Discursive

Steve Ebersole's wrote a "This isn't a rant" rant on the JBoss community site where he proceeds to attack a series of Maven straw men. I'm not going to get into it, other than some quick responses:

1. Docbook? You have a hard time managing DocBook with Maven? C'mon - I manage a library of books with Maven all of which are written in DocBook. The artifacts are deployed to a repository manager, and the builds are all run through Hudson. We spit out ePub, PDF, HTML using the docbkx work from Wilfred Springer.

Developing with JRuby is interesting, but it is also something of a challenge to deploy. If you develop applications deployed with JRuby Rack, I'm guessing that you probably don't bother starting a JRuby Rack web application as a part of your development cycle. In my experience, JRuby Rack is great, but the startup times are challenging. The solution? (It isn't satisfying...) Use C-Ruby during development and start Rails with "ruby scripts/server".

I see two big options for persistence: Hibernate and iBatis. Even though Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) has fallen out of vouge lately, it is still hugely important to most systems. While I've contributed to books on Hibernate and I continue to use it, I've come to see iBatis as the lightweight alternative to the monster that is Hibernate + Spring. So, when I saw that iBatis was moving to the attic my first fear was that the project had somehow died.

Someone recently asked me what tool they should use to write a book. I've decided to answer with a confusing (and somewhat intimidating) diagram. Here it is you can click on the diagram for a larger view:

Book Publishing Pipeline

I've switched a number of books over to 8.5" x 11" format. Although this is not a traditional size for computer books (most computer books are around 7"x 9"), moving to 8.5" x 11" reduces page count for printing conserving resources and reducing cost. I've found it much cheaper to print books on 50-weight 8.5x11 vs. 60-weight 7x9. While, I'm comfortable with DocBook XSL, I dread FO, and the idea of configuring the XSL to create two-column FO is very possible, but wasn't something I wanted to jump into without first evaluating InDesign's support for columns.