Jeroen Reijn

Moving away from MovableType

2009-03-21T10:28:08Z

This will be my last blogpost here. I've decided to move my blog to my own domain, which will be available once the DNS has been updated. MT can not satisfy my needs anymore.

In the near future, I want to migrate it to a Hippo Blog instance driven by our latest product: CMS 7, but until then it will be hosted by Blogspot.

Please update your bookmarks to this RSS feed. From now on, you will be able to follow me @ blog.jeroenreijn.com.

Using Apache Commons FileUpload

2009-02-16T13:25:19Z

I'm currently working on a project that required me to upload some files from a JSP driven web application. A quick Google search brought me to Apache Commons FileUpload. It's a very useful library, that if used correctly makes you're life a lot easier.

Once adding the dependency to my Maven 2 pom.xml and looking at the user guide, I expected it to work straight away, but unfortunately it didn't and I was not really sure why. My piece of code seemed to halt when trying to execute the following method:

  List items = upload.parseRequest(request);

My friend Google was unable to provide me with the correct answer (that's why I'm writing it down now), but after a while I figured out what the problem was. The problem was: me not reading the documentation. On that same user guide page it states:

FileUpload depends on Commons IO, so make sure you have the version mentioned on the dependencies page in your classpath before continuing.

So in the end it was just another dependency. Not sure why it did not throw an error though, but after adding it to my pom.xml it worked like a charm.

Gwibber: a nice open source Twitter client

2008-12-18T20:58:00Z

I use Twitter for microblogging about things that I'm working on or thinking about, that I do not always write a blog entry about.

As I'm using Ubuntu as my operating system, if been looking around for a good Gnome Twitter client, but there are just a couple of them and they are not always as nice.
Recently I came across Gwibber. Eventhough it's still in beta, I've been using it for a couple of days now and I really like it. One of the other great things is that it also supports Facebook, and Digg (and Jaiku), which I'm also using.

If you're looking for a nice Twitter client, be sure to give Gwibber a try.

ps. If you want to follow me on Twitter, you can find me here.

Watch out! Hippo ECM is coming!

2008-12-13T15:45:56Z

The past 3 months have been crazy. You might already have read it somewhere on the world wide web, but if you haven't, we're very close too a first official release of our new ECM product.

It was September when Arjé did his announcement of Hippo ECM and CMS 7 and it has come a long way since. More features have been added and the product has grown a lot since then. Hippo CMS 7 is still in a beta phase, but that won't be for long.

The next couple of weeks I'll try to share my experience, some thoughts and plugins, which I'm in the process of creating. For now I'll go for a short introduction on what's new and how you can compare it to version six.

]]> Architecture

The Hippo ECM architectural model did not change compared to CMS 6/Hippo Repository 1 model, since all components are still decoupled or as I like to describe it: an open architecture.

From the inside a lot has changed though. The core of CMS 7 is fully based on Apache Wicket. The team working on CMS 7 have created a Wicket plugin model, which makes CMS 7 a lot more extendible then CMS 6. In my short experience with the plugin model, I have to say I'm very impressed with it's ability. It will easily allow (other) developers to create their own CMS 7 plugins.

Next to the CMS there is also the content repository, which is now based on Apache Jackrabbit, a reference implementation of the Java Content Repository (JSR-170) standard. The great thing here is that the JSR-170 is well known and accepted by different CM vendors, both open and closed source. With the new upcoming repository we of course added some additional features to the default Jackrabbit repository that would give Hippo users some advantages.I'll talk about this a bit more over the next couple of weeks.

On the front-end side we're also working very hard on some toolkits. Since one of the toolkits (HST2) is still under heavy development I will highlight some features next week. Like with version 6, you won't have to use them, but they can give you some handles to work with. You are still able to choose your own preferred technology, as long as it will be able to talk with the JCR repository.

The Forge

If you want to create you're own plugins/components that work or connect with one of the component in the Hippo ECM suite or use plugins made by the Hippo ECM community, we've created a centralized place to store them: The Hippo Forge. I have some ideas myself, which I hope I can realize in the next couple of weeks. I'll keep you posted.

Documentation

If you would like to play around with the new system, you can get it from our new documentation website. Please keep in mind that the product is still in beta phase and so is it's documentation.

Well that's it for now. Keep an eye on Planet Hippo or subscribe to my feed for more updates.

Lightning 0.9 and Thunderbird 2.0.0.17

2008-11-11T12:15:48Z

After doing a clean install of Ubuntu Intrepid last night (which went quite smooth as expected), almost everything kept working, except the combination of Mozilla Thunderbird and Lightning. I've been using this combination for a while now, since I was looking for a good replacement for my calendar software. I think it's a killer combination with the Google Calendar functionality.

At first I was unable to figure out, what might be the cause of my problems, but digging a bit deeper I found out that Thunderbird can help you out with this, by means of the error console.

Try adding '-console' to the startup parameters to enable the error console in Thunderbird. Once Thunderbird is started you can find the console under 'Tools' in the menu.

The actual errors pointed me to this launchpad page. The bug described the same behavior I was having. I was unable to create a Calendar and the Lightning interface looked a bit broken at some places.

Scrolling down to the bottom of the bug report, others seemed to have found a solution, which was actually quite simple. You need to install libstdc++5 separately. You can do this with aptitude or any other package manager.

$ sudo aptitude install libstdc++5

Afterwards you will need to reinstall the Lightning add-on and everything should be back to normal!

Call for papers - ApacheCon Europe 2009

2008-10-21T13:03:24Z

Bertrand reminded me today that the submission deadline is this Friday! I probably won't sent in an submission this year, because I've not been very active within any Apache community these past months. For those of you reading this blog and thinking about sending in a proposal, be sure to send it in before this Friday!

More information about submitting a proposal for the ApacheCon EU 2009 can be found here.

5 years at Hippo and 5 years of open source

2008-10-09T07:45:52Z

I've been thinking about this post for a while, because I wasn't really sure what to write about my past 5 years. So much has happened and there is so much to mention, but that would mean this would be a longggggg post. I'll just create a (short) summary of my entire story for now.

My main reason to start at Hippo 5 years ago was because I wanted to do something with Java and the web. Hippo provided both and offered a great learning environment at the same time with all the open source products they used in their software.

While doing my daily work at Hippo, I learned a lot about Apache Cocoon, an open source framework, which was one of the core open source products used within Hippo driven websites. Before that, I wasn't really aware that Apache was a lot more then Tomcat and the HTTP server. While getting more involved within the Cocoon community I was up for my first real open source experience.

The Cocoon GetTogether 2003 was a place were I met all the people behind the names that I had seen on the Cocoon mailinglist. The GT2003 was held in Ghent (Belgium) and it was my first of the many to come trips related to working with open source projects at Hippo. Later on, I was able to travel to Dublin and Rome for Cocoon/Apache related conferences with the ApacheCon in Amsterdam 2007 as a highlight. In Amsterdam Jasha and I gave a presentation about Cocoon. I was just elected as an official Cocoon committer a month or so before that and tried to give my share of support to the Cocoon community that had given me so much those past years.

Cocoon wasn't the only Apache open source project I was going to end up using. So far Lucene, MyFaces, Slide, Jackrabbit and Wicket have also been part of my daily work. Then of course we also have our own open source projects, like Hippo CMS and Hippo Repository. I think it was a great move to make both products open source, because it helped the products to become more mature and it allowed other developers to learn much more about the product then if it would be a closed source project.

From the company point of view, it was great to see Hippo grow from the small (only 6 people when I started) to the +/- 40 people that I'm working with now. I think Arje, Tjeerd and Jeroen are doing a great job with this. I've learned so much from them and the other Hippos around me that the current environment is very inspiring. Also the projects that we're doing now with Hippo are getting bigger and bigger. That's one of the reasons why we're currently working very hard on a first final release of Hippo ECM platform, which is coming up very soon.

Looking at my self, I can say I also grew from being a developer working on small websites to developing large applications/websites, guiding partners with their Hippo implementations, doing some consultancy and giving training sessions about open source Hippo software or on the use of Apache Cocoon.

I'm looking forward to what the future will bring us with Hippo ECM coming up and our goal to become one of the bigger players in the ECM market. I guess in 5 more years I can tell you the answer to that question.

Mozilla Lightning 0.9 on Ubuntu Hardy 64-bit

2008-09-25T08:47:31Z

For those of you who are also running a 64-bit linux machine (like me) and want to use the Mozilla Lightning 0.9 Thunderbird add-on, you can find the 64-bit version of this add-on here in the Mozilla release archive. The one that comes from the add-on website doesn't seem to install unfortunately.

If you also want to push your calendar entries back to for instance Google Calender, be sure to use the Provider for Google Calendar add-on. It allows bidirectional access to Google Calendar.

Redesign

2008-09-17T21:11:01Z

I'm currently giving the blog a redesign. Bear with me, while I change the design over the next few days.

links for 2008-09-15

2008-09-15T16:03:22Z

Quarkbase : Everything about a Website

(tags: web tools)

Yet another browser

2008-09-02T07:08:57Z

It's been all over the blogosphere! As far as I can see, you could not have missed that Google has announced it's own open source browser called Google Chrome.

In the past there have been a lot of rumors about a Google browser, but now they made it official. They even created a nice comic about it, to explain all features and concept of the new browser.

Google Chrome looks really promising, but I'm afraid that for us developers it's going to be just another browser to test our web applications against. With the current diversity within the browser market it's already a pain to keep up with all the available browsers. Therefor I think it's a good thing that they did not decide to create their own browser engine, but instead are using the webkit engine, which is also used in Apple's Safari.

Too bad they are releasing the beta on Windows first, because I would have loved to give it a go on Ubuntu!

The Hippo Site Toolkit (HST)

2008-08-09T13:17:26Z

Blogging has not been one of my priorities these past couple of months as you might have noticed. I've been so busy at the Hippo office and at customers, that I was unable to find some decent time to start a new blog post.

I realize I should have written this post 6 months ago, since the project I'm going to write about has been around even longer than that, but as far as I can remember, nobody has ever written a post about it. I think that's a shame and you guys should be made aware of this piece of software.

A new set of development component were created to develop web application with JSP or JSF in combination with Hippo CMS. We called it the Hippo Site Toolkit and it has been available for quite some time.

The HST will allow us to provide default component that aid developers in their work while building web applications with JSP or for instance Apache MyFaces.

There are some example projects available from the Hippo SVN, so be sure to check it out if you're thinking about using JSP or JSF.

links for 2008-06-27

2008-06-27T15:28:54Z

Remove all .svn folders in a directory tree [bash] [find] [subversion] [svn]

find . -name ".svn" -type d -exec rm -rf {} \;

(tags: linux remove .svn)

Firefox 3

2008-06-18T08:06:09Z

Today is firefox 3 download day! I have been using the beta installed on my Ubuntu laptop for a while now and I really like it! It's fast and the big plus is the new improved address bar. All I can say is, help set the record and download Firefox 3 today!

Ubuntu 8.04

2008-06-08T20:21:58Z

It has been a while since I have blogged. I tried, but I never finished the posts. They will show up here in the next couple of days I hope. But for now.. lets just get this post out of the door.

A while ago, I updated all my Ubuntu machines to version 8.04. It feels stable, even on upgraded machines. The upgrades worked almost perfectly. Everything kept working, except for the Evolution/Exchange combination. In the past I used this a lot, especially for the Exchange Calendar, which we use at the office.

The Hardy Heron (8.04) version of Ubuntu comes with Firefox 3 Beta 5. I must say, this is a great improvement in comparison to Firefox 2. The memory footprint is much better, and is more more responsive then version 2. The downside is that not all of my Firefox plugins work yet, but that will be solved in a short time I guess.

I wanted to share my experience with you guys, since I think that Ubuntu is one of the most friendly Linux versions around and I recommend it to everybody!