Raible Designs

The best part about the Colorado Software Summit

The best part about the Colorado Software Summit has been the fact that I can travel home at night. Keystone is beautiful, the conference is well organized - but hopping in my car and sleeping in my own bed last night was awesome. This morning, I'll be heading to breakfast with the family, taking Abbie to school and then driving back up for some dynamite sessions this afternoon.

Tom Bender is speaking at 1:00 on "Mule - A Detailed Look at an Enterprise Service Bus", followed by Bruce's "Apache Geronimo Architecture and Community". I'm staying with both of these guys in a nice condo on the lake (across from the conference center) so it should be fun to hear them speak. I'll do my best to blog both sessions.

My favorite quote from the Colorado Software Summit

Here's a good quote from John Soyring's keynote on Monday:

... Geronimo is a subset of Websphere ...

I especially enjoyed this b/c I was sitting next to Bruce Snyder, one of the founders of Geronimo.

This quote seems to have been backed up yesterday with IBM's release of WebSphere Community Edition.

Spring MVC the most popular web framework among AppFuse users

At the beginning of October, I did an informal poll on the AppFuse mailing list to see which web framework users were developing their applications with. Surprisingly, Spring came out on top, and the component frameworks (JSF and Tapestry) are the least used. I find this interesting b/c AppFuse lowers the barriers and reduces the learning curve for all of these frameworks.

If you're an AppFuse user and didn't respond on the mailing list, please leave a comment with the web framework you're using.

On a related note, I noticed that java.net added RSS Feeds for mailing lists today. This means if you have an RSS Reader, you can subscribe to the AppFuse user mailing list.

Heh, I just subscribed and there's no messages in the feed. Maybe this feature needs a little more work.

Keystone

Heading to the Summit

In a couple of hours (after my fraternity's annual Alumni vs. Actives softball game), I'll be heading up to Keystone to attend the Colorado Software Summit. I'm pretty excited about going; it's at one of my favorite places to ski, and it's the first time I'll be attending. I've heard great things about this conference, and I'm sure it'll live up to its reputation.

On the other hand, I have a good case of the "it figures". I caught a nasty cold from the kids a couple of days ago and it's sure to be in full force by tomorrow. With any luck, I'll lose my voice sometime before a talk this week - or perhaps cough my way through one of them. Do you have a good story about speaking when you're sick? If so, please share.

Pennies in the Radio

Julie took her car in to the stereo shop today b/c the radio was cutting out every once in a while. Actually, it was better than that - it'd quit working when she'd drive over a bump, and then start working again when she hit the next bump. The stereo shop called a few minutes ago to tell us what the problem was: someone has stuffed pennies into the radio, and they'd somehow fallen down and were shorting out the wiring below. I wonder who that someone was?

If you have a good "my life as a parent" story, I'd love to hear it.

What's a good DVI KVM?

I'm looking to get a KVM Switch for my home office. I used to have one when I had 2 19" Dell Monitors and it worked quite well. However, since I got a 23" Cinema Display, I haven't had one. This means that if I ever work on my PowerBook, I don't get to enjoy the comfort of a keyboard, mouse and huge monitor. This needs to change.

I bought a DVI KVM switch when I first got the monitor a year ago, and it didn't work. Apple's DVI connector was too big and didn't fit in the switch. So now I'm looking again - do you know of any that work well with a Cinema Display?

MySQLDialect vs. MySQLInnoDBDialect

I've used Hibernate's MySQLDialect ever since I started using Hibernate and MySQL. However, I noticed with Hibernate 3 there's a couple of new MySQL Dialects in town: MySQLInnoDBDialect and MySQLMyISAMDialect. Using MySQLDialect still seems to work fine for me - and it handles transaction rollbacks when I'm using InnoDB types.

What's the point of these fine-grained dialects? Should they be used when possible, or does MySQLDialect default to one of these based on MySQL metadata? IMO, Hibernate's javadocs could stand to have a little more "doc" action. Maybe I'm just not looking in the right place for the answer to this question.

What's the best way to integrate Ajax into a Java webapp?

I received an e-mail over the weekend asking how to integrating Ajax into into the various web frameworks covered in my Java Web Framework Comparison Whitepaper. Below is my reply:

The best thing that I've seen is to use DWR, Prototype and Scriptaculous.
These will work with all web frameworks, and if you're using Spring on the backend -
DWR makes it easy to expose your beans as JavaScript objects.

Also, there's a number of tag library solutions that greatly simplify things:

  http://javawebparts.sf.net
  http://ajaxanywhere.sf.net
  http://ajaxtags.sf.net

I haven't used the first one, but I have used AjaxAnywhere and saw a demo of
AjaxTags from its developers.  They both look like they could be very useful.

For those of you using Ajax in your Java webapps - what's your advice? Do you use these same libraries or other ones?

This post was partially motivated by my desire to reiterate things that are so obvious.

Roller gets some respect

From A Baggins Under the Hill (nice looking theme BTW):

There's a surprising (or perhaps not so surprising) number of PHP programs, intricate ones at that, that have developers who didn't bother to abstract away the database layer, and wrote DB-vendor-dependent queries. That's a pretty horrible thing to do, since it ties you quite firmly down to one DB (in many cases MySQL). The SQL code is often very tightly integrate with the display code; it's bad enough in the business layer, but the view layer as well? Good gods.
...
Roller, on the other hand, uses things like Hibernate to abstract away queries from the underlying DB implementations, and Velocity to separate out the display logic from the business logic. And blogging software does have business logic, or a model; blog entries and categories and tags and authentication and the manipulation thereof are not simple. As a result, I see features being added to Roller that I'm surprised to see happening so quickly.

As far as solving the issue with Tomcat 5.5, that's just a matter of updating your $CATALINA_HOME/conf/Catalina/localhost/roller.xml file. Here's what I use for Roller on PostgreSQL:

<Context path="/roller" docBase="roller" debug="99" reloadable="false"
    antiJARLocking="true" antiResourceLocking="false">

    <Realm className="org.apache.catalina.realm.JDBCRealm" debug="99"
          driverName="org.postgresql.Driver"
       connectionURL="jdbc:postgresql://localhost/roller"
      connectionName="postgres" connectionPassword="postgres"
           userTable="rolleruser" userNameCol="username" userCredCol="passphrase"
       userRoleTable="userrole" roleNameCol="rolename" />

    <Resource name="jdbc/rollerdb" auth="Container" type="javax.sql.DataSource"
              maxActive="20" maxIdle="10" maxWait="100"
              driverClassName="org.postgresql.Driver"
              username="postgres" password="postgres"
              url="jdbc:postgresql://localhost/roller"/>

    <Resource name="mail/Session" auth="Container" type="javax.mail.Session"
              mail.smtp.host="localhost" />
</Context>