Raible Designs

Welcome to 2005

Happy New Year y'all! 2004 was a great year for this website. It was also an awesome year personally. I have a new baby, a new house and a new bus. I learned way more than I thought I would about Spring, WebWork, Tapestry and JSF. And I spoke at a couple conferences, which I certainly didn't anticipate. In 2005, I hope to step back a bit and spend less time working and more time being a good father and husband. Restoring the bus is my major goal I hope to accomplish this year.

Here's this site's stats for 2004:

[ANN] Equinox 1.2 Released

This release adds support for iBATIS, JDO (JPOX), Spring JDBC and OJB. For detailed documentation on how to use these frameworks with Spring, see Chapter 7 of Spring Live or the Spring Reference Documentation.

For a detailed comparison of the web frameworks included in Equinox, see Chapter 11 of Spring Live (to be released in mid January 2005). Detailed release notes are below:

- Added CruiseControl files and documentation to extras/cruisecontrol.
- Fixed export issue in userList.jsp for displaytag. Birthday should now export w/o any issues.
- Added deployment descriptor for Geronimo with Jetty.
- Added JUnit and UI tests for JSF and Tapestry.
- Added installations for Velocity and FreeMarker with Spring MVC.
- Added installations for iBATIS, JDO, OBJ and Spring JDBC. Hibernate is the default.
- Dependent packages upgraded:

• Cargo 0.4
• DisplayTag 1.0 RC2
• Hibernate 2.1.6
• Spring 1.1.3
• StrutsTestCase 2.1.3

- Dependent packages added:

• FreeMarker 2.3
• iBATIS 2.0.8
• JPOX 1.1.0-alpha-4
• OJB 1.0.1
• Url Rewrite Filter 1.2
• Velocity 1.4

Download. For more information about installing the various options, see the README.txt file.

Demos are available at the links below:

• Spring
• JSF
• Struts
• Tapestry
• WebWork

NOTE: I didn't upgrade to Hibernate 2.1.7 because it doesn't create the HSQLDB database tables when the JVM starts up.

New AppFuse Developer: Nathan Anderson

Nathan Anderson has been a huge help on the AppFuse mailing list lately. He's also setup an IRC Channel and keeps the wiki up-to-date with all kinds of tips and tricks.

I've asked Nathan to join AppFuse as a Committer and he's accepted the offer. Welcome aboard Nathan!

Happy Holidays!

We're heading for the airport in the next hour. I stayed up and tried to finish off Chapter 11. I still have a few more hours to go, but I made a good dent in it. Our flight leaves in 2 hours (6 a.m.) and we'll be in West Palm Beach, FL until the 31st. Should be a fun day - no sleep, 2 kids and we don't arrive until 3 this afternoon.

Enjoy your holidays - I know I will (after today is over with).

Increasing Productivity

I have a new plan for increasing my productivity. With any luck, she'll be writing Java by the time she's 3.

What's up with my PowerBook?

My PowerBook seems to be dying a slow death. When I put it into hibernate mode (by closing it), often it won't startup again. I open the lid and nothing happens. I often have to hold down the power button, power it off, and then restart it.

What's this mean? It means I'm rebooting the damn thing once or twice a day. It's especially frustrating when I'm about to give a talk at JUG meetings or conferences. I get everything setup (IDEs open, Keynote open, etc.), close it as I walk to the front, and then after I plug it in and open it - nothing happens!. This leads to me spending the next 5 minutes rebooting and opening everything again. It's extremely frustrating - especially since it's such a slow-ass machine. This week, I've headed to the coffee shop (3 blocks away) several times to write, and it seems to happen every time I open it. Each time I think, "Did I save before I closed it?" Luckily, I have Word set to save every minute, so it hasn't been a problem yet.

I believe this happened when I first I bought the machine. However, it was only a couple of times per month. Now that it's become a daily event, and I think it's time to take it in. Has anyone else had similar issues?

The good news is I'm back in love with my PowerBook after using it so much this week. It's really an excellent laptop - especially for writing. I hooked it up to my 23" for the first time in a few months today and I thought, "I really need to get a G5." In reality, I don't want a G5 - my Windows box suites me just fine. What I want is a faster PowerBook - when's the next revision?

Did you make the list?

It would've been nice if the Spread Firefox team had let folks know before the Firefox Ad was published. But oh well, shit happens. At least I made the list (PDF).

New Gig?

There's a possibility that I'll be looking for new gig starting in January. If you're looking for some help, let me know.

If you could add another framework to AppFuse, which would it be?

If you could add another web framework option to AppFuse, which one would it be and why? Please keep in mind it already includes Struts, Spring, WebWork, JSF and Tapestry.

AppFuse Tip: Backup and Restore Data with DbUnit

One of the nice things about having DbUnit integrated into AppFuse is you can easily import and export data. I've often used this feature to export a test database (or even production) into my development environment to try and reproduce data-related errors. Here's how to do it:

1. Run "ant db-export -Ddatabase.host=otherhost". This exports all the data into an XML file named "db-export.xml" in the current directory.
2. Run "ant db-load -Dfile=db-export.xml" to import the data into your local database.

I've used the db-export task for other things too - like populating the database through the UI and then updating the test data. All you have to do for this is to copy the db-export.xml file to metadata/sql/sample-data.xml.

NOTES:

• For Oracle, you need to add a "schema" attribute to all the <dbunit> tasks in build.xml. You also need to do this for the "db-export" target for PostgreSQL.
• If you want to limit the tables exported (i.e. from a production database), simply nest a bunch of <table name="table_name"/> elements inside the <export> element.
• If you get errors about foreign key constraints when running "db-load" after "db-export" - you need to re-arrange the order of your tables in the imported XML file.
• To clear out tables before your tests, add an empty <table name="table_name"/> element to sample-data.xml.