SpringSource University in Denver

On Tuesday morning I had just returned from a run at about 9:35am and was checking my messages before I showered and began working for the day. As I was reading various messages, dripping sweat and sipping on some water, I was pinged by my friend and colleague Filip Hanik on IRC. He told me that he was sitting in a classroom in Denver for the SpringSource University Core Spring Training. Here's how the conversation went:

Filip: hey
Bruce: hey, what's up?
Filip: sitting at Core Spring in Denver, but there is no trainer
Bruce: whoops
Bruce: sorry to hear that, is there anything I can do to help?
Filip: yeah, you can come down here and teach this course :)
Bruce: are you serious?
Filip: yes
Bruce: headed for the shower now, see you about 11

By 11am I was in Denver and teaching the first day of the course.

Lucky for me, Chris Beams, a stellar consultant/engineer/trainer at SpringSource, was en route to deliver the rest of the course. Chris arrived later Tuesday evening and taught the course for the rest of the week through Friday and I was lucky enough to sit in. Chris went the extra mile to arrive early and stay late for the rest of the week and even wound up finishing on time on Friday afternoon, a testament to his talents, for sure.

Using Maven? You Should Be Using m2eclipse

If you use Maven for your Java projects, then you should take a look at m2eclipse plugin for Eclipse. After all, there's now a whole book on m2eclipse instead of just a single chapter!

Enterprise Integration Patterns in Practice at JavaOne 2009

Last week I was in San Francisco to speak at JavaOne 2009 to deliver a talk named Enterprise Integration Patterns in Practice where I co-presented with Andreas Egloff from Sun.

We talked about implementing EIP patterns using Apache Camel and Sun's Fuji. I used ActiveMQ in my demo which was rather short but worked well (yay! the demo gods smiled on me last week :-) ) and Andreas showed off Sun's web-based EIP editor. Although this editor looks very cool and Andreas showed how to edit scripting code in each component on the diagram, it left me wondering how it interfaces with Java code. After our demos, my laptop would not flip back to the presentation at the end (which presented an abrupt ending) but still we received a lot of complements throughout the rest of the week.

Beyond the talk, I got to see tons of friends who I don't see that often throughout the year including Debbie, Guillaume, Hiram and Rob, as well as many new SpringSource colleagues (since the acquisition of Hyperic). I also met many, many new folks including Colin and Jamie. I was also lucky enough to eat Thai food twice (love the yellow curry) and sushi once during the week - mmmmmmmmmmm.

If you would like a copy of the presentation, just drop me an email and I'll send it your way (bruce DOT snyder AT gmail DOT com). I'm not sure how much sense the slides will make without the delivery, but it seems like folks are always requesting my presentations after the fact.

JeOS, Oracle XE and VMWare on MacOS X

Last week I installed JeOS (Just Enough Operating System) on VMWare Fusion. JeOS is a slimmed-down version of Ubuntu specifically made for installation in a virtual machine so that it has a much smaller footprint than the normal Ubuntu distribution. Anyway, I did this so that I'd have a VM with a smaller footprint that I can use on my MacBook Pro for development and testing.

After setting up JeOS, I installed Oracle XE on it. Oracle XE is a slimmed down version of Oracle that is free for development and distribution. I used these instructions for installing Oracle XE on Ubuntu but there were some catches, namely that by default the web application for Oracle XE was bound to the localhost, i.e., I couldn't see the web app from Firefox in MacOS X. This was easily remedied via this comment on a blog post about this very topic. After that, I could access Oracle XE from MacOS X. After adding a user for myself via the web app and setting up the environment on JeOS to use sqlplus, I was good to go:

export ORACLE_HOME=/usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server
export PATH=${PATH}:${ORACLE_HOME}/bin

This setup has been working very well for me until today. For no apparent reason, the networking in JeOS went flaky and I could not access the outside world at all. I switched between NAT and host-only networking in VMWare multiple times, rebooting the VM each time - no dice. I upgraded to the latest VMWare Fusion - no dice. I could SSH into the VM from MacOS but that was it. No commands from JeOS would reach the outside world. So on a whim, I reran the vmware-install.pl script again and after that the networking seems to work again. I still have no idea why this happened which is a bit troubling. I don't want to just blindly keep running the install script again with no idea why it's fixing this networking issue.

SpringSource Tool Suite Now Available For FREE!

Last week in Amsterdam, at the SpringOne EU conference, it was announced that the SpringSource Tool Suite (STS) is now available for FREE! I was very pleased that we made this move as STS is an excellent set of Eclipse-based development tools that can make your Java development much more productive.

If you use Eclipse for your Java development and you use the Spring Framework, then you should really take STS for a spin. It's just like using the Eclipse you know and love but with many added features to make your development more productive. Download the SpringSource Tool Suite now!

I also saw many great talks at SpringOne EU that showcased STS via demos using it. Here is a partial list of some that I saw:

• Development using the Spring Framework; editing Spring XML files is so much easier with STS.


• Demos of OSGi development using the SpringSource dm Server


• Many demos using the feverishly popular (and close to me because I work on it) SpringSource tc Server (BTW, the interest in tc Server is through the roof! Who knew it would be such a hit?)


• Numerous Grails demos using SpringSource tc Server


• Combined with the official unveiling of SpringSource Roo, the increase in productivity surprised even me.

One of the demos that stands out in my mind was delivered by Adrian Colyer during his keynote on day two that utilized many technologies. But the thing I remember the most (and wish that I had more time to play with) was the use of the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse and Chris Richardson's Cloud Foundry, both for working with app deployment and monitoring in the cloud. The ease with which Adrian deployed apps to Amazon EC2 and was able to monitor them were amazing. I say it was amazing because I started working with Amazon EC2 from the command line before any such polished tools were available. It is really great to see the ever-increasing ease of working with cloud-based platforms. If you haven't checked out these two tools and you work with Amazon EC2, I highly encourage you to take some time to do so. Coupled with STS, they will make your life much, much easier.

I have to say it is very cool to see the products all come together like this. It's also awesome to watch demos delivered by folks who know each tool so well. It makes me wish that we had more face-to-face meetings so that I could sponge more of the product knowledge from folks!

Apache ActiveMQ at SpringOne EU

Later this month I'll be in Amsterdam again, this time to speak at SpringOne EU about Apache ActiveMQ. It will be great to be back in Amsterdam, especially because the annual Queen's Day celebration takes place the week of the conference, which is always a fun time.

My first SpringOne conference was back in December in Florida and it was very good. Unfortunately I had a lot of travel booked back-to-back at the time so I wasn't able to be there for the entire conference. This time I will be able to spend the entire week at the conference which will be great because there are many sessions I'd like to see. Here are just a few:

• Extreme Productivity in Application Development - A talk by Ben Alex about Spring ROO


• Advanced Concurrency: Design and Construction - A talk by Rob Harrop about, well, concurrency


• Implementing REST Web Application Architectures with Spring MVC - A talk by Arjen Poutsma about the Spring 3.0 support for REST


• Practical Usages of SpringSource dm Server - Another talk by Rob Harrop but this one is about building OSGi applications


• Introduction to Spring Integration - A talk by Mark Fisher about Spring Integration (believe it or not, I don't know much about it - but I intend to learn ;-))

There are many other talks I'd like to see, just too many to list. Take a look at the SpringOne EU schedule for the full list.

Working For SpringSource

I keep hearing from folks who aren't aware that I made a move recently. So for those who don't already know it, I'm working for SpringSource now. So far the experience has been terrific because I'm surrounded by nothing but very smart people, some of whom I already knew and respected. SpringSource is most notable for one of the most widely adopted Java frameworks in existence today, the Spring Framework.

I began using the Spring Framework back in 2003 and I can't see developing any new applications without using it. Although I don't have the privilege of working on the Spring Framework, I do get to heckle Juergen and team from the sidelines. My role hasn't changed much from the past in that I continue to do consulting and engineering. I spend my time working on Apache ActiveMQ, Apache Camel, SpringSource AMS and SpringSource tc Server. I still enjoy working with customers but I'm getting to spend a lot more time doing engineering work which is a nice change.

If you want to hear me blather on more, just follow me on Twitter.