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20041021 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

Comments:

What problem do you have with automatic dependency handling? Checkthis search tool. A multiproject maven sample is the ONess project

Posted by Carlos Sanchez on October 22, 2004 at 09:34 AM MDT #

I vote no Maven. Talk about making some simple hard. That's what you get when you "Mavenize" a project/app. And, Maven is way over the head of the beginner, which is who I assume you are targeting with these apps.

Posted by Erik Weibust on October 23, 2004 at 10:26 AM MDT #

[Trackback] In learning Maven over the weekend I set about the process of creating a Maven Data Access Kickstart project (with Spring, Hibernate, JUnit, DBUnit, and XDoclet). Here's my Mavenized data access kickstart project if you're interested: maven-dao-kickst...

Posted by Todd Huss on January 10, 2005 at 11:55 AM MST #

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Matt Raible is a Web Architecture Consultant specializing in open source frameworks.
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