I don’t think it is that easy. While there are really helpful Gurus participating in mailing lists and forums, written discussion is a problematic transport for your issues. And sometimes its not easy to select the appropriate Guru for your problem. Wouldn’t it be better to be able to talk to a Guru in person?

My employer codecentric now launches a new quarterly workshop series called “Meet the experts“. Because we are and want to continue to be among the thought leaders in Java Technology, Agile Software Development, Architecture and Performance, we decided to invite top notch Gurus to spend a day on our premises and have a full day with interesting talks and an Open Space session in the evening, which everybody can attend (well at least as long we still have seats left).

The first “meet the experts” will be held on 26th of June with “Performance” as it’s topic. Dr. Heinz Kabutz, Java Champion, and Kirk Pepperdine from javaperformancetuning.com, Alois Reitbauer from dynaTrace and my boss Mirko Novakovic will have a talk.

I am really excited about that day and have high expectations. And we have the next events already in the pipe, which I hope that I am allowed to talk about soon.

The data we are providing is collected from multiple sources, this makes it impossible for us to serve UTF-8 data. We have attached the WSDL for ISO-8859-1

The attached WSDL just changed the XML prolog – fail – this is only the encoding of the wsdl not the service.

Still Mule/CXF complains about invalid UTF-8. But wat bugs me is that it seems to be impossible to correct that bug. I dug 2 days into the deeps of Mule and CXF and found multiple places where I potentially could hook in, but there is an internal Mule Interceptor that reads the XML, fails at the invalid UTF-8 data and dies with throwing an Exception.

Too bad

Does anybody know of a workaround for such? I thought I could use Transformer, but it seems i will not get access to the raw input stream.

December 1st – Rich Ajax Platform day
Today my book went into print! The last days were really fast moving. Right after Damon, my copy editor, made my English pleasant to read (Thanks for your patience, Damon!,) the book went to layout. Already shortly after that, I received the book cover and the content as PDF. This was then the first time I realized how the book will look like when holding it in your hand, and I was so happy about it. I can’t wait for the printed copies to arrive.
You can head right to my book website, or to your favorite bookstore to order. There is also an electronic version available from Apress directly.
Thanks to everybody involved, either by reading, answering questions, correcting my mistakes or just keeping me happy, you were of great help!

December 1st – symfony day
As you might know I am the release manager of symfony 1.2, and I am very proud to announce that symfony 1.2 is available as of today. This might be a little surprise for you, because we have never given this early date.
But this is not the only surprise the symfony core team has planned for you. You might be surprised as well that we updated the whole symfony book to contain Doctrine 1.0 and Propel 1.3 documentation.
Think that documentation should be anyway there? yes, but most open source projects forget about it, while we try not to forget about it too often To strengthen the support symfony gives to Doctrine and to make Doctrine easier to learn for people switching from Propel, Jonathan has just published the symfony+Doctrine Book.

Because today is December 1st we launched a new Advent calendar! Because the askeet was so popular and the reason for many people to join the symfony community, we felt it was time to redo it. The new Jobeet will guide you to create a fully functional, state of the art project using best practices and symfony 1.2. Because the lessons every day are designed not to last longer than an hour, you will create a full project in less than 24 hours. Don’t believe it? You will see!

To create more buzz for 1.2, I recently gave an interview for the German Technology Magazine iX, which will have an article about symfony in its January edition.

The conference as such is better than I did expect. Quite a lot of good topics, and many interesting people to meet. Only one negative point for today: I came 5 minutes late into Jeremy’s presentation on integrating AJAX into Spring, cause I talked to a few oracle people still. When I came into the room he was just going over some SpringSource service offering slides. I have seen them soo many times already, so why can’t the SpringSource guys just stop showing it? I headed directly towards another session, onto a JavaScript based distributed database, called nextDB.net . Even when this was also advertising, it mainly was about the conceptual issues one could have with a browser accessible DB. So dear guys at SpringSource: please skip your 15 minute SpringSource portfolio slides, then I might join your talks again.

My personal highlight was a presentation from the founders of Kaazing, who talked about Server-Side Events and WebSockets. Good stuff, and I am very eager to try it out.
From company perspective perhaps the most interesting finding was the product called KITE from Keynote.
More about this then later.
Heading now to the aftershow party

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