On wednesday I’ll fly over to Rome to attend the next edition of the famous Cocoon GetTogether – with two days of Hackathon and one day of presentations this is a nice mix I’m really looking forward to. On Friday, it’s Bertrand and me, talking a little bit about the past (Avalon) and the future (OSGi) of web applications 🙂

It seems that I was too dumb to publish this entry weeks ago. 🙁
But as you’ve most likely seen from other blog entries the Cocoon GetTogether was a success and fun at the same time. Thanks to Daniel I could see the Spring OSGi stuff (Spring Dynamic Modules for OSGi) in action and I must say that I think its a configuration nightmare. Apart from your usual Spring bean configurations you have to additionally define which beans to export and what to import etc. I think this can be easily automated – I hope to have some time to look into this in December.

And as everyone else, I’m looking forward to the Cocoon GetTogether 2008 🙂

In the past weeks I did several releases using the great maven 2 release plugin. And each time I got annoyed that it removes the license headers (or every header) from the pom. According to the issue tracker this has been fixed in beta-5, but actually it hasn’t (see this bug).
After being effected by this bug for far too long, I tried to find the problem. It started out, that there are poms where the license is not removed. So I tried to find the differences and then looked at the code of the maven release plugin (or precisly the underlying release manager doing the work). The current approach is very problematic as it tries to get around several known issues with the used xml implementation – this will lead to problems as soon as implementation details change and as apparent has already problems: for example it depends on the way you specify the namespace and the schema!
Fortunately there is a workaround (I mention it in the bug), but I really hope that this approach will be replaced with a more robust solution very soon!

Both specifications, JSR 286 and JSR 283, started their public review period just recently. Just go here and here to download the specifications of the Portlet-API 2.0 and the Content Repository for Java Technology API Version 2.0 for review.

In the meantime, we managed to get parts of Apache Felix out of the door as a final 1.0.0 release. I think the Felix project progressed very very well and it’s a nice and stable OSGi implementation. So check it out!

Finally I managed to update my weblog – yes, I know, these are the things everyone is really interested in…
Now as reported my Movable Type installation stopped working and updating it did not success, so I installed WordPress. Today I updated this installation to the latest version within minutes: a nice uptodate documentation on the various steps, some simple extract/copy commands and that’s it. So this is how I would expect it from every blog tool….

Without any news announcement, we were finally able to release an updated version of Excalibur SourceResolver. The new version 2.2.3 fixes a bug which made the 2.2.2 unusable. Compared to 2.2.1 it’s a minor bug fix release and everyone using an older version should update to this latest one.
My todo list still contains plans to make the sourceresolver work with plain url components, which would allow you to add your custom protocol and make it usable by just using “plain old java”: java.net.URL. This would also make the integration into an OSGi environment easier…unfortunately it’s not that high on my current list…

Silently a new version of Maven has been released. 2.07 is ready for download for a few days now.

I haven’t tested the new version yet as we’re in the middle of a release process and don’t want to change horses at this time 🙂

But just to repeat myself for all maven haters out there: maven is really great and once you have it configured and running properly it saves you a lot of time. A new this already but relearned it in the last weeks by preparing our release process. Now, I must admit that still the hard part is getting everything running. There are several glitches and problems you have to find workarounds for, so it might take some time. But in the end it pays of. And customizing is so easy by writing your own plugin.

So for me there is currently no reason to use any other tool. Somehow this reminds me a little bit of Cocoon with its high learning curve with pays of later…

Yesterday was the long anticipated day: the Genesis reunion concert in Hannover. The timing was perfect: it started to rain heavily exactly that moment the music began to play. Fortunately we were not affected by the rain as our seats were covered by the roof. In general, we had a good seating place this time, not too far away with a nice view of the stage.

So far so good. After some minutes I began wondering if my ears were defect or if it could be that the sound was very bad and Mike and Tony missing notes. It was obvious, that the heros on the stage were very pissed by the rain and especially Tony seemed to be in a very bad mood. A lot of problems occured during the show, Tony needed a new keyboard, Mike new guitars – they could not be heard during some tracks. The video show was not working properly during the beginning and so on. The sound got better though after half of the concert.

Now, most of it could be because of the rain – but I don’t think that this is a fair excuse. It’s an open air concert with the chance of rain, so everything should be prepared accordingly. Especially as there was a lot of rain during June and it was foreseeable that it will be raining during the Hannover show.

On the good side was the track listing. They managed to cover the whole Genesis era quiet well (although they left out “Calling all stations” of course). And the stage design was great as well. There are a lot of nice ideas with the lightning and the video walls etc. And even a fireworks at the end.

So, counting the pros and cons it was an average concert I think – two and a half hours of good entertainment, but definitly nothing more and not what most people had expected. And as they did not close the concert with “Turn it on again” but with “Carpet Crawlers”, its most likely that this is the last Genesis tour ever. And although I’m a really great Genesis fan, I think they should rather stop after this tour, before the concerts get worse.

Btw, I really hope that Peter will join the final concert of the tour in Rome in July….

And I’m looking for another concert of The Musical Box in November when they are *really* doing their final “Gabriel era tour”. For sure the show and the sound will be perfect that time 🙂

You might be wondering why I haven’t blogged in the last months (ok, perhaps you don’t, but I’ll tell you the reason anyway). Now besides lack of time, my old weblog, a self-installed version of movable type stopped working. I did not succeed in installing newer versions or getting the old one working again. And as I’m really bored by trying to get simple software installed (I’ll post more about this in the coming days), I just installed a new blog based on word press which is supported by my provider. So it was just a click on a button and this blog was working.

Simple but effective.