Starting on March 30, 2007 I accepted full time employment as a Senior Developer of web applications (and other apps) for JPMorgan MaxPlans as a remote developer living in Flagstaff. Therefore I can no longer accept any contract work.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank those who have been instrumental in helping me in my work with OmPoint Innovations to date: Yaakov Weintraub, Kimberly Morello, Jorden de Bouve and Raphael Parree, Nat Dunn, Steven Heckler, Robert Oberg, Nick Kraft, the wondrous people at Penn State University, and Avatar Meher Baba. Thank you all from the bottom of my heart.

May all beings be happy, may all beings be free.

[From August 15, 2006]
We have moved the office back to Flagstaff, Arizona, due to the imminent arrival of a new staff member, namely: our new child. In fact, as a result of this transition I have taken a full-time position with LearningPatterns Inc. as Senior Instructor and courseware developer. All of this is very good for us. OmPoint continues to work on other projects on the side, including a ProTools EQ plug-in, book projects, and more.

[From May 6, 2005]
We have closed the Georgia office and are moving OmPoint Innovations to Ojai California.  Wooo hooo.  We will re-open the doors for training, mentoring, consulting, software development and courseware development as of June 1, 2005.  Wish us luck with the big move.

In the interim, I am doing research and development on EJB 3.0 for our first purely OmPoint courseware: Web Development with EJB 3.0 and JBoss, which I hope to have ready by the end of June.  Enjoy the summer and be happy, there is so much to be grateful for...

Laurent

[From April 3, 2005]

Well, it is Sunday, and I am still at work... much to do...

I was recently teaching at Vanderbilt University some new material about JSP 2.0 features, and also the JSTL 1.1 tag libraries... obviously Sun wants to move the Java code out of the JSP and into custom tags, their own tags to be precise...  Then there are .tag files which, to be honest, are fine but there is nothing wrong with writing a tag library the old fashioned way, except... almost no one does it..  Now with .tag files making tags easier, it will be interesting to see if it catches on, or if the Java code remains in the JSP... we shall see.

I leave Tuesday for Spring Break, YAY!  We will fly to Los Angeles, and then go over to Flagstaff where many old friends are.  Also, Indigo8 is in Flagstaff, and we are already talking about a face lift for this OmPoint web site... so expect newness here.

I have started writing the new Java book, The Soul of Java, and I hope you like it... An outline will be posted shortly with links to each chapter and downloadable PDFs.  One day I will print it too, sell it and give it to my students.  For now, writing it is a job in itself.  After almost 10 years with Java, it wants to be written.  Look for my pretty pictures in it also, as I find that many of the dry technical concepts can be more readilly absobed with an image than with 1000 words.  Heh heh.

Have a wondrous Spring, and don't forget to breathe.

Laurent

[From March 14, 2005]

I just got back from Massachusetts where I was teaching for two weeks, and enjoying the Amherst - Northampton vibrations...  Now I have a little time to do reseach and development before going back out again.  I am focusing on two things right now, how to make Groovy work with Java Portlets (our project is called GrooveHaven)... and also how to get an HTML page to fire up a client side application, and unfortunately without using Java.  My initial solution was to use a "trusted" Java Applet, but my friend, who asked about this, wants to use HTML with as little difficulty as possible... I found some information on using an Active X control, so I may have to walk the Microsoft path on this solution. 

More soon...

Laurent

[From January 28, 2005]

I leave Sunday for a week of Java teaching in Texas, and then back to my Georgia office to finish working with WebLogic 8 & Eclipse with MyEclipse (which has turned out to be much harder than Tomcat with a Sysdeo plug-in).  Getting DataSources to work in WebLogic 8 is not trivial, but this afternoon I finally got it working. The culprit was WebLogic re-setting the CLASSPATH, taking my derby.jar off... and then not finding it...

Mid February I will be in France for a Companion Enterprises meeting.

We shall see what the Spring holds.  Need help with Java?  Let me know. Stay warm.

~ Laurent

[From January 10, 2005]

December 2004 ended with a whirlwind Java teaching travel schedule including Winnipeg Manitoba, Canada as well as Pennsylvania, and Atlanta.  Then I had a great few days of work for Meher Baba material in London before heading home to Georgia for Christmas.  Needless to say, it was good to be home after four weeks on the road.

January has been devoted to J2EE courseware editing, specifically working with Eclipse 3.0.1 using a Sysdeo 3.0 Tomcat plug-in and Tomcat 5.5.4.  All great technologies that actually work.  The next project for January is to get Eclipse and MyEclipse to work with WebLogic 8.1. 

Wish me luck.

On the writing front, we are involved in the creation of a new book, Mandali Email due out early this Spring.  The proofs have been read, and we are just making final changes to this now.

Other books about to be published include Meher Baba's Gift of Intuition, hopefully also available this year.

More soon, now that I have Macromedia Contribute to help me make rapid updates to my site.

~ Laurent

[From July 2004]

I have been teaching Java for a number of years now, and continue to teach: Chicago in August 2004, and Massachusetts in September 2004. I specialize in J2EE (Java Servlets, JSP, and other J2EE components). Most recently I was asked to learn the “Groovy” programming language, based strongly on Java™. I presented my Groovy slides at a Java technical conference (J-Spring 2004 in Holland) about Groovy MarkupBuilder (for easy XML generation), Groovlets (Groovy version of Servlets), Groovy SQL, and other aspects of what Groovy has to offer. The presentation went well. From my research on Groovy, and my communications with James Strachan (Groovy’s creator), I believe it is a technology that is here to stay.

As an ongoing research and development project at OmPoint Innovations, we have our flagship “mAgent” project, aimed at producing an extensible Mobile Intelligent Agent Framework. While we are still in the OOAD phase of this product, we believe that the best software spring forth from a mindful design, and surely the code will follow (this has been our experience). mAgent will combine the best of J2EE (including EJB) with J2ME components to deliver a mobile agent (mAgent) solution like no other. Look for it soon.

Tomorrow I go on vacation to India for three weeks. Life is about alternating activity and rest. I have been inordinately active for the last year. It is time to rest. See you in August.

Laurent Weichberger
Principal Innovator