Raible Designs

Taming JSF 1.1

A couple weeks ago, I received an e-mail from Ray Davis of University of California, Berkeley. In the e-mail, he provided me a link to his team's Confluence Wiki - where he describes their experience and frustrations with JSF 1.1. I really like how Ray explains the problems they experienced, as well as how they fixed them. The "request thread" scope they created sounds similar to what Spring Web Flow does.

Our experience left us very happy with Spring, moderately happy with Hibernate, and not at all happy with JSF. We did manage to deliver a Pilot Gradebook that told us what we needed to know, but sacrificed reliability, consistency, and scalability to do so.

In January 2005, when we moved to full-time work on the official Sakai 2.0 Gradebook, JSF was our biggest concern.

It's a good read for those looking to jump into JSF. I think JSF 1.2 will solve a lot of problems, but who knows how long it will take to get a RI and MyFaces version of that.

Tapestry 4.0 and AppFuse

It looks like someone might integrate Tapestry 4.0 into AppFuse before I get a chance. Now that Tapestry 4 has reached Beta 3, this seems like an excellent idea to me. My only request is to not make the initial Tapestry 4 integration depend on JDK 5. I plan to start working on AppFuse 2.0 in September and it would be nice to have Tapestry 4 in AppFuse 1.9 as well as 2.0. I'd love to start this next month, but I'm attending OSCON and working on Spring Live for most of the month.

P.S. The main reason I'm writing this post is to send a trackback to the developer who wants to do this work. I was unable to leave a comment on their site, nor find a contact e-mail address.

What happens at my house when you're gone for a week

I was out of town last week and Julie architected and started building a deck while I was gone! We still have quite a bit more work to do - but she did the hard part. Her mom was in town all week, so apparently she was staying up until midnight working on it everyday. Of course I knew this before today, but didn't have any pictures to impress you with.

Down all weekend - what happened?

Some of you might have noticed that this site was down all weekend. I didn't notice it until Saturday morning, at which point I was so beat from traveling last week that I didn't care. I tried to fix it for 5 minutes, then gave up figuring Keith (at KGB Internet) would be able to fix it. I sent him an e-mail asking for help - hoping he could kill a stray process or something. I didn't do any more investigating until Sunday - when it was still down. This site has been extremely stable for the last few months, so the fact that it all just stopped working really had (and still has) me puzzled.

I spent about an hour trying to get things to startup again, to no avail. The problem seemed to be related to the fact that the first time I'd try to hit Roller - it would peg the CPU and the number of database connections would start to skyrocket. Within seconds, the connection pool would become exhausted and Hibernate stack traces would begin to litter my logs. I spent hours doing this dance. At one point, I suspected a DOS attack - why else would the connections skyrocket for no reason?

While I was doing the site-fix dance, I created a read-only copy of the AppFuse Wiki at http://appfuse.org/wiki. When I tried to restart Tomcat on appfuse.org, I got stack traces from the JSPs. Upgrading to the latest stable release of JSPWiki (2.2.28) fixed the problem. However, when I'd start the "wiki" app, it would hang when I tried to request pages. Guessing that this was related to the data volume of pages (11.5 MB gzipped), I cleared out the wiki pages directory and started the wiki context with no data. That worked. I was then able to copy the pages back in and get everything back to normal.

Back to this site. I tried several things last night, including upgrading Roller to 1.2, upgrading Tomcat to 5.5.9 and upgrading the JDK to 5.0. Nothing worked, so I gave up and went to bed. This morning, I decided to try JDK 5 with Roller 1.2 and the instance of Tomcat (5.0.28) that's been working so well for the past few months. Still no dice. But I did manage to get the wiki to spit out the errors it did on appfuse.org. Remembering that this was caused by JDK 5, I went ahead and upgraded JSPWiki to 2.2.28 and did the empty directory dance to get the wiki started. Voila! - everything was fixed!

So that's my story. I still don't know the root cause, but I think the JDK 5 + JSPWiki 2.2.28 combination fixed the problem. I also suspect that something is different today than yesterday b/c the number of database connections didn't immediately spike like it did yesterday. I turned the search feature off as part of my site-fixing dance, so that's still off. I've been afraid to touch anything since I got it all working again. I'll try to turn it back on tonight. In the meantime, I need to figure out how to fix the startup problem with JSPWiki.

Update: I think I figured out the problem - particularly with JSPWiki. I was using JSPWiki's PageViewCountPlugin to track page hits. This file had grown to be just over 59 MB! Deleting the file allowed JSPWiki to start problem-free.

On the downhill slope

Now that I've completed 4 out of the 5 days of training out here, I'm really starting to enjoy San Francisco. Of course, I miss my family and friends back home - but the students I'm training have been very hospitable and enjoyable to work with. They even invited me to join them at Zebulon last night for a "going away" party for one of the team members. I was happy to go, but got scared and left after the car bombs started flowin'. It was weird being at Zebulon and not seeing any Tangosol or Solarmetric monkeys (case in point).

Last night, I had the pleasure of dining with Crazy Bob and his woman at a very cool restaurant down by the bay. It was fun talking about how WebWork sucks and Google is a horrible place to work. Bob's work life seems to be pretty horrendous, but the new baby in a few weeks should turn things around. Good luck you two - I wish you the best.

The weather here is awesome. It seems to hover between 60 and 75, which is perfect IMO. Denver weather sounds awful right now. A good quote from Jason: "It's like I went to sleep Tuesday night and woke up in Phoenix."

One of the fun parts of class today was sharing IDEA tips. The good ones I learned were 1) use the pin icon on the panels to auto-close them when you're not using them (Command+1 to re-open the Project pane) and 2) install the Rearranger Plugin to control where your getters and setters are generated. The only tips I had to offer were Command+N, Command+Shift+N and Command+E - which most IDEA users already know. A lot of folks didn't know about Command+E (recent files), so that was likely my only contribution. Another good one I learned was Command+Shift+Alt+N (variable search). With all of the shortcuts I'm learning for IDEA, it's going to become harder and harder to keep using Eclipse. Got another useful shortcut? I'd love to hear about it!

San Francisco Giants

This evening, Matt Filios and I headed down the street to Giants Stadium to watch the Giants play the Braves. The park was very cool, the Guinness was good - and the Giants won in the bottom of the ninth. It was an awesome game and our 20th row seats behind home plate were pretty nice too.

The DOM Scripting Task Force

It's nice to see that someone is going to help make JavaScript code more standardized.

"The skillset of a front end programmer is a three-legged stool: structure (XHTML) is the first leg, presentation (CSS) the second, and behavior (DOM Scripting) the third," said Peter-Paul Koch, a prominent scripting expert and one of the founders of the task force. "These three legs should be equal, but at the moment the behavior leg is the shortest, least-valued and least-understood of the three, even though the DOM has been a W3C specification for seven years and enjoys relatively solid browser support."

The Web Standards Project did a good job of helping evangelize and promote standards in HTML and CSS - let's hope they can do the same for scripting the DOM.

In San Francisco

I'm in San Francisco this week doing some Spring Training. I flew in this afternoon and I'm staying only a couple blocks away from Moscone center. It's kinda weird being here when JavaOne isn't going on. It's even stranger to be staying on the block next to Kate O'Brien's and the Thirsty Bear. About an hour ago, I got to watch the fog settle in over the buildings - which is always a cool site. I'm looking forward to a fun week of teaching and showing developers how their lives can be vastly simplified by using Spring.

Pretty radio buttons and checkboxes

Philip Howard has a nice tutorial on creating pretty radio buttons and checkboxes using CSS and Javascript. Nice work Philip. Hat tip to CSS Beauty.

It's been a while now...

Today is my birthday and I'm happy to say that I'll be goofing off all day. 18 holes this morning and a former-company reunion party tonight. I'll spare you from my birth story this year. If you really want to read it, you can check out last year's entry.