Raible Designs

Database Profiles in AppFuse 2.0

Last night, I added several database profiles to AppFuse 2.0 and its archetypes. What does this mean? It means AppFuse should work out-of-the-box with several databases, including:

• H2
• HSQLDB
• MySQL
• PostgreSQL
• SQL Server

For example, here's how to test a new AppFuse project works with H2:

mvn archetype:create -DarchetypeGroupId=org.appfuse -DarchetypeArtifactId=appfuse-basic-struts -DremoteRepositories=http://static.appfuse.org/repository -DarchetypeVersion=1.0-m4-SNAPSHOT -DgroupId=com.mycompany -DartifactId=myproject

Yeah, I wish there was a way to shorten this command (or prompt for choices) too.

After doing this, you can cd into the "myproject" directory and run mvn integration-test -Ph2. AppFuse 2.0 projects are configured for MySQL by default, so if you want to permanently activate one of these profiles, you can add the following between the <id> and <properties> section of the profile.

    <activation>
        <activeByDefault>true</activeByDefault>
    </activation>

In addition to the profiles listed above, I tried to get Oracle Express and embedded Derby working. No dice on either one. I took a brief look at DB2 Express as well, but with a 400 MB download and 3 JARs required for its JDBC Driver - it seemed like a lot more trouble than it was worth.

Maven 2's build profiles are a powerful feature that we hope to make easy to use. For example, to test your new project with H2 and JBoss, you can simply run mvn integration-test -Ph2,jboss. Thanks to the power of Cargo, this will download JBoss 4.0.5, install it, and run all the Canoo WebTests within it. Of course, this will take a while the first time - especially since JBoss is a 77MB download. Fortunately, we allow you to change one small setting in your pom.xml and use an existing install instead.

Maven 2 is a kick-ass build/deploy/test tool once you figure it out. With AppFuse 2.0, we're doing all the "figuring out" for you.

NOTE: I would add more server profiles, but Cargo's Maven Plugin (version 0.2) has issues with Geronimo 1.1, Jetty 6.x and Resin 3.x. Strangely enough, Jetty's Maven Plugin version 6.0.0 works great, but 6.1.0 throws stack traces.

Update: Support for Oracle and Derby (in networked mode) has been added. We'll consider adding support for DB2 if IBM can figure out how to package their JDBC Driver into a single JAR.

Slick looking Confluence sites

You have to admit, both Wicket and Cayenne have nice looking websites. Did you know they're both backed by Confluence? Wicket has a Writing documentation page that explains how it works. Basically, they use the autoexport plugin to export their content to static files. If you configure this plugin to be invoked from a cron job, it's a great way to create a constantly updating dynamic-but-static site.

I believe there's a couple reasons Apache uses this setup: 1) it allows projects to customize the look and feel of their site w/o customizing how Confluence looks and 2) it reduces load on its servers since most content is served up statically. I've thought about using a similar setup for AppFuse's documentation, but I've run into a couple issues:

• The autoexport plugin is pretty flaky. The latest release (0.13) doesn't work with Confluence 2.2.9. Strangely enough, the previous version (0.12) works fine. It looks like the author had a good run with this plugin when he created it (almost a year ago), but hasn't updated it since.
• The dynamic tree menu doesn't get included in the export. If I could somehow include this tree (and the current theme) when exporting, it'd be very cool.
• The new code macro works much better than the {code} macro, but it has exporting issues both with PDF and the autoexport plugin. I tried using the code macro, but it doesn't show any syntax highlighting when using an Adaptavist Builder theme.

Apache's setup for Confluence appears to be quite good. I wonder if we should use it for AppFuse? We don't have the bandwidth/load issues that they do - and we've managed to make the site look decent using Adaptavist Builder. I like having a single source of constantly changing documentation, rather than two sites, where one is static. I think this causes confusion for users if the documentation changes a lot. That being said, I would like to export the content for bundling and versioning with each release. I wonder if Atlassian is planning on fixing the new code macro exporting issue anytime soon?

AppFuse 2.0 M3 Released

The AppFuse team is pleased to announce the release of AppFuse 2.0 M3! This release marks a milestone in our documentation efforts. We've completed all of the web framework tutorials and ensured that all the archetypes work properly. Turkish language support was added and native2ascii was integrated so all i18n bundles should work properly.

The major things missing from this release are code generation (AppGen) and web services (XFire) support. We hope to add both of these before the final release.

AppFuse 2.0 is available as a Maven archetype. For information on creating a new project using this release, please see the QuickStart Guide.

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

• Java Servlet 2.4 and JavaServer Pages (JSP) 2.0
• Java 2 Standard Platform Edition (J2SE) 5.0

For more information, please see the 2.0 M3 Release Notes.

We appreciate the time and effort everyone has put toward contributing code and documentation, posting to the mailing lists, and logging issues. We also greatly appreciate the help from our sponsors, particularly Atlassian, Cenqua, Contegix, JetBrains, Java.net and KGBInternet. Without them, working on this project wouldn't be nearly as much fun.

AppFuse Book!

David Whitehurst (an AppFuse committer) has taken on the task of writing a book on AppFuse 2.0. I don't envy him, but it looks like he's got a lot of good ideas.

If you'd like to help David shape AppFuse Primer, please post a comment on his blog.

Maven 2 hates Commons Logging

It's true that most people hate commons-logging, but Maven 2 hates it even more. There are many open source projects that use this library, so you're likely to depend on it when you never intended to. Of course, this is Maven 2's transitive dependencies fault - but currently there's no option to turn transitivity off. I tried changing to SLF4J, but that causes some Maven plugins to fail.

Since the Maven team refuses to fix this (even though it's an *obvious* exception to their rule about not changing anything), I've fixed it myself. The AppFuse repo has a fixed version of commons-logging's pom.xml. To get the fixed version of commons-logging, delete it from your local repo, then add AppFuse's repository to your pom.xml:

    <repositories>
        <repository>
            <id>appfuse</id>
            <url>http://static.appfuse.org/repository</url>
        </repository>
    </repositories>

Since the burden of this issue clearly rests upon the shoulders of the commons-logging developers - can we please get a new release with a fixed pom? Pretty please?

Update: I tried to get slf4j to work again today. While I succeeded, I found a critical bug. The bug is that log messages don't print out the method name, just debug(), info() or whatever from your classes. It's possible to fix this by using slf4j instead of clogging. However, that won't help you get method names printed when cranking up the logging for 3rd party libraries like Spring and Hibernate. Since this won't be fixed, it seems better to stick with commons-logging. I doubt I'd have any luck getting all the libraries that AppFuse uses to move away from commons-logging.

java.blogs - nice crippling update

I like how java.blogs updated their site the night before last. The changes seem to be cosmetic for the most part, with a cleaner look n' feel and some language features as well. Seeing these updates is good, and based on the update last week (where they forgot to find.replace ${community.name} with "java.blogs"), it looks like Atlassian might be releasing the software behind java.blogs.

However, there's one thing they screwed up in their most recent update: the software ceases to function.

Ever since they updated, no new feed entries have shown up on the first page. You can tell because the last entries added are experiencing record hit numbers. WTF Atlassian? Did you update the software and forget to test that it works?

In reality, I can't be too upset. This lack of updates is boosting my productivity.

Simplified UI Tags in Struts 2

Struts 2.0.3 contains a much needed simplification of its UI tag libraries. Before 2.0.3, you had to define a property three times (in the value, label and name attributes):

<s:textfield label="%{getText('user.firstName')}" name="user.firstName" 
    value="%{user.firstName}" cssClass="text medium"/>

In 2.0.3+, you can use the "key" attribute to replace all these attributes. For example:

<s:textfield key="user.firstName" cssClass="text medium"/>

One of the things I really like about WebWork/Struts 2 is the previous examples have the ability to write out the entire form row, rather than just an input field. Even better, the markup rendered is customizable via FreeMarker templates.

The bad news is Struts 2.0.3 never got released because the struts-annotations project hasn't had a release yet (good ol' Mavenism). The good news is Struts 2.0.4 is rumored to be out by the end of the month. In the meantime, if you're using Maven 2, you can use AppFuse's repository to get the goods. Here's the repo settings you're need:

<repositories>
    <repository>
        <id>appfuse</id>
        <name>AppFuse Repository</name>
        <url>http://static.appfuse.org/repository</url>
    </repository>
    <repository>
        <id>struts-203-staging</id>
        <name>Apache Struts 2.0.3 Staging Repository</name>
        <url>http://people.apache.org/builds/struts/2.0.3/m2-staging-repository</url>
    </repository>
</repositories>

Yeah, I could just advise you to use AppFuse 2.0 - but we're having a hard enough time supporting our existing users.

The Adventure is Over

After 1 year and 7 months, the big adventure is over. It was a great ride with lots of really cool people. As of Tuesday, operations at Virtuas have ceased to exist and everyone was let go. It's not a big surprise - most of us knew it was coming. I won't go into the details of why it was shutdown because I don't think it's that important. Suffice to say, it was a great job and I really enjoyed working with the folks I did.

So what does this mean for me? What's next?

I hope to go back to doing independent consulting like I was before Virtuas. When I was doing my own thing, I never had to travel, earned good rates and enjoyed 40-hour work weeks. That sounds pretty nice after the once-a-month traveling I was doing.

What does this mean for AppFuse 2.0? I hope the release schedule won't change, but it might. I was hoping to get a fair bit done this week, but it's been nuts with the shutting down festivities and the "moving out" drama. With any luck, I'll get a gig soon and I can concentrate on AppFuse development (and relaxing) until my start date.

If you're looking to hire an enthusiastic Web + Java Developer, please take a look at my resume or send me an e-mail.

AppFuse 2.0 Status

We're working hard on AppFuse 2.0. The good news is things are coming along really nicely. There's quite a few developers working on the project now and they've been a tremendous help. If I knew the move to Maven 2 would've inspired so much help, I would've done it a long time ago! We've got most of the archetypes created and we just need to work on documentation for the 2.0 release M1 release. As far as the roadmap is concerned, we've finished most of the code for an M2 release, but we still need to do documentation. I'm hoping to release 2.0 M1 on Thursday of next week.

If you want to try it, you can checkout the Hello World with AppFuse 2.0 video. After that, feel free to take it for a test drive using the QuickStart Guide.

New features in AppFuse 2.0:

• Maven 2 Integration
• Upgraded WebWork to Struts 2
• JDK 5, Annotations, JSP 2.0, Servlet 2.4
• JPA Support
• Generic CRUD backend
• Full Eclipse, IDEA and NetBeans support
• Fast startup and no deploy with Maven Jetty Plugin
• Testable on multiple appservers with Cargo and profiles

Speaking of goodies, I uploaded a bunch of AppFuse desktop backgrounds to Flickr. Thanks to Max Hays of Timberline Group for creating these.

Only 26 days left until the AppFuse 2.0 Release Party! Location TBD.

Bamboo

After reading Tim's post about Bamboo yesterday, I downloaded and tried it out. I'm very impressed, as I usually am with Atlassian products. As a first impression, I think it's better than all the open source products, but not quite as good as Pulse. Bamboo has a nice UI, but Pulse has a lot more Ajax goodies that make it more usable (IMHO of course).

P.S. I think it's ironic that both Pulse and Bamboo build AppFuse 2.0 (Maven 2-based) just fine, but Continuum hasn't had a successful build yet.