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.

Direct download: TechChat_Tuesdays_47__Dev_News.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 1:11pm EDT

In this episode, we discuss the StrangeLoop 2013 conference.

Direct download: Chariot-TechCast-Episode-81-2013-10-03.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 7:30am EDT

Magnolia CMS is a content management system written in Java that has a long history. Created more than a decade ago, it has evolved into a platform with a significant user base and a large number of third-party extensions that the team dubs 'modules'.

In this podcast, we speak to Magnolia CMS's CTO, Boris Kraft, and to Magnolia engineer Tobias Mattsson.

We first speak with Boris Kraft about the history of Magnolia CMS, and discuss some of the basics of the platform.

Then we interview Tobias, who is the author of the Blossom module. This package provides a Spring MVC web context, which can export content to the CMS from non-traditional sources such as enterprise application data. It uses Spring MVC and annotation-driven classes to expose any data you'd like as content for your project

Tobias is speaking at the upcoming SpringOne/2GX summit in Santa Clara, CA. His topic will be Spring and Web Content Management.

More Resources

Direct download: TechCast-80-Magnolia-and-Blossom-2013-08-28.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 11:03am EDT

Sujan and Ken talk about Sujan's trip to OSCON this year.

Major themes included Data Science, Functional Programming, and Cloud Services.  Show notes on our blog pages.

Direct download: Chariot-TechCast-Episode-79-Sujan-Kapadia-OSCON-2013.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 1:59pm EDT

The tech cast is brought to you by Chariot Solutions education services. If you're on a development team working in Java, Spring, Maven, Hibernate, Scala or Android, we're here to help. For onsite training, one-on one or group mentoring, or to attend one of our public classes, visit us on the web at chariotsolutions.com/education.

This week we feature a Philadelphia developer, Andrew Larkin, who works at Comcast as an engineer specializing in accessibility for their various web platforms. He is currently working on an open-sourced Javascript component framework, Xooie, which provides drag and drop, tabbing, and other features and features support for add-ons and additional components.

Comcast is actively looking for external developers to contribute to Xooie and other projects. You can find their open source projects on GitHub at github.com/comcast.

Andrew runs the Philly Accessibility Meetup which discusses how to design and develop technology that can be used by everyone. Their August 5th, 2013 meeting will discuss five simple rules for accessibility.

Direct download: Chariot-TechCast-Epsiode-78-Andrew-Larkin-Xooie-And-Comcast.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 3:30pm EDT

This week's interview features Fil Maj, of Adobe's PhoneGap project. PhoneGap is a cross-device runtime platform for hosting HTML and Javascript applications on tablets, phones and other hand-held devices. Chariot's consulting practice director Don Coleman joins us as he's worked with Phil on phone gap and plugins, so he lends a hand guiding the conversation. I hope you enjoy this podcast. 

Direct download: Chariot-TechCast-Episode-77-Fil-Maj-04-23-2013.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 4:33pm EDT

Lukas Ruebbelke and Brian Ford, both speaking at Philly Emerging Tech this April, are co-authors of the forthcoming Manning book, AngularJS in Action. They are currently preparing for their first Manning Early Access release, or MEAP.

When Brian was working at Google as an intern, he was exposed to the Angular framework and learned quite a lot about it. So much in fact, that he developed the AngularJS Batarang, a Chrome debugging tool, and helped to launch their documentation site, also written in Angular.

Lukas has been working for over ten years as an application developer, starting with programming languages such as ActionScript and Flash, and then moving into the Javascript/HTML 5 world. He came upon Angular and also enjoyed working with it, as it just made sense to him.

In this TechCast episode, we'll discuss this framework, which helps developers put together browser-centric HTML and Javascript applications. We'll find out the major components, such as a very easily understood Model View Controller framework, the ViewModel or $scope, and other features such as services and the all-powerful Angular directives.

Topics mentioned include:

  • Models, Views, Controller
  • The Angular ViewModel
  • Scopes
  • Services and state
  • De-composing pages into multiple controllers
  • Yeoman as a build tool for Angular and other platforms
  • What are Angular Directives?

Books mentioned:

  • Javascript, the Good Parts - Douglas Crockford
  • Javacript Patterns
  • Javascript Enlightenment

Direct download: Chariot-TechCast-76-AngularJS-With-Lukas-Ruebbelke-and-Brian-Ford.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 12:34pm EDT

Rod Johnson is well known for his work creating and leading SpringSource, and the Spring Framework. But did you know he recently started working with TypeSafe organization? He's advising them on their board of directors, and he's working on his own Scala hobby application. He has some views about the language, how to start using it, complexity vs readability, the "No Frameworks" movement, and more. 

If you want to listen to Rod's history working on Spring, have a listen to episode 74.

Advertisement - my co-host for this episode, Michael Pigg, is running TypeSafe's Fast Track to Scala course at our training facility in January 2013. Use the discount code 'techcast' and save $200 on your seat.

Full disclosure: Chariot is a TypeSafe and SpringSource/VMware training partner.

Direct download: TechCast_Episode_75-RodJohnson-Scala_Views-Part-2.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 10:25am EDT

This interview is a walk through the lead up to and the creation of the Spring Framework with no founder Rod Johnson. Recently, Rod left the company sponsoring Spring, VMware Corporation, and joined up as a board member of TypeSafe to advise them on the future of Scala and other projects.

The podcast, then, is broken into two parts - the first part focuses on Rod's history in creating Spring, what makes it compelling, and how it has developed over the years.

The next part, which will appear on TechCast #75, will focus on Scala, a language that has become more popular of late. Rod is currently advising TypeSafe, the sponsors and creators of Scala, and he has been working on a project for several months totally written in the Scala language. 

Disclosure Note - Chariot Solutions is a VMware consulting and value-added training center partner. 

Enjoy this two-part interview.

Best,

Ken Rimple

Direct download: TechCast_Episode_74-RodJohnson-HistoryOfSpring-Part-1.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 2:05pm EDT

This techcast episode features the open source PDF API developer Bruno Lowagie. His iText library has been used by many Java developers. One of the earier open-source Java APIs, iText was originally written to provide PDF version 1.3-compliant output. This was not the first API that Bruno created to handle PDF, as we'll hear in the interview, and also not the first to be open-sourced.

We'll hear how Bruno has participated in the PDF specification, has worked with various document management concerns including encryption, forms processing, and long-term archiving of PDF document formats. One very interesting section concerns how he approached licensing, and some of the challenges faced by developers when they are looking at dealing with open-source users versus paying clients, and how that informs the decisions of his company has he moves the library forward.

For information about the iText library, in both the commercial and open-source licensed versions, you can visit itextpdf.com.

Direct download: Chariot-Techcast-73-Bruno_Lowagie-2012-10-08.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 11:33am EDT

Regular listeners will recognize Jamie Allen's voice from a number of podcast episodes at Chariot. He recently left us to join Typesafe, the sponsors of the Scala language, Akka, Play and other items that make up the Typesafe stack.

We discuss a number of topics, including:

  • Scala helps you write good code out of the box
  • Languages -vs- Frameworks
  • Functional programming
  • A few upcoming features of scala 2.10 
  • Builds in scala
  • Scalathon 2012
  • Training around Scalathon including Chariot's Fast Track to Scala offering which includes instruction from Jamie Allen himself.

For information about scalathon, head over to the event page at http://scalathon.org/2012/

Chariot is a Typesafe training partner.

Direct download: TechCast-Episode-72-Jamie-Allen-Typesafe-Scala.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 5:27pm EDT

Brian Fox is a longtime open source contributor, having worked on Maven 2 and overseeing the development of Maven 3. He is the VP of Engineering at Sonatype, and currently leads the Nexus repository project. The team has just released version 2.0, which includes support for the growing .NET open source community and the NUGET library manager. 

We discuss the evolution of Maven and repository management, the Nexus repository manager, and key features in 2.0, such as the new smart proxy and the advent of Sonatype's new repository license intelligence and health awareness.

Topics covered:

  • Maven 3.0 and futures
  • Maven central
  • Nexus repositories
  • Some Nexus architecture considerations
  • Nexus 2.0, repository abstractions, NUGET
  • Nexus Pro enhancements in 2.0

More information about Nexus and NuGet here. http://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2012/03/03/sonatype-repository-now-supports-net-framework.aspx

Chariot is a Sonatype consulting and training partner.

Thanks to Brian for speaking to us today on the Techcast.

You can find Brian's blog entries for Sonatype at http://www.sonatype.com/people/author/brian/. Nexus is available at nexus.sonatype.org.

You can find him on twitter at AT brian underscore fox, You can find out more information about Nexus at nexus.sonatype.org.

Direct download: Chariot-TechCast-Epsiode-71-Brian-Fox-2012-03-19.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 12:00pm EDT

Here is our interview with ETE keynoter Alex Payne. His talk, Emerging Programming Languages: a Tour of the Horizon" will be featured on April 11 at 8:30 AM.

Links will be updated over time, I wanted to get this out early.

Alex will be speaking in depth about some emerging languages at ETE. This show is a quick introduction to some of the things going on in the industry, but not as comprehensive as Alex's talk will be. We hope to see you there, and if you're not attending ETE we should have the talk available online a short time after the end of the conference.

Notes:

Alex's first real computer : Mac Quadra.

  • Alex on Sitepoint podcast #39
  • The Strange Loop Sept 23-25 2012 where Alex is helping drive the emerging languages track.
  • Google Go! http://golang.org
  • Scala
  • Haskell
  • Google Go
  • Dart
  • Kotlin
  • R programming language - in last few years, surged for big data


Other topics mentioned

  • David Unger manycore > 24 (1000) cores
  • Portland State University
  • Non determinism / cache coherency

Where to find Alex

- Twitter - @al3x
- web: http://al3x.net/

Produced by Chariot Solutions Education Services

Upcoming courses through June online now at chariotsolutions.com/training_events.

More classes added for summer soon.

Direct download: Chariot_TechCast_70-Alex-Payne-ETE-2012-Keynoter.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 2:29pm EDT

This is the first in a series of podcasts centered around speakers for the Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference. 

My guest today is Alex Hillman. He is a leader in the co-working movement who helped found Independents Hall, known by the shortened name IndyHall (indyhall.org). 

We discuss how Alex got into technology entprenuership, his technical background, how he involved himself in the co-working movement, and we also preview the subject of his talk, Enterprise Makeover: turning cost centers into profit centers.

Links:

  • Beanstalk - a web-based project version control hosting platform
  • IndyHall.org - a co-working collective in Philadelphia that Alex Hillman helped to found
  • coworking.com - a web site devoted to the concept of co-working
Direct download: TechCast-69-ETE-2012-Alex-Hillman-Interview.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 6:30am EDT

Kohsuke Kawaguchi (@kohsukekawa) is the creator of Jenkins, a continuous integration tool he wrote a number of years ago as a way to verify that he checked in his files and didn't affect his multi-developer build. It is safe to say that Kohsuke wasn't the only one with that problem. A huge hit, the Jenkins CI server, which at the time was known as Hudson, reached a wide adoption level, with people installing it officially and even under their desktops in many IT development shops. 

Kohsuke discusses the challenges in developing a tool like Jenkins, which changed names after the new owner of Sun, Oracle, decided that it owned the trademark to the Hudson product name. Oracle has contributed Hudson to the Eclipse foundation, and Kohsuke has continued developing Jenkins, sticking to a build per week strategy, conducting all team meetings in an open IRC forum, as well as documenting project status on their website, jenkins-ci.org.

We talk about current efforts, including supporting the plug-in developer community, writing plugins in Ruby, the CloudBees projects he's working on, and more. Thanks again to Kohsuke and Lisa Wells, who lined up the interview.

Show Notes

Direct download: ChariotTechCast_68_Koshuke_Kawaguchi_Jenkins.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 2:33pm EDT

In this episode, Ryan Campbell joins Ken to talk about the CloudBees development platform, Dev@Cloud, and Java runtime platform, Run@Cloud.  Dev@Cloud can host private maven snapshot and release repositories, your GIT or SVN version control, and hosted Jenkins CI testing.  

For information about CloudBees or about the platforms, including hosted Hudson and open source CI instances, visit them on the web, at cloudbees.com.

We originally lined up CloudBees for our fall Continuous Delivery conference.  

** Edit by Ken Rimple - removed some incorrect information **

Direct download: Chariot-TechCast-Episode-67-CloudBees-Ryan-Campbell.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 5:31pm EDT

We continue our interview with Eric Shamow of Puppet Labs.  Show notes to follow soon, please refer to information from TechCast Episode 65 for now.  

Puppet Labs can be found at www.puppetlabs.com, and they are hosting PuppetConf, a conference on the west coast that is not only about Puppet.  

A word from our sponsor, Chariot Solutions:

Mark your calendars:  Chariot's DevOps seminar - October 18, 2011 at the Penn State Great Valley campus in the Philadelphia suburbs.  We'll have speakers from Chariot, CloudBees, NING, Puppet Labs, Sonatype, and a panel discussion at the end.  Lunch is provided as well. Save on our early bird - $75 instead of the already low price of $99.  More information on the event page.

Also, if Scala is your thing, come to our Fast Track to Scala training in New York City on October 4-5, 2011.  Seats are still available but they will fill up fast.  The course is taught by Typesafe, the company Martin Odersky formed around Scala and Akka to move the language and frameworks forward.  Save $100 by using the coupon code 'techcast' during registration, which can be found at chariotsolutions.com/education.

Direct download: Chariot-TechCast-66-Eric-Shamow-Puppet-Labs-Part-2-2011-09-12.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 3:38pm EDT

My discussion this week is with Eric Shamow of Puppet Labs.  He'll be presenting at our upcoming DevOps Seminar on October 18th.  We took a little time to discuss DevOps in general, and Puppet in some specifics.

Part two will be a deeper dive into Puppet itself.  Look for that podcast in early September.  

Resouces, per Eric:


Eric can be found at his blog, http://opsrealist.com and via e-mail at eric at opsrealist.com. Also twitter - @eshamow


Direct download: Chariot_TechCast_65_0_Eric_Shamow_Puppet_Labs_Part_1.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 12:15am EDT

Podcast Information

This final pre-ETE podcast brings together Josh Clark, designer, developer and author of Tapworthy, a guide to designing great iPhone applications, and Jonathan Stark, VP of Application Architecture at Mobiquity and author of three books including "Building iPhone apps with HTML, CSS and Javascript". Chariot's Kevin Griffin and I sat down over the intertubes to get their take on mobile app design and development. Both authors are speaking at the Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference.

Jonathan Stark's twitter handle is @jonathanstark, and Josh Clark's is @globalmoxie

Links

Books

Direct download: Chariot-Techcast-Episode-64-Stark-Clark-Mobile-Dev.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 4:03pm EDT

Brendan McAdams, 10Gen, the company behind MongoDB

Today's guest is Brendan McAdams. He works for 10Gen, the company behind MongoDB, the document-oriented noSQL database. Brendan is a software engineer who wears many hats - he is a developer on the Java and Scala casbah drivers, works with and commits database driver contributions to frameworks like Akka and Lift, and does community outreach and training in MongoDB. Eric Snyder and I sat down to talk to Brendan about the 1.8 release and the MongoPhilly Philly Emerging Tech Week event on April 26. We start by asking Brendan to define MongoDB. If you want to register for the MongoPhilly event and save 20%, register at bit.ly/mongophilly with the offer code 'chariot'.

Links

Sponsor

Heroku

This podcast is sponsored by Heroku - they let you deploy and scale powerful ruby-based applications on their rock-solid platform in the cloud. For more information, visit heroku.com.

Direct download: Chariot-TechCast-Episode-62-BrendanMcAdams.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 8:00am EDT

Ken Rimple interviews Johanna Rothman

My guest this time is Johanna Rothman, an esteemed project management consultant who runs Rothman Consulting Group, and writes/blogs/speaks/podcasts on a wide variety of topics including Agile, managing suites of projects, and more. Her website is jrothman.com. She is speaking at the 2011 Philly Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference on April 27-28, 2011.

Podcast Topics

Some of Johanna's Books

Sponsor

Heroku

This podcast is sponsored by Heroku - they let you deploy and scale powerful ruby-based applications on their rock-solid platform in the cloud. For more information, visit heroku.com.

Direct download: TechCast-Episode-61-Johanna-Rothman-Pre-ETE2011.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 12:59pm EDT

Ross Mason is the founder of Mule, an open source enterprise service bus that implements the Gregor and Hohpe Enterprise Integration Patterns.  Easy to install and configure, Mule does not place heavy demands on developers - there is no required canonical form, services can be expressed in a number of ways, and it supports a wide range of scripting languages, from Groovy to JRuby and beyond.

 

Chariot integration specialist Rod Biresch and I sat down to chat with Ross recently to talk about Mule, the version 3 release, other related topics.  Chariot is a MuleSoft partner.

 

More show notes to come.

 

Direct download: Chariot-Techcast-Episode-60-02-06-2011.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 12:43pm EDT

Eric Snyder discusses MongoDB, a document-oriented NoSQL database.

Show Notes

  • MongoDB is built and supported by 10gen
  • Information on BSON, a Binary format similar to JSON: http://bsonspec.org/
  • Document oriented datastore. Documents are JSON-like. Storage is really BSON, a binary representation of JSON. 
  •  Supports ad-hoc querying (like relational)
  • Queries are expressed as BSON documents. You can reference deeply nested attributes and there are a robust collection of query operators.
  • MongoDB query optimizer is not cost based. MongoDB tries all query plans simultaneously until it one completes, then it terminates the others. It then reuses that plan for the query until it begins to perform poorly
  • Document attributes can be indexed similarly to a relational db column.
  • Map/reduce is available for more complex data analysis.
  • MongoDB has built-in replication and auto-sharding.
  • Uses a native binary over-the-wire protocol implemented by various drivers. There are drivers available for many languages/environments.

=== Sponsor Note ===

Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference - April 27-28 2011 - is now taking registrations.  We have an amazing array of speakers on a wide range of topics, including NodeJS, Ruby, Rails, Scala, Spring, Agile, and more.  Visit the site today and take advantage of early bird registration.

 

Direct download: Chariot-TechCast-59-MongoDB-Eric-Snyder.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 12:00pm EDT

James Ward has been a guest on numerous podcasts (ETE Evening Podcast - 2010, Episode 34, Episode 18).

He is here this week to give us the state of the state in Adobe's Flash-based RIA technologies, including Flex 4, Flash Catalyst, Air 2.5, and Adobe's support for HTML 5 and CSS 3.  We discuss mobile platform technologies as well, including how Air is being targeted as the mobile flash platform for Android, the Blackberry tablet, and iOS.

Links:

 

Direct download: Chariot-TechCast-Episode-58-James-Ward-Adobe-Flex-2010-11-22.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 4:08pm EDT

Interview with Mark Fisher - SpringSource, a division of VMWare on Spring Integration

Hosts:  Ken Rimple & Gordon Dickens

Mark Fisher is an engineer at SpringSource, a division of VMWare, who leads the Spring Integration project.  He is a Spring consultant, contributor to the core framework, and works on projects such as Spring Flex Integration and the Spring AQMP project.  A long time member of SpringSource, back to the Interface21 days, Mark has deep roots in what makes Spring tick.

Spring Integration is, as Mark describes it, Spring meets Enterprise Integration Patterns.  In this talk, we discuss:

  • How Mark got involved in the Spring Framework
  • An overview of Spring Integration
  • Discussion of version 2.0 features, including a number of new adapters, additional patterns, enhancements brought with Spring 3.0 and more

Mark is also working on Spring Integration In Action for Manning, which should be released early next year.  He will be doing three talks at SpringOne in Chicago next week, covering Spring Integration, 

Technologies mentioned in this podcast include:

Disclosure : Chariot is a SpringSource consulting and education partner.

Sponsor Announcement

The Chariot TechCast podcast is sponsored by Chariot Solutions.

Chariot is holding training in various Spring courses before the end of the year, including the Spring Enterprise Integration course, which covers Spring Integration as well as Spring Batch, on 12/7.  More details can be found on our training calendar.

Direct download: ChariotTechCast-2010-10-13-Mark-Fisher-SpringIntegration.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 10:44am EDT

Chariot TechCast Episode 55 - Interview with Boris Bokowski on Eclipse e4

Today we speak with Boris Bokowski, a committer on the Eclipse Platform UI project, and a Senior Software Engineer at IBM.  His participation in Ecilpse dates back to Eclipse 1.0, when he coded the CVS client for the IDE.

We discuss Eclipse e4, an incubator for new technologies on the Eclipse project.  There are several new features coming as a result of e4, including:

  • A new dependency injection framework for Eclipse bundles, based on the Java platform Dependency Injection JSR
  • A new Rich UI tool, built on Eclipse, that lets developers put together rich client platforms using Eclipse and the dependency management platform
  • A new eGit Eclipse git integration tool

For more information, visit eclipse.org/e4

To read about Boris Bokowski and what he is working on, you can visit his blog:  borisoneclipse.blogspot.com

 

Direct download: Chariot-TechCast-55-Eclipse-e4-Bokowski.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 5:58pm EDT

Episode 54 - Gradle creators Hans Dockter and Adam Murdoch - Part 2

Gradle is an application assembly and build management platform that provides for convention-based build processes like Maven, but also implements a dynamic, groovy-based scripting and plugin system to make it very easy to customize your builds and perform specific steps at any point along the way. My guests today are Hans Docter, who is the creator of Gradle, and Adam Murdoch who is a committer to gradle, and is the CTO of Gradle Inc, a company founded to support development teams working with gradle in the field.

Useful links

This is part one of a two-part series. 

Thanks for listening.  Our podcast audio themes are free theme #3 and #4 from podcastthemes.com

Follow us on twitter - and send your feedback to @techcast, or the #techcast hashtag.

Direct download: Chariot-TechCast-53-gradle-part2-03-10-2010.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 8:02am EDT

Episode 53 - Gradle creators Hans Dockter and Adam Murdoch - Part 1

Gradle is an application assembly and build management platform that provides for convention-based build processes like Maven, but also implements a dynamic, groovy-based scripting and plugin system to make it very easy to customize your builds and perform specific steps at any point along the way.

My guests today are Hans Docter, who is the creator of Gradle, and Adam Murdoch who is a committer to gradle, and is the CTO of Gradle Inc, a company founded to support development teams working with gradle in the field.

Useful links

This is part one of a two-part series. 

Thanks for listening.  Our podcast audio themes are free theme #3 and #4 from podcastthemes.com

Follow us on twitter - and send your feedback to @techcast, or the #techcast hashtag.

Direct download: Chariot-TechCast-53-gradle-part1-03-05-2010.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 12:32pm EDT

Episode 52 - Peter Neubauer on neo4j - a graph database

Peter Neubauer (Twitter :@peterneubauer) is the COO of Neo Technology and one of the founders of neo4j - a graph-based database engine.  We talked about the neo4j project and discussed how it can be used from Java and other languages as an alternative that can provide highly scalable access to related data.

Resources

 

 

Direct download: ChariotTechCast-52-neo4j.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 4:37pm EDT

Episode 51 - Brian Sletten on the Semantic Web and what it means for developers

On this techcast, Brian Sletten describes how the Semantic Web helps to define relationships between interconnected data, discusses the various tools and APIs, and how it is already being used, even without our knowledge.

Services like Friend of a Friend (FoaF), tools like RDFa, query tools like SPARQL, are discussed. If you don't know what the Semantic Web is or why it exists, Brian gives us a good overview and it's worth time listening to. Today, the US Government, wikipedia, and other systems are making data available via these mechanisms, as well as online retailers like Best Buy and Tesco.

Sponsor - Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise April 8-9, 2010. Still time to register for the early bird special and save! Details at phillyemergingtech.com

Brian Sletten's articles on Semantic Web, REST, and more:
Linked data project: 
Best Buy - blog about using RDFa:
Some open source tools:
SPARQL tutorial:
A couple of good SemWeb Twitter lists:

Brian Sletten twitters as @bsletten, and works for Riot Games, and is part of the League of Legends team.

 

 

 

Direct download: ChariotTechCast-50-Brian-Sletten-SemanticWeb.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 10:49am EDT

Episode 50 - Jeremy Grelle on SpringSource's WEB and RIA APIs

For our 50th episode, I sat down with VMWare/SpringSource's Jeremy Grelle, an Open Source developer who works on the Spring WebFlow project, among others. Jeremy will be speaking about Spring's BlazeDS integration library when he comes to town for the Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference in April. We talk about Spring 3.0, and about the following APIs: Spring MVC Spring WebFlow Spring Faces Spring JavaScript Spring's BlazeDS Integration library for Rich Flex applications Thanks to Jeremy for coming on the show and taking the time to talk to us.

Direct download: Chariot_TechCast_50-Jeremy_Grelle.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 5:15pm EDT

Episode 49 - Venkat Subramaniam on Groovy and Dynamic Languages

Venkat Subramaniam is a widely acclaimed speaker, author, professor, and creator of Agile Developer, a mentoring and training company. 

He joined us on the techcast to talk about programming using dynamic languages.  He is well known for his talks and book on the Groovy language, has just published a book on Scala, and discusses his philosophy for applying languages in our talk.

Mr. Subramaniam is speaking at the 2010 Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise show, to be held on April 8-9 in downtown Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  To register, head over to phillyemergingtech.com.

Links:

  1. Venkat's web site - http://www.agiledeveloper.com
  2. Examples of Testing with Groovy -  http://www.agiledeveloper.com/presentations/testingWithGroovy.zip
  3. A great book by Venkat on Programming Groovy
  4. Venkat's Scala Book
  5. Java world Article on DSL

Music today was provided by FreePodcastThemes.com (free theme #3 is our opener) and by Music Alley.  The takeout music was "Jazz Breakfast" from "Gecko 3".  Warning - if you download it has a few explicit words mixed in, but it's got a great groove!  Artist Information.

Direct download: ChariotTechCast-49-Venkat-S-01-19-2010.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 8:00am EDT

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 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

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 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 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

Episode 18 - Interview with Dan Diephouse of MuleSource

This podcast interview features Dan Diephouse of MuleSource.  We talk about his work on XFire, CXF and his current efforts with Mule.  We discuss WS-* and REST, and other web service integration issues.

Time is running out to sign up for the Chariot sponsored Cloud Computing Conference, Fall Forecast, Computing Among the Clouds on October 17th, 2008 at the Penn State Great Valley campus in the western Philadelphia suburbs.

For more information about this and other Chariot Tech Cast shows, visit our shownotes page at www.chariotsolutions.com/podcasts/techcast/shownotes.


Direct download: ChariotTechCast-Dan_Diephouse-10-06-2008.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 2:18pm EDT

Episode 17 - Interview with James Ward of Adobe Systems on Flex

If anyone has been listening since our very first Podcast, we covered flex way back in February with our own Peter Paugh.  But when we had an opportunity to talk to James Ward of Adobe, a Flex evangelist and someone passionate about Flex as well as Java development, we jumped at the chance.

James was a great interview, a fantastic source of information, and will be a good listen.  We talk about Flex, Flex Builder, the open sourcing of various technologies, the Open Screen project, why Java developers should care, and many more topics.

Helpful links and resources:

  1. The Census Benchmark App - James has been working on this for a while.  It is a benchmarking application comparing various RIA / AJAX technologies and speed of operations like sorting, table management, etc...  An interesting way to see relative performance metrics.
  2. Flex Home - the main Flex developer site.
  3. Adobe Open Source - James mentioned this site a lot.  This is where Adobe places all of its' open-sourced technologies.
  4. The Flex SDK Download Page - The open source, freely available SDK
  5. The Shockwave File Format - Adobe has fully documented the SWF file format.
  6. The Open Screen Project - a consortium including Adobe that wants to push Flash onto mobile devices by opening up the standards and exposing the flash player.  More info at the FAQ
  7. Gnash - an open-source flash movie player mentioned in the show
  8. AMF - (pdf download) the ActionScript Message Format - Read up on this, as Flex supports AMF for fast transfer of data between client and server.
  9. BlazeDS - A server-side Java remoting technology using AMF.
  10. LiveCycle ES - A commercial, J2EE-based server platform for Flex development from Adobe.
  11. FXStruts - the FXStruts Library allows Struts developers to expose java objects within a Struts application using AMF

James Ward's blog and useful information is located at www.jamesward.com.   The Flex Show episode 50 is also a good listen...

Direct download: James_Ward_Podcast_Interview.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 12:00pm EDT

Episode 13 - Toby DiPasquale on Google, Map-Reduce, Hadoop, Amazon EC2 and more

This week we feature an interview with Toby DiPasquale of Invite Media.  Toby and I discuss the Map-Reduce algorithm, which is the engine that powers Google's indexing and data processing systems.  We start off by discussing how Google started indexing pages, using traditional methods such as C/C++ routines.  Quickly this became unmanageable, as the amount of data to index outstripped the processing power and traditional data transformation paradigms.

Toby and I then go into discussing Map Reduce, which was originally posited as a thesis and then published as a seminal paper in the community.  Map Reduce has been implemented by Google, and as we'll see in the podcast, others followed suit and created the Hadoop engine, a Java-based Map Reduce solution. 

We talk about Hadoop and it's various subprojects, and then get into a discussion on Amazon EC2 and the Cloud Computing movement, including why it is valuable to organizations who want to scale from one to potentially dozens of CPUs.

I'll post the show notes early next week at http://www.chariotsolutions.com/podcasts/techcast/shownotes.  Until then, enjoy the show and comments are always welcome.

Note:  the podcast audio got a bit distorted on Toby's side, but I don't think it distracts too much.  Rather than re-record the interview I'm presenting it as-is.

Direct download: TechCast-2008-08-01-TobyDipasquale.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 8:10am EDT

Episode 12 - Interview with Chris Cera of Vuzit on Ruby and Rails Development

This week I'm starting an occasional series of interviews on non-Java or non-traditional platform development.  I am looking for reasons that people choose Ruby on Rails, Python, and other languages in lieu of Java EE or .NET, especially in startup organizations.  This interview features Chris Cera, the CTO of Vuzit (http://www.vuzit.com), which is a document web services startup funded by DreamIt Ventures (http://www.dreamitventures.com), a Philadelphia-area seed funding program. We talk about his experiences with various dynamic languages, including Perl and Ruby, and why he feels Rails is a great development platform for his company. At the end of the interview Chris and I get into a discussion about what makes a good programmer / developer.  Thanks for listening.  Feedback can be directed to me at krimple@chariotsolutions.com. KR

Direct download: ChariotTechCast-08-18-2008-podcast.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 4:17pm EDT

Episode 11 - Peter Paugh on Google Web Toolkit

A discussion with Peter Paugh, one of Chariot's architects and Rich Internet Application developers, on the current state of GWT.  GWT was just revved to version 1.5, and is becoming a good Java-based alternative for writing Rich Internet Applications.  Peter and Ken discuss GWT as a platform, the cross-browser compiling mechanism, and other details, and also talk about the controversy surrounding GWT-EXT caused by moving of the license from the LGPL to GPL.

Direct download: ChariotTechCast-2008-06-11.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 5:00pm EDT

Episode 7 - Andy Oswald on Running Ubuntu Linux on a MacBook Pro

If you're at all adventurous, you've probably loaded Linux on a PC sometime in your life.  Some of us avoid that pain by running (screaming) to Mac OS X, where we have a nice, pretty view of the world behind shiny and metallic, stylin' boxes.

Not Andy Oswald.  He's a tried-and-true Linux OS guy (Ubuntu, actually).  When given a Mac Mini to play with, he really enjoyed kicking the tires, playing with those fun apps, but when it got down to brass tacks, he felt more at home on Linux.

Once Andy got his MacBook Pro, he dug around and found a small community of users running Ubuntu on the Mac.  And he's now one of them.  Learn how he fared by listening in.  If you do this yourself, we highly recommend thinking twice, backing up, and using the right machine for the job (NOT YOUR WORK ONE!)

The show notes can be found at http://www.chariotsolutions.com/shownotes/show/7.

Direct download: ChariotTechCast-2008-05-14.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 5:33pm EDT

Episode 5 - Interview:  Dmitry Sklyut on OSGi

Today's show features Dmitry Sklyut, a Chariot consultant who is an expert in the Spring Framework and has been researching the OSGi initiative.  We talk about OSGi as a platform, the various containers, tooling support, and integration with Spring.

Direct download: ChariotTechCast-2008-04-15.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 10:52am EDT

In this episode, Ken talks to Scott Fraser of Portico Systems.
Scott has over 20 years of experience in the IT industry, and
co-founded Portico eleven years ago with CEO Ned Moore. 
Scott and I talk about scripting Java with Jython,
large-scale 64-bit Java VMs, user interfaces using Netbeans'
Visual Library, and more.

This episode features new theme music from http://www.podcastthemes.com.


Direct download: ChariotTechCast-2008-03-24.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 11:45am EDT

Ken speaks to Tom Purcell, an architect with
Chariot Solutions, about Enterprise Service
Bus technologies. They discuss when an ESB
might be used in an SOA environment, some of
the vendors, technical and non-technical
challenges.
Direct download: ChariotTechCast-2008-02-27.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 7:00am EDT

Epsiode 1 - Peter Paugh on Adobe Flex
Ken speaks to Peter Paugh, a solutions 
architect at Chariot Solutions, about
his experiences with Adobe Flex, and
how it might fit into application
development as a Rich Internet Application
framework.
Direct download: ChariotTechCast-2008-02-14.mp3
Category:techcast -- posted at: 7:00am EDT


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