Raible Designs

PowerBook Dent

A fair amount of PowerBook owners I know have corner dings in their laptops. It usually comes from dropping it in a parking lot or something similar. I've managed to escape this problem for a number of years now. Until today. I'm writing this post on my PowerBook, but my hard drive is currently my iPod because I can't boot up off the regular hard drive. I'm heading to the Apple Store in short order to see if they can fix the hard drive.

At least I have a decent story behind it. I was riding my bike downtown today, and while riding off the curb onto Larimer street - I popped a wheelie. I had too much oomph - and the front wheel started to head for the sky. Normally when this happens, you hop off the back of the bike and you're good to go. Not today, my shoes wouldn't snap out of my pedals - so WHAM, splat, boom. I hit the pavement like Whiley Coyote off a cliff. Right in the middle of the street too - good thing no cars were coming. Most of my left side hurt like a mother and my left elbow has some nice road rash - but nothing out of the ordinary from a bike wreck.

After riding off with stars in my eyes, I headed to Chipotle for lunch. After lunch, I broke out my laptop to work on Spring Live. When I pulled it out, I noticed the left-corner dent and thought, "Not bad, could have been a lot worse." Moments later, all my open applications froze up. When I tried to reboot, I got the blue Mac folder with the ? on it. In other words, "I can't find your hard drive." And so another PowerBook repair adventure begins...

Google is helping developers make more money

From Relax, Bill Gates; It's Google's Turn as the Villain:

Google, Mr. Hoffman said, has caused "across the board a 25 to 50 percent salary inflation for engineers in Silicon Valley" - or at least those in a position to weigh competing offers. A sought-after computer programmer can now expect to make more than $150,000 a year.

Thanks Google - we appreciate the inflation.

Using CruiseControl with Subversion

This morning, I had the pleasure of setting up an AppFuse-based project to run under CruiseControl. Normally, this is very easy to do because I have the CruiseControl setup files and instructions. However, this project uses Subversion instead of CVS. Luckily, Subversion is easy to use and I was able to modify things to work quite easily. Below are the steps you can take to modify your AppFuse project to run under CruiseControl and Subversion.

• Download svant and extract it to your work directory.
• In build.xml, change your "cvs" target to "svn" and change the tasks appropriately.
  
  

      <path id="svn.classpath">
          <fileset dir="svnant-1.0.0-rc1/lib" includes="*.jar"/>
      </path>
          
      <taskdef resource="svntask.properties" classpathref="svn.classpath"/>
      
      <target name="svn">
          <delete dir="checkout/appfuse"/>
          <svn>
              <checkout url="https://svn.java.net/svn/appfuse/trunk" 
                  revision="HEAD" destPath="checkout/appfuse" />
          </svn>
      </target>
  

• Modify the "test" target in build.xml to depend on "svn".
• In config.xml, change the <modificationset> to be <svn LocalWorkingCopy="/home/cc/work/checkout/appfuse"/> instead of the <cvs> equivalent.

The instructions have been documented on the wiki and checked into AppFuse's CVS.

A List Apart 4.0

I've always enjoyed A List Apart, so it's great to see they've got so much new stuff:

New design. New structure. New server. New publishing system powered by Ruby on Rails. As the dog days of summer draw to a close, we present A List Apart 4.0. So buy a tee shirt already.

Beautiful, just beautiful.

What do you want to see at Java in Action?

I'm presenting two sessions at Java in Action in October. The first one is a 3-hour tutorial on Comparing Java Web Frameworks, while the second is about Developing Next Generation Web Applications with Ajax in Spring. I'm in the process of writing both of these, and I'm interested to see what Java developers would like to see in these talks.

The tutorial is probably the toughest one because my normal presentation usually only takes about an hour to deliver. For a similar presentation, see Craig McClanahan's The Evolution of Web Application Architectures. I could talk about the history like Craig does, or I could talk about the different frameworks and their features like I usually do. However, I want something more interactive and fun for attendees. I was thinking of live-coding for 20 minutes with each framework, and showing the differences, but that's not a whole lot of fun either. Maybe I could divide the class into 5 groups, educate each of them on features of the framework, and then we could have some sort of debate? Showing code is always something that developers are interested in, so I'll have to figure out how to work that in as well. If you're planning on attending this tutorial - I'd love to hear suggestions.

I'm also curious on what you'd like to see in the 2nd presentation? I was planning on using Equinox (or possibly AppFuse), to show how to use DWR, Prototype and script.aculo.us. A couple of examples I'm thinking of showing are in-page updates and sortable/pageable tables. Any other cool effects or tricks you'd like to see?

Sorry for the cross-post from JRoller, but I wanted to reach the largest possible audience. Please leave comments on the JRoller entry.

Hiking at Red Rocks

Prettying up JSPWiki's URLs

Recently, AppFuse user Charlse Li sent me an e-mail with a "PostfixURLConstructor" class designed to pretty up JSPWiki's URL. With the patch he sent, I was able to change URLs from /wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=AppFuse to /wiki/AppFuse.html. Applying the patch was quite easy, but maintaining backwards compatibility and security required a little more work. Below are the steps I went through to get everything working properly:

• Download postfixurlconstructor.zip and extract to your hard-drive. Copy the "com" directory to your wiki/WEB-INF/classes directory.
• Change the <url-pattern> of the WikiServlet in web.xml from /wiki/* to *.html.
• Add the following two lines to your WEB-INF/jspwiki.properties file:
  
  jspwiki.urlConstructor = PostfixURLConstructor
jspwiki.PostfixURLConstructor.postfix = .html

This is all you need to do to change the default URL schema. However, if you're like me and you've had a JSPWiki instance setup for awhile, you'll need to maintain backwards-compatibility. I wanted to make sure the old URLs mapped to the new ones. In addition, the "edit URL" changed from Edit.jsp?page=PageName to pageName.html?do=Edit. Since web.xml and <security-constraint> can't contain regular expressions, I used the ultra-cool UrlRewriteFilter to solve both issues. Here's the steps I went through to configure it properly:

• Download UrlRewriteFilter 2.5.1 and extract the JAR to your WEB-INF/lib directory.
• Change your web.xml to use a 2.3 DTD instead of a 2.2 DTD and add the filter and filter-mapping to web.xml.
• Create a WEB-INF/urlrewrite.xml file with the following contents:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCENGINE urlrewrite PUBLIC "-//tuckey.org//DTD UrlRewrite 2.5//EN"
    "http://tuckey.org/res/dtds/urlrewrite2.5.dtd">

<urlrewrite>
    <rule>
        <from>^/Wiki.jsp\?page=(.*)$</from>
        <to type="redirect">$1.html</to>
    </rule>

    <rule>
        <from>^/(.*).html\?do=Edit$</from>
        <to type="redirect">Edit.jsp?page=$1</to>
    </rule>
</urlrewrite>

That's it - restart your server and you should be good to go. Thanks for the patch and instructions Charlse!

Update: There does seem to be a couple of issues. The 1st is that none of the attachments are resolving correctly (example). The 2nd that when I try to edit a page, it always shows up with the Main page's text. I'm not going to back out the change just yet, but I will if I can't fix it in the next several hours.

Update 2: I ended up backing out this change, but left in a forward from *.html to Wiki.jsp?page=$1 so all URLs in this post should still work. The "not being able to edit" was the major reason I rolled back to the old URL schema. The attachment issue seems to be related to my browser's cache. Clearing it fixed the problem.

Wicket is the most widely used Java Web Framework

According to this post, Wicket is the most widely used Java web framework. While I believe his statements are true, IMO it's only true in the context of this guy's post. My guess is that most of the folks that read his post were Wicket users, or somehow the Wicket Team got wind of this and told users to e-mail this guy. The main reason I don't believe that Wicket is the most popular is because it's so new. I do think it's an up and coming framework that may become the most popular, but I don't think it's there yet.

So, to answer this question, I believe that claiming Wicket to be the most widely is Just Good Guerilla PR. To put some numbers behind that, here's some graphs showing mailing list traffic for the various Java web frameworks.

Granted, these are just indicators of the number of users - but I believe they are a good indicator. One interesting note about these stats is that Wicket's mailing list traffic has increased significantly in the past few months. Ironically, here's what one of the Wicket developers had to say about this statistic about a month ago:

... who says having a lists that has a lot of traffic is a good thing? It might just as well be an indication of a too-hard-to-understand framework having insufficient documention.

In the past couple of months, I've spoke in front of 25+ Java developers on 4 different occasions to talk about web frameworks. I've asked those developers which frameworks they've used, or plan on using. Struts is still the most widely used, with WebWork and Tapestry the least used. Surprisingly, JSF seemed to be getting no traction among the the audiences I spoke to. Even more surprising (to me at least) was that the most popular web framework continues to be the in-house framework. The overwhelming majority of the developers I've talked to aren't even using open-source web frameworks.

Integrating Lucene with Hibernate

The code_poet has an interesting post on using a Hibernate interceptor to index objects for Lucene searching. I've been thinking about integrating Lucene into AppFuse (or at least providing a tutorial) for quite some time. Hopefully this post will serve as a starting point when I do. I wonder how much the Lucene code can be simplified by the Spring support in the Spring Modules project?

Roller 2.0 looks good!

Dave has posted some screenshots of Roller 2.0. I have to say, the new UI is a big improvement, both with colors and fonts. I hope to try 2.0 out today and hopefully get it installed at Virtuas in the next week or two. I can't wait until this release is installed on JRoller - it'll be very cool when many people can participate in a SourceBeat blog. Nice work Dave!

FWIW, I plan on hanging out in #appfuse and #roller on irc.freenode.net this week. Stop by and say hi if you have questions about either project.