Raible Designs

David Sachdev on Web Framework Proliferation

David Sachdev left the following comment in my post about the Java Web Framework Smackdown at TSSJS in Vegas:

Wow - that's quite a mouthful David. Well written!

P.S. The Early Bird Deadline for TSSJS is today.

WebORB: Have you ever heard of it?

A colleague sent me an e-mail today and asked me if I'd ever heard of WebORB today. Since I hadn't, I figured I'd write this post and see if any of you have heard of it? If so, what is it and what does it do? It it similar to Appcelerator, but server-side only? Or is it more like Granite DS?

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Leasons learned from using Seam

Yesterday, I noticed the Seam Developers released a new seamframework.org site. It's great to see a web framework team eating their own dog food. Of course, if all open source framework developers were paid full-time to work on their respective project, we'd likely see more of this.

My favorite part of the new site is the Forums, which has an Atom Feed you can use to monitor topics posted. This morning, I noticed a topic from Daniel Hinojosa titled ANN: amazinggates.com is alive with Seam & lessons learned. In this topic, Daniel lists a number of lessons he learned from working with Seam.

The one thing I noticed about Daniel's "Amazing Gates" site is it seems extremely fast. Do you think this is because of Seam or did he follow the rules for high performance websites?

The New Javalobby Sucks?

I didn't say it, Jesse Sightler did. Even though he didn't say "it sucks" explicitly, that's what I read in his post:

Is it just me, or has the new Javalobby proven to be a significant step backwards? The old site was a Slashdot style discussion system with a pace very appropriate to the pace of news flowing from the Java community. The light emphasis on announcements was welcome, and useful while at the same time not being overstated.

The new site feels a lot like TheServerSide.Com from a few years ago. They've gone to a system where the frontpage is updated frequently (many times per day) and the content there is seldom interesting enough to attract any significant discussion. Unfortunately, this means that the overwhelming number of articles on the frontpage appear dry and uninteresting. I don't think I've really read anything there since the switch to the new format.

For the sake of the site, I do hope they figure out their mistake here. There is no shame in turning this into worsethanfailurethedailywtf all over again (hopefully you get that reference).

I like the new site because I visit it more than the old one. Of course, that could be a direct result of me posting there. If I could change one thing, I'd like to see a java.blogs-style aggregator of all zones (then I'd turn off the .NET and Kids Code Zones).

Do you agree with Jesse? Should Javalobby change back to the old-way of using forums?

I believe the reason for the change was because DZone has become so much more popular than Javalobby. I think they're hoping to capitalize on that brand name and extend it to other communities. Look at the following graph from Alexa for proof. More traffic = more $$ from advertisers.

Building a Better Maven with Ant

It looks like the Ant folks are thinking of building a better Maven.

I see many developers adopt Maven because they want a build system able to provide common features with no effort. Most of them don't want to spend much time writing an Ant script, or have seen or heard that maintaining Ant build scripts is troublesome. So they choose to use Maven only because it's easy to use for common use cases: install, write a simple pom of a few lines or generate it using an archetype, and you're ready to compile, test and package your new project following the Maven standard structure. They also get dependency management for free, and with only a few more effort they have multi module builds, and some nice features like code analysis, coverage, and a set of report gathered in a web site. That's really nice and that's what I like about Maven.

But Maven suffers from a lack of flexibility and robustness IMHO. And later the same people who first adopted Maven because of its perceived ease of use become frustrated when they need to tweek the system to their own needs or don't understand how the release plugin work. Then some of them go back to Ant, first having to go through a sometimes painful road to describe their whole build system in xml, especially if they aren't Ant experts. Others try to use new build tools like raven, buildr or others.

I really like Ant, and think it is a very good basis for robust and flexible build systems. People with enough knowledge of Ant can write very good build systems, testable, maintainable and adaptable. But you need to get your hands dirty, and you need to get a good knowledge of some of the mechanisms which can make an Ant based build system manageable: import, scripts and scriptdef, macrodef, presetdef, and so on. [Read More]

What do you think - is this a good idea?

I agree that Maven has its warts, but I don't think it's that bad. I've also heard that Maven has been successfully implemented at large companyies like eBay, Intuit and E*Trade[1]. Is the "Maven sucks" meme largely something that exists in the blogosphere, but not in the real world?

I think the biggest benefit of Maven is dependency management. I think it makes your code more modular and easier to build. Rather than having a monolithic source-code tree that depends on itself being built in a certain order, you can have individual modules that pull dependencies from a central location. This can be done with Maven's Ant Tasks as well. I don't see a problem with building a better Maven with Ant, but to try and build a better Central Repository sounds like a nightmare to me. The current repository has been improved for years and is much better than it was a couple years ago. That being said, I would love to see somebody build a more accurate Central Repository. Ideally, it'd be done sometime next week.

[1] I could be wrong about these companies. If you're a developer at one of these companies, please confirm or deny. Any comments on Maven's success at these companies would be great as well.

Update: Speaking of Maven, there's an interesting comment on a Javalobby post I wrote:

With all the critical remarks the Maven project is receiving, wouldn't it be time for some Maven project lead to step up and explain the team's position? Or is it completely deaf to the sentiments? How many builds have to fail, how much more headaches are needed before others start their own version of Maven and do it the right way (like Don [Brown])?

Seems like an excellent question to me. Guys?

Maven 2 Archetypes get a much needed improvement

Yesterday, a new version of the Maven Archetype Plugin was released. This release incorporates many of the improvements that were developed in a different project - code named "Archetype NG". The two major improvements are 1) you only have to use "mvn archetype:create" now and 2) you can create archetypes from existing projects.

I haven't tried #2, but #1 seems to work pretty well (especially since AppFuse archetypes are the first 9 ).

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Ext JS Tag Library

James Carr in Making extJS More Accessible to Java Developers:

With my recent interest in extjs, I was playing with the idea of making a Struts2/WebWork component library or a tag library to handle a lot of the boilerplate extjs code (i.e. creating layouts and such) but, luckily, discovered someone beat me to the punch!

I randomly came across ExtTLD this morning while sifting through my rss feeds, and I must say I am rather impressed. Although I consider myself a pretty good javascript developer, there seems to be a lot of java developers who aren?t that hot at javascript... which is why whenever I attend any java related conference there is always several sessions touting "javascript free ajax!" frameworks like GWT, Ajax4JSF, or IceFaces. Although I've always been skeptical of such frameworks, I do see their benefits... especially for the java developer who excels at serverside JEE development but generally sucks when it comes to adding javascript behavior to the presentation layer.

I can definitely see how Ajax-with-IDE-code-completion would appeal to many developers. However, I do have to agree with James:

So far it looks good, but I haven't had a chance to play with it yet. Basically, I'll have to see if it passes my "good javascript generator framework" test. I?m a pretty staunch advocate of unobtrusive javascript, and generally hate any presentation layer framework that seeks to dump several hundred (or thousand) lines of javascript inline in the html document.

For development shops that have UI-only developers for the front-end and Java developers for the controller/validation part of an application, frameworks that generate JavaScript usually don't make sense.

ExtTLD's license:

ExtTLD is published under GPL 3.0 license however restricts use by companies participating in animal abuse, such as animal testing laboratories etc.

A Positive Wicket Experience

Julian Sinai recently released the first version of his company's product based on Wicket. In A Year of Wicket, he describes the experience (emphasis mine).

I've been working with Wicket for almost a year. We've just released our first product that uses Wicket for the user interface, and so it seems like a good time to take stock. Unfortunately, it's not a public site, it's an installable enterprise product, so I can't show it to you. If you don't want to read further, here's the executive summary: Wicket rocks!

I was hired as the GUI Architect for this project. I came to it with many years of GUI experience, mostly using Swing, but without a lot of web development experience.

Because of my Java and Swing background, I was drawn to Wicket. It maps fairly closely to the Swing model of development. So does GWT, but when I evaluated it, it seemed so different from other J2EE frameworks that I felt it was a step too far. No HTML, and no WAR files, for example. This made my colleagues nervous, who were used to Struts and PHP. Me too, as a matter of fact.

I had done some pretty serious prototyping for another project with Tapestry, and there were certain things I liked, like runtime bytecode generation. But the learning curve was pretty steep. At one point I needed to create a custom component, and to do so I needed to learn about engine services and other arcane things that I felt made the process too hard. By contrast, custom components are Wicket's bread and butter, and they are very easy to build.

I also took a close look at JSF. It seemed overly complex to me, and not much of a departure from the Struts era. It came across as a technology designed by committee, with the combination of several complementary libraries required to get the job done, and there are still too many configuration files.

So we decided to use Wicket.

...

One of Wicket's advantages is the strict separation of design from behavior, that is, HTML from code. While we did not have a web designer on the team who built the HTML (the developers did this), and therefore didn't get any mileage from the separation in that sense, we definitely gained from having all the behavior in Java code, because it gave us all the power of refactoring, compile-time error checking, and maximum reusability. [Read More]

I really like how Julian talks about reasons they didn't choose other frameworks. Beyond that, I think it's important to note that Wicket was a perfect fit for someone with heavy Java and Swing experience. I still think Wicket is a little verbose for Web developers that program in Java (me), but it's unlikely there's very many of those. Building a form in Java seems so much more cumbersome than building it with HTML - but that's probably just me.

FreeMarker vs. JSP 2

I've been doing quite a bit of prototyping with Spring MVC and Struts 2 with both JSP and FreeMarker in the last few months. I'm trying to migrate a proprietary servlet-based framework with a proprietary JSP compiler to something that's open source. There's a couple of important features that the proprietary view framework has:

1. It's expression language allows methods to be called with arguments.
2. Templates can be loaded from a JAR on a remote server.
3. XML in variables is escaped by default.

For #1, I've found this to be impossible with JSP EL or JSTL. I've created JSP functions that allow argument passing, but they don't allow overloading of functions. FreeMarker solves #1.

For #2, JSPs again fail because the templates have to be on the file system or in a WAR. FreeMarker solves this problem as well.

For #3, neither JSP or FreeMarker solve this problem. I realize it can be fixed in FreeMarker by hacking the code - I've done the same with Tomcat and solved it for JSP as well.

So based on the requirements in this project, FreeMarker is the clear winner. Here's some problems that I see with using it:

• No XML escaping of expressions by default
• No compile-time checking of expressions
• IDE support is limited to Eclipse (meaning very little in the way of code-completion)

FreeMarker users - are there other problems you've experienced when using FreeMarker in your applications?

Java Web Framework Smackdown at TSSJS in Vegas

This year's TSSJS is starting to look like an excellent conference. I'm particularly excited to be moderating the following Expert Panel.

Java Web Framework Smackdown: Struts 2, Spring MVC, Grails, Seam/JSF and Wicket
The leading advocates of today's popular Web frameworks will duel under the Vegas Lights. Come and learn when to use your favorite framework and to see if it can live up to its hype.

We're talking about productivity, scalability and maintainability of Java-based Web applications. The emerging trend is that simplicity is better and productivity matters. Furthermore, if maintainability is the most costly part of any application -- how do these frameworks perform?

Attend if you're a Java Web developer, or if you simply like good entertainment. A working knowledge of the popular Java Web framework options will make this session more fun. If you haven't worked with any framework, come and learn who has the best spokesman.

I plan on bringing the boxing bell from OSCON 2005 to make this session one of the best in the show. I'll be coming up with a list of questions for these experts in the next couple of months. In the meantime, if you have any suggestions, please let me know.

With a venue like The Venetian, why wouldn't you go?