After six great days at WDW we left Orlando yesterday and started the last part of our vacation: the gulf coast of Florida. Currently we’re at Tarpon Springs and explored Honeymoon Island today (that’s the name of the island, stupid!). Tomorrow we’ll drive south to Naples and then on wednesday north again towards Fort Myers (our flight back home departs on sunday).
The weather is really great, it’s a little bit too warm for me 🙂
Apparently I used the free wifi in our hotel to check my

I guess the title will come with a lot of hits for my weblog 🙂
Anyway, in the afternoon my vacation starts and my wife and I will fly over to Orlando to enjoy the sun and the wonderful world of Disney. We’ll stay for two weeks at various places in Florida until we have to get back home 🙁

This morning we had our nice little portals track here at ApacheCon – which was well received and attended by several people. First was Ate with a great presentation about the upcoming JSR 286 specification (portlet api 2.0) and then we had our portals panel. Together with Ate and David Sean Taylor we gave an overview about the portals project, standards and related stuff. Befor we started we were unsure if there is high interest and if people have questions at all. But in the end we were surprised in a positive sense that very soon a lifely discussion started and it continued through out the session. In the end we had to cut off discussions as we were pretty soon over time. So I think this was a big success and I’m a little bit unhappy that we didn’t propose the panel for Amsterdam.
The portals track was finished by a session from Ate and David about the Jetspeed enterprise portal solution. In fact the session gave me some ideas about how to merge the Cocoon portal with Jetspeed. I have to dig into the details first, but perhaps it’s possible. Especially as Jetspeed is planning to have a “lightweight” version sometime next year.

Today was a much better day with respect to my presentations 🙂 Both, the Sanselan and the iBatis, session went from my point of view very well and I think I could get the point about these cool projects across. Unfortunately the attendance in the fast feather track is not that high, but fortunately there were several people in the iBatis talk.

Btw, you can find all session slides here.

Yesterday I gave my new JCR in Action talk together with Bertrand for the first time. The room was fully packed but to be honest, I’m not that happy about how it went – I think it was my worst presentation ever. But I hope I could at least give an impression of what JCR is and how you could benefit from it.
The good thing about it is that I have now a very clear picture of how the session should have been 🙂 So, if I ever get the chance to talk about JCR again, it will be much better. Promised!

There are many ways to create/register services when using OSGi. The most straight forward is to add a bundle activator to your bundle and this activator then registers your services. The disadvantage of this approach is of course that you have to write Java code to register your services. Especially if your service requires other services, you have to write a lot of code.
There is also the Declarative Services Specification of OSGi which allows you to define your services in an XML configuration file stored in your bundle. You can specify dependencies of your service to others and the service component runtime (SCR) takes care of providing the dependencies and managing them. So in addition to write your Java service you have to come up with this XML configuration file.
Fortunately, there is a cool Maven plugin at Apache Felix: the SCR plugin which simplifies providing services for OSGi tremendously. (For a complete picture of these issues see the SCR Plugin documentation)
The basic idea of this plugin is to use annotations stored in your Java implementation. For instance if you just specify the

@scr.component

in a Java class, the plugin will automatically generate the XML configuration for you. There are more tags allowing you to handle references to other services, configuration properties etc. We even added some cool byte code generation which reduces the amout of code you have to write even more. I don’t want to go into the details here, as there is of course some documentation.
So, if you’re using OSGi, you should definitly check out the SCR plugin!

On friday the 2nd of November we went for another convert of The Musical Box in Hamburg. The venue, the congress center, is really great and the organization was excellent as well. The concert room was rather small, sitting in the 16th row, we just sat some meters away from the stage and could see every detail of the musicians – which was very interesting to see. So it was nice and cosy 🙂
The Musical Box were performing the Genesis Selling England by the Pound Tour (The Black Show) and once more this was amazing. You can’t spot any real difference between this concert and the original ones! Unfortunately this seems to be the real last tour of them for this era of Genesis 🙁
Next year they will perform the Trick of the Tail tour – of course putting a Collins “clone” as the singer. I’m still not decided if I want to see this as for me the Gabriel era is much more interesting.

Yesterday we arrived in Atlanta for the great ApacheCon US 2007. The flights went without major problems but I’m still wondering about the security checks. This time was no extra US security check at Frankfurt airport so we could enter the boarding area directly. The last times there used to be an extra check which did take some always some hours to get through. So this seems to be an improvement 🙂 But when leaving the airport in Atlanta you have to go through a security check again. I still don’t know what’s the purpose of this is. You already have been checked when entering the departure airport, so how could you have dangerous goods when leaving the arrival airport? Together with the nice immigration queuing it took us nearly 90mins to get out of the airport 🙁
Anyway, the hotel is very nice and I’, cirrently enjoying the hackathon 🙂
Starting tomorrow I’ll have a session each day (about JCR, iBatis and Apache Portals).