Matt RaibleMatt Raible is a Web Developer and Java Champion. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

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Over 10 years ago, I wrote my first blog post. Since then, I've authored books, had kids, traveled the world, found Trish and blogged about it all.

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Tuesday February 08, 2005

AppFuse not for Rookies

Adrian Sutton hits the nail on the head:

...for seasoned veterans who understand (its) technologies well, AppFuse should be a big time saver. I can see a lot of beginners getting into very deep water with it though.

AppFuse can help you get started quickly, but it won't help you really learn how to use the different technologies. Its tutorials are designed to show you how to CRUD a simple object, but that's about it. For learning the different frameworks, that's what books are for. Technical authors put a lot of time and energy into writing. A good way to show your appreciation is to buy their books. :-D

My Recommendations:

Posted in Java at Feb 08 2005, 04:04:59 PM MST 7 Comments
Comments:

I find Appfuse useful for learning how the technologies fit together. I can have a perfectly good understanding of how to build with each seperate component, but when fairly complex frameworks require configuration (*cough* spring *cough*), I tend to benefit from a working sample so I don't have to reproduce the basic configuration.

Posted by Scott McClure on February 08, 2005 at 07:05 PM MST #

Nice business strategy you've got there, Matt! ;-)

Posted by Keith on February 08, 2005 at 07:29 PM MST #

I agree completely. Appfuse was very overwhelming when I first started learning about J2EE. Equinox was much, much easier to understand and figure out how everything worked together. But to be honest, even after spending the last couple of months developing an app that was spawned from Equinox, there's so much stuff in Appfuse, it still is a bit much to take in.

Posted by PJ Hyett on February 09, 2005 at 12:45 AM MST #

I think there are two major contributing factors here:

One is that this is more an issue with open-source rather than being particular to Appfuse. One of open-source's greatest attributes is choice but with that comes the cost of integration of all that choice. It's great that we can choose between Hibernate/JDO/iBatis:Spring/Hivemind:Tapestry/JSF/SpringMVC:Ant/Maven but it also requires expertise come implementation time to implement/understand the integration of all those technologies.

The second and probably larger factor is having it all come together in one package fronted by a tightly integrated IDE. Commercial vendors continue to own the soup to nuts application development stack space with VS.net and WSAD which let a junior developer install the suite, write, and deploy an application without extensive configuration and integration. Hopefully that will continue to improve in the future and perhaps someday there will be an AppFuse IDE.

Per Adrian's post, if a beginner wants to dive into Java web development I can't think of a better way at this point in time than downloading Appfuse or buying MyEclipse. Good software development is complicated, there is a lot to learn, and I don't know if it will ever get easier. I feel like there is a lot more to know now with ORM, MVC, IoC, AOP, Unit testing etc... than there was 5 years ago. In my experience all of those things make an application more maintainable in the long run when used properly but the up-front knowledge required seems to continue to increase every year.

Posted by Todd Huss on February 09, 2005 at 12:49 AM MST #

I also find AppFuse a bit overwhelming at first glance (and loved Equinox because it brought it down to a more 'barebones' level), but as others have mentioned it is a _great_ learning resource. While yes it is important to understand the technologies involved, it is extemely helpful to seem them tied together in a 'best practice' fashion. Reading Hibernate (or Spring, or JSF, or...) documentation is all well and good, but when you sit down to tie them all together you can still feel just as lost. AppFuse/Equinox can function as that missing piece of documentation. I do feel this is why things like Ruby on Rails has had such great success, though. While it is great that you can choose so many options in the java world, it is quite a bit easier to ramp up in the Rails world: you have Ruby, Rails, and HTML (okay, and setting up a database). A brief tutorial on MVC to understand the Rails layout if it is new to you and you're on the way.

Posted by SJG on February 09, 2005 at 12:12 PM MST #

Many people I know are in favour of Rails, specially compared to J2EE frameworks (any of them). Rails tends to make things simple. J2EE frameworks tend to make things complex.

Posted by Jason Barker on February 09, 2005 at 06:50 PM MST #

Yes, I've been learning Appfuse for a couple of weeks now (after having been out of the Java world entrenched in C++ Solaris work), I had read through a few Struts books, and using Appfuse has really helped me to understand some aspects better. It has, and is, quite a learning curve and it seemed that everytime I started to understand one tool, another was referenced, but I can tell using this superframework as it were, is really going to help with maintainance of my app. Still a newbie to Appfuse, but loving it so far.

Posted by Jeremiah Myers on February 16, 2005 at 07:11 PM MST #

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