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W Brian Leonard

Brian Leonard is a Sales Engineer at Oracle responsible for Oracle's Fusion Middle products including WebLogic, SOA Suite and Exalogic. Prior to joining the Oracle sales organization, Brian was a Product Manager for Oracle's Solaris technologies.

Brian began his career working as a systems engineer with EDS at Enron, but claims no responsibility for Enron's ultimate demise. Always wanting to experience California, Brian moved from Houston to Silicon Valley in 1991 just in time to ride the .com wave. In 1997 Brian joined the startup NetDynamics, which was pushing a new concept called an application server. In 1998 NetDynamics was acquired by Sun Microsystems and soon after J2EE (now Java EE) was born. Brian then spent the rest of his career working in the application server space before his boss suggested he consider joining the than left for dead NetBeans team. During that time the NetBeans community grew from thousands to millions of users, and Brian falls to sleep at night assuming he played some small part in fueling that growth.

Brian spends almost all of his spare time hanging out with his 3 awesome kids, in fear of the day they wake-up and decide he's no longer cool enough to hang out with.
 

 

bleonard's blog

Introducing The Observatory

Posted by bleonard on June 25, 2008 at 4:19 PM EDT

Yesterday Gregg Sporar, Roman Strobl and I launched The Observatory, a blog dedicated to those learning to use OpenSolaris.

OpenSolaris 2008.05: Installing MySQL 5

Posted by bleonard on June 23, 2008 at 3:25 PM EDT

Looking at the MySQL web site, the instructions for Installing MySQL Community Server seem more complicated then they need to be. Maybe that's because there are no instructions for OpenSolaris (yet - I hope). Here are the easy steps that got me up and running.

OpenSolaris 2008.05: Installing NetBeans 6.1

Posted by bleonard on June 19, 2008 at 1:56 PM EDT

Unfortunately, NetBeans 6.1 has not yet made it into the package repository for OpenSolaris 2008.05 yet. Here's how to install it.

Step 1: Install the JDK

OpenSolaris 2008.05 does not ship with the JDK, so if you haven't already done so, it needs to be installed first.

OpenSolaris 2008.05: Configuring an External Monitor

Posted by bleonard on May 29, 2008 at 12:06 PM EDT

If you have an NVIDIA graphics card, OpenSolaris 2008.05 comes with a sweet NVIDIA utility for working with their cards. The only problem is that is seems pretty worthless w/out an existing xorg.conf file and the proper permissions to write to it:

OpenSolaris 2008.05 Meet the MacBook Pro

Posted by bleonard on May 27, 2008 at 7:07 PM EDT

Okay, so I'm not the first to document this configuration (1). However, I wasn't successful with any of the other approaches I discovered. Maybe this was because it most cases they were using a pre-release build of OpenSolaris 2008.05. So, for what it's worth, here are the steps that led me to success...

Drag & Drop with Rails

Posted by bleonard on April 18, 2008 at 2:45 PM EDT

The ability to drag and drop has been a staple of desktop applications for years. With the advent of Ajax, the ability to drag and drop has now found its way to web applications. In this entry I spice up the blogging application we've been building with the ability to drag comments to the trash.

Autovalidation with Rails

Posted by bleonard on April 16, 2008 at 3:31 PM EDT
Actually, I don't know what this feature is called, but I love it when a web application gives me instant feedback on the validity of my entry. For example:


Blogging for Dollars (and T-Shirts)

Posted by bleonard on March 18, 2008 at 2:37 PM EDT
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Hello Grails!

Posted by bleonard on January 30, 2008 at 9:37 PM EST

NetBeans 6.1 M1 was just released, and with it comes rudimentary support for the Groovy language and the Grails framework. I say rudimentary because this is M1, but there's a lot of work in progress as you can see from this task list.

Testing Rails Applications

Posted by bleonard on January 4, 2008 at 2:04 PM EST

All well developed applications are supported by tests. In this entry I extend the web log I've been building to include some unit, functional and integration tests.