Today I wanted to start a prototype portlet and thought that instead of wasting time creating my environment with ant I could use that same time learning maven2 and creating the environment with it.

I used maven for EasyConf and some projects in Germinus so I wasn't expecting it to be hard. Overall I was very pleased with the great improvements of Maven2 over Maven1. In particular I think that idea of defining a lifecycle is just brilliant.

But unfortunately I've also found some annoying problems. First of all the documentation has improved a lot since I first used maven, but it still feels very short. Being used to ant I often found myself with questions to which I couldn't find an answer. After reading some articles I finally found a book about maven written by Vincent Massol et al and sponsored by Mergere. If you want to learn about Maven I strongly recommend starting with it:

A post in Yahoo's blogs dated June 21st 2006 says We Now Support Microformats where thay state:

Yahoo! Local fully supports the hCalendar, hCard, and hReview microformats on almost all business listings, search results, events, and reviews.

I think that wide adoption by widely use portals was the next step for the success of microformats. In the near future we'll likely see more and more tools that make use of them. I would bet some money that Firefox extensions will come very quickl

Probably the most important change in the next version of Ruby on Rails, 1.2, will be its embracing of the REST style of developing web applications. I started learning about Rails and REST at the same time and quickly got excited about both of them so in my opinion is a great thing that we can now get the benefits of both at the same time.

Just as a quick summary:

• REST is about using the full power of HTTP, which is a lot more that most of us thought. URLs should point to resources and the HTTP verbs (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) should be used with a meaning.
• Ruby on Rails is a web development framework developed with the Ruby language. It comes with its own development environment and provides libraries for the whole stack from the frontend to the database backend. It's motto is to use convention over configuration and I can tell you that it really pays of.
  

There are right now quite a few promising technologies out there. Nobody can possibly learn about them all, so I have to choose. Here are the technologies to which I'm commited to learn more:

• Ruby and Ruby on Rails: I recently performed a series of experiments (Spanish) and was very impressed by how well thought Ruby on Rails is. I cant' wait to see Rails 1.2 released to be able to try Active Resourse, which I see as another great step forward to the raise of REST.
• REST: I initially thought REST was just a simpler alternative to web services based on SOAP and WSDL. It's much more, it's about how following a small number of well thought rules web services can be much elegant and simpler.
  

Here are the tecnologies that I use and prefer:

Operating System

GNU\Linux. I've always been a Debian fan and did never move to any of its sister distributions, but I must say that Ubuntu and its 6-month-based periodic relases have won me.

Window environment

KDE. While I originally helped the GNOME project, when I tried KDE 2 I liked it so much that I switched. I've recently tried GNOME once again and I must say that I really like the progress they have made. They still seem far of KDE in terms of application integration, but it seems better at providing more usability. I'll give it a second chance.