Raible Designs

My Review of Java Studio Creator (a.k.a. Rave)

I attended a Rave Demo at Sun in Broomfield today. The meeting actually had two parts - the first hour was a marketing schpeel about Sun's Enterprise Java System and the second hour was a demo of Java Studio Creator. The first hour was boring and very marketing esque - they did have an interesting price point though - $100 per employee. This is small business friendly, which is nice to see.

The Rave (a.k.a. Java Studio Creator) Demo was when things got good. Here's my notes from Dan Robert's presentation, followed by my impressions and comments. Dan is the Product Manager for JSC and was seemed to be very in tune with the tools marketing (i.e. all the good stuff from Intellij and Eclipse - and how JBuilder sucks).

What is it?

• New Java Development Tools initiative
  • For the corporate developers who write code, but don't understand all of the complexity of J2EE and just need to get their job done.
• A full fledged Java IDE
  • Visual Design Tools, 2-way editing, Editor, Debugger, Repository Management, and Project Management
  • Cool new Look and Feel
• Complementary to NetBeans and Java Studio
  • Even Enterprise developers can use it for Rapid Prototyping
  • Use Java Studio or any other tool to add persistence layers (heh, this is b/c they think that persistence can only be EJBs ;-))

What does it do?

• Quickly builds web applications that solve time-critical, real world problems
  • Complete web application creation for departments, workgroups and businesses of all sizes
  • Focus on easy to understand, event driven coding model
  • Simplifies access to existing infrastructure
  • All Java-standards based servers, all databases, all Web services, all desktops
  • Their main goal is to do web applications well, they'll catch up with the rest later

Standards-based solution for all developers

• A development solution based on 100% Java standards
• Delivers "Write Once, Run Anywhere"^TM benefits: portable apps, portable developer skillsets
• Quickly solves time-critical app development needs
  • Drag and Drop, rapid visual access to databasess and web services
  • consistent UI look/feel/behavior across all apps

Visual features to speed development

• Palette for widgets, custom graphics, code clips, etc...
• Query Editor

Simplified Access to Existing infrastructure

• Use any JDBC Compliant Database (3.0)
  • Drag in and automatically create DB connections to data-aware components
• Web Service Consumption
  • Easily pull in existing web services from Enterprise wide solutions or business partners

Java Studio Creator Roadmap

• Hammerhead:
  • 2-tier dynamic content web applications based on JSP and JSF with Page Flow design tools
  • Releases: Early Access Spring 04 (today!), FCS Summer 04 (at JavaOne)
• Thresher:
  • Minor Update Release
  • Focuses on Ease of Development and Stability
• Mako
  • Extended Client Support

Download today from http://www.sun.com/jscreator. OS X version will be available shortly after the release (JavaOne).

After the PowerPoint, Dan started into the Demo. The first thing I saw that was cool was that when he clicked on the "Run" button, it actually deploys the app and opens the browser to run it. What you see in the browser looks very similar to what you see in the IDE. The IDE looks very simple. My current client went with me and he remarked that it "looks a lot like Eclipse."

The IDE has lots of palettes, and the UI essentially looks very clean. The pallets can be docked just like in IDEA - which I like. It looks a lot more like a native Windows application than it does like Swing. Here are the palettes it has:

• Server Navigator
  • Data Sources
  • Web Services
  • Deployment Servers Palette
• User Defined
  • JSF Standard Components
  • JSF Validators / Converters
• Property Sheet
• Project Navigator

Dan then dragged a drop down component and a table component onto the page. Secondly, he added a stylesheet and it visually changed the background and fonts on the page. I asked him if there was an imbedded browser. He said they took a look at using Mozilla, but it was too much and apparently one of the "real smart" engineers wrote the embedded browser component from scratch. Dan said it was the same guy who wrote the demo from scratch in 2 minutes at JavaOne last year. The thing I found very cool was that the HTML that is written into the JSP is XHTML - none of this Netscape 4.x support. Fuck Netscape 4.x - I'm glad Sun had the foresight to drop support for it.

After adding the stylesheet, Dan used the Data Sources navigator to grab a table and drag it to the drop-down. Then he did the same for another table and the data grid. Using the Visual SQL Query Builder (which looks a lot like M$ Access) he linked two tables and added a new column from a 2nd table to the grid. He then showed us that JSC has pretty good support for 2-way editing. Edit the code, the visual representation changes. Edit the visual, the code changes. This seems to be a big problem with WYSIWIG editors, especially when it comes to dynamic webapps. It appears that they've done a pretty good job to solve this.

Next he showed us some cool features of the components. For the table, there is an "enable paging" checkbox - and for the drop-down, you can right-click and select "auto-submit on change." He then set a couple of converter types on the drop-down and had to hand-code the event handler for the drop-down. Two lines of very simple code and he was done. The code was simple enough that you could have guessed the syntax. Code completion popped up nicely as well. Apparently the JSF coding style is that each page (JSP) is backed by a Bean that contains different event handlers. The code looked pretty simple and all the data was retrieved via RowSets.

Bill Dudney was there and asked about testing tools (i.e. Cactus or JUnit). Dan's response was that these are usually used by more advanced Java developers and there's talk of it, but nothing has been done yet. Now he pulls up a very cool page navigation creator which he uses to drag and drop buttons and links to point to different pages. Then someone asked about cost - and here's what makes it great. Under $300. They also hope to have lots of add on components for JSF by JavaOne. Unfortunately, there's no tooling for building JSF components in Java Studio Creator. For more information checkout http://developers.sun.com/jscreator.

The main reason I really like Java Studio Creator was that you literally never had to see any JSF code - and you get all of the features I like to use in webapps. Furthermore, I've been training a couple of guys all week on JSPs and using JSTL's SQL tags to do CRUD on a database table. While it's simple stuff, since they've never done web development before, it's a bit advanced. I'm sure their eyes will glaze over tomorrow when I start showing them how to write JUnit Tests, DAOs and how to use Hibernate to CRUD an object. They'll probably fall asleep by the time I show them how to wire the DAOs to Hibernate using Spring. When they saw this demo today - there eyes lit up and they got inspired to do their projects again. It looks easy for them now. All they need is a JDBC 3.0 driver for DB2 and they should be able to rapidly develop webapps with Java Studio Creator. I don't blame them for wanting to use this tool - it greatly simplifies things.

After the meeting, I asked Dan about transactions and if it was possible to use Hibernate instead of the RowSet stuff. He said that since JSC is based on NetBeans, you could probably write a plugin to use Hibernate instead of RowSets. As far as I know, the main reason you'd use Hibernate is for caching - but rowsets probably have that too. I know that the spec lead for JSF is talking to the Spring developers about JSF-Spring integration, so maybe that will be a future option as well.

Another thing that's not currently supported is the use of great technologies like Tiles or Sitemesh. Sitemesh integration would likely be pretty easy - you'd just never see your decorated UI in the IDE. Tiles is definitely something on the roadmap, but they don't have a solution yet. Dan indicated that using "includes" in your JSPs should work just fine - rendering in the IDE as they would in your browser. Good stuff - I hope we start using it at my current project - I think it'll do wonders for productivity. Since it's based on standards (JSF and RowSets) - the generated code looked pretty clean too.

DU in Frozen Four

You can tell that NCAA Hockey isn't nearly as popular as other sports - i.e. basketball or football. Today, the "Frozen Four" begins and DU (my Alma Mater) is in it for the first time in almost 20 years. How can you tell its not that popular? Because the first game started at 10:00 this morning! On a Thursday?! Let's hope they win - then maybe we'll get a prime-time game where we can actually watch them. Go DU!

Make your JUnit Tests run faster when using Spring

JRoller is down, and has been down for an hour or so - so I've decided to post this Spring Live entry here.

I discovered an interesting thing today about Spring and my JUnit tests. I noticed that the VelocityEngine I was setting on my PositionManager was getting initialized once for each test* method in my Test. This means that since my PositionManagerTest has 10 test methods - it would load the context 10 times.

Loading the context so many times was because the following code was in my Test's parent's constructor:

    ctx = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("/applicationContext.xml");

I suppose I expected any constructor-iniatialized variables to be initialized once and only once. So I figured out a solution to make my JUnit tests run faster. By making the ctx variable static, and loading the file in the member variables definition, I greatly reduced the amount of time needed to run tests. Below is the new code I'm using:

    protected static ApplicationContext ctx = 
    	new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("/applicationContext.xml");

By doing this, the ApplicationContext is only set once, and my tests run much faster. Here's some performance comparisons from Struts Resume:

Average time to run "ant test-dao": 36 seconds
Average time to run "ant test-dao" after this change: 26 seconds

A 10 second improvement - that's crazy talk dontcha think?! I've tried it on single tests, as well as suites - and it seems to improve performance by approximately 30% across the board.

Because of this experience, I have to recommend that when you write JUnit tests that use Spring - you should initialize your ApplicationContext in a static member variable. It seems to be the best performing and logical choice. Of course, if I'm off my rocker - please let me know.

On a sidenote, it would be cool if Roller allowed me to turn off comments for a single post. I like how Simon posts stuff on java.net and then aggregates it to his personal weblog.

Eclipse Plugins updated for 3.0 M8

At my current client, I'm teaching a class this week on developing Java-based webapps. I'm starting simple with basic JSPs and JSTL's SQL Tags. Later, I plan to teach them how to write JUnit tests, DAOs, Actions, etc. I hope to show them how Hibernate and Spring can reduce the pain of J2EE.

The main problem is that it's kinda tough to teach this stuff to people that have no webapp development experience. How can you tell them Hibernate is soooo much easier, when they've never used JDBC? How can you show them that Spring simplifies things when they've never developed a complicated app?

Anywho, back to the point of this post. As part of the first day, I had the class (actually, there's only 2 students) setup their development environments (JDK, Eclipse and Tomcat). I decided to go with the latest Eclipse 3.0 M8 b/c I'm an upgrade junkie and I firmly believe that it's best to teach the latest and greatest stuff. Because we're using M8, I had to update a bunch of plugins and decided to package it up and release it. So without further ado, I give you Eclipse Plugins 1.1. [Download, Release Notes]

Here's the current list of plugins included in this package:

• XMLBuddy 2.0.5 - XML Editor
• Colorer 0.6.0 - General Syntax Highlighter (JSPs, HTML, CSS, etc.)
• Jalopy 1.0b10 - Source Code Formatter
• Lomboz 3m8.preview3 - JSP Editor
• JSEditor 0.0.4 - JavaScript Editor
• Easy Explorer 1.0.1 - Open Explorer/Finder
• Tomcat Launcher 221 - Run and debug Tomcat
• Spring UI 0.9.5 - Edit Spring's files

NOTE: I updated most of these plugins because older ones didn't work with Eclipse 3.0 M8. I haven't tested all of these, but they are the latest versions (as of yesterday).

I still use Eclipse on Windows, but I sure am getting used to using IDEA on the Mac. Now if I could only figure out some slick ways to pre-program keys-to-code. The Flex guy in NYC last weekend would press one key and a whole block of text would appear. I think that'd be a nice touch for next week's presos in Florida. It'd be cool to write a JUnit Test, DAO Interface, and DAO Implementation in a matter or keystrokes (i.e. one for each method).

Related posts: 1.0 Release.