The Random Musings

JBI Development Not For The Maven-Hearted

March 3rd, 2010

I have managed to persuade my current project team that Maven is worth their time and investment, and we have seen some good results from using it. It has been good for the simple projects, but our hope was that for more complicated scenarios our understanding of the few maven verbs would see us through any potential road blocks.

Unfortunately the road block I have hit is that attempting to find any up-to-date maven plugins for JBI development appears to be restricted to ServiceMix. This would be fine if we were actually using ServiceMix, but unfortunately we are not . . . we are using OpenESB v2.2.

In OpenESB land they lull you into a false sense of security by providing the illusion of maven pom files for the Netbeans generated Service Engine project. But when you dig in you find that it is an invocation wrapper for building using Ant. Maven dependency management is used to ensure that the right jars are in your local maven repository so that the build files can reference them directly for classpath resolution.

Oh well!

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Redbox Still Leading . . . In My Book

February 19th, 2010

This week I saw that Redbox, a company who’s services I use, were in my news feed twice.

1. Article on TechCrunch where they have decided to offer new releases 28 days after the DVD has been officially released in stores.

2. They will be offering Blu-ray rentals later this year.

It should be stated that they still offer a price point for rentals that cannot be beaten. $1 per night. I had hoped that Cable and Satellite providers would take notices and reduce their Pay-per-view movie prices to compete and remove the temptation for people to even consider Redbox. Sadly not, they remain at their $5 per movie price point, losing revenue as the word spreads that cheaper alternatives are available.

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Can You Own an iPad Without a Computer

January 31st, 2010

I have been looking for a replacement computing device for my mother to use. Her constant requirement to me is "something to read emails on my hotmail account".

Originally I was thinking of a Netbook like a Dell Mini so I took her to BestBuy for her to get an idea of size and form factor. Now, after seeing countless videos about the iPad, I am wondering if that would be a better fit for her. Though the million dollar question is . . . .

Do you need a Computer to own an iPad?

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Blackberry What If . . .

November 24th, 2009

I like many others am currently caught up in the mobile explosion/evolution as far as capabilities and availability. I am a Blackberry Storm (v1) user and I got here because of some strange loyalty to the Verizon network. I can safely say I would very likely to move to an iPhone if they were on the Verizon network.

Right now we have iPhone and Android getting the most headlines and the comparison usually used in any new mobile devices review is . . .

“Is it an iPhone Killer?”

What I want to know is, what is the impact to RIM and Blackberry of having Android making a relatively good showing with a new device on the Verizon network?

Will the attraction of an open source platform draw developers from the Blackberry platform to the Android 2.0 environment? Will we see companies try and provide an Enterprise friendly messaging solution that is an alternative to the Blackberry Enterprise Server and uses Android instead?

What if RIM decided that they would dispense with their own Java based framework for their phones and used Android instead? Could they deliver their Enterprise grade solutions on top of Android? Would that allow them to invest their development dollars higher up the stack and accept that the lower level software can be a commodity developed by someone else? Would they continue to build devices or rely on other vendors?

Maybe these questions have been asked already and maybe RIM are the ones taking serious looks at similar ideas.

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Ohio, We Have Arrived

November 24th, 2009

Okay, a bit dramatic, but the truck (and family) have made it to a new state. We set out at 4:08 AM, and we arrived at the hotel in Canton at approximately 2:40PM. All in all an okay drive, since we forced our GPS to take us along I90 to Buffalo instead of down I84 into NY, NJ and PA. the only traffic we hit was just outside of Buffalo, apart from that we were often the only vehicle on the road for stretches of time.

Right now the family is asleep after a filling meal and desert at Red Lobster. We took a quick drive to see where the Pro Football Hall of Fame was located, in preparation for tomorrows morning visit before we continue on our drive to somewhere close to Cincinnati.

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