Hippo CTO blog - Arjé Cahn

Monday 2nd, Tuesday 3rd and Thursday 5th of November
Oakland, CA
Content Tech, Hadoop, Lucene, NoSql, OSGi/Felix, SocialAndWidgets, Subversion, Tomcat, Traffic Server Podling, WebCrawlers, WebServices

Join us for a third year of Apache Meetups! Users, committers, managers and developers will come together on the evenings of Monday 2nd, Tuesday 3rd, Thursday 5th of November .

Registration is free of charge, and everyone is invited. Register on the meetup wiki pages:

Monday 2nd (BarCamp Apache during the day)

• 20:00 - 22:00 NoSqlMeetup Room 1&2
• 20:00 - 22:00 Tomcat Room 6

Tuesday 3rd (BarCamp Apache during the day)

• 20:00 - 22:00 Lucene Room 1&2
• 20:00 - 22:00 OSGi/Felix Room 3
• 20:00 - 22:00 Traffic Server Podling Room 4

Thursday 5th

• 20:00 - 22:00 Content Tech 1&2
• 20:00 - 22:00 Web Services 3
• 20:00 - 22:00 SocialAndWidgetsMeetup
• 20:00 - 22:00 Web Crawlers Room 5
• 20:00 - 22:00 Hadoop Room 6
• 20:00 - 22:00 Subversion Room 7

If you're interested in any of these popular open source projects, come join us for an evening of presentations and discussion with the creators and committers working on the projects themselves.

Hosted by and located at the ApacheCon, these five special community meetings are taking taking place on the days before the ApacheCon conference in Amsterdam. Entrance is FREE for everyone, so sign up quick!

Location
Marriott Oakland City Center
1001 Broadway | Oakland, CA 94607 | +1 510 451-4000

What is a Meetup?

• Focused on a single Apache project
• Organized by the members of the project community itself
• Open agenda, anyone can propose a talk, covering a wide range of subjects related to the core project
• An opportunity for users, interested people and committers to get together

MeetUps generally happen during the evening, and, most importantly, are supposed to be fun (as well as useful).

ApacheCon is the official conference of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), drawing ASF Members, innovators, developers, vendors, and users to experience the future of Open Source development. Drawing internationally-renowned thought-leaders, contributors, influencers, and organizations in the Open Source community, ApacheCon offers insight into the culture and community that develops and shepherds industry-leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server - the world's most popular Web server software for ten years running.

About ApacheCon US 2009

These special Apache Meetups are organized as free side events next to their bigger sister conference, the ApacheCon US 2009.

ApacheCon is the official user conference, trainings, and expo of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Celebrating its landmark 10th Anniversary, ApacheCon US takes place November 2 - 6 at the Marriott Oakland City Center, California.

The global conference series gives attendees a 360-degree view into the highly lauded community that develops and shepherds industry-leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server - the world's most popular Web server software. ApacheCon offers participants the opportunity to deepen their understanding of Open Source methodologies and further advance their participation with like-minded peers in a relaxed, community-focused environment. More than 500 users, developers, and thought leaders are expected to attend.

With engaging keynote addresses, technical presentations, informal networking, Birds-of-a-Feather discussions, and entertaining social events, ApacheCon US 2009 gives participants the opportunity to choose from more than 60 sessions at the beginner, intermediate, and expert level. From mission-critical implementations to groundbreaking technologies, incubating projects, and collaborative development, ApacheCon presenters and faculty are passionate about some of the hottest issues at the heart of the industry.

Register today at http://www.us.apachecon.com/c/acus2009/about.

Posted by Arjé Cahn at 2:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week, XML turned 10. Hurray!
Incredible that it's just 10 years ago.

Crunching my memory, I think the first time I came across XML was somewhere in the end of 1998, when I was working on a Microsoft technology based CMS. Since people have been harassing me with this horrendous error ever since, I hereby would like to make a public confession.

The stupidest thing I ever did with XML
Store a 100Mb of XML data in a single MS Access record using ASP.
It took ages to store or retrieve the data, and I kept all data in memory for operations before I flushed it back to Access. And the database obviously crashed all the time. But you know, learning comes with making mistakes.

The coolest thing I ever did with XML
Giving all attendees of the Cocoon GetTogether a virtual seat using SVG and Cocoon SVG-to-JPG transformations :)

The stupidest thing I ever saw someone else do with XML
Calculate a square root using pure XSL transformations (this one is actually courtesy of Ard ;) )

So what was your best XML moment?

10 years old. Can you imagine? Not even old enough to visit high school. Another 8 years before XML will be allowed to drive a car.

Read more on the W3C website..

Posted by Arjé Cahn at 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I felt sad for Lars - one of my Cocoon buddies - when he told me that his company lost its primary investor. They're now forced to close down the shop. A horrifying experience, and I really wish Lars and his collegues all the best. But are they really in such a bad situation?

It surprised me that Mindquarry's investors spend their money on an open source company without really understanding the business model behind it. But by pulling out, they might be doing the originators a big favor.

For half a year, the developers have been able to build their product, while getting all of their bills paid by someone else. Now that the investor is gone, the company shuts down. But the code, the knowledge and the intellectual investments are still very much alive.

Mindquarry released all of their code under an Apache Software License, so whatever they produced, will still be available to the general public. That of course includes the original developers. The investors will not be able to monetize any intellectual property of the technology they paid for while they go ahead and kill the company. Instead, their only option is to simply pick up their bags and go somewhere else.

To contrast that, the Mindquarry developers *will* be able to continue their work and possibly even build a new business model around it. After all, the technology they spent all their time on, is still freely available.

Did the investors realize this when they invested in their open source startup? And did they think of it when they decided to move out? Was it their intention, or not, or did they just not care?

It's very similar to the Kazaa/Skype/Joost way of working: the smart guys get to keep all the technology for themselves while they sell the 'brand' to someone else (eBay, for example). In this case, the technology is safeguarded by an open source license which makes the case even smarter. The code is not just in the hands of the owners of the brand, the investors, or even the smart guys that developed it. It's out there in the open, waiting for new people to pick it up and continue work.

From a customer point of view, it's an extremely bad situation to see the company that you've put your faith in go belly-up. But at least, given the open source nature of the system, *someone* will be able to continue the product they've invested in and build up some proper support around it.

It's a very good thing to see that this time, the bubble didn't just burst leaving nothing behind. Previous bubbles killed people's jobs, their investments and the products they've been working on so hard. Instead, there's still a tool, a community, a piece of technology that can be used and continued. All money and efforts are not just lost because of some silly investor pulling the plug. Oh no, they've actually done the developers a huge favor: they paid all their bills for 6 months, let them do whatever they thought would be good to do, and then got the hell out just before the open source process really got to kick in.

Now it's up to the brains behind Mindquarry to take benefit of this situation and leverage what they've been building up.

It would go too far to say that Lars and friends are in a much better situation now they got rid of their investors. They still need to get their lunches paid for, and without someone backing them up that will be very hard to do. They can use all the support they can get. I wish them luck.

But hopefully this experience will grow the product stronger, living out there in the open.

Go for it, Lars, don't let this opportunity slip away :-)

Posted by Arjé Cahn at 5:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So,

Does Hippo CMS (and as a consequence, Apache Cocoon) support the Chinese character set?

Here's part of the answer:

Continue reading to see how I set it up within 10 minutes.

Continue reading "Got Chinese?" »

Posted by Arjé Cahn at 6:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Building a large web application that *must* have extendable UI widgets in Cocoon is very hard to do. We've had this with our applications, since we have to tell our community to learn almost every single aspect of Cocoon in order to be able to extend our widgets: the sitemap, Java, XSL, Flowscript, Cforms, JXTemplate, Javascript, CSS, HTML, and many more. If you miss out on any one of these technologies, you'll be lost. Extending a certain component (aka widget) means you have to implement extension points in the original code pointing to a possible extension. It requires hooks into the pretty much all of the Cocoon parts, like the sitemap, JXTemplate, XSL, Flowscripts, and all the other different techniques. Each one of them requires a very different way of handling extensibility.

This is a bit of a scary point to make, as I'm afraid I'll get ass-whooped by Cocoonistas that believe this is all very well possible with CForms + flowscript. And maybe it is - but it's just a little bit hard if you're not a Real Cocoonista :-)
It raises the question of whether there should be a widget framework in Cocoon proper, or whether I should move away from Cocoon and find a suitable alternative outside of it. Or maybe have an integration of the two.
Don't get me wrong - the Hippo CMS UI is completely seperated from the website delivery layer, which can (and sometimes should) still be done in Cocoon! You know I love her and I always will ;).

But we must move to a more object oriented way of writing web application UI's, and consider doing this all in plain Java. A UI consists of components, sometimes referred to as widgets. I prefer the term widget as it makes it very clear that we're talking about user interface components, as opposed to components that only live on the serverside to provide real application logic.
So what are the requirements for such a widget framework? And are there any suitable options?

Widget framework requirements

Basically, these are the points that need to be taken care of by my favorite widget framework:

• A widget should be a uniform object, with it's own behaviour, methods and events
• The presentation of a widget must be properly seperated from its behaviour
• Any logic provided by a widget is 'behaviour', which might need some serverside processing, but does not handle any application logic
• Widgets must be extendible, both in presentation and in behaviour (also see discussion on HippoCMS-dev)
• Designing the widget's presentation should be fairly easy to do, and should not limit the design of the user interface (at least, not too much)
• A widget's behaviour must be unit testable
• Widgets are able to group other widgets
• AJAX support in the framework should be transparant and not obfuscate behaviour code (too much)
• Behaviour should be codable in Java

Matching frameworks

Wading through the enormous list of AJAX web application frameworks (don't forget to check out Manageability), a couple seem to be very capable of doing what I want them to do.

On my shortlist, there are the following Java web app frameworks:

Cocoon + DOJO

We know our way around in it, but it has the extensibility problems I mentioned above.
Because of Cocoon's design architecture, presentation and behaviour are very well seperated. However, a widget is not a uniform object, which causes trouble and makes inheritance very hard to do. Unit testing widgets in Cocoon quickly resolves to hard to develop HTTP unit tests. Changing a widget's behaviour can be painful, given the amount of different coding techniques needed to perform the job.

Echo2

Would completely replace Cocoon (in our case). The Echo analogy is a pure Java way of thinking. Translates parts of your Java code into Javascript to execute on the client. Allows for inheritance. Drawback: makes a lot of roundtrips to the server (slow), and there's no way to work around any weird behaviours. Could become a big burden. What about the license?

Google Web Toolkit

Another standalone framework, and as such a complete replacement for Cocoon. Compiles your Java code into Javscript using a proprietary compiler (which is not very unusual, BTW).
Semi-pure Java, forces you to keep thinking about the clientside Javascript you're generating. Loads ALL user interface code into the client at startup. UI response is fast. Still requires plenty of workarounds to get things done. Has lots of limitations in terms of the widgets it supports. License is OK, but it's impossible to predict what Google will do with its compiler?

Wicket

Makes component/widget extendability a breeze. Needs Dojo or any other library for AJAX. Easy to implement very specific HTML / Javascript functionalities if needed. Less limitations. Needs only 2 levels of knowledge: it's either 'Java' or 'HTML-CSS-Javascript'. Does that work?
Drawback: Still requires HTML / CSS and Javascript coding.
Nice: has a concept of both WebApplications and PortletApplications. According to Sylvain, only replaces the Flowscript/CForms part of Cocoon and not your favorite Cocoon pipeline plumbing. Is currently in the Apache Incubator.

Prototyping

Thanks,

-- Arjé

Posted by Arjé Cahn at 6:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Kirsten and I got married last week after being Cocoon GetTogether for about 5 years. Hurray! We had an excellent day in the sun with lots and lots of friends, and a really nice week in Florence afterwards. Excellent! I'd like to thank all of my Hippo, Luminas, Sourcesense and Apache buddies who where there to see me wearing a proper suit and shiny new ring :). And to the rest: sorry, gals, he's a married guy now! :-)

Lady Coco wants it all
And just when you think you've had it all - organizing the location, the food, the music, the rooms, the beds, the drinks, the speakers, all the official stuff and of course all of the fun stuff - it hits you right in the back: there she is again, that other lovely woman in your life. She calls herself Coco, although "Cocoon GetTogether" is her real name and she's *not* happy that you've left her for some other chick.

So there you go again, hunting down speakers, attendees, sponsors, rooms, diners, drinks, hotels, proposals, WiFi access, whiteboards, power outlets, yada, yada, yada... The lady demands fulltime attention. Again!

But, heck, she's fun, and I'm looking forward to having everyone back in Amsterdam in October again to relive the three-day Cocoon GT rollercoaster. Currently, the counter is at almost 40 attendees from 7 different countries, which is quite a lot given the fact that the program is not even online yet.. A really good sign. This year, the hackaton days are free, thanks to our wonderful sponsors S&N (thanks guys!) and my company Hippo. Now there's *no* excuse anymore for you to skip the hackaton days, it's just too much fun to miss. And really important for Cocoon, too!.

Pizza hacking
In the meantime, I've been talking with the venue about doing a pizza-and-beers evening hacking session on monday, October 2nd. Also, the WiFi access will be much more improved after last year's four o'clock automatic WiFi shutdown troubles. There'll be plenty of power outlets again (certainly after I've seen what a shortage of outlets can do to a big crowd like this year's ApacheCon Europe in Dublin..).

More room
Also, there's still the option of using an extra, smaller room during to the hackaton or conference days for tutorials or other sessions. Although the budget might allow it, I'm awaiting any brilliant ideas for the room, otherwise I will cancel it and use the money for something more appropriate. So, go on, don't be shy!

Hackaton agenda
On October 2nd and October 3rd, the days before the Cocoon Gettogether 2006, there is a Hackathon foreseen at the Felix Meritis Foundation building in the center of Amsterdam.
It might be good to start thinking about how we'll be filling the two Hackathon days.. Please jot your ideas down on the Wikipage!

The main idea is to use this page to hack together some agenda for both days. Please make this a joint effort. There's one big moshpit-like room available for us on the 2nd or 3rd floor, which can hold up to 60 or 80 people.

The Hackathon will start on both days at 9:00 AM and ends around 18:00. There'll be food on both days, on monday in the room itself and on tuesday outside.
In the evenings the room is available for use until 23:00. There's no evening program defined, but anything goes, so jot down any ideas on the Wikipage!

Hackaton infrastructure and logistics
There will be:

• food


• drinks


• long tables


• WiFi access


• some hubs for wired access (bring your own cable!!)


• plenty of power outlets


• fairly large whiteboard (will 3 normal ones do?)


• 3 flip charts


• tape to assemble pages


• beamer + screen to beam on

Conference day (wednesday) infrastructure and logistics
The talks will be in the same building as the hackaton, but we'll have a much nicier room available that can easily hold around 120 people. There'll be:

• chairs


• food


• drinks


• (some!) long tables


• lots of WiFi access


• plenty of power outlets


• big beamer + screen to beam on


• all audio gear you could dream of


• CocoonGT shirts!

After the conference, there'll be a nice reception with drinks and snacks.
What am I forgetting??? OMG - panic rushes to the head all over again ;)

See you soon!

-- Arjé

Posted by Arjé Cahn at 4:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (1)

Because I was on holiday, I forgot to send out the RFP reminder for the Cocoon GetTogether 2006... :( Therefor, here's a short reminder, giving you all some extra time to send in your proposals!

Please send in your proposals for talks before tomorrownight:

September 6, 23:59 CET

See http://www.cocoongt.org/Request-for-papers.html for guidelines. It can be really short, as long as there's some basic description in there so we can start setting up the program.

Thanks, and looking forward to meeting you all (again) in october in Amsterdam!

-- Arjé

Posted by Arjé Cahn at 12:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)