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
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!