Raible Designs

RE: Trolling with Java Web Frameworks

Fred Daoud has an excellent post titled Trolling with Java Web Frameworks. Well written Fred!

Gmail adds IMAP support

I'm pumped that Gmail finally added IMAP support. I've been waiting for this feature ever since I started using Gmail. Thanks Google! Now I can reply to starred e-mail on a plane and use tools like Apple's Mail to compose/read my e-mail. When I hooked it up yesterday, it took 6 hours to download the 23000+ messages I have stored on Gmail. I don't know if Mail will handle the volume very well, but with Leopard arriving tomorrow, hopefully Mail will be improved.

It should be a fun weekend installing Leopard. With two MacBook Pros (one from LinkedIn), I can test on one before I upgrade both. Of course, the best part of the weekend won't be technology - there's an Alumni softball game for my fraternity, a Halloween Party and several Rockies games to watch. You all know that weekends where you don't get on your computer are the best, right?!

Google Goods at the Colorado Software Summit

This morning, I woke up early and attended Dion Almaer's talk on Google Gears. Dion works at Google in the Developer API group and is a member of the Google Gears development team. This presentation is called How to take your Web Application offline with Google Gears.

Dion starts with a video that Google Developers made. It's a parody of Dick in a Box, but it's called API in a Box. This was by far my favorite part of the presentation and it all went downhill from there.

Gears is a browser plugin that adds a database and a JavaScript API that allows applications to "go offline" and use these resources to store data. It does not do anything to handle synchronization of data back to the online database.

Gears has three modules as part of its API: LocalServer, Database and Workerpool.

The Database is embedded using SQLite. Google contributed Full Text Search to it and the entire database is 250K. Below is an example of how you might use the API:

var db = google.gears.factory.create("beta.database", "1.0");
db.open("database-demo");
db.execute("create table if not exists ...");
...
var rs = db.execute("select * from Demo order by Timestamp desc");
while (rs.isValidRolw()) {
    var name = fs.field(|);
    ...
}

During the rest of the talk, I tuned in and out, but caught a number of interesting tidbits:

• GearShift - DB Migrations for Gears.
• Database Query Tool - one-page browser-based application that can be added to existing applications to add a query browser.
• Gears in Motion - full database tool for creating databases, modifying tables, inline-editing, etc. After building your database, you can export the SQL for use in a Gears application.
• Syncing is not a part of Gears because it's a very difficult problem to solve - especially when you have huge data.
• The best way to implement synching is to start simple, like Zoho Writer. It's like Google Docs, but allows you to read your documents off-line. The next version they're planning on allowing offline editing.
• You should plan on allowing your application to run - possibly by using cookies to store the data and create a "CookieBaseContent" implementation that gets chosen instead of "GearsBaseContent". In other words:

  content = hasGears() ? new GearsBaseContent() : new CookieBaseContent();
  

• Debugging is a pain - you can simplify by using helper functions that allow you to clear the database.
• Google's Read/Write JavaScript API looks like some really cool stuff. It solves the cross-domain problem and is (at its core) a clever bundling of browser hacks. It's not specific to Google's APIs and can be used in any Ajax application.
• Gearsmonkey - uses Google Gears with the Firefox Greasemonkey plug-in to take other's applications offline.
• Dion uses Greasemonkey to add keystrokes to GMail and remove ads from Facebook.
• Wikipedia has an offline version that's powered by Gears. It uses iframes to cache pages with Gears and was developed by Google. It's unannounced by Dion didn't say I couldn't blog about it.
• Dojo offline has a sync framework.
• Vortex is an offline toolkit that builds on Gears.
• GWT has Gears support - all you have to do is drop a JAR in your classpath. If you don't like using Gear's JDBC-esque API - maybe you can use Hibernate with Gears?

Dion ended by talking about how Adobe Air is great for desktop-like applications that you can easily build with Ajax technologies. Silverlight is impressive, but only for media applications - you have to draw components yourself. Java Applets may make a comeback. The browser plugin has been rewritten to be fast as well as have full support for Java Web Start. It's possible that Gears + the Java Plugin can make it possible to use Java technologies (i.e. Hibernate or JPA) to talk to the browser's database. Firefox and WebKit are adding database components to their next major releases - so offline applications should become even easier to develop in the future.

Overall, this was a great talk - largely because Dion is a great speaker and made it fun and interesting.

After Dion's talk, I delivered my Web Framework talk and had some lunch while trying to get Rockies tickets (no luck). After lunch, I attended Bill Dudney's Comparing Spring & Guice talk. I learned some things about Guice I didn't know and enjoyed his comparison of the two Dependency Injection frameworks.

One question that Bill couldn't answer is how Spring 2.5's annotation support stacks up against Guice. Is it as full-featured as Guice? Does it add additional features and keep up with Guice for performance? What about wiring up objects without annotations - does it allow you to autowire your classes based on naming patterns without annotations in your code? What I'm hoping for is a DI framework that allows me to autowire classes using rules/conventions rather than annotations. I'm fine with using annotations for edge-cases, but it seems like a lot of the DI I do these days could be configured up-front and used for the entire application (rather than having to wire up each class).

Overall, it was a great day at the Colorado Software Summit.

Choosing a JVM Web Framework

This morning I delivered my Choosing a JVM Web Framework presentation at the Colorado Software Summit. One of my goals for the talk was to get more audience participation and stories of how folks thought it best to choose a web framework. The room was packed and the crowd was interested, so we barely even used the slides I prepared. One of the most interesting things about the audience was that over 60% (of 50-60 people) were using Struts 1. Most of them came to learn about frameworks they might think about migrating too. Unfortunately, I didn't talk a whole lot about the frameworks and their features, but a few members had advice concerning frameworks *not* to use based on their experiences. Overall, it was a lot of fun to interact so much with the audience and hear their thoughts on web development for the Java Platform.

You can download a PDF version of my presentation from my presentations page. Thanks to all the folks who responded to my Stories Wanted post - I used many of these comments as part of the "Case Studies" in the presentation.

Apache Roller, Acegi Security, LDAP and JA-SIG CAS

Earlier today, I delivered my talk on Apache Roller, Acegi Security and Single Sign-on. As part of this talk, I put together a couple of tutorials you might find useful:

• Roller 4.0 with LDAP and CAS
• Roller 4.0 on Geronimo

NOTE: These tutorials are using Roller's trunk as we found some things to simplify LDAP integration tonight.

You can download a PDF version of my presentation from my publications page.

During the presentation I did a number of demos:

• Installing Roller on Tomcat
• Integrating Roller with Apache Directory Server
• Integration Roller with CAS
• Integrating CAS with LDAP

Rather than saving the demo for the end, I did it as the first part of my presentation. This worked extremely well - especially since I didn't have to worry about running out of time.

If you're using Roller, have you integrated it with LDAP or another SSO solution? If so, is it working well for you?

Beautiful

This has to be cutest picture I've ever captured. It's hard to believe she's going to be 5 next month.

First Snow!

It usually snows in September in Denver. This year, it waited until today. It was awesome to wake up this morning and see the white stuff coming down. Bring on Ski Season - I'm ready!

Bill mentions that A-Basin is open. If you're going to this year's Colorado Software Summit (starts today), you may want to bring your skis. Then again, who wants to ski greens?

Wow!

The Rockies are the National League Champions!! Congratulations guys - it's been incredible watching your post-season magic. The next couple weeks should be quite the adventure.

Off to New York and Connecticut

Today marks the beginning of a long-awaited trip to the East Coast. Way back in March, I negotiated a deal with a company in Danbury, CT to teach my Open Source Java Jewels training course. I was supposed to deliver it in May, but that got changed because of their 45-day Vendor Approval Process. It was rescheduled for August. August came and it got moved again because so many people were on vacation. It was rescheduled for October and I'll be delivering it next week.

I'm teaching 2 courses: one for 16 managers Monday - Tuesday and one for 21 developers Wednesday - Friday. Yeah, I know that's way too many students, but I think I can handle it. I warned the company it wasn't a good idea to have that many students, but they wanted to pack them all in anyway. Oh well.

The best part about this trip is I'm doing something I've wanted to do for a long time. I'm taking the kids with me! The rest of my family is coming too - my parents will be on our 2nd flight today and my sister flies in Monday. My dad grew up in Beacon, NY - only 45 minutes from Danbury. Since his brother and sister still live there (as well as many cousins) it should be a fun week of family and crazy kids in a hotel room. With any luck, we'll get to see some fall colors and create some great memories.

Maven Meetup in San Francisco tomorrow (Tuesday)

If you live in the Bay Area and you're interested in talking with the inventors of Maven and/or XWiki, you should checkout the XWiki + Maven meetup at Terracotta's HQ. Java Open Source gurus Vincent Massol and Jason van Zyl will be there - sounds like a fun event!