The "I" in JBI is for Integration

Just in case anyone was wondering....

I came across this article today which discusses integrating XMPP presence in J2EE, and as I am reading the whole time I'm thinking I could do this with JBI utilizing the XMPP Binding Component and the JMS Binding Component. Leveraging the BPEL Service Engine I could easily orchestrate everything and not have to write any code, just create a composite application and deploy it to my JBI Container (e.g. OpenESB) and I'm golden. The XMPP BC would handle receiving the presence notifications and utilizing BPEL we could pass that along to the JMS BC to be published to the topic or queue.

I get the feeling that most developers feel the need to always write code to come up with solutions to their problems, when in all actuality there might be a solution to your problem already. I have said it 100 times myself, "I'm not happy unless I'm in my IDE coding away".

So my last thought....

Before you get knee deep in code (I know it's fun), check out some of the components that are available and see how you can use JBI to integrate solutions for your problems. Remember the "I" in JBI is for Integration.

XMPP BC - More Development on the way

We are set to add some more enhancements to the XMPP BC, but first a quick recap of what we added last month:

• Group Chat capabilities
• Join
• Invite
• Kicks
• Leave
• Send/Receive Messages
• Send/Receive Complex Types

Here is what we have in the works for this month:

• More Group Chat capabilities
  
• Create/Destroy Groups
• Presence Notifications (Allows a consumer to monitor the status of members in the room)
• Upgrading to the latest Smack API (3.0.4)

Stay tuned for more updates, you can get the latest release here.

Silverlight - The death of the browser

At least mine anyways. So I was reading one of the Flex evangelists blogs about Silverlight 1.0 being released, and I thought I would see what all the hoopla was about. So I went to MLB.com and checked out some videos. What a mistake that was. First you will have to install Silverlight, no big deal I've had to install the Flash Player before as well. Once I get that installed and restart my browser, it took 2-3 minutes for my browser to load everything, and the whole time my processor is pegged at 100%. I waited patiently and finally was able to play a movie, and of course instead of showing the highlights immediately Microsoft had to pat themselves on the back. Finally the highlights started, and the quality was terrible. I couldn't hardly read the score because it was fuzzy, and it the actual footage looked choppy. I've seen enough, I try and go back to Google Reader and now my browser isn't responding, I had to kill the process and start a new session. Nice job Microsoft. First impressions are the most important, and my first impression of Silverlight is to go uninstall it as fast as I installed it.

Flex and Real Time Collaboration

I stumbled upon this interesting Video Podcast from Dereck DeMoro of Jive Software in which he discusses the benefits of switching to Flex while developing the Spark Web Client. A few key points that he mentioned was that they were developing a desktop application (Spark) that was written in Java (Swing in particular) and a Web client that was written in HTML and JavaScript. He mentions how they wanted to mimic the two applications to provide the same user experience, and how they struggled to do this. Once they switched gears and started developing with Flex they were able to have one code base that utilized for the web application and the desktop application. For the web app, you just embed the swf into an HTML file, and for the desktop application they leveraged Adobe AIR (formerly Apollo). He talked about how this greatly simplified their development efforts, as well as things like testing since they only had to test one baseline.

Another key thing he mentions is the easy transition he and his team had (They were all Java developers with no Flash or Flex experience) in transitioning to Flex. I've had to opportunity to program in Actionscipt and it is very similar to Java, in fact I would bet most Java Programmers could pick it up in no time.

Sometimes I get the feeling that Java developers don't want to try something different, they just want to stick to what they know. To me, if it's better I don't care, and in my opinion Flex is better.

The Big House wasn't so Big on Saturday

Yes, I am a die hard Michigan Wolverines fan, and yes I've been getting phone calls, emails, and text messages from friends I haven't talked to in quite some time rubbing salt in my wounds. Maybe Saturday's loss to Appalachian State was a wake up call for a very talented senior laden football team, or maybe it's a start to a very disappointing season. I guess we will have to wait and see, but as most Michigan Fans will say if we can beat Ohio State at the end of the year then who cares if we lost to that 1-AA team in September.

At least Team USA annihilated Argentina (Led by Bron and Melo, I think we definitely take the gold for coolest names), and American Sprinters dominated at the World Championships (Tyson Gay was awesome), the USA is looking good for Beijing.