Raible Designs

Moving

Today is move-in day to our remodeled house. The final trim installation and a the last few doors should be done sometime this afternoon. It's hard to believe it's almost done. It's been a long journey since construction started in March. There were a few interesting times along the way, like the garage demolition and basement wall falling off. It's tough to mention it, but it wouldn't be right to talk about this finished house without taking a moment to remember Bob the Builder. He would be smiling from ear to ear if he was here today.

It's been 7 months since we moved into our current house. After living in sub-1000 sq. ft. houses for the last 15 months, it'll be nice to get some space again. Total square footage on new house? Somewhere around 2500 square feet! Here's a comparison between old and new (click to zoom in):

Old House

New House

Comparing Web Frameworks: Equinox, Ant and Maven

Next week I'll be putting together the sample apps for my Comparing Web Frameworks talk. They're going to be pretty simple. They'll be created using Equinox and will closely resemble the MyUsers app created in Chapter 2 of Spring Live. That is, they'll just be simple webapps that allow you to CRUD a database table. MyUsers just edits a user's first and last name, but I'll probably add a "birthday" field to demonstrate Date handling. Even though it's simple, it'll have a pageable/sortable list, validation and success messages - which is what most apps need. Of course, if I can't get X feature to work, I'll make sure and highlight that in my talk.

Equinox is based on Ant and works quite well. However, I have a Maven version of Equinox that I developed for Open Logic this summer. They've been gracious enough to let me release this as open source. BTW, if you're looking for a rich set of Maven sample apps - Blue Glue 3.1 will have a few (including multi-project). Blue Glue also contains detailed documentation on each of these sample apps I'm creating for this talk.

So the question is - should I release a Mavenized version of Equinox? Or should I modify Equinox to contain and allow you to use both Ant and Maven? The problem with allowing both is I'd likely give up everyone's favorite Maven feature - downloading dependencies. I personally have grown to loath this feature b/c repositories are hardly ever up-to-date and I spend a lot more time trying to get repositories updated (or creating my own) than I would downloading the JAR. Spring uses both and simply points Maven to its local JARs. That's probably what I'd do.

Of course, the easiest (and KISS) thing to do is to use Equinox with Ant and not complicate things. However, I'm willing to put in a couple hours to try and make Equinox allow both. Regardless, I'm willing to release a Mavenized version of Equinox - if there's interest.

P.S. Don't forget to thank the Open Logic guys for making this all possible. I wouldn't have been able to do this talk without their generous donation.

AppFuse's License

Someone sent me an e-mail today and made me aware that the Commons Attribute License that AppFuse uses only applies to documents and such:

"Collective Work" means a work, such as a periodical issue, anthology or encyclopedia, in which the Work in its entirety in unmodified form, along with a number of other contributions, constituting separate and independent works in themselves, are assembled into a collective whole.

Because of this, I'm thinking of switching to use an Apache 2 License. This seems to be the friendliest license for open source. Basically, all I want to do is try to get folks that use AppFuse to give it some credit. Which really means they're marketing it in a sense. More marketing -> more users -> (hopefully) I'll stay employed and the product will get better.

The only pain I can see about licensing with an Apache License is they want you to add a short copyright notice at the top. But I'm not really handing the copyright of AppFuse over to ASF, am I? Do I have to add this copyright to all my .java files? I know that Spring does this, but... ugh ... seems rather unnecessary.

Automating the new house

Automating your project might be cool, but what about your home? In a recent Macworld issue, there's an article titled Automate Your Home. After reading it, I became inspired to do some automation in the new house. Since we're scheduled to move in this weekend, I'm getting close to buying the software and hardware necessary to do this. The top software packages seem to be Indigo (for OS X) and Active Home (for Windows).

I'm leaning towards the Windows version since my Windows box is always on and there's likely more information/experience working with that version. My PowerBook gets turned off frequently, so that's not a good idea. I could buy a new G5, but $4000 for home automation is a bit spendy. In reality, I'd like to find a easy-to-use (and install!) version for Linux since my Linux box is always on. Any tips?

I'd love to hear any experiences folks may have with automating their homes. Initially, I plan on automating light activation when you walk in the room. Any other cool ideas?

What's up with GMail?

I'm sure a lot of other GMail users have seen this. For the last couple of days, whenever I get an e-mail from someone with @gmail.com in their e-mail address, GMail displays the following warning:

Warning:  This message may not be from whom it claims to be. Beware of following any links in it or of providing the sender with any personal information. Learn more

My guess is they've had some sort of security breech or someone's been spoofing gmail addresses. Any ideas?

MyJavaPack - an Open Source version of Blue Glue?

As noted by John Munsch, MyJavaPack looks pretty cool. At first glance, it looks like an open-source version of Open Logic's Blue Glue. Since I actually did some work on Blue Glue this summer, I downloaded MyJavaPack and did a a quick install.

I was quite impressed. All it did was download the packages I requested and installed them. In most cases, this is what I want - especially on my machine where I already have everything setup. Blue Glue goes a bit further than MyJavaPack. It installs and configures everything for you. This is great for brand new machines, but can be a pain for pre-configured machines since it adds stuff to your PATH.

The thing I like about MyJavaPack is that it's open-source. Therefore, I might be able to dig in and customize it for an AppFuse-based installer. Such an intaller would include tools for developing AppFuse: Ant, Tomcat, MySQL, Eclipse and AppFuse. That'd be pretty cool to be able to download and install an entire development environment.

Neither product does what we all really want: the ability to do an "update" (like Windows Update or Software Update on OS X) of our existing packages.

Java Developers - let's take over the MySQL Conference!

Last April, I attended the MySQL Conference in Orlando. It was a good time, but the number of Java Developers there was pitiful. I had a good time hanging out with Mark (Matthews) and Anthony, but it was still a poor showing. Now MySQL is gearing up for this year's conference (April in Santa Clara) and I'm thinking about submitting a proposal. Anyone interested in joining me? Let's bombard them with proposals and see if we can take over the sucker! If nothing else, it'd be cool to hang with more Java Developers in California.

The conference actually ends the day before Julie and I's 5th year anniversary (April 22nd). If my proposal gets accepted - I think we're going to have Julie's sister babysit and Julie will fly out to spend the weekend touring around wine country. Sounds like fun, eh? Now I just need to find some sort of limo so we can do lots of tasting.

Got RSS Bandwidth Issues?

I got an interesting e-mail the other day from my.rsscache.com. It appears to be a caching service for your RSS feeds. I definitely have bandwidth issues, but I'm not too concerned because Google Ads pay for my hosting costs. This looks like a valuable service, and it's cool they have a cached version of my RSS feed, but I'm wondering what the catch is? There has to be some sort of catch. Are they just trying to get weblogs to signup, and advertise their service - and then hope to get big corporate players that will pay?

Tapestry Tutorial Roundup

I'm going to start integrating Tapestry into AppFuse in the next few weeks. There's nothing like a good set of tutorials to help this process along. Here's a list of current tutorials I found - let me know if you know of others:

• Introduction to Jakarta Tapestry
• Getting Started with Tapestry and Part II: Improving the Currency Converter
• Creating a Tapestry CRUD application

There also seems to be an up-to-date list of Tapestry Resources on Java201.com. I've started reading Tapestry in Action, so hopefully that will speed things up. I've made it to page 100 and I'm afraid I won't make it much further. I need to "just do it" more than I need to learn how to do it. I've often found that I learn a lot more after diving into the code and trying to do something and go back to reading when I start banging my head against the wall.

Integrating Tapestry into AppFuse shouldn't be that hard. I've already done it with the MyUsers application from Spring Live. Therefore, the Tapestry+Spring stuff will be easy. The only hard part, as far as I can tell, is going to be integrating Friendly URLs. Anyone got a patch for Tapestry 3.0.1?

Comparing Web Frameworks: Presentation Outline

My Comparing Web Frameworks outline is due to the ApacheCon Planners today. I spent a couple of hours putting it together this morning and I'm mostly done. In reality, I know that I won't cover the things that everyone wants to know. In an ideal world, I could simply target the presentation towards people like me: they know Struts but want to learn more about the other frameworks. Before diving in, they want to know some things to watch out for.

The problem with doing that is writing for people like me sometimes backfires. I'd like to make it an advanced presentation, but I'm not an authority on all 5 frameworks - so that seems a bit far fetched. However, if I could add Tapestry and JSF support to AppFuse in the next two weeks - I'd have a lot more experience to refer to. But that ain't gonna happen - the first update chapter for Spring Live is due next week. OK, enough rambling - here's the slide titles I've come up with. So far, it's 22 slides and shouldn't grow any since it's supposed to be finalized when I submit it.

• Who is Matt Raible? My background, open source involvement, etc. Trying to give myself some credibility.
• Framework Experience: Long time Struts user, used Spring since end of last year, developed apps with other three this summer. AppFuse supports Struts, Spring MVC and WebWork; Tapestry and JSF coming before end of year.
• Meet the Candidates
  • Struts: Pros and Cons. Pretty much a standard, lots of examples, HTML tag library kicks ass. ActionForms kinda suck, can't unit test (only StrutsTestCase integration tests), Mailing list is swamped.
  • Spring MVC: Nice lifecyle (for overriding binding, validation, etc.) integrates with many view options seamlessly, IoC for easy testability. Not widely used, requires lots of code in JSPs, almost too flexible (no parent controller for SimpleFormController and Controller).
  • WebWork: Simple architecture, tag library easy to customize, interceptors are pretty slick. Documentation only recently written, few examples, client-side validation needs work.
  • Tapestry: Very productive once you learn it, templates are HTML (great for designers), healthy project. Documentation very conceptual, rather than pragmatic (lots of "read the book"). Steep learning curve, few examples. Impossible to test - page classes are abstract.
  • JSF: J2EE standard (lots of demand and jobs), fast and easy to develop with, rich navigation framework. Tag soup for JSPs, a bit immature (doesn't come with everything), no single source for implementation.
• Controllers and Views: Show controllers for all 5 frameworks and template page (JSP/HTML) for forms. Give URL to download sample apps.
• List Screens: How easy is it to integrate a sortable/pageable list of data? Struts, Spring and WebWork can use tag libraries like the display tag, value list or data grid. Tapesty has contrib:Table. JSF has dataTable component that requires custom logic for sorting (let me know if this has changed).
• Bookmarking and URLs: Struts, Spring and WebWork give you full URL control. Tapestry has ugly URLs. JSF does a POST for everything. Conclusion: first 3 play nicely with container-managed authentication. Tapestry doesn't (although there's a patch for pretty URLs). JSF is not friendly to bookmarking.
• Validation: Struts and Spring MVC can use Commons Validation - a mature solution. I've heard it's architecture is ugly, but who cares - it works! WebWork uses OGNL which allows powerful expressions. Client-side support is new and maturing. Tapestry has robust validation w/ good messages out-of-the-box. JSF has ugly default error messages, but is the easiest to configure.
• Testability: Struts you can use StrutsTestCase, which requires web.xml and struts-config.xml. WebWork and Spring allow easy testing with Mocks. Spring has a spring-mock.jar that can be used for mocking the Servlet API with any framework (it's not Spring-specific). Tapestry is impossible to test because page classes are abstract. The argument I've hard is "you don't need to test them b/c they're so simple." JSF page classes can be easily tested and actually look a lot like WebWork Actions (except they don't extend anything).
• Success Messages: The easiest way to solve the duplicate-post problem is to redirect after doing a POST. Struts is the only framework that allows for success messages to live through a redirect. It's fairly easy to get i18n messages in a Struts Action. Spring has nothing "built-in" for success messages. Long classnames / method arguments make it kinda clunky to get messages. WebWork has the cleanest way to get messages using a simple "getText()" method. Both require a custom solution to make your messages live through a redirect. Tapestry requires you to throw an exception to redirect and it still doesn't redirect (I haven't solved the duplicate post problem with Tapestry). JSF requires lots of code to get a ResourceBundle, but you could use Spring's IoC to inject a "messageSource" bean, making it a lot easier. JSF requires a custom solution for messages to live past a redirect.
• Spring Integration: Supported by all, sample apps have examples (quick slide).
• Internationalization: JSTL's <fmt:message> tag makes it easy in all JSP-supporting frameworks. Too bad there's not a standard for getting bundles in controllers and setting messages. Struts, Spring and JSF encourage you to use one ResourceBundle for all messages while WebWork and Tapestry encourage separate files for each page/action. This strategy is probably better for large teams.
• Page Decoration: I used to be a huge advocate of Tiles (using it since August 2001). SiteMesh is much easier to setup and use. Tiles can be used in Struts, Spring MVC and JSF. SiteMesh can be used with all 5 frameworks. In fact, the sample app uses the same SiteMesh setup for all w/o changing a thing. SiteMesh requires no maintenance, Tiles requires you add entries to tiles-config.xml whenever you add a new page.
• Tools: Struts has lots of tools available for it and even frameworks built on top of it (i.e. Beehive's NetUI/PageFlow). Spring has Spring IDE which is really just an XML tool for validating your bean and their relationships. WebWork has none (that've been released), but it is on the roadmap. Tapestry has Spindle, which is great for code-level programmers. It doesn't do drag-n-drop, but it does validate relationships between files. JSF has lots - but all of them cost money and tend to hook into proprietary app servers.
• Business/Marketing: Struts has lots of jobs and is well-known in the industry. A lot of enterprise applications are based on it. Spring is getting more press, but mostly because of the framework's other features. Knowing the rest of Spring is more valuable than Spring MVC. WebWork is gaining ground, but it's still virtually unheard of on job boards. If you do get gigs using WebWork, it's likely word-of-mouth and you'll probably be working with some pretty smart people. Often used with Spring and Hibernate. Tapestry needs more marketing - no one has heard of it, hence no jobs exist for it. JSF is quickly becoming the most popular. Want to stay employed? Learn JSF. The best reason: so you can back up your arguments on why you do/don't like it.
  
  Dice Job Count: Struts (1006), Spring (15 - not a very good name for searching, used "spring framework"), WebWork (14), Tapestry (9), JSF (147).
  
  
• My Opinion: You have to come to the conference for that . Slides should be posted following my presentation.
• Resources: Link and such for downloads, frameworks and tools mentioned.

Comments, suggestions, like it/hate it? Let me know. I expect to send this in in a few hours - so you'd better be quick!