Raible Designs

AppFuse vs. Grails vs. Rails

In the comments of my Choosing a JVM Web Framework, Graeme Rocher writes:

no offense Matt, but I fear you are a grossly inappropriate person to be writing such a study given your past history of claiming frameworks like Grails are competitors to AppFuse. Any such study will come laced with doubts over its honesty and I'm sure this doesn't just apply to Grails.

In the post Graeme linked to, I said:

I think Grails and AppFuse are more likely competitors rather than compatible. Grails uses Spring, Spring MVC and Hibernate under-the-covers, whereas AppFuse uses the raw frameworks. Of course, it would be cool to allow different classes w/in AppFuse to be written in Groovy or JRuby. At this point, I think it's probably better for users to choose one or the other.

Since writing that post a year ago, I've changed my opinion about AppFuse being competitors with Grails or Rails. Why? Because they're different languages. I don't think you should choose a web development stack first. I think you should choose your language first. For those that choose raw Java, I think AppFuse provides a good solution. To be more explicit, here's a private conversation that David Whitehurst (author of The AppFuse Primer) and I exchanged.

David: Have you been looking at Ruby on Rails any? And, if so, I'm sure you're as impressed by those who command the language as I am. But, I think the J2EE web application is not dead yet. Do you think any comparison of the complexity of AppFuse vs. Rails should be mentioned in the book?

Matt: I'm highly aware of Rails, have attended talks and tutorials on it, even bought books about it - but I've never written an app, done a tutorial or used it in the real-world. I'm afraid of it. I'm almost certain I'd like it, and I'd likely like Grails as well. However, the reason I stick with pure Java is because that's where my clients' demand is and hence the consulting dollars for me.

It's probably also possible to create AppFuse for both Rails and Grails. I believe Rails' Streamlined in much like AppFuse. I like to think of AppFuse as language agnostic - it's always been designed to eliminate ramp up time. While Rails and Grails simplify the programming API and make it possible to develop code with less lines of code, it'd be nice to have user management, file upload and other things like AppFuse has. When I start using these frameworks, it's likely I'll develop some sort of features like AppFuse has and use them on projects. Of course, if they already have all the features of AppFuse via plugins, I wouldn't reinvent the wheel - I'm simply use what's already there and be happy about it.

I don't know if it's relevant to mention Rails, but it probably doesn't hurt. There's no reason to ignore the competition if they're indeed competition. I don't see them as competition, and I almost don't see Grails as competition either. AppFuse (in its current state) is for developers that've chosen to use the language and frameworks that AppFuse supports. It's not trying to solve everyone's problems - it's merely trying to simplify things for those using the frameworks it supports.

There's nothing saying that AppFuse can't have a Rails or Grails version in the future. For me, it'll happen if I start developing applications using these frameworks and see the integration needs like I saw with the Java frameworks. The good news is most of these frameworks have done the integration work, so it's really just a matter of creating features or using plugins.

David: I keep getting these "dream-squasher" friends of mine showing me Rails, Grails, and how wonderful Ruby is. It's impressive, but I'm not convinced that big business is ready to adopt it any time soon.

Matt: As a Java programmer, I think you'd be a fool to ignore Rails or Grails and not at least be familiar with them. There's no reason to discount technology until you've used it on a real-world project - at least 6 months or longer - IMO.

Just because you're productive in Ruby and like it - that doesn't make you a bad Java programmer.

I hope this clears up any confusion on how I feel towards Rails or Grails. I would welcome the opportunity to use them on a project. If I was starting a products-based company, I certainly would give them a shot in the prototyping phase. However, I'm a consultant that makes money from clients hiring me to explain/do what I know best. At the current time, that happens to be open source Java frameworks.

I do plan on learning a plethora of other frameworks, in other languages, I just haven't had the time yet. When I do, I hope that I can somehow become proficient enough to help companies adopt them as well. However, to build up that experience and expertise will likely take years. I think this is how lots of companies feel. Can you blame them for not "jumping ship" on their current skills and knowledge?

Of course, then you have the Relevance guys who seem to be doing exactly what I hope to be doing in several years from now. Not only do they specialize in Java and its frameworks, but they also do consulting and training around Rails, Grails and Ajax. I can't help but admire them tremendously.

Choosing a JVM Web Framework

I plan on rewriting my "Comparing Java Web Frameworks" presentation for this year's Colorado Software Summit. Rather than "Comparing Java Web Frameworks", I'm going to make it into more of a "Choosing a JVM Web Framework" presentation. I think this opens it up to more possibilities such as Grails, JRuby on Rails, Flex and GWT.

One of the things I hope to talk about is choosing the right tool for the job. I think there's 3 types of web applications you can develop:

1. Consumer-facing, high-traffic, stateless applications
2. Internal, more desktop-like applications that are stateful
3. Media-rich applications that require a RIA framework like Flex

Once you've decided on which of these you're developing, it's much easier to narrow down the choices:

1. Struts 2, Spring MVC, Stripes
2. JSF, Tapestry, Wicket
3. GWT, Flex, OpenLaszlo

I'm not sure if GWT fits in the RIA category. I'm not sure where Rails or Grails fit either. They more closely resemble category #1 than any other, yet there's a lot of speculation about their scalability. I think if that perception can be changed, they'll fit into the first category quite well. However, I don't think they compete with component-based or RIA because they don't hold state or offer rich-media capabilities.

Sidenote: I find the scalability debate quite interesting. There's a fair amount of propaganda in Javaland that scalability can be achieved with appservers and clustering tools like Terracotta. If this is true, I've yet to read good solid proof of it. Most of the "how to scale" information out there suggests "share nothing" architectures that shard data and applications across several servers. Of course, there's scalability and then there's massive scalability. Can appservers and clustering solve massive scalability like Google and Amazon require?

The 2nd and 3rd categories have someone of a blurry line, so I'm hoping to figure out how to clarify that. There's also a lot of other factors that will go into choosing a web framework. What if you're simply trying to replace a home-grown framework with an open-source one? If you want to keep your backend and all its logic, does it make sense to use something like Seam, Grails, JRuby on Rails or even AppFuse? Probably not - all their wizbang features and CRUD generation doesn't mean much if all you're using is the web framework. Also, if your application requires support for non-JavaScript browsers (for 508 compliance), then GWT and JSF can be easily eliminated. I know that there are many claims that JSF doesn't require JavaScript, but I've yet to see a real-world application developed with JSF that expects JavaScript to be turned off. Progressive enhancement is a requirement by many of my clients these days.

What's your opinion? How can we make it easier for developers and companies to choose a web framework? Is categorizing application types a good technique?

Seeley Lake on Fire

Where's my Mom the "Burn Boss" when you need her? From the Missoulian:

Seeley Lake residents prepare to flee Jocko Lakes fire
In two weekend days, the Jocko Lakes fire exploded across 18,000 acres, destroying one home, damaging several others and threatening this small western Montana town.

In doing so, the wildfire earned itself designation Sunday as the No. 1 priority forest fire in the nation.

After Saturday?s firestorm and flurry of evacuations, Sunday brought minimal winds and gave fire crews a fighting chance to get a handle on the fire, which is just a mile west of Seeley Lake and a mile north of Placid Lake.

Seeley Lake is 25 miles from The Cabin. There's unlikely to be a threat the The Swan (where I grew up). However, Seeley Lake is pretty close to home as I went to high school there and we have a very good family friend living in "Dog Town". Must be exciting times right now.

This fire made me think of this awesome photo from a few years back.

5 Years

Doh! It looks like I missed my 5-year blogiversary last week. It's hard to believe it's been 5 years since I started this blog on August 1, 2002. A lot has happened since then: Abbie was born, we moved from Morrison to Denver, Jack was born and Julie built a new house. For those that know me personally, a lot has happened this summer too.

Julie and I are getting a divorce.

Our reason is simple - we're not in love with each other like we expect a married couple should be in love. It's going to be a good move for the both of us and while it might be hard to get through the next several months, we'll both be happier in the long run. We still plan on raising a family together, we'll just be doing it from two separate households and living two separate lives. I bought a house a few weeks ago and moved in last week. This past weekend was my first "Daddy's weekend" and the kids and I had a blast.

I realize that divorce is a sensitive subject and it might not be something that folk's think is appropriate for a blog post. I started this blog in order to document my life's history and this seems like a pretty important thing to document. My life has certainly changed a lot in the past couple months and it's likely to change quite a bit more in the future. I realize I haven't been blogging much lately - now you know why. I don't know if I'll return to actively blogging like I once did, but I think I will.

I've turned off comments for this post - I hope you understand. If you'd like to tell me your story about successfully raising children of divorce, I'd love to hear about it.

Update: It figures - my contact form appears to have been broken for the last month or so. If you used it to send me a message, there's a good chance I didn't receive it. Sorry - it should be fixed now.

Roller Themes

Eugene Strokin has been doing an excellent job migrating Free CSS Templates to Roller Themes. So far, he's done 10 and it doesn't look like he's stopping any time soon. Well done Eugene! IMO, nice-looking themes for Roller has been one of its biggest missing features.

Now if we could only use Roller to power the Apache project site...

Trim Spaces in your JSP's HTML Redux

Since my last post on trimming whitespace in JSPs seems to be a popular topic, I figured it appropriate to note that JSP 2.1 supports a new trimWhitespace directive.

<%@ page trimDirectiveWhitespaces="true" %>

If you're using a Servlet 2.5 XSD, you can also do this in your web.xml:

    <jsp-config>
      <jsp-property-group>
        <url-pattern>*.jsp</url-pattern>
        <trim-directive-whitespaces>true</trim-directive-whitespaces>
      </jsp-property-group>
    </jsp-config>

A Servlet 2.5 XSD seems to be the following:

<web-app
    xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd"
    metadata-complete="false"
    version="2.5">

To learn more about this feature, view Summary of New Features in JSP 2.1 Technology and search for "TrimWhiteSpace". It'd be nice if there was anchors in this article for a direct link, but I couldn't find any.

Now I just wish JSP's EL had an xmlEscape="true" flag to escape XML in printed variables. Freemarker supports this.

Hat tip to Kerem and Krishna's Unified Expression Language for JSP and JSF article.

AppFuse now powered by Contegix and Atlassian

The AppFuse project is now hosted on a Contegix server for its documentation, demos, issues and continuous integration. Single sign-on to all of these servers is handled by Crowd. Many thanks to Atlassian for their generous donations of licenses. The free server and service from Contegix is one of the nicest things that anyone has ever done for me - thanks guys!

If you see any issues that might be related to this move, please let us know.

In addition to running the Atlassian Suite, we're also hosting our own Maven repository. We've been hosting our own for almost a year now. Now that AppFuse is residing on the same infrastructure as Maven's central repo, I wonder if it makes sense to publish to the central repo? I don't see any advantages. If we continue to retain our own, we can have more control, publish to it easily, and fix annoying bugs. What do you think - continue with our own or publish to the central repo?

Update Feb 20, 2015: All AppFuse artifacts are published to Maven Central and have been for several years.

Open Source Web Frameworks' Mailing List Traffic - June 2007

Who knows if these stats mean anything, but it does make a pretty graph. Current mailing list traffic leaders in the web framework space: Rails, Flex and GWT. For those frameworks with dev and users lists, these stats are from the users lists. If you find these numbers to be inaccurate, please let me know.

Here's the numbers in case you want to create your own graphs:

• Rails: 4056
• Flex: 3558
• GWT: 2305
• Django: 1951
• Wicket: 1718
• Struts: 1689
• Grails: 1307
• MyFaces: 1283
• Tapestry: 1268
• TurbyGears: 797
• Stripes: 206
• OpenLaszlo: 189

Integrating Struts 2 + JSF + Facelets

What if you didn't have to choose between a request-based framework and a component-based framework? What if you could use them together and use request-based for some pages and component-based for others? This is the functionality that the Struts 2 JSF Plugin provides.

To be fair, the JSF-Spring project says it does the same thing for Spring MVC + JSF, but there doesn't appear to be any documentation.

I did some prototyping of Struts 2 + JSF and discovered that it does indeed work. I also discovered that there's no documentation on integrating it with Facelets. Luckily, it's pretty easy to do - hence my reason for writing this entry. You might ask why I want to use Facelets when JSF 1.2 supports JSP fairly well? My reason is because JSP 2.1 hijacks #{}, which Struts 2's OGNL uses for some expressions. Because of this, I want to be able to run on a JSP 2.0 container until a workaround comes along. Sun's JSF 1.2 RI can run on a JSP 2.0 container, while MyFaces 2.1 cannot (at least in my experience).

There's two ways to get Struts 2 + JSF + Facelets working:

• Create a WEB-INF/faces-config.xml file and override the default view-handler:

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <faces-config xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee"
      xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
      xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee 
          http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-facesconfig_1_2.xsd"
      version="1.2">
  
      <application>
          <view-handler>com.sun.facelets.FaceletViewHandler</view-handler>
      </application>
  </faces-config> 
  

• The 2nd way is to use Ajax4JSF and declare the view-handler in your web.xml (allowing you to get rid of faces-config.xml):

  <context-param>
      <param-name>org.ajax4jsf.VIEW_HANDLERS</param-name>
      <param-value>com.sun.facelets.FaceletViewHandler</param-value>
  </context-param>
  

NOTE: You have to use 2nd method if you want to use Ajax4JSF. It won't read the view-handler from faces-config.xml.

If you're using SiteMesh, you may have to add another <parser> element to your sitemesh.xml to get Facelets pages decorated:

<parser content-type="application/xhtml+xml"
    class="com.opensymphony.module.sitemesh.parser.HTMLPageParser"/> 

Thanks to Laurie Harper for his assistance figuring this stuff out.

Now you might ask - why would you want to do this? For one, Struts 2 has a better navigation model (IMO) than JSF. Also, if developers want to use JSF and think it's a better way for a certain module - let them go to it!

OSCON 2007: Comparing Java Web Frameworks

This afternoon I delivered my Comparing Java Web Frameworks talk at OSCON in Portland. I told attendees I'd post it here afterwards, so here it is:Download Comparing Java Web Frameworks Presentation (5.1 MB)

For comments on this presentation from earlier this year, see related postings from ApacheCon EU and JA-SIG. This presentation is pretty much the same as the one from ApacheCon and JA-SIG, except it has a different theme and I chopped out the Sweetspots section (due to time constraints).

Portland is great this time of year, but unfortunately I won't be sticking around. I'm heading down to Salem to work remotely for a couple of days, returning for the Oregon Brewers Festival on Friday and heading back to Denver on Saturday. I'll be glad when July is over - I've traveled to a new state every week.