Today was a day of several milestones in my quest to support my family through my writing, 2 milestones as a matter of fact.

1. My twenty-first article was published today. I know what you’re thinking: “Isn’t the tenth article or the twentieth article a more important milestone? What makes 21 so special?” Number 21 is special because it was my first article to go up completely unedited. Okay, my editor did change one link, but that was the only change in 432 words. Furthermore, my title - which I have struggled with more than anything else - made it up on the site verbatim. The standard disclaimer still applies - that my writing on that site is related to the content management market and will loosely resemble gobbledygook to most people.
2. I earned the ability, or was granted the privilege, to begin posting articles under my name rather than my alter ego of “Staff Writer”. This is important to me not only because now I can start introducing myself as “Contributing Writer at CMSWire.com”, but also because my oldest son (Son #1) is now convinced that I am actually being paid to write articles. How did I react to being granted this elevated privilege? I submitted my first article under my name too late to get posted this week. Is that classic or what?

So where do we go from here? I am thinking now that I am starting to make a name for myself on the Information Superhighway, maybe I should get this place in order. I have had “site audit of jasoncampbell.org” and “update jasoncampbell.org so you feel like posting” on my to-do list for way too long. Perhaps now I will find the adequate motivation to make this blog something worth actually reading, we’ll see.

Don’t worry, you probably won’t see another of these posts unless I am fortunate to reach 50 articles or 100 articles. You hopefully will see me begin to write about my new obsession - writing. Mrs. Campbellodeon will get a kick out of that considering she already makes fun of me for reading books about reading.

Stay tuned and let me know if you know anyone who needs an amateur writer.

The guy I am working for has been very encouraging and I am enjoying working for him. He took a chance on an unproven writer and I am thankful for that.  Mrs. Campbellodeon and I are excited about this opportunity because we both want for me to be able to focus more on my writing (as a way to hopefully one day escape the daily grind), and also because every little bit of extra money helps us toward our goals of getting out of debt - not too mention helping to feed the four boys who are eating us out of house and home.

Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email if you have questions or feedback.

Google Opens PPT Offensive in the Clone Wars

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Alfresco: One of Ten Enterprise Software Companies to Watch

I planned to research writer’s blessings when I returned to my desk, but before I could get there I began to form a blessing in my mind and I decided to capture it before it was lost forever. Here it is:

May your words flow freely like a spring
      that bursts forth from your soul
May your mind be not but a filter
      to cleanse the swell from within you and never abate it
May your hands be certain and affectionate
      to both your keys and your quill
May your eyes be strong and vigilant
      despite the hours required of your craft
May your captured thoughts and emotions live forever
      in the hearts of your readers

Compare my version to this version from Lisa Gardner:

May you always remember the thrill
     of being swept away by a really good book.
May the words you’re typing on the page be as worthy
      as the words running through your mind.
May your deadline be behind you.
May a good story lie ahead of you.
And as we go forth
May you always enjoy the journey
     to finding those two perfect words: The End.

Which do you prefer?

However, I don’t want to write about the doctors (who I thought were great - patient and with great attitudes) or the nursing staff (who I also thought were great - patient and helpful with great attitudes and personality) or the facility (which I thought was perfectly servicable yet typically unremarkable). No, I want to write about the emotions I felt as I walked into the recovery room to see my son after his surgery.

He was sitting up on the bed and, for lack of a better phrase, he looked like hell - as much like hell as a 9-year old can look. He looked like he had been crying, but he wasn’t upset. He just looked wiped-out. I watched him devour a crushed popsicle and listened as the nurses raved about his bravery and toughness and courteousness. It is difficult to describe the feeling of pride that swelled up within me. I can say that it was difficult to control my emotions. I didn’t want to lose it because:

1. I didn’t want to stress Son #1 in anyway while he was trying to recover,
2. My wife seemed so completely relieved that the procedure was over - she was more nervous beforehand than I or my son was - that I didn’t want to spoil that feeling for her, and
3. I didn’t want to look like an idiot in front of the nursing staff.

And yet, I caught myself several times trying hard to keep it together and not break down in tears.

Why would I be so emotional? Shouldn’t I be happy that he had made it through the procedure so successfully?

It wasn’t about my happiness that the procedure was over or my pride in how well my son had handled himself. The emotion came from the fact that when I walked into the recovery room I realized that my entire life - everything I live for - was sitting up in that bed, recovering. It is difficult to describe, but I don’t think of my life as being evenly split across the people in my family. In other words, I don’t think of my wife as 1/5 of my life and Son #4 as 1/5 of my life, etc. I think of each one of them as my entire life.

I can remember vividly when Son #4 was born, which will have been 7 weeks tomorrow. After he was born and cleaned up and they had taken him to the nursery to warm up, I lost it and completely broke down. My wife could not relate because of the overwhelming sense of relief she felt - the pregnancy being over and our son finally being here so we could see what he looked like. I was so emotional because in those moments just before our son was born, the pain my wife was in was almost more than I could handle. Then there is a brand new person in the room with us - another child that I have been entrusted with. The somewhat overly dramatic metaphor that comes to mind is a rubber band being stretched out and then snapped back.
But that is how I felt in those moments after Son #4 was born and in those moments after I walked in Son #1’s recovery room.

I am reminded of something my father told me growing up: “There are emotions that you will not have and cannot understand until you have children of your own.” He was absolutely right.

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“Do you remember your father?” asked the judge sternly, “that father whom you have disgraced?” The prisoner answered: “I remember him perfectly. When I went to him for advice or companionship, he would look up from his book on the Law of Trusts, and say, ‘Run away, boy, I am busy.’ My father finished his book and here I am.”

“And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.”
- Ephesians 6:4

“Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger by the way you treat them. Rather, bring them up with the discipline and instruction that comes from the Lord.”
- Ephesians 6:4 (New Living Translation)

The purpose of parental discipline is to help children grow, not to exasperate and provoke them to anger or discouragement (see Colossians 3:21). Parenting is not easy - it takes lots of patience to raise children in a loving, Christ-honoring manner. But frustration and anger should not be causes for discipline. Instead, parents should act in love, treating their children as Jesus treats the people he loves. This is vital to children’s development and to their understanding of what Christ is like.

Source: God’s Little Devotional Book for Dads (God’s Little Devotional Books)
**********************************************************************************************************

“People have a way of becoming what you encourage them to be - not what you nag them to be.”
- Scudder Parker

“Fathers, don’t aggravate your children. If you do, they will become discouraged and quit trying.”
- Colossians 3:21

Children must be handled with care. They need firm discipline administered in love. Parents should not aggravate them by nagging, deriding, or destroying their self-respect so that they quit trying.
However, the opposite problem occurs when parents are afraid to correct a child for fear of stifling some aspect of his or her personality or losing his or her love. Single parents or parents who cannot spend much time with a child may be prone to indulgence. But such children, especially, need the security of guidance and structure. Boundaries and guidelines will not embitter a child. Instead, they will set the child free to live securely within the boundaries.

Source: Men of Integrity
**********************************************************************************************************

The two devotionals above come from two different sources. One of which follows the days of the month, the second entry is for August 18th. However, the first entry comes from a devotional book that follows no such timeline. I find it interesting that after missing my devotional for 3 days, these two entries line up perfectly. As Dash’s teacher in the “The Incredibles” would say: “Coincidence, I THINK NOT!”.

These entries fall again into the realm of finding the balance in parenting. Love vs. Discipline; Nagging vs. Encouragement. These are the things that must be balanced. What makes it even more difficult is the effect that your mental and emotional state has on this balance. If you are in good mood, then you are less likely to administer discipline: “Oh, it’s not that big of deal”. If you are in a foul mood, then you are more likely to come down on your children for small transgressions and less likely to be forthright with a compliment or encouragement. I deal with this daily as I am moody and prone to depression. I try to make up for these shortcomings with hard work, selflessness, and generosity. Only my family can judge my progress.

Learning to control your emotions and parent from your center rather than the edges of your emotions is one of the myriad of things that makes effective parenting so difficult.

Success in the world means power, influence, money, prestige. But in the Christian world, it means pleasing God.
- Charles Colson

Can a man achieve both? Absolutely. Why are the men and women who achieve both not known? Because the people who achieve both have no need to be recognized. If they truly please God, then naturally they will please their family and friends. If those requirements are fulfilled, the needs of strangers (the media) cease to matter.

However, I believe it is at least twice as difficult to achieve both. The two main reasons that come to mind are:

1. If a person is truly pleasing to God, then “success in the world” becomes less of a priority. Why would one need to strive for power, influence, money, and prestige when they are already pleasing to their creator? However, I would venture to guess that “success in the world” is an unintended by-product of pleasing God. Much like the saying: “You cannot out-give God”, meaning that the more you give the more you will be rewarded by God.
2. The values required to be pleasing to God, unfortunately, do not necessarily line up with the values required to achieve “success in the world”. Whether it be steroid abuse in athletics or corruption at the top of corporations (both profit and non-profit) or political maneuvering in the middle of corporations. It is difficult in today’s society to convince a child that sometimes you have to “take the long way around”. Especially when the person who took the shortcut is being rewarded.

Corresponding verse:

And whatever we ask we receive from Him, because we keep His commandments and do those things that are pleasing in His sight.
- 1 John 3:22 NKJV

And a more contemporary version:

And we receive from Him whatever we ask, because we [watchfully] obey His orders [observe His suggestions and injunctions, follow His plan for us] and [habitually] practice what is pleasing to Him.
- 1 John 3:22 AMP

Agile Requirements from Static Specifications
Presenter: Vincent Frisina

The unfortunate reality of large-scale development is that requirements evolve in unexpected ways as the needs and understanding of the various stakeholders in the project change. This is often complicated by a slow-moving requirements analysis and specification process that isolates developers from stakeholder feedback. The development team is then caught in the middle trying to catch up with a changing system while trying not to fall behind in their deliverables. In this case study, we examine a number of techniques that have allowed one team to stay on top of shifting requirements and limit rework costs.

For this session, the slides were handed out. At the moment, those slides are not available anywhere that I am aware of. Unfortunately, until those slides are available these notes may not make a whole lot of sense. This post will be updated when those slides are available somewhere online. Feel free to comment if you have questions.

Beginning of notes

• This session applies to very large, long term projects: projects where Word is not sufficient for tracking requirements
• Developers have a love/hate relationship with requirements
• Document Centric Requirements Management
  • output of requirements analysis is a document (usually written in Word, maybe an Excel spreadsheet)
  • communication is achieved by passing documents around
  • problems arise with regard to vocabulary and contradictions between reviewers
• Example Project
  • ~10,000 pages of specifications, 100’s of documents
  • constant revisions of requirements
  • ~10 stakeholder organizations providing requirements
• Agile Development
  • understanding that there is going to be change and being prepared to deal with it
  • can be difficult to adjust to
  • not waterfall
  • utilizes “Parallel Requirements Feedback Cycles”
    • Users and Stakeholders work with Business Analysts to improve user understanding of the system
    • Developers work with Business Analysts to improve analysis
• Predicate Catalog -> Domain Dictionary
  • create a dictionary of common concepts
  • where code uses a predicate, the requirements should cite the domain dictionary
  • expect gradual acceptance from analysts
• Query Objects -> Logical Data Model
  • Entities and related queries define a logical model
    • functional requirements sit on top of explicit or implicit models -> make them consistent
    • existing logical models may be too low level
• Validation Rules -> Data Consistency Requirements
  • extract cross-cutting consistency and validation rules from functional requirements
• Development Team Considerations
  • be prepared fro additional ramp-up time
  • developers must review and questions the requirements
  • seek out overlaps and conflicts between teams
  • team leader must insure that feedback occurs
  • consider official “librarian” roles on the team
    • this role needs to understand the business domain

A few closing points:

• Overall, I was disappointed in this session. The presentation seemed more like a case study than anything else. The presentation did not into enough detail about the specific project or about the methods employed to be particularly useful.
• I agree that mammoth projects require a different method for requirements management, but I just don’t believe that there are many gigantic projects (like the one this presentation was geared toward) currently going on. I am probably mistaken, but I know that the methods here did not apply to the kind of work that I do or have done at any time in my career.
• Lastly, I got the impression that the presenter did not want the attendees to ask questions. He did encourage people to ask questions, but when the questions came his comfort level changed dramatically. The lesson learned here is that you need prepare for questions just like you practice your presentations. As a presenter, you need to go through your presentation and think about what questions you might be asked and be prepared to answer them. I think it is also beneficial to give your presentation to a couple of small groups of colleagues to solicit feedback on your style but also to get a baseline of questions that you should be prepared to answer.

Next up: Java Specialists in Action by Heinz Kubutz

• Speaker: Doug Bateman (D)
  • My impression of him was that he had an excellent attitude and was in an excellent mood considering it was 8 am on a Tuesday and he was about to give a 3 hour lecture.
  • He started out by chatting with the attendees and not acting like a lecturer.
  • He is relatively young, which isn’t unexpected, but he still seemed young to be presenting at a conference.
  • He is an experienced presenter - I gathered this from his comment about being videotaped.
  • My assumption is that he is involved with TheServerSide.com in some form or fashion as he appears to know the editor of the website personally.
• There were 14 attendees plus at least one guy from TheServerSide.com
• D: The presentation is not scripted (i.e. there are no slides, he worked from an outline in Notepad) and he is more concerned with answering our questions about portal.
• D: Starts the presentation by generating a list of questions from the attendees
  • What’s a portal? <demo>
  • What’s making stakeholders EXCITED about portals? (JEC)
  • How do I do content management in Portals?
  • We want single sign on, how do we approach bringing multiple apps together?
  • What development practices and coding exercises are portable across portal server applications? What’s portable, what’s not? (JEC)
  • How close are portals to being commoditized?
  • Where are the portlet repositories? Why so few?
  • Inter-portlet communication
  • What is WSRP?
  • What’s the best way to approach the architecture to make portal applications?
  • Advice on estimating portlet development.
  • How do you get a portal production ready?
  • State of the union on different portal servers.
  • What to do when a vendor isn’t standards compliant?
  • How to handle different levels of authorization in portals? What is the impact on user experience?
  • Summary of different development tools for portlets.
• What is a portal?
  • Google News
    • different regions on the screen
    • navigation bar
    • Edit link for each region: allows personalization (hallmark trait of a portal)
    • aggregation of data/information on a portal (another hallmark trait)
  • My Yahoo
    • banner at top of screen
    • regions of information are separate applications which share real estate on the screen
    • allows minimize/maximize portions
    • provides ability for the user to design the screen at runtime
  • Separates page design from the actual content: content can be static or dynamic
  • The guy who builds the page (the web page served by the portal server) may not be the guy who writes the portlets contained within the page
    • portlet developers have to assume that their portlet will run on screens with other portlets
    • beware of dependencies between portlets
  • Portals allow end-users to design pages
  • TheServerSide.com: doesn’t allow much personalization
  • Portals have independent content sharing screen real estate
  • Vocabulary Word: regions - the manner in which screen real estate is divided up
  • Vocabulary Word: theme - the standard look and feel for a group of pages
  • Business users don’t know what portals are (either)
    • at least, they know less than developers
    • they have to be educated on portals
  • JEC Follow-up: research examples using BEA Portal - real world sites
  • Vocabulary Word: windowlet - little window
  • Teams need a common vocabulary
  • Jetspeed: Apache’s portal server
  • There are themes within a windowlet
  • Vocabulary Word: skin - how the windowlets look, the rendering of the frame for the portlet
  • Single Sign-on
    • log in once, go anywhere
    • important to portals AND outside of portals
  • Jetspeed Demo
    • portal page stays the same, portlet changes based on user interaction
• What is a Portlet?
  • By design, they should be self-contained applications that will run independent of the other portlets on the screen
    • allows separation of page design from portlet development
  • A portlet is an independent application that can be dynamically included in a web page
  • Problem: real estate sharing
    • 2 types of portlets: greedy, non-greedy (sidebars)
  • Problem: two portlets on a page and both portlets contain a form -> who/what handles the form submission?
  • Problem: links and page flow between portlets
  • Portlets have to play nice with other “unknown” portlets
  • Tip: portlet specific navigation should be contained within the portlet/windowlet
  • Portlet developers can only control what’s inside their portlet, not the entire portal page
  • Vocabulary Word: pagelet - individual screens within a portlet (welcome pagelet, catalog pagelet, etc.)
  • Vocabulary Phrase: portal page - web page containing portlets served up by a portal server
  • The easiest, fastest, lowest cost, lowest pain way to convert an existing app/site to portal is to use a single portlet
• Beginning of the second hour
• D: there are two big questions that haven’t been asked
  • Can we see some portal/portlet code?
  • Portal Architecture?
• D: uses the Oracle JDeveloper 10g product for the demo
• Why do business users want portal?
  • Personalization
  • Central area for aggregation of information/content/data from separate existing applications
• What can I build rapidly?
  • What can’t I build rapidly?
• D talks a lot about what salesmen are selling vs. what can actually be done vs. how it should be done
• Portals are actually designed to be used for corporate intranets
• Oracle’s portal product
  • has instant change functionality with rich text editing (the bleeding edge version)
  • traditional portal builder (current/older version) is a web app that builds the portal page - layout
• A good portal product will make it easy to create basic pages
• How to design a page has not been standardized
• JEC Follow-up: There is a Java standard for portlets - JSR 168 (research)
• JEC Follow-up: WSRP - Web Services for Remote Portlets
• Oracle product demo
  • the entire page refreshes when an action occurs within a portlet
    • Side Note (JEC): look for a future post on how this can be avoided with Ajax
  • provides a web-based wizard to create custom portlets based on existing portlets
• Portals are glorified CASE tools
  • at least, that is how they are being sold
• How do I build a portlet in Java and add it to a page?
  • D: uses JDeveloper
    • has a Java Portlet development wizard
    • all the Java Portlets within Oracle developer expose a webservice - there is a SOAP Servlet that handles communications between the portlet and the web server
  • Java Server Faces (JSF): makes portlet development in Java easy; JSF to portal conversion is easy
    • Side Note (JEC): The comment above inspired me to attend a session about JSF.  Unfortunately, the session was underwhelming but in case I don’t write about it - JSF is an immature Java version of asp.net and it is the idea of an “ExternalContext” that makes portal/portlet development so easy.
  • There is a Struts migration kit/info
  • Portlets are packaged up as WAR files
  • Portlets are basically a standalone Java web application that has a built-in “gateway” for communication with the web/portal server
  • Portlets can be deployed remotely (WSRP) or within the portal itself
  • The portal page(s) can be managed/developed separately from the development of the portlets
    • the portal pages can tie into and display the portlet regardless of the state of the portlet in the development cycle, i.e. as new versions of a remotely deployed portlet are created and deployed, the portal page will simply show them and won’t require a re-build or re-deploy
    • the point above simplifies the build and release process, however it doesn’t simplify QA
  • D: uses notepad to create the outline for the presentation which is what the entire presentation is based on - no powerpoint
  • The core of Portal development is the same as the core of a Content Management system
    • The questions they try to answer when a user event occurs:
      • What is on the page?
      • What did the user request?
      • What should the next page look like?
    • Portal vendors will sale the content management capabilities
  • JSR 168 example
    • portlet.xml
      • name
      • return type
      • implementation: java class
    • javax.portlet.*
    • looks a lot like a servlet
      • doDispatch
    • taglibs are provided for the JSP representation of the portlet
    • a lot like a webapp
      • able to run inside a box
    • All the major java/web development frameworks are adding support for portal/portlet development
    • Forms have to work with restrictions since there could be multiple forms spread across multiple portlets on a single portal page
      • processAction: handle the form submit (step 1)
      • doDispatch: render all the portlets for the next page (step 2)
    • Homegrown frameworks (developed in-house) will require a large development effort to add portal support
      • D recommends migrating to an established framework, and then going to portal
    • D: JSF is the future, “hands down”
    • JSF Example
      • action class and form class (Struts) are put together - they are called “backing beans”
      • provides a “graphicImage” tag that handles URLs to images in a portal environment - ExternalContext
      • JSF is a cleaned up version of Struts with more power
• How do you design an application to run in Portal (a portal app)?
  • porting an existing application
    • create one big portlet to contain the entire app
    • anything more than that requires a redesign
  • designing a new application
    • “would this portlet work well and make sense all by itself?” if not, then it is not a portlet - it is a component
    • decompose an existing application or design by determining what functionality could be contained within it’s own application
    • no inter-portlet communication: they should be independent applications
    • JSR 168 supports “shared session” for portlets that are deployed in the same WAR file
    • each portlet should be capable of loading and saving it’s own data (load and save itself)
      • this can be accomplished by making a service call within each portlet
      • login is handled by the portal server and then the portlets figure out “who they are”
  • D drew a picture that had the web tier including the “shared session” (whose use should be minimized, i.e. only when it makes sense) which sent requests to a stateless service layer which used something like Hibernate to connect to a database
    • performance boosts could be achieved in the service layer by using caching
    • JEC Follow-up: AppFuse

A couple of finishing points:

• Doug was careful to say if your processes and tools are doing the job for your particular situation, then there is no reason to change them.
• Doug also said that he had little experience with BEA’s Portal Server because he had never been hired to work on it.  His assumption was that either no one was using it or no one had any problems.  He did mention that BEA Portal had built-in functionality to support inter-portlet communication, and while it was supported it should only be used in instances that make sense.

I enjoyed Doug’s presentation style - I heard another attendee describe it as “shooting from the hip”.  He made it more like a discussion and little like a lecture.  Based on the other sessions I have attended (and hopefully, they will be written up as well), Doug’s style is superior to Powerpoint slides and minimized interaction with the audience.

The content was applicable because I had little knowledge of and no experience with portal technologies prior to the session.  Overall, I would say the session made the first day worthwhile.  Unfortunately, Doug’s follow up session in the afternoon did not live up to the standard set by the morning.  Doug struggled with the shorter timeframe (70 minutes) and he was unable to provide enough new content to the returning attendees (like me) or enough background on Portal technologies for the new attendees.  He ended up going through best practices again, which are valuable but were old news for the returning attendees.  My impression is that it had more to do with the scheduling of the sessions throughout the conference - which hasn’t been that great.  So far, the two morning sessions (the second of which I hope to write up tonight or tomorrow) have made the conference worthwhile.  I have high expectations for tomorrow as there will be two more Ajax sessions and a morning session that compares all the major web frameworks.

• “Building Portals with Portlets” - Doug Bateman
• “Agile Requirements from Static Specifications” - Vincent Frisina
• “Best Practices for Designing Portlet Applications” - Doug Bateman
• “Java Specialists in Action” - Heinz Kabutz

I have over 12 pages of notes, the majority are related to portal, that I plan to capture today or this evening.  Doug provided some great stuff about portals.  Unfortunately, the other two sessions were not as strong.

Battery going dead and day 2 starting.

Thanks.