Raible Designs

RE: Why use Maven

Warner has a post about why he likes Maven. He might not know it, but he's actually ripping on AppFuse, its directory structure, and build file. I like getting ripped on, so that doesn't bother me. What bother's me is that Warner has comments turned off so no one can get him back.

The main reason that AppFuse uses Ant over Maven is speed. Maven runs much slower than Ant. Period. Also, with an open source project like AppFuse - I try to appeal to the larger audience, who likely has Ant installed. Other OS projects I work on (displaytag and struts-menu) both use Maven and people have a lot harder time trying to build from source b/c of Maven issues. Lastly, I like having a complete download - rather than download-dependencies-after-you-download-the-project like Maven does. I realize if I did use Maven I could package the dependencies in the app - which is likely what I'd do anyway since the main repositories seem to be constantly out-of-date.

Recently, I had a similar experience to Warner. As part of my current contract, I was tasked to write a couple of Maven sample apps. Warner came to my rescue and helped me out a lot, but I felt like I was jumping through a lot of hoops to do simple stuff that was already done in the Ant version of my app. I guess I'm just not a Maven guy. A project that's done right, regardless of if it's done with Ant or Maven, should build by typing "ant" or "maven" - or at least provide you help on what you need to type. Some projects, like Spring and Struts, actually allow you to use either one out-of-the-box. That's a pretty cool idea and likely keeps everyone happy.

It sounds like Warner has re-worked AppFuse to work with Maven. Care to donate your couple hours of work? I wouldn't use it personally, but there has been interest in a Maven version. Some folks seem to like slow build tools.

JSF: Which implementation should I use?

A few weeks back, Bill Dudney recommended I use MyFaces for my JSF app. He said it was less buggy than Sun's version. When I looked at MyFaces's website today, I noticed all their releases are betas - which is not a good sign IMO. Anyone have experience with either one? I think I'll go with Sun's as it probably has a larger community, and therefore more information.

I'm also hoping to use the JSF-Spring package. I was a little scared when I saw it's lack of documentation, but then I discovered it's in the JavaDocs if you scroll down. I'm not looking forward to the JSF's tag soup, but hopefully it won't be too bad.

My Tapestry Experience

I've finished migrating the sample app I'm working on from WebWork to Tapestry. You can also read about my WebWork experience. WebWork took me 2 full days to complete and the Tapestry version took me about 4. I had a bit of an advantage with WebWork as I've read a lot about it before working with it. I'm probably a bit biases against Tapestry because everyone thinks it's the bees knees - I don't mean to be harsh - I'm just reporting through the eyes of a developer. I'm sure I'll have similar gripes with JSF. Below is a list of things I discovered:

• There's something wrong with a project when its documentation is outdated and folks tell you to "Buy the book" rather than "read the documentation". On that same note, most of the documentation that does exist seems to be targeted at the advanced user.
• Like WebWork, there was no simple CRUD example I could look at. Then, like a ray of light from the sky - Warner published one yesterday! This tutorial vastly improved my productivity - thanks Warner! The only things I saw that I'd change in this tutorial is the use of individual setters vs. a domain object. Also, an ICallback is in the code, but never really used.
• The recommended way to name templates (.html) and page specification (.page) files is starting with an Uppercase letter. So rather than home.html (which most web developers are used to), it's recommended you use Home.html. Of course, this is easy to change - just seems like a weird recommendation, almost Apple-ish or Microsoft-ish.
• By default, all templates and pages are cached. Sure this is good because Tapestry is production-ready, but when you're developing - this needs to be off so you can get deploy+reload functionality. If you're using Tomcat, you can turn caching off by setting a $CATALINA_OPTS environment variable with value "-Dorg.apache.tapestry.disable-caching=true" (no quotes).
• Tapestry integrates with Spring very nicely. So easy it's almost silly. When I first created my list screen, it actually had only one line: public abstract UserManager getUserManager(); - and then I used OGNL to get my list of users: userManager.users. It doesn't get much easier than that.
• While setting success messages is fairly easy - I couldn't find a good way to prevent duplicate postings. With most frameworks, I stuff messages in the session and then retrieve them on the next page. With Tapestry, you have to throw a RedirectException if you want a true redirect (which requires a lot to calculate the URL of a page). I ended up using a PageRedirectException in hopes of simplifying this - but this seems to just do a forward instead of a redirect. In the few hours I spent on it, I couldn't find a way to save success messages and have them persist through a redirect. The reason I want to use a redirect is so a refresh of the page doesn't submit everything again. I know it's trivial, but is is an issue that most frameworks don't handle cleanly (except for Struts).
• There's no way to test Tapestry classes - since they're abstract, you can't just invoke them and test. Granted the classes are simple - but as long as other frameworks allow you to test their .java files and Tapestry doesn't - this will be an issue.
• When you first enter a blank form (i.e. to add a new user), the cursor's focus is put on the first required field. As a developer and user, I'd like to control this a little more (for example, by putting it on the first field). Furthermore, I'd like to control it easily - without having to subclass ValidationDelegate. On that same note, it'd be cool if required fields had an asterisk by default. WebWork does this and Spring/Struts can do this using Hatcher's LabelTag.
• There's no easy way to get the URL of a page - for example, to use in a <button>'s onclick handler to do location.href. I ended up having to implement a method in my page class, and a @Block in my template, setting the button's value with OGNL, and then using JavaScript to do onclick="location.href=this.value". The default components that ship with Tapestry only produce links and submit buttons (that must be in a form).

When developing this sample app, I often felt like I was banging my head against the wall. This is likely because I didn't want to take the time to truly understand how Tapestry works - I just wanted to get my app done. I did end up buying Tapestry in Action, but I probably won't read it until I have time or decide to use Tapestry on a project. I agree that Tapestry is cool, but it's certainly not intuitive for a Struts guy like me. I do look forward to working with it in the future and I'm sure I'll grow to like it more as I gain more experience.

Many thanks to Erik for his tech support and knowledge and to Warner for his nice kickstart tutorial.

Gloomy Denver Morning

Today was a morning like most. I got up early and was working away. I had to watch Abbie for a couple hours while Julie took her Mom to the airport - but other than that, it was pretty normal. Then it all changed.

At about 10:20 this morning (under an hour ago), Julie rushed into my office to tell me that Bob the Builder had a stroke next door. I ran over there to see if I could help - and there he was - sitting in his Bobcat, unconscious. One of his workers was giving him CPR, but he apparently hadn't been breathing for a few minutes. The ambulance showed up a few minutes after and hauled him away about 10 minutes later. He still wasn't breathing and had no pulse. I hope he's OK.

Update: Bob passed away this morning at Porter Hospital. He will be missed.

August is gonna be a rough one

I've got a lot on my plate for August. Probably too much, but I'm going to make a run at it anyway. In addition to my 40-hour per-week contract, I'm going to try and finish off 1.0 of Spring Live and release the next version of AppFuse. Julie and I were talking last week and I estimated that I'd need about 100 hours outside of "work" to accomplish both of these tasks. That's 65 hour weeks, or 12.5 hour days. Yech...

I'm off to a bad start today since I was twidding with my monitor most of the day and only billed 4 hours to my client. Tonight I got a couple hours in on AppFuse, but only minor bug fixes - no major features. It's gonna be rough - if I seem short or don't post much you'll know why. If I did it right, I'd get up at 4 every day and be I'd have my time in + exercise by 6 p.m. every night.

We'll see how it goes - the baby is due September 3rd (a.k.a. Labor Day Weekend) and I'd like to be done with Spring Live 1.0 and AppFuse 1.6 before the little guy/girl comes out. I told Julie if she had it two weeks late it would work out awful nice for me!

AppFuse Changes: Unit Testing with Easy Mock and Spring's Struts Plugin

I have a couple of proposal for the next AppFuse release. Let me know what you think:

• Change service and action/controller tests to use Easy Mock to mock dependencies. This will likely require a bit more code in the test, but it'll allow true unit testing of components. Current tests are more like integrations tests, which tend to be slower. The Canoo WebTests will continue to act as the integration tests that verify functionality top-to-bottom.
• Change Struts to use Spring's Struts Plugin. XDoclet's Spring stuff should make this pretty easy so you don't have to modify any XML - just like the current situation. The advantage of this is you can use dependency injection on your actions, rather than getBean(...).

I hope to get these in, along with a WebWork option, in the 1.6 release. I'd love to get 1.6 done and released in August, but I'm probably dreaming since I'd like to finish Spring Live in the same time frame. Of course, I'm also planning on fixing any bugs that are currently entered.

23"

I arrived home this afternoon and found that my new 23" monitor had arrived. This thing is fricken' awesome! It's so crisp, clear and BIG!! The only bad part is that I thought it supported Windows out-of-the-box - by having a VGA port. No such luck. It looks like I'll have to buy a DVI male to VGA male adapter - or possible new DVI video cards. New video cards would suck since I'd have to buy 3 for my two Linux boxes (Fedora and Suse) and one for my Windows box.

Regardless, it plugs right into my PowerBook and works great with it.