Beckshome.com: Thomas Beck's Blog

I had long planned the move from the .NET-based DasBlog blogging engine to WordPress but just couldn’t seem to make the time to complete the move. I finally pulled the trigger and cutover to WordPress a couple of weeks ago. The process was not nearly as painful as I imagined and I’m now beginning to reap the rewards of working on a blogging platform that’s more broadly integrated into the Web ecosystem. This blog entry is a collection of the key technical takeaways from my migration. Hopefully they will be helpful for other people looking to migrate to WordPress, especially on the Microsoft IIS platform.

• Getting WordPress Up and Running on IIS is Very Easy – I was surprised how easy it was to get WordPress running on IIS 7. The entire process took me no longer than 30 minutes to complete once I had the correct guidance in place. The items that were of the utmost help to me here were as follows:
• Webpage – Using FastCGI to Host PHP Applications on IIS 7.0 – A great introductory background and overview document on FastCGI on IIS 7. A good first read but shouldn’t be used as an installation guide.
• Screencast – Installing PHP on Windows Server 2008 – First in a three part series that will get you up and running with WordPress on IIS7.
• Screencast – Installing MySQL on Windows Server 2008 – Second in a three part series of screencasts covering the installation and initial database creation under MySQL.
• Screencast – Installing WordPress on IIS 7 – The third and final screencast should bring you home with the installation. If you install the newest version of PHP / WP, several of the IIS settings covered at the end of this screen cast will have already been made for you. Just ignore them.

• There’s Help Porting Content Into WordPress From Other Blog Engines – This was very welcome news as porting everything by hand would have been intolerably tedious. Porting blog content is a two step process:
  • Das Blog to BlogML Converter – Converts DasBlog source XML into standard BlogML file that can be imported into WordPress.
  • WordPress Import Module – The import module covered at the bottom of this post allows you to import BlogML into WordPress.

• Don’t Forget About Mapping the URLs of Your Entries so That All Your Links Don’t Break – Maintaining external consistency is critical to followers of your blog. They care little that you migrated onto new software. Google cares even less. Don’t make people think about this. Do the work for them and map your legacy URLs to the new URLs in WordPress so that the change is transparent to everyone but you. Most of the guidance I could find on the web around mapping WordPress URLs dealt with Apache mod_rewrite. Fortunately IIS 7 provides an extension called “URL Rewrite” that can rewrite incoming URL requests. This article and the links within provide you everything that you need to understand URL Rewrite and get the job done.

• Take The Opportunity To Leverage the Cloud – Although the text ports fairly well using BlogML as a bridge, the other binary content (images, document, etc.) need to be moved over manually. You can just copy the DasBlog contents folder over to maintain URL continuity or you can get a bit more ambitious. I chose to leverage Amazon’s S3 file storage service to store all of my binary content so that I don’t have to worry about backing it up or moving it ever again. I took the opportunity to set up S3 virtual hosting so that, with a bit of DNS trickery, my blog binary contents are all served from http://s3.beckshome.com.

• Identify and Engage the Necessary WordPress Widgets – One of the key features of the WordPress blogging engine is its extensibility and the vast array of freely available themes and plugins that you can use to add valuable functionality to your blog. A top 10 or 20 list of plugins would warrant another post entirely and there are a multitude of these lists already out there. Instead, I’ll recommend a series of plugins that I found to be absolutely necessary to replace content or functions I had available under DasBlog and which I considered “table stakes” for the move over to WordPress.
• Flickr Badge Widget – I replaced separate DasBlog pages for my photos and videos with a single Flickr Flash Badge that links to my Flickr account.
• Kimli Flash Embed – I have a screencast I did on Microsoft Virtual Earth a while back. This was the only way to embed it into the main WordPress page.
• SyntaxHighlighter Evolved – I have a bunch of source code snippets embedded in my blog entries, mostly C# and Ruby. This plugin made them look better than they ever did on my older blog with zero fuss.
• WP Google Analytics – Despite the avialbility of WordPress stats, I’m sticking with Google analytics. This plugin made the transition seamless.

I’ve been busy since returning from vacation on getting my new iMac up and running. Aside from the machine being a physical work of art, it’s also been performing very well and runs so silent that I’m hearing all kinds of new noises in my house that I wasn’t aware of before. This doesn’t mean that I’ve completely forsaken Windows. In fact, the move to the Mac has allowed me to finally move to Vista on my home machine and install Visual Studio 2008, which is killing my work laptop. For those of you remotely familiar with the Mac, running Windows side-by-side with OS X has been possible since the release of the Intel-based Macs. This started with Boot Camp and gained serious traction with the release of Parallels. Most recently, VMware jumped into this space with their Fusion product for the Mac. I went with Fusion due to reviews on both Apple’s site and Amazon.com that seemed to indicate that Fusion was more stable and that there were far more converts from Parallels to Fusion than in the opposite direction.

I’m running 3 operating systems now on this machine, 2 of them under Fusion 1.1. Mac OS X Leopard came pre-installed with the machine and Vista and Ubuntu Linux are running under Fusion. Despite the 64-bit Intel architecture on the new Macs, both the Vista and Ubuntu installs are 32-bit. I didn’t hear enough good news about the 64 bit releases to convince me that they were worth pursuing. All of this is running on 4GB of memory. Only 1 GB was stock and you’d be crazy to pay Apple’s prices for memory. Other World Computing (OWC) will get you to the 4GB maximum for less than $100. The memory install took all of about 10 minutes and OWC’s service and delivery were nothing short of outstanding.

As far as the individual operating systems, they are all running fine. That said, everyone puts different kinds of stresses on their machines. Mine is software development and I require each of my operating systems to run at least oneIDE. That’s actually the reason for the existence of these VMs in the first place. Although my initial research prepared me for the worst, I’ve had no issues with running IDEs concurrently on all 3 operating systems. I’ve encountered some small quirks, which I’ve documented below for anyone who might find this sort of thing useful:

• Mac OS X Leopard – I’m running NetBeans 6.0 with the Ruby-only configuration. Much to the chagrin of many Mac developers, Leopard did not ship with Java 6 even though it was included in some of thepre-releases. This proved to be a non-issue for the installation of the latest version of NetBeans. Obviously, running NetBeans in Ruby-only mode means that I’m not exercising the JDK and thus avoiding what could potentially be a lot of issues.
• Windows Vista – Although I’ve had issues getting used to the Vista operating system from the Windows 2003 Server / Windows XP I’ve become so familiar with, I’ve had few issues actually running Vista. I’m running Vista with the 1 GB RAM that Fusion recommended and have had no issues thus far. The only issue I encountered was trying to install Vista in Fusion Easy Install mode with multipleCDs , as opposed to a DVD. This is a documented issue with Fusion that I didn’t become aware of until I ran into it head-on. Simply switching to a normal install solved all of my issues. On top of Vista, I’m running Visual Studio 2008. This runs pretty quick – even on 1 GB and builds of moderately sized solutions are pretty fast. TheIDE is really responsive and you really only notice that your running in a virtualized environment if you try to resize the entire Vista window to get more real estate for the IDE.
• Ubuntu 7.10 – Despite the size of the operating system, this installation took longer than Vista. I chose not to use one of VMware’s canned virtual appliances and go with a fresh install. I would probably re-examine this decision if I had the chance to do it all over again. Ubuntu is running NetBeans 6.0 with the full Java EE stack. The install of NetBeans downloaded directly from netbeans.com went really well once the proper Sun JDKs were installed. Both the Java 5 and Java 6 JDKs were available directly from Ubuntu’s installation utility. I installed Java 5 first and, after realizing that it was a vanilla 1.5.0 release that didn’t meet the requirements for NetBeans 6.0, I installed Java 6. Things have been just dandy since then.

I’ve posted about how impressed I was with NetBeans as a Java IDE and the incredible progress this product has made in the last couple of years. I knew for a while that Ruby on Rails and JRuby support was coming for the next major Netbeans release (v 6.0), but I hesitated moving from RadRails to NetBeans until the feature set had stabilized. Last week, the Netbeans 6.0 beta was released and, with RadRails stagnating somewhat under the Aptana brand, I caved in and made the switch.

George Cook does an excellent Job of running through the new features with lots of nice pretty screenshots. If you’re looking at moving to Netbeans as a Rails IDE, it’s the first place I suggest that you go. Some of my favorite features of Netbeans (with screens shamelessly stolen from George’s site) include code completion

…and debugging

There are several features from RadRails that I miss and that I hope the NetBeans team will consider integrating over time. These include the ability to import a project directly from Subversion and the test window that allows you to visually check the status of your tests and select particular tests to run. Those features aside, I don’t plan on going back to RadRails. NetBeans has made so much progress so quickly, I can only imagine that it’s going to put significant distance between itself and RadRails in the near future.

You can get Netbeans 6.0 here, available as a skinnied-down Ruby only version if you want. Finally, since Netbeans uses JRuby as the default interpreter and expects the Derby Java database, this article on wiring NetBeans for InstantRails should get you up and moving with the standard Ruby interpreter and MySQL database configuration, regardless of whether you’re using InstantRails or not.

Final note if you’re brand new to Ruby on Rails and reading this post. Skip right to Rails 2.0, which is now in preview mode, to avoid dealing with Rails 1.2.x deprecations and to benefit from some of the new defaults. Enjoy!

Eliminating or reducing enterprise system batch processing is the bane of many architects looking to convert large-scale legacy systems to current platforms. Some believe, rightly or wrongly so, that mainframe-style batch has no place in modern system architectures and attempt to eradicate its existence entirely. Others are a bit more accepting and attempt to understand the role that batch processing fills in enterprise application architectural space. Even for these people, finding people with the skills to engineer batch processing systems with these newer technologies is not an easy proposition since little or nothing has been written about batch on the Java or .NET platforms.

I’ve seen various attempts at non-mainframe batch processing over the years from the simple CRON / Quartz type attempts to more sophisticated approaches that handled concepts such as scheduling, job control, retry and rollback, and parallel processing. There are commercial applications that purport to take care of much of this for you. Many of these are, for better or worse, nothing more than mainframe tools ported to the Java and .NET platforms with little regard for the differences between mainframe and non-mainframe architectures.

I’ve seen several attempts at batch processing frameworks in .NET. The earlier versions (pre .NET 2.0) of Rocky Lhotka’s Component Scalable Logical Architecture (CSLA) included admittedly simple batch functionality. Avanade’s Avanade Connected Architecture (ACA.NET), which formed the backbone of Microsoft’s Enterprise Library, had a batch element, entitled fittingly ACA Batch. Until recently, the Java open source community had only produced several half-hearted batch processing architectures which, given their lineage as the first “true” legacy replacement technology, is actually more than a bit disappointing.

A couple of month’s back, word got out that Rod Johnson, the brains behind the widely respected Spring framework, was going to be presenting the Spring Batch Framework at this year’s JavaOne conference. Yesterday, the formal announcement was made of the addition of Spring Batch to the Spring portfolio. A combination of Interface21 (the folks behind Spring) and Accenture (the folks behind Avanade) resources have collaborated in the creation of this batch framework.

I haven’t checked out the source code yet but Spring Batch purports to be non-dependant on other Spring facilities. The architectural diagram for Spring, which is shown below, won’t tell you much.

Perhaps more telling are the use cases upon which their framework is based:

• Simple Batch Repeat
• Automatic Retry After Failure
• Commit Batch Process Periodically
• Asynchronous Chunk Processing
• Copy File to File in a Batch
• Massively Parallel Batch Processing
• Manual Restart After Failure
• Sequential Processing of Dependant Steps
• Partial Processing
• Whole-Batch Transaction
• Scheduled Processing.

If any or all of these things are present needs of your existing system and will need to be replaced over time, I encourage you to look at Spring Batch. Even if you’re developing in a language other than Java, take a look at Spring Batch. If historic success provides even the slightest indicator of future success, than Spring Batch will be another exciting and innovative addition to the Spring Suite.

The Microsoft Live Search Maps update to include Firefox support that I blogged about a couple of weeks ago was released sooner than I expected. The updated maps API supporting Firefox has not yet been released but word has it that this is imminent as well. I’ve put together a brief screencast of Live Search Maps running in Firefox. Omitted from the screencast are the features that have been available in Firefox for a while, like bird’s eye view. Focus is given explicitly to navigating with the 3D control.

When running the 3D control, you can turn detailed building rendering on or off from the options link in the upper right corner of the screen. Detailed rendering chews up more space but looks a whole lot better. It looks like Microsoft is definitely taking the geospatial market seriously and is out-innovating Google in this area. Cross browser 3D support (albeit limited to Windows), bird’s eye views, and other features are real eye catchers. In the 3D realm, I like Microsoft’s approach to creating the 3D space on their own. Google might have overextended the community participation concept with Google Earth’s philosophy of user-created 3d models. Do we really need 60 different virtual models of the Empire State Building? That seems just a bit too confusing. Still, if you look at the number of mashups built using the respective mapping APIs, Microsoft still has a lot of catching up to do. Either that or folks just aren’t willing to admit that Microsoft might actually have something here.