JBoss A Developer's Notebook

I love these developer's notebooks. I wish I could have gotten one for MFC back in the day. The new one on JBoss by Norman Richards and Sam Griffith, Jr., is no exception. In fact, as a long time JBoss "User" (definitely a four letter word in the JBoss world), I can say it's some of the best material on the subject. It's always been tough to find good docs for JBoss, but it's such an awesome J2EE server, that users like myself just muddle through. For the past few years I've been depending on Meeraj Kunnumpurath's excellent JBoss 3.0 Handbook, but "JBoss a developer's Notebook" will be the first thing I reach for now.

I've been using JBoss for almost 5 years now, so I was suprised as to how many things this book cleared up for me. I especially liked the chapter on Security and the final chapter, which is on rolling out JBoss into production. I'm a programmer, so most of my JBoss experience is setting up local or development servers. In the past, I've worked with smart system admins to get JBoss setup on the production servers, but in my new, much smaller business, I'm faced with doing it myself. I feel much better now that I've got this book within reach.

A Beautiful Day in Ann Arbor

Tough day for MSU fans in Ann Arbor. Although I'm not much of a sports fan, I couldn't have had a better day yesterday. I hope the poor MSU fan with the Chevy Truck is a Tigers fan.

My friend AAron kicked off the tail gating around 1:00 pm with, unbelievalbe as it sounds, power drinks and vodka (definitely the lunch of champions). We were quickly joined by Daniel and the three of us, plus Harriet, Hester, and Pearl went in search of the blue balloon.

The Blue ballon is where friends of AArons were tailgating. It took us a few hours to make it through the crowd. The dogs where so good, but of course, they slowed us down. AAron quickly got annoyed by answering all the typical questions that go with walking the girls.

Q: What are they?

A: St. Bernards.

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Q: How much do they eat?

A: About 45 lbs a week (but the alchohol bill is a killer)

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Q: What are there names?

A: Harriet (if you were Daniel), Hester (if you where me), and Pearl (if you where AAron)

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Q: How much do they weight?

A: About 200 pounds

Q: Do you have them all in your house?

A: Dammit, leave me alone.

Well, we eventually found the Blue Balloon and shortly after that the very awesome Nortel party. They actually let us in thanks to my friend Brian. What a great party, besides the Keg, Scotch, and food, they had a band and of course screens to watch the game on. Another huge bonus was we had a continuous supply of water for the girls.

Eventually we were joined by everyone who is cool, including my wife Mary. All around, a great day in Ann Arbor.

MSU vs. UofM

Tomorrow is going to be a beautiful day in Ann Arbor, a perfect fall Michgan day. It looks like Mary and I are going to be tail gating with the girls (Harriet, Hester, and Pearl, our three St. Bernards). My dad might come down and we're certainly going to be joined by a few other friends. Heck, we might even watch the game.

EJB 3

I've been working with Hibernate 3 using hibernate-annotations.

This was really just a fluke, I needed solid O/R mapping and my previous experience with Hibernate was very positive. In addition, I've fallen in love with Java Annotations and didn't want to deal with any messy XML files to define my mappings.

I was amazed at how easy it was to create persistant objects. Within a matter of an hour or so I was cranking right along, able to add, updated, and delete objects from the database.

In order to do this, I had inadvertantly used the EJB3 standard annotations. It's how the Hibernate folks documented their annotations, so I just went with it.

It's now been a few weeks. I've got my application on a production server (JBoss) running on a public site with MySQL in the background. I've have load tests that confirm nothing horrible is happening. It just Couldn't have been easier to create or maintain.

Then, my friend Chris called and we started talking about Spring. Chris is a serious Alpha Geek and knows his Spring very well. I on the other hand always had a hard time getting with the Spring program. I really wanted to understand what I was missing. From our conversation I realized that Spring would probably be a help for my server side components, so I started thinking about what Spring could do for me.

Then Chris sent me the following: http://www.infoq.com/news/spring-ejb-3-compared

All of a sudden I realized I was doing full blown EJB3 and didn't even know it. Although I was only doing one small part of EJB, it's a pretty important part and it looks like the rest is as easy as what I've already done. In the old days, when one wrote EJB code, they knew they were writting EJB code. I think the EJB folks heard the cries of the community and did the right thing here. Now I feel I can use EJB3 to do the things I was considering using Spring for beyond the database (really can't wait to play with Session Beans).

First Entry

I just created this new Blog and I wanted to test it out. This is part of a larger effort to learn more about publishing tools. Using Heitzeg.com as a test bed for now.