Raible Designs

[TSE] Rapid Web Application Development with Rob Harrop

There's a couple of other sessions I should probably go to, namely Juergen's talk on Transactions and Mark Fisher's Message Driven POJOs Rock! However, transactions is generally a pretty boring topic and I don't see myself developing any MDPs in the next two weeks. If you don't use your knowledge in two weeks, you generally lose it, so I'll wait to learn more about MDPs until someone pays me to. I know a fair bit already, so I don't know that there's a whole lot more to learn.

I'm attending Rob Harrop's Rapid Web Application Development Essentials talk. With any luck, I'll learn some new tips that we can use in AppFuse.[Read More]

Spring's "p" namespace and AppFuse Performance Tuning

After seeing Rod Johnson's post about Spring 2.0's "p" namespace, I'm wondering if it's something we should include in AppFuse? I don't think it's quite as intuitive as <property name="">, but I'm curious to see what users think. The biggest reason against using it is (AFAIK) neither Eclipse nor IDEA will give you code-completion on (whereas they will for <property name="">).

In other news, Matt Fleming has an excellent writeup on how he optimized AppFuse (Spring MVC flavor) to handle pages with large forms. His form was 38 MB worth of HTML when saved to disk so I doubt everyone will need this, but it certainly is interesting information. If there's enough demand, we'll make Matt's suggestions available options in an upcoming release.

How do you get open source frameworks past the red tape?

From an e-mail I received earlier this month, with a subject of "Acceptance red tape":

After requesting permission to use the Spring Framework for the business logic and data access layers of an application, how do you fight something like this? Spring is not an approved Framework for the ********** environment. We understand the benefits of the framework. However, we have not certified it in our environment. Additionally, we have concerns that this framework will not gain long standing traction among the J2EE community. We would like to reduce the number of frameworks used in our environment, and do not want to be left with "legacy" frameworks that have little acceptance or support as is the case with the pico container. This is a response from one of our clients after asking about the use of a framework in our development after another vendor had used the PicoContainer without their permission. We have Spring experience and we love it. My responses have been to ask what they have certified that we could use and to ask their business staff to override their tech staff. I'm caught needing to redesign an aging J2EE application with an awfully over-architected original design confined to EJB 2.1, JSP 2.0, Servlet 2.4, and JDK 1.4.X in a very short amount of time. The additional responses were that they have only certified Struts and although both the business staff and the tech staff admit they know the benefits of Spring, neither of them are allowing us to use it.

My response:

Wow - I don't know what to say, especially when they say "Additionally, we have concerns that this framework will not gain long standing traction among the J2EE community." They're probably using Struts and they thinks it's wonderful, eh?

I could compose a long response with lots of details, but the fact that they prefer EJB over Spring is baffling. Spring is so much easier to program with, it's not even funny. Granted, EJB does have its place, but it's often used as a hammer for a problem that doesn't exist.

Have you experienced similar "Acceptance red tape" in your company? If so, how did you work around or work through it?

Is XMLC a dead project? Is anyone using it?

From an e-mail I received a while back:

I'm interested in hearing your opinion of XMLC? And when will we see it in AppFuse? ;-) Seems to me that with it's base in xml and all the ajax and SOA hubub that it could be primed for a resurgence. And what about BarracudaMVC as an AppFuse option?

[Read More]

GenericRCP - A GUI for your Hibernate Domain Objects

Peter Schneider-Manzell is an active contributor to AppFuse's documentation and mailing list. Yesterday, he posted a message to the mailing list announcing the 0.3.0 release of GenericRCP.

We (a good friend of mine and myself) started a SpringRichclient based project, called "GenericRCP". With this tool, you can edit your DB directly via your classes and Hibernate. The GUI (Panels / Binding etc...) is generated dynamically out of a JAR, containing the classes and hbm.xml files.

For AppFusers: You only need to import your <.....>-dao.jar, and you can start to edit the values.

You can use this project as a starting point for a customized editor with CRUD functionality and add customized panels / attribute editors for different classes / attribute types, and combinations of them.

Yesterday, I tried GenericRCP with the appfuse-dao.jar from 1.9.4 (XDoclet-based), as well as the appfuse-data-common-2.0-SNAPSHOT.jar (annotations-based) and it worked with both. Nice work Peter!

[CSS 2006] Using Maven 2 to get control over your Development Process

This afternoon I attended Hermod Opstvedt's talk on Using Maven 2 to get control over your Development Process. Most of it was review for me, but I took some notes anyway. About halfway through, I quit taking notes and just listened. The most interesting part for me was seeing how the Maven Embedder works. Since Maven doesn't currently allow you to create archetypes from existing projects the embedder seems like a good workaround. I'd rather code in Java rather than XML any day. [Read More]

AppFuse 1.9.4 Released

This release's major new features are upgrading to Spring 2.0, Hibernate 3.2, and Facelets + Ajax4JSF integration for the JSF option. In addition, many libraries have been fixed and a few bugs have been squashed.

To install and configure AppFuse for development, see the QuickStart Guide. Thanks to all the sponsors who have contributed products and free hosting to the AppFuse project.

• Download
• Release Notes
• 7 Simple Reasons to use AppFuse

To see how AppFuse works, please see the following demos (username: mraible, password: tomcat):

• Struts + Spring + Hibernate
• Spring + iBATIS
• WebWork + Spring + Hibernate
• JSF + Spring + Hibernate
• Tapestry + Spring + Hibernate

Comments and issues can be sent to the mailing list or posted to JIRA.

Note: If you're building AppFuse on Linux, you should be aware of some non-English encoding issues. The solution is to add something like the following to your ~/.bashrc file.

export LC_CENGINE=en_US
export LANG=en_US
export LANGUAGE=en_US

Equinox (a.k.a. AppFuse Light) 1.7 Released!

This release's major new features are upgrading to Spring 2.0, Hibernate 3.2, an Ajax + Spring MVC version, an Acegi Security + Spring MVC version and Struts 2.0 as an optional web framework. It's highly likely that the "extras/security" package can be installed with other web frameworks, but it's only been tested with Spring MVC. Furthermore, this release provided all of the different combinations that Equinox provides - all 50 of them!

All of the frameworks used in Equinox, as well as most of its build/test system is explained in Spring Live. A summary of the changes are below (detailed release notes can be found in JIRA):

• Added extras/spring-ajax with examples of ajaxified displaytag (with AjaxAnywhere), in-place editing (Script.aculo.us), in-page updates (DWR) and lightbox (Lightbox gone Wild) popups.
• Added extras/security with Acegi Security integration for authentication and authorization.
• Automated creation and testing of all possible combinations for distribution.
• Converted from JSP to Facelets for JSF/MyFaces option.
• Integrated Ajax4JSF into JSF/MyFaces option.
• Added Struts 2.0.1 as web framework.
• Upgraded to Spring 2.0, including improved XML syntax and JSP Form Tags
• Added Cargo settings to pom.xml so it's possible to run web tests from Maven.
• Changed dataSource bean to use a connection pool.
• Added popup calendar (using jscalendar) to Spring MVC and Struts 2.
• Added OpenSessionInViewFilter for Hibernate and OpenPersistenceManagerInViewFilter for JDO/JPOX.
• Fixed foreign-language encoding issues with Spring's CharacterEncodingFilter.
• Changed from DAO to Dao to be more consistent with other projects.
• Dependent packages upgraded:
  • Canoo WebTest 1393
  • Cargo 0.8
  • Commons Validator 1.3.0
  • DWR 1.1.1
  • FreeMarker 2.3.8
  • jMock 1.1.0
  • JPOX 1.1.1
  • Hibernate 3.2
  • MyFaces 1.1.4
  • Spring 2.0
  • Spring Modules Validation 0.5
  • Struts 1.2.9
  • Tapestry 4.0.2
  • WebWork 2.2.4
• Dependent packages added:
  • Acegi Security 1.0.2
  • Ajax4JSF 1.0.2
  • AjaxAnywhere 1.2-rc2
  • Facelets 1.1.11
  • Struts 2.0.1

Download. For more information about installing the various options, see the README.txt file.

Demos:

• Spring · Spring + Ajax · Spring + Acegi
• JSF + Facelets
• Struts 1 · Struts 2
• Tapestry
• WebWork

Thanks to all the users of Equinox for making this a great release!

P.S. I'm fully aware that this project's name conflicts with an Eclipse project.

Integrating Facelets and Ajax4JSF with MyFaces

I spent a few hours tonight integrating Facelets into an AppFuse-based application. The integrating was fairly easy thanks to the work Thomas Gaudin did back in January. For the most part, it was just a matter of 1) replacing <fmt:message> tags with #{text['key']} tags, 2) replacing the <%@ include file="/common/taglibs.jsp"%> at the top of each page with Facelet's namespace tags and 3) renaming the pages from *.jsp to *.xhtml. The only thing that tripped me up was I thought the "c" namespace was the same as JTLS's URI, but it's actually a whole new URI. Thanks to the Facelets developers for a much-needed fix for JSF.

After I got Facelets integrated and working, I dove into integrating Ajax4JSF. Two hours later and I have the simple repeater demo working. What took so long? I spent an hour staring at (and googling for) the solution to the following error:

PhaseListenerManager.informPhaseListenersBefore(74) | Exception in PhaseListener RENDER_RESPONSE(6) beforePhase.
java.lang.NullPointerException
        at com.sun.facelets.FaceletViewHandler.writeState(FaceletViewHandler.java:759)
        at org.ajax4jsf.framework.renderer.AjaxRendererUtils.writeState(AjaxRendererUtils.java:850)
        at org.ajax4jsf.framework.renderer.AjaxRendererUtils.encodeAreas(AjaxRendererUtils.java:740)
        at org.ajax4jsf.framework.renderer.AjaxContainerRenderer.encodeAjax(AjaxContainerRenderer.java:128)
        at org.ajax4jsf.ajax.UIAjaxRegion.encodeAjax(UIAjaxRegion.java:210)

The solution turned out to be removing the FaceletsViewHandler from faces-config.xml:

<view-handler>com.sun.facelets.FaceletViewHandler</view-handler>

Also, it seems the following is required in web.xml:

    <context-param>
        <param-name>org.ajax4jsf.VIEW_HANDLERS</param-name>
        <param-value>com.sun.facelets.FaceletViewHandler</param-value>
    </context-param>

Hopefully this helps others googling for the exception above.

Integrating Hibernate Validator with Spring MVC

Remember when I wrote about Better client-side validation with Prototype back in May? Ted Bergeron responded to my post with the following comment:

Now that I am using Hibernate Annotations Validator, I stopped using commons validator. You can use the hibernate validator without using hibernate for persistence. I wrote some jsp 2.0 tag files to handle binding my form fields with spring mvc, and I use reflection to check for the validation annotations. This makes it no work to have a js calendar for all Date fields, or have class="required" added to all fields that have a @NotNull annotation. I'd be happy to send you the code for appfuse 2.0.

Ted followed up by sending me the code. I took a look at it, and reviewed a well-written PDF he'd written for his work. I told him he should publish it as an article, hooked him up with some folks at IBM developerWorks - and voila! Ted's article, titled Hibernate can meet your validation needs was published yesterday. Nice work Ted!

I'm looking forward to trying to leverage Hibernate Validation annotations for all the web frameworks in AppFuse. Should be interesting hacking into the cores of the frameworks to modify how their validation engines work.