I cannot find time to post any interesting things lately, so I can only share great stuff with readers.
This week end, Laurent Bois has published a great post about:
- Deploying a remote (OpenSocial) Google Gadget made with GWT in eXo
Take a look to this tutorial, that is based on eXo Portal 2.5 and eXo WebOS 1.5.
Thanks Laurent for this great post!
eXo Platform is a nominee in the 01.net Pro 2008 awards. If you like our product I am inviting you to vote for our solution:
When working on software design, UI Mockups are quite important and Patrice, colleague of mine at eXo has pointed me to a very cool tool to use when you have to quickly do a mockup, and work with the dev team in an iterative fashion: This tool is "Balsamiq Mockup". Here an example of mockup realized with Balsamiq:
Also if you read more about the tool, you can see that it has native integration with others tools such as JIRA, so cool to be able to integrate a mockup easily when defining a new item...
Take a look to this screencast explaining the basic features and use of the product:
I have been within eXo Platform for almost 2 months now.. As expected, it is crazy, and exciting. This is why I did not have lot of time to blog... Ideas are here, just time is not... So here a very quick post on my current work...
We have been releasing new releases of products (Portal/Portlet Container, Collaboration Suite), deliver a training on eXo Portal, writing docs, articles, and many other exciting things... One of them is this nice example of integration of GWT Google Gadget in eXo WebOS.
During this period, when I was not working with customers, prospects and partners, I have learned a lot about one of the most exciting and powerful features: eXo ECM coupled with eXo Portal/WebOS. eXo exposed using a powerful UI, and set of API, its JavaContent Repository on which you can build powerful sites/portal using eXo templating engine... and one other cool thing, at least for me, is the fact that most of the programming that you do, including rich Ajax based application is done using Groovy. (using GroovyServer Pages)... More to come about eXo features on this blog, but the best place to be is to follow our company/project blog at http://blog.exoplatform.org, where all the team is presenting new features, and events of the eXo community...
Also, I have created, with Sebastien Roul a JUG in Nantes, here some information for French people:
I am very excited to say that this week is my first week as an employee of eXo Platorm. Excited for many reasons.... I'll pass on the excitement of a new job, we are all excited about that... So what are the others reasons:
I am pleased to work for a product where users can follow on a daily
basis what is the exact status of the different features, not from
marketing slides but directly from the source trunk... But also where
any user can influence the product either by providing direct feedback
to the developers using mailing lists, tracking tools and wikis; even
more if they want to participate to the development itself.
So being open source, will avoid some kind of lock-in, but this is not
the only point: standards is another important point. eXo Platform,
since its first release in 2003, has been great about defining,
supporting and implementing standards. So eXo Portal is a great
implementation of a JSR-168 portlet container, and it is today also one
of the first portal and portlet container supporting the new JSR-286
Java Portlet API. In addition to the Java Portlet API support, it is
also possible to consume remote portlet using WSRP 1&2. As you
can see eXo Portal is a great solution to implement and integrate an
enterprise portal based on standards. In addition to portal standard,
eXo is also providing a powerful ECM that is based on a Java Content
Repostory (JCR/JSR-170) implementation.
Based on the fact that eXo is open source and support industry standard it is a great tool to use; and it has been chosen by some other projects for example:
You also have other softwares that are using various part of the product from te JCR to the Portlet Container... it depends a lot of your needs...
eXo Platform is a lot more than en enterprise portal. The core architecture of eXo is based on an internal SOA built at the top of an IoC container (Pico Container). This architecture has been leveraged in many point to expose new services and assemble all the components of the eXo Platform suite.
Let's take a quick look to the components of eXo Platform:
In addition to these component that are available today in the eXo Ultimate distribution or as stand alone solution, you can see in the source trunk:
One last example of the vision of the eXo Platform is the fact that all services could be exposed either as REST Services using the JSR-311 (JAX-RS) or as SOAP Services using the JSR-181 (Annotations based services).
One of the feature that I am currently watching closely is the implementation and support of Open Social standard, that allows easy integration of "social-applications" with other very hot subjects for the “Enterprise 2.0” such as social networks, mashups and so on...
Stay tune, and take the time to download and install eXo Platform...
As a closure, I just invite you to take a look to eXo and contact me if you have any question about the product or if you have
We are all badly impacted with the price of oil. Yeah it really expensive,
now people is the US have a gas that is as expensive as France's
prices, shocking! ;).
Anyway, I do not want to talk about cars and gas, but really on the
good effect of the expensive oil. I do believe that expensive oil has
good impacts, not for my bank account but for the "planet", and may be
indirectly for software industry.
Like many of you I am following TechCrunch, and one of the latest post was quite "amazing":
I have to say that I am quite impressed by the large number of comments that have been made using Seesmic. Bravo to Loic Lemeur's vision for this tools... This is simply the new and easy way to really do the "read/write" Web, I should say "record/watch" Web.
One thing is still bothering me, how to I find interesting content that is saved using Seesmic? Yes, I can use social features to subscribe to people that are sharing similar center of interest. But I cannot find any folksonomy on Seesmic, am I missing it, or it is just not available yet? Or let's dream and imagine than Web search/index engine will be able to index these video content to help me to find interesting content -may be this exists but I have not found it yet-. Loic, is it your next big feature to transform Seesmic in the next killer app?
So far I do not have the feeling that I missed anything -watch the comments and you will understand-, but it looks like people love to use the video to discuss/share with others, and I can understand why... We have moved from technical tools: Complex Web Authoring Platform, to easy Blog publishing, to pure video recording tool, so very easy indeed. I can imagine my mother posting a comment to a blog or video now... thanks to Seesmic!
Lately, I have been presenting Web 2.0 tools to my coworkers, and explaining how it could be used to improve the way we do "things" (especially business). Here a list of some of the tools I am talking about blogs, wikis, second life, social networking/bookmarking/tagging/rating,, facebook, friendfeed, youtube, seesmic, feeddo, flock and many others depending of the questions and the mood of the moment...
One of the tool that I love to present is Twitter... and now I have an good example of why we all need to be on Twitter ;)
Thanks to Justin from Twitter...
Andres and Guillaume have posted on the Groovy Users list the pointers to many (if not all) the Groovy and Grails sessions of JavaOne 2008... You want to learn more, this is a great opportunity to do it so:
Thanks to all of the authors... I would love to be there watching these session live... This post is the opportunity also to point you to this video from InfoQ of Jason Rudolph doing a very nice introduction to Grails during last year QCon conference...
Yesterday, I have been surprised when I saw the following announcement:
One interesting thing is Brian Chan's blog entry about Liferay and Sun explaining how they have been working together so far... to fill the limitations of each other solutions.So today what does that means? Liferay is leveraging the development power of Sun to implements standards (for example JSR-286). I have always been frustrated by the lack of standard support and 'real' innovation in Liferay (compare to its competitors such as eXo Platform, and Jboss for example). In the other hand Sun will leverage the "tiny Liferay product" killing its own solution. Sun's portal is really to big without that benefits for developers/users (compare to its competitors, BEA,IBM, Oracle for example).
So what's the next step for this partnership? If Sun wants to push a real portal offering, it can only finish by a full acquisition of Liferay... even if it is stated that it is not the plan.
Let's wait and see how this "WebSynergy" goes... However one thing is cool, it will put more visibility on Enteprise Portals. With all the Web 2.0 stuff: social computing, mashups, collaborative works/intelligence, the need for "Enterprise Portal" (I should add a 2.0) is back stronger than before...
I have attended or presented at JavaOne for the last 6 years when I was living in the SF Bay Area... But this year I won't be in San Francisco for JavaOne. As you can guess, I am sad about that... However, I still look at the schedule and events, and here what I would like to do:
Last Friday (April 18th) I was attending the launch of "eXo WebOS" in Paris. Benjamin Mestrallet, creator of eXo has started the event with a presentation of the solution and its impact on the IT. Like any internet user, each time I see eXo Web OS and applications I am very very impressed. They have pushed very far the use of AJAX based applications to offer a complete virtualization of the OS/Desktop, not in a Virtual Machine, but simply in your favorite browser.
I am just cross posting this entry to react to this very interesting article:
- Exposing a Database as a Web Service a developer.com article...
Now that I am back in consulting business, I often have customers where I am not allowed to connect my Mac on the network. Annoying!!!! But this is not a big issue since now it is easy to bring you environment on a USB key.
XWikey: my wiki on a key
On a daily business, I have installed my personal XWiki on my 2Gb USB Key, and a JDK (for windows, on OSX I am using the default one). So with this solutions I have my personal CMS, Website and applications with me, and I can use it from any computer available. I work on any site, any meeting room directly on my Wiki even when I am not connected. I am using a packaged Entprise XWiki that comes with Jetty and HSQL, so it is a complete and self contained environment. I just changed the start and stop scripts to point to the JDK that is on the key. Nothing exceptional here, but it is very useful.
Others portable applications
I know that a Wiki is not enough most of the time to " bring your life with you", and you may want more, such as Open Office, Mail and Web clients, ... Some of the packages you can use:
The next test will be to run the OS from the key, I have not done it yet, have you? Some options for this:
A friend of mine asked me some questions about Oracle and acquisitions. He could not, remember all of them and when they occurred... If you have the same questions take a look to the Oracle Acquisition page on Oracle.com since 2005:
Some others are probably missing since in 2003/2004, Collaxa was acquired by Oracle. If you do not remember Collaxa was the first release of the BPEL Process Manager. You can also take a look to a part of the site that I like that is the Oracle's history.You are looking for a Wiki... take a look to this very nice online tools:
This tool can help you to find the best Wiki for you needs, free or not, hosted or not, ... and many other criteria. In addition to the Wiki Matrix, this site offers the same features for: Enjoy!By default Oracle Web Service client is sending the SOAP messages using an UTF-8 encoding. This is the recommendation of WS-I Basic Profile. To be exact it says UTF-8 or UTF-16.
It is quite simple to change this encoding...
First you have to know that the JAX-RPC container will return the same character encoding than the one that is received. To change the character encoding, you just need to set the ClientConstants.CHARACTER_SET_ENCODING to the value you want to use. Here some simple client code:
Stub stub = (Stub)myPort.getPort();
stub._setProperty(oracle.webservices.ClientConstants.CHARACTER_SET_ENCODING, "UTF-16");
Most of the Web Services stacks are offering the same kind of utility to do that, for example here the property you must set to do the same in IBM's JAX-RPC implementation:
com.ibm.wsspi.webservices.Constants.MESSAGE_CHARACTER_SET_ENCODING.
Last week, more than 400 people of Sogeti group were meeting at Les Fontaines, for the annual KickOff. It was for me the first big event since I have joined this company last October.
You have probably heard about IBM ProjectZero, this "incubator"project from IBM pushing a new way of building, assemble and run Web applications. I won't talk about the technology in this post, it will come later, but just comment about the way this project is developped: a Community-Driven Commercial Development process.
I have just created a poll -see leftbar- asking to list the different tools you are using for business. In fact I would like to have some feedback of you use of Wiki, Blogs, Instant Messaging on you daily job.
With the latest big news around Oracle-BEA and SUN-MySQL deals I have missed an interesting article on Infoq with the following title:
- Request: Sun, Drop Support for JRuby
I have to say that I do agree with Craig Wickesser asking Sun to Drop Support for JRuby.
Disclaimer: you do probably already know all these sites if you are like me spending lot of time on the Internet... (too much time?) But still, some people could be interested, like the customer I have been working with lately...
During a presentation to a customer around Web 2.0 and Social Networking, which sites do I use myself and why they could be interested for customer and their business.... So I really quickly write up this list, and just want to share it here...
| http://facebook.com http://linkedin.com | Social networking... and many more. More and more important in business. |
| http://flickr.com http://dailymotion.com http://youtube.com | Multimedia site... I am sure you all use it daily. I have used this to share pics about events (internal or external). |
| http://del.icio.us | Social Bookmarking... |
| http://www.digg.com/ http://www.technorati.com/ | Social links, content is rated by user. |
| http://www.basecamphq.com/ | Project Management tools, you need to look to all the 37signals applications. Very useful |
| http://docs.google.com http://google.com/apps http://code.google.com http://maps.google.com | Google services are terrific, as user or developer. |
| http://wetpaint.com http://wikidot.com | Public and free wiki that I used to communicate with customers, coworker and friends. |
| http://www.netvibes.com/ http://google.com/reader | News and content syndication. |
| http://wordpress.org/ http://blogspot.com http://typepad.com | Blogs... |
| http://amazon.com http://paypal.com http://ebay.com http://www.salesforce.com/ | I use these site as consumer, but these services are more and more important in customer business, and will be part of our job as developer/integrator. |
