How does one keep up with the HUGE volume of emails on the Apache Flex dev mailing list? I’m a committer on the project, a full time employee, full time father, and a full time husband to my wife. A typical project is not that difficult to follow, really. But this project does not fit in the standards of a typical project. The sheer amount of volume is insane. I’ll let the numbers speak for themselves. In the first month of the project, there were 3691 emails thrown around.  Granted, a lot of those emails were votes for the Logo, which was a huge success (Phew, glad it’s over – I had to tally all those votes myself!). In addition, I understand this is all new to the community, and Flex has a large active and devoted community, so there’s a lot of questions everyone wants answered and all the unknowns of how this project is going to move forward. It’s going to take time, for sure – so if you aren’t patient, I’m sorry, but move on. I’m sticking around, because I know the great things that can happen here. This is something the community has been asking for for a long time, and I’m glad it’s at the Apache Foundation.

Back to my point, the amount of discussions aren’t falling by any means, they are steady, and on target already and it’s only the fist day of the month. The day isn’t even over, and we already have around 150 emails flying around. I enjoy reading every bit of these discussions, but I just haven’t found the time. I’m behind by 263 discussions (which some have 50+ emails in the thread). Some of them I could probably care less about, but I’m definitely missing a lot of good discussion on momentum of the project that I really don’t want to miss. And catching up from this ginormous pile of email is not only daunting, but almost unbearable.

Last month’s email stats weren’t as high as the January. February only had about 2135 emails. I contribute that lower volume to the fact that we were sitting on our hands waiting for permissions, code, jira (still waiting), legal, etc… But we’re still talking an average of 73.62 emails / day. That’s a pretty high rate, especially since it appears that’s the groups low volume.

So how do you stay organized with such a large amount of volume? That’s the question I’d like to see a good answer to.

Currently, I’m relying on GMail to help me out. If I read part of a discussion and get side tracked, I use a feature of GMail that I absolutely love, labeled: “Mark unread from here”. With the conversation view, I find it easy to navigate because I can read a few emails in the thread, and collapse all the ones I read so I know where I’m at. Although, this still doesn’t address how to manage getting through this sheer amount of email on top of everything else I have going on in my life.

If anyone has any suggestions, please clue me in. Maybe there’s a way, and I’m just lost and somebody can show me the way.

Mailing List Stats:
January: 3691 emails
February: 2135 emails
Day 1 of March: ~150 emails at the time of this writing

Oh, and these stats do NOT include the amount of email from the private list, and the incubator list that PPMC members are suppose to follow.

These stats show that this is going to be great, and that this project is going to be one seriously successful project. I know Flex will be strong, and I’m passionate about where Flash is heading, but I’ll post about that separately at another time to come in the near future.

I put a PowerPoint together and presented this to my peers at VMware. These are the most useful features in Eclipse that I use daily. I’ve been using eclipse since about 2006, and haven’t looked back since. It’s by far my favorite IDE because of how customizable it is.

In the presentation, I went over Keyboard shortcuts, Navigation tips, and Organization techniques. You can grab the PowerPoint here.

Here’s a short list of keyboard shortcuts I find most useful in Eclipse and Flash Builder:

Now that I’m settling into my new job at VMware, it’s time for what I’m calling the “New Job Resolution”. Kind of like a new year resolution, something I’ve never really done. That resolution is to get more involved in the community, post more blogs flex related, and then some. I’m even considering possibly looking into becoming a community leader here.

To start this new resolution off right, I will be posting a presentation I did for my company on Eclipse Tips & Tricks. So Stay tuned…

Being a parent, holding a full time job that allows absolutely 0 flexibility in hours and often demands more than 40 hours, and not an adequate vacation/sick leave. Sorry for the rant, I just might be a little bitter to that fact that we don’t get any sick time and only 2 weeks of paid time off and as a salary exempt employee, if I’m sick, my pay is docked. Ok, seriously, enough with the ranting.

In addition to being a parent to an almost 3 year old girl (yes, girls are more difficult to raise than boys), I’m also taking on side contract work that’s keeping me up until 2am every morning putting in about 20-30 hours in per week after hours. So, enough complaining, if anyone has some super ability to control time, please, let me know.

On to why I’m posting now… I’ve decided, that despite everthing going on, I am going to make a commitment to post at least once a day, even if it hurts or is useless rambling (such as this).

More to come on what I’m working on and other cool stuff I’m discovering…

An example (with source) can be viewed here.

Minimal Requirements: JRun 4 Updater 6 or higher

Data Source Name: xxx
Driver: Other

CF Data Source Name: xxx
JDBC URL: jdbc:macromedia:sqlserver://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:1433;databaseName=xxx;SelectMethod=direct;
sendStringParametersAsUnicode=false;MaxPooledStatements=1000;AlternateServers=(xxx.xxx.xxx:1433,xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:1433);ConnectionRetryCount=xx;ConnectionRetryDelay=xx

Driver Class: SQL Server 2000/2005
User Name: xxx
Password: xxx
Description: [optional]

Advanced Settings:
Maintain Connections:

JDBC URL Explained:

• jdbc:macromedia:sqlserver://
  • This specifies the driver and initializes the connection string.
• xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
  • The IP Address of the Primary Database Server
• 1433
  • The port to the Database Server, typically 1433 for SQL Server, but could be different.
• databaseName
  • The name of the database on the server.
• SelectMethod
  • Determines whether database cursors are used for Select statements.
    • Available methods are:
      • direct
      • cursor
        • Changing to cursor can negatively affect performance.
• sendStringParametersAsUnicode
  • Determines whether string parameters are sent to the server in Unicode or in the default encoding of the database server.
• MaxPooledStatements
  • The maximum number of cached prepared statements created by the application.
• AlternateServers
  • A comma delimited list of IP/Port combinations that make up the alternate servers. This must be in parenthesis as shown.
• ConnectionRetryCount
  • How many times to try and connect to each server in the list, starting with the Primary Server listed in the connection string.
    • A typical setting is 2.
• ConnectionRetryDelay
  • The number of seconds before retrying a connection
    • A typical setting is 5.

I’m the type of person that likes to use vmware, and sometimes over use vm’s. For each client project I take on, I create a clone from a base image so I have a clean slate to start from. This way I don’t have to worry about conflicting configurations for different clients. It’s super easy and efficient, and it provides me with a dedicated server instance for each client. Ok, so the challenge I originally faced with doing that is exposing websites transparently on port 80 because of being behind a router/firewall, I had to choose a single machine on where to forward port 80. I chose my server that runs my vmware, but that wasn’t going to do me any good since each vmware instance has it’s own IP in my configuration (I use bridge networking, so each instance of a vm server acts just like a physically connected machine) and sending port 80 to the one server wasn’t going to determine which server to actually send the request to without having some sort of application to do that work for it. Well, one day in my research I came across Oracle’s Web Cache, which acts as a reverse proxy, and solves my problems. Now, I can forward my port 80 from my router to the server that’s running Oracle Web Cache, and in Oracle I setup the origin server, site definitions, and site-to-server mapping. What this gives me is the ability to have x number of servers behind my router/firewall, and each inbound request on port 80 is handled by the one server that’s running Oracle Web Cache which is responsible for proxying the request to it’s respective server. I spent a few years trying to accomplish this and researching, and it was just about a year ago or so that I came across the idea of reverse proxy and then found that Oracle Web Cache was exactly what I needed. In addition to this awesome benefit of reverse proxy, it provides performance increase by compression and caching, imagine that.

If anyone is interesting in me posting details on how-to config Oracle Web Cache for reverse proxy use, please leave a comment.