Apache Camel and EIP at JavaOne 2009

Looks like I'll be headed to San Francisco to speak at JavaOne in June. If you're at all familiar with the wonderful Enterprise Integration Patterns book, then this will be of interest to you since it's focused on using the EIP patterns in your applications.

I'm doing a session titled Enterprise Integration Patterns In Practice with Andreas Egloff from Sun. Andi is going to speak about Fuji and I'll be talking about Apache Camel. Both software packages allow you to make use of EIP patterns in their own way. We're planning to discuss the patterns themselves and where they might fit into your applications, the use of Domain Specific Languages to express EIP patterns, the relation of EIP patterns to items such as Message Oriented Middleware and Service Oriented Architecture and we'll do a demo of both Fuji and Camel.

Direct Linux Kernel Input

CAUTION: Wicked powerful feature in Linux

I've worked with Linux since back around 1995 or 1996 and I was not aware of this feature until yesterday. Did you know that you can send commands directly into the Linux kernel via /proc/sysrq-trigger? You can instruct the kernel to perform such tasks as rebooting the kernel and crashing the system among many others. This winds up being very handy for testing purposes (and incredibly powerful).

Just don't invoke this command without first checking with your sysadmin or you might be heavily flogged.

40% Off of ActiveMQ in Action!

Starting today Manning is offering 40% off ActiveMQ in Action (either print+ebook or just ebook) redeemable at checkout. You can use the coupon code activemq40 to get the discount. This offer expires on Tuesday, 31 March 2009.

Your Mom wants you to buy this book!

Web Designer/Webmaster Position at SpringSource

Please DO NOT APPLY for this position if you:

• Are a talentless hack whose best skill is procrastination


• You crumble under pressure


• You disdain collaborating with coworkers

Please DO APPLY for this position if you:

• Enjoy working in Flash, Illustrator and Photoshop


• Live to hack CSS, Javascript and PHP


• You are enthusiastic and focused on users and their experience on your websites


• You enjoy working with an incredibly talented group of folks


• You want to work for a company whose products are incredibly popular and have been adopted far and wide

At SpringSource we're looking for somebody who lives to handle everything about websites from graphic design to technical infrastructure to marketing to support to site analytics.

APPLY TODAY.

Systems Integration Has Done It Again, Mein Furer

Below is a clip from a film about Nazi Germany named Downfall(Der Untergang in German - thanks Emmanuel). The subtitles were added so as to relate the entire clip to systems integration and the seeming battle over control amongst teams inside of a company (as well as a little hat tip to my friend Ross and his system integration product named Mule). This had me laughing out loud a few times - absolutely hilarious!



For some reason the embedded video is a bit chopped so here's the link to YouTube.

Safari 4 Beta - Nice and Speedy

I've been a dedicated Firefox user for years now, but I tend to open many, many tabs at once causing it to push the CPU quite a lot. This isn't a big deal when my MacBook Pro is plugged in but when running on battery it means that the battery life can take a serious hit - down to less than two hours at times. So over the last few months I have tended to dance back and forth between FireFox and Safari even more.

Although there are some FireFox plugins I use fairly regularly, I've been living OK without them in Safar. The biggest discovery I made in Safari a couple months ago was the restoration of tabs and windows after quitting Safari. Firefox handles this automatically. After poking around under the History menu I found an option named 'Reopen All Windows From Last Session' and another option named 'Reopen Last Closed Window'. These two options in Safari are the equivalent of two options I use in Firefox all the time. The difference with Firefox is that it will prompt you when it opens asking if you'd like to restore the tabs and windows from the last session. Then this week I saw some folks talking about upgrading to Safari 4, so I took the plunge and it was well worth it.

1. Safari 4 is simply much faster. GMail is incredibly fast (not a huge surprise since it has always been faster than Firefox) - even faster than Safari 3.


2. The new visual history feature named Top Sites is nice eye candy but not earth-shattering as Opera already has similar features.


3. Top Sites also offers a nice search feature. It's really no different from standard history searching but it uses Top Sites so it shows the visual preview of the pages in your history.


4. Tabs have been moved to the very top of the overall window which is a little goofy looking at first, but they can be dragged around and even dragged off the current window to make a new window or even dragged onto an existing window to form a tab.


5. Autocomplete on the browser command line with a suggestion about what you're typing is pretty cool.


6. The reload button has been moved to the end of the browser command line (like the iPhone).


7. Safari 4 upgraded and didn't break the DeliciousSafari plugin I use. Very nice considering that many Firefox plugins need to be upgraded after a FireFox upgrade.

I'm sure there's much more to the Safari 4 upgrade, but these are the items I noticed right away. Here's a list of 150 features in Safari 4 from Apple with the new features flagged.

One thing I found odd was that the upgrade required MacOS X to be rebooted. I'm sure there's good reason, but what a PITA. Oh well, small pain for big gains in speed.

UPDATE: Well, what I said about the DeliciousSafari seems to only apply to it. It looks like 1Password is not working at all so I need to look into reinstalling it.

Do You Need Integration Patterns? You Need Camel

I'm in Germany consulting this week and it is cold and snowy - brrrr. I miss the Colorado sunshine.

This is just a quick re-blog of Jon's awesome entry about EIPs and Camel named Apache Camel... more EIPs than you can shake a stick at!.

If you need enterprise integration patterns, you need Apache Camel.