Raible Designs

Upgraded to Roller 4.0

This site is now running Apache Roller 4.0. If you see anything funky, please let me know. As part of the upgrade, I did a bunch of spring cleaning, so it's possible I deleted some files I shouldn't have. As far as upgrading, the only issue I know of is this one where my categories are no longer in the same order. Since it didn't seem possible to fix easily, I decided to not worry about it and go ahead with the upgrade.

If you'd like to take Roller 4.0 for a test drive, you can use the Test Blog on this server. Username is test, password is roller.

I dig the new entries and comments counter:

Spring Security 2

It looks like we'll have to wait until next week to get our hands on Spring Security 2 (the next release of Acegi Security). The good news is it looks much simpler. From what I can tell, this new code is available in Acegi's SVN repository. Here's to hoping the Acegi Team writes some sort of migration guide.

New Tools for AppFuse Project: MarkMail and FishEye/Crucible

We've recently added some some new features to the AppFuse project. The first feature is the good folks at Mark Logic (primarily Jason Hunter) has setup a kick-ass mailing list archive for us at appfuse.markmail.org.

This is an easily searchable set of archives and goes all the way back to when our mailing list started in March 2004. In the future, they hope to provide RSS/Atom feeds and allow posting (like Nabble does). I've added a link to these archives to the mailing list page. To learn more about MarkMail, please see Jason's announcement of the service @ Apache.

The second feature is we've installed FishEye and Crucible (a code review tool) on AppFuse's server at Contegix. We've used FishEye in the past, but now we have it on our own server.

Thanks to Mark Logic and Atlassian for supporting the AppFuse project.

This is the Hottest Blog on Programming

I received an e-mail this morning that said the following:

Congrats! Your blog has made it into the TOP 50 of The All Night Coder blog community, powered by SocialRank!!!

Then I clicked on the link they supplied and discovered I'm #1! Since I know it won't last, I figured I'd better take a screenshot.

Spring MVC, JstlView and exposeContextBeansAsAttributes

Did you know that Spring MVC's JstlView has a exposeContextBeansAsAttributes property you can use to expose all your Spring beans to JSTL? I didn't. To configure it, you configure your viewResolver as follows:

<bean id="viewResolver" 
    class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver">
    <property name="viewClass" value="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.JstlView"/>
    <property name="exposeContextBeansAsAttributes" value="true"/>
    <property name="prefix" value="/"/>
    <property name="suffix" value=".jsp"/>
</bean>

After doing this, any Spring bean can get referenced in JSTL with:

${beanId.getterMethodWithoutTheGetPrefix}

If you're using Spring 2.5a annotations and <context:component-scan>, you'll need to specify a "value" attribute on your annotations in order to reference them in JSTL. For example:

@Controller(value = "beanId")
@RequestMapping("/foo.html")
public class MyController extends SimpleFormController

...

@Component(value="testClass")
public class TestClass {

Pretty cool stuff. It'd be a lot more useful if you could call methods with parameters. Hopefully JUEL will solve that problem. JSTL's functions work, but I'd rather write ${foo.method('arg')} rather than ${taglib:callMethod(foo, 'method', 'arg')}.

How Gmail will make money

I found the following when cruising through some options in my Gmail account today. Seems like a decent strategy to me.

Integrate AppFuse with Crowd in 5 Easy Steps

The good folks at Atlassian have written a nice tutorial on Integrating Crowd with AppFuse and Acegi. Crowd is a web-based single sign-on (SSO) tool that simplifies application provisioning and identity management. We use Crowd for the AppFuse project to maintain a single user store for JIRA, Confluence, and Bamboo. It's worked awesome for us.

AppFuse Light 1.8.1 Released: includes upgrades to Spring 2.5 and Wicket 1.3

AppFuse Light 1.8.1 is a bug fixes release that includes an upgrade to Spring 2.5 and Wicket 1.3 RC1. See the Release Notes for more information on what's changed since the last release.

What is AppFuse Light? Click here to find out.

AppFuse Light is a lightweight version of AppFuse. I was inspired to create it while writing Spring Live and looking at the struts-blank and webapp-minimal applications that ship with Struts and Spring, respectively. These "starter" apps were not robust enough for me, and I wanted something like AppFuse, only simpler.

AppFuse Light is designed to show Java Web Developers how to start a bare-bones webapp using a Spring-managed middle-tier backend and Hibernate for persistence. By default, AppFuse Light uses Spring for its MVC framework, but you can change it to JSF/MyFaces, Stripes, Struts 1.x, Struts 2.x, WebWork, Tapestry or Wicket. In addition, there's a number of extras for Spring MVC, including Velocity and FreeMarker versions, Ajax support and Acegi Security support.

This project was formerly named Equinox and has been under development since April 2004.

AppFuse Light now offers 60 possible combinations for download:

• Web Frameworks: JSF (MyFaces), Spring MVC (with Ajax, Acegi Security, JSP, FreeMarker or Velocity), Stripes, Struts 1.x, Struts 2.x, Tapestry, WebWork, Wicket
• Persistence Frameworks: Hibernate, iBATIS, JDO (JPOX), OJB, Spring JDBC

If you have any questions about this release, please subscribe to the AppFuse user mailing list by sending a blank e-mail to [email protected]. You can also post questions in a forum-like fashion using Nabble: http://appfuse.org/forum/user.

If you're a developer of one of the frameworks that AppFuse Light uses - I'd love a code review to make sure I'm "up to snuff" on how to use your framework. I'm also more than willing to give commit rights if you'd like to improve the implementation of your framework.

Live demos are available at:

• Spring · Spring + Ajax · Spring + Acegi
• MyFaces + Facelets
• Stripes
• Struts 1 · Struts 2
• Tapestry
• WebWork
• Wicket

What's on tap for AppFuse Light 2.0? Here's what I'm hoping to do:

1. Drop the seldom-used persistence frameworks: JDBC, JDO and OJB.
2. Drop Struts 1.x and WebWork as web frameworks (replaced by Struts 2).
3. Support the same persistence frameworks as AppFuse: Hibernate, iBATIS and JPA.
4. Re-use appfuse-service, appfuse-hibernate, appfuse-ibatis and appfuse-jpa in AppFuse Light. I'll likely include the core classes (User, Role) since AppFuse Light is more "raw" than AppFuse.
5. Require Java 5.

Let me know if you disagree with any of these items or would like to see other enhancements.

AppFuse 2.0.1 Released

The AppFuse Team is pleased to announce the release of AppFuse 2.0.1. This release squashes a number of bugs and includes an upgrade to Spring 2.5. To learn more about Spring 2.5's features, see InfoQ's What's New in Spring 2.5: Part 1 article.

For information on upgrading from 2.0, see the 2.0.1 Release Notes or changelog. AppFuse 2.0.1 is available as a Maven archetype. For information on creating a new project using AppFuse, please see the QuickStart Guide or the demos and videos.

What is AppFuse? Click here to find out.

AppFuse is an open source project and application that uses open source tools built on the Java platform to help you develop Web applications quickly and efficiently. It was originally developed to eliminate the ramp-up time found when building new web applications for customers. At its core, AppFuse is a project skeleton, similar to the one that's created by your IDE when you click through a wizard to create a new web project.

AppFuse 1.x uses Ant to create your project, as well as build/test/deploy it. AppFuse 2.0 uses Maven 2 to create your project as well as build/test/deploy it. IDE support is much better in 2.0 because you can generate the IDE project files with Maven plugins. AppFuse 1.x uses XDoclet and JDK 1.4+.

This project was started in April 2003.

The 2.0 series of AppFuse has a minimum requirement of the following specification versions:

• Java Servlet 2.4 and JSP 2.0 (2.1 for JSF)
• Java 5+

If you've used AppFuse 1.x, but not 2.x, you'll want to read the FAQ. Join the user mailing list if you have any questions.

Thanks to everyone for their help contributing code, writing documentation, posting to the mailing lists, and logging issues.

We greatly appreciate the help from our sponsors, particularly Atlassian, Contegix, JetBrains, and Java.net. Atlassian and Contegix are especially awesome: Atlassian has donated licenses to all its products and Contegix has donated an entire server to the AppFuse project. Thanks guys - you rock!

Please post any issues you have with this release to the mailing list.

Comparing Java Web Frameworks Presentation on Parleys.com

The good folks from JavaZone have published a video of the Comparing Java Web Frameworks presentation I did in Oslo in September. Enjoy!

Update: In this presentation, I say we've chosen Struts 2 at LinkedIn. Even though it solved most of our problems, I'm also now prototyping with Spring MVC. I wish JSP/JSTL had a way to call methods with arguments like Struts' OGNL supports.