I will be at the Open Source Exchange organized by Skills Matter and Xebia on Wednesday to learn more about their partnership and to hear some of the speakers, including my friend Guillaume for an update on Groovy.  The event is free so if you’re in town you might want to drop by !

If you are interested in a great tool to do collaborative user interface design then run off to Peldi’s Balsamiq Studios website and follow the instructions to download a great new product that I am proud to have contributed to : Balsamiq Mockups for XWiki.

If you want to learn a little more about the product, Peldi wrote a fantastic product announcement on the Balsamiq Studios blog.  Thank you for the kind words Peldi !  It has been a real pleasure working with such an enthusiastic professional and I am looking forward to our future work together.  You are doing a great job on the Mockups product and as I can read your blog, there are a bunch of us that think so !  That’s what I call a milestone ! May the release of  Balsamiq Mockups for XWiki bring in many more that realize the power and flexibility of combining these two great tools.

If you have not yet experienced XWiki, then you can definitely learn more about this advanced open source wiki by going to the XWiki.org website and trying it out for yourself.  XWiki actually has a diverse product line of enterprise collaboration tools built on top of the XWiki Platform such as award winning XWiki Watch, a collaborative feed reader, or the dead simple wiki experience, XWiki Workspaces.  It will be really neat to see how Mockups will filter up into these more focused products, its a topic I’m very interested in exploring and pursuing !

I’ll be at Google Developer Day 2008 Paris on Thursday.  It will be the opportunity to see some friends and get a hands-on update on some cool Google stuff like the App Engine and GWT.  Everyone has been asked to download all the toolkits and to bring their laptop (and power adapter). Hope to see you there !

I’ll post some pics of the event here on Thursday.

If you are in France in October you will surely have the occasion to join the French and francophone agile community in one of the many cities where the Agile Tour 2008 will be held on:

- 01 octobre : Besançon
- 03 octobre : Mulhouse
- 06 octobre : Genève
- 09 octobre : Grenoble
- 14 octobre : Lille
- 16 octobre : Toulouse
- 23 octobre : Valence

This new initiative has been organized by a lot of good people doing a lot of hard work.  My friends at Ekito are participating in the Toulouse event on October 16th and I bet they will be showing some of their work on the IceScrum project…

If you’re in town, don’t miss the opportunity to mingle and share your experience and insights with the agile community in France !

What I want, let’s say for Pilango’s XWiki instance is to use URL’s like:

http://xwiki.pilango.com/bin/view/Main/

instead of repeating xwiki in the url as will happen with a default tomcat configuration:

http://xwiki.pilango.com/xwiki/bin/view/Main

I ended up also taking partial advantage of XWiki’s Short URL capabilities by setting

xwiki.showviewaction=0

In XWiki’s xwiki.cfg file and now have URL’s like this:

http://xwiki.pilango.com/bin/Main

Here’s how I did it !

My apache site file:

NameVirtualHost *:80

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName xwiki.pilango.com

<Proxy *>
Order deny,allow
Allow from all
</Proxy>

ProxyRequests Off
ProxyPreserveHost On
ProxyPass / http://localhost:8081/
ProxyPassReverse /  http://localhost:8081/
</VirtualHost>

Part of tomcat’s server.xml file that declares a dedicated service for the xwiki instance as the ROOT webapp which is done by the path=”" attribute in the Context element.

  <Service name="xwiki">
    <Connector port="8081" proxyName="xwiki.pilango.com" proxyPort="80" />
    <Engine name="xwiki" defaultHost="localhost">
      <Host name="localhost" appBase="/home/tomcat"
            unpackWars="false" autoDeploy="false"
            xmlValidation="false" xmlNamspaceAware="false">
        <Context docBase="/home/tomcat/xwiki" override="true" path="" />
      </Host>
    </Engine>
  </Service>

Et voilà !

David’s point is very much applicable to Pilango’s evolving story…  Thanks to Matt Asay’s post on the Open Road for pointing this out.

I’ve been interested in (fascinated by ?) how the Ubuntu distribution is assembled with such regularity and with such a high level of quality for a long time.  I have been running development versions of Ubuntu since feisty I believe and have enjoyed (well most of the time) the occasional breakage as an opportunity to learn more about Ubuntu and linux in general.  For the last year or so I stepped my participation up a bit by trying to be good at reporting bugs in general and actually trying to fix them for instance in bzr or bzr-svn.

This weekend I decided to stop fooling around and try to learn the rudiments of debian packaging with the idea of focusing on java packages and in particular getting software like grails or xwiki packaged on Ubuntu.  So I dove in, learned about packaging on the Ubuntu wiki through the very well written Packaging Guide.  After working on updating the dependencies to openjdk for the existing Groovy package with some help from persia, slytherin and istarex on the #ubuntu-java channel on irc.freenode.net, I managed to do that fixing a bug in the build and removing an unnecessary runtime dependency on the bean shell framework libs.

Today I took a closer look at the hurdles involved in packaging a codebase like grails which has dependencies on parts of large codebases like hibernate and spring which also need to be packaged !  In the process I understood that there would have to be some kind of collective effort to do maven right on Ubuntu for instance so that it can be use as a build tool for java packages.  So I took a closer look at the Ubuntu development process and decided to officially join as an Ubuntero !  I achieved this by reading, agreeing with and signing the Ubuntu Code of Conduct with my pgp key.

I now hope to progressively learn more about the ongoing work, the people involved, and the issues in making Ubuntu a kick-ass platform for java applications in general and for those I love in particular.

I’m on assignment this week at Axians, a subsidiary of the large French conglomerate Vinci, that is specialized in providing custom audiovisual installations to corporate and institutional accounts.  The objective of my work is to secure a code base that is critical to continued operations at a high-level institutionnal account.  I have introduced Bazaar and getting the code base under change control.  I have also introduced Doxygen as a source code documentation tool (it is a C++/C codebase).  Things are working out well and my contact appreciates the possibilities of these tools.  More as the assignment moves forward on this post…

Any other good tools, methodologies or suggestions for documenting a critical codebase ?

Update : Nothing special to report !  The assignment went well and will finish off tomorrow with a big deck of slides that explain tool setup, tool usage, application architecture, application run-time configuration, and some ideas for starting a future software development project in a controlled environment with unit testing, continuous integration, etc…

One of the time consuming aspects of the assignment was simply setting up the toolset (Bazaar and Doxygen) in a Windows XP development environment.  There are a lot of pieces here and there that are useful to someone that can benefit from tools like TortoiseBzr and simply getting them together and documenting there installation idyosyncranies is some work.  It would be great if a comprehensive Windows installer for these tools existed, then again my customer got very interested in Ubuntu watching me work over my shoulder, so maybe they will start to leave Windows behind little by little !

Installation went fine although the AIR detection widget present on the download page incorrectly states that AIR is not installed, another linux quirk.  Peldi graciously offered me a license (Thank you Peldi !) for my work on Pilango Workplan’s UI and that is fantastic because I really needed to start thinking about it and Mockups is just perfect for that.  Here is an example of some early thoughts on an element of Pilango Workplan’s UI:

What’s great about Mockups is that you work with high-level elements to compose your UI without having to focus on the implementation details of a particular framework.  You also have great freedom to personalize the UI elements with your titles and data through a dead simple text editor interface (very wiki like !).

I did some UI prototyping work in GWT a couple of months ago for instance.  The result was not bad because it was an executable prototype which could be demoed, but the amount of work involved to end up with something that’s difficult to modify is not worth it when you have a tool like Mockups around.

I really like the comment feature because it allows you to put down some thoughts on your UI before actually attempting to prototype them.  Using a wiki for collaboration on Mockups must be fantastic and would make a great addition to an earlier product that is on hold for the moment, Pilango Design, where I wanted to work on collaborative design processes (Crowdsourcing Innovation !).  For the moment, I’m simply keeping my mockups under version control just like other important files.

So in conclusion, go check out Balsamiq Mockups for your UI prototyping needs.  I assure you, you won’t regret it !

P.S. By the way, Balsamiq Mockups is also a great deal…

This was all possible because of two great partners.

First, Companies Made Simple which I highly recommend for anyone looking to start a UK business.  Their online application is smart and simple and their process highly streamlined.  I spent some time looking for the right agent and I’m definitely glad my research finally brought me to Companies Made Simple.

Second, HSBC which is truly a global bank (well, maybe missing some coverage in America).  Thank you Rita for overseeing my application and Bertrand and Jacques at the branch office here in France for your help and support.

And finally thank you Emily for your help and support.

Now on to a first contract starting next week and more posts later to talk about Pilango Workplan, my current software development focus, and Balsamiq Mockups, a great new tool for UI design that people around the web have been discovering recently.  I will be using Mockups to design the  UI for Workplan.  More on that later because Mockups is such a neat tool it deserves a nice detailed post (at least one !) all by itself.