For those of you looking for an AppFuse Light, I have good news for you. I've actually been sitting on it for several months now, but now I'm prepared to release it. It's name is Equinox and it's much, much simpler than AppFuse. Equinox has only one build-time dependency (CATALINA_HOME being set for the servlet-api.jar). There's no code generation and no features - not even security. However, it supports building, testing and deploying from Ant, and even has support for managing Tomcat out-of-the-box.
To get started with Equinox, you can download the QuickStart Chapter from Spring Live. This chapter shows you how to develop a simple webapp using Struts, Spring and Hibernate - which talks to an HSQL database. Struts and Spring are integrated using the ContextLoaderPlugin and all tests are designed to be run out-of-container using JUnit and StrutsTestCase. Equinox ships with project files for both Eclipse and IDEA so you can develop and run the tests in either of these top-notch IDEs. There's also a demo available. Thanks to Boér Attila for the kick-ass CSS.
If you like what you see in the QuickStart Chapter, there's much more in the other ERP chapters of Spring Live - now available for download. Too see what's in the other chapters, checkout the Chapter Summaries.
This is a nice milestone - feels good to have made it this far. Have a good weekend!
The W4T Eclipse product looks pretty cool. However, the demo seems to imply that you create web apps using INNOOPRACT's web framework. While it looks useful - who in their right mind is going to develop webapps based on some company's Java framework when there's over 30 open source ones out there? Would you want to tie your application to the success of one company?
W4T Eclipse seems to be based on Yoxos. How the heck to you pronounce that?! The good news is that Yoxos is only $20 whereas MyEclipse is $30. Both are cheap - if they work well, why not have both? Note: it doesn't look like Yoxos works on the Mac (MyEclipse does).
Anyone worked with Yoxos and know what plugins it bundles?
I can't help but brag about how cool my current gig is with Open Logic. My task for the next few weeks is to write a simple sample app - and create alternative MVC implementations. Targeted frameworks include Struts, Spring MVC, WebWork, Tapestry and JSF. Not only am I working from home, but they dropped off an AMD XP 2800 to work with. Installing Fedora Core 2 with VMWare is what I'm up to this morning. Working with open source all day - it doesn't get much better than this.
Way back in January, Rick Hightower sent me instructions on how to run AppFuse on JBoss. I finally got around to digging through my inbox and putting them on the wiki. Here's how to run AppFuse on JBoss. If anyone is using JBoss, please feel free to edit these instructions.
Also, I noticed that Lee Grey has started an AppFuse Line-by-Line Category on this his blog. Very cool! Lee has a perspective that I never thought of:
AppFuse makes it possible for you to be productive, to take advantage of some of the most powerful and widely used open source development tools, before you really understand what you're doing. As a beautiful side-effect of this, you become familiar with Ant, Hibernate, Spring, Struts, Tiles, XDoclet, JUnit, Cactus, Canoo, DBUnit, and on and on -- all in the process of developing your application!
Good stuff Lee - keep it up! While this is a good perspective - I dread to think of supporting all those folks that don't "really understand what they're doing." 
