ITJungle had a story in today’s email that talked about getting Jetty up and running on our beloved AS400. I wanted to mention it here because I believe this is a solid alternative to Websphere Application Server (WAS) from IBM and it was on my TODO list to “port” to the AS400; so I guess now it is off my list of things to do :-) My traditional Java app server on the AS400 is still Tomcat because it is also a very small foot print and is used by the vast majority of Java web developers (so support is excellent).
The other thing I noticed is that the author is using what appears to be XUbuntu which is a flavor of the same Linux OS I use. This excites me greatly because I think the “free” desktop is rising into power and will give consumers a new and solid choice moving forward.
The other day on WEB400-L (midrange.com) Mr. Anderson mentioned that he saw my name in the JavaServer Faces: The Complete Reference book written by Ed Burns (Senior Staff Engineer, Web Tier Architect and Co-Specification Lead for JavaServer Faces Technology, Sun Microsystems, Inc.). I had completely forgotten that about 3 or 4 years ago he had emailed me to ask if he could use my approach to protecting pages with a login in his upcoming book.
Excitement mounted as I immediately went out to Amazon to see if I could find it in the “free” pages they sometimes let you view, but I couldn’t find it. Because having my name next to those like Ed Burns and Craig McClanahan is so exciting I decided to buy myself a copy to verify if it was in fact true. Sure enough, he made sure to give me credit for the PhaseListener idea I had. Click on the links below to see scanned images:
Oh how delightfully exciting! Maybe Ed Burns and I will sit down to a bowl of peanuts and sip tea over a discussion about 5250/RPG vs. JSF/Java some day:-) I will show him how successful software stacks from days gone by have been.
BTW, if you want to see what I actually did you can go to my original blog post from 2005: http://mowyourlawn.com/blog/?p=6
I showed my wife the book, telling her my name was printed in it. She tried to match my excitement but it was quite evident she had no clue who Ed Burns was, or JSF, or what a PhaseListener was - but she played along anyways :-)
On final note, everyone should go out and buy this book! Click here
Microsoft has long been trying to get into the enterprise server market but has been unable to because their foundation is rotten (i.e. building a software that was meant for the desktop and a single user). Well they are now try to rectify that by introducing a new effort code named Midori which is in a research & development status.
Could this be something that could actually/finally compete with OS400 at a reality level? Is it too little too late with Linux making strong strides on the desktop? Who knows, but it will be fun to see if the deepest pockets in the industry can pull something like this off. If I were them I would be hiring from the IBM and Linux crowds to make sure it was a success.
You can read more about it at SDTimes (where I read about it): http://tinyurl.com/6dwzhx
Yesterday I was doing some testing on my Ubuntu Linux laptop to see if I could get my Sonicwall NetExtender VPN software working correctly (and I did through an interesting bug work-around, ping me if you are trying to get it working and I will let you know how I did it). During that process I would connect to my neighbors unsecure wireless, try to connect to my VPN, and then test to see if I could reach my AS400. Instead of using a standard 5250 emulator I instead just used a regular old terminal (i.e. in Windows this would be a DOS prompt) vs. opening up tn5250j.
I thought I would blog on the subject because I am guessing not everybody knows you can simply open a DOS or Terminal window and type the following to get a session to your AS400:
prompt:>telnet <AS400 IP address>
That will bring up a plain-Jane interface for you to communicate with your AS400, allowing you to enter commands, prompt, etc, to your hearts content!
Of course as a father and someone who greatly enjoys programming computers I would want to test the waters to see if my children would also be interested in the same subject matter. (a bit selfish, I know, but I don’t try to steer my daughters away from other things like playing violin even though we have numerous less expensive and more common instruments in the house) .
Anyways, I have been introduced to this new programming teaching tool named “Alice” which can be found at www.Alice.org. This is a totally cool approach to teaching the next generation programming in a very practical and fun way. While Alice is mainly used for grades 6 through 12 and college, I thought I would try it out on my 7 yr old daughter. Turns out she loves it and the “drag and drop” programming skills required are easily learned if one knows how to read (which rules out my other daughter who is just entering Kindergarten this coming year, though that doesn’t stop her from trying :-).
The basic concept is you create a “world” where you have a basic backdrop (i.e. grass with blue sky) and you add “objects” to it (i.e. pre-created people or sceanery peices like buildings). In the end you are creating a cartoon like movie. Once you have added objects to the world you can select an object and change it’s initial attributes, or you can drag attributes to the editor pane and in a top down fashion the changes will be executed when the movie is played. For example, I can have a person way far off in the distance and drag the position attribute of that person to the editor pane and specify a new value for their position. When the movie is played it will show the person far away, and when it reaches the change in position attribute it will bring them to the forefront - pretty cool and easy stuff.
To find out more about Alice you can head over here:
To those that like to sip their morning coffee and listen to talk shows, now is your chance to do all that AND have it be work related (i.e. RPG, DB2, AS400, SQL, etc)!!
Bob Cozzi is putting on a live show every week and has invited me to join in when I can. Bring your buzzword bingo cards as I will make sure to say things like “Synergy” and “Proactive” and “Milestones”. You can get your buzzword bingo cards here.
You can check out the agenda for todays internet radio by going to the www.RPGWorld.com home page.
Earlier this week I was fed up with going back and forth between Linux and my virtual Windows XP (VirtualBox.org) because I was doing green screen stuff (TN5250j on Linux) and then WDSC - back and forth type style. My wish has always been to have IBM release a OS agnostic version of WDSC (i.e. one that will run on Linux), but they don’t think there is enough need. I wouldn’t even baulk at paying good money for such an IDE based on how much I use it!
Anyways, a gent by the name of Mihael Schmidt has been developing an Eclipse based AS400 language editor and recently made it’s presense known to the midrange.com community via the WDSC forum. To say I stumbled over the cat trying to get to my browser to check it out is an understatement :-)
The best part about this is that it is a 23MB download and installs in less than 1 minute. Basically you download, unzip, double click the startup executable and you are ready to connect to your AS400 (I have only done this on Linux and not on Windows yet)! This is a VERY lightweight (as in fast and small foot print) utility, though it doesn’t have a lot of features yet either. It gives you basic edit/save/compile capabilities along with being able to view your spool files (for compile listings). See the screen shot to the left for an idea of what it looks like.
Note that you can also set your compile options for a particular source member which is a nifty feature. Mihael has offered a place to log tickets for bugs and feature requests which can be found here: http://84.244.3.151/projects/rpgnge/newticket. Needless to say I have made good use of it over the past couple days :-)
Mihael says he is debating whether to make this a free open source project or make it a saleable product as right now it is in beta and *free* to download. I vote for somewhere in the middle as I don’t mind paying a small yearly fee (i.e. $25/seat) for software that gets me basic functionality. In the same breath I would love to contribute to the project with coding, so I hope he determines to let people assist with development (hint hint Mihael :-).
So, I would recommend you at least check it out and see what you think. Feel free to post your thoughts back here on my blog!
As some of you may or may not know, I am a husband of seven years and have four children. I am lost for the reason Amanda ever fell in love with me, but was I sure glad to find such a patient woman.
Anyways, part of being a father is raising your kids (obviously), but one thing I have found is that while raising kids it can be the comic adventure of a lifetime. One such adventure was when my son asked if he could have some lemon juice after seeing me more than once make a glass of lemonade by mixing water, sugar and lemon juice. The comedic part came when I realized that it would probably be cute if my son would drink lemon juice straight without having it diluted. The following video is the result of that thought :-)
I think this might be the first time I have heard of a cool new site from our local news station vs. having known about it for months ahead of time. Anyways, there is a new search engine out there that is authored by an ex-Google employee that is making some pretty big claims (i.e. three times as many searched pages as Google). It is named Cuil (Irish for Knowledge) and can be found at http://www.cuil.com .
Go ahead and check it out over the lunch hour today and post a comment back about what you think.
So far this year I have been a busy bee. One of the two big announcements I have is that Mantatech has an Audio/Video seminar I did titled “WDSC Tidbits Of Goodies”. I will share the other big (bigger) announcement hopefully before August 1st. The seminar contains a large collection of the little and big things I love about WDSC - the things that I have found to make me more productive over my past 5 or so years of using the tool.
The audio/video seminar approach is something new Mantatech is trying out and I think it is a great idea. The basic idea is that you purchase a seminar for $96 and can then access it for an alloted time to view as many times as you want. The other cool thing about this approach is that it can be easily updated by the author should more (or different) information come about. In my case I hope to double the length of the seminar sometime next year once I have the next round of tidbits done.
To access the seminar first go to Mantatech.com(click here) and then select “Seminars By Instructors” on the left nav area. Then on the next page select “Aaron Bartell”.
Jetty up and running on our beloved AS400. I wanted to mention it here because I believe this is a solid alternative to Websphere Application Server (WAS) from IBM and it was on my TODO list to “port” to the AS400; so I guess now it is off my list of things to do :-) My traditional Java app server on the AS400 is still Tomcat because it is also a very small foot print and is used by the vast majority of Java web developers (so support is excellent).
n trying to get into the enterprise server market but has been unable to because their foundation is rotten (i.e. building a software that was meant for the desktop and a single user). Well they are now try to rectify that by introducing a new effort code named Midori which is in a research & development status.
