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From an e-mail I received a while back:
I'm interested in hearing your opinion of XMLC? And when will we see it in AppFuse? ;-) Seems to me that with it's base in xml and all the ajax and SOA hubub that it could be primed for a resurgence. And what about BarracudaMVC as an AppFuse option?
If you happen to be in downtown Denver tonight, and you're interested in Geronimo, you may want to stop by the Rock Bottom Brewery for the Geronimo Special Interest Group. IBM is sponsoring the food and beverages and Bill Dudney will be providing the conversation. I highly recommend attending if you can as there will be a plethora of good beverages for all. I won't be missing it.
Also, for those interested in learning more about AppFuse, I'll be speaking at the Denver JBoss User Group on Thursday night. There's a lot of cool stuff happening in AppFuse's SVN right now. This is, in large part, caused by a number of new committers: Mike Horwitz, Bryan Noll and David Whitehurst.
Mike has done a lot of work to allow Maven to recognize a WAR's dependencies. Furthermore, he's in the process of trying to get this functionality added to the maven-war-plugin. Bryan Noll (a.k.a. "Country Bri") has recently converted the data module to have a Generics-based generic DAO implementation for Hibernate and iBATIS. Bryan has recently become an OpenJPA committer as well - so feel free to start harassing him about doing the JPA implementation for AppFuse. Finally, David has been working feverishly on the AppFuse Maven Plugin that replaces AppGen. Welcome aboard gents and thanks for all your contributions so far!
As far as JSF Ajax frameworks are concerned, there seems to be two major players: Ajax4jsf and ICEfaces. I don't know that either one is a true open source project (where developers are from multiple companies), but Spring isn't either, so I don't know that it actually matters. I think it interesting that both products don't seem to care about capitalization, but I digress.
Today, ICEsoft announced they've open-sourced ICEfaces. Was this inspired by Java going GPL?1 I doubt it, these things take time and it's likely that ICEsoft had this one in the cooker for quite a while. I do think it's interesting that the major JSF component vendors (Oracle, Exadel and now ICEsoft) have all open-sourced their products. Must be a tough market out there.
Apparently, ICEfaces works with Facelets, so it should work with AppFuse and Equinox. Looking through ICEfaces documentation and sample apps, they seem to be missing a straight-forward "here's how to integrate it into your existing application" guide. They do show how to modify your web.xml, but there doesn't seem to be a short, concise guide to what configuration settings you need to add to your faces-config.xml. I was somewhat motivated to write such a guide this morning, but lost motivation quickly as I realized it might be quite the effort. If someone wants to create the Maven bundles for ICEfaces, I'll try to carve out some time later this week to write up instructions for integrating ICEfaces into Equinox and AppFuse.
Unfortunately, integrating ICEfaces into your project is only the beginning. The hard part is choosing which is a better Ajax toolkit: ADF Faces/Trinidad, Ajax4jsf or ICEfaces? Trinidad and ICEfaces seem to be more about components, whereas Ajax4jsf is more about Ajaxifying regular ol' JSF components. So I think Ajax4jsf still remains, and ICEfaces looks like a better out-of-the-box component library than Trinidad. I guess time will tell.
Update: I forgot to mention Infragistics NetAdvantage as a JSF Ajax framework. OpenLogic decided to use Infragistics in the project I started for them. I was able to get it working in AppFuse fairly easily, but it's kinda ugly from a setup standpoint. They require you to copy a bunch of static files (images, stylesheets and scripts) into your project. Yech.
[1] Stephen O'Grady has an excellent writeup on this: And Sun Said, Set My Java Free: The Open Source Q&A.
I'm curious to know if folks think I should rename Equinox to "AppFuse LE"? LE stands for "Light Edition" in this context, but I'm open to other suggestions. Even though my Equinox
project is ranked higher than Eclipse's Equinox project, it's obvious there's a name clash. It seems to make sense for me to change the name since it's a one-man project and Eclipse is a huge organization.
AppFuse LE seems like a good descriptive name, as does "AppFuse Light" and "Spring Kickstart".
Eventually, I'd like to figure out a way to merge AppFuse and Equinox. If users could start with something like Equinox (no features) and
plug-in the various features, that'd be pretty cool. Some web frameworks (i.e. Struts 2) have a plugin feature, but most don't. I figure we
can leverage Struts 2 for all frameworks, and convert to specific frameworks' plugin features if they're added. Of course, we're also looking at OSGi and Spring's OSGi support for our plugin architecture. The only problem with OSGi is it looks pretty complicated compared to Struts 2's plugin system.
The other advantage of changing the name is I could create a new java.net project with SVN support and not have to pay for the CVS -> SVN conversion. Of course, leaving the name the same also makes it pretty easy as there would be no additional work for me. 
Thoughts?
I'm attending the Denver NoFluff show this afternoon. For the first session, I attended Glenn Vanderburg's talk titled JavaScript Exposed: There's a Real Programming Language in There! (Part 1). It was the first time I saw Glenn speak and it was a real pleasure. His talk was more like a conversation than a traditional conference talk, as are most sessions at the NoFluff shows. While I was tempted to stay for Part II of Glenn's talk, I figured it'd probably suite me better to experience Justin Gehtland for the first time.
Justin's talking about Advanced Hibernate and his slides are online. Most of you probably know that NoFluff shows are the best conferences out there. However, did you know you can drink beer during the sessions? I'm drinking one right now. How? Because if the show is at a hotel, you can drink anywhere in a hotel1. Being that it's Friday afternoon, it feels somewhat appropriate.
1. Of course, I asked Jay for permissions before I brought a beer to this session. His only criteria was that I buy one for the speaker. Nice!
If you're in the Denver area, tonight's DJUG should be a good one. Scott Davis is presenting on how to Roll your own Google Maps and I'm talking about Migrating from Struts 1 to Struts 2. I've seen Scott's presentation and it's very good. He explains the basics of CSS and JavaScript so even if you're new to web stuff, you won't be lost.
The nice thing about being the main speaker is I can almost guarantee that the talk will finish on time, pending questions and answers of course. With any luck, we'll be at the Rock Bottom by 8:30. Here's the current agenda:
5:30-6 p.m. Food and Networking
6-7 p.m. Basic Concepts
7-7:15 p.m. Break and Announcements
7:15-8:15 p.m. Main Meeting
8:15-8:30 p.m. Questions and Answers
8:30 p.m. Door Prizes
Update: Download Migrating from Struts 1 to Struts 2 (PDF, 4.7 MB).
Last night, I did a bit of playing with technologies new to me. First of all, I got AppFuse 2.0 running on Continuum. This was was easy enough, I just had to add <scm> information to each pom.xml. Thanks to those who recommended this approach. I thought it was a silly solution until I realized "mvn site" produced the wrong information when <scm> wasn't present for sub-modules.
Since I was playing with Continuous Integration tools, I decided to give Cerberus, LuntBuild, and Pulse a spin. My goal was to give each server the old "college try" and see if I could get them running with minimal effort. I don't know where I heard about Pulse, but it was somehow included in my tests.
Cerberus didn't work with my Cygwin/Ruby setup, so I was done with it quickly. LuntBuild worked pretty well, but the interface and configuration seemed kinda clunky. I also found it strange that it uses a 4.x version of Jetty - seems kinda old. I was surprised to see that it uses Tapestry for its web framework. Pulse was the nicest one with a kick-ass (ajaxified) user inferface, powered by Acegi, WebWork and Hibernate (according to its JARs). It was definitely the easiest to setup and use. While Pulse isn't free for commercial use, it is free for open source projects, as well as small teams.
Summary: Continuum, LuntBuild and Pulse seem to be the best tools for building Maven 2 projects. While CruiseControl works, and works well, it does require you to customize XML from the command line, whereas these tools allow you to do everything through a web interface.
Toward the end of the night, I downloaded NetBeans 5.5 and installed its Maven 2 Plugin. I was surprised at how full-featured this plugin is. I was able to build, test and run the AppFuse web modules in the embedded Tomcat without issues. It's definitely a cool plugin. As for NetBeans, it seemed pretty sluggish and I couldn't figure out how to get Ctrl+Shift+R functionality, which is a must for me these days. Also, I couldn't get the JSF support working for the AppFuse JSF Module, seemingly caused by the Maven plugin (project properties only has Maven options). Since NetBeans works so well with Maven 2, and it's much more full-featured than Eclipse, it seems natural to recommend it to AppFuse 2 users. Of course, I like IDEA a lot more, but there's no Maven 2 plugin that I know of.
Ever since I upgraded to IDEA 6.0.1 on OS X, I've been getting Out of Memory errors like no tomorrow. It seems like it's leaking memory when I'm not even using it. Today, I went to lunch shortly after opening IDEA to do some work. When I came back, I was created with the following dialog:
I've set my Info.plist to have -Xms256m -Xmx512m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m, but it doesn't seem to help. How has your IDEA 6 experience been on OS X? Are you running out of memory? I haven't had any issues on Windows - maybe it's a problem with the MacBook Pro?
I fully expect the IDE zealots to say "use NetBeans or use Eclipse". Eclipse doesn't support hierarchical projects, so that won't work. I'm willing to try NetBeans if I can run something like "mvn netbeans:netbeans" and if it supports hierarchical projects like IDEA does.
If you're interested in learning about Struts 2 or AppFuse, I'm doing a number of speaking engagements in the next month:
How's that for getting some mileage out of my CSS presentations?
I don't know who will be doing the Basic Concepts talk at DJUG, but I'm pretty sure Chris Maki will be presenting on JPA at the JBoss User Group meeting.
In addition to these local talks, I'll also be talking at The Spring Experience on What's new in AppFuse 2.0. Since my talk is at 9:30 p.m. on Saturday night, I'm looking into getting some free beer to bribe people into showing up.
The AppFuse JIRA instance has been getting hammered with spam today. Some jackasses are creating accounts and posting issues (as well as comments) chalk full of links. Any ideas how to stop this - outside of not allowing new users to sign up?
