Raible Designs

Thursday January 13, 2005

Being in the office is like being on vacation Ever since June of last year, I've worked out of my house. I had a couple of different clients, but none of them required I go to their office - so all my work was remote. I'd done this before - in fact all of 2002 I worked out of our house in Morrison. Working at home has its perks: no need to get dressed, fast equipment/network, seeing the family more and highly flexible hours. It also has its downsides. The biggest downside I'm finding is you actually have to work all the time. For the most part, when I worked from home, I wrote code 8 hours+ per day. Sure I'd read blogs and have a conference call every now and then, but for the most part, I was working and thinking the entire time.

After being in an office environment for the past 4 days, I'm finding it's like being on vacation. In an office environment, you typically have meetings. In meetings, you don't really need to think - you just sit their and participate. No coding, no problem solving, just good ol' human interaction and communication. Not only that, but the team I'm on is a great group of guys and I feel like I've been working there for years. Stuff that used to take me 2 days to figure out now takes a couple of hours with a team member's help. Furthermore, since we all have similar interests - there's a fair amount of water-cooler talk. The part I really like is the comradery. You know the kind - where guys insult each other to no end and both parties are laughing the whole time. I can't tell you how many times I've sat in my cube and laughed my ass off while these guys take jabs at each other.

Of course, my perspective could be scewed. I've been working on my Mac all week, which Powerbook owners know is a pleasant experience. It may be slow, but I'm paid hourly, so I don't mind too much. Oh yeah, and the best part? I got a window seat. I can see out over the city as well as the mountains. Life is good in downtown Denver these days. Posted in General at Jan 13 2005, 11:04:24 PM MST 5 Comments

Installing Jetspeed 2 and deploying Struts/JSF Portlets One of things we're moving to on my current project is portlet development. The client has a bunch of apps they want developed and it makes a lot of sense to develop them as portlets and deploy them in a portlet container. Because of this, we spent some time this week mucking around with Jetspeed-2. Bruce and I figured out how to install it, and then I did a bit of work with Equinox to deploy the Struts and JSF versions as portlets.

I didn't get equinox-struts or equinox-jsf fully functioning in Jetspeed, but I did get them to deploy and bring up the first page. I expect to do some more work in the next month to get these apps fully functional. In the meantime, I've put together the following tutorials.

• How to Install Jetspeed
• Convert Equinox to a Struts Portlet
• Convert Equinox to a JSF Portlet

If you have any tips on getting JSF or Struts WARs working in Jetspeed, please let me know.