Back again....

I haven't been posting much lately (obviously). My fiance has moved up here to good old Medford, Oregon, and I have been pretty busy between helping her get settled and working. I have been playing around with a bunch of new stuff since my last post.

Ruby: I have been able to get my hands on 'Ruby Cookbook' from O'Reilly. My boss at work bought a copy for our department, bless his heart. If you plan on quickly jumping into some useful Ruby I highly recommend this book. I have already used it for developing a SOAP service client to test a Java XFire service I wrote. With this books aid I wrote the whole thing in five minutes. The benefit is in being able to test my web service with another language, and to verify the correct responses. I feel the 'cookbook' series is one of the best for becoming useful in a new language. They match a seasoned coders ability to look past the basics of a language's grammar and begin actually getting into the api's and such of a language (the nitty gritty ;).

XFire: this is a nifty Java tool for doing webservices, which get war'd up and deployed into a J2EE web container. I am using it to create web services at work now, deploying to a 5.x version of Apache Tomcat. XFire is very quick and easy to work with. I started out using MyEclipse's new built in XFire web project. Of course I wanted to use XFire in a Maven2 type project (for the enormous benefits that Maven2 provides). This is easy!!! The best part about using XFire was that the services I created worked with M$ Dynamix Ax out of the box, which is a huge deal to my bosses. I was using Axis before, but I had to customize WSDL files for each of my services. Ax's SOAP object did not like the WSDL files automatically created by Axis (thus the customizing). Creating and maintaining WSDL files was time consuming and complicated the whole web service creation process for me. XFire will also auto generate WSDL files, which then work with M$ Dynamix Ax. Hurrah!!!

Servicemix (Smix) and ActiveMQ (AMQ): these amazing open source projects have become a major deal at my work. We are currently using both to implement our cockeyed attempt at SOA. We are luckily starting out easy, but I get the feeling I will soon be going full bore into setting up our company with an Enterprise Service Architecture (ESA). My awsome boss bought more books. I don't have all of them here, but I will tell you that "Enterprise Integration Patterns" is the book to read to get your feet wet. It is a theoretical type textbook which ellicits heartwarming memories of college reading. In it you will not find long code samples. You will find in depth explanations of how and why things work in the enterprise integration world.

Portlets: I have once again taken up the burden of Java's Portlet api. It is pretty rad. I am using Liferay which is actually better for portlet development (in my opinion of course) than Pluto. Pluto is supposed to be a container used for portlet development. I think it's got a ways to go, considering the ease of deploying/redeploying portlet .war's in Liferay. Oh and not to mention how nice Liferay looks! I am hoping to write a nifty portlet which will interface with a tool we use for storing information on projects and requests for things. This tool is called QuickBase, and is an online app from Intuit. We have used it to develop a bunch of stuff for tracking projects. It was my dept's first crack at doing anything of the sort and falls a bit short (especially in the ease of use aspects). If I can get it up it will be a very nice proof of concept. Fingers crossed.

Portlet-MVC: Who wants to do plain old portlet development? Not me! I first messed around with the Struts portlet bridge framework, but quickly became bored of it. Struts may be the big kid, but the kid is obviously a beer short. I have been searching around for a better MVC for portlet development. I have found Spring 2.0's Portlet MVC. I am happy, especially since I'm a fan of Spring to begin with. The Spring portlet framework allows you to easily leverage Springs niceties. You can also work in Struts, WebWork, etc. if you really want to....

So thats it. I am trying to check out a portlet app from Spring's site. It is supposed to be packaged with the 2.0 releases of Spring, but I downloaded many different versions and none included the sample app. I'll post later on how I get it (if I can). C'ya.