New Release of Apache Camel Now Available

The newest release of Apache Camel is now available for download! Grab the binary release as a tarball or a zip now. It includes a big list of improvements and new features driven from the Camel community. This is a great testament to the continuing widespread adoption of Camel.

Just a few of my favorite items include:

• Camel's Maven archetypes


• clarification of the recursive property on the file component


• The use of exclusive locks for reading a file to prevent reading a file before it's fully written


• Some new options on the tracer


• The Eclipse Templates for Camel (nice work Jon)

There are many, many more items in the full list of improvements, take a peek.

A couple weeks ago I spoke about Camel at the Colorado Software Summit and received a lot of wonderful feedback. Folks at the conference really enjoyed the session, so much that three separate people began writing Camel routes after seeing my session and were really enjoying its simplicity.

Free Maven, m2eclipse, Nexus and Hudson Training Next Week!

If you want to brush up your skills with Maven, m2eclipse, Nexus and Hudson then you should get to this free training in New Orleans next week!

Brian Fox, Jason van Zyl and I will be in New Orleans for ApacheCon US 2008 next week and are offering a free one-day training in order to gather feedback on the course material. The course is intended for folks already familiar with Maven and will focus on using Maven proficiently with your team, working with Maven in Eclipse via m2eclipse, managing your artifacts with Nexus and automating your build and testing it with Hudson.

The training will be held at the Marriot on Tuesday November 4th from 9am to 4pm. To sign up for the course, please email us at training at sonatype dot com. Availability is on a first come, first served basis so we suggest you sign up quickly.

Everyone is welcome and make sure to bring your laptop!

Open Source is Free Software - What's Your Opinion as a User?

My friend Greg Wilkins recently wrote a thought-provoking post about free software and open source. I encourage you to go read it, but I also encourage you to think about what it means to YOU. My experience has taught me that it's too easy for those of us who are actually working on open source projects to have a clouded point of view so I'm always very interested in your opinion as a user of open source but not a developer of the open source you use.

Something I found compelling was an analogy posted in the comments by a reader. The following is the quote:

Taking without contributing at all is destructive. My local bank branch is 5 mins walk away. It has free coffee for customers. I am a customer. What happens if I no longer buy coffee at home but get all my coffee from the bank? What if I go a step further and sell the bank's coffee in my coffee shop? Most likely, this will mean no more free coffee in the bank, for anyone. By your logic I didn't do anything wrong. BUT I HAVE PRODUCED A BAD OUTCOME "Everything free" might be a noble aim but how can it work in practice? You fail to consider the practical implications of "take with no give."

While this analogy seems good, it kinda misses the mark slightly. The bank's business model is based on the financial services it provides. The coffee is just a small perk to keep you happy while you are there using the bank's financial services. So the analogy doesn't isn't 100% stable, though I still see the author's point. If you are a consumer of open source and you contribute back in absolutely no way, then the community is said to be at risk. Remember, contributing is as easy as participating in mailing list discussions and filing bugs. That's exactly how I tend to get started with any open source project because the bar for participation is usually pretty low.

Anyway, it's an interesting topic for sure as I've had many of these types of discussions over the years at software conferences, on consulting gigs and even inside the companies where I have worked. What's interesting is very wide range of the points in such a discussion. But I digress...

seq Unix Utility for MacOS X

Today I needed the seq Unix utility and I discovered that MacOS X does not have it. Neither does MacPorts :-(. So I Googled for it and found that scripting god Dave Taylor (who lives in Boulder) has a blog post about this. He provides a shell script that produces basic seq functionality and it works great. Now I'm able to write quick little one-liners like this:

for i in $(seq 1 10); do cp ~/tmp/cheese.xml ~/tmp/cheese$i.xml; done

Thanks, Dave!

Me Meme

Idea from Tim.

1. Take a picture of yourself right now.


2. Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair…just take a picture. (should be super-easy with Photobooth)


3. Post that picture with NO editing.


4. Post these instructions with your picture

Maven: The Definitive Guide Now Available For Use With Post-Its!

OK, OK, hands up, who likes to litter their technical books with Post-It flags? I've consulted to many companies over the years and every time I'm at a company I can immediately tell where the developer area is located based on the number of Post-Its hanging out of the books.



If you've ever had questions about using Maven, integrating Maven with Eclipse or using a repository manager, then you should grab a copy of Maven: The Definitive Guide from Amazon so you can litter it with those Post-It flags, notes, highlights, etc.

A *lot* of work went into this book and it shows. It was written by many of the folks who created Maven and made it what it is today. So it's full of insider information and examples.

Before blindly purchasing a copy however, I recommend taking a look at the freely available version on the Sonatype website. Although I've suggested the digital version to many, many folks over the last few months, I've heard a fair amount say that they still like to have an actual book. For those that want the actual book to hold, here's your chance!

BTW, check out that link above to the Post-Its. Who knew there were so damn many Post-It products today!

Register to Vote NOW!!!

REGISTER TO VOTE NOW!!!

Colorado Software Summit Approaching

It looks like the session schedule for the Colorado Software Summit has been made available just yesterday. This is the time where all the speakers figure out where they're speaking slots fall throughout the week.

For those that have never attended, the Software Summit is a yearly software conference in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado in late October. Last year on my drive up, it was a blizzard of snow once I got through the west side of the Eisenhower Tunnel. Of course, the next day all the snow had melted and the weather was beautiful again. That's one reason why I love Colorado :-).

This year I'm speaking about Service Oriented Integration With Apache ServiceMix and Taking Apache Camel for a Ride. Both talks are about integration with Apache projects.

This year Raible and I are sharing a condo with Jason. The dude abides.