ALERT! Changes coming to this blog!

Just so you are not caught off guard, I'll be making some changes to this blog in the coming days. The Feed URL will be changing over to FeedBurner, and the primary URL will change from a BlogSpot domain to http://blog.strongbackconsulting.com. The new address currently acts as a redirect to http://thejavablues.blogspot.com.

The reason for the changes are several fold:

1. This blog regularly comes up in search engine hits, whereas the company site only occasionally shows. The company site NEVER showed up in any hits before we changed the UI for it. We would like to increase traffic to the company site to increase our lead generation.
   
2. We will have better hit ratings on the Strongback website if this blog shares the domain name as well as the similar navigation as the Strongback site.
3. This move will allow us the flexibility to move the whole blog over in the future to an in house system (such as WCM, or Lotus Connections) should we decide to do so. Once the new URL and feed addresses have had time to settle in, its very easy to redirect the subdomains to new IP addresses on servers that we manage.
4. This move will greatly increase our SEO effectiveness.
5. The UI is dated and does not properly reflect the brand of the company that it represents (but it was MUCH better than the previous company site). Now the blog needs to catch up to the company site so that it better matches the branding, the theme of which is "Craftsmanship".
6. We've already removed the AdSense links on the site - as if I want to advertise for my competitors on my blog site! Now we have some other links that we would like to add or remove as well, in accordance with the brand.

So, please be sure to update your Feed addresses in Google Reader, Bloglines, Newsgator, or whatever you are using for your RSS/ATOM reader. Google assures us that the move will leave a 301 redirect at the old address, so we are hopeful that that is true. Just in case, be sure and update your bookmarks and reader configs just the same!

Rational Team Concert for System z has a new home

It has previously been difficult to find information specific to the mainframe for Team Concert. Now, the jazz team has moved Team Concert for System z to its own project page. For those looking for information on the product specific to System z, here is the link: https://jazz.net/projects/rational-team-concert-z/

The product is at version 1.0.1.1 status and the team has released a beta for version 2.o. Some of the features coming for version 2.0 include:

• z/OS native file system support
• Enhanced build capability
• Coexistence support for existing host SCMs

The full release plan for version 2.0 can be found here.

SpringSource gets acquired by VMWare

Wow.. I did not see this one coming. Spring Framework has been the golden child of the Java community, often favoring their simple Inversion of Control (IoC) in favor of the more complex Java EE frameworks such as EJB.

http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/08/vmware-springsource

VMWare is the top dog in virtualization (Strongback is partner), so it looks like the path to cloud computing is being set firmly for the Java community.

An stunning presentation on social media.

I love this. This is a follow on to last year's SlideShare best presentation winner. This is wickedly cool. Yes, there are a few f-bombs in there, but some great statistics on social media. This should make you wonder how you can take advantage of social media/social software from within your enterprise.

What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later

View more documents from Marta Kagan.

Central Florida WebSphere Users Group

This week I went to the first meeting of the rebirth of the Central Florida WebSphere Users Group in Orlando. There were mostly IBM'ers there and only 3 people (including myself) not from IBM. Nonetheless they had some great content. Nii-Boi Koi did a great presentation on WebSphere MQ File Transfer Edition (FTE), which appears to be a pretty good solution for situations where FTP is used all over the place. A good example they brought up was where a retailer was receiving nightly sales data from thousands of locations and need to apply SLA's and business rules on the files.

There was also a high level presentation on cloud computing and a discussion of the Cloudburst appliance.

The group is tentatively scheduled to meet once a quarter, but I'm hoping it meets a bit more often than that. I'm planning on presenting at least once in the coming months, most likely on Jython scripting and automated builds with WebSphere App Server.

If you have an interest in joining a local chapter of WUG, just visit www.websphere.org and find a chapter near you.

Resurrecting the abominable About Us page

The About Us page is on nearly every website, and usually contains the typical corporate drivel. It is the most overlooked page, yet one of the most common page that is viewed on a web site.

I was listening to BoagWorld podcast #173 and mentioned a site that has taken on the About Us page in a whole new fashion.

Be sure to check out this most shocking example of rethinking the About Us page.

Now... how to incorporate these goals into our corporate website. Hmmm

Odd popup behavior in HATS

Here is an issue that has cropped up on the 7.x release of HATS. Its very very minor one, but can eat up a bunch of hours to troubleshoot.

Lets say you have a popup selection widget, and specify you want it to display with the image rather than a button or link.

Let's also say that your HATS widget is placed within an absolute positioned element (i.e. style="position: absolute" or within a style selector of your CSS file).

You will have two issues. One, the popup will be positioned relative to the absolutely positioned element that contains it. You can get around that by forcing the popup DIV to be a child of the BODY element in the popup(popupid) function:

document.body.appendChild(content);

Next, there will be an issue in IE where if a user clicks the popup, closes it and re-opens the popup, the popup will migrate upwards or away from where it first opened. This is only an IE issue and it applies to version 6,7,and 8. You'll need to add the following to the getButton(popupid) method - just above the final return statement:

// The following is to account for a popup that is triggered by an image.
var imgs = document.getElementsByTagName("IMG");
for (i=0;i
var element = imgs[i];
var onclickstring=" "+element.onclick;
if (onclickstring.indexOf(popupid)!=-1 ) {
// now that we have found the element
return element;
}
}