Raible Designs

Better Date Input

JSCalendar is my pop-up calendar of choice these days, but I have to admit this better date input demo is very cool. It'd be sweet if you could combine the two. Hat tip to fiftyfoureleven.com.

Why Wicket looks cool

I like the looks of Wicket for a couple of reasons - without even using the framework yet.

• Its project homepage looks good. If you're using a Java web framework, chances are you're developing UIs too. If you don't know how to make sites look good - it's time to find a new line of work IMO. Of course, learning how to make good-looking UIs is another option.
• Its Wicket Stuff project. It provides Hibernate, fValidate and Spring integration. It also appears to provide an option to use Velocity for your templates. I'm not sure what the Velocity integration provides - since HTML templates (ala Tapestry) should do everything that's needed.

What I don't like about the project:

• The Buzz page has a quote that's (apparently) from this site. Unfortunately, it looks like I said it - which I didn't.
• There's no books being written about it. If it's really that good - where's the books? Ruby on Rails will have 3 by the end of this year. Any good framework should inspire books to be written about it.
• The Wicket Stuff project has no documentation. Javadocs don't cut it. Tutorials are king.

I hope this project succeeds - Tapestry needs some competition and I don't think JSF is providing it. If JSF adds HTML Templates (or I figure out how to use Java Studio Creator to manage an AppFuse+JSF project), that's a different story.

Using Ivy in AppFuse

I'll admit, the thought of not checking in JARs to AppFuse's CVS is intriguing. With Ivy, I think I could pull off the current setup, plus a dynamic-downloading system. By current setup, I mean that the JARs are distributed in your "lib" directory and you can build your app w/o downloading any dependencies. I like this because I can develop AppFuse and not worry about my internet connection.

Dion doesn't get my love for checking in JARs. The main reason I do it is because it takes me a less time to download a new release and check it into CVS than it takes me to find that same release in Maven's Repo. Case in point: Hibernate 3.

I love the idea of Ivy, and mockhaug makes it sounds great, but I don't want to have to create a bunch of metadata whenever I want to use something like Hibernate 3. Then again, if Ivy is ever going to catch on, someone has to do it.

In conclusion, I'm still not convinced I should integrate Ivy into AppFuse - sounds like maintaining and uploading dependencies would be a lot more work than just checking in JARs. If there was a person responsible for creating Ivy metadata every time a new release came out, I might think different.

Very cool search with XMLHttpRequest

From fiftyfoureleven.com, I learned about forgetfoo.com - which is doing some very cool stuff with XMLHttpRequest. Be sure to check out the calendar, comments and naked picture of Britney Spears.

While we're on the topic of cool stuff, I also learned about this cross-browser Nifty Corners component. Should we call a set of CSS+JavaScript files a component I think so, what else would you call it?

Closures with CollectionUtils

Here's a pretty nifty trick for using closure's with Jakarta Commons CollectionUtils:

I wonder if there's any performance hit from doing things this way vs. a good ol' Iterator? Hat tip to Anand Subramanian.

Use SiteMesh to decorate multiple webapps

Did you know it's possible to decorate multiple webapps with the same SiteMesh decorator? I learned how to do this from the SiteMesh mailing list:

• Put sitemesh.jar in your container's classpath. You could put it into each webapp's WEB-INF/lib, but it looks like there's problems with that.
• Create and deploy a webapp that contains the common decorator.
• In each webapp's decorators.xml, add a "webapp" attribute to point to the webapp you deployed in Step 2.

  <decorators>
      <!-- load decorator from a different web-app deployed in the server -->
      <decorator name="main" webapp="some-other-webapp" 
          page="/decorators/main.jsp">
          <pattern>/*</pattern>
      </decorator>
  </decorators>
  

Try to do *that* with Tiles.

More Tapestry+Ajax Components

Tacos is "library of useful Tapestry components", created by Viktor Szathmary. Today, he published a new release with support for Partial Page Rendering and Partial Forms. I especially like that Viktor incorporates the Fade Anything Technique as part of the components. Even better, these components work fine with JavaScript turned off. Well done Viktor! Too bad I can't use Tapestry at my day job.

DU Wins and The Blizzard of 2005

Last night was a great game and DU has repeated as NCAA Champions! Woooo hooooo!! Nice jobs gents - we're definitely looking forward to next year's season and hope to get season tickets on the glass.

This morning, I woke up to a bunch of snow, high winds and The Blizzard of 2005. It's nothing like the Blizzard of 2003 where we got 4-8 feet of snow, but it's still pretty exciting. I snapped a few picks of what it looks like around our house.

Maven 2 Alpha - looking good!

I saw that the Maven 2 Alpha was released today and decided to give it a spin. The two features in Maven 2.0 that look compelling to me are 1) speed and 2) transitive dependencies. I've been using Maven 1.x on my current project since January and I still don't like it. Why? It's dog slow on my PowerBook (but tolerable on my Windows box) and you have to specify a shitload of dependencies when developing an app with Struts+Spring+Hibernate.

Maven 2 looks good, and it does seem to startup as fast as Ant (at least on Windows). Just typing "m2" completes in about a second, and so does typing "ant". Typing "maven" takes about 3 seconds (even though it reports it only took 1 second). I look forward to seeing Maven 2 evolve. I wonder if we should rewrite our POMs for Maven 2 (we current have 11 sub-projects)? We'd probably be a pretty good test-bed, but I don't think Maven 2 supports all the 1.x plugins - does it?

I doubt I'll use Maven 2 with Equinox or AppFuse this year - mostly b/c I don't expect it to be released until 2006. I do like the looks of Ivy and I've considered re-writing AppFuse's monstrous build.xml file using JAM. If I were to use Ivy, I think I'd still release with all JARs in a local "lib" directory. The nice thing about Ivy is it would give users the option of checking JARs into source control (currently, it's required).

Even after using Maven for several months, I still like local JARs better than downloading. It does make a lot of sense in a multi-project environment though.

As for JAM, I don't like it for two reasons: 1) it uses the non-transitive dependency listing like Maven 1.x and 2) it requires you install JAM and set a $JAM_HOME. I'd prefer to keep AppFuse to one build tool - Ant or Maven (or both).

I suggested a large refactoring of the build process (and collapsing of the source trees) for AppFuse 1.9, but it was rejected by users for the most part. Their opinion: the build process works great, we like it - work on other stuff that's more important (code generation, tools support, etc.). Another thing that's suprised me about AppFuse users is the relatively small number of folks that have requested support for appservers other than Tomcat. To date, I don't think I've had a single Resin or Orion request, but I've had plenty of WebLogic, WebSphere and Sun App Server requests. The most compelling reason to use JAM for building/deploying/testing AppFuse is for its server support, but if I don't need it, why add the complexity?

I guess some things just work, and there's no reason to fix them if they aren't broken. Maven 1.x is not one of those things IMO. It's good to see the improvements coming in Maven 2.

Cool Web Cam

A co-worker pointed out a pretty cool webcam today. It's called the Cupola Cam and it displays live shots from a camera in Littleton, Colorado. The coolest part is you wait in a queue for full-control of the camera, and then you can move it around to look at everything. Nice use of Java technology too (it's an applet).