HIPPO \\ Jeroen Reijn

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.

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 2:25 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 9:58 PM | Permalink

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.

Continue reading "Watch out! Hippo ECM is coming!" »

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 4:45 PM | Permalink

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!

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 1:15 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 3:03 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 9:45 AM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 10:47 AM | Permalink

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!

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 9:08 AM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 3:17 PM | Permalink

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!

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 10:06 AM | Permalink

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!

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 10:21 PM | Permalink

The ApacheCon Europe has landed and the first day is already behind us. This morning I arrived at the conference location in Amsterdam for a full day of sessions. Monday and Tuesday were mainly filled with meetups, hackathons and training sessions, which I was unable to attend, but today was reserved for some interesting talks.

Looking back at today I had a mixed agenda with technical and business tracks. This morning I started off with "The Business of Open Source - Power, Prestige, and Propulsion" hosted by
Sally Khudairi. It was great to see other companies talk about how they experience working with open source and how their customers experience their first steps with open source.
Working for a company that runs on open source, I was familiar with most remarks and comments, but it was nice to hear how other companies of different size and different market had experienced this.

Next up was Gianugo Rabellino with "Your Open Source strategy sucks!". I met Gianugo a couple of years ago and when I'm at conference I always try to attend his presentations. They are solid and straight forward and give you a nice insight on the subject that he's talking about. It was another good one Gianugo!

After lunch I went for my first technical talk of the day about "Apache Felix - A Standard Plugin Model" by Richard Hall. A had heard about the Felix project before and that it involved OSGI, but it was a refreshing view and a great eye opener on the subject. I really like what it's capable of and I'm curious too see if I can somehow use this in the near future.

Back to the business room for Arjés talk on "Open Source Business in Europe". Even though I work with Arjé, I've been outside of our office for the past couple of weeks, so it was good too see him in action again. He gave us a nice insight in how Europeans work with open source and how this has evolved over the past couple of years. Thanks Arjé!

I ended the day with two technical sessions. "Advanced JavaServer Faces - Using cool JSF Technologies" by Matthias Wessendorf and "Building scalable AJAX Push applications using Comet" by Jeanfrancois Arcand. The first talk attracted my attention, because I recently had to do some maintenance on a Myfaces project and after learning the basics, this talk gave me a nice impression on what I will be able to do more with MyFaces, then what I've seen so far.

The last session of the day was a bit hard to choose, because I also wanted to attend Jeremy Quinns ('sorry I did not attend your talk Jeremy') "Break my site", but I had never really had to get the change to see what Comet was. Last year, the Comet talk was at the same time as ours (Jasha and mine) about Cocoon, so I went for the Comet one this time. It was an interesting subject, and it was great to hear about this way of development. I was unaware that this was already possible.

Looking back it was great again to see all my friends of all the different Apache projects and meet new people along the way. The social part is one of the great thing about the ASF.
For those that were not able to attend today, be sure that you visit tomorrow or Friday for some more interesting talks. See you there!

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 11:00 PM | Permalink

Some of you might have seen the news out there on the web, but for those that did not, Hippo has expanded it's borders to the US! Last week it all became final and Hippo bought BlueSunrise.

Hippo and BlueSunrise have known each other for a while now, because both companies are very active inside the Apache Software Foundation. The Apache Portals project is one specific project that both have been working on over the past couple of years.

I think this expansion was to be expected, since we had an ongoing demand from clients outside Europe and mainly in the US. To be able to give sufficient support to these clients it's best to have a Hippo location in the same country.

It's great to see a company grow like this. I've been working at Hippo since early 2003 and I can remember sitting with 6 of my colleagues at the Hippo office in a building somewhere in the north of Amsterdam.Now ... 5 years later, we have about 45 people working at Hippo and multiple locations around the world.

I'm excited to see what will be next...

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 1:16 PM | Permalink

I've been too busy lately to actually keep track off the things going on around me. I almost even forgot that the ApacheCon Europe 2008 is only a couple of weeks away. This year I will not be doing any talks, since I thought there was nothing interesting for me to talk about. I enjoyed giving the Cocoon talk together with Jasha last year, so perhaps you'll see me/us speaking again at one of the other ApacheCons.

I have a couple of ideas now for new presentations, but I'm not sure yet if I can put my ideas into actual concepts, before actually sending in a proposal. We'll see! For those of you coming to the ApacheCon in Amsterdam (I really suggest you to come), I hope to see you there. If you have any question about Cocoon or Hippo CMS, be sure too stop me if I'm walking past you. I'm looking forward to some talks.. See you there!

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 10:14 PM | Permalink

There is some exciting stuff happening over at Hippo!

More details about this soon..

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 9:38 PM | Permalink

Another year has passed and while looking back at 2007 I have to say it was an exciting year. So many great things happened last year, so I can only hope this year will bring the same.

I've seen great things happen at Hippo in 2007. The company grew, we had new partners implementing our products, did some very exciting projects and we took the next step in what I think is going to be the next big thing in content management.

While writing this post, I realize that it has been an exciting year and it all started in March, where I was voted an official Apache Cocoon comitter and joined the Apache Software Foundation. I just came back from my vacation to Spain when I realized I had been proposed as a Cocoon comitter. This was of course great news and I was overwhelmed.

May was the month that Jasha and I did a presentation about Cocoon at the ApacheCon Europe 2007 in Amsterdam. It was great to do something back after so many years for a community that has always helped us out. It was our first big presentation at a conference like ApacheCon, which made it extra exciting.

In July I got the key to my new apartment. I had been waiting for this for a while, since they were still building the place. Even though I now moved out of Amsterdam, I really enjoy living there.

The past year I traveled a lot and October was my traveling month, where I visited Rome and New York in less then 2 weeks. 2007 was the year that the Cocoon GetTogether was held in Rome, which I enjoyed a lot. I've been in the Cocoon community for so long now that I know most people and we had a lot of fun. The settings were great (in a zoo) and I even got to see something of the ancient city at night. Since it was my first time in Rome, I really want to visit the city again. A week later I visited New York on business for a couple of days (how cool is that!) and it is really an amazing city. We stayed in new York for about 3 days where we had a couple of meetings with some great and interesting people. I hope that I will be able to go back some day, because I really enjoyed it.

In December I took a look inside one of the other Apache communities, namely Apache Wicket. I was amazed by the amount of people that showed up for such a *new* Apache project. Since we at Hippo are looking very serious at Wicket, I hope to be doing a project with it soon, to see what Wicket is really all about. Seeing demos is nice, but it does not add anything, except some knowledge of what it is and how it works. Real life experience always works best for me.

I hope this year will be another successful year. I've been thinking about what I wanted to do next and what I do know is that I want to be more active in the Apache communities. I also want to focus on taking my SCJP exam this year, because I have the book, but was just not able to make sufficient time to study. We'll see!

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 8:30 AM | Permalink

It has been there for a while now, but I was not able to find some decent time to write a blog entry about it. A while ago I made a Cocoon 2.2 block out of the Hippo Site Sample. This can become very interesting for developers starting with Hippo in 2008, since Cocoon 2.2 will be coming out very soon.

You can get the site sample block out of the Hippo svn repository.

I've tested it with the following settings:

• Maven 2.0.8
• Sun JDK 1.5
• Cocoon 2.2 trunk
• Ubuntu Linux 7.10

Please note that this is very experimental and I still recommend using Cocoon 2.1 for projects that will go in production in the next 6 months.

I've put a page up on the Hippo Wiki that describes all steps.

Have fun!

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 3:01 PM | Permalink

Last Friday I had the pleasure to visit one of the first big Apache Wicket meetups in the Netherlands. At the Felix Meritus, the same place as where the Cocoon GT 2006 took place, I was able to listen to a couple of the brightest Apache Wicket minds.

Looking at the amount of people that came to the NL Wicket meetup it reflects the activity of the Wicket Community. Even though the meetup was arranged on a very short notice, about 94 people attended. That's a great number if you ask me. I guess most of them were dutch, but also a couple of developers from outside of the Netherlands attended the meetup.

For an impression of the event you can take a look here .

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 8:50 AM | Permalink

A couple of days ago I tried to update Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty) to 7.10 (Gutsy). I was excepting another flawless upgrade after my experience with upgrading Ubuntu before from 6.06 to 7.04. Unfortunately this was not the case. During the installation I had a couple of errors and almost at the end my installation even crashed. As a complete novice on this level, what were going to be the consequences?

I first tried to use the synaptic package manager to see if an update could help. It seems my index was somehow broken and could be fixed with:

$ sudo apt-get install -f

After that I did another update and all packages seemed to install properly.
The next problem I had was that after the initial boot my xorg.conf somehow seemed to be broken. I only got a black screen and nothing else.

Creating a new xorg.conf seemed to fix it.

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

After that I had a running environment again. The video performance still seemed quite slow especially when browsing webpages. My Dell integrated Intell video card seemed to be the problem. On one of the ubuntu forums I found a hint that told me to create a file called 'disable' for the xgl-xserver.

Create the following file:

$ vi ~/.config/xserver-xgl/disable

After another reboot it seemed to solve all my problems. It even looked like it was running smoother then before. I'm a happy Ubuntu user again. Let's hope things work out a bit better next time.

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 10:01 PM | Permalink

Wow the past weeks have flown by. I made a start with this post on the plane back from Rome to Amsterdam, but I could not find the time to finish it. So here goes:

The last two days happened so fast, I was unable to continue my daily blog writing. Day two of the Hackathon was a day of trying out and playing around more with Cococon 2.2. I continued my quest together with Jasha, while he was working on his presentation in the mean-time, with the webdav block. During the day I also attended a couple of talks on 'What to deprecate in 2.2', 'The future of Cocoon Forms and Dojo' and 'Cocoon Marketing'. These talks were held in small groups of about 12 people and were very interesting. Jeremy initially started the talk about Cocoon Forms, which attracted quite some audience. He proposed to migrate Cocoon Forms to the 1.0 release of Dojo, once it's final release is there.
At the end of the day we all went out for some nice real italian pizza and after that a good strawl around town. We got to see the Trevi fountain and the Pantheon. They are both amazing to see.

On the conference day there were a lot of good talks. Some of them I had heard before and others were completely new. Jasha did his talk about the cocoon project wizard, which received some good response from the audience. At the end of the day it was time to clean up and head home. It were 3 amazing days with lots of italian culture, good Cocoon talks andnew friends. I hope to see everybody at the next GT again. Till next year!

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 11:09 PM | Permalink

The first day of the Cocoon GetTogether 2007 Hackathon has just ended and I have to say the it's great to be in Rome. We've been really lucky with the beautiful weather here. It's about 26 degrees Celsius,lots of sunshine and a perfect blue sky and it appears to stay that way for the next couple of days. The past 1,5 day have been great. Italy is such a wonderful country.

Our journey started on tuesday when Arthur, Jasha and I left the Hippo office around 4pm and took a cab to Schiphol airport, where we met Arje. The check-in went pretty smooth and after a while we boarded the plane. During the flight to Rome we had a great view of the Italian Alps, because of the great weather, which ended in some beautiful images.

Continue reading "Cocoon GT 2007 Day 1" »

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 12:16 PM | Permalink

It seems the Cocoon GetTogether 2007 program is available at the Cocoon GT website. I knew Jasha was going to submit a proposal and it seems it has been accepted. "Create your website in 5 minutes with the Cocoon Project Wizard". I've seen Jasha doing his magic a couple of times and this is something really worth seeing. It gives you a head start when starting out an Apache Cocoon project. I would say: Show us what you got Jasha!

It was a complete surprise to see another familiar name in the program list. One of my other colleagues, Martijn Vos, apparently had submitted a proposal and it seems his talk has also been accepted! I've not been able to meet up with Martijn yet, since I've been more out, then inside the Hippo office, but I'm very curious about "Use more Java!".

But those are not the only talks. There are more interesting talks like: "Break my site: Practical Stress Testing and Tuning of Cocoon Applications" by Jeremy Quinn and "Hands on Cocoon" by Francesco Chicchiriccò and so many more. Just go and check out the full program at the Cocoon GT website!

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 11:00 AM | Permalink

Well the Cocoon GetTogether 2007 is coming up. It's only a bit more then two weeks from now. Have you registered? I know I just did! Be sure to register on time, because the space is limited. I think Rome will be a great place for a GT. I've never been to Rome myself, so I think it's going to be a great experience and I'm definitely going to bring my camera.

I can't wait to meet up with all my fellow Cocooners, have some laughs, drink some beers, eat some great food and see what's hot in the world of Cocoon. For the hackathon there are some plans to do some Cocoon 2.2 integration with Apache Wicket. I've noticed there are a lot of people spending time on Wicket, so it's a framework to take into account.

Of course there will be a Hippo team present. You can probably spot us by the blue t-shirt with the big red Hippo's on the back. Have you used the CMS before or you're perhaps thinking about it, just walk bye and come and have a chat!

See you in Rome!

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 2:48 PM | Permalink

The great thing of having an Open Source CMS is getting feedback and contributions from the community. Last night I had such a moment when Marco Casavecchia Morganti send me an email that he had translated Hippo CMS entirely to Italian. He wondered if we were interested in the Italian translations? Sure we are! As a matter of fact I committed the translations today into the trunk and 6.05 branch of the CMS. So the 6.05.01 release will also have an Italian translation pack.

Thanks again Marco for you contribution!

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 4:37 PM | Permalink

The vacation period is almost over and the conference season is starting up again. First up is the Cocoon GetTogether 2007. Gianugo recently announced the Cocoon GT 2007 which will be held in Rome this year. The dates are now final, so mark the 3th,4th and 5th of October into your schedule. This year there will be two days of Hackathon and one sessions day. Jasha and I are thinking of doing a session at the GT this year. We're not 100% sure what it's going to be about, but perhaps a session on Cocoon 2.2 from a beginners perspective. It all depends on how much time we can spend on digging a bit deeper into 2.2.

A week later at the 11th of October there will be a dutch conference called J-Fall, organized by the NLJUG (Dutch Java User Group). I've submitted a proposal last night, which is a slightly modified version of our ApacheCon EU talk. Let's just wait and see if it gets selected. Speaking at a dutch conference will be a completely new experience for us.

In the beginning of November there is also the ApacheCon US in Atlanta. Unfortunately Jasha and I were too late with sending in our proposal, but Arjé and Ate will be speaking at the US edition this year. Let's see if we can use our talk, which we'll be preparing for the GT, at the ApacheCon US next year.

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 10:59 AM | Permalink

Hippo CMS is getting a lot of attention in the Netherlands and around Europe these days, but of course our goal is to make it a world-wide well known product. The only way to achieve that is by promoting it a bit more then letting the product promote itself.

Recently I came across Ohloh. Ohloh is a source directory that helps you find the software product you need. With some help of tags, stacks and the Ohloh community you can find some great pieces of software.

To help developers find Hippo CMS, it has recently been added as a project to Ohloh.

Even though Ohloh is still under development it's fun to see what the Ohloh team does with your source code. It can give you a good view on how active the committers of a project really are, how many committers are involved in a software product and there is so much more interesting information that Ohloh retrieves from your source code repository. I was actually surprised by the source code statistics which stated that the amount of Javascript/Flowscript used in the CMS was about 65% and only 6% Java code has been written until now. Since the CMS is based on Apache Cocoon there is a lot more Java involved, but that's inserted with some help of Maven.

Ohloh is still updating, but I've just also added Hippo Portal and Hippo Repository.

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 11:40 PM | Permalink

The old Hippo website was created a while ago and it badly needed a redesign. Now it's finally there! If you've not been to the Hippo website over the past week, you will probably not have noticed that the entire website has been redesigned.

I think the old website was really outdated and I'm very happy with my employers new website! Of course it's powered by two products I really care about: Hippo CMS and Apache Cocoon.

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 10:08 AM | Permalink

Today I switched from having multiple IM (Instant Messaging) clients open at the same time to only one on my Windows XP desktop. Pidgin (formerly known as Gaim) has all the IM protocols I need to talk with my friends and co-workers. It's an open source application that runs on multiple platforms. The past 2 years I was very happy with Trillian Basic, but when Google introduced it's GoogleTalk I was back at having multiple clients. Pidgin has now solved this for me.

Adium has been able to do this for a while, but I was not able to find a suitable Windows client untill now.

I've been working with it for a full day now and I'm very happy with it. It saves me system resources, runs on multiple platforms and the great things is that you can even combine multiple accounts of the same protocol. If you're looking for a new IM client that combines multiple protocols, be sure to take a look at Pidgin.

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 5:00 PM | Permalink

It's been quiet here this month. I've been extremely busy (what else is new) with finishing up old and starting up new projects. One of the exciting new things is that I've been asked to help out with a new project that embraces the power of Cocoon (hurrah!).

It's a very nice project with a lot of interesting features. The team is very skilled and they are very enthusiastic about the project. My job for now is to support them in their daily Cocoon development and help them out with solutions for parts of their system.

I'm currently looking at how we can implement faceted navigation and fast searching. The first thing that came to mind was Lucene and Solr. I've heard Bertrand talking about Solr so many time that I had to take a look at it. Solr seems to be very powerful,flexible and easy to use. Even for people new to Solr it's easy to setup and play with.

So yesterday I gave Solr a try, to see what we could use it for and it seems to be almost exactly what we need. Cocoon and Solr are in my opinion made for each other since you can do all sorts of XML operations with Cocoon and send and receive these to/from Solr.

While playing around with Solr, I wanted to give it a try from a Cocoon application to see how they would interact. Since you can get results back from Solr by doing an http request it's very easy to integrate this in your Cocoon sitemap. Digging a bit deeper, I stumbled upon a Solr SearchGenerator for Cocoon. Of course that sounded very interesting and I tried it at once. The SearchGenerator is actually very simple and is just a wrapper around an http PostMethod that sends a query to Solr and generates the XML response into the pipeline. Now I had all I needed.

I've even written a small faceted webapp based on the sample content provided in the default Solr checkout. It was fun to write and did not even take me that long. I'll write some more documentation about this and put it online, so other people could also try this out.

So far I really like Solr. Can't wait to spend more time on using it!

Some good links on Solr:

• Search smarter with Apache Solr, Part 1: Essential features and the Solr schema
• Search smarter with Apache Solr, Part 2: Solr for the enterprise
  

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 12:07 AM | Permalink

Yesterday I just tried the update button in my Ubuntu update manager and I'm pleased to say the update to 7.04 Feisty Fawn went as smooth as it could be. No problems and Feisty Fawn seems to be running very smoothly now. Not that I had any problems before. It still amazes me how Linux has been improving over the past years. I can still remember all the pain I had when installing hardware and so on.

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 9:50 PM | Permalink

Last week I had to finish up some work just before being able to leave for the ApacheCon EU 2007. I wanted to go there on Wednesday, to see Stefano's No-Nonsense Introduction to "semantic web" Technologies and some Lucene talks, but I got held up until late in the afternoon.

After my arrival at the Moevenpick Hotel I teamed up with Jasha to do some preparations for our presentation on Friday. We moved some slides and made some additions to the demo. I was pleased with the ApacheCon being held at the Moevenpick. The hotel was nice and food was good and plenty of drinks during the day time!

On Thursday there were a couple of interesting session which I wanted to attend. I started out with Apache Performance Tuning Part 1, which seemed interesting in the beginning, but in the end I noticed that my knowledge of Apache isn't as outdated as expected. Later that afternoon I visited "Up to Speed with Java Content Repository API and Jackrabbit" by Alexandru Popescu. I found it to be very interesting, since we're looking into Jackrabbit at the moment at Hippo.

At the end of Thursday the lightning lottery talks took place and as usual this was a big laugh! I always find them very amusing and the speakers have a good sense of humor. Of course the Google sponsored beers helped a lot.

There were two more serious though of which one of them came by Stefano Mazzocchi. It was something he had to tell the 'Cocoon community' as a whole. Stefano invented Butterfly after leaving the message that Cocoon had become too bloated. I agree that Cocoon 2.1 is bloated, but there is a very simple explanation for that: it's lack of dependency management. That's where Cocoon 2.2 does a much better job in combination with Maven 2. I guess I will have to take an even deeper look at Stefano's latest invention, to see what he actually came up with, but it sounds interesting.

Friday was the big day where Jasha and I had to do our presentation. After some more preparations in the morning and afternoon, we went outside to get some rest and enjoy the lovely weather. I have to say that the weather during the ApacheCon was great. We talked the entire presentation through and were ready to go! First we headed for Bertrand who did an excellent talk on XSLT and XPath.

After a short break and some some delicious ice-cream it was up to us. People started coming into the room one by one and I think we had around 35 people attending our talk. For a Friday afternoon at 16.30 pm I think we did pretty well. I noticed a lot of people left early on Friday to catch their early flight or train back home. After the talk Jasha and I both had the same feeling: It went pretty well for a first time presentation together! We both found some places in the presentation where we could improve our next talk, so we'll take that along for the next one.

After attending Andrews talk on Cocoon 2.2 and Web 2.0 we went out to enjoy the weather and some nice cold, well earned beers! I think this year was another successful ApacheCon EU. Next to all the presentations the social happening is one of the great aspects of the ApacheCon. You get to meet all the people you actually only know by name. Make sure you'll be there next year. I heard it's going to be in Amsterdam again in 2008!

For all the people that attended our talk: Thank you and I hope to see you next year!

Some extras:

• An impression of the ApacheCon by all attendees at Flickr
• A short impression by me at Flickr
• Several presentations (Including ours)

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 3:00 PM | Permalink

Two well known open source products got a major release out in the past couple of days: Thunderbird 2.00 and Ubuntu 7.04

I'm a big fan of both products and have been using them for quite some time. I've updated Thunderbird this morning and it feels a bit faster and looks cleaner. I think I'll wait a bit before upgrading to Ubuntu 7.04 to see if it brings any problems. A mail client is less time intensive if something goes wrong compared to an entire OS.

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 11:25 AM | Permalink

It's official now.
Saturday morning I got an email from the ASF that said my account had been created.

Hurray!

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 9:10 PM | Permalink

The past couple of weeks have been crazy. I've been all over the place and today I can finally find some time to start with our ApacheCon presentation. Last week I've been visiting some Hippo friends in the UK. I always love to visit London, because it's such a great place. Especially the soho district, where their office is located, is full of these small foodshops and restaurants. It's really nice and I should really take some vacation and go there for a couple of days and see all the nice things around town.

On monday I had some spare time in the evening to go for beers and dinner with Andrew and Jeremy. Great to see you guys again! We talked about the upcoming ApacheCon in Amsterdam and we're all a bit concerned about the fast upcoming deadline for our presentations, which ends March 23th. That's more then a month in advance! Jasha and I will really have to put some more effort in it to reach that deadline. I also noticed that the Early Bird registration ends this Friday, so you better make sure you have registered, because it saves you quite some money!

More good news on the Apache front: Andews vote was a success and the result was: 22 positive votes. I hope that in a couple of days all the paperwork is done and I can be proud to say that I'm part of the Apache family :-)

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 9:00 PM | Permalink

Coming back from a vacation always means you'll have to catch up on all your e-mail. Thank god for spam-filters, otherwise I would have gone nuts on all the e-mails. While reading up on my mail, I was pleasantly surprised by this e-mail on the Cocoon developers list. Thanks Andrew! I was totally not expecting this and even Arjé was astonished how speechless I was about it for the rest of the day.

Last year I worked closely with Andrew on several large Cocoon projects. Now that I'm thinking about it I've already been using Apache Cocoon for almost 4 years now and still enjoy working with it every day. Time flies I must say.

I'm also very happy to see that Felix is getting the same trust from the Cocoon community as I'm getting. I know Felix through Cocoon and Hippo CMS and we met last year for a couple of minutes in one of the restaurants at the Cocoon GT. Felix has been putting a lot of effort into Cocoon 2.2 lately, so I think he really deserves it! Keep up the good work Felix!

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 10:39 PM | Permalink

I finally found some time to update my Ubuntu installation from Dapper to Edgy. I was a little bit concerned about the upgrade after reading Jeremy's blogpost. I'm glad I did not face Jeremy's problems. My update went very smooth and even with my own Beryl installation in Dapper everything still worked like a charm after the upgrade.

The only thing I did was follow Method A of the guide presented on the Ubuntu Forums.

My impression so far: Edgy is cool!

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 7:16 PM | Permalink

Well it seems the word is out and our ApacheCon talk has been accepted! We were waiting for a confirmation before spreading the word, but the schedule seems to be final now.

Jasha and I were pretty amazed to hear that our proposal was selected out of all the submissions. Looking at the speakers list it's amazing to see us between all those well known Apache member and committer names. The fun part is though that if you look at the list, it seems that we're almost the only two speakers who are not in some sort affiliated with the Apache Foundation other then using one of it's great products: Apache Cocoon.

It seems that us rookies will have to compete with two big shots for audience. It's too bad that Ate Douma is speaking at the same time, since I was curious about his talk on "JSR-286: Portlet Specification 2.0 for Portal and Portlet Developers". I've been working closely with Ate lately on a new and exciting Hippo project, so the portal subject really interests me.

It seems Apache Cocoon is closing the ApacheCon Friday with Andrew coming right after us with "Web 2.0 with Cocoon 2.2". I think the order is great, because you can go from a novice to an experienced session. We hope to get your Cocoon knowledge up to date for Andrews session later that day.

If you're interested in what Apache Cocoon is all about, be sure to come and visit our session! Remember: "Basic web application development with Apache Cocoon" is where you have to be! ;-) We're more then willing to answer all your questions and hope you will enjoy our talk.

See you on the 4th of May!

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 11:15 PM | Permalink

I guess I don't have to tell everybody how great FireBug is for Web Development, but I'm going to do it anyway. FireBug is so easy to use and so feature-rich that I think it's the best plugin available for FireFox. I think it's a must for every web developer these days and I can't image working without it, since I first started using it.

I've your not familiar with FireBug yet then here is a good article for you to read. In short: FireBug is an open source feature-rich web development plugin for FireFox. It has features like, debugging, profiling and javascript logging within your browser.

This month FireBug is more then a year old and has grown enormous over the past year. A couple of days ago version 1.0 came out and it's extremely stable. I use FireBug all the time while working on Hippo CMS, since it's full of Javascript and XMLHttpRequest calls and it helped me out a lot.

If you're not using FireBug yet, be sure to check it out and play with it for a while to get familiar with it.

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 4:45 PM | Permalink

The ApacheCon EU 2007 is coming up and the deadline for proposals ended last night. I've seen several ApacheCon proposals come by over the past weeks and was thinking together was Jasha that we had to do something ourselves this year.
We've both worked on a lot of projects build with Apache Cocoon for a couple of years now and know most of the pains when starting with Cocoon, so we decided to submit a proposal ourselves: "Basic web application development with Apache Cocoon".

If the proposal gets approved the session will be very low level. As less code as possible, but more of an explanation about what can be done with Cocoon, how Cocoon handles itself in the web 2.0 hype these days and why Cocoon could be useful for you.
Cocoon can do so much more then most people think. You can create really powerful applications, high performance websites and multi-publishing platforms.

We'll just see what happens next!

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 10:43 AM | Permalink

As I promised a while ago I would keep everybody up to date on my progress with some new/improved CMS features.

So what's new? Well there are two new/improved features available in the Hippo CMS trunk.

• Multiple asset upload
• Copy document made it into the document actions panel

More exciting things are coming up soon. I will keep you posted!

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 3:31 PM | Permalink

As of yesterday Google WebToolkit (GWT 1.3 Release Candidate) is 100% Open Source and Apache 2.0 licensed. This is a great step for GWT and for web developers around the world.

Since our primary mission is to help users (as opposed to hoarding proprietary development tools), opening up GWT has always been a no-brainer -- we just had to decide when. Now that GWT has some serious adoption and a lively user community, open-sourcing is the obvious next step to help GWT evolve more quickly.

We've been playing around with GWT here at Hippo to get some insight on the toolkit for Hippo CMS 7. We haven't decided yet on what framework will power Hippo CMS 7, but Google's decision makes it more interesting.

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 9:40 AM | Permalink

I've been strugling with WPA on my Ubuntu Dapper installation for a while now. There are numerous installation guides to get WPA working, but none of them worked for me or they were extremely complex and far beyond my linux knowledge. I would like to work with Dapper more, but it did not allow me to connect with the wifi network at the Hippo office or at home.

Yesterday I continued my WPA quest and I am happy to report that I finally got it to work.
Fred made an easy list to follow and in the end I actually did get it working. I tried it this morning in the office as well and it works like a charm.

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 10:36 AM | Permalink

Well last week I was told that I was about to get some time for implementing cool new features in the CMS like Niels mentioned last week.

First up is the multiple binaries upload which will make working with the CMS a lot easier for most people. I'll promise to keep you up to date on my progress and let you know as soon as possible when these features are available, so you could give them a try.

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 12:04 AM | Permalink

Mozilla released FireFox 2.0 last week, so I really had to give it a go. It feels more stable and even seems to perform a lot better. It has a slightly different look and feel, but it you can switch back to the old theme if you want. One of the first things of course was to test Hippo CMS, but as expected it still works like a charm.

Even though not all of my extensions (now called add-ons) seem to work yet, I love working with this new version. One of the good things is that FF 2 has the option to restore your previously opened sessions in case your browser crashes. Keep up the good work at Mozilla I would say!

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 4:18 PM | Permalink

After Microsoft's release of Internet Explorer 7 last week, we had to make sure that the changes made in Internet Explorer 7 wouldn't affect the functionality of Hippo CMS. The only thing which had to be tweaked was a CSS file, so from now on you can also use Hippo CMS together with Internet Explorer 7!

Mozilla is also releasing Firefox 2.0 soon, so gave it a go, but it appears to works as with preview versions of Firefox.

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 5:49 PM | Permalink

It has been a week since the CocoonGT2006. Time really flies, but now it's time for a quick flashback of all the things that happened during those days.

The GT Hackathon started for me on tuesday, since I was tied up at the office with still a lot of work to do before the big day. I was glad to be there for a couple of hours at the hackthon, so I was able to join Jeremy's talk about CForms and Dojo. I think we both came to the conclusion that Dojo is great and Cocoon should try to embrace Dojo even more, but the question remains: "What's the best way of integrating Dojo in Cocoon?".
After this interesting talk I had to head back to the Hippo office to finish up some unfinished work.

Wednesday was the big CocoonGT conference day. It started out early at 9am and kicked off with Arje's opening speech. I've seen several interesting talks about LDAP, Daisy, Hippo CMS and a very funy talk from Andrew, but there was one talk which showed something really new and exciting. Simone Gianni was talking about Cocoon blueprint. The demonstration by Simone was very interesting and Blueprint gives you a completely different perspective on building Cocoon websites. I hope he continues working on blueprint and there will be a release soon.

There are some photos available of the GT at Flickr, so be sure to check them out.

Well that's it for now. If you want to know more about the GT, be sure to attend it next year. There have been rumours going on, that it might be in Rome next year!

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 11:30 PM | Permalink

Only two days left till the first day of the Apache Cocoon Hackathon! Have you registered for the conference day?
If not, please do! See the CocoonGT website for more information.

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 9:59 AM | Permalink

The other day I discovered IEs 4 Linux - Internet Explorers for Linux. This great tool gives me another reason to start developing my web applications in my Ubuntu development environment. IEs 4 Linux gives you the full power of IE 5.0-6.0 inside linux in combination with Wine. The installation was very easy. No clicks needed. No boring setup processes. No Wine complications. Just one easy script and you'll get three IE versions. What else could you wish for right?

After having used FireFox, Thunderbird and Eclipse for many years, I can not see why I would not be able to do my daily work in a linux environment these days. Now I just need to convince my boss ;-)

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 12:27 AM | Permalink

As you might have noticed, my latest interest is going out to creating my own Eclipse plugin. I've been thinking about this for a while, but recently I finally found some time to look into this. There is a lot of information about creating your own Eclipse plugin on the internet, so I think I will manage.

This is just a test project, but I have some plans in this direction in the future, so I will keep you posted.

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 8:26 PM | Permalink

Year in year out people travel around the world to spread the word about this great product called Apache Cocoon. From ApacheCon's to OSCON's you will find people doing talks about Cocoon. The best place for talking about Cocoon is the annual Cocoon GetTogether where people from around the world meet and share knowledge about Cocoon.

This october will be edition number five of the Cocoon GetTogether and it will be held in Amsterdam, just like last year. The only difference with last year will be, that all events will take place at one location: The Felix Meritis.
Last years hackathon was succesfull, so this year there will be two days of hackathon again. The third day will be the conference day, where there will be a lot of people talking about new features, Cocoon's roadmap, existing projects and so on.

This years GT will be held from 2-4 October. Currently the counter is at 40 people from 7 different countries and it's still a month to go! It looks like this will be another succesfull year for the CocoonGT.

I will be there. Will you?

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 11:55 AM | Permalink

Aptana is a web development IDE based on the eclipse platform. It has a strong focus on Javascript, but it's a real nice plugin for web development. Since I try to use nothing else then Eclipse during my development, I'm very happy to see it's also available as a single Eclipse plugin. It's free and soon to be open sourced.

Via Ajaxian.

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 4:39 PM | Permalink

At OSCON, the O’Reilly open source conference, Google announced an open source project hosting site called: Google Code Project Hosting. Greg Stein, an open source engineer with Google and chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, says in an interview with NewsForge that it's not supposed to rival SourceForge.net, but I guess that SF will of course suffer from Google's new service.

Google's new system is built on a modified Subversion repository that stores it's data in Big Table, a scalable, storage technology used in Google. Subversion is a very flexible and proven technology these days.

At a first glance, the smooth AJAX interface is not very present as with GMail and Google's Calendar, but as allways the interface is very straightforward. For now it doesn’t provide as much information as you would expect, but as Stein says: "it's not yet feature complete". They are working very hard on delivering new features.

Stein describes the project as ideal for smaller open source projects, rather than larger projects with more complex needs, such as Apache. However, they also say that larger projects are welcome of course.

Well let's wait and see what happens with this new service. A little competition doesn't hurt anybody!

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 1:03 PM | Permalink

All user interface components within Hippo CMS are handled by a javascript framework, which regulates the interaction between the different views and perspectives within the user interface. This framework will also handle the AJAX requests to the server for updating all perspectives and views.

I think one of the most unknown and underestimated features within Hippo CMS is the ability to debug this framework. If you want to create a new view or perspective within the CMS you will have to get a deeper understanding of what is going on in the background.

Ok well I will stop talking and show you guys how to do this! The configuration for the framework can be found in the framework component.xml. Each important component in the CMS has it's own component.xml. (perspectives, framework, workbench). For the debugger window to appear you will have to modify the following framework attributes:

• showLogger: set this to true
• logEnabled: set this to true
• logLevel: set this to '1' to put this to DEBUG
• logger: this should be the name that represents you component in the debug window.

A typical example of the framework component configuration is shown in the next code sample.

Each perspective has it's own component.xml file, where you can add the logger attribute to display only the messages of that specific perspective. So did you modify your component? OK! Now refresh the CMS instance in your browser window and you will notice the debug window in the bottom of the page. You can also detach this window if you want or detach it by default (see the other configuration options in the framework configuration). This debug window should give you enough information on what's going on inside the CMS, why your new view isn't working or what calls are beeing made to the server.

More information on how to handle debugging in Hippo CMS can be found on http://www.hippocms.org.

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 1:47 PM | Permalink

I'm sitting outside now in sunny Amsterdam, after catching up some sleep, rethinking the ApacheCon Europe 2006 in Dublin. Arthur, Dennis and myself arrived on wednesday evening, so we had all thursday to attend sessions. Most of them were about AJAX, but there were some other interesting sessions that I really wanted to attend as well.

Continue reading "ApacheCon Europe 2006 part 2" »

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 4:17 PM | Permalink

Since I'm completely wasted and awake for over the past 30 hours, I will be posting my real entry about the Apache Con EU tomorrow. In the meantime you can already take a look at the ApacheCon Europe 2006 photos at Flickr.

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 1:29 PM | Permalink

It looks like some fellow Hippo developers and myself will be attending the ApacheCon Europe 2006 in Dublin next month. This will be my first big Apache Conference with developers from different projects within the Apache Software Foundation. I'm really exited about it and while looking at the sessions, my interest is going out to the Ajax and Apache MyFaces sessions (next to the Cocoon sessions of course).

I noticed more Cocooners are joining me in Dublin and it looks like Cocoon is well represented at the ApacheCon with people like Gianugo Rabellino (SourceSense), Bertrand Delacrétaz (Codeconsult) , Carsten Ziegeler(S&N) and Doug Tidwell (IBM) doing session about Cocoon.

I also see that there are some sessions on other CMS's. Maybe it's an idea to do a session on Hippo CMS next year? Sounds like a great idea to me! ;-)

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 11:50 PM | Permalink

This evening I took my first steps with RoR. After watching the "Putting Flickr on Rails" movie I thought: "Hey that doesn't look that hard! " So I downloaded all libraries from the RoR website.
But how to continue? What kind of IDE can be used to program Ruby in? At first I thought of an Eclipse plugin (there are a couple), but after a while I found a project based on Eclipse called RadRails. It helped me getting started and I was up and running in no-time.

What better way is there, to try a sample and play around with the code to see what happens. Instead of creating the Flickr application in 5 minutes, like they tell you at the RoR website, it took me a little over an hour, but I managed to create my own web 2.0-ish Flickr application and setup the Rails environment on my laptop. I guess that's not that bad for a first try.. it's quite fast actually!

My next goal is to dig into the framework a little more. See if I can find something to use in combination with Hippo CMS. I will keep you posted!

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 12:14 AM | Permalink

Since I've been very busy lately, I have not been able to find time to dig into development techniques like Ruby on Rails. RoR seems to be quite hot these days. After reading Ugo's blog about Ruby for Java programmers it made me even more curious. Since I wanted to experiment with other techniques and combine them with Hippo CMS I think Rails might be nice to start with. After doing some research I found out that Stuart Eccles was already working on a WebDAV plugin for Rails. The plugin is not released yet, but when that happens, I am going to give it a go. In my opinion it would be nice to have a sample of how to connect Rails with Hippo CMS. I hope it's going to be released sone, so I can try and write some documentation about how to connect RoR with Hippo CMS. I'll keep you posted!

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 12:52 AM | Permalink

While browsing the Firefox extensions archive, I found this very nice developer extension called Server Switcher made by Czedik-Eysenberg.
It enables you to easily switch between sites on your development and live server(s), so you will immediately see the differences. I've played with it a little bit and it's a great tool to use! I would really recommend it to everybody.

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 4:17 PM | Permalink

Yesterday the Mozilla Foundation released a new version of their Firefox browser. Both Firefox 1.5.0.2 and Firefox 1.0.8 have been released. Firefox 1.0.8 will be the last release in the Firefox 1.0.x product line, that's why the Mozilla Foundation recommends all users to upgrade to Firefox 1.5.0.2.

Firefox is now available as a universal binary for the Mac. This makes it possible to run Firefox on the new Intell Macs as well. This release fixes some security issues, memory leaks and bugs. I've installed it a few minutes ago and it's seems to function very well.

Posted by Jeroen Reijn at 1:36 PM | Permalink