holdorph's blog

The second version of the Java Portlet specification has been finally released. JSR 286 hit its final release milestone, yesterday, June 12, 2008.

As announced by Eric Dalquist...

JA-SIG is proud to announce the General Audience release of uPortal 3.0.0. uPortal 3.0.0 GA is the culmination of a significant effort by many people in the uPortal community to take a revolutionary step with the uPortal code base.

A month ago I went to the the University of Hull with my colleague Katie Valenti. We were there for two days of meetings about Sakai. After two days, we were supposed to go home. Katie actually did. Me, well I have a different story.

Recently someone asked me to read a NY Times article Stop Them Before They Shoot Again. And just to ward off any misconceptions, this is a photography related article, not about gun control. In any case, this is a short response to that article.

Digital cameras allow us to take a nearly infinite number of pictures for nearly no cost. Film based cameras required us to at least pay for film and the development process. When we look at the differences between digital and film based photography, the sheer number of images, can be both an advantage and disadvantage. I would never recommend to someone with a digital camera, to start taking fewer pictures. I would caution a digital camera owner to carefully think about what they do with the pictures they capture.

This past weekend I participated in a local conference called The Desert Code Camp. This conference was provided free of charge. People volunteered to speak on different topics and you could attend any session you wanted.

Ok, I have an itch, I can't scratch. Sorry, for the poor analogy, but it's pretty close to how I feel. In a lot of the rest of my java development world, there are more or less naming conventions to cover different situations (here's one example). However, I've alway felt like there was not a perfect naming strategy for Portlet Web Applications.

In a previous post, I described how to do some simple Timing for using Spring 1.x and the ProxyFactoryBean. I acknowledged that there might have been a way to take advantage of an existing Spring class instead of writing my own. I spent some time this last weekend, working on how to use the existing Spring class and also how to take advantage of the new Spring 2.0 XML Schema-based configuration.

Recently I needed to conduct some performance testing. In the process, I needed to time certain pieces of Java code, to better understand where time was being spent. A large portion of this application was already wired together with the Spring Framework. As I have shown previously, when your application is already Spring-enabled it is easy to add additional services to it. I decided to look to Spring yet again to help me with timing my Java method calls.

I had the opportunity to attend the JavaOne conference last week. One reason I really enjoy this conference is using it as a opportunity to measure the pulse of the Java industry. For example, last year Ajax was all the rage.

Recently a Client requested help to remove the use of uPortal Template Users. This change will better enable upgrades to future releases of uPortal. This post explains the changes necessary to remove the use of Template Users from a typical uPortal deployment.