Raible Designs

RE: What Web Application framework should you use?

Tim O'Brien has an interesting post titled What Web Application framework should you use?. The first thing I noticed about this post is the permalink. It looks like he started with "Isn't Rails supposed to change...", which makes me wonder what the rest of the title was. In this post, he rags on Java Web Frameworks and the lack of a clear path for choosing one. He ends up predicting that many will stick with Struts 1.x (poor bastards) and those that aren't tied to Java should move to Rails. I don't have a problem with folks moving to Rails, but I would like to comment on the Java Web Framework space and Tim's comments.

He says:

Prediction: The confusion over what is happening over at Struts is going to discourage people from continuing to use it. The Struts team did the right thing in recognizing that Struts 1.x was a dead-end, but that project needs a single public message. Is it Struts Action or is it Struts Faces? Or is it two frameworks capitalizing on the Struts brand name?

I think what is going on in the Struts project is definitely two frameworks capitalizing on a brand name. That was a concious choice on the project's part when they chose to start creating sub-projects. The interesting thing about Struts Shale is it's largely a prototype for JSF 2.0. Furthermore, it was rejected by many Struts developers as becoming Struts 2.0. Why? Because JSF sucks. Especially when used with JSP - which is what most folks are doing.

JSF continues to be the most over-hyped under-used framework in Javaland. If you read the blogs of first-time users, you'll find many complaints and issues on how things work. Granted, most of these problems are with JSP and the implementation, but still. If I were in charge of JSF, I'd dump JSP altogether, bundle Facelets with it and allow more flexible page navigation (including controller-to-page). Don't get me wrong, I like the ideas behind JSF, I just don't like the implementation (or the fact I have to wait years for things to be fixed in the spec).

That being said, I've yet to meet an unhappy WebWork fan. If you find someone that still likes Struts, ask them if they've used WebWork. Chances are they'll say no. As far as Tapestry is concerned, the learning curve is too high. It's been rejected time and time again by my clients because of the learning curve. Are they going to fix this? Yep, they're going to re-write the whole damn thing - again! Every major point release of Tapestry throws backwards-compatibility out the window. Furthermore, I've heard once you get over the learning curve, it's a joy to work with. I've also met people at conferences that've used it over a year and say they're still struggling with its concepts.

Spring MVC - I wish I had bad things to say about it, but I don't. It (obviously) has the best Spring integration, but I've found WebWork much more pleasurable to work with. Sure, Spring has a ThrowawayController, but with a name like that, you can tell it's a second-class citizen.

Inspired by Tim's post, here's my prediction:

Struts Action 2 will be the best choice for developing Java-based web frameworks. Not only does it support JSF, but it's easy to learn, test and use. Furthermore, it seems to be the most often used framework in major software products and web sites.

How's that for a clear message? Struts Action 2 is the shiznit, now let's get back to developing applications.

Disclaimer: This is my opinion with a lot of stuff thrown in to get folks riled up. I've never put a JSF, Tapestry or Spring MVC application into production (except for AppFuse of course), so most of my opinions are likely without foundation. In wonder how many applications Mr. O'Brien has put into production with these frameworks?

Happy Father's Day

Father's Day has been great so far. We started off this morning by opening gifts. The kids gave me some new framed pictures, as well as a whole bunch of huckleberries. I couldn't ask for better gifts. After that, we headed out to breakfast at my favorite joint, Pete's University Park Cafe. From there, we headed up to Tiny Town and rode around on the "Choo Choo Train". We stopped for ice cream on the way home and now I'm sipping a cold one while watching the US Open. Life is good.

Thanks to my Dad for being such an inspiration - I hope I'm as smart as you someday Pappy. Can't wait to see you in July!

Related: Father's Day 2005, 2004 and 2003.

Upgraded to Roller 2.3

I spent some time today and upgraded this site to the the latest Roller release (version 2.3). Let me know if you see anything out of order. In addition to the upgrade, I made a couple of improvements:

• Improved titles: now they change based on page, category and individual posts.
• Fixed search paging: previously, you couldn't page through search results.

Hope you're having a good weekend - Happy Father's Day to all the Dads out there.

#8 on Google

It's amazing what a blog can do for your name. I wonder why Photo Matt got bumped from #1 to the 2nd page?

[DeRailed] Denver Rails User Group Meeting

Last night, Francis (Virtuas' Operations Manager) and I went to the local Rails User Group meeting, better known as "DeRailed". This group was started by a good friend of mine, Fernand Galiana, who obviously doesn't know how to blog. Since Virtuas is a sponsor, and I really like Rails technology, I felt like it'd be a fun meeting to attend. I wasn't disappointed.

The meeting was held 3 blocks from our offices at the downtown Tattered Cover. The first presentation was by Doug Fales, and he talked about his new soon-to-be-launched site called WalkingBoss. With this site, he integrates GPS Data (GPX files) and Flickr photosets to allow you to easily plot your trips on a map. It looks very easy to use, and somewhat inspired me to get a GPS device, and possibly a new (smaller) camera. Doug's blog has more in his most recent post. Unfortunately, I don't see that his blog has permalinks, so this might be hard to find in the coming weeks.

The 2nd talk was Ruby Meta Programming and was presented by Ara Howard. Since I don't know a whole lot about Ruby, this talk was over my head, but somewhat interesting nevertheless. There was about 20-25 people that showed up for this meeting and I found it to be a much younger and more down-to-earth group than the local DJUG. Furthermore, almost everyone went out for beers at the Rock Bottom afterwards, which is a lot different than DJUG (10-15 out of 75-100 usually go). Good meeting, good group of guys. Thanks Fernand!

[DJUG] Portlets and Portal Architecture with Scott Ryan

The genesis of this talk is Scott's has talked to a lot of developers about web development and most don't understand all the features you get from portal servers. A lot of developers don't know how to sell them to upper management. Typically, they're very expensive, but you get a lot of functionality and features for the price. Portal servers are not just glorified web applications.

You all know what portals are, right? Yahoo is probably the most famous. RockyMountainNews.com uses a portal server, so does Denver Post. The top commercial offerings are BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, Plumtree, Vignette, ATG and Microsoft Sharepoint. The first version of WebSphere was based on Jetspeed 1 and it was a pretty bad implementation. Plumtree was bought by WebLogic and is apparently a combination of .NET and SOA. Microsoft claims they're adding more portal-like stuff, but currently it's very document-management centric (reminds me of Alfresco).

On the open source side, the players are Liferay, Jetspeed, JBoss Portal, Exo, Metadot, Plone, PHP-Nuke and Magnolia. I didn't know Magnolia was a portal server, must be a new feature. Liferay is Scott's favorite, Jetspeed is pretty good, but not much out of the box.

Portals all started because companies had disparate websites and wanted a way of combining them into a single dashboard. Pieces of a portal:

• Single Sign-on with a unified security model.
• Security/Administration: Portals usually have a content-management component, which allow delegated administration. It's difficult to organize this initially, because of the need to create a hierarchical organizational structure of permissions.
• Personalization: out-of-the-box you can customize the look-n-feel. A lot of times these are driven by rules engines, particularly in the open source arena. Content can often be customized so you can add/remove items that you're interested in.
• Content Management: always comes with a portal because a portal is usually responsible for displaying content. Some include workflow and administration features, like locking, version and administration. JSR-170 defines an interface for accessing CMS systems.
• Collaboration: this is the hot thing this year. Forums, discussions, blogs, RSS feeds, real-time chat, etc.
• Administration: Creation of users, groups and roles. Page and portal layouts, themes, skins and CSS. Selective rights to users to modify desktops and portal attributes.
• Search: Federated search, content repository and meta data search. Web page, database and file system search.
• Interaction Management: Rule-based personalization, campaign execution and management. Event and behavior tracking. Content/Product centric marketing.
• Commerce: Catalog, shopping cart, etc.

For doing portlet development, Scott recommends using a more native technology (i.e. Struts, JSF, PHP, JSP, etc.) and enabled it as a portlet using bridges. Development interfaces are offered via the web or many commons IDEs. You will need some XML, HTML, JSP, CSS and graphics experience to totally enable a portal. Sounds similar to the stuff you need to know for Ajax, eh?

Portals require a mix of development and configuration skill sets. The mix of configuration and development is determined by the platform. Try to lean away from the proprietary features but don't run away from them. Look for pre-build portlets, themes, skins, etc.

One big gotcha of portlet development is source code management. When Scott started developing with portlets, there was no such dev/test/prod setup - vendors just expected him to modify prod. Vignette has a "car" file archive, Liferay has a "lar" archive. These files allow you to easily deploy the changes required for a portlet to work. Apparently, this is still a space that needs a lot of work to allow good source-code control and the ability to rollback updates.

When rolling out a portal for an organization, it's important to start small and build features incrementally.

At this point, my laptop died - as in it went completely black. I hit the power button and it started up again, complete with the loud "bong" for all to hear. A few seconds after restarting, it went black again, so I gave up. After Scott's talk finished, I opened up and tried again - and now it's working.

The rest of Scott's presentation was very cool - he did demos of Liferay's and WebLogic's portals. Liferay looks very cool and a lot of their features remind me of Netvibes.com.

DJUG Tonight: Portals, MyFaces and Dojo

Tonight's Denver JUG meeting should be a good one. Scott Ryan is going to do a presentation on Portals, followed by Bill Dudney on integrating MyFaces and Dojo. Both presentations look interesting, but I really like what's in Scott's description:

The real questions is what really makes up a portal and what makes it different from just a normal AJAX enabled website. In this basic concepts presentation we will look at the components that make up a modern portal framework. We will look at the common architecture of this framework and what pieces and parts you should expect to find inside a portal framework. We will examine several commercial and Open Source portal frameworks including PHP and Java based portal framework. We will look at some of the tools that enable you to develop and configure a portal and if we have time we will look at installing and developing with a common open source portal framework.

With any luck, I'll be able to blog both talks.

In case you weren't aware, Scott has also done a fair amount of work migrating AppFuse to Maven 2, along with Brian Topping. Scott has put together an appfuse-maven-plugin and Brian has converted an existing AppFuse project to Maven 2. Read more about the move to Maven 2 in this mailing list thread.

Don't forget the best part of DJUG - networking at the Rock Bottom Brewery!

Seam 1.0

I've posted my thoughts on Seam 1.0 to my Virtuas blog. What are your thoughts?

It's great to see the release of Seam 1.0. Seam is similar to many full-stack frameworks like Rails, Rife and AppFuse in that it gives you all the pieces you'll need to build a kick-ass web application.

I've blogged my thoughts on Seam before, so there's no need to do that again. I like the idea, especially the lack of interfaces and the 3-files-for-each page idea. However, I don't know that this concept will fly with Java developers. I agree there's a need to simplify, but many of us are mesmerized by the de-coupling that Spring gives us. So now we're programming to interfaces, and every-so-often swapping implementations. I don't know that we can switch to this simpler model. And then there's the "EJB" thing. I think there will be a fair amount of developers that don't use EJB3 simply because it has the "EJB" name. The best thing the EJB Expert Group could have done for EJB3 would be to give it a new name.

The other thing I worry about with Seam is that it wasn't developed from an existing application. AFAIK, it didn't get extracted from a real-world application that had all the problems that Seam solves. I know that Gavin is a smart guy, and he's probably seen these problems in the real world, but there's nothing like developing a real-world application with a technology - and then extracting the framework from that.

In reality, I'm probably jealous. Seam has some really cool features, JBoss has done a great job of marketing it, and it seems to be a really cool way to develop applications. If I'm going to make AppFuse a direct competitor to Seam, it's gonna be quite the uphill battle.

Funny Video

This is too good not to post. Received from Emily of virtuastravels.com.

Integrating JCaptcha with Acegi and AppFuse

Jason Thrasher has put together a nice howto for integrating JCAPTCHA with AppFuse via Struts. If you're interested in making your application more secure for signup or authentication, check it out!