I am happy to announce that Rickard Öberg (of open source J2EE fame) has joined us as Chief Architect of TheServerSide.com (which was built and is run by The Middleware Company). Rickard will be responsible for the design and implementation of a slew of new cutting edge features, all implemented with the latest and coolest J2EE and open source technologies.

Other than spec and system upgrades, TheServerSide codebase has been almost unchanged in its 1.5 years of existence, mostly due to time and man power. With Rickard on board, all that will change. Some of the immediate upgrades to TSS include a practical re-write of the old pre-taglib JSP/Javabean layer to use Rickard's WebWork framework, and an upgrade to EJB 2.0.

In the next couple of months you can expect to see polls, surveys, email integration with the forums and a whole lot more.

Also joining the development effort is Kjetil Paulsen, a Senior Software Architect who works for Mogul Technology, a training and consulting company based out of Norway. Kjetil has been using EJB since the .9 specificaiton, and has been a TSS member since its inception. Kjetil will continue to work for Mogul, but will also be working with Rickard part time, developing features.

Thanks for all your patience everyone, enjoy the new TSS!

sincerely,

Floyd Marinescu
Director of TheServerSide.com


See an interview with Rickard in our Hard Core Tech Talk Interview Library.

Check out the official press release:
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AUSTIN, TX (BUSINESS WIRE) - Jan 4, 2002 - The Middleware Company, the world's leading skills-transfer resource for enterprise Java technology, today announced that Rickard Öberg has joined The Middleware Company as Chief Architect of TheServerSide.com J2EE Community, the industry's main resource for J2EE news, discussions, reviews, patterns and articles. TheServerSide.com is built and run by The Middleware Company as a service to the J2EE community.

Rickard Öberg is a figurehead in the J2EE industry, having been the core architect of the JBoss Open Source J2EE Application Server, as well as author and project lead of the popular XDoclet and Webwork open source initiatives. Rickard is also the author of the book Mastering RMI. Rickard joins an expert team that runs TheServerSide including Ed Roman (author of the book Mastering EJB and CEO of The Middleware Company) and Floyd Marinescu (Director of TheServerSide, author of the book EJB Design Patterns).

"Rickard's decision to join our team furthers our mission to have the world's leading experts working together at The Middleware Company" said Ed Roman, CEO. "The expertise that Rickard adds to our team will ultimately lead to a greater value proposition for our clients in the training and consulting services that we offer."

As Chief Architect of TheServerSide.com, Rickard will be responsible for the design and implementation of a slew of new cutting edge features, all implemented with using J2EE technology and best practices, such as the ones taught by The Middleware Company in their training courses, as well as the design patterns in the book EJB Design Patterns - the latest book in The Middleware Company series of technical books.

"TheServerSide.com has always been one of my favorite sites and I am very excited about joining and developing this great portal into something even better," said Rickard Öberg.

"With Rickard on board, the expertise and functionality of TheServerSide.com will be greatly enhanced over the coming year, making TheServerSide.com an even better resource for J2EE Architects and developers," said Floyd Marinescu.

ABOUT THESERVERSIDE.COM J2EE COMMUNITY
TheServerSide.com J2EE Community is the industry's only source for focused J2EE news, discussions, design patterns, application server reviews and technical articles. With over 134,000 members, TheServerSide.com is a community driven site that provides an excellent way to stay on the edge of J2EE technology. TheServerSide is also hosting free downloads of the best selling books Mastering EJB and EJB Design Patterns, and exlusively hosts streaming video interviews with industry movers and shakers. TheServerSide is built and run by The Middleware Company, the leading Enterprise Java Training and Consulting.

ABOUT THE MIDDLEWARE COMPANY

The Middleware Company specializes in advanced enterprise Java technology training and consulting. Founded in 1998 to assist corporations migrating to the Java platform to improve the success of e-Commerce projects, it helps among the world's largest organizations including BEA, Oracle, Cisco, Nextel, MetLife, Sterling Commerce, Standard & Poors, and many others to reduce risks and sustain cost-efficiency by building proficiency in a Java expertise. Instructors are expert architects with deep development experience and strong server-side skills, as well as notable thought leaders in the field. Services include on-site training in Java 2, EJB, J2EE, and XML-Web Services, architecture consulting, and open enrollment courses held worldwide. Courseware is licensed outside North America. The Middleware Company also built and maintains TheServerSide.com, the leading online J2EE community.

Does it suggest the picture on the left bottom of TSS homepage will be replaced by this one? :)
<P>
<img src="http://www.jboss.org/pictures/sam.gif">

Congratulations, Rickard!

Well, congratulations to theserverside, too! It's hard to believe there are serious J2EE developers who haven't already been affected by his work in one way or another. His contributions to JBoss and WebWork are highly visible of course... I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that the same code generation engine he developed that evolved into XDoclet, also sits at the core of the MVCSoft Persistence Manager. Thanks Rickard, and I can't wait to see what you do here! -Dan O'Connor

Fantastic news. It is great to have you on board, and will be good to see how TheServerSide.Com changes in the next few months / year!

Congratulations, Rickard and TSS!
Rickard is one of the most creative and rational developers I've ever known. I'm sure we'll learn more from him hereafter.

Ara.

This a goo news for our community¡¡¡¡

i have one question, Will be the code of the serverside open to the community???

For the newbies, as i, this will help a lot. At least part of this code as example.

Thanks.

I'm glad that you're as excited about this as I am :-) We have a bunch of interesting new features coming up that'll make your TSS experience better.

The answers to your questions are as follows:
Randy, if it makes sense.

Enrique, that is definitely the intent. Preferably as a whole, but it's tricky to make it completely OpenSource as there are so many TSS-specific tweaks in the code. Hopefully I'll be able to refactor those out so that it can be reused more easily, but that may be difficult. What *will* happen, no matter what, is an article series where I outline the features and architecture of TSS. There's going to be quite a lot of things in them that you probably have never seen oir heard about before.

/Rickard

BTW, if you want to have discussions of how TSS should evolve, head over to the Portal Feedback forum under Discussions.

/Rickard

ok, i understand that whole code is imposible, but i cathc a lot of ideas from TSS but sometimes the ideas ar not enough and examples with some code, for me, are necessary.

I posted one idea in the portal feedback forum some time ago, about attach files to discussions and patters and floyd said that is a good idea.

I hope that in the next version we could see something like that, for newbies and young people like me, only 22, this will help a lot.

I have to say that i'm a user of xdoclet and in two months, i hope make public some ideas and code that i'm making around it.

thanks for your responses, and pardon for my poor english
regards

Will TSS be "Built on JBoss" in the future? ;^)

This is a very good news for the J2EE Community. I am pretty sure, TSS will become more valuable now with Rickard on board. Congrats TSS.

This is great news! Rickard is one of the most talented java developers in the Java Open Source community. Have a great one Rickard!

Wow, That's great!!

Hope we can all gain some enlightenment from the Open source "Luminary" :)
Congrats TSS ...............
On the Addition of another Jewel in the precious crown!

Maybe TheServerSide forums could work more like the JBoss forums :), there are so many features lacking here that I think would greatly contribute to the overall effectiveness of this site...things like watching topics, and visual indications of new and updated discussions are crucial for creating an effective online environment.

Toby, I very much agree with you.

On watching topics, our current idea is to keyword-categorize pretty much everything on the site, and allow you to pick whatever keywords you're interested in to create "Your TSS". The whole thing would be search engine driven (Lucene rocks), so it aint that hard to implement either.

This would, for example, mean that if you are watching the "EJB" keyword, then if someone in the JSP forum talks about "Enterprise JavaBeans", you will see that too, 'cause the two terms are related as synonyms. Should be pretty powerful. You'll be able to add this thingy as a channel in your browser too (RSS for Netscape, and CDF for IE), so it'll be easy for you to see when updates occur. Have you seen anything like this somewhere else?

Anyway, if you have more suggestions on features, head over to the Portal Feedback forum.

/Rickard

Hello Rickard,

Good to have you on board TSS.

> This would, for example, mean that if you are watching
> the "EJB" keyword, then if someone in the JSP forum
> talks about "Enterprise JavaBeans", you will see that
> too, 'cause the two terms are related as synonyms.
> Should be pretty powerful. You'll be able to add this
> thingy as a channel in your browser too (RSS for
> Netscape, and CDF for IE), so it'll be easy for you to
> see when updates occur. Have you seen anything like this
> somewhere else?

Well actually, yes, I would highly recommend the XMLfr web site (http://xmlfr.org) as a source of inspiration. Its content is mostly in french but it is one of the best examples I've encountered of what is a so-called "semantic Web site".

You have a fairly complete explanation (in english this time) of how it's built and what it does here: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/05/02/semanticwebsite.html

The use of taxonomy modules in RSS feeds (and eventually topic maps) is probably the way to go for building nice cross-sections search capabilities based on topics.

Hope this helps,

Olivier.

Olivier,

Thanks for the reference! That sounds very similar to what I'll be doing here at TSS. One of the key issues is the autocategorization of the current content. Some will be ok, and some will be "photographs", but I guess it's better than nothing. And once it's implemented, new data can be categorized manually which should provide better quality.

I also intend to use Lucene as the foundation for the searching and grouping, instead of an RDBMS. Lucene seems to have all the capabilities I need, and is extremely flexible and fast. The only problem lies in updating the indices continuously, but that should be fixable.

/Rickard

Congrats Rickard!

Did you know we have a beer in Canada called "Rickard's Red"?

Beer is one of the most important things in a developer's life.

Gordon

I didn't know that. The beer name, I mean ;-)

/Rickard

Isn't this a step backwards careerwise? Architecting something like JBoss is stuff of the elite. Working on a portal is stuff of the ordinary.

Hehe.. that depends on what kind of features are included ;-)

Watch this space.

/Rickard

Push it up rickard;-) great place to be!

does this mean the end of jboss? why would he jump ship if jboss was "going to conquer" the world?

What are you talking about? JBoss is an open source project! I am sure that Rickard will still be offering his time just as much as ever, and there is a large community around the project too.

This does not mean the end of jboss.

*sigh* not this again...

Is it absolutely required that I devote my entire life to one particular thing, or is it ok if I try doing other things as well?

The success or non-success of JBoss has absolutely nothing to do with me. I haven't worked on JBoss for a very long time, and guess what, it seems to be pretty ok anyway. I did my part, now others are doing theirs.

/Rickard