Ok, this actually happend now nearly a month ago, but I never managed to blog in the past weeks (or was it months?) Ray played the last concert of his “Accoustic Genesis” tour in the world famous town of Paderborn (were I happen to live) – for those people not knowing Ray: he’s the singer of Skiltskin (with the famous song Inside) and used to be the front man of Genesis after Phil left.
Anyways, the concert was great. I’m not really a fan of accoustic music but Ray and his friend were really amazing. The played some Genesis/Gabriel/Collins/Others songs – sometimes in very interesting versions – and a lot of Ray’s songs (which were unknown to me but good as well). So it was a very pleasant evening with a very talented singer and guitar player. If you ever have the chance to see him live , just do it and buy him a Jaegermeister afterwards 🙂

Today is a great day to celebrate a birthday…

I just installed a nice little plugin that gives you “code” completition features for dependencies inside a maven pom. It lists you all available matching dependencies from a configurable repository. Great stuff.

Are you bored of using dumb stuff? Do you want to play with the cool guys and use the greatest and latest stuff in Java world?
Well, then we have a great news for you: just use Apache Sling and you’ll participate from this great new framework.
The idea and initial code has been developed at Day and the father of Sling is my collegue Felix Meschberger. We donated the project to Apache last year and since then Sling has become a very interesting and also exciting project.
With our new slogan “Bringing back the fun” (to Java development) we submitted Sling to the JAX Innovation Award and out of 40 submissions Sling has been nominated for the award (which means we reached the final with 9 other submissions). Yesterday was the great day where the winners of the Award have been announced and we were very surprised but definitly proud that Sling managed to win the 5th place in the competition!
It’s a little bit hard to explain very briefly what Sling is about. Sling is intended to bring the fun back (ok, I already mentioned this) and make the life of a web developer easier. It deals with the annoying task of bringing your content into the web and providing a plattform to manage/update the content. Underneath Sling makes use of a Java Content Repository (like Jackrabbit). Sling is built into OSGi bundles and therefore benefits from all advantages of OSGi. On the development side we integrated a scripting layer (using Apache BSF) which allows you to use any scripting language with Sling (of course you can use plain old Java, too).
That’s a very rough description, so check out our website.
Sling is currently in the Incubator and we’re looking for people who want to join the fun and make Sling even greater.

The photo shows two proud committers of Apache Sling: Felix Meschberger (on the right) and myself (on the left).

The next major version of Cocoon has been released – for now it’s only available as artifacts in the Maven repository – but this allows you already to directly start and use the latest and greatest of Cocoon.
There are many new and great things to check out and explore – so check out the website and the mailing lists. If you can’t find the right answers there don’t hesitate to bug us on the mailing lists!

I always wanted to blog about this: This is a big thank you to the Apache Commons team who directly picked up my innocent question if they could support OSGi in their upcomming releases and immediately added this to their projects. There are already some releases out, like commons-io and commons-lang, that you can directly deploy as a bundle.
This is great as this saves time and energy to all people using OSGi and commons projects – no wrapper bundles are needed anymore and you can directly use the released stuff.
So again, THANK YOU!

Next week I’ll be in Amsterdam for the ApacheCon EU 2008; there will be a lot of interesting stuff going on (as always at a ApacheCon). Apart from my JCR talk :), you should check out the hackathon where you can meet, talk and code with all the others, the Fast Feather track and the BOFs of course. These are great opportunities to get to know the Apache spirit 🙂 And of course there are plenty of good sessions and other activities!

In the next days I’ll add JCR support to the Cocoon portal for Cocoon 2.2 – the content repository can then be used to store all profile and user information. Currently, although the mechanism is pluggable, the file system is used for the profiles.
With the optional JCR storage service, there will be a much better way of storing and handling profiles. Current the profiles are XML documents, so whenever a change is made to the profile, the whole document needs to be stored. With JCR it should be possible to just save the changed part of the profile tree.
So stay tuned…

It seems that April 2008 will be a very busy month for me in terms of conference attending. First, there is the ApacheCon Europe in Amsterdam where I’ll talk about “JCR in Action” (again). This session will be totally different to the one in Atlanta. Promised 🙂
In late April I’ll attend the JAX 2008 in Wiesbaden. I’m happy to give two sessions there, the first one about the new (and by then final) portlet API 2.0 (JSR 286) and the second talk will be about the new and great Apache Sling framework.

Unfortunately we had to fly back home on Sunday and we arrived on Monday morning around 08:00AM at the great airport in Paderborn. Now I think I could write for ages about wired security checks – I guess I’ll never understand how and when these should happen. There must be some hidden rule when passengers need to be checked between connecting flights. As I mentioned, this time there was no additional security check between our flight from Paderborn to Frankfurt and the flight from Frankfurt to Atlanta. And this was very convenient as we only had 30 minutes between the flights. So I thought that this is now common sense – and to be honest, if you went through the security check once what’s the point of going through it twice?
Anyway, on our flight back we went through three security checks – always the same procedure, always the same checks. First check was of course in Fort Myers. After we landed in Boston we had to leave the secure area and reenter in the internationl terminal. The third check was in Frankfurt directly after landing.
Now, one interesting detail is that the first thing they check is your passport and your flight ticket – this means that only people with a valid flight ticket can go through the security check and I guess they want to ensure that the person the ticket is for, is the one who is taking the plane. But during boarding noone checks this again…somehow strange.
Ok, I don’t want to bore you to death but believe me there were many more strange things involved in these checks…
So we are back again in some very nice weather here, it’s raining and storm – that’s nothing compared to the sunny weather in Florida…sigh