Coffee & Gems

Yesterday, I gave a talk at the Java User Group Switzerland (JUGS) titled "Agile RESTful Web Development". It was about the REST style in principle and hands-on RESTful development with Apache Sling. I enjoyed giving the talk and think that it was well received. Here's the slide deck: Agile RESTful Web Development View more documents from mmarth .

I just wrote a small Ruby script to generate a Google sitemap out of file directory. I thought that it might come handy as a quick start for someone, so here is the code (requires the builder gem) require 'builder' htmlfiles = Dir.glob("*.html") x = Builder::XmlMarkup.new(:target => $stdout, :indent => 1) x.instruct! x.urlset( "xmlns" => "http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" ) { for file in htmlfiles do x.url{x.loc "http://www.example.com/#{file}"; x.lastmod "2009-09-17"; x.changefreq "monthly"; x.priority "0.8"} end }

(cross-posting from here ) OK, I admit it, declaring that " the RDBMS is dead " is a meme that has been going around the software industry for a while. Remember object-oriented data bases that were supposed to replace the relational ones? Well, guess who is still here. However, despite the RDBMS's amazing survival skills I would like to propose a related prediction: I believe that the year 2009 will go down in history as the year when the " relational model default " ended. The term "relational model default" was coined by me to describe a peculiar thing that goes on in application development: start talking to your average application developer about some arbitrary business requirement and chances are that simultaneously he mentally constructs a relational model to fit those requirements. That relational approach to modeling your problem may or may not be suitable. The real problem is that all too often this default does not get challenged. As a conse...

The slides shown in my Jazoon talk are now online: Jazoon 2009 View more presentations from mmarth .

On Thursday, I will give a talk at the Jazoon conference in Zurich. It will be about Apache Sling, the web framework for content-centric applications. The agenda is: Scalable Agile Web Development: REST meets JCR meets OSGI This session is a very hands-on lab that shows how a real web application is developed from scratch in a very agile fashion leveraging a heavy-weight enterprise ready back-end yet allowing for unprecedented agility in development in building rest-style web applications. Thinking of a classic j2ee stack this may sound like a contradiction. Agility of development begins with the amount of tooling and setup we need to get started, so expect to see the entire walk-through from installation of the server software to the development of a complete application within the time constraints of the session. Agenda: (1) Web architecture, think outside the box. (2) Meet: apache sling. (3) Building a real-life webapp from scratch. The full conference agenda is here . I shall also ...

It has been a while since I have been on a standards committee (the last one was OMTP ), but I have now joined the Technical Committee of CMIS : Content Management Interoperability Services. Better interop is certainly something the CMS world is in dire need of.

Today, I am happy to announce that minimeme.org is finally "officially" going live. minimeme is a news aggregator focused on tech and software development news. minimeme was born out of a personal frustration of mine: each morning I would skim through my feed reader only to find the relevant items twice or more times. On the other hand the signal to noise ratio of many feeds was way too low. I felt like a machine trying to retrieve the important items. So I decided to build a machine to do that for me. There is no human intervention in the news selection - it is all done in a bias-free, neutral algorithm. Hence there is the claim "little Switzerland of tech news", minimeme is supposed to be neutral like Switzerland. Having tested the algorithm for a couple of months I believe minimeme is now stable enough to be officially let loose. On top of the two currently implemented sections " dev " ( feed ) and " valley " ( feed ) there is a Twitter accou...