This week's interview features Fil Maj, of Adobe's PhoneGap project. PhoneGap is a cross-device runtime platform for hosting HTML and Javascript applications on tablets, phones and other hand-held devices. Chariot's consulting practice director Don Coleman joins us as he's worked with Phil on phone gap and plugins, so he lends a hand guiding the conversation. I hope you enjoy this podcast. 

Our first podcast from Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise is our Javascript frameworks panel. Led by Robert Hansen, author of GWT in Action and host of our prior Web Framework shootout in 2011, it includes developers who contribute to Meteor, Backbone, Ember and AngularJS, four Javascript frameworks that cover the gamut between all-in one platforms to comprehensive client-tier frameworks to strongly focused and less-comprehensive and more configurable ones.

Robert Hansen - moderator
Avital Oliver - Meteor Development group, core developer
Tim Branyan - Matchbox - Backbone contributor
Yehuda Katz - creator of Ember, Rails Ruby and other standards projects contributor
Brian Ford - AngularJS Core Team / Google / co-author AngularJS in Action
Lukas Ruebbelke - Senior Engineer WebFilings - co-author of AngularJS in Action

Sponsored by the Chariot Education Services Team.

This podcast episode is an interview with three leaders of the 2013 Philadelphia Enterprise Hack-a-thon contest, which is being launched at Philly Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise on April 2-3, 2013. 

The interviewees are:

• Mike Schellhase  - Director of Field Applications - Bentley Systems 
• Phil Moyer - Managing Director of Technology @ Safeguard Scientific
• Satwik Seshasai - VP of Engineering at NextDocs

Lukas Ruebbelke and Brian Ford, both speaking at Philly Emerging Tech this April, are co-authors of the forthcoming Manning book, AngularJS in Action. They are currently preparing for their first Manning Early Access release, or MEAP.

When Brian was working at Google as an intern, he was exposed to the Angular framework and learned quite a lot about it. So much in fact, that he developed the AngularJS Batarang, a Chrome debugging tool, and helped to launch their documentation site, also written in Angular.

Lukas has been working for over ten years as an application developer, starting with programming languages such as ActionScript and Flash, and then moving into the Javascript/HTML 5 world. He came upon Angular and also enjoyed working with it, as it just made sense to him.

In this TechCast episode, we'll discuss this framework, which helps developers put together browser-centric HTML and Javascript applications. We'll find out the major components, such as a very easily understood Model View Controller framework, the ViewModel or $scope, and other features such as services and the all-powerful Angular directives.

Topics mentioned include:

• Models, Views, Controller
• The Angular ViewModel
• Scopes
• Services and state
• De-composing pages into multiple controllers
• Yeoman as a build tool for Angular and other platforms
• What are Angular Directives?

Books mentioned:

• Javascript, the Good Parts - Douglas Crockford
• Javacript Patterns
• Javascript Enlightenment

Joel Confino is a long-time consultant at Chariot Solutions. He has spent the last four years working with a large enterprise, here named ABC Corporation, rolling out a new development platform and build process. Joel was one of two speakers at our event, which also included Sonatype's Jason Van Zyl. Joel's focus was building in competitive advantage by choosing to implement continuous integration tools such as Maven, Nexus, Jenkins, and Sonar. 

Rod Johnson is well known for his work creating and leading SpringSource, and the Spring Framework. But did you know he recently started working with TypeSafe organization? He's advising them on their board of directors, and he's working on his own Scala hobby application. He has some views about the language, how to start using it, complexity vs readability, the "No Frameworks" movement, and more. 

If you want to listen to Rod's history working on Spring, have a listen to episode 74.

Advertisement - my co-host for this episode, Michael Pigg, is running TypeSafe's Fast Track to Scala course at our training facility in January 2013. Use the discount code 'techcast' and save $200 on your seat.

Full disclosure: Chariot is a TypeSafe and SpringSource/VMware training partner.

This interview is a walk through the lead up to and the creation of the Spring Framework with no founder Rod Johnson. Recently, Rod left the company sponsoring Spring, VMware Corporation, and joined up as a board member of TypeSafe to advise them on the future of Scala and other projects.

The podcast, then, is broken into two parts - the first part focuses on Rod's history in creating Spring, what makes it compelling, and how it has developed over the years.

The next part, which will appear on TechCast #75, will focus on Scala, a language that has become more popular of late. Rod is currently advising TypeSafe, the sponsors and creators of Scala, and he has been working on a project for several months totally written in the Scala language. 

Disclosure Note - Chariot Solutions is a VMware consulting and value-added training center partner. 

Enjoy this two-part interview.

Best,

Ken Rimple

This techcast episode features the open source PDF API developer Bruno Lowagie. His iText library has been used by many Java developers. One of the earier open-source Java APIs, iText was originally written to provide PDF version 1.3-compliant output. This was not the first API that Bruno created to handle PDF, as we'll hear in the interview, and also not the first to be open-sourced.

We'll hear how Bruno has participated in the PDF specification, has worked with various document management concerns including encryption, forms processing, and long-term archiving of PDF document formats. One very interesting section concerns how he approached licensing, and some of the challenges faced by developers when they are looking at dealing with open-source users versus paying clients, and how that informs the decisions of his company has he moves the library forward.

For information about the iText library, in both the commercial and open-source licensed versions, you can visit itextpdf.com.

Rebooting this podcast starting THIS WEEK!  I hope to have one developer news every other week, starting today.

This summer has been anything but a vacation, with our training exploding and me spending lots of time in the classroom. I've also penned two updates to Spring Roo in Action, so I've been pretty busy. But I realized we haven't been updating the DevNews, so let's get back to it, shall we?

Links

• The Selfless Debugger (Big Nerd Ranch) http://weblog.bignerdranch.com/793-the-selfless-debugger/ - How the XCode 4.4(.1) debugger has trouble keeping track of itSELF and how to deal with it.
• SpringSource Tool Suite open sourced and moved to GitHub - 3.0 released too - http://blog.springsource.org/2012/08/13/springsource-tool-suites-3-0-0-released-reorganized-open-sourced-and-at-github/
• Chariot Blogger - Chariot's Keith Gregory - http://blog.kdgregory.com/2012/08/taming-maven-dependency-management.html - about the dependency management tag, excludes, and other specialties of the Maven language.
• Keith again with how to set up local repository servers: http://blog.kdgregory.com/2012/08/taming-maven-local-repository-server.html
• Joel Confino in an older post (but I love it) about how to tame your GMail with Groovy - http://blog.chariotsolutions.com/2011/08/groovy-script-to-tame-gmail-attachments.html
• Corey Latislaw on setting up the Roboelectric Android debugger plugin with IntelliJ - http://blog.chariotsolutions.com/2012/08/integrating-robolectric-with-intellij.html

Our Sponsor -special training deals from Chariot Solutions Education Services

Save $200 now on the upcoming Core Spring training on 9/11 - 9/14-2012 at Chariot Solutions in Fort Washington (Philly) PA by using the offer code back2school. Course details at http://chariotsolutions.com/training_events/49

Sponsors

• Chariot Solutions Education Services - Training in Spring, Hibernate, Scala, Maven and more. Visit us on the web at chariotsolutions.com/education

Events

• Scalathon 2012

News

• Rod Johnson Leaving VMWare
• Spring project infrastructure maturing
• FuseSource acquired by RedHat

Podcasts

• Java Posse #387 - features NoSQL discussion from the Java Posse Roundup 2012 in Crested Butte, CO
• Chariot TechCast #72 - out on June 8th, Jamie Allen on Scala past present and future

Chariot Authors corner

• Chariot bloggers - Lyle Anderson - two part article series on Flyway Migrations and Maven
• Chariot bloggers - Ken Rimple - Spring Roo and Web Flow on Java.Net
• Chariot bloggers - Anatoly Polinsky - something deeper - Scala: fun with CanBuildFrom - a way of building collections via a type of builder pattern Chariot bloggers -
• Chariot Bloggers - John Shepard - UTF-16 for Grammars - quick code sample printing out some of the standard grammar elements in the unicode UTF 16 character space.

Presentations

• Andrea OK Wright's presentation on Polyglot programming, using Scala as a host language to execute Python code. Extremely well annotated and detailed. A must read if you're thinking of embedding one language within another, as she shows the breadth of techniques available.