Test Flight

Update: here are the rest of the pictures from today.

What a fun day! The weather was absolutely gorgeous all day! Can you say Old Wive's summer?

After church, Julie and I, along with a bunch of friends, went to Chipotle in Hyde Park for some burritos and tacos. Then a few of us headed back to Crossroads for our “Vision Tour” – we got a walkthrough of the new facilities that have been built through many of our donations. It was way cool! Once all of the construction is done (five more weeks, I think), that place is going to be huge! After a few yummy snacks at the end of the tour, the moment I’d been waiting for all day arrived – it was time to fly the kite!

Julie and I drove up to Voice of America (VOA) Park in West Chester (I think that’s where it’s at…) and we tried out the new kite. I have to admit that I was pretty worried – there was almost zero wind. We threw some grass into the air to test for a breeze, and it barely moved at all from where it was thrown – not a good sign. But still, there was some wind, so we put together the kite (I was excited, and I think Julie was having fun just watching me) and launched it. Miracle of miracles, it actually flew!

I got the kite to fly for a few minutes, but having never flown in low wind conditions before, it wasn’t long before it looked like a duck that had been shot out of midair and slowly floated towards the ground. I had had a decent little flight, especially considering the lack of wind. Julie was up next. I was completely amazed! She launched the thing and it never even looked like it was coming down! Talk about being put in your place – when the girlfriend - errr, I mean fiancé! – who’s not even that into kites (OK, not into them at all really) can out fly the guy who loves kites (love might be too strong of a word), it’s a pretty sad state of affairs.

Anyway, after a while she was kind enough to let me fly MY kite again, and I had much better luck the second time around – I guess I learned something from watching her.

If you’re looking for something fun to do, I highly recommend getting a kite – and a fiancé to fly it with:)!

What a beautiful morning!

It’s a beautiful day today! Julie and I are going to Cincinnati to go to church in a few minutes. After church, we’re going to grab lunch with some friends, and then – if the wind picks up (and even if it doesn’t) - we’re off for a test flight of my new kite!

My Challenge to You: Use JBoss for a day without Google

That's right, I challenge you to use JBoss for an entire day of heavy development/configuration without making use of Google at all. Unless you're an expert or you're not doing much JBoss specific work, I'll wager you're not going to be able to get much done once you run up against your first stack trace or come up with a perfectly reasonable question.

So what's the point of the bet? If you tried the same exercise with say, WebLogic, 9 times out of 10 you'd find you wouldn't have much trouble. Why? Well, let's do a quick comparison:

Official JBoss documentation count (on jboss.org) for JBoss WS (JBoss' horrible, horrible implementation of JAX-RPC 1.1 (JSR 101) that cobbles together not only Axis, but Sun's JWSDP (which is horrible in it's own poetic right)):

25 Wiki pages

Official WebLogic 8.1 Web Services documentation:

498 page PDF document

Let me say that again: JBoss gives you 25 wiki pages "for free", WebLogic gives you 498 solid pages. Are those wiki pages really "free" when you spend five times the amount of hours developing a JBoss service compared to a WebLogic service?

Here's the thing about JBoss: they ship an inferior product (yes, I know, it's free), they ship inferior documentation (no, of course not all the time, but far too often), and a lot (no, not all, but a lot) of their people are difficult to work with.

Marc Fleury said:

At Jboss we don't make any money besides service, there are no licenses to sell. Usually when software is sold, service is treated as an afterthought. This is not our case.

What's the problem with that? Well, you're not going to make nearly as much money on service if you provide the thorough documentation that people need to use your product up front. Does JBoss purposely provide sparse documentation to create more service contracts? I can't say for sure.

But what if Google weren't around?

Would people even be able to use JBoss?

Would you be able to figure out how to configure its instance of jUDDI (did you even know it shipped with that?)?

Would you be able to write a JAX-RPC 1.1 Web Service using document/literal encoding with attachments?

For your sake and mine, I hope Google doesn't go out of business anytime soon.