Raible Designs

Thursday October 21, 2004

Comparing Web Frameworks: Equinox, Ant and Maven Next week I'll be putting together the sample apps for my Comparing Web Frameworks talk. They're going to be pretty simple. They'll be created using Equinox and will closely resemble the MyUsers app created in Chapter 2 of Spring Live. That is, they'll just be simple webapps that allow you to CRUD a database table. MyUsers just edits a user's first and last name, but I'll probably add a "birthday" field to demonstrate Date handling. Even though it's simple, it'll have a pageable/sortable list, validation and success messages - which is what most apps need. Of course, if I can't get X feature to work, I'll make sure and highlight that in my talk.

Equinox is based on Ant and works quite well. However, I have a Maven version of Equinox that I developed for Open Logic this summer. They've been gracious enough to let me release this as open source. BTW, if you're looking for a rich set of Maven sample apps - Blue Glue 3.1 will have a few (including multi-project). Blue Glue also contains detailed documentation on each of these sample apps I'm creating for this talk.

So the question is - should I release a Mavenized version of Equinox? Or should I modify Equinox to contain and allow you to use both Ant and Maven? The problem with allowing both is I'd likely give up everyone's favorite Maven feature - downloading dependencies. I personally have grown to loath this feature b/c repositories are hardly ever up-to-date and I spend a lot more time trying to get repositories updated (or creating my own) than I would downloading the JAR. Spring uses both and simply points Maven to its local JARs. That's probably what I'd do.

Of course, the easiest (and KISS) thing to do is to use Equinox with Ant and not complicate things. However, I'm willing to put in a couple hours to try and make Equinox allow both. Regardless, I'm willing to release a Mavenized version of Equinox - if there's interest.

P.S. Don't forget to thank the Open Logic guys for making this all possible. I wouldn't have been able to do this talk without their generous donation. Posted in Java at Oct 21 2004, 02:57:52 PM MDT 3 Comments

AppFuse's License Someone sent me an e-mail today and made me aware that the Commons Attribute License that AppFuse uses only applies to documents and such:

"Collective Work" means a work, such as a periodical issue, anthology or encyclopedia, in which the Work in its entirety in unmodified form, along with a number of other contributions, constituting separate and independent works in themselves, are assembled into a collective whole.

Because of this, I'm thinking of switching to use an Apache 2 License. This seems to be the friendliest license for open source. Basically, all I want to do is try to get folks that use AppFuse to give it some credit. Which really means they're marketing it in a sense. More marketing -> more users -> (hopefully) I'll stay employed and the product will get better.

The only pain I can see about licensing with an Apache License is they want you to add a short copyright notice at the top. But I'm not really handing the copyright of AppFuse over to ASF, am I? Do I have to add this copyright to all my .java files? I know that Spring does this, but... ugh ... seems rather unnecessary. Posted in Java at Oct 21 2004, 10:54:08 AM MDT 11 Comments