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.

Regular listeners will recognize Jamie Allen's voice from a number of podcast episodes at Chariot. He recently left us to join Typesafe, the sponsors of the Scala language, Akka, Play and other items that make up the Typesafe stack.

We discuss a number of topics, including:

• Scala helps you write good code out of the box
• Languages -vs- Frameworks
• Functional programming
• A few upcoming features of scala 2.10 
• Builds in scala
• Scalathon 2012
• Training around Scalathon including Chariot's Fast Track to Scala offering which includes instruction from Jamie Allen himself.

For information about scalathon, head over to the event page at http://scalathon.org/2012/

Chariot is a Typesafe training partner.

Rich Freedman lent some time to talk to Ken Rimple tonight over skype and re-launch the Developer News series, which has been on hiatus since February. Here are some of the topics they discussed:

• Apache Tika - Apache Tika
• Griffon 0.9.5 released - 120 plugins?? Wow...
• Grails 2.0.3 is available
• Apache Tomcat 7.0.27 released with support for WebSockets
• A Computer Scientist in a Business School: The Google attack: How I attacked myself using Google Spreadsheets and I ramped up a $1000 bandwidth bill
• Pivotal Labs is said to have been sold ? Tech News and Analysis (ancient link, and yes, they were, and to EMC to boot!)
• The 'T' twitter command-line client
• Oh my ZSH
• The Android Scripting project - pure awesomeness!

The developer productivity tools they mentioned were:

• Notational Velocity - Rich's note taking tool that has an Android API

Brian Fox is a longtime open source contributor, having worked on Maven 2 and overseeing the development of Maven 3. He is the VP of Engineering at Sonatype, and currently leads the Nexus repository project. The team has just released version 2.0, which includes support for the growing .NET open source community and the NUGET library manager. 

We discuss the evolution of Maven and repository management, the Nexus repository manager, and key features in 2.0, such as the new smart proxy and the advent of Sonatype's new repository license intelligence and health awareness.

Topics covered:

• Maven 3.0 and futures
• Maven central
• Nexus repositories
• Some Nexus architecture considerations
• Nexus 2.0, repository abstractions, NUGET
• Nexus Pro enhancements in 2.0

More information about Nexus and NuGet here. http://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2012/03/03/sonatype-repository-now-supports-net-framework.aspx

Chariot is a Sonatype consulting and training partner.

Thanks to Brian for speaking to us today on the Techcast.

You can find Brian's blog entries for Sonatype at http://www.sonatype.com/people/author/brian/. Nexus is available at nexus.sonatype.org.

You can find him on twitter at AT brian underscore fox, You can find out more information about Nexus at nexus.sonatype.org.

Here is our interview with ETE keynoter Alex Payne. His talk, Emerging Programming Languages: a Tour of the Horizon" will be featured on April 11 at 8:30 AM.

Links will be updated over time, I wanted to get this out early.

Alex will be speaking in depth about some emerging languages at ETE. This show is a quick introduction to some of the things going on in the industry, but not as comprehensive as Alex's talk will be. We hope to see you there, and if you're not attending ETE we should have the talk available online a short time after the end of the conference.

Notes:

Alex's first real computer : Mac Quadra.

• Alex on Sitepoint podcast #39
• The Strange Loop Sept 23-25 2012 where Alex is helping drive the emerging languages track.
• Google Go! http://golang.org
• Scala
• Haskell
• Google Go
• Dart
• Kotlin
• R programming language - in last few years, surged for big data

Other topics mentioned

• David Unger manycore > 24 (1000) cores
• Portland State University
• Non determinism / cache coherency

Where to find Alex

- Twitter - @al3x
- web: http://al3x.net/

Produced by Chariot Solutions Education Services

Upcoming courses through June online now at chariotsolutions.com/training_events.

More classes added for summer soon.

Hey, all. Gordon and I cooked up a few tasty items for your digestion this week. We've got

• Take your programming course with a grain of salt, please - A developer takes a college course whereby strict consequences are dished out for not following "the" rules. is this wrong?
• http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/118703/where-did-the-notion-of-one-return-only-come-from/118717#118717 - brought up in the discussion.
• Dreyfus model of skill acquisition - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Mentioned in the discussion
• McCullough and Berglund on Mastering Advanced Git?-?O'Reilly Media - A great video tutorial on Git that relates to our discussion of the Grails 101 video.
• O'Reilly: Mastering Grails 101 Video - What brought us to talk about the videos in the first place...
• Spring Roo 1.2.1.RELEASE available - Yes, it's updated again. This time, no book changes required (beyond search/replace) - yay!
• Heroku makes sharing SQL data as easy as URL - And it's so freakin' hip.
• Grails 2.0.1 Available... - An update is available to Grails that includes 80 bug fixes and other items.
• Get Started with Java on Heroku - A nice site to launch a fully configured application, ready to host on Heroku, with a variety of frameworks including Spring and Play.
• Specializing Generalist - You, sirrah, are a Specializing Generalist. I hope you can find it in yourself to cover for me while I'm gone. I'm also a Specializing Generalist, and my specialty is in generalizing about specialties. Seriously though, I tend to agree on this angle for staffing teams in general... Ken