I have a number of thoughts in mind, which will likely turn into posts, and they are all leading up to a bigger unified thought. This is one of them.

PGP / GPG email encryption is a good thing. It's a pretty secure system, and the public registries of public keys makes it easy to communicate securely with someone new, with a reasonable amount of trust. One major issue, which I think most people identify as the biggest issue with PGP, is that the popular mail programs don't support it out of the box, or don't support it well.

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My first web application built using Seam is now live. It is called 10MinuteMail and you can see it at www.10MinuteMail.com.

It gives you a temporary e-mail address, and lets you receive and reply to e-mail sent to that address. The e-mail address expires in 10 minutes (or more, you can extend it as you need more time). Basically I created to learn Seam, and to provide an easy way to avoid giving your real e-mail address to websites which require an e-mail from you to sign-up. Think of it as spam avoidance.

For me, one of the hardest things about getting started with developing with Seam was getting a project setup that I could work with. The examples that ship with Seam only build within the whole Seam super-project, which doesn't work for developing your own projects. Most of the other guides on setting up a project (using Eclipse WTP, or other things) either didn't work for me, or seemed overly complicated, or used a structure that just seemed odd to me.

If they work for you, that's great. If they don't, I've posted up a zipped up version of the base seam project that I use. I use Eclipse 3.2 and MyEclipseIDE as my development environment, so you may need to make a few tweaks. You have to configure your JBoss installation location, and the ant script will build and deploy an exploded ear file as it's default target. The project I used for the base structure is the Seam Booking example, so just replace things as you like.

Get the base seam project here!

A friend of mine created a RFC for uniquely identifying an entity. The Tag URI scheme uses a tagging entity, to identify the tagger, this is usually a domain or e-mail address owned by the tagger. Then it uses a date to identify the unique owner of the tagging entity.

It basically allows you to uniquely identify something, through time. I think it's a fascinating concept. Add in a way to correlate other tags which refer to the same entity (as it's a many to one relationship between tags and entities), and there's a lot of intersting things you can do (more on this later...).

The only issue I'm having is finding a use or a reason to use them in the here and now. I don't currently have any tagging needs which need to be future-proofed to this degree.

Ideas?

Anyhow, here are some links for your enjoyment:

• Tag URI Home Page
• Tag URI Forum
• Tag URI RFC

JBoss has recently released version 1.1 beta of the Seam product.

As JBoss puts it, Seam is:

JBoss Seam is a powerful new application framework to build next generation Web 2.0 applications by unifying and integrating popular service oriented architecture (SOA) technologies like Asynchronous JavaScript and XML(AJAX), Java Server Faces(JSF), Enterprise Java Beans(EJB3), Java Portlets and Business Process Management(BPM) and workflow.

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