So, I haven't been blogging here in quite a while. Now that the cat's been let out of the bag, I've actually been blogging over at OpenXource, a new venture I've started to address the growing needs of corporations releasing opensource and participating in open communities as more than simply users.

So, the act of God known as Frances has caused me to change MUAs. I used to be a dyed-in-the-wool Pine 3.96 user, but the sysadmin upgraded, and I had to adapt to Pine 4.x. Then, Frances rolled through, and the machine that is the MX for werken.com (where I .forwarded everything) lost power for most of the day. So, I removed my .forward on the codehaus.org box, did an apt-get for Pine, and discovered that it doesn't support DJB's Maildir stuff which we use at the haus. So, I've now fired up and am trying to learn Mutt (meaning that I'm un-learning a decade of Pine keystrokes). This is also a subtle reminder that it's still polite to send plaintext email wrapped at 72 columns.

Also, it's not much fun climbing upon your 80-year-old house in the driving rain to tie a tarp over the roof the previous owners described as having "no leaks". Sure, depending on the definition of "no".

While surfing around to find stuff to put on the publications page of the new and improved Drools website, I kept tripping across comments from folks who thought Drools was dead and who complained about its lack of documentation. So I figured it was time to make some noise again. Drools is decidedly not dead. Rapid progress is being made towards a 2.0-final release, including 100% JSR-94 compliance. Thanks to Alex, Andy, Doug, Mark and others I'm sure I'm forgetting to mention, documentation and examples have all been massively improved. So, if you haven't been by lately, I suggest dropping by the site and checking it out again.

We just replaced BeanShell with Janino in Drools. It's an order of magnitude faster, and simply rocks.

Janino is a compiler that reads a JavaTM expression, block, class body, source file or a set of source files, and generates JavaTM bytecode that is loaded and executed directly. Janino is not intended to be a development tool, but an embedded compiler for run-time compilation purposes, e.g. expression evaluators or "server pages" engines like JSP.

EMMA: a free Java code coverage tool

A Coverage Tool for Java Developers, Written By a Java Developer

Code coverage for free: a basic freedom? Until recently, the world of Java development had been plagued by an absurd discrepancy: Java developers had excellent free IDEs, free compilers, free test frameworks but had to rely on code coverage tools that charged an arm and a leg in license fees. As a Java pro, I would like to use the same free coverage tool regardless of whether it is a massive commercial project at work or a small fun project at home. I've created EMMA to be that tool.

xmlhack has been a useful resource, but it looks like Edd has had his fill and needs a break.

That's all for now

A new venture, named Controlhaus, an effort with BEA, was announced

The BEA WebLogic Workshop controls are immediately and freely available for download at http://www.dev2dev.com/controlpack.com. BEA is sponsoring an open source community to foster collaboration and further improvement on service controls. The community will be hosted at controlhaus, a sister site to popular open source community codehaus, at http://www.codehaus.org.

The eWorld conference seems to be going well-enough. I spent the day at the dev2dev booth handing out the new WeblogicPro magazine, along with toy cars with BEA logos on 'em. You can tell the tech industry is in a slump by the type of schwag everyone gives out.

Had the distinct pleasure of meeting Cameron Purdy and Cliff Schmidt yet again, and Chris Fry, Alex Vasseur and Jonas Boner for the first time.

I'm still in SF until early Friday, so if you're here and I don't know it, look me up.

dom4j 1.5-beta-2 has been released. Maybe that'll inspire us to get a new Jaxen release out the door sooner rather than later.

I'll be at BEA eWorld 2004. You'll be able to find me at the dev2dev booth.

Service-Oriented Architecture...

It's the buzz in the world of enterprise software development and integration: Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA). And at BEA, we're all over it.

Well, I finally came kicking and screaming into the 1990s by signing up for Yahoo! Messenger. I think I still prefer IRC, but apparently some folks prefer Yahoo and some organizations block port 6667. Strange, but true.

TeXML: an XML vocabulary for TeX just struck me as horribly wrong.

TeXML is an XML vocabulary for TeX. A processor translates TeXML source into TeX.

Berkeley DB has always been useful. More so now that you can use it from Pure Java.

Berkeley DB Java Edition

Fort Chiswell, Virginia. Not exactly a place that'd make you think "wifi hotspot". No, the Comfort Inn in which we're comfortably staying does not have broadband. Across the highway, and down the road, though, is a Flying J truck plaza. A Wifi-enabled truck plaza. With a pretty strong signal that reaches the comfortable bed in the Comfort Inn. Probably 3/4-mile distance. $4.95 for 24 hours of access. Rock! Flying J is your friend.

eth1      IEEE 802.11-DS  ESSID:"flyingj"  Nickname:"HERMES I"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.412GHz  Access Point: 00:0B:FD:C8:B0:46  
          Bit Rate:1Mb/s   Tx-Power=15 dBm   Sensitivity:1/3  
          Retry limit:4   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality:31/92  Signal level:-75 dBm  Noise level:-106 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:122
          Tx excessive retries:448  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

nntp//rss is an RSS aggregator that provides an nntp interface. That's cool. Leverage existing technology and applications while allowing the user to experience new things in a familiar interface.

Bridging the worlds of NNTP clients and RSS feeds, nntp//rss is an application that will enable you to use your existing favorite NNTP newsreader to read your information channels.

Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks was a good session that I attended at the ETech Conference in San Diego.

Technologists consume Big-Gulp-loads of information, and write, code, and edit reams of output. Author Charlie Stross notes that he reads and digests more in his morning bookmarks than most literate 18th-century readers would process in a year. Linus Torvalds and other open source leaders hold down day jobs, and still have time to create wonders in their spare time. Everyone at ETech juggles amounts of email that would stun an ox.

While not necessarily a causal relationship, the sampled geeks tended to use plaintext, shells, and email. And index cards. Lots and lots of index cards.

Rebecca, a self-proclaimed "east-coast girl" declared San Diego to be "too sunny".

I'll be dragging my wife to California for her birthday. Meanwhile, I'll also be attending the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference next week. Isn't that a great birthday gift for a non-geeky wife?

I'd like to announce Drools 2.0-beta-13 which mostly corrects just a small problem with the groovy semantic module. Additionally, Kalstride has released their KRules GUI for Drools.

2.0-beta-13 is actually now out, fixing a problem with the Groovy semantic module. At the same time, I'd like to announce the Kalstride KRules GUI.

While working on search.codehaus.org, I was adapting mnogosearch to the infrastructre of The Codehaus. This included not only global search capability, but also the freedom to search logical sub-sets of the assets we host.

mnogo has a nice feature where you can pass limiting search URLs as a query parameter. But I find that to be ugly. So, with a little mod_rewrite, and a Perl CGI which is truly a classic wrapper-facade around mnogo's search.cgi, I've encapsulated my own collection logic using pretty URLs and collection descriptors on the file-system. The Perl wrapper synthesizes a QUERY_STRING that mnogo will eat, and formats the results nicely.

Overall, I'm pleased. I use to hate Perl. Now, I realize that sometimes, it can certainly get the job done.

Googlearchy: How a Few Heavily-Linked Sites Dominate Politics on the Web (PDF).

Claims about the Web and politics have commonly confounded two different things: retrievability and visibility, the large universe of pages that could theoretically be accessed versus those that citizens are most likely to encounter. While the governing assumption of much previous work has been that retrievability would translate inexorably into visibility, we cast doubt on that claim. Drawing on a large literature in computer science that ties a site's visibility to the number of inbound hyperlinks it receives, this paper proposes a new methodology for measuring the link structure surrounding political Web sites. Our technique involves iterative, extremely large scale crawls away from political sites easily accessible through popular online search tools, and it uses sophisticated automated methods to categorize site content. In every community we examine, we find that a small handful of Web sites dominate. Online political communities on the Web thus seem to function as "winners take all" networks, a fact that would seem to have widespread implications for politics in the digital age.

Drools 2.0-beta-12 has finally shipped.

While the Drools project has previously experienced a drought in terms of releases, the release schedule has once again picked up and active progress is being made. Ring in the new year!

Some of the important changes include:

* 2-phase execution model
* conflict reslution
* removal of Jelly
* simplification of the XML language
* expanded the semantic module framework
* fixed the go-slow bug. several orders of magnitude faster now.
* a Groovy semantic module
* a new manual
* simple bash script to build it (no maven required)
* all dependencies included
* and a brand spanking new website

Keep in mind this is still a beta release, and there are indeed holes in the website and the manual. Good luck and godspeed.

Congratulations to Thomas Diesler, one of our developers on drools. He's joining the JBoss Group. Rock on Tomsk!

I would like you to Welcome Thomas Diesler that will start with us on the 1st of January 2004 (at 0h00, and I will verify this). <applause />

Thomas will work on the Web Services for J2EE 1.4 and is also interested in better integrating a rule engine in JBoss. He will work out of M�nich and he is thus our first true German-speaking engineer.

Thomas is also the stereotype of the Red-Pill guy: he left East-Germany while he was at the army by doing a risky trip through slavic countries (he was then condamned to a life-sentence by the East-German authorities), had to swim between borders, etc. and .... a few months later... the Berlin wall felt! Somehow frustrating I guess ;)

This set of utilities seems somewhat misguided.

Tired of writing the same old code over and over again to catch InterruptedExceptions on Thread.sleep() calls?

The example that is so proudly displayed demonstrates how the library makes it easier to sleep without having to catch and ignore those apparently useless InterruptedException s. What this fails to realize is that when an InterruptedException is thrown, chances are, someone is trying to shut things down or otherwise do, I dunno, something exceptional. If you're ignoring them, then you're not addressing the circumstances correctly. You certainly don't need a library to help you ignore them more effeciently.

Thread.sleep(...) doesn't throw InterruptedException just to annoy you. It's done for a reason. Understand the reason and code appropriately.

O'Reilly Open Source Convention 2004 has issued a call for participation.

Individuals and companies interested in making presentations or giving tutorials are invited to submit proposals using the form below. Proposals will be considered in two classes: tutorials and convention presentations (sessions). Presentations by marketing staff or with a marketing focus will not be accepted; neither will submissions made by anyone other than the proposed speaker.

"RELAX NG is now an International Standard" says James Clark. Maybe this will remind folks that the W3C (or JCP or...) doesn't have a stanglehold on standards.

I have just been informed that RELAX NG was published by ISO as an International Standard on 1st December 2003. The full title is: ISO/IEC 19757-2:2003 Information technology -- Document Schema Definition Language (DSDL) -- Part 2: Regular-grammar-based validation -- RELAX NG

groovy 1.0-beta-1 is out! proclaims James. I've redeployed the website, so it should be the latest'n'greatest now. Plus, it matches the new haus theme. Much thanks to Sam for picking up much of my parser slack. Even James started diving into it towards the end.

This is the first ever release; so I'm sure there maybe mistakes or issues with the source / binary distro; we can fix any issues & do more releases much quicker now. A last minute feature that made it into the release (complete with typeo) thats not yet been documented is the script 'groovysh' which runs a groovy command shell. Its like the swing console but works on the command line - you just need to enter a blank line to execute a command (so hit CR twice).

drools/drools-groovy was imported by James Strachan yesterday. There ya go, Ted.

Current directory: [codehaus] / drools / drools-groovy
Files shown: 8

Howard Katz recently announced XQEngine on the [xml-dev] list.

XQEngine is a compact (roughly 250K) embeddable component written in Java. It's not a standalone application and requires a reasonable amount of Java programming skill to use. It has a straightforward programming interface that makes that fairly easy to do. It's single-threaded and should work well as a personal productivity tool on a single desktop, as part of a CD-based application, or on a server with low to moderate traffic. (Making the engine thread-capable is not overly difficult and remains a future project.)

The Java Community Process(SM) Program - JSRs: Java Specification Requests - detail JSR# 94 mentions that JSR-94 has reached the Proposed Final Draft stage. Yes, it's oldish news by now, but I finally got around to reading it. Was pleased to see myself mentioned in the Acknowledgements section.

Proposed Final Draft 29 Oct, 2003

Business Rules Forum 2003 is happening November 2-6 in Nashville (Nashvegas to those of us who have spent time in Tennessee). I think I'm going to attempt to attend.

Change is the only Constant

Your enterprise undergoes change all the time. Entering into new Markets. Introducing new Products. Complying with new Regulations. Making new Agreements with customers and suppliers. Changing business direction through mergers, acquisitions, alliances and divestitures. And the rate of change is increasing daily. Can your systems and procedures keep up?

A Business Rule Application is an Agile Application; one deliberately architected for continuous change in business logic. Even better, a Business Rule Application gives the control of Business Rules back to the business.

Been blogging on the hausblog instead of here.

Using XPath with SOAP uses Jaxen to demonstrate how to frob SOAP stuff with XPath.

XPath is a language for addressing parts of an XML document, used most commonly by XSLT. There are various APIs for processing XPath. For the purposes of this article I will use the open source Jaxen API. Jaxen is a Java XPath engine that supports many XML parsing APIs, such as SAX, DOM4J, and DOM. It also supports namespaces, variables, and functions.

XPath is useful when you need to extract some information from an XML document, such as a SOAP message, without building a complete parser using JAXM (Java API for XML Messaging) or JAX-RPC (Java API for XML-Based RPC). Moreover, the loosely-coupled nature of web services suggests that the use of dynamic data extraction is sometimes better than using static proxies like the ones produced using JAX-RPC.

In the article I'll show a JAXM Web Service for calculating statistics and a generic JAXM client that uses the service, demonstrating the use of XPath for generic data extraction.

CM Today is trying to revitalize itself and is looking for CM geeks to participate.

Starting today (as in CM Today :-) ), we are gearing up for a greatly expanded CM Today, one you will find compelling, interesting, and hopefully even a little controversial. We hope to begin to share our new ideas and content with you in the coming weeks and months, so please check back often.

And we want you to participate. We are looking for people to participate in CM Today both as contributors and maintainers. If you have an opinion you want to share, we want to hear it and give you the reach of CM Today to make sure others hear it, too. Please contact Alex Neihaus (alex@cmtoday.com) for information on how to participate.

Once again, thank you and stay tuned.

ShiftOne Java Object Cache is yet-another cache library. Seems nice, small and focussed.

JOCache is a Java library that implements strict object caching.

Java Binary Enhancement Tool from Network Associates is surprisingly licensed under a BSD-esque license.

The Java Binary Enhancement Tool (JBET) is a general Java program analysis and manipulation tool. Existing class files can be disassembled, reassembled, or edited programmatically through the JBET API. JBET can also be used to create new Java class files from scratch. JBET uses a convenient internal representation of all the contents of Java binary (.class) files, allowing the user to edit the classes easily, in a structured manner.

Continuous Integration is the topic in this month's Crossroads News.

With the growing acceptance of rapid development techniques in many development organizations the notion of continuous integration of changes has also become commonplace. Continuous Integration involves an automated process in which developers changes are either continually or on a periodically introduced into the application as they are checked into the source code repository.

BPMN, the Business Process Modeling Notation, has been released by BPMI. BPMN is a graphic notation for workflows and choreography.

The Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI.org) today announced the release of the public draft for the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN 1.0) providing a readily understandable, royalty-free notation designed for both business process design and business process implementation. As an amalgamation of best practices within the business modeling community, BPMN provides a simple, standardized means of communicating process information to other business users, process implementers, customers, and suppliers.

UCM Central seems to be a nice little collection of things related to configuration management.

UCMcentral is a popular non commercial "Coffee Break" site providing support and education in the field of Configuration Management. It is the intention of this site to promote CM in both traditional and new areas of technology.

We'll definitely be in Amsterdam from 30th of September until the 9th of October. Got some meetings to attend, and a haus party to throw, so if you've in the vicinity, holler, and we'll hook up.

Good gravy. I can't understand how otherwise intelligent developers think that doing development on Windows is a Good Idea. I've spent the last 3 days ostensibly wasting time fighting Win2k in order to debug some Java that works just fine on Linux and OSX but fails to operate correctly on Win32. Luckily, I've had VMWare at my disposal, but the window hosting Windows is just like a pit of hell.

Even adding Cygwin is not sufficient to make using Windows fun. I guess I've gotten used to the Unix way of things, and window managers with 10 virtual screens, and console windows that I can resize, even horizontally, by just dragging. I'm starting to think that I should add a Win32 surchage to my daily rate when forced to deal with this toy of an operating system.

Over the weekend, I had the distinct pleasure of spending some time with Thomas Diesler, the man behind the JSR-94 binding for drools. We knocked around a few ideas for improving drools to make it "enterprise-grade" mostly involving distributed transactions.

Hopefully sometime soon I'll get the opportunity to return to drools to implement some of these ideas. Particularly interesting would be to allow a working-memory to participate in an XA transaction so that rules may be fired upon commit or even be used to abort a transaction involving multiple resources.

Additionally, we noodled around with some ideas regarding using drools in a distributed cache environment for scalability, in addition to not-in-memory fact bases such as JDBC datasources (or more appropriately, JCA datasources).

So, no, not much content in this entry. Just noting that sometimes you have to connect with someone in real life to breath some enthusiasm back into a project. Plus, my blog had rolled all entries, and was completely blank.

Akmal Chaudhri has announced the XML Database Symposium (XSym'03) in Berlin.

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is playing an increasingly important role in the exchange of a wide variety of data on the Web and elsewhere. The database community is interested in XML because it can be used to represent data that originates in repositories by providing structure and the possibility of adding type information.

The symposium theme is the combination of Database and XML Technologies. Today, we see growing interest in using these technologies together for many web-based and database-centric applications. XML is being used to publish data from database systems to the Web by providing input to content generators for Web pages, and database systems are increasingly used to store and query XML data, often by handling queries issued over the Internet. As database systems increasingly start talking to each other over the Web, there is a fast growing interest in using XML as the standard exchange format for distributed query processing. As a result, many relational database systems export data as XML documents and import data from XML documents and provide query and update capabilities for XML data. In addition, so called native XML database and integration systems are appearing on the database market, whose claim is to be especially tailored to store, maintain and easily access XML-documents.

There's some notes and such from the ANTLR Cabal 2003.

We met in Medford, Oregon for 3 days July 12-14, 2003 to discuss the future of ANTLR. Specifically, we wanted to discuss what a future version of ANTLR (3.0) would look like. We made a list of what we didn't like about the current system and made a wishlist for ANTLR 3. There are four raw, stream-of-consciousness documents that resulted from the cabal. The documents are summarized and linked to below. Feel free to comment on the documents to the antlr-interest list, but the real "request for comments" will occur once a real whitepaper has been flessed out.

CNN has an article about proposed legislation to allow public access to publically-funded research papers. Only makes sense to me, since it's our tax dollars being spent. I've got my receipt around here somewhere...

BERKELEY, California (AP) -- A number of prominent scientists got some support from a congressman in challenging the way their publicly funded research papers are handled by for-profit journals. Congressman Martin Sabo, a Minnesota Democrat, has introduced legislation that would give immediate public access to all research papers created mostly with federal money, regardless of which journal publishes them.

Thomas rolled 2.0-beta-11 of drools out the door.

The latest official build is 2.0-beta-11 .

This is mainly a checkpoint for folks before heading down the path to 2.0 beta-12 on the way to 2.0-final. The roadmap will give you an idea of where we're heading.

PapersInvited claims to be (and I have no reason to doubt it) the largest listing of call for papers in all areas of specialization.

PapersINVITED.com was conceived and developed to assist those numerous scientists, professors and student researchers who have had a difficult time in tracking Calls for Papers from professional bodies, universities, journal editors and other conference organizers.

PapersINVITED.com brings an exhaustive list of Calls for Papers in all areas of specialization to your fingertips.

Morphon XML Editor is now free-as-in-beer.

Morphon XML-Editor now available under a free software license

The Morphon XML-Editor is now being offered under a free license, there are no strings attached. Morphon Technologies would like to increase the user base of the Morphon XML-Editor. Having a larger and varied user base will help us understand better the future needs of our users.

To use the free XML editor, you will no longer need a license key. You simply have to register (optional) and then download Morphon. The software is fully functional with no crippling features, no time limit to usage.

The people behind the languages we all use...

Saxon 7.6 introduces support for XQuery alongside XSLT.

Release 7.6 is the latest installment of my experimental implementation of the new XPath 2.0 and XSLT 2.0 specifications. For the first time, this release also includes support for XQuery 1.0. In all cases, the product is aligned with the working drafts published on 2 May 2003, though of course not all features are implemented.

James Taylor pointed me towards FreeCache.

FreeCache is a system of

* cooperating caches to move
* large files of
* free content
* closer to users.

Characteristics of the Agile SCM Solution by Appleton, Berczuk and Konieczka (should we call them the gang of three?) continues the analysis of SCM within an agile environment.

Around the turn of the Century, (year 2k), we began seeing software projects that were attempting to try a new development approach called Agile. Most were implementing Extreme Programming, and their reasons were to reduce cost, improve software quality, better manage project risk, and to offer the business quicker functionality in the form of frequent releases incorporating smaller sets of change.

Scott Sanders has issued a humourous and informative press release entitled Jaxen executes (not so) hostile takeover of SaxPath. The Jaxen project is much indebted to Scott for his recent activity trying to get Jaxen to a 1.1 release.

Today, the surprising hostile takover by Jaxen of SaxPath was announced and executed. The code formerly in the org.saxpath.* namespace will now live in the org.jaxen.saxpath.* namespace. Jaxen 1.1 beta2 will soon be released to include this functionality. If you are currently using SaxPath for something else and want to upgrade, you just need to change the package name, as everything else is the same.

Robin: Remote XUL Desktop seems like a really cool hack.

Randall Knutson has released the first prototype for a remote desktop using XUL. Point your Mozilla XUL browser (e.g. Firebird) @ http://robin.sourceforge.net to call up a fresh desktop with a startup menu and play XulMine, Mozteroids, Pagman, Snake, Xultris, MozInvaders and more. What is Robin? Here's the "official" blurb from the sourceforge project site: Remote Operating System Build in Netscape (Robin) is a window manager using DHTML, Javascript, XUL and some crazy hacks.

On a recent project, I've decided to take a lateral step from test-driven development towards documentation-driven test-driven development, or d²td².

Basically, I write the docs so I have the requirements, which allows me to write the tests, which then help write the code itself. Things that make sense while writing the tests or code start looking goofy sometimes when you have to describe them in prose documentation. So, if you feel like an ass trying to describe how to use a component, that's a code smell that means you probably need to refactor.

So, I'd like to solicit experiences from others if you've used this type of development before. Most everywhere I've worked, either commercially or on open-source, documentation was an afterthought. Drop a comment or email bob@werken.com.

Antlraux has been announced by Enrique José García Cota. Seems to be quite the useful collection of accessories for antlr.

draft-harold-jmxp-00.txt describes a remote protocol for Java Management Extension over BEEP channels.

JMXP is an application protocol that provides access to information about a JMX Agent's MBeanServer and the MBeans registered with that MBeanServer. JMXP also provides a mechanism for transmitting the Notifications emitted by a JMX Agent's MBeans to remote clients.