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As of late on the IAM effort, we have been involved in an evaluation of application servers.  Actually this is our second round of doing so.  Last year, we did an evaluation of Mule, ServiceMix and Geronimo.  At the time Geronimo, being fully Java 5 EE compliant, turned out to be a good choice for development.  We liked it because it had a great plug-in for Eclipse and it met all of our needs at the time.  As part of our project's functionality we needed to use Java Messaging Services (JMS).  The problem we ran into with Geronimo was it did not support the STOMP protocol.  So we re-grouped and switched to IBM's WebSphere Community Edition.  The message problem was solved, we thought.  Then we tired to use SSL for messaging and found the support in WebSphere CE to be lacking.

So, we commenced round #2, which included: Tomcat, WebSphere, JBoss and WebLogic.  Since all of our Web Services were SOAP-based we needed a really good servlet container, which Tomcat is.  However we needed other features like the messaging, which Tomcat does not provide, but the other products did.  We ended up doing a lot of timing tests and evaluations and our winner is?  WebLogic.  It is a very fast Application Server, and it met all of our requirements.  Since our development is going to be using Oracle, the tight integration between the database and the application server also made it an attractive choice.  And the runner up was Tomcat BTW.  Probably the best servlet container out there.  Why did we not select it?  Mainly because of having to add other tools either to it or standalone to meet the requirements that we have come up with.  Timing results are below.

Wow, I am blogging over lunch, who would have thunk it?  I am not sure why I stopped blogging, I used to write a lot of regular posts.  I probably need to update the "pages" of the site too.  For instance, I am no longer the Manager of the Software Solutions Group.  Actually that group no longer even exists.  Right now, I am the Technical Manager for Penn State's Identity and Access Management project, otherwise known as IAM.  IAM has been a great career change for me, because I had done IdM (Identity Management) for years.  So that's the work stuff. 

Outside of work, railfanning is still a major interest.  I try to get out at least once a week, when the weather is nice.  Camera-wise these days I am still using my Canon Rebel Xsi and a Panasonic P&S.  I am still in the quest of the perfect lens for railfanning that won't break the bank.  For now I am using a Tamron 18-270 VC.  It works OK. 

OK, back to work!

Interesting question isn't it?  People use facebook for different things; networking, dating, complaining, you name it.  Just yesterday my step-daughter Courtney sent me an invite for something call Dogbook.  Yes, it seems that within facebook you can build a network for your pet, in this case my dog.  Oh yeah, it also includes cats too.  So I gave it a try, we have three dogs, a min pin, a yorkie and a big question mark.  I set up a dogbook for our min pin, felony, fel for short.  I was able to set up information about him, favorite things to do, and then build a network of friends for him.  So what's the value?  I'm not sure yet.  I was able to find groups to joins for other min pins.  So there could be something there.  But right now, I am just not sold.  It definitely does show that social networking is exploding into other directions that I would have never guessed.  And yes, I do update fel's status when he does something new.

Like most of you out there in blog land, I read a lot of tech news and views from a variety of sources.  Some of my favorites are digg.com, lifehacker.com and slashdot.org.  Just recently I came across a post about a news aggregator site called newser.com.  newser was mentioned as being the future of on-line newspapers, and I agree.  Last night on Fox Business, I heard that most of the stock prices of the major newspapers are actually less than the price of the paper itself.   I receive the CDT at home, but with a site like newser, I could be convinced to cancel my subscription. 

I am a big Mac user, right now I am typing this post on my iMac.  Also in my office, you will find a MacBook and a Mac Mini.  At home, I have a Mac Mini too.  But there are times when I need to run other operating systems for testing like Windows and a flavor of Unix.  Since all of my Macs are Intel-based, I am able to take advantage of the virtualization software that is available.  I have tried Parallels and VMware Fusion.  Under both of those products, I installed a licensed copy of Windows XP and Ubuntu.  In the end, I really liked VMWare for its features and performance.  Heck, I even went out and purchased a copy for home.  Now the landscape has changed a bit.  A while back, Sun released VirtualBox as Open Source, which is another VMWare-like environment.  From the VirtualBox site:

This one of my first posts about things in my world that have nothing to do with software.  So back to the audit, no it was not the IRS.  I had an energy audit performed on my house.  With rumors of really high oil and energy prices, I decided to take some action back in the summer and see if there were things I could to keep things under control.  In the back of my mind, I figured the audit would go well, since my house was constructed in 2000.  Ha, was I really wrong.

So I contacted the auditor, who in the end turned out to be someone I went to high school with, go figure.  Anyways, John came out and told me about the process.  We started off with a questionnaire about how we (my wife Sheri and I) feel about the house.  Is it really cold in the winter, and warm in the summer and many other questions like that.  Actually, there were three pages of questions.  After the question period, John went around the house looking for things and then started in the basement and worked his way upstairs to the attic.  The last thing he performed was a blower door test.  You can read more about that here.  John assured me the house would do well.  Well it did not. Based on the results of the test, he felt that I had huge holes in my ductwork and I was loosing energy in other places.  Ouch!  So here were some of the recommendations:

1. Fix my basement insulation, as it was installed incorrectly.
2. Insulate my water pipes
3. Seal behind my sinks.
4. Seal other areas that had drafts.
5. Add additional insulation to my attic.
   
6. And many other things (10 pages worth).

In the end, the things were easy to fix and the costs were minimal.  The audit itself ended up only costing me $300.00.  I plan on having a follow up audit later this summer to see if there are any more things I can do before the electric caps are removed.  From a tech standpoint, it was really interesting to see how technology was being used to determine the problems with my house.  Opps, sorry this was not supposed to be a post about software.  Ha!

For the longest time, I have been in the quest for the perfect development environment, and I've had little luck until this past week.  Now do not get me wrong there are loads of great environments out there, and I have used most of them.  Back at Raytheon, I used Rational Rose, StP, Visual Basic and Symantec Visual Cafe for Java.  When I came to Penn State, I did a lot of Java, so I continued to use Symantec and its various follow-ons.  Then I branched out to other languages and platforms.  I'm not your average programmer who in a day just uses one language.  Monday for example, I was coding some "C", PL/SQL (Oracle), shell script and Java.  And all of it was done using "vi" on UNIX.  My desktop is a Mac, but I just never found something that worked for me.  I tried Eclipse and I really wasn't impressed.  So I almost came to the conclusion that I was just going to be stuck using "vi".  Now do not get me wrong, I am really good with "vi", and the other UNIX tools, but I was missing the features of an integrated environment.  Well folks, good news I found my environment and its NetBeans.  I am running version 6.5 on Mac and its great.  I ended up loading all of the plug-ins for the languages that I deal with.  And to make matters even better, Wednesday I found a PL/SQL plug-in.  Now I can develop stored procedures, compile and debug them from my desk.  Being the old programmer that I am, I have to admit that I did switch the editor to use "vi" bindings.  Some things are just hard to give up.  

From www.wired.com - Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004.  Its a pretty interesting read.  As of late, I'm finding less and less time to blog.  Twitter, facebook and del.icio.us do make my life a lot easier.  

Hello, its sure been a while since I have had a chance to blog about anything.  This summer sure has gone fast, with migration after another.  Personally, I'm sure glad the semester has started, so I can get caught up on other things.  Today's topic is maintenance programming, that is art of developing software to maintain existing applications and/or services.  At my previous job at Raytheon, that used to be the kiss of death.  Comments like, "Oh he is doing maintenance, well that's it for him" used to be commonplace.  Reality is, I have a friend who is doing maintenance on the same software application that I worked on 12 years ago.  My friend knows its a real killer, but he has all of the experience so his skill is needed.

As of the last two years, I am finding myself in the same boat, just doing maintenance programming.  Needless to say, I know how important it is, but in a word it can be just boring.  How do you make it exciting, other than the obivious resigning?  Well what I try to do is see if I can apply a new technology or programming language in a way that will enhance the functionality of the application.  Of course you do not want to do technology for technology's sake. 

Here is an example of where some new technology could make things better.  We have some applications that provide APIs that when called returned XML documents.  Back in the day, when I developed them, frameworks, SOAP, Web Services and so on were just in their infancy.  So doing things with a simple HTTPS POST and rolling your XML was pretty much the solution.  Now today, we have things like Web Services, and REST.  So for some of the newer enhancements, I will be looking at those technologies.  Hopefully that will make maintanance programming more exciting.

You are probably asking yourself, which Portal?  There are so many things out there today with portal-like features, that's it hard to tell one from the other.  The Portal that I am referring to, is the Penn State Portal @ https://portal.psu.edu/.  As many of you know a long time ago, I was the primary developer for the Portal.  I'm not going into all of the historical stuff, I already did that in a previous post. 

When we looked at the portal concept, a number of us felt it was great idea.  One place to go to for all of your stuff, whether its Penn State-related or external like CNN.com.  And for a period of time, we had some traction.  The portal was the place to go for a number of things like RSS feeds and chat.  When we were doing our design, we make a conscious decision that we were going to settle on using RSS for content-type channels.  At the time the specification was in the hands of Netscape and the version was around 0.91.  Software to take RSS and convert it to HTML existed, but its performance was not very good.  So we ended up writing our own parsers using compiler tools (Lex and Yacc).  Then for chat, we had a Java Applet (yes an Applet) that supported Jabber in the portal.  Another thing that we can up with in the portal was the concept of your personal bookmarks.  That way a person could log in and always have access to their bookmarks.  Again another great idea at the time, now with sites like del.icio.us, you may not need a capability like that.

So where have things gone?  Well today, everybody and their brother has their own RSS aggregrator (News Reader).  I personally use NetNewsWire.  And for things like chat, we just launched a Jabber Alpha/Beta that supports native clients.  A web-based version is on the way.  So there are  a number of things out there that replace the functionality of the Portal.  I will be the first to admit that. I have not checked usage numbers in years.  But, people still use the portal.  Why you may ask?  Well it gives them something that many other sites do not, personalization and customization.  Your portal is personalized for you, because we know a little bit about you based on your directory information.  This is a pretty neat concept that still has merit.  Customization of course will allow you to go in and pick and choose the concept you want to see. 

Back to my original question, is the Portal dead?  I think it is on life support, but not dead.  People at Penn State and other Universities still find value in the portal concept.  Remember a single place to go for all of my stuff.  If I had my way, what would I do to resurrect the portal?

1. Complete rewrite to make it Web 2.0/3.0.
2. Make content publishing more user friendly.
3. Try to make it the hub for all Penn State applications.  Those applications do not have to be wholly contained in the portal, just use the portal as a launching point for them.
4. Make things easier to use (look at Google's Portal for example).  And you maybe asking why not just use Google?  That question has been asked in different forms before, because Penn State content should stay inside of Penn State.

Since others and myself have spent so much time on the portal, I sure hope we can save it and breathe new life into it.