This content is moving... The new home of our emerging technology podcasts and screencasts is Chariot Emerging Tech. The current feed will be retired soon.

Episode 48 - Google Wave interview with Joe Gregorio

Joe Gregorio, Google Developer Advocate and member of the Google App Engine team, is also working on Google Wave, a new collaborative environment that mixes concepts from IRC, Mail, IM, and document sharing.

  1. APIs http://code.google.com/apis/wave/
  2. Example bots:  builtins:  Linky automatically makes links of text typed in to the wave. 
  3. For more examples, look at wave-samples-gallery.appspot.com
  4. Developers can sign up for sandbox access here https://services.google.com/fb/forms/wavesignupfordev/
  5. Non-Developers can request a preview account here https://services.google.com/fb/forms/wavesignup/
  6. No public client/server API yet, waveprotocol.org has links to wave protocol forum
Direct download: TechCast-48-Google-Wave-Joe-Gregorio.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 6:00am EDT

Episode 47 - Jonas Boner on the Akka framework, Scala, and highly scalable applications

Today's podcast features Jonas Bonér, the creator of the Akka framework.  If you've been listening to the podcast, especially to Episode #37 with Alex Miller on Java Concurrency, here is an alternative approach to providing scalability on the Java VM.

Akka features an implementation of Actors, Software Transactional Memory, and Transactors, a hybrid approach to working with STM inside of Actors themselves.  Jonas also provides a mechanism for writing these components inside of the Java language as well.

Actors are not a direct part of the Scala language. Rather, they are implemented as a library.  There are, in fact, at least three implementations.  Jonas Bonér's Akka framework includes actors as well as access to Software Transactional Memory.  In this episode, my colleague Jamie Allen and I interview Jonas to try to pull apart what Actors and Software Transactional Memory are, and how they can help developers write highly scalable, concurrent applications.

Links:

  1. The Akka Mountain in Sweden (Akka is named after the mountain)
  2. The Akka framework homepage is www.akkasource.org (or www.akkasource.com or even www.letitcrash.com)
  3. A good blog entry about Akka 
  4. The high level overview of Akka from the akkasource site
  5. Jonas' home page and the Akka twitter handle

 

Direct download: Chariot_TechCast_47-Jonas_Boner_and_Akka.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 10:51am EDT

Episode 46 - Guillaume LaForge on Groovy and Gaelyk, an App Engine Groovy platform

Today's interview features the Groovy luminary Guillaume LaForge.  Guiallume's work on improving the Groovy language paved the way for the innovative frameworks such as Grails and Griffon, and showed a whole generation of Java developers to stop worrying and love dynamic programming.

Guiallaume is the Groovy project lead, and is constantly improving the language.  One of his newer efforts is the App Engine framework Gaelyk.  Running on top of Groovy, this framework allows developers to build Google App Engine web sites with very little effort.  We talked to Guillaume about the project, and about his thoughts on Java 7 as well.  This week we took questions from the 'twitterverse', and I started using Google Wave to edit my show notes.   

Upcoming Groovy 1.7 features...

  1. Support for anonymous inner classes (before suggested you use closures)
  2. Providing an AST Builder, to make it easier to provide AST transformations (such as @Singleton, @Delegate).  AST transformations are compiled into bytecode.

Gaelyk - The Google App Engine framework

  1. Groovlets, small groovy web scripts - just write a script!
  2. Templates - separate Groovy code from view
  3. Injects Google features into scripts, not abstract them too much
  4. Sitemesh templating: Guillaume is researching sitemesh integration but likely not including it directly (providing instructions at some point)
  5. Question asked by @wmacguyver on what Groovy
    1. DataStore was easy to wrap with a thin veneer - is hoping to more groovify and add a DSL around it
    2. Mail - added ONE method to enrich base class to make it eaiser to use from scripting
    3. Route support in 0.32 - was more work but not complex to do...
  6. Asked about what projects running in Gaelyk - early days... but check out groovyconsole.appspot.com - a way of executing Groovy code online and sharing snippets.  Written by Guillaume.  Another one out there is a javascript toolkit for writing iphone web apps iui - demo app is built on Gaelyk (no link avaialble)
  7. Also hosted on Gaelyk:  Gaelyk project itself
  8. Community feedback - will drive some enhancements, obviously Guillaume is very committed to Groovy language too!
  9. Users have become contributors - submitting suggested changes / patches, these are very welcome.
  10. Future feature:   Querying support on deck potentially for datastore, simple SQL queries don't work on a NO-SQL database.

Question from twitter user @HamletDRC: @techcast Which JDK7 feature will effect Groovy the most: Closures, Jigsaw, or something else? (question for @glaforge)

Java 1.7 Closures -

  1. The working document - mentions dynamic interfaces for closures, groovyc compiler could create same interfaces under the hood - could be interoperable POTENTIALLY...
  2. Could we pass groovy closures to a java class?  No implementation yet, so we need to see how languages work together...
  3. Java closures - cannot access non-final vars, etc... Shouldn't replace Groovy closures with Java closures...


Jigsaw (JDK modularity)

  1. Interesting to investigate.  Would be nice to modularize Groovy a bit - maybe pull pieces into modules (groovlets, etc)... OSGi is an option as well, need to evaluate. 

Thanks also to lucaxtex for his tweet: lucastex @glaforge incredible work on #gaelyk UrlRoutes! This is getting sweeter each day :)

Direct download: TechCast-46-Gaelyk-with-Guillaume.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 11:43am EDT

Episode 45 - SpringSource's Ben Alex on Roo, a Java-based agile framework

Ben Alex carved out some time to talk to me about the SpringSource Roo project, a very interesting and different take on Convention over Configuration Frameworks.

All of the major prior frameworks seem to use dynamic and meta-programming tricks to get work done.  Ben's team focused on taking advantage of the Java platform, and hence Roo is a fast, java-and-AOP solution for getting things done using existing APIs like JPA and Spring's APIs.  Applications are built using a command-line shell (even with code completion, just hit tab!) but in the end, they are just maven-based Spring projects.

You can find out more about Roo itself by visiting
www.springsource.org/roo

Mentioned in the podcast is the book "The Humane Interface" by Jeff Raskin.  Ben says that reading that book helped him form the basis for his ideas about Roo.

Ben Alex can be reached via twitter as @benalexau, and the #roo hashtag gets quite a workout.  We also suggest visiting the forums, as JIRA issues posted there are generally answered promptly. 

Chariot Solutions is a SpringSource education and consulting partner.

Direct download: ChariotTechCast-2009-11-19-Ben-Alex-Roo.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 6:26pm EDT

Episode 44: Manik Surtani on JBoss Infinispan Distributed Data Grid and Cache

Today's guest is Manik Surtani, from the JBoss Infinispan project. 

Infinispan is a data grid project that grew out of JBoss Cache, and is able to dynamically ramp up and down cache nodes at will.  Manik discusses the various features of the engine, including querying, monitoring, scalability, and more.

Visit the Infinispan project site at www.jboss.org/infinispan

Infinispan tweets on the @Infinispan username, and you can watch all tweets related to Infinispan at #infinispan

If you are in Antwerp, Belgium attending DEVOXX '09, head on over to the announcement page and register with this URL.

JBoss is a Chariot Solutions partner.

Direct download: ChariotTechCast-2009-11-17_Infinispan.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 4:34pm EDT

Episode 43d: SpringOne / 2GX - Dmitry Sklyut and Brent Baxter

A recap of the events of the last two days of SpringOne, with Brent Baxter and Dmitry Sklyut. Show notes will be available soon. Chariot Solutions is a SpringSource partner.

Direct download: TechCast-Episode-43d-SpringOne-4.mp3
Category:devnews -- posted at: 9:00am EDT

Episode 43c: SpringOne / 2GX - Gordon Dickens show reflections

Gordon Dickens is a consultant and trainer with Chariot Solutions. We caught just before the wrap-up on Thursday to see Gordon's impressions (ask him to do Charlie Chaplain)… Gordon discusses Spring 3.0 & Java 6, JPA 2 support, Spring Integration, Spring Roo, Grails, and more. Chariot Solutions is a SpringSource consulting and training partner.

Direct download: TechCast-Episode-43c-SpringOne-3.mp3
Category:devnews -- posted at: 3:35pm EDT

Episode 43b: Brent Baxter on SpringOne Day 1

Here is another perspective on SpringOne from Chariot Solutions' Brent Baxter.

Direct download: TechCast-Episode-43b-SpringOne-2.mp3
Category:devnews -- posted at: 10:17am EDT

Gordon Dickens is a consultant and trainer with Chariot Solutions. We caught up in the early afternoon on Tuesday to catch up on Rod Johnson's keynote and topics around Spring 3.0, Grails, and some other things. Chariot Solutions is a SpringSource consulting and training partner.

Direct download: TechCast-Episode-43a-SpringOne-1.mp3
Category:devnews -- posted at: 3:53pm EDT

Episode 42 - Chariot's Eric Snyder on Apache CouchDB

Chariot's Eric Snyder works in both Java, Spring-based applications as well as with dynamic platforms such as Ruby on Rails.  He brought CouchDB to our attention earlier this year, and we thought we'd share some information about it with our listeners.  Apache CouchDB is a RESTful web-centric document-based database system written in Erlang.  It can be used either directly using RESTful mechanisms or via a wrapper API in a number of languages.

Resources:

  1. http://couchdb.apache.org - project website
  2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESDBM9-U804 - CouchDB: Relaxing Offline JavaScript (Google Tech Talk)
  3. http://books.couchdb.org/relax - CouchDB: The Definitive Guide


APIs (small subset)

  1. http://github.com/jchris/couchrest- ruby API
  2. http://github.com/langalex/couch_potato- ruby API (higher level layer on top of couchrest)
  3. http://couchdbkit.org - python API
  4. http://github.com/mbreese/couchdb4j - Java-based CouchDB API

 

Direct download: ChariotTechCast-CouchDB-42-2009-10.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 2:28pm EDT

Episode 41 - Andres Almiray on Groovy Griffon, THE Swing UI Framework

Our guest on this episode is Andres Almiray, key contributor to the Groovy Griffon project at CodeHaus.  Griffon is an MVC framework and application development platform for building Swing-based applications, and can be configured to execute Applets, Java Applications and Web Start projects.

Andres talks about the Griffon MVC framework, plugins, Addons, event dispatching, and a lot more.

Resources

Griffon home http://griffon.codehaus.org
Griffon Mailing Lists
The Grails project, the starting point for the core of Griffon

The Griffon Team
Andres Almiray - http://www.jroller.com/aalmiray
Danno Ferrin - http://shemnon.com/speling/
James Williams - http://jameswilliams.be/blog/entry/index
Guillaume Laforge http://glaforge.free.fr/weblog/
Jim Shingler http://jshingler.blogspot.com/
Josh A. Reed http://josh-in-antarctica.blogspot.com/

You can follow twitter updates from the team at @theaviary

Be sure to leave us feedback via twitter (#techcast) or email (techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com)

Ken

Direct download: ChariotTechCast-41-Andres-Almiray-Griffon.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 2:20pm EDT

Episode 40 - A roundtable discussion with the Open Solutions Alliance

Disclosure:  Chariot is an integration partner with the OSA.

Panelists

Nick Halsey - Marketing and Product Management at JasperSoft
Debbie Moynahan - Community management and marketing for Fuse Open Source @ Progress SW
Deb Woods - Product management at Ingres
Anthony Gold - President of Open Solutions Alliance and board member of Blue Nog, CEO of Healthy Humans


Resources

  1. White paper:  Open Source Consolidation in the Data Warehouse Market
  2. Obama's Open Source for America initiative.
  3. OSA Datasheet
  4. Interop Datasheet
  5. 2009 Annual Prediction Survey 
  6. Website for the Open Solutions Alliance: www.opensolutionsalliance.org (also note that homepage hosts a comprehensive Google calendar of upcoming open source events)
  7. Top Ten Reasons to Adopt Open Source in the Enterprise



Direct download: TechCast-2009-09-11-OSA-Roundtable.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 1:30pm EDT

Episode 39 - Jon Kern and Corey Haines on Agile, Software Craftsmanship

A discussion with Jon Kern and Corey Haines about Agile, Pair Programming, Software Craftsmanship, and more.

Show Notes:

  1. Corey Haines - Pair Programming Tour - http://programmingtour.blogspot.com/
  2. Jon Kern's web site, Technical Debt.  Here is a recent post on metrics (with links to Corey's video)  to measure quality July '09 http://technicaldebt.com/archives/2009_07.html
  3. Software Craftsmanship - the movement website - http://manifesto.softwarecraftsmanship.org/
  4. Robert C. Martin - "Uncle Bob" - http://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/category/uncle-bobs-blatherings
  5. Interesting comment from JB Rainsberger on the law of Speed -vs- Quality http://www.jbrains.ca/permalink/218
  6. On not needing defined requirements to enable good design http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/01/dont-need-def-for-good-design
  7. Technical Debt - what is it?  http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?TechnicalDebt
  8. Kent Beck's "To Test or not to Test" blog entry (do read the comments) - http://www.threeriversinstitute.org/blog/?p=187 
  9. The Liskov Substitution Principle http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?LiskovSubstitutionPrinciple and the five principles of class design (SOLID), cohesion and coupling http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?LiskovSubstitutionPrinciple 
  10. Jamis Buck - Recovering from the Enterprise - RubyConf '08 presentation http://averyblog.com/ruby-rails/rubyconf-08-jamis-buck-recovering-from-the-enterprise/ - hey, you don't need a DI framework in Ruby, man!
  11. Software Engineering - an oxymoron in your organization - http://technicaldebt.com/archives/2009_04.html#000867
  12. Cucumber http://cukes.info/ RSpec http://rspec.info/ and BDD http://behaviour-driven.org/
  13. Podcast with Arlo Belshee on Promiscuous Programming http://agiletoolkit.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=400364

 

Direct download: TechCast-39-Agile-2009-08-28.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 2:26pm EDT

Episode 38 - Rob Harrop on Spring dm Server and OSGi

Rob Harrop is the lead engineer on SpringSource dm Server, and is a key contributor at SpringSource.  He co-authored Pro Spring, a seminal work in helping developer understand how to best use the Spring Framework. 

In this podcast, I talk to Rob about OSGi and the Spring dm Server.  We discuss the state of OSGi development, how it differs from traditional web-based Spring application development, and recent advancements in the technology.

We also briefly discuss the recent merger announcement with VMWare corporation.  Point of disclosure: Chariot Solutions is a SpringSource development and training partner.

Show Notes:

  1. The official OSGi R4 specification can be found here.
  2. Information about the SpringSource dm Server can be found on the SpringSource Team Blog, and on the official site.
  3. The RFC66 specification (standard OSGi web container) is not yet published, but Rob has a good post from May outlining how dm Server approaches implementing a draft version.
  4. Lots of information about Spring dm Server can be found on the developer forums.

Coming in October is the SpringOne 2GX conference, and in November we will offer a one-day seminar on Grails, Spring's agile Groovy-based web development platform, with Jeff Brown of SpringSource.

Direct download: ChariotTechCast-2009-08-14-Rob-Harrop.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 9:00am EDT

Episode 37 - Alex Miller on Java Concurrency

Our interview with Alex Miller focused on his work on Java Concurrency and also on Terracotta, the clustering technology which replicates graphs of Java objects between multiple Java virtual machines.

Developers working in environments needing high concurrency should definitely review the most recent Java Concurrency API.

Here are links to some of the topics we spoke about:

  1. Alex's DZone Core Java Concurrency Refcard is located here and is a good start for researching the Java 6 concurrency features. Of particular note is Table 1 on Page 1, which lists the key concepts that should be understood before delving into solving concurrency related problems.
  2. Discussion of various thread management mechanisms, which include Task Executors
  3. Discussion of Locks versus the traditional synchronized keywords, and ReadOnly and ReadWrite lock mechanisms
  4. Concurrent Maps, CopyOnWriteArraySet and CopyOnWriteArrayList (among others) provide map, list and set semantics, but are optimized for highly concurrent access in reading and manipulating these collections
  5. You can read Alex's blog postings on tech.puredanger.com
  6. The Lambda Lounge is located in St. Louis, and is located at www.lambdalounge.org.
  7. The Strange Loop Conference website is available at www.thestrangeloop.com.

Enjoy, and thanks, Alex!

Ken

Direct download: ChariotTechCast-08-10-2009-Alex-Miller.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 12:00am EDT

Chariot BusinessCast Episode 1 - (nee TechCast Episode 36) - Sean Blanda of TechnicallyPhilly.com

I had a great conversation with TechnicallyPhilly's Sean Blanda last week. We talked about how the Philly IT scene is still lively, and about how he and his two compadres Brian James Kirk and Christopher Wink gather and write up news on their lively and informative website. Technically Philly covered our Philadelphia Emerging Tech show in the spring.

  1. Someone who bikes a lot on the trails in Philly (we have a lot of good road biking trails here) wrote an app to track crime on the trail.
  2. Read their article about recycled machines ending up in Ghana
  3. Read up on the state funding issues for Ben Franklin Technology Partners, a capital group based in Philadelphia.

Enjoy the website.  You can hit it from www.technicallyphilly.com or www.tphilly.com if you don't want to type so much, and it's iPhone friendly.

Direct download: July14-TechCast-TechnicallyPhilly.mp3
Category:bizcast -- posted at: 12:00am EDT

Episode 35 - A few beers with Chariot's Open Source Integration Experts

Last week I had the pleasure of hosting a roundtable chat over drinks with four of our integration experts.  I wanted to discuss some of the issues facing companies today, including how to approach integration projects, and when to use technologies like SOA ESB platforms. 

My guests were:

  1. Rod Biresch
  2. Tom Purcell
  3. Roberto Rojas
  4. Steve Smith

You can read their blogs by visiting their links on Chariot's Bloggers Page.

We had some interesting discussions around open source tools.

Key Topics:

  1. SOA Platforms
    1. Apache ServiceMix
    2. Fuse
    3. Mulesource Mule ESB
  2. Integration Tools
    1. Spring Integration
    2. Apache Camel
  3. Tools and Techniques
    1. Enterprise Integration Patterns
    2. Governance tools such as Mule Galaxy
    3. Monitoring Tools such as Hyperic / Mule HQ / JBoss JON / SpringSource AMS

Feedback always welcomed!

Direct download: Chariot_TechCast_35_-_Integration_and_SOA.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 12:00am EDT

Episode 34 - James Ward on Flex 4, Flash Builder, and more

Today's guest is James Ward, of Adobe Systems.  James is a technology evangelist on Flex and AIR solutions for Adobe.  We talked about the upcoming Flex 4.0 SDK, Flash Builder (the new name for Flex Builder) and other topics such as remoting, AMF and various implementations of the AMF format.

This is a good podcast to listen to if you are interested in the future of Flex, as there are some significant changes and improvements on the horizon.

Items of note:

  1. Flash Builder Beta - Download link.
  2. Flex 4.0 Beta (Gumbo) - Project homepage.
  3. AMF binary remoting and BlazeDS
  4. Some UI frameworks - PureMVC, Swiz and SmartyPants (IoC based), Parsley (also mentioned Matt(e) but no link handy.)
  5. RubyAMF
  6. James' web site
  7. Drunk on Software!

Enjoy the podcast, I think you'll find it informative.

Direct download: 07-13-2009-James_Ward_Flex_4.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 5:31pm EDT

Episode 33 - Peter Muir from JBoss on JSR-299 (JCDI) and the WebBeans RI

JSR-299, the API formerly known as WebBeans, is a Java-based configuration and dependency injection system for the Java EE platform.  In fact, the JSR has been renamed as such with the short name JCDI, and the original title 'webbeans' went to the reference implementation, which is being led by my guest, Pete Muir of Redhat/JBoss.

Pete and I discuss the JSR, what features it brings to Java EE, where to find information about the specification, and the WebBeans reference implementation.

Links to information related to the episode:

  1. Pete blogs on the in.relation.to site:  http://in.relation.to/Bloggers/Pete
  2. Pete's presentation on WebBeans and JSR-299
  3. Pete's Seam 3 Presentation
  4. Upcoming talk on JSR-299, hosted on Sun's "The Aquarium"
  5. Good reference book on WebBeans available from the Seam website (current link here)
  6. Official JSR-299 public draft #2 docs
  7. WebBeans user forum on the SeamFramework site

 Enjoy the interview!

Direct download: ChariotTechCast-33-Pete-Muir-WebBeans.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 6:00pm EDT

Episode 32 - Grails discussion with Brent Baxter and Gordon Dickens

Grails is a convention over configuration web framework, written in the Groovy dynamic language and based on the widely adopted Spring and Hibernate frameworks.  In this TechCast, I sit down with Chariot's Gordon Dickens and Brent Baxter and discuss the relative merits of developing applications on the platform. We talk about the Groovy language, the productivity of building applications on the Grails platform, available plugins, and overall uses for the platform.

Grails Training at Chariot on May 11
We are running a one-day seminar on Grails at Chariot on Monday, May 11.  Sign up using the promotional code 'techcast' and receive 50% off the cost of the seminar.  Visit the course information page for details.

Groovy key points

  1. Groovy compiler generates Java ByteCode
  2. Groovy collections are easy to work with
  3. Closures - blocks of code that can be passed around anonymously
  4. The each method for iteration, key and value for maps -vs- just lists
  5. Groovy GDK - Groovyized Java library classes (each, etc)
  6. Groovy and XML - XMLSlurper for parsing, Markup Builder for XML emit
  7. Installing Groovy - and the Groovy Console
  8. Groovy 1.6 - Grape dependency management
  9. Groovy is being embedded in SOA/Integration containers (Camel, Mule, etc)
  10. Mounting Groovy scripts in Spring:  the Spring <lang:groovy> namespace

Grails framework key points

Visit the grails kickstart page to walk through many of the topics we've talked about, including:

  1. Grails create-app to build an application skeleton
  2. Domain Classes and dynamic finders
  3. Controllers and scaffolding

    Other topics:

  1. Grails is based on Hibernate, Spring, Spring MVC and other projects
  2. Grails plugins for extending both front end features and backend capabilities
  3. Webflow using Grails closures - see my blog entry on this


Groovy/Grails Books

  1. Groovy in Action - Dierk Koenig et al...
  2. Programming Groovy - Venkat Subramaniam
  3. Groovy Recipes - Scott Davis
  4. Groovy and Grails Recipes - Bashar Abdul-Jawad
  5. The Definitive Guide to Grails, 2nd edition by Graeme Rocher and Jeff Brown (from G2One, now SpringSource - Graeme is the founder of the Grails framework)
  6. Grails in Action, Glenn Smith and Peter Ledbrook (currently a beta e-book, will publish in June/July of 2009)
  7. Groovymag.com
  8. GroovyBlogs.org

Chariot Bloggers on Grails

  1. Gordon Dickens writes about Grails on grailsframework.blogspot.com
  2. Ken Rimple blogs about Grails and other technology, music and photography at www.rimple.com
Direct download: ChariotTechCast-04-28-2009-Groovy-Grails.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 10:00am EDT

Episode 31 - ETE 2009 Keynote - RedHat's Michael Tiemann - Exonovation

This podcast episode is a recording of Michael Tiemann's keynote presentation from the 2009 Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference.  Michael is RedHat’s VP of Open Source Affairs, and has a  long history in working on open source projects.  He is the president of the “Open Source Initiative,” and has served as the CTO of RedHat, and founded the first open source software company, Cygnus.

Michael’s talk focuses on "Exonovation", or innovation from an open community, and how it can make a product even better than a closed, controlled, proprietary effort.  It is a very interesting talk, and for those who want to follow along with the slides, you can go to http://www.chariotsolutions.com/slides/pdfs/ete2009-ExonovationTieman.pdf

Books discussed during the talk:

  1. The Only Sustainable Edge: Why Business Strategy Depends on Productive Friction and Dynamic Specialization:  John Hagel III, John Seely Brown - This book questions the zero sum gain theory espoused by Harvard Business School.
  2. Democracy in America: Alexis de Tocqueville (the link is a free transcript download) 
  3. Unlocking the Sky: Glenn Hammond Curtiss and the Race to Invent the Airplane by Seth Shulman.  Referred to when discussing the Wright Brothers' assumption that instability was a key feature of flight.
  4. As We May Think : Vannevar Bush, the Atlantic Monthly, 1945 - Vannevar imagined the Internet (or something eerily like it) in this paper.
  5. Outliers: The Story of Success - Malcolm Gladwell

Web Links:

  1. Michael Tiemann’s blog - http://opensource.org/blog/8
  2. Truth Happens - http://truthhappens.redhat.com/
  3. The Open Source Initiative - http://www.opensource.org

Show Sponsors:

  1. SquareSpace.com - A hosted content management and blogging platform that makes publishing your web content easy.  Sign up using the promotional code 'techcast' for a 10% discount on your monthly service.

 

Direct download: Chariot-TechCast-2009-04-ETE-Michael-Tiemann.mp3
Category:ETE Sessions -- posted at: 4:10pm EDT

Episode 30 - Interview with Squarespace.com's Anthony Casalena (and sponsorship announcement)

I had been listening to Leo Laporte's tremendous This Week in Tech (or MacBreak Weekly) podcast, and found out about SquareSpace.com from the show. The crew was raving about how easy it was to use to publish web content, and how it blew away Wordpress in terms of productivity. So I set up a free trial for my personal account and was also suitably impressed. In doing research I found that SquareSpace is a Java-based platform, so, since the Chariot TechCast focuses on successful Java platforms, it made for a great fit. I did an interview a few weeks ago with the creator and co-founder,
Anthony Casalena, who is responsible for the technology backing the site.

You'll hear how Anthony created the site primarily to solve his own frustration with using blogging tools, and how the technologies are applied to serve a large number of customers on a handful of actual servers. During the lineup of the interview, SquareSpace offered us a sponsorship, and we accepted. If you use the keyword 'TECHCAST' during your free trial to register for a plan, you'll get 10% off the cost of any of their plans.

Technologies mentioned in the podcast:

  1. Apache OJB - Object Relational Mapping API for Java
  2. Apache Tomcat - web application server
  3. SQL Server - relational databases
Direct download: ChariotTechCast-04-2009-Squarespace.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 9:47am EDT

Episode 29 - Manning Authors Forum with Dan Allen, John Resig, David Black

On today's show, we feature the Manning author's Q&A  forum.  Marjan Bace is the co-founder of Manning Publications, which publishes books on a wide variety of technical topics. 

Last year at ETE, Marjan assembled the web framework shootout (if interested...  part 1, part 2).  This year Chariot asked him to assemble an author’s forum, where he takes questions from the audience on writing books for publication.

The panelists are Dan Allen, author of Seam in Action, David Black, author of Ruby for Rails and the upcoming title, The Well-Grounded Rubyist, and John Resig, author of the upcoming Secrets of the Javascript Ninja.

This is a very interesting look at what it takes to write a book, what it demands of you, and what you end up learning in return.  Marjan, Dan, David and John did a great job.

Direct download: ChariotTechCast-2009-04-10-Manning-Author-Forum.mp3
Category:ETE Sessions -- posted at: 10:18am EDT

Today’s show is a recording of the Philly Emerging Tech session by Jason Van Zyl, of Sonatype.  Jason is the creator of Maven, a java build tool that works using a set of conventions and plugins. 

This talk focuses on the current challenges in building OSGi based modular applications using Maven, and how the Tycho project enables easier integration between headless builds from tools such as Hudson, the Maven POM, and the Eclipse IDE.  You may download the presentation at http://www.chariotsolutions.com/slides/pdfs/ete2009-MavenAndTheFutureofOSGi.pdf

Links:

  1. Sonatype's blog page on all things tycho.
  2. Sonatype's m2eclipse plugin



Direct download: ChariotTechCast-2009-04-09.mp3
Category:ETE Sessions -- posted at: 10:00pm EDT

Episode 27 - Blue State Digital Jascha Franklin Hodge on Obama Social Media Campaign

One of the highlights of the 2009 Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference was our afternoon keynote from Jascha Franklin Hodge, from Blue State Digital. 

Mr. Franklin Hodge cut his social media teeth working on the Howard Dean campaign.  Blue State Digital built and managed the Barack Obama campaign website, which provided news, email correspondence, coordination with official and unofficial leaders on events, YouTube and video/audio media, and more.

This keynote highlights the successes of properly using the internet and social media to run a successful campaign including contrasts with the McCain effort as well as discussion of lessons learned.

A copy of the presentation slides is being processed, and will be made available soon.  For now, you can view the slides from an earlier presentation at MIXX Canada, on Slideshare

Direct download: Chariot-Techcast-04-07-2009.mp3
Category:ETE Sessions -- posted at: 10:03am EDT

Episode 26 - Andy Hunt on Pragmatic Thinking and Learning

Andy Hunt is co-founder (along with Dave Thomas) of the Pragmatic Programmers.  Their seminal book, The Pragmatic Programmer, gave every developer a nudge, and started their publishing company, The Pragmatic Bookshelf.

Andy's latest book (his seventh) is Pragmatic Thinking and Learning, Refactoring your Wetware.  His keynote at 2009 Philly Emerging Tech covered topics from the book, and was a fantastic walk down memory lane (sorry, couldn't resist).  Seriously, folks, his talk was all about maximizing your ability to learn and retain knowledge.  Here are some great books he mentioned:

  1. Andy Hunt:  Pragmatic Thinking and Learning
  2. Mihaly Csikszent: Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (P.S.) 
  3. Dan Pink: Whole New Mind
  4. Betty Edwards: Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

You can find Andy's writing on the Pragmatic Bookshelf or on his blog, toolshed.com. For a mind map of his key topics, click here.

The second part of the podcast includes audio from the Destruction Zone.  Pictures were posted at our ETE Flickr Group.  The company, Wondergy, allowed us to tear apart old fax machines, printers, computers and cell phones, and worked with Chariot to line up green recyclers to haul it all away.  You'll hear a little audio, although distorted, of the bashing of a copier, as well as an interview with Wondergy's Ken Fink, on how the project came together.



Direct download: TechCast-Episode-26-04-02-2009.mp3
Category:ETE Sessions -- posted at: 11:00am EDT

Episode 25 - Emmanuel Bernard on Bean Validation JSR-303 and Hibernate Search

In this podcast, we speak to JBoss's Emmanuel Bernard on the future of validation using JSR-303, the Bean Validation framework. JSR-303 aims to provide an annotation-driven mechanism to mark plain old java beans with annotations, such as @NotNull, @Min, @Max, and can support custom validation annotations as well.

JSR-303 is part of the Java EE 6 suite of JSRs and will be used automatically out of the box by frameworks such as JSF 2.0. Emmanuel also goes into some detail about the current state of Hibernate Search. Useful links:

  1. Hibernate Validator (4.0.0, which is currently in alpha 3, is the reference implementation of JSR-303).
  2. The Bean Validation RI RoadMap, which contains a link to useful resources such as the updated JSR (more up-to-date here than on the JSR page itself).
  3. Emmanuel's Hibernate Search in Action, published by Manning, and co-authored with John Griffin.
  4. Hibernate Search Project Homepage
  5. JSF 2.0 and JPA 2.0 project homepages
  6. Emmanuel Bernard's blog, No Relation To.

 

Direct download: TechCast-Episode-25-04-01-2009.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 11:05am EDT

Episode 24 - Dan Allen on Seam, Part 2

Last Thursday I had an opportunity to sit down with Dan Allen and talk about the Seam Framework.  Dan was a great resource for learning about Seam.  This is the second of a two-part interview, where we focus on the future of Java EE 6, including JSR-299, formerly known as WebBeans, and how Seam will change as the Java EE specification evolves.  We also discuss varying front-end technologies such as Flex and AJAX, and a bit about workflow. 

Resources we mentioned in the talk include:

  1. Granite DS  - graniteds.org - A Flex remoting framework that includes support for Seam as well as other platforms such as Guice, Spring and POJOs
  2. Flamingo - Another Flex (and JavaFX) remoting framework that exposes Seam and Spring services using a variety of protocols including AMF and Hessian.
  3. The JSR-299 Specification.  Dan claims it is a decent read and it seems to be  something every Java EE developer needs to be aware of at some point in the near future.

Show notes are available at techcast.chariotsolutions.com.

His upcoming talk at the Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference on March 27th covers implementing Security in Seam.  Dan is the author of Manning's book, Seam In Action, which can be purchased in paper or PDF form.  He recently became a Red-Hatter, which he blogs about at his blog/website, www.mojavelinux.com.  You can also find him on in.relation.to, a blog site running on JBoss Seam that covers topics such as Seam, JBoss Tools, WebBeans, Eclipse, and RichFaces.  His twitter ID is #mojavelinux.

You can follow the Chariot TechCast on twitter as techcast, and visit chariotsolutions.com for more information about our company.

Direct download: TechCast-Episode-24-03-17-2009.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 10:31am EDT

Episode 23 - Dan Allen on Seam, Part 1

Last Thursday I had an opportunity to sit down with Dan Allen and talk about the Seam Framework.  Dan was a great resource for learning about Seam.  This is the first of a two-part interview, where we focus on the Seam framework itself, how it differs from Spring and other frameworks, and how it marries JSF and POJO as well as EJB components, providing a stateful view of the world and making programming easier for APIs such as Java Persistence.

His upcoming talk at the Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference on March 27th covers implementing Security in Seam.  Dan is the author of Manning's book, Seam In Action, which can be purchased in paper or PDF form.  He recently became a Red-Hatter, which he blogs about at his blog/website, www.mojavelinux.com.  You can also find him on in.relation.to, a blog site running on JBoss Seam that covers topics such as Seam, JBoss Tools, WebBeans, Eclipse, and RichFaces.  His twitter ID is #mojavelinux.


Direct download: TechCast-Episode-23-03-16-2009.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 10:18am EDT

Episode 22 - Chris Richardson on Cloud Foundry

Today, I speak to San Fransisco based consultant Chris Richardson, author of Manning's POJOs in Action, and creator of Cloud Tools and Cloud Foundry, both tools created to simplify working with Amazon Web Services for Java and Grails applications.

Chris and I speak about the growth of Cloud Computing, as well about his projects.  We also discuss the increased adoption of Groovy and Grails as a rapid development platform.

Pertinent links:
Amazon Web Services
Cloud Tools
Cloud Foundry
Grails

Thanks to Chris Richardson for coming on the show.  A reminder for our upcoming Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference, hosted in Philadelphia, PA, on March 26 and 27. With over 50 speakers across a wide variety of topics, it is fast becoming the East Coast event to see. Tickets are selling fast, so to reserve your seat, visit www.phillyemergingtech.com today.  

Archives of the show, as well as show notes, can be found on our website, techcast.chariotsolutions.com.  You can email feedback to techcastfeedback@chariotsolutions.com.

Direct download: TechCast-2008-02-18.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 3:57pm EDT


Register Now!

Subscribe!

Mobile Users

Sponsors

Chariot Events

Categories

Archives