Andy Gibson » Blog

FlutterCode.com released

Andy Gibson — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 02:48:18 +0000

I’ve been fairly quiet over the last couple of months as I’ve been working on a few items, working on a new site and working on getting two new Open Source projects final and out the door.

I’ve renamed Spigot to DataValve, and moved it to the new site FlutterCode.com which will also host my other project called Knappsack which is a set of Maven archetypes for Java EE 6.

The new site will be home to most of my tutorials, articles and other writings, as well as possibly some screencasts and even podcasts. It will in essence be a pure java development site. This blog will go a bit quieter and contain less development stuff, although most opinion will get put out here instead of over there. I’ll also be copying some of my tutorials over there from this blog.

I’m aiming to create a fairly cohesive tutorial site, aided in part by the Maven Archetypes which will give me a firm base onto which I can build tutorials without having to start from scratch, but one archetype is a sandbox Java EE 6 app with project configuration, a demo model and some test data. The sandbox app will let developers create a new skeleton java EE 6 application they can play with. Building on that, there is a sandbox-demo application which as an archetype that creates a full working demo CRUD application using Java EE 6 so developers can see how all the different pieces of Java EE 6 go together. It includes features such as conversations, JPA CRUD, page parameters, CDI injection and events.

Again, I have to say it, but Open Source is Hard. In the past couple of months, I have been working on a whole new site, getting 2 projects ready to roll with documentation and site content to boot as well as working a job, and having some kind of life.

Now it’s out, I can start to focus a little more on getting some more Java EE 6 tutorials and articles out.

Christmas Hiatus Over

Andy Gibson — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 04:35:13 +0000

Well, 2009 is done with and we are plunging headlong into 2010. Being European, I like to take a good week off around Christmas and New Year and with relatives here for Christmas I haven’t spent much time on work or blogging. So for those that have sent emails, apologies for the delay and I’ll get back to you this week/weekend. I have a few posts lined up including part 3 of the CDI articles covering Events, I’ll probably do one introducing conversations and then I’ll start writing on creating some real world apps with JSF and CDI. If anyone has anything they’d like to see in these articles, let me know.

Also, I have a couple of food posts almost completed as Christmas was full of good food and recipes that inspired me to blog about it (Must have been watching Julie & Julia in the New Year that did it).

Happy New Year all!

New Blog Theme

Andy Gibson — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 20:38:35 +0000

Yes, I’ve done some decorating around here, well, actually I got the interior designers in as I didn’t write this theme. I have retired my own custom theme as I felt it wasn’t making the most of the features that Wordpress has to offer such as widgets and plugins.

This Carrington Framework Overview gives you an idea of some of the details that can go into making the best theme possible and right now I just don’t have the time to dedicate to my own theme to do it right. Instead, I have found myself a new theme and done some customization on it, and no doubt it will be tweaked in the days and weeks to come.