Thanks to Alex Gargenta and Shawn Silverman for a fun evening at the San Francisco Java Meetup. Shawn showed us how to program little tank-like robots called TrackBots. I managed to create a completely insane program for the robot, but managed not to crash it.

I went last night not only to play with robots, but to check out the group because we’re doing a presentation there next month on Quercus! I hope everyone will be able to come out and join us. More information to come…

Woohoo! I’m pretty excited about this one. There are so many new cool features. Here’s the list:

• Resin IoC - Fully WebBeans (JSR-299) compliant IoC container
• Embedded Resin - Use Resin in an existing application or within a unit testing framework like JUnit.
• Support for gobs of 3rd-party packages: Maven2, Ivy, Mule, Struts2, CXF, Wicket, and more!
• Lots of updates to security, including an update to the authenticator configuration
• Exposure of the Resin JMS queues as BlockingQueues
• Watchdog updates
• Security updates
• Resin remoting

Wow… there are a lot of features there. I was going to write a bigger entry to cover everything, but I think now that it would be better if I split it up. Over the next few days, I’ll be writing more in depth entries about each of these features. It’ll probably take a week…

I’m working on our new monthly newsletter which will have announcements, tips on using Resin, Quercus, and Hessian, case studies from real production users, and more. There are a few things going on behind the scenes of the newsletter:

1. Writing content (duh ;-))
2. Formatting
3. Figuring out how to send it out

Writing the content actually hasn’t been too difficult — there’s a lot going on with the release of 3.1.5 (seriously, it’s got tons of fixes and new features) and Caucho in general. Formatting is also a bit tedious, but I’m slogging it out.

The real issue is how to send the darned thing out. I looked around and found PHPList, a PHP newsletter manager. It sends out mail at a nice steady rate, does double opt-in, handles opt-out, and other nice features. I ran it on Quercus and… it worked! I’m pretty pleased. Quercus occasionally hickups on untested packages due to very odd PHP or reliance on undocumented PHP behavior, but not this time. I think we’re finally getting to the point where we mimic the other implementation of PHP quite precisely (except we have distributed sessions, are faster in compiled mode, etc. :-)).

We’re pleased to present our new blog, running on WordPress and Quercus! Check back daily (that’s right, daily) for updates and thoughts about Caucho, our products, our engineering, and the industry.