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JSP and JSF Early Review Drafts Available

The Early Draft Reviews are now available for the new JSP and JSF specifications. Read More ».

Speaking at MySQL Users Conference

Looks like I'll be speaking at the MySQL User Conference in April 2005. This conference is at the Santa Clara Convention center, where SD West was last year.

Congratulations! You have been accepted as a presenter for
the MySQL Users Conference 2005 at the Westin Santa Clara, Santa Clara,
California, April 18, 2005 - April 21, 2005.

The following has been accepted as a 3 hour tutorial class for the
event:

"Developing Test-Driven Web Applications With Spring and Hibernate"

The tutorial classes are scheduled for Monday, April 18, and we will
send the exact time schedule shortly.

They wanted a fancier title than all the AppFuse ones I had cooked up - that's why it's titled Developing Test-Driven Web Applications With Spring and Hibernate. Now I just need to figure out what kind of app to develop in 3 hours. With AppGen and AppFuse Generator, it takes a lot of fun out of the development process. Or maybe it puts the fun back in?

If there's a JUG nearby that'd like to know a bit more about AppFuse or Spring, let me know.

[DJUG] JMS and Spring

Tonight's DJUG should be a fun one. First, I hope to learn some JMS tips and tricks from Chris Huston then I'm doing a presentation on Spring. I asked the group what they wanted to know about Spring last week and I got a wide range of answers. There should be a good mix of newbies and experienced Spring users. I'll give you a link to my presentation, but I have to warn you that there's not much there. I tend to show a lot of code in and do demos when I present, so my presentations tend to be kinda thin. My two goals for tonight are 1) keep it under an hour so we can all get to the bar and 2) inspire Spring-mania among the crowd.

   Download Presentation »

[ANN] AppFuse 1.7 Released

This release adds support for JSF/MyFaces and Tapestry as web framework options. AppGen has been updated to work with both of these frameworks and I added new tutorials as well. You can read about my integration experience in a previous post.

After I released AppFuse 1.6.1, I knew the only way I was going to get Tapestry and JSF support done was if I stayed close to the code and started the next release. I never envisioned developing the Tapestry and JSF versions of AppFuse at the same time, but it turned out to be very efficient. If you want a comparison of all the different web frameworks in AppFuse (and AppFuse Light) - you can checkout my Comparing Web Frameworks presentation. If you want more in-depth coverage - it'll be in the next Chapter of Spring Live.

• Download
• Release Notes
• Learn more about AppFuse
• Live Demos:
  • Struts + Spring + Hibernate
  • Spring + iBATIS
  • WebWork + Spring + Hibernate
  • JSF + Spring + Hibernate
  • Tapestry + Spring + Hibernate

If you find any issues, let us know.

Integrating JSF and Tapestry into AppFuse

Well it looks like I accomplished my goal for the year: integrate Spring MVC, WebWork, Tapestry and JSF into AppFuse. I decided to integrate JSF and Tapestry at the same time so I could get a good feel for their differences. Also, I figured there would be a lot of similarities I could re-use between the two. I found this to be a great idea. Often I'd use the first framework as a template and the second would go much quicker. It turned out to be a good strategy because I often found bugs in the first while working on the second. I really enjoyed developing with both JSF and Tapestry - here's my notes from my development marathon over the last week:

Tapestry

• For Tapestry, I created a patched version of the 3.0 source. I did this because I wanted some non-standard things, like friendly URLs, a global properties file and a popup calendar that works with IE/XHTML. The Tapestry Community was gracious enough to supply the source - so I didn't have to do much patching myself.
• Pure HTML, like Tapestry has, is ssoooooo much nicer to work with. The syntax highlighting in HomeSite is fully functional again! I've been an HTML developer since 94 and I felt like it was 97 all over again - when we didn't write apps, just static HTML.
• Overriding the default Tapestry ValidationDelegate was pretty easy - and there's even an example in Tapestry in Action. I was able to add asterisks for required fields and error messages next to the fields fairly easily. Erik Hatcher also hooked me up with a Label component for non-validating fields.
• For the contrib:Table component, you can easily i18n column headings by using "keyName:propertyName" as the column value. However, if your keyName has a period in it (i.e. user.username), you can't override the ValueBlock b/c user.username is an invalid OGNL expression. I patched Tapestry to solve this.
• The ability to use <span key="keyName"/> to render i18n keys is awesome. So simple.
• Tapestry has a very rich validation framework that requires virtually no configuration. No setting up your resource bundle, etc. It just works. Client-side too.
• It would be nice to show all the client-side validation errors in a single dialog instead of one-at-a-time (WebWork does this too).

JSF/MyFaces

• I like how you don't have to create mappings - just link to the .jsp with an .html extension.
• For some reason, when I save a user and server-side validation occurs, the user's username and roles disappear. Good thing client-side validation is available.
• It was easy to override the Labels to add asterisks thanks to some code from David Geary on the MyFaces mailing list. In order to make it work, I had to ditch my HTML <table> and use an <h:panelGrid>. Now my JSP is Tag Soup. I think JSF is going to have to ditch JSP if they want to get anywhere. Hopefully JSF will soon support HTML templates like Tapestry and parse them with a Servlet Filter or something.
• It's unfortunate that I have to specify a "styleClass" attribute on all my <h:message> tags - I'd like to just set a default for these tags (others too).
• I ditched JSF's message setting and opted for setting my own List of messages in the session and then grabbing them out with a MessageFilter. This was so much easier to implement than the standard JSF message setting stuff.
• I'd rather not have to specify <f:loadBundle> at the top of each page. It's going to be the same for my whole app - it'd be nice to set a default bundle and variable name that all tags could access.
• It was quite a bit easier to integrate JSF into AppFuse than Tapestry. This was mainly due to the fact that I could re-use a lot of the JSP code, as well as the WebWork Actions are pretty close to the JSF Managed Beans.
• Spring Rocks - it never caused any issues with either framework. I just wish MyFaces wouldn't warn that it can't find a variable that it's already found. I had to turn logging down to FATAL so I don't get any meaningless messages from MyFaces.
• With JSF, why do I have to specify the supported locales in faces-config.xml? Why can't it look up the available bundles like JSTL with Spring/WebWork/Struts does?

So after all of this, which is my favorite? Unfortunately, there is no clear winner. They're both pretty cool, but not that much better than Struts, Spring or WebWork. In reality, I like them all, that's why they're all integrated into AppFuse!

Update: I forgot to mention that I was very pleased with the latest version of Canoo's WebTest. It now uses HtmlUnit at its core and its JavaScript support has vastly improved. I wouldn't have been able to do integration testing on the JSF version without this (updated) library. Not only did it work great, but it found XHTML issues in my code - that rocks! The JSF and Tapestry versions of AppFuse are the only ones that run Canoo tests with JavaScript turned on. This is mainly because the old tests worked fine w/o JavaScript and I didn't want to break them.

The Future of the J2EE Web Tier

There's a chat in a few hours on the future of the J2EE Web Tier. I'll be sitting in and hoping to learn something. The alignment of the JSP EL and JSF EL will be nice - but we really want HTML Templating for JSF - like Tapestry. After developing Tag Soup JSPs for JSF and HTML-editor-friendly pages for Tapestry, I can say there's definitely a big difference. Tapestry templates are much easier to read. However, if you have an existing JSP app, you can migrate to JSF easier.

AppFuse - Tapestry and JSF Support in CVS

I've finished the coding part of adding JSF (MyFaces) and Tapestry support to AppFuse. This weekend was spent knee-deep in XDoclet templates - updating AppGen for these two frameworks. I still need to write up a couple of blog posts about integration and update the tutorials, but the hard part is done.

If you're an early-adopter, feel free to check it out. The QuickStart Guide should help you get the source from CVS. I hope to release version 1.7 later this week.

Helluva Week

It's been a rough one this week. Mainly due to AppFuse. This is the 4th (or maybe 5th) night this week I'm up late working on it. Tonight will be an average night, turning in at 5:30 a.m.. Last night was 6:00 a.m. Abbie likes to wake me up at 8.

The good news is that I have the JSF and Tapestry integration done. I just finished up writing all the programmer tests for the beans/pages and tomorrow (today?) I'll work on Canoo WebTests and installation/appgen/documentation. With any luck I'll finish up and release this weekend.

Next week, I get to write a chapter for Spring Live on MVC Framework integration. I'm also talking about Spring at the local Denver JUG on Wednesday night.

I can't wait for Christmas - 2 weeks in Sunny Southern Florida.

When GMail and Firefox Suck

For the most part, both GMail and Firefox rock. However, when you're typing a long e-mail in GMail and you hit Ctrl+R instead of Ctrl+T, it really sucks. Rather than opening a new tab, I lost my whole e-mail message. Damn. Maybe it's time to go back to the desktop client. I've lost a few e-mails with GMail, but I don't think I've ever lost one with Outlook or Thunderbird. I guess it's time to setup GMail's POP3 access.

Fix CSS max-width in IE

Anthony has a good post on using this minmax script to fix a CSS bug in IE. If you're using the Sunsets theme (like I am) with Roller - you might want to add this to your page templates. I've patched this site - thanks Anthony!

To patch your theme, create a page with name "_minmax.js" and link "minmax.js", populate it with the script contents and then add the following in your theme's <head>:

    <script type="text/javascript" src="$ctxPath/page/$userName/minmax.js"></script>

You can also create CSS pages for your site using a similar technique. While we're talking about IE bugs, you might want to know that <script/> doesn't work in IE, that's why you always have to add the closing </script> element.