Raible Designs

SpringOne 2GX 2015: My Presentations on Comparing Hot JavaScript Frameworks and NoXML

Last week, I had the pleasure of traveling to Washington, DC to speak at the annual SpringOne 2GX conference. I was pretty stressed for the last few weeks because I had to create two new presentations from scratch, and both had to be 90 minutes long. I was also hoping to finish the JHipster Book before the conference started. I was able to finish both presentations in the nick of time, but did not find the time to write the last chapter in the JHipster Book.

The first presentation was titled Comparing Hot JavaScript Frameworks: AngularJS, Ember.js and React.js. I started by revisiting the Comparing JVM Web Frameworks talk I did at vJUG last February. I explained how I think traditional web frameworks are no longer relevant in 2015, but I do believe server-side rendering is still very relevant. From there, I used Yevgeniy Brikman’s framework scorecard (from his Node.js vs. Play Framework presentation) to rank each framework by a number of different criteria. You can see the final results on slide 160. Since the scores were so close, I believe you could tweak some scores a bit (or add weights to the different criteria) and make any of the frameworks come out on top.

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

I started writing the second presentation a week before I had to deliver it. On Thursday, September 10th, I stayed up late, trying to figure out how to create a good presentation on NoXML and finish the last part of the JHipster Book. Then it came to me, I needed to parallelize and do them both at the same time. I decided to compare AppFuse (which is similar to a legacy Spring application with lots of XML) to JHipster (which hardly contains any XML).

I wrote a 10-page Google Doc on how I planned to do this, then went rafting and camping with my family for the weekend. I finished most of the presentation on Monday night, but then realized the presentation wouldn't be long enough to fill 90 minutes. So I hunkered down at midnight, created a new AppFuse application and removed a bunch of its XML. This took me until 3:30am, and I was able to accomplish the following tasks:

• Spring XML to Java
• Spring Security Configuration to Java
• web.xml to WebApplicationInitializer
• Spring MVC to Java
• Migrated to Spring Boot
• Maven to Groovy

I was pretty pumped when I completed my final goal: converting to Spring Boot and getting a test to pass. I made commits to an appfuse-noxml project on GitHub as I accomplished each step. You can see all the changes in the project's commit log. While I'd figured everything out, I still needed to complete the presentation. Luckily, I found time to do this the night before, the morning of, and in the final hour before I had to deliver the talk. You can imagine my relief when I was done delivering both talks.

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

While I didn't get to spend much time at the conference, I did have a lot of fun while I was there. I got to meet some new folks, reconnect with old friends, and enjoy beers and dinner with a smiling crew on Thursday night. The Broncos victory late that night was the icing on the cake.

Setting up a Minecraft Server in the Cloud

My 10-year-old son, Jack, is a huge fan of Minecraft. If you let him, he'd play all day, skipping meals and having a blast. It's most fun to hear him playing with his sister or his best friend. I'm amazed it's captured his attention for so long; well over two years. Both my kids loved it when Scott Davis taught a Devoxx4Kids Denver class on Server-side Minecraft programming.

We haven't had any Devoxx4Kids Denver workshops this year, but that's about to change. First of all, I'm happy to announce we're working with the Rocky Mountain Oracle Users Group to have a Day of Family Coding Fun at Elitch Gardens this Friday. There will be a workshop on Raspberry Pi and I'll be doing a demonstration on how to setup a Minecraft Server in the cloud. Next weekend, we'll be doing a more in-depth Minecraft Workshop at Devoxx4Kids Denver. If you'd like to join us please RSVP. Since having your own Minecraft Server is a fun thing for kids, and useful for parents, I figured I'd document how to do it here.

First of all, let me say that I'm standing on the shoulders of giants. When I first setup a Minecraft server, I used Ben Garton's Setting up a free Minecraft server in the cloud - part 1 as well as part 2 and 3. I also found Aaron Bell's How to run a Minecraft server on Amazon EC2 to be quite useful.

Without further ado, here's you how to setup a Minecraft Server on Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2015!

Best Practices for using Foundation with AngularJS

I was recently tasked with doing some research to figure out the best way to use Foundation with AngularJS. Goals for this research included:

1. Identify use cases of Foundation for Sites vs Foundation for Apps and recommend when to use each.
2. Look at pros and cons of using AngularJS with Foundation for Sites.

I'm writing this blog post to get feedback from you, fellow web developers, on your experience with Foundation. Have you tried using Foundation for Sites with AngularJS? If so, did you experience any pain?

From what I can tell, it looks like Foundation for Apps (FA) was created because folks had issues making AngularJS and Foundation 5 play nicely together. The Next Foundation explains why FA was created. Reddit's web_design zone has quite a few comments related to this article.

From there, I found a few ZURB blog posts that describe FA's three main advantages over Foundation for Sites (FS):

1. A New Grid
2. Motion UI
3. AngularJS Integration

This thread on the Foundation forums seems to indicate that FA would be good for developing applications while FS would be good for an intranet built on WordPress (since it's more of a website than a webapp).

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:

Developing Services with Apache Camel - Part I: The Inspiration

In early May, my client asked me to work on a project migrating from IBM Message Broker 6.1 to an open source solution. Their reason was simple, the IBM solution was end of life and outdated. To prove how out of date it was, the Windows version required Windows XP to run. IBM WebSphere Message Broker has been replaced by IBM Integration Bus in recent years, but no upgrade path existed.

At first, I didn't want to do the project. I was hired as a Modern Java/UI Architect and I had enjoyed my first month upgrading libraries, making recommendations and doing a bit of UI performance work. I hadn't done much with ESBs and I enjoy front-end development a lot more than backend. It took me a couple days to realize they were willing to pay me to learn. That's when I decided to clutch up, learn how to do it all, and get the job done. This article is the first in a series on what I learned during this migration project.

My approach for figuring out how everything worked was similar to working on any new application. I get the source code, install the software necessary to run it, and run it locally so I can interact with it.

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?

Rafting the Yampa through Dinosaur National Monument

In January, my friend Brice sent out an email to a bunch of folks asking us to apply for a river permit lottery. He sent us links to lotteries for Dinosaur National Monument - Yampa River and Desolation Gray - Green River. There were 10 of us on the email and we all applied for both permits. In mid-February, I found out I won the Yampa permit and the trip planning began. This was a huge deal for some since they'd been trying to get this permit for 10 years.

When we got all the details worked out, we were scheduled to launch on Saturday, May 31 and take out on Wednesday, June 4. Our put-in was Deerlodge Park and take-out, Split Mountain. If you're interested, you can see a map.

Over the next four months, many emails flew between us (33 pages if printed out) and much planning ensued. We had a planning BBQ, endured a permit-award-never-sent-fiasco and I tried to back out for Abbie's 5th grade continuation ceremony. Since I was the permit holder (and had to go), the crew convinced me it was a trip of a lifetime. We left Abbie in Denver for her ceremony and took Jack with us. When we launched on May 31, we had 21 people, 8 rafts and one inflatable kayak. Of the crew, 6 were children (aged 6 - 11).

Spring Break in Florida: Golf, Beaches and Boats!

Florida is a beautiful state, with sandy beaches, excellent fishing, fun people and a great enthusiasm for golf. When I dreamed up Trish, I knew she'd have an awesome family, but I never expected her parents to have a house on a golf course. Trish's grandma, Claire Stanley, is a legend in her own right. I've never met her, but I knew I loved her when Trish's dad first told me about her "layered shots". When I saw Claire's name listed several times on the walls of the The Country Club of Naples, a deep respect came over me. Claire picked out her house on the 17th hole (Trish's favorite number) of the Country Club in 1966, when the establishment was founded. My bus was born in 1966.

Today, Trish's parents have turned it into a golf and relaxation oasis, complete with beautiful orchid gardens, a sweet pool and Japanese decorations from the country where they first met.

As a golf enthusiast, I'm embarrassed that we've only visited her parents in Naples once before. We bought Abbie and Jack golf clubs last year for Jack's birthday, and they both like to play the game. To make up for our lack of visiting family in Florida, we took our kids on a golf vacation for this year's Spring Break.

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.