Chariot Emerging Tech Cast

DevNews #44 - Grails, Griffon, Apache Tika, our favorite developer tools and more

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 02:32:54 +0000

Rich Freedman lent some time to talk to Ken Rimple tonight over skype and re-launch the Developer News series, which has been on hiatus since February. Here are some of the topics they discussed:

Apache Tika - Apache Tika
Griffon 0.9.5 released - 120 plugins?? Wow...
Grails 2.0.3 is available
Apache Tomcat 7.0.27 released with support for WebSockets
A Computer Scientist in a Business School: The Google attack: How I attacked myself using Google Spreadsheets and I ramped up a $1000 bandwidth bill
Pivotal Labs is said to have been sold ? Tech News and Analysis (ancient link, and yes, they were, and to EMC to boot!)
The 'T' twitter command-line client
Oh my ZSH
The Android Scripting project - pure awesomeness!

The developer productivity tools they mentioned were:

Notational Velocity - Rich's note taking tool that has an Android API

Chariot TechCast, Episode #71, Brian Fox of Sonatype on Nexus 2

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 15:39:13 +0000

Brian Fox is a longtime open source contributor, having worked on Maven 2 and overseeing the development of Maven 3. He is the VP of Engineering at Sonatype, and currently leads the Nexus repository project. The team has just released version 2.0, which includes support for the growing .NET open source community and the NUGET library manager.

We discuss the evolution of Maven and repository management, the Nexus repository manager, and key features in 2.0, such as the new smart proxy and the advent of Sonatype's new repository license intelligence and health awareness.

Topics covered:

Maven 3.0 and futures
Maven central
Nexus repositories
Some Nexus architecture considerations
Nexus 2.0, repository abstractions, NUGET
Nexus Pro enhancements in 2.0

More information about Nexus and NuGet here. http://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2012/03/03/sonatype-repository-now-supports-net-framework.aspx

Chariot is a Sonatype consulting and training partner.

Thanks to Brian for speaking to us today on the Techcast.

You can find Brian's blog entries for Sonatype at http://www.sonatype.com/people/author/brian/. Nexus is available at nexus.sonatype.org.

You can find him on twitter at AT brian underscore fox, You can find out more information about Nexus at nexus.sonatype.org.

TechCast #70 - Alex Payne (@al3x) on emerging languages

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 19:29:46 +0000

Here is our interview with ETE keynoter Alex Payne. His talk, Emerging Programming Languages: a Tour of the Horizon" will be featured on April 11 at 8:30 AM.

Links will be updated over time, I wanted to get this out early.

Alex will be speaking in depth about some emerging languages at ETE. This show is a quick introduction to some of the things going on in the industry, but not as comprehensive as Alex's talk will be. We hope to see you there, and if you're not attending ETE we should have the talk available online a short time after the end of the conference.

Notes:

Alex's first real computer : Mac Quadra.

Alex on Sitepoint podcast #39
The Strange Loop Sept 23-25 2012 where Alex is helping drive the emerging languages track.
Google Go! http://golang.org
Scala
Haskell
Google Go
Dart
Kotlin
R programming language - in last few years, surged for big data

Other topics mentioned

David Unger manycore > 24 (1000) cores
Portland State University
Non determinism / cache coherency

Where to find Alex

- Twitter - @al3x
- web: http://al3x.net/

Produced by Chariot Solutions Education Services

Upcoming courses through June online now at chariotsolutions.com/training_events.

More classes added for summer soon.

DevNews #43 - Programming wisdom, videos, grails, Roo, Heroku, SQL sharing and more

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 16:17:00 +0000

Hey, all. Gordon and I cooked up a few tasty items for your digestion this week. We've got

Take your programming course with a grain of salt, please - A developer takes a college course whereby strict consequences are dished out for not following "the" rules. is this wrong?
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/118703/where-did-the-notion-of-one-return-only-come-from/118717#118717 - brought up in the discussion.
Dreyfus model of skill acquisition - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Mentioned in the discussion
McCullough and Berglund on Mastering Advanced Git?-?O'Reilly Media - A great video tutorial on Git that relates to our discussion of the Grails 101 video.
O'Reilly: Mastering Grails 101 Video - What brought us to talk about the videos in the first place...
Spring Roo 1.2.1.RELEASE available - Yes, it's updated again. This time, no book changes required (beyond search/replace) - yay!
Heroku makes sharing SQL data as easy as URL - And it's so freakin' hip.
Grails 2.0.1 Available... - An update is available to Grails that includes 80 bug fixes and other items.
Get Started with Java on Heroku - A nice site to launch a fully configured application, ready to host on Heroku, with a variety of frameworks including Spring and Play.
Specializing Generalist - You, sirrah, are a Specializing Generalist. I hope you can find it in yourself to cover for me while I'm gone. I'm also a Specializing Generalist, and my specialty is in generalizing about specialties. Seriously though, I tend to agree on this angle for staffing teams in general... Ken

TechCast #69 - Alex Hillman of indyhall.org discusses his background, ETE 2012 talk

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:30:00 +0000

This is the first in a series of podcasts centered around speakers for the Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference.

My guest today is Alex Hillman. He is a leader in the co-working movement who helped found Independents Hall, known by the shortened name IndyHall (indyhall.org).

We discuss how Alex got into technology entprenuership, his technical background, how he involved himself in the co-working movement, and we also preview the subject of his talk, Enterprise Makeover: turning cost centers into profit centers.

Links:

Beanstalk - a web-based project version control hosting platform
IndyHall.org - a co-working collective in Philadelphia that Alex Hillman helped to found
coworking.com - a web site devoted to the concept of co-working

DevNews #42 - We hitchhike through Spring, Rails, WebOS and Javascript

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 22:05:00 +0000

In this fine episode, we cover:

Spring Framework 3.1 goes GA | SpringSource Team Blog - Complete non-XML configuration support Environment Profile Support Jackson Message Marshalling Cache Abstraction c: Namespace
See Gordon's article on Spring 3.1 Profiles here and the c: constructor namespace here.
Spring Integration Home | SpringSource.org - Supports NoSQL databases: MongoDB, Redis & Gemfire Supports AMQP & RabbitMQ
HP Announces Open webOS 1.0, Outlines Release Schedule | TechCrunch - Looks like HP is serious, at least in getting WebOS to a wider audience. Question is, can they attract attention enough to make it a viable player in the mobile market, or is Android going to roll over it like a freight train. We'll discuss in the DevNews.
Riding Rails: Rails 3.2.0: Faster dev mode & routing, explain queries, tagged logger, store - Here ya go, Rails 3.2. Benefit for you - faster development mode!!
The Top 10 Javascript MVC Frameworks Reviewed | CodeBrief - A good overview of ten MVC frameworks for single-page Javascript applications.
See a number of mobile articles by our Chariot bloggers, including Steve Smith

From a list to Details View using Backbone.js and jQuery Mobile (Steve Smith)
Sorting collections with Backbone.js and jQuery Mobile (Steve Smith)
Introduction to Backbone.js with jQuery Mobile (Steve Smith)
Introduction to Sencha Touch (Don Coleman)

Thanks for listening.

Sponsors:

Chariot Solutions Sponsors the Chariot TechCast. Visit Chariot Solutions on the web at chariotsolutions.com and learn about our project consulting, mentoring and training services.

Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise is happening on April 10-11, 2012. Early Bird specials run until mid-February. Grab your tickets before they all sell out. See the amazing speaker list, including Yehuda Katz, Matz (creator of Ruby), Douglass Crockford, and many more.

Ken, Gordon and Steve

Chariot DevNews #41 - Microsoft and Secure Boot, 1 GB I/O per second, NYC High School for Comp Sci

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 18:37:41 +0000

DevNews #41 is brought to you by Chariot Solutions, leaders in software development in mobile, web, and integration, as well as mentoring and training. Find out about our services at chariotsolutions.com.

Links:

New York City gets a Software Engineering High School - Joel on Software - How cool is this? Wouldn't it be awesome to go to a tech high-school? Does a degree matter in this day and age as much as good skills and background?
Public Data Sets on Amazon Web Services (AWS) - You can fire up EC2 with data against various public datasets mounted as EBS volumes.
Microsoft confirms UEFI fears, locks down ARM devices - SFLC Blog - Software Freedom Law Center - Ok, our ETE regular Toby DiPasquale found this horrid piece of news about Microsoft's Secure Boot for Windows 8, an UEFI patent, and their newfound proclivity to wall up a previously unwalled garden.
Android Design Guidelines - See http://www.subtraction.com/2012/01/13/android-doubles-down-on-design as well for more on this topic.
Fusion-io Breaks One Billion IOPS Barrier :: Fusion-io - Wow. 1 Billion I/O per second? We love WOZ. Read on. Brent Ozar, SQL Server guy video cast - covers how they use general rules of high database throughput (solid state drives, everyone a DBA).
Use try-with-resources: Language Enhancements for the Java 7 OCPJP Exam - So, we have a new form of try statement that allows you to define 'closeable' objects within, that it then automatically closes once the try block finishes. This is a new Java 7 feature, from Project Coin. Read on...
Chariot Solutions: Introduction to Backbone.js with jQuery Mobile - Our own Steve Smith has written a practical article introducing Backbone.js and jQuery to build a mobile application. A great tutorial for beginners.
SpringSource/html5expense - GitHub - This is a HTML 5 application demonstrating cross-platform mobile using jQuery and Spring.

Big thanks and congratulations to my co-host Jason Grittman, who is moving to California - this is his last show (as a regular!). Thanks Jason for all of your help! We'll hope to have you back soon from your new roost in Silicon Valley!

Ken

Well, it's a sad day in Chariot DevNews land. We have to say goodbye to Jason Grittman, who is leaving for a new gig on the west coast.

Chariot TechCast Episode #68 - Kohsuke Kawaguchi - creator of Jenkins

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 19:31:01 +0000

Kohsuke Kawaguchi (@kohsukekawa) is the creator of Jenkins, a continuous integration tool he wrote a number of years ago as a way to verify that he checked in his files and didn't affect his multi-developer build. It is safe to say that Kohsuke wasn't the only one with that problem. A huge hit, the Jenkins CI server, which at the time was known as Hudson, reached a wide adoption level, with people installing it officially and even under their desktops in many IT development shops.

Kohsuke discusses the challenges in developing a tool like Jenkins, which changed names after the new owner of Sun, Oracle, decided that it owned the trademark to the Hudson product name. Oracle has contributed Hudson to the Eclipse foundation, and Kohsuke has continued developing Jenkins, sticking to a build per week strategy, conducting all team meetings in an open IRC forum, as well as documenting project status on their website, jenkins-ci.org.

We talk about current efforts, including supporting the plug-in developer community, writing plugins in Ruby, the CloudBees projects he's working on, and more. Thanks again to Kohsuke and Lisa Wells, who lined up the interview.

Show Notes

The Jenkins Project web site - http://jenkins-ci.org
CloudBees, cloud development, CI, and hosting - http://cloudbees.com
Testing Jenkins, from Jenkins - the CI site for Jenkins itself and other Jenkins related projects: http://ci.jenkins-ci.org
Writing Jenkins plugins - https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Plugin+tutorial
Writing Jenkins plugins, this time in Ruby! https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Jenkins+plugin+development+in+Ruby
Kohsuke's web site - http://kohsuke.org
Jenkins official twitter username: @jenkinsci

DevNews #40 - Spring 3.1 is here, Grails 2.0, and Heroku for Grails

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 19:42:00 +0000

Show Notes

Spring 3.1 goes GA - http://blog.springsource.org/2011/12/13/spring-framework-3-1-goes-ga/
Grails 2.0 Released - http://blog.springsource.org/2011/12/15/grails-2-0-released/
Grails on Heroku goes beta - http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2011/12/15/grails/
Peter Ledbrook on vert.x - http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/home/groovy-vert-x
vert.x 0.2 with limited Groovy support - http://purplefox.github.com/vert.x/
ember.js (formerly amber.js) - http://www.emberjs.com/
Google Spreadsheet in 10 min with Neo4 - jhttp://blog.neo4j.org/2011/12/neo4j-labs-heroku-neo4j-and-google.html?spref=tw
Groovy Algorithms - http://blog.chariotsolutions.com/2011/11/groovy-algorithms-shunting-yard.html
Akka Scheduler - http://blog.chariotsolutions.com/2011/10/akka-scheduler-actors-with-heartbeats.html
Scala Actors in Groovy - http://raibledesigns.com/rd/entry/concurrency_on_the_jvm_using
Philly ETE 2012 Speaker Lineup - http://phillyemergingtech.com/2012/speakers

Ken & Jason

DevNews Episode 39 - Steve Jobs RIP, MIT CS books, Roo updates

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 21:13:00 +0000

Welcome to Episode 39! This week we discussed:

Enjoy!

TechCast #67 - Ryan Campbell of CloudBees on Dev@Cloud and Run@Cloud

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 21:31:00 +0000

In this episode, Ryan Campbell joins Ken to talk about the CloudBees development platform, Dev@Cloud, and Java runtime platform, Run@Cloud. Dev@Cloud can host private maven snapshot and release repositories, your GIT or SVN version control, and hosted Jenkins CI testing.

For information about CloudBees or about the platforms, including hosted Hudson and open source CI instances, visit them on the web, at cloudbees.com.

We originally lined up CloudBees for our fall Continuous Delivery conference.

** Edit by Ken Rimple - removed some incorrect information **

Philly ETE 2011 Podcast #3 - How MongoDB Helps Visibiz Tackle Social CRM

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 18:00:00 +0000

Philly Emerging Technologies Podcast 2011 - #3

How MongoDB Helps Visibiz Tackle Social CRM

Speaker - Mike Brocious - Lead Architect, Visibiz

From the ETE Session Abstract

So you’ve heard about MongoDB and it sounds really sweet (BTW, it is!). Now you’re thinking about using it in your application. We can’t tell you if it’s right for your application, but we can tell you how we’re using it at Visibiz and that might help you with your implementation.

This presentation provides a use case of MongoDB at Visibiz. It first discusses why we chose to use MongoDB as our application’s primary datastore (what were the relevant application requirements and perceived benefits). It then covers how we’re using MongoDB in the application, touching on schema design of the primary collection and listing several secondary uses for it in the architecture. We also touch on lessons learned, as well as pros and cons.

Philly ETE 2011 Podcast #2 - Doing the Mundane a Million Times a Minute with Mark Chadwick

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 15:30:00 +0000

Philly Emerging Technologies Podcast 2011 - #2

Doing the Mundane a Million Times a Minute

Speaker - Mark Chadwick, Invite Media/Google

From the ETE Session Abstract

When dealing with high-volume distributed systems, even the most mundane tasks can be daunting challenges. This talk describes some of the steps, as well as missteps, made while building such a system. It will work through the discovery of such pain points, as well as describe their resolutions with specific technologies or patterns.

Over the course of three years, Invite Media built a high-volume system for serving online advertisements from the ground up. Some of the more interesting challenges revolved around operating routine services at scale, such as distributing requests, logging diagnostics, and keeping track of simple transactions.

This talk will dive into some of these problems, showing the evolution of simple systems at scale, with a strong bias towards cloud-hosted applications. It will include details about the discovery and resolution of bottlenecks we experienced, as well as specific technologies and pattens discovered in the process.

It may serve as a springboard for ideas when building distributed cloud-based systems, as well as hone a sense of when components may be reaching their tipping point.

Chariot TechCast #66 - Part two w/Eric Shamow of Puppet Labs

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 19:38:10 +0000

We continue our interview with Eric Shamow of Puppet Labs. Show notes to follow soon, please refer to information from TechCast Episode 65 for now.

Puppet Labs can be found at www.puppetlabs.com, and they are hosting PuppetConf, a conference on the west coast that is not only about Puppet.

A word from our sponsor, Chariot Solutions:

Mark your calendars: Chariot's DevOps seminar - October 18, 2011 at the Penn State Great Valley campus in the Philadelphia suburbs. We'll have speakers from Chariot, CloudBees, NING, Puppet Labs, Sonatype, and a panel discussion at the end. Lunch is provided as well. Save on our early bird - $75 instead of the already low price of $99. More information on the event page.

Also, if Scala is your thing, come to our Fast Track to Scala training in New York City on October 4-5, 2011. Seats are still available but they will fill up fast. The course is taught by Typesafe, the company Martin Odersky formed around Scala and Akka to move the language and frameworks forward. Save $100 by using the coupon code 'techcast' during registration, which can be found at chariotsolutions.com/education.

DevNews #38 - The world is changing (a bit) and more

Sat, 10 Sep 2011 12:48:19 +0000

This week we catch up with all of the world's news in what normally is a quiet August. Then we discuss some new releases in the Firefox world, the new Java Lambda decision, Java 7 features, and a warning about Java 7 and Lucene.

Hosts: Jason Gtitman and Ken Rimple

Show Notes

Chariot TechCast #65 - Discussion with Puppet Labs' Eric Shamow - Part 1

Sat, 20 Aug 2011 04:15:00 +0000

My discussion this week is with Eric Shamow of Puppet Labs. He'll be presenting at our upcoming DevOps Seminar on October 18th. We took a little time to discuss DevOps in general, and Puppet in some specifics.

Part two will be a deeper dive into Puppet itself. Look for that podcast in early September.

Resouces, per Eric:

http://www.puppetlabs.com/ - the main site for Puppet
Puppet Labs has recently put up a great getting started guide which should really help folks who want to get started. This page comes with a link to a training VM that you can use to get started with Puppet right away: http://docs.puppetlabs.com/learning
PuppetConf will be held on September 22-23, in Portland, OR - http://www.puppetconf.com
A great summary of a talk by Patrick Debois summarizing the notion of culture change and trust as the cornerstone for a DevOps environment: http://www.maestrodev.com/blogs/trust-as-the-cornerstone-of-devops-culture
Eric has an article, DevOps at Advance Internet: How We Got in the Door, appearing in this month's Cutter IT journal: http://www.cutter.com/itjournal.html

Eric can be found at his blog, http://opsrealist.com and via e-mail at eric at opsrealist.com. Also twitter - @eshamow

Philly ETE 2011 Podcast #1 - Polyglot Persistence with Chris Richardson

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 19:28:47 +0000

Philly Emerging Technologies Podcast 2011 - #1

Polyglot Persistence for Java Developers

Speaker - Chris Richardson, VMware

From the ETE Session Abstract

Relational databases have long been considered the one true way to persist enterprise data. But today, NoSQL databases are emerging as a viable alternative for many applications. They can simplify the persistence of complex data models and offer significantly better scalability, and performance. But using NoSQL databases is very different than the ACID/SQL/JDBC/JPA world that we have become accustomed to. They have different and unfamiliar APIs and a very different and usually limited transaction model. In this presentation, we describe some popular NoSQL databases – Redis, SimpleDB, MongoDB, and Cassandra. You will learn about each database’s data model and Java API. We describe the benefits and drawbacks with using NoSQL databases. Finally, you will learn how the Spring Data project simplifies the development of Java applications that use NoSQL databases.

Download the Slides

DevNews #37 - Heroku adds Clojure AND Mats, we talk LMAX, Grails 1.4 is now 2.0, design patterns in JS

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 19:24:33 +0000

Joining Ken Rimple this week are Jamie Allen (@jamie_allen) and Jason Gritman. Topics discussed:

Getting Involved

Want to send us audio feedback? Email your feedback, or even better, record your MP3 and share it with techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com, or tweet us at @techcast. We'd love to put your question, comment, rant or clarification on the air. But please keep it civil...

Events / Sponsorship

Chariot Solutions sponsors this DevNews episode.

Training Events in August:

August 2-5: Zero to Rails 3 Training courtesy of Engine Yard
August 10-12: Hibernate with Spring training

Find out more about our courses, including Maven, Spring, and Rails, at chariotsolutions.com/education

DevNews #36 - Kevin Griffin on iOS5, Java 7 RI is the Open JDK, Unity for Ubuntu, Listener Feedback, more

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 21:10:00 +0000

What a couple of weeks!

The Philly Emerging Tech 2011 Conference really knocked me for a loop. What a great show, and so much to process from it too. We'll have content coming in very soon, including screencasts of close to a dozen sessions. Look for announcements here and on our blog soon.

The news this week

So, we're joined this week by @kgriffin - no, not Kathy Griffin, Kevin Griffin (one's British, the other is on the B-List...) Kevin talks to us about iOS 5, what we know, what we can say without getting in big trouble. We also talk about some other things such as the HTML5 web workers API.

Then, I run through some articles, including Ubuntu's shiny new upcoming Unity desktop, the move by Oracle to open source Java even more by handing out Open JDK 7 as the new JDK RI (I know, right?), the VMWare vFabric internal cloud offering (Chariot is a SpringSource/VMware partner but we're including it because we talked about the Cloud Foundry offering, and this is a contrasting offering). We take Ben Darfler's (@bdarfler) audio feedback on the inaccuracies of our recent reporting about Jenkins and Hudson. Thanks to Ben for that feedback note!

Sponsorship/Plugs

Learn about Chariot's Training Services in Spring, Maven, Hibernate and Ruby.

DevNews #35 - A slew of Google IO announcements, Scala forces join, and more

Thu, 19 May 2011 13:00:00 +0000

In this week's episode, we've given Eric a lot of coffee and set him loose on the Google I/O announcements. We also discuss the new Scala / Akka company, TypeSafe, Hudson being donated to the Eclipse foundation, 7 inch tablets, and Matt Riable's foray into demonstrating Java EE 6 security.

The views and opinions expressed by Eric and Ken are their own, and not official viewpoints of Chariot Solutions. That said, enjoy!

Chariot TechCast #64 - Pre-ETE Conversation with Josh Clark and Jonathan Stark on Mobile App Design and Development

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 20:03:00 +0000

Podcast Information

This final pre-ETE podcast brings together Josh Clark, designer, developer and author of Tapworthy, a guide to designing great iPhone applications, and Jonathan Stark, VP of Application Architecture at Mobiquity and author of three books including "Building iPhone apps with HTML, CSS and Javascript". Chariot's Kevin Griffin and I sat down over the intertubes to get their take on mobile app design and development. Both authors are speaking at the Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference.

Jonathan Stark's twitter handle is @jonathanstark, and Josh Clark's is @globalmoxie.

Books

Tapworthy - Designing great iPhone apps - Josh Clark
Building iPhone apps with HTML, CSS and JavaScript - Jonathan Stark

Chariot TechCast #63 - Davis Frank on Jasmine, the Javascript BDD testing framework

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 17:39:00 +0000

Davis Frank is an agile software engineer who created and contributes to the open source Jasmine javascript testing framework. He created the project to help him test applications for the former Palm, now HP webOS mobile application platform, which is written in native Javascript. Pivotal has a number of projects related to jasmine on github, including the port of Jasmine to the HP WebOS framework, which he also created.

He is speaking at the Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference next week, and his talk, Practical Jasmine, will start with a 10 minute quick demo, then dive into real tips on how to best use (see how I didn't use utilize?) the framework. We spoke last week about a number of topics, including how Javascript is just a bit different than other languages, how the current testing tools didn't meet the needs of Pivotal when they were developing applications on the HP WebOS mobile platform, and about where to go to see well-written Jasmine tests (how about the Jasmine source code itself?)

Resources

Jasmine Homepage
Viddler video demonstration of Jasmine in action
Pivotal on GitHub including Jasmine and Jasmine on WebOS
The website of Douglas Crockford For crying out loud, read Javascript, the Good Parts, will ya?

Sponsor

This podcast is sponsored by Heroku - they let you deploy and scale powerful ruby-based applications on their rock-solid platform in the cloud. For more information, visit heroku.com.

Chariot TechCast #62 - Brendan McAdams of 10Gen MongoDB on Mongo 1.8 and MongoPhilly 2011

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 12:00:00 +0000

Brendan McAdams, 10Gen, the company behind MongoDB

Today's guest is Brendan McAdams. He works for 10Gen, the company behind MongoDB, the document-oriented noSQL database. Brendan is a software engineer who wears many hats - he is a developer on the Java and Scala casbah drivers, works with and commits database driver contributions to frameworks like Akka and Lift, and does community outreach and training in MongoDB. Eric Snyder and I sat down to talk to Brendan about the 1.8 release and the MongoPhilly Philly Emerging Tech Week event on April 26. We start by asking Brendan to define MongoDB. If you want to register for the MongoPhilly event and save 20%, register at bit.ly/mongophilly with the offer code 'chariot'.

Sponsor

This podcast is sponsored by Heroku - they let you deploy and scale powerful ruby-based applications on their rock-solid platform in the cloud. For more information, visit heroku.com.

Chariot TechCast #61 - Johanna Rothman on Managing Projects

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 16:59:00 +0000

Ken Rimple interviews Johanna Rothman

My guest this time is Johanna Rothman, an esteemed project management consultant who runs Rothman Consulting Group, and writes/blogs/speaks/podcasts on a wide variety of topics including Agile, managing suites of projects, and more. Her website is jrothman.com. She is speaking at the 2011 Philly Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference on April 27-28, 2011.

Podcast Topics

Some of Johanna's Books

Sponsor

This podcast is sponsored by Heroku - they let you deploy and scale powerful ruby-based applications on their rock-solid platform in the cloud. For more information, visit heroku.com.

DevNews #34 - Google hires Gosling, closes Android Honeycomb, we talk productivity

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 19:07:00 +0000

Hello there, and welcome to April 1st. Still working on those screenshot URLs from our episode on Friday, but we do have the links from articles we spoke about in the podcast below.

I bought a Mac. So sue me. | ZDNet - Hee hee, couldn't resist. Yet another person who walked smack into becoming a mac convert. Welcome to the club, sir!
Google Android 3.0 "Honeycomb": Open source no more | ZDNet - Wait, umm... Is Honeycomb closed only to Google's prime hardware partners, or is this something mis-understood? Or is it not ready to be replicated yet because it's still too early? Is Google Applifying?
Useful Bookmarklets for your iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch Browser - We use this as a launching board for talking about productivity tools.
Java Founder Gosling Joins Google - PCWorld Business Center - Fete Complete? (sic) James Gosling is hired at Google...
Participants - Philly Tech Week - Concurrent with Philadelphia Emerging Tech - Technically Philly is running a "Philly Tech Week" with a lot of great sessions. Visit the site and see the events, from ETE to a day of MongoDB and much, much more. Chariot is a sponsor of Philly Tech Week and runs Philly Emerging Tech.

Have a great week.

Ken and Eric

The opinions expressed on our developer news show are wholly those of Eric and Ken, and not official statements from Chariot Solutions.

DevNews #33 - The triumphant return of Eric, Node.js, Rails Metaprogramming, much more

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 19:54:28 +0000

We start out this week looking at the career of superprogrammer Fabrice Bellard, and move on to topics as different as RSA seed files and potential compromise, Apple's 10.6.7 update, graphing and data visualization, metaprogramming in Ruby, heck the list goes on and on…

Brought to you by Chariot Solutions Education Services. This Spring we have a Spring special - our Spring training courses are off-the-hook affordable for the months of April and May! Save some money and learn how we deliver superior training in Spring, Maven, Hibernate, and much more at chariotsolutions.com/education. Chariot Solutions is a VMware and Sonatype education services partner.

DevNews #32 - No Eric today, it's all about the Cukes, Couchbase for iOS, Wavemaker, DSLs and more

Fri, 11 Mar 2011 21:53:14 +0000

Welcome to our Developer News, Episode #32. Eric is here in spirit and on assignment. He donated three articles - see if you can see which ones are his!. As usual, our dev news show notes are here, but can be accessed at delicious.com/developernews.32

DevNews #31 - Rails 3.1 rumors, Forking and Joining in Java 7, Google Patents and more

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 22:21:00 +0000

The TechCast is brought to you this (and every) week by our employer / sponsor, Chariot Solutions. We have lots of training in Spring and Maven coming up in March, and if you hurry you can enjoy an early bird special rate. Visit our training calendar at chariotsolutions.com/education.

Links (in no specific order - you can view them also at delicious.com/developernews/31

Sponsor Links

Hurry and register for our Philly Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise before IT FILLS UP.

For SpringSource, Maven and custom training, come learn at Chariot. Course and calendar information available at chariotsolutions.com/education. We've extended the Core Spring and Spring Enterprise Integration course early bird specials for March!

Ken and Eric

DevNews #30 - Seam 3 Beta 1, Netflix hearts NoSQL, Green Beans, HTTPS myths, more

Mon, 07 Feb 2011 21:44:40 +0000

Show notes to follow. For now, visit http://delicious.com/developernews/30

Ken & Eric

Chariot TechCast Episode #60 - Ross Mason of Mulesoft on Mule 3

Mon, 07 Feb 2011 17:43:00 +0000

Ross Mason is the founder of Mule, an open source enterprise service bus that implements the Gregor and Hohpe Enterprise Integration Patterns. Easy to install and configure, Mule does not place heavy demands on developers - there is no required canonical form, services can be expressed in a number of ways, and it supports a wide range of scripting languages, from Groovy to JRuby and beyond.

Chariot integration specialist Rod Biresch and I sat down to chat with Ross recently to talk about Mule, the version 3 release, other related topics. Chariot is a MuleSoft partner.

More show notes to come.

DevNews Episode #29 - WebM takes the 'M' out of HTML5, JRuby best release ever, more...

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 17:40:00 +0000

This week's Dev News is brought to you by the letter 'M', as in 'WebM'. Google has announced that future releases of the Chrome browser will no longer support H.264, instead moving to the new WebM and VP8 codec/format. So we riff on that for a while. If you want a really good analysis from people who know Google and video really well, check out the latest episode of This Week in Google from the TWIT network.

We also discuss the App Store trend - both of us have used the Apple Mac App Store, and kinda like it, from a consumer perspective.

Big news in JRuby-land, a big release, we have it covered. Also we talk about a very nice little feature in Spring's property placeholder configuration that enables default values, right in the XML. And we follow up with a discussion on Rich Hickey's decision to close financial donations to the Clojure project.

Show notes (until it dies) are currently available on delicious.com/developernews/29. Ken apologizes for the audio quality as he recorded it on his Macbook Air's internal mic, forgetting to bring his mics back from a recording session with 'da band' this weekend.

Have a good week.

Ken & Eric

Chariot TechCast #59 - Eric Snyder on MongoDB, a NoSQL Database Engine

Thu, 06 Jan 2011 17:00:00 +0000

Eric Snyder discusses MongoDB, a document-oriented NoSQL database.

Show Notes

MongoDB is built and supported by 10gen
Information on BSON, a Binary format similar to JSON: http://bsonspec.org/
Document oriented datastore. Documents are JSON-like. Storage is really BSON, a binary representation of JSON.
Supports ad-hoc querying (like relational)
Queries are expressed as BSON documents. You can reference deeply nested attributes and there are a robust collection of query operators.
MongoDB query optimizer is not cost based. MongoDB tries all query plans simultaneously until it one completes, then it terminates the others. It then reuses that plan for the query until it begins to perform poorly
Document attributes can be indexed similarly to a relational db column.
Map/reduce is available for more complex data analysis.
MongoDB has built-in replication and auto-sharding.
Uses a native binary over-the-wire protocol implemented by various drivers. There are drivers available for many languages/environments.

=== Sponsor Note ===

Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference - April 27-28 2011 - is now taking registrations. We have an amazing array of speakers on a wide range of topics, including NodeJS, Ruby, Rails, Scala, Spring, Agile, and more. Visit the site today and take advantage of early bird registration.

Chariot DevNews Episode #28 - Web Frameworks, Amazon goes DNSing, Refining Ruby, and more

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 21:17:25 +0000

Eric and Ken talk about Amazon's new DNS server, Route 53, discuss Matt Raible's excellent web frameworks comparison study, discuss resources for Scala from the Basement Coders, talk about a new mixin feature request around the Ruby language, and more.

Disclaimers: Chariot is a SpringSource partner, and uses Amazon and Google services. The opinions of Eric and Ken do not reflect anything other than their viewpoints. Enjoy.

Chariot TechCast #58 - Adobe's James Ward on Flex 4, AIR 2.5 and more

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 21:08:46 +0000

James Ward has been a guest on numerous podcasts (ETE Evening Podcast - 2010, Episode 34, Episode 18).

He is here this week to give us the state of the state in Adobe's Flash-based RIA technologies, including Flex 4, Flash Catalyst, Air 2.5, and Adobe's support for HTML 5 and CSS 3. We discuss mobile platform technologies as well, including how Air is being targeted as the mobile flash platform for Android, the Blackberry tablet, and iOS.

Links:

First Steps in Flex - screencasts with Bruce Eckel (includes link to the book)
James Ward's homepage / blog - jamesward.com
James Ward's GitHub Repository
Jangaroo, an ActionScript -> JavaScript cross-compiler
The Adobe Edge Prototype - HTML 5 editor ala Dreamweaver, Flash Builder, etc...
What's new in Air 2.5

Mobile Application Developer Seminar - Don Coleman on State of the Art

Fri, 12 Nov 2010 18:18:11 +0000

Today's conference session is a talk from this week's Mobile Application Developer seminar series, held by Chariot Solutions, in Philadelphia.

The talk, "State of the Art for Mobile Application Development", was given by Chariot's Don Coleman, who develops both enterprise and mobile applications in a variety of platforms and languages. In this talk, he surveys the current landscape of APIs and platforms, and gives his perspective on where things are today, and where they may be moving to in the future.

Links

Presentation Slides
Javascript frameworks
- jqTouch - http://jqtouch.com
- Sencha Touch - http://sencha.com
- SproutCore - http://sproutcore.com
- IUI - http://code.google.com/p/iui
- XUI - http://xuijs.com
- Zepto - http://zeptojs.com
- Phone Gap - http://phonegap.com
- Rho Mobile - http://rhomobile.com
- Titanium Appcelerator - http://appcelerator.com
- Corona - http://www.anscamobile.com
- Adobe Air 2.5 - http://adobe.com

DevNews Episode #27 - Java, Python and the Mobile Don

Fri, 12 Nov 2010 16:30:44 +0000

This week's show includes BREAKING NEWS (we need some sort of web effect for this) - Apple is joining the Open JDK. Should really mix things up.

This podcast is brought to you by Chariot Solutions. We're hiring! Visit our recruiting page for more details.

Sponsored Events:

December 1, 2010 @ Conshohocken Marriott - Continuous Integration for the Enterprise
December 7, 2010 @ Chariot - Enterprise Integration with Spring
December 14, 2010 @ Chariot - Rich Web Applications with Spring

Act now for savings - use discount code 'spring25' for 25% off either of the Spring courses.

Chariot TechCast Episode #57 - SpringOne 2GX Recap

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 21:42:59 +0000

Recap session with Chariot's Gordon Dickens and Dmitry Sklyut.

Chariot is a SpringSource Education and Consulting partner.

Topics

Keynote
Spring Core
Spring Data
Grails and Reddis
git.springsource.org
Spring Integration
Roo 1.1 release

Ken

Sponsor Note

Visit Chariot Solutions' Education Calendar for details on upcoming training courses in Spring, Maven

There is still time to register for our Mobile Event and our Continuous Integration event, both held in the Philadelphia area.

DevNews 26 - Everybody is a Legacy Framework, Apple JDK Deprecation, IBM drops Harmony, mass hysteria

Tue, 26 Oct 2010 17:57:00 +0000

Ok, folks. So many things happened in the past week that we needed to get an episode out to talk about them. Not that Eric or me have any line into correct reasoning behind anything, but we wanted to talk, so here it is: our Cats-and-Dogs episode!

We have several debates raging in Java-land right now, between the "Spring is a legacy framework" bruhaha, the movement to OpenJDK by IBM, and Apple's deprecation of the OS X JDK. We attempt to take no side, but we also leave no stone unturned (or is that Tern unstoned) in our efforts to open up debate on these topics...

Chariot TechCast Episode #56 - Mark Fisher on Spring Integration

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 14:44:00 +0000

Interview with Mark Fisher - SpringSource, a division of VMWare on Spring Integration

Hosts: Ken Rimple & Gordon Dickens

Mark Fisher is an engineer at SpringSource, a division of VMWare, who leads the Spring Integration project. He is a Spring consultant, contributor to the core framework, and works on projects such as Spring Flex Integration and the Spring AQMP project. A long time member of SpringSource, back to the Interface21 days, Mark has deep roots in what makes Spring tick.

Spring Integration is, as Mark describes it, Spring meets Enterprise Integration Patterns. In this talk, we discuss:

How Mark got involved in the Spring Framework
An overview of Spring Integration
Discussion of version 2.0 features, including a number of new adapters, additional patterns, enhancements brought with Spring 3.0 and more

Mark is also working on Spring Integration In Action for Manning, which should be released early next year. He will be doing three talks at SpringOne in Chicago next week, covering Spring Integration,

Technologies mentioned in this podcast include:

Disclosure : Chariot is a SpringSource consulting and education partner.

Sponsor Announcement

The Chariot TechCast podcast is sponsored by Chariot Solutions.

Chariot is holding training in various Spring courses before the end of the year, including the Spring Enterprise Integration course, which covers Spring Integration as well as Spring Batch, on 12/7. More details can be found on our training calendar.

Chariot DevNews Episode 25 - Java in Stasis? Applying a chainsaw, revving Hibernate and other saucy topics

Thu, 07 Oct 2010 15:05:18 +0000

Do you know why you're binding those HQL parameters? Want to make the simplest AppEngine application in Groovy? How about learning about why you're such a bad programmer (that includes all of us, according to the post).

All this and more in today's Developer News for Thursday October 7, 2010.

Have a great week! - Ken and Eric.

Sponsored by: Chariot Solutions Events and Training for Fall/Winter 2010/11:

Event: Chariot Solutions Mobile Application Development Series - Tuesday November 9th 8:30 - 10:30 AM
Training: Core Spring Training - November 9 - 12, 2010
Training: Enterprise Integration with Spring - December 7 - 10, 2010
Training: Rich Web Applications with Spring - December 14 - 17, 2010
Training: Hibernate with Spring - January 11 - 14, 2011

Chariot DevNews Episode 24 - A triple shot of Python, RESTful Rails, and NoSQL GORM and Reddis

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 19:25:00 +0000

We've all been very busy of late. Just got a chance to catch up and so we have lots to talk about in episode #24.

Links

Upcoming Events

October 5 - Core Spring Training @ Chariot Solutions
October 12 - Continuous Integration for the Enterprise

Chariot DevNews Episode 23 - I hereby patent strange podcast episode titles...

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 21:12:00 +0000

(Sorry for the delay between shows lately. It's the summer, and I was away on vacation...)

Especially THIS week, the opinions of Ken and Eric do not reflect the opinions of Chariot Solutions...

Speaking of this week, here are the links, found also on delicious.com at delicious.com/developernews/23

Links you can use!

Blog / Podcast Disclosure: we have partnered or worked in various capacities with a number of the companies mentioned in the show, including Sun, Oracle, Google and SpringSource.

Chariot DevNews Episode 22 - We've Got Mobile and CI, Digg and grails sharding, and more

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 21:03:00 +0000

Thanks to Kevin Griffin for joining Eric Snyder and myself this week.

Articles of interest

From http://www.delicious.com/developernews/2:

The Chariot DeveloperNews is sponsored by Chariot Solutions. In September we are running a number of training courses in the Spring Framework, including Enterprise Integration with Spring and Hibernate with Spring. We are also running two one-day Maven courses - an Intro and Advanced course. Check our course calendar at www.chariotsolutions.com/education.

ETE 2010 Session #9 - Linda Rising - Deception and Estimation

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 12:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to release this recording of Linda Rising's talk on Deception and Estimation. This is a one-hour talk, and is a good talk about how we deceive ourselves in a number of ways in life in general, and of course in the estimation process.

From the abstract:

"Cognitive scientists tell us that we are hardwired for deception. It seems we are overly optimistic, and, in fact, we wouldn’t have survived without this trait. With this built-in bias as a starting point, it’s almost impossible for us to estimate accurately.

That doesn’t mean all is lost. We must simply accept that our estimates are best guesses and continually re-evaluate as we go, which is, of course, the agile approach to managing change. Linda Rising has been part of many plan-driven development projects where sincere, honest people with integrity wanted to make the best estimates possible and used many “scientific” approaches to make it happen – all for naught. Re-estimation was regarded as an admission of failure to do the best up-front estimate and resulted in a lot of overhead and meetings to try to “get it right.” Offering examples from ordinary life – especially from the way people eat and drink – Linda demonstrates how hard it is for us to see our poor estimating skills and helps work with the self-deception that is hardwired in all of us."

Thanks to Linda Rising for speaking at ETE 2010 and letting us publish her talk.

slides

Chariot DevNews Episode 21 - We have Rails 3 RC1, Grails and Griffon, and more!

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 19:49:00 +0000

In the DevNews today...

Sponsor Moment:

We are sponsored / supported by our employer, Chariot Solutions, a leader in development and integration services in areas such as Java, Spring, Flex and Ruby on Rails. Visit chariotsolutions.com/education to see our online training calendar. We're hosting courses in Spring and Maven this fall. Check us out today.

Podcast Disclosures:

We are partners with SpringSource, SonaType and Engine Yard, all of whom which may have been mentioned either directly or indirectly in this podcast.

Ken & Eric

Chariot DevNews Episode 20 - Start, Finish, or Play the Game

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 20:26:00 +0000

Amongst our weaponry...

For the full list of developer news URLs we considered, head over to delicious.com/developernews/20

Ken & Eric

Chariot DevNews Episode 19 - Releases Releases, oh pay me, HTML5 salary please

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 20:47:00 +0000

Chariot Developer News Episode #19

Hosts: Ken Rimple and Eric Snyder

The watchword this week is Release... Many releases upcoming or out, including FireFox 4 beta/preview 1, Tomcat 7 beta 1, and the upcoming Passenger 3 and GMail with HTML 5.

Links are not being loaded to delicious yet, so here they are in their glory!

ETE 2010 Session #8 - Bonnie Aumann - Are your developers BSing you?

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 19:56:00 +0000

Bonnie Aumann is an agile project manager and customer advocate for Algorithmics. Her ETE 2010 talk is entitled "Are your developers BS'ing you?" In this talk, she tries to cut through the potential blame game and IT culture issues by practicing rapid feedback and response, and Agile techniques.

Her abstract

"A question I’m often asked is how a non-technical manager like me can tell when their software team is pulling one over on them. This seems to be especially true of enterprise managers and points to structural problems with command and control development methodologies. The principlesof whole team interaction and the practices of rapid feedback and response in Agile seem to create an alternative culture in which things "just work."

Explicit tag warning

You'll hear the word "B.S." in long form several times in this talk, so anyone offended by this term should not tune in. However, it's done in context, and is very tasteful.

Resources

Bonnie's presentation page: http://ow.ly/24myk
The Tree Cartoon: http://ow.ly/24mzq
Slides from the discussion : http://ow.ly/24mAl
The Cocktail Party Effect: http://ow.ly/24mBp
Servant Leadership: http://ow.ly/24mCe
Bonnie Aumann on Twitter: twitter.com/bonniea

Chariot DevNews Episode 18 - HTML 5, Google CL, Spring Security Patch, and more

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 17:12:00 +0000

Today's episode is #18. We discuss a number of technologies. LINKS, provided by the code snippet below!

GEEK OUT!

If you're curious, here's how we fetched and converted the list from delicious rss using Groovy Console

def feed = new XmlSlurper()
      .parse("http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/developernews/18")
  println "<ul>" 
  feed.channel.item.each { feedData ->
      println "<li><a href='${feedData.link}' " +
       ">$feedData.title</a></li>"    
  } 
println "</ul>"
return null

Enjoy,

Ken & Eric

PS - Standard disclosure: Chariot Solutions is a SpringSource partner.

ETE Session 2010 #7 - Audrey Troutt - Influencing your way to Agile

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 18:59:00 +0000

Our ETE 2010 Session today is "Influencing your way to Agile" by Audrey Troutt. Audrey Troutt is a Software Engineer at the Drexel Math Forum. She can be reached on twitter at @auditty.

In this talk, Audrey describes ways to approach your team members, bosses, bosses bosses, and other types in a more productive, influential way. She discusses common pitfalls and traps, and the talk is very informative as well as entertaining. At the end of the session she takes audience questions.

Her slides are available online.

ETE 2010 Session #6 - Write once, run on any phone

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 20:54:00 +0000

ETE Session #6 is "Write Once, Run on Any Phone"

A session with Chariot's Aaron Mulder and Kevin Griffin.

They discuss three popular mobile frameworks that allow developers to write the software one time and deploy it to each phone platform supported by the framework.

Rhodes, Titanium and PhoneGap are featured.

Slides for the presentation can be found here.

Chariot BusinessCast Episode 4 - Open Source Project Selection Part 2 with Joel Confino

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 13:31:00 +0000

In Part 1, Joel discussed licensing models. In this episode, Joel and Ken talk about the other criteria in his selection process.

Criteria

License model - See BusinessCast Episode 3
Code Quality
- JavaNCSS - Free tool (and maven plugin) to analyze lines of code / number of methods, MCCabe metrics etc...
- JDepend - analyzes and checks for cyclic dependencies
Runtime Analysis
- Do a performance test - check CPU, memory, I/O peaks, etc...
Design
- Grade all software by reading the code, checking for code smell, etc. Set a short timebox to see if you can review the code and see structure, organization, etc...
- Pay attention to Bob Martin's four design principles
- Can you understand how they organized the code?
Project Velocity
Pedigree
Community
Market Penetration - ohloh.net is a good tool here
Documentation quality - can you read the docs? Read the code and understand how the docs relate? Dev, admin, test, install, etc.?
Support
Functionality and Features

Enjoy the podcast!

Joel and Ken

Chariot BusinessCast Episode 3 - Joel Confino on Open Source Software selection - licensing

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 13:24:00 +0000

Today my guest is Chariot's Joel Confino. He's worked as a consultant with a variety of open source technologies, including Java and Spring, for more than a decade. Joel has been called upon by management types on various clients to advise in matters such as open source project selection, which can be a thorny process. Today we discuss an open source evaluation and selection process that he has developed and has been made available for review in a public journal (see below).

This is a two-part series. In the first part, Joel lays out his selection criteria and why he feels most other selection processes are not comprehensive enough for the unique world of open source software. We then dive into a very informative discussion of open source license models, including the GNU Public License, the Lesser GPL, the Apache license, and variations thereof.

Of course we aren't lawyers, so always consult one before making legal agreements. But I think if you don't know a GPL from a LGPL, it's definitely worth listening to this talk.

Joel's research, also part of his Master's Thesis in Computer Science, is published in IGI Global's International Journal of Strategic Information Technology and Applications, and is available for $30 online by the publisher. Disclosure: Joel is not compensated for purchases of this paper.

In part 2, we discuss the other criteria, including code quality, project velocity, pedigree, community, market penetration, and more. We will spend a significant amount of time discussing both static and dynamic analysis of code. Look for that to be released in a few days.

ETE 2010 Session #5 - Social Media - Why Should I Care? Panel Discussion.

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 19:42:00 +0000

Today's ETE 2010 Session is another panel discussion:

Social Media - why should I care? (session details).

Panelists:

Skip Shuda - CEO, Team and a Dream
Chip Rodgers - VP and COO, SAP
Adam Coomes - President, Infegy
Erik Harbison - Senior Director of Interactive Marketing, TrueAction
Ken Rimple - Director of Education, Chariot Solutions

Disclosure: Chariot Solutions collaborates on social media efforts with Team and a Dream

Chariot DevNews Episode 17 - Roo, Gradle, Grails, Rails, Security and Cloud Backup

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 14:39:00 +0000

Our development news episode today is brought to you by the letter 'C'. C is for Cloud.

Links:

Using gradlew (the Gradle Wrapper) for Easy Gradle Execution: http://mrhaki.blogspot.com/2010/05/gradle-goodness-use-gradlew-for-easy.html
Cucumber, a brief overview: http://www.lostechies.com/blogs/joeydotnet/archive/2010/06/01/cucumber.aspx
Using OpenID authentication on App Engine: http://blog.notdot.net/2010/05/Using-OpenID-authentication-on-App-Engine
What's a plugin-oriented architecture (Grails plugins and web slices): http://blog.springsource.com/2010/06/01/whats-a-plugin-oriented-architecture/
Using SpringSource Tool Suite 2.3.3.M1 with Roo and GWT: http://blog.springsource.com/2010/06/02/using-springsource-tool-suite-2-3-3-m1-with-roo-and-gwt/
The Self Destruct File: http://blog.obiefernandez.com/content/2010/05/the-selfdestruct-file.html
Recording of Grails/Terracotta webinar... : http://dave-klein.blogspot.com/2010/05/recording-of-grails-terracotta-webinar.html
Watch AS34J - ActionScript for Java Developers by James Ward: http://www.jamesward.com/2010/05/17/watch-as34j-actionscript-3-for-java-developers/

Upcoming Events @ Chariot:

Hans Dockter on Gradle - Chariot Pizza and Beer night 6/11/2010 @ 5PM in Fort Washington, PA. It's a twofer - we're running this as a Philadelphia Groovy Grails User Group session as well. Details: http://www.phillygroovy.org/calendar/13662235/ hurry! Seating is limited to 25.
Introduction to Maven and Maven Intermediate training at Chariot 6/15 & 6/16, 2010
From Zero to Rails 3 - Rails training w/Engine Yard using pair programming and pair training techniques! Save $800 off the normal price for this one-time introductory offer.

ETE 2010 Session #4 - Panel Discussion - Challenges with Mobile Development

Fri, 28 May 2010 15:39:00 +0000

Today's ETE 2010 session is a panel discussion I chaired on mobile application development. Panelists were:

Adum Blum - @AdamBlum - RhoMobile, a re-targetable mobile application development platform
Joe Conway - Big Nerd Ranch (Apple mobile developer, trainer, mentor, co-author of iPhone Programming)
Andrew Oswald - Chariot Solutions, developer of the ETE Android application representing Android development
Kevin Griffin - Chariot Solutions, mobile developer, with interests in open source mobile application development tools, experience with Blackberry, iPhone development

Enjoy.

Ken

Chariot DevNews Episode 16 - Hush huh, Py Py, Hush Hush Maven-I, HTML 5 (sing it!)

Wed, 26 May 2010 03:59:00 +0000

Your bi-(hopefully)weekly dish of developer news, served up fresh and hot. Well, ok, one day later than originally recorded.

An un-expergated version of the links is available at http://delicious.com/developernews/16

Links

My Common Git Workflow - http://yehudakatz.com/2010/05/13/common-git-workflows/
PyPy - what a name - Python written in Python. How very meta of you! http://alexgaynor.net/2010/may/15/pypy-future-python/
Django 1.2.1 released - now with multi-database love. http://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2010/may/24/121/
Dive into HTML 5. FANTASTIC web site that goes through the history of HTML, and what HTML 5 is all about. Also a forthcoming book. http://diveintohtml5.org/
7 lessons learned while building reddit - http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/5/17/7-lessons-learned-while-building-reddit-to-270-million-page.html
Flex and Java Differences: Getters and Setters. Flex has properties, Java doesn't. Read up. http://www.jamesward.com/2010/05/07/flex-and-java-differences-getters-setters/
Java exceptions and Flex - Cornel Creanga on DZone - actually talking about BlazeDS and Java exceptions - http://css.dzone.com/news/java-exceptions-and-flex
Upcoming sessions on Rails Conf from RailsEnvy - http://blog.envylabs.com/2010/05/rails-3-tutorials/
Maven 3. 3? Wait a minute! Yes, 3. What's new in Maven 3.0 from Matthew McCullough - summarized by Matt Raible. http://java.dzone.com/articles/whats-new-maven-30-matthew

Chariot Training Events (shameless but relevant plug) related to the show

June 15 - Sonatype Maven 101 - Introduction @ Chariot in Philly
June 16 - Sonatype Intermediate Maven 201 - Learn about CI tools, repositories, site reporting, plugins, multi-module projects more.
June 22-24 - From Zero to Rails 3 with Engine Yard - A complete Rails 3 for beginners course, taught on our fab 22" iMac machines, pair programming AND pair teaching! Save over $800 now on introductory course pricing. Hurry, space is limited.
Official SpringSource Core Spring 3.0 training August 10-13 - A chock-full course from SpringSource on Spring, including overviews on Spring Security, remoting, ORM, AOP, and more.

Partners discussed in this podcast:

Sonatype
SpringSource
Engine Yard

Chariot TechCast Episode 55 - Interview with Boris Bokowski on Eclipse e4

Mon, 10 May 2010 21:58:00 +0000

Today we speak with Boris Bokowski, a committer on the Eclipse Platform UI project, and a Senior Software Engineer at IBM. His participation in Ecilpse dates back to Eclipse 1.0, when he coded the CVS client for the IDE.

We discuss Eclipse e4, an incubator for new technologies on the Eclipse project. There are several new features coming as a result of e4, including:

A new dependency injection framework for Eclipse bundles, based on the Java platform Dependency Injection JSR
A new Rich UI tool, built on Eclipse, that lets developers put together rich client platforms using Eclipse and the dependency management platform
A new eGit Eclipse git integration tool

For more information, visit eclipse.org/e4

To read about Boris Bokowski and what he is working on, you can visit his blog: borisoneclipse.blogspot.com

Chariot DevNews Episode 15 - Macros, Compositional UI vs HTML/CSS, Python and Ruby goodness

Mon, 10 May 2010 21:00:00 +0000

It has been quite a dry spell in podcast land for the listeners. We've been recovering from running Philly ETE last month, and are just starting to dig out. Content will now start coming out in regular frequency again on the Techcast. *Phew!*

This DevNews edition is more of a housecleaning of links than before. The full list we put up there is at delicious.com/developernews/15, but we only cover about 9 links or so...

News Items (covered today)

Zen Coding - templates for a variety of IDEs for HTML/CSS productivity - here is the IntelliJ article
Ruby Equality - Do YOU know the four types of Ruby equality check?
Netbeans 6.x Java EE 6 quickstart on netbeans.org
SpringSource new announcements - RabbitMQ purchase, GemStone purchase, Webflow 2.1.0 milestone 1 release, and read up on Spring's Spring EL feature in Spring 3.0
Actor-based concurrency with Python using Pysage
Microsoft embracing HTML5 and CSS3 for IE 9.0! H.264 hardware-enabled encoding for Windows Mobile is coming... BTW, here's WebKit's main page.
The RedCar JRuby IDE
7 Reasons to Hate Your Code by Yield Thought
Testing your GWT Code

The usual podcast disclaimer: The opinions expressed on the DevNews are those of the participants, and not official positions of Chariot Solutions. Also, we discuss a few technologies from our partners. Partners of Chariot Solutions include

SpringSource / VMWare
JBoss, a division of Redhat
Engine Yard

Panelists today: Ken Rimple & Eric Snyder

DevNews taking a break this week...

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 20:58:00 +0000

Sorry for the late notice, gang. Since I run the techcast and I'm consumed with various education admin / teaching responsibilities this week, we're going to take a break for one week. We will resume next week, and will also start pushing some ETE podcasts as well. Stay tuned, and as always, thanks for listening to the techcast!

Chariot DevNews Episode 14 - Sinatra, Rack frameworks, Groovy++, Rails 3, Flask and lots more

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 21:04:00 +0000

Until we can load the show notes, please visit

http://delicious.com/developernews/14

Thanks,

Ken, Eric & Gordon

ETE Thursday Evening Podcast - ETE Podcast #3

Sun, 18 Apr 2010 15:33:00 +0000

We held an open podcast on the evening of April 8th at the happy hour reception of the 2010 Philly Emerging Tech show. I had invited James Ward and Michael Cote to sit with me, and see what developed. Well, beyond the happy hour food and beer, which flowed freely, so did the conversation. Adam Coombs from Infegy sat down with us, and later Ed Burns from Oracle joined the table.

We had a great time with a wide ranging conversation. I hope you enjoy it.

Standard disclaimer for a live broadcast: Of course, the opinions expressed are our own, influenced by food and beer, and not those of our employers...

Links

All about Philly Cheesteaks (mmm, yummy!)
The banning of cross-compilers by Apple in the new iPhone SDK
Reminisce about your first computer and check out THIS cool site
The Turbo button
We podcasted from the Sheraton Society Hill who set up a nice podcasting table, complete with electric and a steady stream of beverages, in South Philly - thanks for the hospitality!

Guests

Adam Coombs of Infegy http://www.infegy.com/
Ed Burns of Oracle
James Ward of Adobe
Michael Cote of Redmonk

Thanks everyone!

ETE Session 2010 #2 - The Great Web Framework Shootout of 2010

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 20:52:00 +0000

Chariot TechCast ETE Podcast #2 - the Web Framework Shootout of 2010

Warning: NSFW

Our last web framework shootout at ETE was in 2008, and we felt it was high time for another meetup. Since then, Rails and Merb have merged, JSF 2.0 was released, Grails has become more mature, Spring has moved into annotation-driven configuration in a big way, and there are still a ton of choices for an architect to make when choosing a web framework.

This year the shootout is led by Robert Hanson, author of Manning's GWT In Action, who was a speaker on last year's podcast. This is a Not Safe For Work download, as it involves some cursing and stronger statements, but overall it's no worse than you'll hear when meeting up with a few of these guys at a bar.

Slides have been published by Robert on his website. We will have them soon as well as a large number of slide decks at chariotsolutions.com/downloads/presentations.

Speakers in this shootout include, in no particular order:

Chris Richardson of Cloud Foundry/SpringSource/VMware
Dan Allen and Lincoln Baxter III of JBoss, a division of RedHat
Alex Payne of Twitter
David Black of Cyrus
Scott Davis of Thirsty Head
Yehuda Katz of Engine Yard
Jeremey Grelle of SpringSource/VMware
Ed Burns of Oracle

All told, we have representatives arguing for Rails, Grails, Seam, CDI, Spring, Spring MVC and JSF, but also discuss JavaScript "we are solving problems from 10 years ago," component abstraction -vs- scripting on the page, the eternal Java versus Ruby debate, and many more.

Music for the podcast was performed by Chariot's Andrew Oswald.

Chariot DevNews Episode 13 - Cassandra likes the Groovy Python Migration Script!

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 21:04:00 +0000

Lots of topics this week. Shownotes are available on delicious.com/developernews/13 as well. Submit your story ideas as tag "devnewsideas" and we'll look for them before each show.

South 0.7 Released
Python 2.7 Release
The future of CSS: The Flexible Box Model
MGG 254: Storage, AirDisk, 10.6.3 Woes, SD Cards, and WebKit
Groovy 1.7.2 - Three Features Worth the Upgrade | Javalobby
Mercurial: Early Thoughts | Javalobby
[Not covered on the TechCast] Wow. This is big news. The father of Java has left Oracle : Time to move on... : On a New Road
Spring batch has an upload facility that can take spring configuration data : Uploading Job Configurations to Spring Batch Admin | SpringSource Team Blog
Jason Seifer has moved on and is doing a podcast called The Ruby Show with Dan Benjamin. The new show is at 5by5.tv/rubyshow, the existing railsenvy.com website is empty : Rails Envy

Thanks for listening. You can head over to the DevNews forum at PhillyEmergingTech to leave feedback or discuss the show. Forums:

Chariot Solutions is a SpringSource and EngineYard partner (relevant partners for this podcast episode.

Ken Rimple & Eric Snyder

ETE Session 2010 #1 - Michael Cote of RedMonk on Cloud Computing

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 20:58:00 +0000

Chariot Solutions TechCast - ETE 2010 Conference Session #1 - Keynote Session from Michael Coté, analyst from RedMonk

I first ran into Michael Coté's work back in 2008 when we put together the Chariot Cloud Con East conference. Among the many grandstanding blogs about cloud computing at the time, RedMonk was a place we could go to read about emerging trends, such as Platform as a Service and Software as a Service.

Useful links:

Conference Abstract (including slides link)
Michael Coté's RedMonk page
Follow @cote on twitter…

Chariot DevNews Episode 12 - Countdown… HTML in 5, Flex in 4, Spring in 3.0.2, darn!

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 19:47:00 +0000

Show notes available at

delicious.com/developernews/12

Hope to see you at ETE 2010 - if not, please visit the techcast site, or chariotsolutions.com for news about show recordings and video.

Ken & Gordon

Chariot DevNews Episode 11 - Fluffy Cloud Computing, Rails with any JAR, jQuery for all...

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 21:31:00 +0000

Bookmarks available on delicious.com/developernews/11

Chariot DevNews Episode 10 - Lots of Spring and Java today

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 20:11:00 +0000

As always, social bookmarking on delicious.com for the devnews

delicious.com/developernews/10

However, here are the links...

Links:

Follow us on twitter. Official news: @techcast and @chariotsolution - Ken Rimple is @krimple, Gordon Dickens is @gordonad

Partner Disclosures

Chariot has consulting and/or education partnerships with SpringSource and JBoss

Chariot BusinessCast Episode 2 - KYW NewsRadio's Steve Butler on Social Media

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 20:03:00 +0000

Steve Butler is the Program and News Director for KYW News Radio, a well-known AM news radio station broadcasting out of the Philadelphia region. The station has adopted social media platforms such as Twitter and podcasting, in order to disseminate news items and provide longer-format content to their listeners. Mr. Butler is interviewed by Tracey Welson-Rossman.

Chariot DevNews Episode 9 - We Drizzle CouchDB all over the MySQL and Gradle it out to teams who pair...

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 21:12:00 +0000

Due to all of my various time constraints, this is the "Brown Bag" edition of the Developer news - now without jazz!

Our show bookmarks can be found on:

www.delicious.com/developernews/9

Thanks,

Ken, Eric (apparently earlier I wrote Scott) & Gordon

Episode 54 - Gradle creators Hans Dockter and Adam Murdoch - Part 2

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:02:00 +0000

Gradle is an application assembly and build management platform that provides for convention-based build processes like Maven, but also implements a dynamic, groovy-based scripting and plugin system to make it very easy to customize your builds and perform specific steps at any point along the way. My guests today are Hans Docter, who is the creator of Gradle, and Adam Murdoch who is a committer to gradle, and is the CTO of Gradle Inc, a company founded to support development teams working with gradle in the field.

Useful links

The gradle.org website
Adam and Hans' Gradle Inc. developer support site
Follow Gradle news on twitter - @gradleorg on twitter

This is part one of a two-part series.

Thanks for listening. Our podcast audio themes are free theme #3 and #4 from podcastthemes.com

Chariot DevNews Episode 8 - Grails, Griffon, Django, db4o and more!

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:37:00 +0000

Links to follow soon… You can read the devcast bookmarks at

http://delicious.com/developernews/8

Thanks,

Ken, Brent, Eric and Gordon

Episode 53 - Gradle creators Hans Dockter and Adam Murdoch - Part 1

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:32:00 +0000

Gradle is an application assembly and build management platform that provides for convention-based build processes like Maven, but also implements a dynamic, groovy-based scripting and plugin system to make it very easy to customize your builds and perform specific steps at any point along the way.

My guests today are Hans Docter, who is the creator of Gradle, and Adam Murdoch who is a committer to gradle, and is the CTO of Gradle Inc, a company founded to support development teams working with gradle in the field.

Useful links

The gradle.org website
Adam and Hans' Gradle Inc. developer support site
Follow Gradle news on twitter - @gradleorg on twitter

This is part one of a two-part series.

Thanks for listening. Our podcast audio themes are free theme #3 and #4 from podcastthemes.com

Chariot DevNews Episode 7 - PyCon 2010, Unladen Swallows, Rocket Scientists, and more

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 16:22:00 +0000

Developer news segments are a weekly program, run by Chariot's application developers and architects. This week we discuss PyCon 2010 with Eric Snyder.

Links can also be found on delicious.com at delicious.com/developernews/7

Submitting a news link? Just add one with the public tag 'devnewsideas' and we'll try to incorporate it into the show.

Note: Sorry about the audio in this show - we need to set up better mics for a multi-guest recording...

Links for this show:

Thanks from Ken, Brent, Eric and Gordon!

Chariot DevNews Episode 6 - Lots of new software releases

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 23:30:00 +0000

All DevNews bookmarks are available at

delicious.com/developernews/6

Thanks for listening!

Ken & Brent

Episode 52 - Peter Neubauer on neo4j - a graph database

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 21:37:00 +0000

Peter Neubauer (Twitter :@peterneubauer) is the COO of Neo Technology and one of the founders of neo4j - a graph-based database engine. We talked about the neo4j project and discussed how it can be used from Java and other languages as an alternative that can provide highly scalable access to related data.

Resources

neo4j home page
The top 10 ways to get to know neo4j
Presentation landing page for Tobias Ivarsson - Python and neo4j at PyCon
Social querying with Gremlin, the Graph Programming Language project - example using DBPedia
How gremlin and neo4j work together

Chariot DevNews Episode 5 - Clojure, Charting, Scripting is Groovy...

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 20:11:00 +0000

Sponsorship: Our sponsor this week is the Philly Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference. Early bird registration is extended - get your tickets this week - more information, including our schedule, is available at phillyemergingtech.com. Speakers include Uncle Bob Martin, Michael Cote, and many, many others.

You can find the articles we've bookmarked at Delicious.com. Our URL for this week is:

delicious.com/developernews/5

As always, you can bookmark items of interest on delicious.com and add the tag "devnewsideas" and we'll try to incorporate them into the show.

Ken & Brent

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

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:32:00 +0000

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!

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 21:48:00 +0000

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

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 15:49:00 +0000

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!

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 22:26:00 +0000

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

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 22:15:00 +0000

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

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 13:00:00 +0000

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

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 22:11:00 +0000

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 +0000

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, 07 Dec 2009 15:51:00 +0000

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, 02 Dec 2009 16:43:00 +0000

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

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:26:00 +0000

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

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 21:34:00 +0000

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

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:00:00 +0000

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

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:35:00 +0000

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

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:17:00 +0000

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

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

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:53:00 +0000

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

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:28:00 +0000

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

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 18:20:00 +0000

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

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 17:30:00 +0000

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

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 18:26:00 +0000

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

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 13:00:00 +0000

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

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 04:00:00 +0000

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

Chariot BusinessCast Episode 1 - (nee TechCast Episode 36) - Sean Blanda of TechnicallyPhilly.com

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 04:00:00 +0000

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.

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

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 04:00:00 +0000

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

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 21:31:00 +0000

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

Wed, 13 May 2009 22:00:00 +0000

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

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 14:00:00 +0000

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

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 20:10:00 +0000

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:

SquareSpace.com - A hosted content management and blogging platform that makes publishing your web content easy. Sign up using the promotional code 'techcast' for a 10% discount on your monthly service.

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

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 13:47:00 +0000

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 +0000

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 +0000

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

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 14:03:00 +0000

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

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 15:00:00 +0000

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

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 15:05:00 +0000

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

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 14:31:00 +0000

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

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 14:18:00 +0000

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

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 20:57:00 +0000

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, 04 Dec 2008 12:46:00 +0000

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

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 03:54:00 +0000

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

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 12:00:00 +0000

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

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 18:18:00 +0000

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

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:00:00 +0000

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

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 11:28:00 +0000

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

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 11:23:00 +0000

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

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 11:16:00 +0000

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

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 12:10:00 +0000

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

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 20:17:00 +0000

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

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 21:00:00 +0000

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

Wed, 28 May 2008 04:23:00 +0000

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)

Tue, 20 May 2008 13:42:00 +0000

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

Thu, 15 May 2008 20:05:00 +0000

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

Wed, 14 May 2008 21:33:00 +0000

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)

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 04:21:00 +0000

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

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 14:52:00 +0000

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)

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 18:28:00 +0000

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

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 15:45:00 +0000

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

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:00:00 +0000

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

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 12:00:00 +0000

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.