Driss-A-Blog

First up, though, was the JBoss session. Unfortunately, I wasn't as impressed as I'd like to have been. The presentation was just talking on about how they have JBoss pre-configured for performance on the Server OS. But they never really said anything about how they did it. In addition, they have some tools that make it easy to deploy J2EE apps by writing the XML deployment descriptors for you. But we've got that done already, so that doesn't help much. Overall, a wash.

I escaped early to get to Pacific Heights for 608. Tyler said to be there about 15 minutes early, so I walked in past the guards. They tried to stop me, but once I explained that I was speaking, they still wouldn't let me in until they could scan my badge. Whatever.

There were four demos. The first was the guy for OpenBase. He was running his demo on the two G5s that were available for demo machines. The second guy, for 4D, was using a PowerBook on the lone remaining video connector. The third guy, for FileMaker, was doing a slideware demo, so that left me time to prepare my PowerBook. I quickly launched all the required apps, and made sure the server wasn't running. Something I learned the other day was that our server doesn't take well to having the network switched out from under it.

The first guy showed off OpenBase and his scheduling/customer management app. Everything went well for him. The second guy wasn't so lucky. His slides went fine, but his demo went off the rails once he tried to launch Quark XPress to layout his sample weather page. "Anyone here from Quark?" he asked. "No? Good." I, of course spotted an opportunity.

As soon as that guy took his PowerBook from the demo connector, I dropped mine into place, clicked the "start" button in Monitor to start up the server, and immediately had to get off stage. It wasn't my turn yet, and thus I just had to trust that my server would work.

The third guy didn't really have a product to show, just their company, which does small, versatile database work with FileMaker. I was hoping things were going well on my PowerBook but had no idea.

Finally, when Tyler bid me welcome, I hopped on stage, saw that the server was running, logged myself in, and began.

"Thanks, Tyler, for having me. Actually, I have an apology to make to you."

Tyler stood there, startled. We'd practiced this session twice before, but I'd been saving this one for the real presentation. I turned to the audience.

"It turns out that when you leave an Apple employee a voicemail message that starts, 'Hey, this is Avi. We've got to talk,' they freak out. Sorry about that." Yes, I really had left such a voicemail for Tyler, and he did have that reaction. But the joke went much better than I expected. Nearly everyone got it, and so I launched into my first slide.

I talked about Harris Publishing and Baseview Products, and how we work together to make newspaper publishing software. I talked about the different lines of newspaper software. Next slide.

There are several of our products that use FrontBase. Our Circulation product does, as does Advertising. Production is coming next year. But I was there to talk about Editorial. See our pretty icon? Next slide.

We use JBoss and J2EE and JDBC to do our magic. We develop using ant and cruisecontrol, and let people use whatever IDE they like. We've got people using Eclipse, JBuilder, and IntelliJ. And they're all happy. Next.

Why use FrontBase? I started naming off reasons. Easy to install, and easy to maintain. Of course, I couldn't resist an easy laugh. "The thing is, the average newspaper site can't afford a full-time DBA, and their tech people are already busy running around fixing Quark problems. So the database has to be very-low maintenance."

The next two slides talked more about the technical capabilities of FrontBase, praising its SQL-92 compliance while noting that some databases can't even handle nested SELECT statements.

Finally, demo time. I briefly showed off our admin tool, written in Java. But the main demo was in NewsEditPro, our Carbon app. I created a new story, using some styled macros for easy assembly. I decided to forgo my planned Jayson Blair comment. I saved the story. Next was to show off our Photoshop integration. I pulled up the picture search, and started looking for a particular image I saw the other night in practice.

"Where is it?" Scrolling down. Ah. "Mmmmm. Sandra...." I double-clicked the picture of Sandra Bullock, cropped it in Photoshop, saved it back, and showed that the database had updated.

Time to do the InDesign demo. I pointed out the app, and then started dropping things on the page. First was the story, which imported just fine. Next was the image of Sandra. The problem was that I'd never actually practiced the demo at the projector's resolution, and I think I managed to drop the caption of the photo on top of some text-wrapping boxes. When the caption didn't show up, I tried dropping a different photo onto that page, and that one's caption showed up. Good.

Time to wrap up. "Everything you see here, from the stories, to the images, to the stylesheets, lives in a database. FrontBase."

It was over. Finally. Tyler finished things up, we answered some questions, then went down to lunch.

There were three more sessions to the day. I went to back-to-back sync sessions. Once again, like the Spotlight sessions, it seems to be a technology that's gotten a lot of work on it, but still has plenty to go before primetime.

The last session of the day was on the linker. The dynamic linker has long been an issue for which Apple has taken a lot of heat, but finally they've delivered some major improvements that should make everyone happy.

At 6:30, I wrapped up my things and headed back to the Mosser. It was Friday night and it was time for Shabbat.