Yesterday I bought a License of Enso Launcher and I realized that it's the first license that I've ever bought voluntarily.

First of all I want to clarify that doesn't mean that all of the other software I'm using doesn't have a license, it's just that it came with the computer or it does not require a license. In fact I usually use only open source software with very few exceptions.

So what is Enso Launcher and why did I buy a license? It is a product meant to make the computer easier to use inspired by the ideas of Jeff Raskin in The Humane Interface. I really enjoyed reading that book so it was great to see that someone had made it real. Accidentally I've been using Windows for a while and really missed the command line, so Enso was a perfect fit for me. They are really showing how good a command interface can be (emacs users already knew, enso has a lot of the concepts of emacs commands but with an improved UI).

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 some other projects in which I have collaborated (or at least I tried to), but I haven't been collaborating for a while:

• Apache Jakarta Commons Configuration: Library for Java developer which offers advanced features for reading properties files or access XML files as if it where properties files. I've sent several patches which have been kindly accepted.
• GNOME Hispano (Spanish): Group of people dedicated to promoting GNOME within the spanish speaking community. I was the webmaster and helped convert from a static website to a dynamic website based on XML + XSLT.

Agile Spain is a group of people who believe in Agile Methods as a better way to perform the most usual type of project that are done nowadays. As any other methodology it can be well or bad understood, well or bad applied. For this reason, our aim is to become a center of information for both theory and practice within the spanish world.

I'm one of the four founding members of Agile Spain along with Cesar Colado, Luis F. Canals and Enrique Comba. I'm currently one of the managers of its website and community along with Jesús Pérez, Ismael Ferrer and Carmen Vidal.

• Website: http://www.agile-spain.com
  

I started the project as part of the PhD Thesis at the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid. My aim was to provide a centralized place to document and discuss about the best way to run development projects on a collaborative ways. The first and best examples of collaborative development models are in the free software world although I believe that they can be applied elsewhere as long as the sharing ideals also exist.

• Blog: http://collaborativedevelopment.blogspot.com/
• Wiki http://www.jorgeferrer.com/collaborativedevelopment
  

APICE is an spanish association, sited in Madrid, which works to include children in risk of social exclusion. They use computing classes as a means to teach both social subjects and technology that will be useful for them in the future. I'd like to highlight that they have recently renewed its software infrastructure to use only free software. Each computer used by the children is equiped with GNU/Linux.

My main collaboration with APICE is the development and mantainance of the website, which is based on Drupal.

• Home page: http://www.asociacionapice.org (Spanish)
  

EasyConf is a library to access configuration of software components and applications. It defines simple conventions to make it easier to use. It was born in a portlets-based portal and has several features useful for this and similar environments.

EasyConf aims to make easy the development of highly configurable Java applications. You can start with a very simple scheme and when you need it you'll be able to add powerful functionality such as XML files, support for several environments or aggregation of componentes.

I started the development of EasyConf in 2004 with some collegues at Germinus. We felt the need of a tool that would help us deploy different configuration parameters in different deployments. Soon after EasyConf went OpenSource and its development was greatly accelerated. Currently all the expected feature set is complete and its development has slowed down a little.

Liferay is an Open Source portal platform. It supports JSR-168 and comes with many useful bundled portlets. I've evaluated eXo and JBoss Portal and nowadays I think Liferay is better as a whole.

I started working with Liferay through my involvement in the EducaMadrid (spanish) project. Since then I've been able to know the code well, meet it's main developer Brian Chan and contribute several interesting functionalities and ideas such as using the portlets to build websites, themes, etc.

• Home page: http://www.liferay.com