Raible Designs

A Fantastically Fun February at Jfokus 2020 and the Rocky Mountain JUGs

Jfokus is one of my favorite conferences in the world. It takes place in Stockholm, Sweden, during one of the coldest months of the year. As a native Montanan, I love the winter season and skiing. It was with great pleasure that I returned to Jfokus as a speaker this year, after skipping the last couple of years.

True story: the last time I was at Jfokus was 2017, and Okta had just acquired Stormpath. I negotiated my Okta employment terms in the Radisson Blu lobby!

I gave three talks this year: two on the main stage during Jfokus and one at Jforum Stockholm on Tuesday evening.

Grails + Angular vs. JHipster

I recently received an email from a long time follower of my comparing web frameworks research and presentations. He asked some interesting questions:

I am starting on a new venture to build a direct to consumer web application. I am planning to leverage Cloud services to build my CI/CD pipeline. I am very strong with Java Backend/middleware and learning Javascript Front-end frameworks. I love Spring and SOFEA. Having said that, I am wondering if I should use Grails + Angular or JHipster? My primary concern with JHipster is there is hardly any ‘community', there is Julien and whatever he says/thinks goes! Can you give me some pointers?

I imagine there's other JVM developers with similar questions, so I figured I'd publish my response for all to see.

Yes, I'm probably a bit biased since I'm writing a JHipster book. However, it's been easy for me to introduce and use Spring Boot at my last few clients. They were already using Spring, so the transition to using a Spring simplifier was a no-brainer. I haven't had as much luck getting clients to adopt Grails, even though I've suggested it. That could change now that it's based on Spring Boot.

What's your experience? Would you recommend Grails + Angular over JHipster? If so, why?

Getting Hip with JHipster at Denver's Java User Group

Last night, I had the pleasure of speaking at Denver's Java User Group Meetup about JHipster. I've been a big fan of JHipster ever since I started using it last fall. I developed a quick prototype for a client and wrote about solving some issues I had with it on OS X. I like the project because it encapsulates the primary open source tools I've been using for the last couple of years: Spring Boot, AngularJS and Bootstrap. I also wrote about its 2.0 release on InfoQ in January.

To add some humor to my talk, I showed up as a well-dressed Java Developer. Like a mature gentleman might do, I started the evening with a glass of scotch (Glenlivet 12). Throughout the talk I became more hip and adjusted my attire, and beverage, accordingly. As you might expect, my demos had failures. The initial project creation stalled during Bower's download all JavaScript dependencies. Luckily, I had a backup and was able to proceed. Towards the end, when I tried to deploy to Heroku, I was presented with a lovely message that "Heroku toolbelt updating, please try again later". I guess auto-updating has its downsides.

After finishing the demo, I cracked open a cold PBR to ease my frustration.

I did two live coding sessions during this presentation; standing on the shoulders of giants to do so. I modeled Josh Long's Getting Started with Spring Boot to create a quick introduction to Spring Boot. IntelliJ IDEA 14.1 has a nice way to create Spring Boot projects, so that came in handy. For the JHipster portion, I created a blogging app and used relationships and business logic similar to what Julien Dubois did in his JHipster for Spring Boot Webinar. Watching Josh and Julien's demos will give you a similar experience to what DJUG attendees experienced last night, without the download/deployment failures.

You can click through my presentation below, download it from my presentations page, or view it on SlideShare.

You might notice my announcement on slide #32 that I've signed up to write a book on JHipster.

I haven't started writing the book yet, but I have been talking with InfoQ and other folks about it for several months. I plan to use Asciidoctor and Gradle as my authoring tools. If you have experience writing a book with these tools, I'd love to hear about it. If you've developed an application with JHipster and have some experience in the trenches, I'd love to hear your stories too.

As I told DJUG last night, I plan to be done with the book in a few months. However, if you've been a reader of this blog, you'll know I've been planning to be done with my '66 VW Bus in just a few more months for quite some time, so that phrase has an interesting meaning for me.

Converting an Application to JHipster

I've been intrigued by JHipster ever since I first tried it last September. I'd worked with AngularJS and Spring Boot quite a bit, and I liked the idea that someone had combined them, adding some nifty features along the way. When I spoke about AngularJS earlier this month, I included a few slides on JHipster near the end of the presentation.

This week, I received an email from someone who attended that presentation.

Hey Matt,
We met a few weeks back when you presented at DOSUG. You were talking about JHipster which I had been eyeing for a few months and wanted your quick .02 cents.

I have built a pretty heavy application over the last 6 months that is using mostly the same tech as JHipster.

• Java
• Spring
• JPA
• AngularJS
• Compass
• Grunt

It's ridiculously close for most of the tech stack. So, I was debating rolling it over into a JHipster app to make it a more familiar stack for folks. My concern is that it I will spend months trying to shoehorn it in for not much ROI. Any thoughts on going down this path? What are the biggest issues you've seen in using JHipster? It seems pretty straightforward except for the entity generators. I'm concerned they are totally different than what I am using.

The main difference in what I'm doing compared to JHipster is my almost complete use of groovy instead of old school Java in the app. I would have to be forced into going back to regular java beans... Thoughts?

I replied with the following advice:

JHipster is great for starting a project, but I don't know that it buys you much value after the first few months. I would stick with your current setup and consider JHipster for your next project. I've only prototyped with it, I haven't created any client apps or put anything in production. I have with Spring Boot and AngularJS though, so I like that JHipster combines them for me.

JHipster doesn't generate Scala or Groovy code, but you could still use them in a project as long as you had Maven/Gradle configured properly.

You might try generating a new app with JHipster and examine how they're doing this. At the very least, it can be a good learning tool, even if you're not using it directly.

Java Hipsters: Do you agree with this advice? Have you tried migrating an existing app to JHipster? Are any of you using Scala or Groovy in your JHipster projects?

AppFuse, Reduced

In November, I had some time off between clients. To occupy my time, I exercised my body and brain a bit. I spent a couple hours a day exercising and a few hours a day working on AppFuse. AppFuse isn't used to start projects nearly as much as it once was. This makes sense since there's been a ton of innovation on the JVM and there's lots of get-started-quickly frameworks now. Among my favorites are Spring Boot, JHipster, Grails and Play.

You can see that AppFuse's community activity has decreased quite a bit over the years by looking at its mailing list traffic.

Even though there's not a lot of users talking on the mailing list, it still seems to get quite a few downloads from Maven Central.

I think the biggest value that AppFuse provides now is a learning tool for those who work on it. Also, it's a good place to show other developers how they can evolve with open source frameworks (e.g. Spring, Hibernate, JSF, Tapestry, Struts) over several years. Showing how we migrated to Spring MVC Test, for example, might be useful. The upcoming move to Spring Data instead of our Generic DAO solution might be interesting as well.

Regardless of whether AppFuse is used a lot or not, it should be easy to maintain. Over the several weeks, I made some opinionated changes and achieved some pretty good progress on simplifying things and making the project easier to maintain. The previous structure has a lot of duplicate versions, properties and plugin configurations between different projects. I was able to leverage Maven's inheritance model to make a number of improvements:

Why I prefer IntelliJ IDEA over Eclipse

Over the last couple months, I've received a few emails asking why I prefer IntelliJ IDEA over Eclipse. They usually go something like this:

I keep seeing you recommending IntelliJ. I keep trying it intermittently with using Eclipse, but I feel like I'm missing something obvious that makes so many people think it's better. Granted having the usual plugins incorporated is nice, but other things like the build process and debugger sometimes seems a step back from Eclipse. Could you please blog a '10 reasons why I love IntelliJ' or point me to something that would clue me in?

I grew to love IntelliJ for a few reasons. It all started in 2006 when I decided to migrate AppFuse from Ant to Maven. Before that, I was a huge Eclipse fan (2002 - 2006). Before Eclipse, I used HomeSite, an HTML Editor to write all my Java code (1999-2002). Eclipse was the first IDE that didn't hog all my system's memory and was pleasant to work with.

The reason I started using IntelliJ in 2006 was because of it's multi-module Maven support. Eclipse's Maven support was terrible, and m2e hasn't gotten a whole lot better in recent years AFAIK.

Back then, I used to think everything should be built and run from the command line. A couple years later, I realized it was better to run tests and debug from an IDE. Now I'm more concerned with the ability to run tests and debug in an IDE than I am from the build system.

In 2009, I started doing a lot more front-end work: writing HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I also started digging into alternate languages for these: Jade, GWT, CoffeeScript, LESS, SASS - even Scala. I found IntelliJ's support, and plugins, to be outstanding for these languages and really enjoyed how it would tell me I had invalid JavaScript, HTML and CSS.

My original passion in software was HTML and JavaScript and I found that hasn't changed in the last 15 years. AFAIK, Eclipse still has terrible web tools support; it excels at Java (and possibly C++ support). Even today, I write most of my HTML code (for InfoQ and this blog) in IntelliJ.

In reality, it probably doesn't matter which IDE you use, as long as you're productive with it. Once you learn one IDE well, the way others do things will likely seem backwards. I'm so familiar with debugging in IntelliJ, that when I tried to use Eclipse's debugger a few weeks ago, it seemed backwards to me.

In a nutshell: the technologies I've worked with have been better embraced by IntelliJ. Has this happened to you? Have certain technologies caused you to use one IDE over another?

Comparing JVM Web Frameworks at vJUG

A couple months ago, I was invited to speak at Virtual JUG - an online-only Java User Group organized by the ZeroTurnaround folks. They chose my Comparing JVM Web Frameworks presentation and we agreed I'd speak yesterday morning. They used a combination of Google Hangouts, live streaming on YouTube and IRC to facilitate the meeting. It all went pretty smoothly and produced a comfortable speaking environment. To practice for vJUG, I delivered the same talk on Tuesday night at the Denver Open Source Users Group.

The last time I delivered this talk was at Devoxx France in March 2013. I didn't change any of the format this time, keeping with referencing the Paradox of Choice and encouraging people to define constraints to help them make their decision. I did add a few new slides regarding RebelLabs' Curious Coder’s Java Web Frameworks Comparison: Spring MVC, Grails, Vaadin, GWT, Wicket, Play, Struts and JSF and The 2014 Decision Maker’s Guide to Java Web Frameworks.

I also updated all the pretty graphs (which may or may not have any significance) with the latest stats from Dice.com, LinkedIn, StackOverflow and respective mailing lists. Significant changes I found compared to one year ago:

2013 - A Year in Review

2013 was an amazing year: Trish and I got married, celebrated on a 'round-the-world honeymoon and invested in a new 4x4 VW Bus. I finally achieved my goal of vacationing 25% and I got to spend more than two months in the presence of my wonderful parents.

For this Year in Review post, I'll use the same format as I did last year:

• Professional
  • Speaking
  • Projects
• Personal
• 2014

Professional

For the last few years, I've generally had one client per year. That changed this year when my contract with Oracle ended in May. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to develop a cool dashboard application before I finished. I wrote about it in a four-part series.

Using Grunt with AngularJS for Front End Optimization

I'm passionate about front end optimization and have been for years. My original inspiration was Steve Souders and his Even Faster Web Sites talk at OSCON 2008. Since then, I've optimized this blog, made it even faster with a new design, doubled the speed of several apps for clients and showed how to make AppFuse faster. As part of my Devoxx 2013 presentation, I showed how to do page speed optimization in a Java webapp.

I developed a couple AngularJS apps last year. To concat and minify their stylesheets and scripts, I used mechanisms that already existed in the projects. On one project, it was Ant and its concat task. On the other, it was part of a Grails application, so I used the resources and yui-minify-resources plugins.

The Angular project I'm working on now will be published on a web server, as well as bundled in an iOS native app. Therefore, I turned to Grunt to do the optimization this time. I found it to be quite simple, once I figured out how to make it work with Angular. Based on my findings, I submitted a pull request to add Grunt to angular-seed.

Below are the steps I used to add Grunt to my Angular project.

A Webapp Makeover with Spring 4 and Spring Boot

A typical Maven and Spring web application has a fair amount of XML and verbosity to it. Add in Jersey and Spring Security and you can have hundreds of lines of XML before you even start to write your Java code. As part of a recent project, I was tasked with upgrading a webapp like this to use Spring 4 and Spring Boot. I also figured I'd try to minimize the XML.

This is my story on how I upgraded to Spring 4, Jersey 2, Java 8 and Spring Boot 0.5.0 M6.

When I started, the app was using Spring 3.2.5, Spring Security 3.1.4 and Jersey 1.18. The pom.xml had four Jersey dependencies, three Spring dependencies and three Spring Security dependencies, along with a number of exclusions for "jersey-spring".

Upgrading to Spring 4
Upgrading to Spring 4 was easy, I changed the version property to 4.0.0.RC2 and added the new Spring bill of materials to my pom.xml. I also add the Spring milestone repo since Spring 4 won't be released to Maven central until tomorrow.

<dependencyManagement>
    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-framework-bom</artifactId>
            <version>${spring.framework.version}</version>
            <type>pom</type>
            <scope>import</scope>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>
</dependencyManagement>

<repositories>
    <repository>
        <id>spring-milestones</id>
        <url>http://repo.spring.io/milestone</url>
        <snapshots>
            <enabled>true</enabled>
        </snapshots>
    </repository>
</repositories>