Docker images are great! They are not only portable application containers, they are also building blocks for application stacks. Using a Docker registry or the public Docker Hub, you can compose setups by just downloading the right Docker image.

One of the challenges Docker is facing right now, is its own development speed. Since its initial release in January 2013, there have been over 7.000 commits (in one year!) by more than 400 contributors. There are more than 1.800 forks on GitHub and Dockers brings up approximately one new release per month. Docker is in a super fast development right now and this is really great to see!

Eclipse Foundation Announces Java 8 Support! One day after my post about Java 8 in Eclipse Kepler (4.3) and Eclipse Luna (4.4), the Eclipse Foundation announced official support for Java 8 in Eclipse Kepler. Here is there blog post straight outta Ottawa, Canada:

Java 8 is officially available since a couple of days. It was released on March 18th this year. Yeah! But - Eclipse, the biggest and most popular Java IDE is a little bit behind the schedule (at least IMHO). There is no official Eclipse version for Java 8 right now!

Docker containers and respectively images can become fairly large. I recently worked with a Docker image which was over 7 GB big. However, it is pretty easy to flatten an image at the end.

I recently played around with Docker, an application container and virtualization‎ technology for Linux. It was pretty cool and I was able to create Docker images and containers within a couple of minutes. Everything was working right out of the box!

During the last few days I struggled with installing Oracle XE 11g on an Ubuntu VM. And with “the last few days” I mean “the last few weeks”. Sad, but true. Here is what I learned about installing Oracle XE 11g on Ubuntu. But please note that I am not a Linux specialist nor an Oracle specialist - it was my first try. And as you will see, I try to make my life as easy as possible. But let’s start with the very basics.

Last year I posted two modifications for the Wordpress plugin NextGen Gallery and its Thickbox and Shutter effect (here is the old one for Thickbox and the old one for Shutter). The modification makes it possible to click on the current image to go forward to the next image. To close the slideshow you can just click somewhere beneath the image. This is the same behavior as on many popular website such as Facebook.

My studies go into the final round - since the first of February I work on my master thesis about (enterprise) OSGi applications and PaaS providers in the cloud. I evaluate an existing OSGi server application and try to migrate it to a PaaS provider. My deadline is in the mid of July 2014.