Gero Vermaas on...

I recently switched my server at home from a PC running Linux to a Mac Mini. Should have done that way earlier. The OSX UI is so much more convenient than a everything that Windows and Linux have to offer and getting the server processes running was dead easy (MAMP, Zimbra as mail/calendar server, Tomcat to run blogs etc). And then of course the great tools in the iLife suite make managing you photo collection, creating DVDs etc. so simple.

In the process of buying the Mac Mini I once took my 1.5 year old daughter with me the to the Mac shop. In the entrance they had an old Apple Lisa standing and it was love at first sight between my daughter and the Lisa. So young and already instinctively falling for the right computer :-)

... it's probably the only conference where there is a line for the gents toilet instead of the womens toilet... This is the  line for the gents toilet at JavaPolis in Antwerp.

Just committed the 0.6 version of the OSS/J TCK Foundation to Java.net. Highlights of this version are:

• Support for the web services integration profile
• Simplified configuration
  

The project is now also a first class citizen of the Java Enterprise Community on Java.net, it graduated from Incubator to Java Enterprise Project and is (currently) listed on the Java Enterprise Community homepage.

From now on the OSS/J TCK Foundation will be actively used by the OSS/J Order Management Expert Group to build the TCK.

One of the functionalities that OSS/J TCKs need to test for is notifications. As you might know OSS/J APIs have 3 integration profiles and notifications are supported in all three profiles. Both the EJB and XML/JMS integration profile rely on JMS Topics to sent notifications from the OSS/J Server implementation to the clients that subscribed for it. For the web services integration profile JMS Topics cannot be used, WS-Notification is used Instead. Since I did not want to implement all the nitty gritty of WS-Notification myself, I searched a bit an came across Apache Muse. Now, that was a real help. Working from the wsn-consumer and wsn-producer examples that are included in the download I was able to build the WS-Notification support into the OSS/J TCK Foundation real quick. I did run into a couple of question, but the support on the user mailing list of Muse was outstanding. Using this support, I was able to resolve questions quickly and get a working implementation in no time.

In summary: two thumbs for Apache Muse!