Eric D. Schabell: September 2013

Monday, September 30, 2013

GOTO Aarhus 2013 - Impressions of OpenShift Primer

Impressions from
GOTO Aarhus 2013
Today I was in Aarhus, Denmark at the GOTO 2013 conference where I presented a session based on my OpenShift Primer book.

It was an extremely professional conference, well organized, well visited (I would estimate around 800 attendees), with a large exhibition area where we could easily mingle with sponsors and attendees.

I gave my talk in a room for about fifty attendees, which was part of a music school which gave it really nice acoustics.

They might post video of the session, not sure so watch the main GOTO site for that information.

My slides are here online, linked from the OpenShift hosted project with Awestruct: http://presos-onthe.rhcloud.com



For those of a more traditional nature, here are slides you can download.

Thursday, September 26, 2013

OpenShift Primer - an example for hosting your awestruct presentations in the cloud

It has never been easier to combine excellent cloud and JBoss technology, like Ruby, that a nifty presentation tool called impress.js, a site generation tooling known as awestruct, and cloud hosting from OpenShift to dazzle at your next presentation.

Introduction

The example I am going to take you through will eventually look just like this site, where you find some of my presentations for the last hear, deployed in a Ruby based OpenShift cloud instance, written using impress.js, and generated by awestruct.

Note that you can browse through the presentations, use the arrows provided in the bottom right corner to walk through the slides, embed your site and presentations anywhere as it is HTML (just use an iframe), and that it is automatically available on all mobile devices without any more adjustments from your side.



Getting started

You will need Git, Ruby, some editor, an OpenShift account, and awestruct installed, you know the basics. I am not going to walk through all of this with you, but assume you can follow these components getting started guides.

What I have done is put together a quickstart to get your site as shown above up and running, which is then a template for adding in your very own presentations. It is giving you a head start, to save some time. Follow along as I walk you through putting this together on your own, first from the web admin console from OpenShift, then from the command line with OpenShift tooling (rhc).

OpenShift web console
You will need to login to OpenShift (http://openshift.com) with your user and create a ruby 1.9 cartridge (not the older ones you might see listed there). Just name it presos and leave the rest to default settings.
Ruby 1.9 cartridge creation.
You will be presented with a getting started screen, with half way down the page instructions for cloning the repository of the instance you just created. You will need to open a console and clone this into your local machine:

$ git clone ssh://5242ecxxxxxxxxx0000aa@presos-inthe.rhcloud.com/~/git/presos.git/

Now change into the presos directory and we will be copying into your repository, the setup I have ready for you in my repository (https://github.com/eschabell/openshift-presos-awestruct/tree/v0.3). Run the following commands.

$ cd presos
$ git remote add upstream -m master git://github.com/eschabell/openshift-presos-awestruct.git
$ git pull -s recursive -X theirs upstream master
$ git push

This will pull down my code into your project, merge the results, then you push it up to your OpenShift instance. Watch the console output as it merges in the new code, installs the required awestruct dependencies, kick starts the server, and you are ready to check out your project online at http://presos-$yourdomain.rhcloud.com.

Command line tooling
Once you have installed the OpenShift command line tooling (just a gem install rhc command for unix based machines), you can do the folowing to get your ruby instance setup and populated with my quickstart project.

$ rhc app create -a presos -t ruby-1.9 --from-code=https://github.com/eschabell/openshift-presos-awestruct.git

This will pull down my code into your project, merge the results, then you push it up to your OpenShift instance. Watch the console output as it merges in the new code, installs the required awestruct dependencies, kick starts the server, and you are ready to check out your project online at http://presos-$yourdomain.rhcloud.com.

Bring it to life

You will notice that the site you are looking at is found in presos/lib/*, here you will need to place your own presentations. Each presentation is represented by a .haml file. This is used to generate the eventual .html file.

$ cat judcon2013_rockstar.html.haml 
---
layout: judconbase
---

.slides
  %section.title(data-state="judcon2013" )
    .title-information
      %h2 Do you want
      %h4 to be a
      %h2 JBoss Rock Star
      %h5
    .title-author
      Eric D. Schabell
      %br
        JBoss Technology Evangelist (Integration & BPM)
      %a{ :href=>"http://twitter.com/ericschabell"}@ericschabell

  %section(data-state="judcon2013" )
    .title-information
    %h1 What does it take?

If we take a closer look at the rockstar presentation haml file, we see that it starts with a layout referencing a base file, in this case called judconbase. We find this is just an included haml file locating in the _layouts directory. Review this for things you might want to adjust for your presentation, but you will note a line that is important which links to a css file where we will set up any images we want to use.

%link{ :rel=>'stylesheet', :type=>'text/css', :href=>"#{site.base_url}/css/theme/judcon.css", :id=>'theme'}

Then you will find a .slides line that starts the slides, here we show only two slides, which are defined using markdown. The data-state attribute is a link to the css file we mentioned above, where if you look there you will find the images used in the slides setup to display as a background, cover, or somewhere inside the slide canvas area.

The easiest way to determine how your changes are affecting the layout of your slides is to run the awestruct command from the lib directory and in daemon mode. This will provide a local server for you to access at http://localhost:4242, and it is auto updated each save of a file in the lib directory.

$ cd presos/lib
$ awestruct -d

By default the build that awestruct is creating is for localhost, but you can adjust the file in presos/lib/_config/site.yml to have several profiles. Just run awestruct with the -P flag and provide one of your profiles to generate a new target site in _site.

Code, deploy, enjoy

The motto is code, deploy, enjoy! I hope this article provides a bit of a helping hand to get you started in pushing your presentations online.

Thursday, September 19, 2013

JBoss BRMS Primer - session with Borussia Dortmund

Coaching the first half of the game...
As posted previously, I was in Dortmund last Monday to talk about JBoss Business Rules Management System at a Red Hat Partner Viada event.

This is a Red Hat Premium Partner in Germany that is very active in promoting, implementing, and evangelizing JBoss products. They have done interesting and extensive work in the JBoss BRMS field.

There were about 30 attendees to this event, with a mix of technical expertise. There were developers, architects, and even a manager or two. My talk was followed by a live example from a project done by one of the Viada consultants.

What made is memorable was not only the attendees, but the location. We were inside the stadium of Borussia Dortmund and there was a no-holds-barred tour of the entire complex at the end of the event.

My talk was about an hour and included a live demo of the JBoss Cool Store Demo which you can find out more about setting up yourself by following the provided link.

The slides from my session are here:




Here you can take a virtual tour of the Borussia Dortmund stadium:

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Devoxx Belgium 2013: OpenShift Primer - get your applications into the Cloud

I submitted a few talks to Devoxx this year, hoping to get the chance to appear there in person this time.

They accepted a Tools in Action talk showing some of my OpenShift Primer work that is based on the e-book. I will be bringing a few copies (download vouchers) so that a few lucky attendees can enjoy a free copy on the way home from the conference.

The event is from 11-15 November, you need to register.

OpenShift Primer - get your Applications into the Cloud
Ever wondered about the new Cloud offerings out there? What is a PaaS? What is this thing called OpenShift?

Whether your business is running on applications based on Java EE6, PHP or Ruby, the cloud is turning out to be the perfect environment for developing your business. There are plenty of clouds and platform-as-a-services to choose from, but where to start? Join us for an action-packed hour of power where we'll show you how to deploy your existing application written in the language of your choice - Java, Ruby, PHP, Perl or Python, with the Java project of your choice deployed into the OpenShift PaaS in just minutes. All this and without having to rewrite your app to get it to work the way the cloud provider thinks your app should work.

If you want to learn about OpenShift PaaS and see how investing an hour of your time can change everything you thought you knew about the Cloud!

(Speaker author e-book: OpenShift Primer, will give away free copies in session)


Click on image for more
information on this
e-book

Thursday, September 5, 2013

JBoss BRMS Cool Store Demo updated with EAP 6.1.1

Forge Laptop Sticker added to the Cool Store!
You all might remember the JBoss Business Rules Management System (BRMS) Cool Store Demo, which we released some time ago.

This week the final GA of JBoss EAP 6.1.1 was released, so we are back with a newer version 1.3 is running on JBoss EAP 6.1.1 and leveraging the central JBoss Maven repository.

To review, this demo was originally created by Jason Milliron. He put together an example web application based on the popular framework Vaadin which is an example of an online shopping cart. This web application demonstrates interaction between a web front end and a decision table and rules package. This allows the business logic to become externalized from your deployed application and can then be modified as needed at runtime. This application leverages the rules to calculate the shipping costs based on your rules in the table below.

Shipping pricing table
It is pretty simple really, you can adjust how much the ranges are and what the shipping for the shopping cart total order will be by tweaking this table, for example:

  • the price from Tier 1 based on value totaling between $26 - $50 is $5.99
  • you can fill your cart with under $25 of materials to validate
  • adjust it to $6.99 (as shown in yellow)
  • save and commit changes
  • build your coolstore package
  • clear the shopping cart application
  • re-order the same materials and validate the charge to shipping is now $6.99
See the provided documentation and Readme file in the project. You will also find a complete BRMS rules package with unit test scenarios. This is a complete project.

Enjoy!

UPDATE: Three part video series covering the functionality in this demo project is available now, get started with Part I - Installation.

JBoss BRMS Rewards Demo Updated with EAP 6.1.1

This week the final GA of JBoss EAP 6.1.1 was released. Previously I had updated the Rewards Demo to run on JBoss EAP 6.1.0, so time to take a step forward.

Getting the project
The project is available on Github at https://github.com/eschabell/brms-rewards-demo/tree/v2.0. You can retrieve this with a simple 'git clone git://github.com/eschabell/brms-rewards-demo.git' and 'git checkout v2.0', after which you can follow the step-by-step guide found in the Quick Start Guide. This is provided in both ODT and PDF formats. It is all kicked off by the init.sh script you will find in the project, which is quite verbose and points you to the various steps you might need to take should you have chosen to not to read the provided Quick Start Guide.

Enjoy!

JBoss BRMS Customer Evaluation Demo Updated with EAP 6.1.1

This week the final GA of JBoss EAP 6.1.1 was released. Previously I had updated the Customer Evaluation Demo to run on JBoss EAP 6.1.0, so time to take a step forward.

Getting the project
The project is available on Github at https://github.com/eschabell/brms-customer-evaluation-demo/tree/v2.1. You can retrieve this with a simple 'git clone git://github.com/eschabell/brms-customer-evaluation-demo.git' and 'git checkout v2.1', after which you can follow the step-by-step guide found in the Quick Start Guide. This is provided in both ODT and PDF formats. It is all kicked off by the init.sh script you will find in the project, which is quite verbose and points you to the various steps you might need to take should you have chosen to not to read the provided Quick Start Guide.

Enjoy!

ALS - JBoss cycling in 2nd annual Ries van der Velden Classic

Last year I participated in the first annual Ries van der Velden Classic to ride against ALS. I will give a bit of background and tie it back into JBoss by the end, so bear with me.

I have a friend who was a pretty avid cyclist, having done the Alpe d'HuZes (climbing this famous Tour de France mountain 6 times in a single day) just 2 years ago. He was in great condition, but in the Fall of that year he was diagnosed with ALS. He has been lucky enough to have an amazing group of friends that have helped to set up a foundation and to organize the Ries van der Velden Classic to raise funds to fight ALS.

Sporting the Red Hat JBoss cycling gear, I (JBoss Technology Evangelist) again wanted to ride for this good cause. The route is a loop between Zandvoort and Bloemendaal that we were to ride as much as possible, with each loop being sponsored with 1, 5, or 10 euros.

I rode the event last Sunday, 1 Sep 2012, together with
hundreds of registered participants and they raised over 12,300- euros (estimated). I completed 6 loops for a total of ~130 km in just under 5 1/2 hours on the bike. My personal performance data was monitored and can be found at the bottom of this article. A day well spent and done with Red Hat cycling gear that features the JBoss logo. Ries could appreciate this marketing as he is a fellow IT engineer.

We wish Ries all the best and look forward to sporting the Red Hat JBoss cycling kit in the third annual event!


Tuesday, September 3, 2013

JBoss Forum Hamburg - a day of JBoss BRMS

I got invited to present a few sessions, a live demo, and chat with various customers at the JBoss Forum in Hamburg last week. Here is an impression of that day, arriving the night before, speaking, and then walking around a bit before flying homewards.

It was amazing to see that city, to chat with a multitude of customers that told me stories around their usage and plans with respect to rules and processes. I also good really good responses on the live session where I showcased the Cool Store demo.

Monday, September 2, 2013

JBoss BRMS Primer - appearance at Brussia Dortmund stadium

I will be appearing for the first time in the Brussia Dortmund stadium on Monday, 16 September 2013. My session is at 1430 hours.

I will not be singing in the stadium.

I will not be playing in a football match at the stadium.

Instead I will be appearing at the JBoss Business Day being hosted in Germany.

I plan to present on the current and coming versions of JBoss BRMS with some hints about the upcoming JBoss BPM Suite. Be sure to register online if you are in the area.

JBoss Business Rules & BPM Solutions with JBoss BRMS
This session will get you started with JBoss BRMS. It will walk you through some of the capabilities, components and basic concepts that one needs to understand to start building process and rule-driven applications. Join us for an hour of Business Process Management (BPM) concepts, explanations of how to capture your enterprises logic in business rules and a demonstration or two from real live processes that bring these concepts to life.

Slides can be found here.