Jeff Mesnil
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Photo Walk by Night

July 20, 2012

Last night, I went out with a few friends for a photo walk (and beers!) after sunset.

I put a 35mm f/1.8 on my D7000 and took only a small Manfrotto tripod to help for long exposures. Lights were a challenge all night long and the white balance was hopelessly confused by all the different light sources.

I focused mainly on architectural details (doors, knobs) and the reflection of the city lights in the river. I wanted to catch the river with a silky aspect and contrast it with the harsh lights coming from the buildings.

It was a fun night and I am looking forward to the next one.

Old Door
Old Door
Yellow/White Walls
Yellow/White Walls
City Lights in the River
City Lights in the River
Tribunal
Tribunal
Trekkie Knob
Trekkie Knob1

  1. This shot could have been taken straight from Star Trek movie. ↩

Fête de la Musique

June 22, 2012

Fête de la Musique
Fête de la Musique

The weather was not great for la fête de la Musique this year but it is always fun to wander in the streets listening to both amateur and professional musicians.

JBoss EAP 6.0 GA is Released

June 21, 2012

JBoss by Red Hat

It's official: JBoss EAP 6.0 GA is released. One of its highlights is the integration of HornetQ as its messaging provider. Using EAP6 means you can now have support from Red Hat for HornetQ.

I came back to Red Hat only a few months ago and did not contribute much to the HornetQ integration into the application server. This was a great collaboration between the AS and HornetQ teams to ensure the best experience to configure and use HornetQ.
I'd even recommend to leverage EAP6 (or JBoss AS 7.1) over standalone HornetQ servers. Wether you only need a messaging server or not, the management and deployment features brought by the AS are invaluable in production environment.

I wrote most of my contributions to EAP6 in HornetQ codebase during my first stint at Red Hat. I still remember the long hours, hard work and team work to release the best and fastest messaging provider. A few months later, we were able to reach this goal and I am happy to be back at Red Hat right on time to see the benefits of this work.

I can't wait to see what is coming next for JBoss and Red Hat.

Using SockJS with Stomp Over Web Sockets

June 5, 2012

Recently RabbitMQ announced that is was exposing STOMP through Web Sockets and showed an example using my stomp-websocket JavaScript library.

They leveraged a hack in the library to replace the Web browser WebSocket implementation by the one provided by the SockJS library which falls back to a variety of browser-specific transport protocols if the browser does not suppor the Web Socket protocol.

Originally introduced to test the stomp-websocket library, it defined a WebSocketStompMock global variable that was replacing the Web browser WebSocket class by a mock. This was not meant to be used on the client side and is a bit dirty for that (as it pollutes the global namespace).

An user reported that this hack was no longer working on recent commits.

I fixed it and introduced a cleaner way to switch the WebSocket implementation to use by setting the Stomp.WebSocketClass variable instead.

With the most recent version, Web browsers can now leverage the SockJS libary with stomp-websocket using the following code:

Stomp.WebSocketClass = SockJS;
// same as usual
var client = Stomp.client(url)
[...]

Web Sockets for everyone!