Lair of Peppe

All right, the topic may be a little bit exaggerated. I just got my driver’s licence for motorcycles on Thursday, and have to get used to the idea.

I had been thinking for a while about getting the license, by the influence of my girlfriend, Katja. She has had the license as long as we’ve known each others, and has been talking every summer about getting some kind of bike. This summer I decided to get the license so that we can get a bike together for the next summer. The bike is mostly for fun, but also using it for transportation, as we do not own a car.

We’re looking for a street/sport bike of roughly 600cc. The first model I was looking at was the Suzuki GSX, but that idea got scrapped as it wasn’t really of Katja’s liking. Now I’ve been eyeing at Kawasaki er6-f, and it seems to be a good choice for us. Nothing is decided yet however, and we’re still looking at other possibilities. Requirements is about that it should be somewhat a sport model, used - 2-4 years old model, around 5000€. I am open to suggestions!

The original plan was to buy the bike this fall, but that probably won’t happen. Getting the driver’s license did not go as smooth as planned, and I lost a little interest into looking into the gear for that reason. It was really at the last possible moments that I got the license as it was already sub-zero temperature on my last exam, on Thursday. By failing it I would have probably had to wait for the next spring to continue. Now that I got through it, my interest is back up a little. I guess we’ll get the bike in the spring. I should get the other gear as soon as possible, as they should be much cheaper now on the fall. Only the clothes and gear I’ll need will cost around 1000€. Therefore it would be nice to get some warehouse emptying rebate this fall.

I should head to the stores in the coming days and see what they have to offer. Too bad that I don’t know many places in Turku to get the equipment,  but I guess I’ll come up with something.

So I’ve been working at IT Mill now since April of 2008 as a software developer. I thought I could give a little sales pitch of the company and the product, describing what the company does, and what I do there. IT Mill is altogether a software house, and their main product is Vaadin, which I already mentioned.

Vaadin is an open source Java framework for developing Rich Internet Applications (RIA), in a manner much like Swing. RIA is just a fancy name for saying that I have an application that runs in the browser. Everything needs to have a Three-Letter Acronym (TLA) nowadays. The idea is that you can develop your whole application  in Java, without having to care about low level languages like HTML, CSS and foremost Javascript. Vaadin uses Google Web Toolkit (GWT) to accomplish compatibility with browsers. GWT has a compiler that can translate Java to HTML and Javascript. When you develop with GWT you usually do a huge chunk of the application’s user interface and logic that is translated into Javascirpt. That means that the whole application can be sent over to the browser. If you need more data from the server the Javascript can call on the server directly with the request. Vaadin has taken a little different approach to the whole. First of, it has a clear split between what is on the server and what goes to the browser. Vaadin has a bunch of minimal precompiled components in it, such as layouts, text fields, selects and tables. The programmer then mixes and matches these to a user interface and only the view is sent to the browser. The browser doesn’t get any business logic at all – the components just sends the user input back to the server as key-value pairs. For example, if you have a text field and the user writes ”abc” into it, the text field sends a variable named ”text” with the value ”abc” to the server without valuating it. It is then the servers responsibility to decide what to do with that variable. This way you can have a normal Java application on the server side with no dependencies to the user interface other than than receiving the input. This approach has several benefits

• The API that the Javascript can use to call the server is minimal. The components only have one function which only can sends variables – no commands – to the server. This makes the attack surface for hackers as small as possible, and turns the application from a white box to a black box.
• As the components are precompiled, and the business logic stays as Java on the server, you don’t have to compile you application at any point, except when you change the basic behavior of the components. The component set that comes along Vaadin is wide enough, and you can really do a lot without starting to develop your own components. With GWT you have to compile every time you change something, or add an extra button, or whatever.
• Initial data which is sent to the browser is just a fraction compared with sending the whole application. This has the trade-off that every action the user takes will fire of an round-trip to the server, so the request amount is much higher.

As Vaadin is open source and completely free, you might wonder where is the catch – how the company finance this project. The business plan of IT Mill is split into to major parts. First off, we sell extra services around Vaadin, like holding training days with topics revolving around developing with Vaadin, selling applications like user interface testing software and  offering support packages to development teams. The other part of the business plan is that around two thirds of the whole company works with developing in-house applications that uses Vaadin on request of customers. This gives the funds that is needed to develop Vaadin to an ever greater framework. The company is still growing fast, having had a 50% annual growth measured in the total amount of employees, and that is about the growth expectations for the coming years too.

I, myself, work with doing applications to customers. I work in a team of four developing the next version of an application that is now a native Windows application. By turning it into an Java/Vaadin application they get the benefits of reducing upkeep costs – updates doesn’t have to be rolled out to every computer that uses the application, only to the server. At the same time it is platform independent, so it can be used on Linux and Mac too. We’ve been working on this project now for a little over a year, and it is shaping up nicely. We hope to roll out the first version out  pretty soon. Gonna be exciting. Other than the project I’ve been going to companies holding training seminars to them. The topics have been about developing with Vaadin and doing UI regression testing.

This whole post turned out to sound like I’m trying to sell the product to everyone. No worries, as I said it is free. :) What can I say, I’m proud of the company, the whole team is great, and I’m confident that Vaadin will be successful.

If you want to check out more, go to vaadin.com or jump straight into the demos. If you want to try it out, I recommend the tutorial.

Hi there!

Starting my first blog - this should be interesting. I have multiple times thought of starting my own blog - but the idea has always failed when I remember finally how lazy I am. But now it’s time to get my stuff together, and put some effort in it. I have some work-related stuff that I’m thought of writing articles about, so I guess a blog format would fit it quite well. Second motivation is that I’m quite bad in writing articles, posts, specs, whatever, and the best way to get better is by writing.

Best to start of with some background information. I live in the northern cold regions of Turku, Finland. I’m (sadly still) a student at the university Åbo Akademistudying on a master degree in computer science. I’m about 3/4 done. I’m also working full time as a software developer at the company Oy IT Mill Ltd , developing projects with the company’s framework, Vaadin. Vaadin is a Java framework for developing web applications. At work we have something called Community Friday, where we can use 10% of our whole working time into doing some personal projects. Right now I’m exploring what happens when Vaadin goes Spring. I was going to write some articles about it, and that’s the main reason why I put up this site, and writing this right now. So you might expect to see a series of articles written about Vaadin and Spring in the near future.

Besides being interested in software engineering, I’m also quite fond of finance and will probably write something about that too. I have recently got heavily involved into investing (while I might say heavily, keep in mind that I’m still a student so there is no millions flying around :)). I see stock markets and money more like a big system, or as a game. And as with most games, you can beat it if you’re justskillful enough. For me it is not so much about the money itself - but more about the challenge in the system that intrigues me.

And following up on the topic of games - I really like games. More exactly all kinds of computer games, but also board games. I guess I never outgrew my inspirationin gaming when I was little, and I have no intentions to stop playing either. I may express some opinions in that topic as well.

Other than that, I don’t know, maybe I want to express myself regarding music, gadgets, random thoughts of life, something like that. Let’s see. My first topics will probably be work related. A introduction of Vaadin, followed up on a series of posts regarding Vaadin and Spring integration. It’s all quite open still.