Outerthought.Blog

Yesterday, we presented Kauri 0.3, our take at Java-based RESTful web application development for a full room of Devoxx attendees in Antwerp. It was great fun seeing the many hours of Kauri development finally coming together.

Kauri 0.3 is now in a usable state for a wider audience: check out www.kauriproject.org for download links. This packaged release makes the many changes and new features from the source tree readily available to all.

The 0.3 release marks a level of feature-completedness that delivers on our "holistic teamwork" promise in offering a framework equally allowing hardcore Java developers and UI engineers to collaborate on shared projects.

Most notable changes for this release are:

• a convention-based "pages" routing subsystem that allows fast prototyping without extra coding or configuration
• run-time-based mode setting of prototype vs production state allowing easier plugability of mock-up and real service modules: both routing and Spring configuration can now vary depending on this flag
• an improved basic data REST service module for building CRUD services with two implementations: JPA-driven for straight Java to database persistence, and a json-based 'dbmock' module which can be used to fake data services in prototype mode
• many improvements to the templating module and its samples with a special focus on the newly-introduced template inheritance mechanism, which allows abstraction of shared layout components
• completion of an extensive form framework refactoring, including the release of an elaborate list of ready-to-use form controls
• a Maven plugin for packaging Kauri apps into industry-standard web application containers
• an expanded set of samples showing typical usage scenarios and features
• a bunch of renames to accommodate common sense and improved naming conventions throughout all Kauri artefacts (template tags, config files, form configs, etc etc)

We're psyched to see Kauri in a fully usable state, and we would appreciate any sort of feedback or comments that will help us to set goals for the next 0.4 release.

Lastly, we've also polished up our web presence a bit to blend more logically marketing content, documentation and the development wiki. If you fail to find what you need from our website, let us know!

In order to grow the Kauri community, you can also join us on Facebook and Ohloh:

• http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=52174871969
• http://www.ohloh.net/p/kauriproject

Be a doll and sign up there: more Kauri fans means a lot to us in these early days!

Thanks also to our early adopters and project sponsors Schaubroeck.

Hope you enjoy this release,

The Kauri developers

Marc | Bruno | Freya | Paul | Karel | Jeroen | Ives

ps: here's our Devoxx presentation on Slideshare.

Running a small business is a on-going battle between risk management, opportunism, long-term strategy and medium-long-term thinking. The joy of being small however, and having a short decision cycle, is to be able to act and re-act swiftly, and to make a point when it matters rather than when the media campaign dictates. We've made a small decision a few weeks ago we're quite proud about, and we want to share it with you.

That decision is to go Volvo for our entire car fleet. OK, it's a small fleet with six vehicles, however we feel the message behind this decision is important. The car industry is going through an extremely bad time at the moment, and needs any help it can get. Being a large industry, car manufactures do a lot of outsourcing and subcontracting, which means other companies will be impacted as well.

Volvo is one of the more important employers in the Ghent region, and should get credits for that. Local employment is very important in order to cut traffic and thus pollution, but it also builds a spirit of togetherness and entrepreneurship for the entire Ghent region. That's why we joined Gent BC right from its start: Ghent is a great region to work from, and we're proud to share that region with companies like Volvo.

The Volvo brand, in our minds, is a factor of quality, cost/value balance but also a level of environmental awareness we want to be tied to. Not so much the pure ecological values, but an awareness of a product existing, operating, evolving in a certain context. A sense of ungreediness, not abusing the available resources - very much like we try to grow the business context of our open source products: by finding customers that want to share our common ideals and goals, by growing common platforms where win-win solutions can be created.

Plus, they're great cars to drive as well, obviously. ;-)

So from now on, our car brand will be Volvo, preferable car models which are assembled in the Ghent manufacturing plant, and purchased by our leasing partner at a local Volvo dealership (ACG).

Disclosure: Volvo isn't on our customer list.

It seems as if ReST has reached some sort of tipping point: different schools of ReSTfulness are starting to appear, and its original creator has a challenging time defending what defines 'true' ReSTfulness. As architects of a ReST-centric web application development framework, it's the kind of tension which shows interesting times are ahead of us, and a call for caution to do the right thing.

I'm particularly struck by this blog post from (very) old acquaintance Dave Pawson, who I enjoyed meeting many years ago at an XSLT training course then organized by the Belgian SGML Users Group's president Paul Hermans. Talk about dinosaur memories. ;-) Here's what Dave writes on the ongoing debate between 'true' ReST designs and their more diluted forms:

Ten years ago I saw James Clark in action on DSSSL then XSLT. I gave him a nickname, BSOP, brain the size of a planet (Hitchhikers reference). James seems to operate on a level (and I'm told at a speed) quite different from mere mortals. Others whose opinions I value have confirmed this. No complaint from me, I'm grateful for what James has given freely to the world of software. The perspective though is that the James's of this world are few and far between. Never having met Roy, I've heard enough to believe that he's quite possibly in a similar category. His thinking seems far enough away from the people that are approaching REST for the first time that there is almost too big a gap. Roy has forgotten more than most are likely to learn about HTTP. When I want to use REST to get a message over that's the focus, not architectural issues. I think this is one of the reasons that REST is still misunderstood. Until such as Paul and a good few others do some really good job of 'translating' from architecture to ... whatever you want to call the practical layer of thinking that more common folk work at, then REST will be misunderstood, 'adapted for use' and otherwise abused due to misunderstanding.

I'm almost convinced that Roy can't | won't | is too busy to do such a translation. It's down to others to try.

Like it or not, this is one of the challenges ahead of us when trying to raise awareness (and sympathy) for Kauri. Rather than the technical details, which is all fairly mundane Java stuff anyways, what we should try to achieve with Kauri is to create some practical level of can-do-mentality with Java developers, while gently guiding them to do ReST the right way.

And not step into the trap of alienating ourselves from the user community on the basis of principles rather than usefulness. Kauri should bring usefulness to ReSTfulness.

Marc and I will be preaching ReST for Java folks on December 8th at Devoxx, so by then we should be ready with some real answers.

Interesting times ahead.

Yesterday, the first general assembly of Gent BC was held in the dean's offices of the Ghent University (UGent). Outerthought, together with SMO bvba, were the only SMEs to join this new initiative right from the start as an associate member, with Steven also joining the board of Gent BC.

Gent BC is a new initiative from the Ghent city administration, the University of Ghent, and the Provincial Development Agency and aims to become the prime online and real-life networking platform to stimulate technological entrepreneurship and innovation in the Ghent region. The goals of Gent BC are threefold: to combine and strengthen efforts of all actors in the Ghent knowledge economy, to stimulate academic, technological and innovative entrepreneurship, and to promote the Ghent knowledge region in Flandres and abroad.

Outerthought is the only SME currently joining the Gent BC board, and while our primary aim obviously is to connect with all involved parties, many of them being academic institutions and large organisations, we also want to represent the specific needs and priorities of innovative and technology-driven SMEs.

It is often said that SMEs have difficulties collaborating with academic research institutions or exploiting governmental support to grow their business and thus also local employment, compared with larger organisations and research centra. By joining Gent BC, Outerthought wants to cut this longstanding prejudice short and try to bring a pragmatic, SME-reality-sized voice to this new innovation platform.

More specifically, in the context of Gent BC, we aim to further professionalize our R&D activities around Kauri and related web development methodologies, hopefully in collaboration with other Gent BC members. Also, we want to further steer the development of Daisy towards a leading framework for knowledge-centric content applications.

I don't know about you people out there, but we ordered our landlord already to ignite the central heating system as the days are getting chillier and chillier. Summer time has gone by again, and it's about time to put up a summer redux on our starving company blog. The usual excuse: we have been busy, and we prefer to focus on customers and projects.

I'm not sure if we're allowed to say so already, but we successfully delivered a first large Kauri-based project a couple of weeks ago. It's a ReST service layer for user-generated content, i.e. tags, annotations, polls, comments and such, and it's been designed for one of the world's largest media organizations. Let's say we learned a lot about scaling, partitioning, mysqlproxy and various other exotic (for us) technologies and concepts, and that we were happy to at least not have to worry about the Java-side of things, as that part of the application fitted extremely well with Kauri.

That, and one of our Outerthinkers becoming a proud twin-father (congrats, Karel!), another one getting married (congrats, Paul!), Freya who switched from a part-time to a full-time scheme, combined with a healthy dose of holiday leaves and such: yessir, it was summer chaos season again.

The next few weeks will be quite remarkable as well: it's been a serious while since we had a full house working on a single project. Our first big Kauri user is eagerly awaiting for his development team to hit the road with a first serious release, which means Kauri is getting our undivided attention these days.

And after that? Well, there's still and always Daisy 3.0 looming a bit further around the corner, but first we have to ship this Kauri baby. So if you excuse us for now, and join us in welcoming some more silence: we will be back!