaforge.free.fr/weblog/
Jim Shingler http://jshingler.blogspot.com/
Josh A. Reed http://josh-in-antarctica.blogspot.com/

You can follow twitter updates from the team at @theaviary

Be sure to leave us feedback via twitter (#techcast) or email (techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com)

Ken

Episode 40 - A roundtable discussion with the Open Solutions Alliance

techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 17:30:00 GMT

Disclosure: Chariot is an integration partner with the OSA.

Panelists

Nick Halsey - Marketing and Product Management at JasperSoft
Debbie Moynahan - Community management and marketing for Fuse Open Source @ Progress SW
Deb Woods - Product management at Ingres
Anthony Gold - President of Open Solutions Alliance and board member of Blue Nog, CEO of Healthy Humans

Resources

White paper: Open Source Consolidation in the Data Warehouse Market
Obama's Open Source for America initiative.
OSA Datasheet
Interop Datasheet
2009 Annual Prediction Survey
Website for the Open Solutions Alliance: www.opensolutionsalliance.org (also note that homepage hosts a comprehensive Google calendar of upcoming open source events)
Top Ten Reasons to Adopt Open Source in the Enterprise

Episode 39 - Jon Kern and Corey Haines on Agile, Software Craftsmanship

techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 18:26:00 GMT

A discussion with Jon Kern and Corey Haines about Agile, Pair Programming, Software Craftsmanship, and more.

Show Notes:

Corey Haines - Pair Programming Tour - http://programmingtour.blogspot.com/
Jon Kern's web site, Technical Debt. Here is a recent post on metrics (with links to Corey's video) to measure quality July '09 http://technicaldebt.com/archives/2009_07.html
Software Craftsmanship - the movement website - http://manifesto.softwarecraftsmanship.org/
Robert C. Martin - "Uncle Bob" - http://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/category/uncle-bobs-blatherings
Interesting comment from JB Rainsberger on the law of Speed -vs- Quality http://www.jbrains.ca/permalink/218
On not needing defined requirements to enable good design http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/01/dont-need-def-for-good-design
Technical Debt - what is it? http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?TechnicalDebt
Kent Beck's "To Test or not to Test" blog entry (do read the comments) - http://www.threeriversinstitute.org/blog/?p=187
The Liskov Substitution Principle http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?LiskovSubstitutionPrinciple and the five principles of class design (SOLID), cohesion and coupling http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?LiskovSubstitutionPrinciple
Jamis Buck - Recovering from the Enterprise - RubyConf '08 presentation http://averyblog.com/ruby-rails/rubyconf-08-jamis-buck-recovering-from-the-enterprise/ - hey, you don't need a DI framework in Ruby, man!
Software Engineering - an oxymoron in your organization - http://technicaldebt.com/archives/2009_04.html#000867
Cucumber http://cukes.info/ RSpec http://rspec.info/ and BDD http://behaviour-driven.org/
Podcast with Arlo Belshee on Promiscuous Programming http://agiletoolkit.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=400364

Episode 38 - Rob Harrop on Spring dm Server and OSGi

techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 13:00:00 GMT

Rob Harrop is the lead engineer on SpringSource dm Server, and is a key contributor at SpringSource. He co-authored Pro Spring, a seminal work in helping developer understand how to best use the Spring Framework.

In this podcast, I talk to Rob about OSGi and the Spring dm Server. We discuss the state of OSGi development, how it differs from traditional web-based Spring application development, and recent advancements in the technology.

We also briefly discuss the recent merger announcement with VMWare corporation. Point of disclosure: Chariot Solutions is a SpringSource development and training partner.

Show Notes:

The official OSGi R4 specification can be found here.
Information about the SpringSource dm Server can be found on the SpringSource Team Blog, and on the official site.
The RFC66 specification (standard OSGi web container) is not yet published, but Rob has a good post from May outlining how dm Server approaches implementing a draft version.
Lots of information about Spring dm Server can be found on the developer forums.

Coming in October is the SpringOne 2GX conference, and in November we will offer a one-day seminar on Grails, Spring's agile Groovy-based web development platform, with Jeff Brown of SpringSource.

Episode 37 - Alex Miller on Java Concurrency

techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 04:00:00 GMT

Our interview with Alex Miller focused on his work on Java Concurrency and also on Terracotta, the clustering technology which replicates graphs of Java objects between multiple Java virtual machines.

Developers working in environments needing high concurrency should definitely review the most recent Java Concurrency API.

Here are links to some of the topics we spoke about:

Alex's DZone Core Java Concurrency Refcard is located here and is a good start for researching the Java 6 concurrency features. Of particular note is Table 1 on Page 1, which lists the key concepts that should be understood before delving into solving concurrency related problems.
Discussion of various thread management mechanisms, which include Task Executors
Discussion of Locks versus the traditional synchronized keywords, and ReadOnly and ReadWrite lock mechanisms
Concurrent Maps, CopyOnWriteArraySet and CopyOnWriteArrayList (among others) provide map, list and set semantics, but are optimized for highly concurrent access in reading and manipulating these collections
You can read Alex's blog postings on tech.puredanger.com
The Lambda Lounge is located in St. Louis, and is located at www.lambdalounge.org.
The Strange Loop Conference website is available at www.thestrangeloop.com.

Enjoy, and thanks, Alex!

Ken

Episode 36 - Sean Blanda of TechnicallyPhilly.com

techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 04:00:00 GMT

I had a great conversation with TechnicallyPhilly's Sean Blanda last week. We talked about how the Philly IT scene is still lively, and about how he and his two compadres Brian James Kirk and Christopher Wink gather and write up news on their lively and informative website.

Technically Philly covered our Philadelphia Emerging Tech show in the spring (article here).

Some of our topics of conversation have related articles:

Someone who bikes a lot on the trails in Philly (we have a lot of good road biking trails here) wrote an app to track crime on the trail.
Read their article about recycled machines ending up in Ghana
Read up on the state funding issues for Ben Franklin Technology Partners, a capital group based in Philadelphia.

Enjoy the website. You can hit it from www.technicallyphilly.com or www.tphilly.com if you don't want to type so much, and it's iPhone friendly.

Episode 35 - A few beers with Chariot's Open Source Integration Experts

techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 04:00:00 GMT

Last week I had the pleasure of hosting a roundtable chat over drinks with four of our integration experts. I wanted to discuss some of the issues facing companies today, including how to approach integration projects, and when to use technologies like SOA ESB platforms.

My guests were:

Rod Biresch
Tom Purcell
Roberto Rojas
Steve Smith

You can read their blogs by visiting their links on Chariot's Bloggers Page.

We had some interesting discussions around open source tools.

Key Topics:

SOA Platforms
1. Apache ServiceMix
2. Fuse
3. Mulesource Mule ESB
Integration Tools
1. Spring Integration
2. Apache Camel
Tools and Techniques
1. Enterprise Integration Patterns
2. Governance tools such as Mule Galaxy
3. Monitoring Tools such as Hyperic / Mule HQ / JBoss JON / SpringSource AMS

Feedback always welcomed!

Episode 34 - James Ward on Flex 4, Flash Builder, and more

techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 21:31:00 GMT

Today's guest is James Ward, of Adobe Systems. James is a technology evangelist on Flex and AIR solutions for Adobe. We talked about the upcoming Flex 4.0 SDK, Flash Builder (the new name for Flex Builder) and other topics such as remoting, AMF and various implementations of the AMF format.

This is a good podcast to listen to if you are interested in the future of Flex, as there are some significant changes and improvements on the horizon.

Items of note:

Flash Builder Beta - Download link.
Flex 4.0 Beta (Gumbo) - Project homepage.
AMF binary remoting and BlazeDS
Some UI frameworks - PureMVC, Swiz and SmartyPants (IoC based), Parsley (also mentioned Matt(e) but no link handy.)
RubyAMF
James' web site
Drunk on Software!

Enjoy the podcast, I think you'll find it informative.

Episode 33 - Peter Muir from JBoss on JSR-299 (JCDI) and the WebBeans RI

techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com — Wed, 13 May 2009 22:00:00 GMT

JSR-299, the API formerly known as WebBeans, is a Java-based configuration and dependency injection system for the Java EE platform. In fact, the JSR has been renamed as such with the short name JCDI, and the original title 'webbeans' went to the reference implementation, which is being led by my guest, Pete Muir of Redhat/JBoss.

Pete and I discuss the JSR, what features it brings to Java EE, where to find information about the specification, and the WebBeans reference implementation.

Links to information related to the episode:

Pete blogs on the in.relation.to site: http://in.relation.to/Bloggers/Pete
Pete's presentation on WebBeans and JSR-299
Pete's Seam 3 Presentation
Upcoming talk on JSR-299, hosted on Sun's "The Aquarium"
Good reference book on WebBeans available from the Seam website (current link here)
Official JSR-299 public draft #2 docs
WebBeans user forum on the SeamFramework site

Enjoy the interview!

Episode 32 - Grails discussion with Brent Baxter and Gordon Dickens

techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Grails is a convention over configuration web framework, written in the Groovy dynamic language and based on the widely adopted Spring and Hibernate frameworks. In this TechCast, I sit down with Chariot's Gordon Dickens and Brent Baxter and discuss the relative merits of developing applications on the platform. We talk about the Groovy language, the productivity of building applications on the Grails platform, available plugins, and overall uses for the platform.

Grails Training at Chariot on May 11
We are running a one-day seminar on Grails at Chariot on Monday, May 11. Sign up using the promotional code 'techcast' and receive 50% off the cost of the seminar. Visit the course information page for details.

Groovy key points

Groovy compiler generates Java ByteCode
Groovy collections are easy to work with
Closures - blocks of code that can be passed around anonymously
The each method for iteration, key and value for maps -vs- just lists
Groovy GDK - Groovyized Java library classes (each, etc)
Groovy and XML - XMLSlurper for parsing, Markup Builder for XML emit
Installing Groovy - and the Groovy Console
Groovy 1.6 - Grape dependency management
Groovy is being embedded in SOA/Integration containers (Camel, Mule, etc)
Mounting Groovy scripts in Spring: the Spring <lang:groovy> namespace

Grails framework key points

Visit the grails kickstart page to walk through many of the topics we've talked about, including:

Grails create-app to build an application skeleton
Domain Classes and dynamic finders
Controllers and scaffolding

Episode 31 - ETE 2009 Keynote - RedHat's Michael Tiemann - Exonovation

techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 20:10:00 GMT

This podcast episode is a recording of Michael Tiemann's keynote presentation from the 2009 Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference. Michael is RedHat’s VP of Open Source Affairs, and has a long history in working on open source projects. He is the president of the “Open Source Initiative,” and has served as the CTO of RedHat, and founded the first open source software company, Cygnus.

Michael’s talk focuses on "Exonovation", or innovation from an open community, and how it can make a product even better than a closed, controlled, proprietary effort. It is a very interesting talk, and for those who want to follow along with the slides, you can go to http://www.chariotsolutions.com/slides/pdfs/ete2009-ExonovationTieman.pdf

Books discussed during the talk:

The Only Sustainable Edge: Why Business Strategy Depends on Productive Friction and Dynamic Specialization: John Hagel III, John Seely Brown - This book questions the zero sum gain theory espoused by Harvard Business School.
Democracy in America: Alexis de Tocqueville (the link is a free transcript download)
Unlocking the Sky: Glenn Hammond Curtiss and the Race to Invent the Airplane by Seth Shulman. Referred to when discussing the Wright Brothers' assumption that instability was a key feature of flight.
As We May Think : Vannevar Bush, the Atlantic Monthly, 1945 - Vannevar imagined the Internet (or something eerily like it) in this paper.
Outliers: The Story of Success - Malcolm Gladwell

Web Links:

Michael Tiemann’s blog - http://opensource.org/blog/8
Truth Happens - http://truthhappens.redhat.com/
The Open Source Initiative - http://www.opensource.org

Show Sponsors:

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Episode 30 - Interview with Squarespace.com's Anthony Casalena (and sponsorship announcement)

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 13:47:00 GMT

I had been listening to Leo Laporte's tremendous This Week in Tech (or MacBreak Weekly) podcast, and found out about SquareSpace.com from the show. The crew was raving about how easy it was to use to publish web content, and how it blew away Wordpress in terms of productivity. So I set up a free trial for my personal account and was also suitably impressed. In doing research I found that SquareSpace is a Java-based platform, so, since the Chariot TechCast focuses on successful Java platforms, it made for a great fit. I did an interview a few weeks ago with the creator and co-founder,
Anthony Casalena, who is responsible for the technology backing the site.

You'll hear how Anthony created the site primarily to solve his own frustration with using blogging tools, and how the technologies are applied to serve a large number of customers on a handful of actual servers. During the lineup of the interview, SquareSpace offered us a sponsorship, and we accepted. If you use the keyword 'TECHCAST' during your free trial to register for a plan, you'll get 10% off the cost of any of their plans.

Technologies mentioned in the podcast:

Apache OJB - Object Relational Mapping API for Java
Apache Tomcat - web application server
SQL Server - relational databases

Episode 29 - Manning Authors Forum with Dan Allen, John Resig, David Black

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 14:18:00 GMT

On today's show, we feature the Manning author's Q&A forum. Marjan Bace is the co-founder of Manning Publications, which publishes books on a wide variety of technical topics.

Last year at ETE, Marjan assembled the web framework shootout (if interested... part 1, part 2). This year Chariot asked him to assemble an author’s forum, where he takes questions from the audience on writing books for publication.

The panelists are Dan Allen, author of Seam in Action, David Black, author of Ruby for Rails and the upcoming title, The Well-Grounded Rubyist, and John Resig, author of the upcoming Secrets of the Javascript Ninja.

This is a very interesting look at what it takes to write a book, what it demands of you, and what you end up learning in return. Marjan, Dan, David and John did a great job.

Episode 28 - Sonatype's Jason Van Zyl on Maven, OSGi and Tycho

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 02:00:00 GMT

Today’s show is a recording of the Philly Emerging Tech session by Jason Van Zyl, of Sonatype. Jason is the creator of Maven, a java build tool that works using a set of conventions and plugins.

This talk focuses on the current challenges in building OSGi based modular applications using Maven, and how the Tycho project enables easier integration between headless builds from tools such as Hudson, the Maven POM, and the Eclipse IDE. You may download the presentation at http://www.chariotsolutions.com/slides/pdfs/ete2009-MavenAndTheFutureofOSGi.pdf

Links:

Sonatype's blog page on all things tycho.
Sonatype's m2eclipse plugin

Episode 27 - Blue State Digital Jascha Franklin Hodge on Obama Social Media Campaign

techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com — Tue, 7 Apr 2009 14:03:00 GMT

One of the highlights of the 2009 Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference was our afternoon keynote from Jascha Franklin Hodge, from Blue State Digital.

Mr. Franklin Hodge cut his social media teeth working on the Howard Dean campaign. Blue State Digital built and managed the Barack Obama campaign website, which provided news, email correspondence, coordination with official and unofficial leaders on events, YouTube and video/audio media, and more.

This keynote highlights the successes of properly using the internet and social media to run a successful campaign including contrasts with the McCain effort as well as discussion of lessons learned.

A copy of the presentation slides is being processed, and will be made available soon. For now, you can view the slides from an earlier presentation at MIXX Canada, on Slideshare.

Episode 26 - Andy Hunt on Pragmatic Thinking and Learning

techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com (Ken Rimple) — Thu, 2 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Andy Hunt is co-founder (along with Dave Thomas) of the Pragmatic Programmers. Their seminal book, The Pragmatic Programmer, gave every developer a nudge, and started their publishing company, The Pragmatic Bookshelf.

Andy's latest book (his seventh) is Pragmatic Thinking and Learning, Refactoring your Wetware. His keynote at 2009 Philly Emerging Tech covered topics from the book, and was a fantastic walk down memory lane (sorry, couldn't resist). Seriously, folks, his talk was all about maximizing your ability to learn and retain knowledge. Here are some great books he mentioned:

Andy Hunt: Pragmatic Thinking and Learning
Mihaly Csikszent: Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (P.S.)
Dan Pink: Whole New Mind
Betty Edwards: Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

You can find Andy's writing on the Pragmatic Bookshelf or on his blog, toolshed.com. For a mind map of his key topics, click here.

The second part of the podcast includes audio from the Destruction Zone. Pictures were posted at our ETE Flickr Group. The company, Wondergy, allowed us to tear apart old fax machines, printers, computers and cell phones, and worked with Chariot to line up green recyclers to haul it all away. You'll hear a little audio, although distorted, of the bashing of a copier, as well as an interview with Wondergy's Ken Fink, on how the project came together.

Episode 25 - Emmanuel Bernard on Bean Validation JSR-303 and Hibernate Search

techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com (Ken Rimple) — Wed, 1 Apr 2009 15:05:00 GMT

In this podcast, we speak to JBoss's Emmanuel Bernard on the future of validation using JSR-303, the Bean Validation framework. JSR-303 aims to provide an annotation-driven mechanism to mark plain old java beans with annotations, such as @NotNull, @Min, @Max, and can support custom validation annotations as well.

JSR-303 is part of the Java EE 6 suite of JSRs and will be used automatically out of the box by frameworks such as JSF 2.0. Emmanuel also goes into some detail about the current state of Hibernate Search. Useful links:

Hibernate Validator (4.0.0, which is currently in alpha 3, is the reference implementation of JSR-303).
The Bean Validation RI RoadMap, which contains a link to useful resources such as the updated JSR (more up-to-date here than on the JSR page itself).
Emmanuel's Hibernate Search in Action, published by Manning, and co-authored with John Griffin.
Hibernate Search Project Homepage
JSF 2.0 and JPA 2.0 project homepages
Emmanuel Bernard's blog, No Relation To.

Episode 24 - Dan Allen on Seam, Part 2

techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 14:31:00 GMT

Last Thursday I had an opportunity to sit down with Dan Allen and talk about the Seam Framework. Dan was a great resource for learning about Seam. This is the second of a two-part interview, where we focus on the future of Java EE 6, including JSR-299, formerly known as WebBeans, and how Seam will change as the Java EE specification evolves. We also discuss varying front-end technologies such as Flex and AJAX, and a bit about workflow.

Resources we mentioned in the talk include:

Granite DS - graniteds.org - A Flex remoting framework that includes support for Seam as well as other platforms such as Guice, Spring and POJOs
Flamingo - Another Flex (and JavaFX) remoting framework that exposes Seam and Spring services using a variety of protocols including AMF and Hessian.
The JSR-299 Specification. Dan claims it is a decent read and it seems to be something every Java EE developer needs to be aware of at some point in the near future.

Show notes are available at techcast.chariotsolutions.com.

His upcoming talk at the Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference on March 27th covers implementing Security in Seam. Dan is the author of Manning's book, Seam In Action, which can be purchased in paper or PDF form. He recently became a Red-Hatter, which he blogs about at his blog/website, www.mojavelinux.com. You can also find him on in.relation.to, a blog site running on JBoss Seam that covers topics such as Seam, JBoss Tools, WebBeans, Eclipse, and RichFaces. His twitter ID is #mojavelinux.

You can follow the Chariot TechCast on twitter as techcast, and visit chariotsolutions.com for more information about our company.

Episode 23 - Dan Allen on Seam, Part 1

techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 14:18:00 GMT

Last Thursday I had an opportunity to sit down with Dan Allen and talk about the Seam Framework. Dan was a great resource for learning about Seam. This is the first of a two-part interview, where we focus on the Seam framework itself, how it differs from Spring and other frameworks, and how it marries JSF and POJO as well as EJB components, providing a stateful view of the world and making programming easier for APIs such as Java Persistence.

His upcoming talk at the Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference on March 27th covers implementing Security in Seam. Dan is the author of Manning's book, Seam In Action, which can be purchased in paper or PDF form. He recently became a Red-Hatter, which he blogs about at his blog/website, www.mojavelinux.com. You can also find him on in.relation.to, a blog site running on JBoss Seam that covers topics such as Seam, JBoss Tools, WebBeans, Eclipse, and RichFaces. His twitter ID is #mojavelinux.

Episode 22 - Chris Richardson on Cloud Foundry

techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 20:57:00 GMT

Today, I speak to San Fransisco based consultant Chris Richardson, author of Manning's POJOs in Action, and creator of Cloud Tools and Cloud Foundry, both tools created to simplify working with Amazon Web Services for Java and Grails applications.

Chris and I speak about the growth of Cloud Computing, as well about his projects. We also discuss the increased adoption of Groovy and Grails as a rapid development platform.

Pertinent links:
Amazon Web Services
Cloud Tools
Cloud Foundry
Grails

Thanks to Chris Richardson for coming on the show. A reminder for our upcoming Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference, hosted in Philadelphia, PA, on March 26 and 27. With over 50 speakers across a wide variety of topics, it is fast becoming the East Coast event to see. Tickets are selling fast, so to reserve your seat, visit www.phillyemergingtech.com today.

Archives of the show, as well as show notes, can be found on our website, techcast.chariotsolutions.com. You can email feedback to techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com.

Episode 21 - SpringOne Conference Redux, Day 2

Thu, 4 Dec 2008 12:46:00 GMT

Day two of SpringOne is recapped here by our three Chariot consultants in the field: Rich Freedman (greybeardedgeek.net), Michael Pigg and Dmitry Sklyut (itdependstm.blogspot.com) all give us their take on the sessions of the day. Topics covered include the Spring Tomcat server offering, Spring DM, the keynote, Spring MVC, upcoming Java EE features in Spring 3.x, and more.

Episode 20 - SpringOne Conference Recap, Day 1

techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com — Wed, 3 Dec 2008 03:54:00 GMT

Chariot is bringing you coverage from the 2008 SpringOne show floor. This initial podcast, recorded today with Rich Freedman, reviews the Rod Johnson keynote, including Spring 3.0 features, the upcoming "Application Configurator" and more.

Episode 19 - Cloud Computing Panel Redux

techcast-feedback@chariotsolutions.com — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 12:00:00 GMT

Today's podcast is a redux of last Friday's "Fall Forecast, Computing Among the Clouds" panel discussion. Moderated by Ken Rimple (me), our guests were

Kortina, a Google App / EC2 Developer
Chris Richardson, author of Manning's POJOs in Action and developer of CloudTools, an EC2 deployment framework
Chris Cera, CTO of Vuzit, an Amazon EC2 / S3-based product for managing various document formats online
Toby DiPasquale - a long-time user of Amazon EC2 and S3

The panel discussed various aspects of cloud computing, including administration, scalability, security, tools and various strategies. It's a good listen, with lots of interesting debate and dialog.

Enjoy the show. Please email your comments to techcast-feedback@chariotsolutions.com. Show notes will be available within a few days.

Thanks,

Ken

Episode 18 - Interview with Dan Diephouse of MuleSource

techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com — Mon, 6 Oct 2008 18:18:00 GMT

This podcast interview features Dan Diephouse of MuleSource. We talk about his work on XFire, CXF and his current efforts with Mule. We discuss WS-* and REST, and other web service integration issues.

Time is running out to sign up for the Chariot sponsored Cloud Computing Conference, Fall Forecast, Computing Among the Clouds on October 17th, 2008 at the Penn State Great Valley campus in the western Philadelphia suburbs.

For more information about this and other Chariot Tech Cast shows, visit our shownotes page at www.chariotsolutions.com/podcasts/techcast/shownotes.

Episode 17 - Interview with James Ward of Adobe Systems on Flex

krimple@chariotsolutions.com — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:00:00 GMT

If anyone has been listening since our very first Podcast, we covered flex way back in February with our own Peter Paugh. But when we had an opportunity to talk to James Ward of Adobe, a Flex evangelist and someone passionate about Flex as well as Java development, we jumped at the chance.

James was a great interview, a fantastic source of information, and will be a good listen. We talk about Flex, Flex Builder, the open sourcing of various technologies, the Open Screen project, why Java developers should care, and many more topics.

Helpful links and resources:

The Census Benchmark App - James has been working on this for a while. It is a benchmarking application comparing various RIA / AJAX technologies and speed of operations like sorting, table management, etc... An interesting way to see relative performance metrics.
Flex Home - the main Flex developer site.
Adobe Open Source - James mentioned this site a lot. This is where Adobe places all of its' open-sourced technologies.
The Flex SDK Download Page - The open source, freely available SDK
The Shockwave File Format - Adobe has fully documented the SWF file format.
The Open Screen Project - a consortium including Adobe that wants to push Flash onto mobile devices by opening up the standards and exposing the flash player. More info at the FAQ
Gnash - an open-source flash movie player mentioned in the show
AMF - (pdf download) the ActionScript Message Format - Read up on this, as Flex supports AMF for fast transfer of data between client and server.
BlazeDS - A server-side Java remoting technology using AMF.
LiveCycle ES - A commercial, J2EE-based server platform for Flex development from Adobe.
FXStruts - the FXStruts Library allows Struts developers to expose java objects within a Struts application using AMF

James Ward's blog and useful information is located at www.jamesward.com. The Flex Show episode 50 is also a good listen...

Episode 16 - Ken Interviews DreamIt startup TapInko

krimple@chariotsolutions.com — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 11:28:00 GMT

In this third interview about startups and technology, Ken interviews two of the founders of TapInko, a marketplace for buying and selling ads. Ken spoke to Nicolas Warren and John Newell, who architected their application in Microsoft .NET.

What we find interesting about these three ventures is the differences in approach. One team focused on getting ideas out quickly, another focused on application development using a combination of PHP and Python, and this team focused on .NET and building out an application framework first. Listen to this team's approach, as we start in the middle of a conversation about building software out of nothing. (I need to credit that quote to Dave Thomas of the Pragmatic Programmer...)

Correction: I had originally mentioned that John Valentine was an interviewee, but it was, in fact, John Newell. My apologies.

Episode 15 - DreamIt Startup PhrazIt talks about their startup with Ken

krimple@chariotsolutions.com — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 11:23:00 GMT

This is the second in a three part series on technologies and startup companies. Ken sat down with the founders of PhrazIt, a social web site focused on short reviews of 30 characters or less. The team originally started, and will continue, a concept called Study Buddy, which would allow college students to find like-minded study mates.

The three founders, David Kosslyn, Ryan Schoen and Shankar Ramaswamy, are college sophomores at MIT and Harvard.

Episode 14 - Ken talks to DreamIt startup venture Snack Feed

krimple@chariotsolutions.com — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 11:16:00 GMT

This is the first in a three-part series of interviews we did at DreamIt, a startup incubator located at Drexel University's science center. DreamIt sponsors 11 different startups, houses them in the incubator, and gives them some nominal funding and education on the startup process.

Snack Feed uses the social web to share videos between users. The team members built a FireFox plugin that you can use to publish content to four major vendors at the same time, and also uses PHP and is beginning to work with Google App Engine for some of its' technology.

Ken spoke to Founders Jason Cyril Laan, Christopher (CC) Laan, and Mika Ohiorhenuan.

Episode 13 - Toby DiPasquale on Google, Map-Reduce, Hadoop, Amazon EC2 and more

techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com — Fri, 1 Aug 2008 12:10:00 GMT

This week we feature an interview with Toby DiPasquale of Invite Media. Toby and I discuss the Map-Reduce algorithm, which is the engine that powers Google's indexing and data processing systems. We start off by discussing how Google started indexing pages, using traditional methods such as C/C++ routines. Quickly this became unmanageable, as the amount of data to index outstripped the processing power and traditional data transformation paradigms.

Toby and I then go into discussing Map Reduce, which was originally posited as a thesis and then published as a seminal paper in the community. Map Reduce has been implemented by Google, and as we'll see in the podcast, others followed suit and created the Hadoop engine, a Java-based Map Reduce solution.

We talk about Hadoop and it's various subprojects, and then get into a discussion on Amazon EC2 and the Cloud Computing movement, including why it is valuable to organizations who want to scale from one to potentially dozens of CPUs.

I'll post the show notes early next week at http://www.chariotsolutions.com/podcasts/techcast/shownotes. Until then, enjoy the show and comments are always welcome.

Note: the podcast audio got a bit distorted on Toby's side, but I don't think it distracts too much. Rather than re-record the interview I'm presenting it as-is.

Episode 12 - Interview with Chris Cera of Vuzit on Ruby and Rails Development

krimple@chariotsolutions.com — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 20:17:00 GMT

This week I'm starting an occasional series of interviews on non-Java or non-traditional platform development. I am looking for reasons that people choose Ruby on Rails, Python, and other languages in lieu of Java EE or .NET, especially in startup organizations. This interview features Chris Cera, the CTO of Vuzit (http://www.vuzit.com), which is a document web services startup funded by DreamIt Ventures (http://www.dreamitventures.com), a Philadelphia-area seed funding program. We talk about his experiences with various dynamic languages, including Perl and Ruby, and why he feels Rails is a great development platform for his company. At the end of the interview Chris and I get into a discussion about what makes a good programmer / developer. Thanks for listening. Feedback can be directed to me at krimple@chariotsolutions.com. KR

Episode 11 - Peter Paugh on Google Web Toolkit

krimple@chariotsolutions.com — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 21:00:00 GMT

A discussion with Peter Paugh, one of Chariot's architects and Rich Internet Application developers, on the current state of GWT. GWT was just revved to version 1.5, and is becoming a good Java-based alternative for writing Rich Internet Applications. Peter and Ken discuss GWT as a platform, the cross-browser compiling mechanism, and other details, and also talk about the controversy surrounding GWT-EXT caused by moving of the license from the LGPL to GPL.

Episode 10 - ETE Keynote, Lucinda Holt of Commerce 360 on Technology Waves

krimple@chariotsolutions.com — Wed, 28 May 2008 04:23:00 GMT

Commerce 360 CEO Lucinda Holt discusses technology waves and how organizations use them to their advantage. She compares four competing movements in adoption a new or disruptive technology: Custom development, Tooling, Applications and Platforms. She gives many examples from her own past and offers thoughts on how to "ride the waves" that may be appropriate for your organization. The presentation, once loaded, can be accessed at our presentations page It is a shockwave file, which should open in your browser. Click on the blank screen to start the slides. If you cannot run the presentation, you should install the latest Macromedia Flash player.

Episode 9 - Web Framework Shootout, Part 2 (Language)

krimple@chariotsolutions.com — Tue, 20 May 2008 13:42:00 GMT

Today we feature the second of a two part session from the 2008 Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference. The session, entitled "Web Framework Shootout," was assembled and moderated by by Manning co-founder Marjan Bace and was one of the highlights of the conference. Speakers included Yehuda Katz, Chad Davis, Max Carlson, Robert Hansen, Bear Bibeault, Chris Richardson, Dan Allen, Emanuel Bernard, Peter Armstrong and Obie Fernandez. Quite a group!

I have lightly edited the quiet patches, and edited out one or two questions where people were speaking off mic and nobody responded. If you hear dropouts, it's because of those reasons, no major content was left out.

This half does contain a few curse words and some heated debates. There is a very interesting exchange between the Java and Ruby camps.

Episode 8 - Manning Web Framework Shootout at Chariot ETE 2008

krimple@chariotsolutions.com — Thu, 15 May 2008 20:05:00 GMT

Today we feature the first of a two part session from the 2008 Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference. The session, entitled "Web Framework Shootout," was assembled and moderated by by Manning co-founder Marjan Bace and was one of the highlights of the conference. Speakers included Yehuda Katz, Chad Davis, Max Carlson, Robert Hansen, Bear Bibeault, Chris Richardson, Dan Allen, Emanuel Bernard, Peter Armstrong and Obie Fernandez. Quite a group!

The show was broken into two parts due to the fact that it ran rather long (over an hour). I have lightly edited the quiet patches, and edited out one or two questions where people were speaking off mic and nobody responded. If you hear dropouts, it's because of those reasons, no major content was left out.

The second half promises to be even more entertaining than the first. I'll publish that segment next week, as we need to beep out a few choice words as the conversation got quite heated. Enjoy the podcast!

Episode 7 - Andy Oswald on Running Ubuntu Linux on a MacBook Pro

krimple@chariotsolutions.com — Wed, 14 May 2008 21:33:00 GMT

If you're at all adventurous, you've probably loaded Linux on a PC sometime in your life. Some of us avoid that pain by running (screaming) to Mac OS X, where we have a nice, pretty view of the world behind shiny and metallic, stylin' boxes.

Not Andy Oswald. He's a tried-and-true Linux OS guy (Ubuntu, actually). When given a Mac Mini to play with, he really enjoyed kicking the tires, playing with those fun apps, but when it got down to brass tacks, he felt more at home on Linux.

Once Andy got his MacBook Pro, he dug around and found a small community of users running Ubuntu on the Mac. And he's now one of them. Learn how he fared by listening in. If you do this yourself, we highly recommend thinking twice, backing up, and using the right machine for the job (NOT YOUR WORK ONE!)

The show notes can be found at http://www.chariotsolutions.com/shownotes/show/7.

Episode 6 - What's new in Spring 2.5? (ETE Presentation)

krimple@chariotsolutions.com — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 04:21:00 GMT

This presentation, by Rossen Stoyanchev from SpringSource, was delivered at the 2008 Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference. Rossen discusses changes in the Spring Framework version 2.5, concerning Java and J2EE, AspectJ, OSGi, Annotation-driven configuration, Spring MVC, and new testing support with the TestContext framework.

You can find the presentation slides on our web site at http://www.chariotsolutions.com/slides/pdfs/ete2008-RossenStoyanchev-spring-2.5.pdf.

Don't forget to visit the show notes page at http://www.chariotsolutions.com/podcasts/techcast/shownotes.

Episode 5 - Interview: Dmitry Sklyut on OSGi

krimple@chariotsolutions.com — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 14:52:00 GMT

Today's show features Dmitry Sklyut, a Chariot consultant who is an expert in the Spring Framework and has been researching the OSGi initiative. We talk about OSGi as a platform, the various containers, tooling support, and integration with Spring.

Episode 4 - Rails 101 by Aaron Mulder (ETE Conference Session)

krimple@chariotsolutions.com (Ken Rimple) — Thu, 3 Apr 2008 18:28:00 GMT

Today's show features Aaron Mulder and his Introduction to Rails talk. It was recorded at Chariot's 2008 Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference. You can find many of the presentations in the Downloads section of Chariot's web site, www.chariotsolutions.com.

Aaron's presentation is entitled Rails 101. Click here for the PDF file and follow along. iTunes users: the URL is http://www.chariotsolutions.com/slides/pdfs/ete2008-rails-101.pdf

The ETE conference was held at Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA. Learn more about Drexel's iSchool at www.ischool.drexel.edu.

Episode 3 - Interview: Scott Fraser of Portico Systems

krimple@chariotsolutions.com (Ken Rimple) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 15:45:00 GMT

In this episode, Ken talks to Scott Fraser of Portico Systems.
Scott has over 20 years of experience in the IT industry, and
co-founded Portico eleven years ago with CEO Ned Moore.
Scott and I talk about scripting Java with Jython,
large-scale 64-bit Java VMs, user interfaces using Netbeans'
Visual Library, and more.

This episode features new theme music from http://www.podcastthemes.com.

Epsiode 2 - Tom Purcell on SOA Enterprise Service Bus Technology

krimple@chariotsolutions.com (Ken Rimple) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:00:00 GMT

Ken speaks to Tom Purcell, an architect with
Chariot Solutions, about Enterprise Service
Bus technologies.  They discuss when an ESB
might be used in an SOA environment, some of
the vendors, technical and non-technical 
challenges.

Epsiode 1 - Peter Paugh on Adobe Flex

krimple@chariotsolutions.com (Ken Rimple) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 12:00:00 GMT

Ken speaks to Peter Paugh, a solutions 
architect at Chariot Solutions, about 
his experiences with Adobe Flex, and 
how it might fit into application 
development as a Rich Internet Application
framework.