Raible Designs

Lots of Java activity in San Francisco

The last 24 hours here in San Francisco have been quite interesting. Yesterday, I had lunch with a group of AppFuse users. They work for a company a few blocks from my training class. Chipotle was on the way, so I grabbed a burrito on my route and had a great time talking with them about the various open source tools that AppFuse uses, as well as what's on the roadmap. Thanks for the cookies John!

After class yesterday, I had a Guinness with an AppFuse user that recently put a high-volume site into production. He said it's held up surprisingly well and AppFuse greatly simplified his ability to deliver the project on time. In fact, most of the features the client wanted were already built-in.

Last night was another hotbed for Java talk - from web frameworks to TSSS in Vegas. Matt Filios and I had dinner and drinks with Mike "wanna play poker" Cannon-Brookes, Crazy Bob, Patrick Linskey, Geoff Hendrey (I hope I got the name right) and a number of other guys whose names escape me. It was Mike's birthday, so I left early to avoid the chaos that Crazy Bob and Mike always seem to stir up.

To top it all off, this morning I ran into a couple of folks that read this blog. I was getting breakfast at a local bagel shop - when a guy came up to me and asked "Is your name Matt"? I answered yes, and we talked briefly about my trip out here. It was kinda wierd being recognized, but kinda cool at the same time. It was good to meet you Nadeem.

I'm heading home from this wonderfully warm place tonight, but I'm sure I'll be back in the near future.

RE: Is Ajax gonna kill the web frameworks?

James is asking "Is Ajax gonna kill the web frameworks?" From my personal experience, I can definitely say that Ajax is going to give web frameworks a run for their money. However, I doubt it's going to completely replace web frameworks. There's many companies out there that aren't willing to commit to developing a JavaScript-only UI - not even Google. GMail has a non-javascript version that's used when you disable JavaScript in your browser.

That being said, I'd much rather work on a project that embraces and uses Ajax over a web framework. However, even if you decide to use Ajax, doesn't the same framework proliferation problem still exist? DWR, Scriptaculous, Prototype, AjaxTags, AjaxAnywhere, Rico, Dojo, JSON-RPC - which Ajax frameworks are the best ones to use? If one of these projects joins Apache, will it become the de-facto Ajax framework like Struts did?

San Francisco

This week, I'm conducting a Spring and Hibernate workshop in San Francisco. I arrived late Monday night and will be here until Friday evening. So far, it's been an interesting trip. I woke up yesterday with some sort of stomach bug and almost had to postpone the class. Luckily, the pains in my stomach (and profuse sweating) went away 15 minutes before the class was scheduled to start. I made it through the day, but was pretty worn out afterwards. After class, I headed back to my hotel room and laid down for a power nap around 5 p.m. When I woke up it was 2:00 a.m. I went back to sleep and today I'm feeling much better.

The weather is beautiful here - upper 60s to low 70s during the day. This is quite a contrast to Denver - when I left, it was cold and starting to snow. In fact, our plane had to go to the de-icer before we could take off.

Good Bus Stories

I found some good bus stories on Dead Bus Diaries today. The first, The Wayback Machine is a story of a couple guys who make a roadtrip to pick up a 21-window bus. The story reminds me of my Dad and I's Road Trip to pick up my bus. When driving through Utah, through all the canyon's and mountains, the brakes on the bus changed from having 2-3 inches of cushion, to having only a 1/2".

I remember my Dad telling me, "Bah, you just need to pump the brakes more." Then it was his turn to drive down a long pass - and he quickly realized the brakes were on their way out. Regardless, we drove it home - through lots of mountains and valleys - with a mere 1/2" of travel b/w the brake pedal and the floor. I promptly got it fixed when we arrived back in Denver.

The second post, 3,200 Gallons of Gas and Counting, links to vwvagabonds.com - which has a great story about a couple who left the hustle and bustle and drove their bus around the world. 3 years, 60,000 miles, 24 countries, 4 continents, 122 border crossings and 3200 gallons of gas. Quite impressive if you ask me.

PowerBook won't boot after upgrading to 10.4.3

This morning, I began building a new user account for my demos tomorrow at NFJS. I'm doing this because the last time I did demos was a disaster. Since then, I've rebuilt my hard drive, and while things seem faster - a clean user account is the best way to get maximum efficiency. While building the new user, I was prompted by Software Update, and promptly installed Backup 3.0.1 and OS X 10.4.3.

After configuring a number of settings, I rebooted the machine. Now all I get is a gray screen with a dark gray apple on it. The damn thing won't boot. I rebuilt the disk with DiskWarrior, but no dice. Now I'm trying to repair permissions and all that jazz with Disk Utility.

Luckily, I can still boot off my iPod and I can always rebuild an external Firewire drive if I need to. However, I'd much rather get back to where I was this morning. There's nothing like hosing your machine the day before you really need it.

Update: I fixed the problem by reinstalling OS X with the "Archive and Reinstall" option. No data loss, time to backup.

Rocky Mountain Software Symposium

This afternoon, the Rocky Mountain Software Symposium returns to Denver for the final show of the year. Of course, this conference is better known as No Fluff Just Stuff, Denver. Lucky for me, I'll be presenting all my sessions tomorrow so I'll at least get one day this weekend to relax. It looks to be a good show, with lots of interesting sessions. Here's mine:

• 8:45 - 10:15 AM: Test-Driven Development with Spring and Hibernate
• 1:45 - 3:15 PM: Developing Web Applications with Spring and Ajax
• 3:30 - 5:00 PM: Spring's AOP and Transaction Frameworks

After the presentation class I attended last week, I think all these should be renamed. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to re-organize the presentations, but if I could change the titles, they'd be something like this.

• Write better code faster with Spring and Hibernate, use AppFuse to simplify both
• Make your webapps suck less by using Ajax
• Use Spring AOP and Transaction Frameworks, because they're so damn easy

Update: PDFs of my presentations, as well as the Ajax demo is available from Equinox's downloads section. Make sure and view the README if you want to run the demo and see how to view the Ajax features.

Effective Presentations

At Virtuas today, we had a workshop from Joel Hochberger of Effective Presentations. This was a very valuable training course that I learned a lot from. We started out by doing short presentations that were videotaped and criticized by other folks in the class. It was interesting to see myself speaking on video because I did a lot of "umms" and "ya knows" that weren't noticed by me or the audience.

After learning to pause more, quit shifting and have better eye contact - we moved on to learning how to better organize our presentations. Joel gave us some great tips that I should be able to really benefit from. The main gist was that you can easily create better presentations by simply thinking from the listeners perspective. What is the main benefit the listener derives from your idea?

The other two things that really stuck with me were: 1) ask for action from your listener (what they must do to achieve the benefits of your idea) and 2) summarize your presentation following audience questions. If you get a chance to attend one of Joel's workshops, I'd definitely recommend it.

Editing Java webapps instead of edit/deploy/reload

For the last few years, I've always done Java webapp development the hard way. Yeah, I'm the guy that makes Dion cringe (although I'm pretty sure he's not referring directly to me). I edit a class/jsp/xml file and run "ant deploy reload". Then I wait a few seconds for my context to reload in Tomcat. Luckily, I do mostly test-first development, so it's rare that I have to open my browser to test stuff. However, with the power of CSS and Ajax, manual testing in a browser is becoming more and more useful (although Selenium may solve that).

I've long resisted the power of the IDE, b/c I've always trusted Ant and felt confortable with the command line. However, I'm ready for a change. I'm ready to start developing Equinox and AppFuse-based applications using the edit/save/auto-reload cycle. So how do I get started? Where's the instructions for setting up my IDEs to work this way?

I prefer to use Eclipse and IDEA for development - so I'll likely try to get this working in both. If I get it working, I'll make sure and provide good documentation so others can do the same. I'm also willing to make any changes in project structure to make this happen; modifying build.xml (or pom.xml) to accomodate shouldn't be too difficult.

Happy Birthday Abbie!

Today is Abbie's 3rd birthday. It's hard to believe how fast she's grown up. On one hand, I'd like to say it feels like just yesterday that she was born - but it doesn't. A lot has happened since she was born: Jack, a new house, new cars, the bus, speaking at conferences and writing books. Phew, I hope life slows down a little soon.

Happy Birthday Abbie - I hope you enjoy your birthday party as much as we will!

Simon begins "The Journey"

It's pretty cool to see that Simon is going to begin a quest to find the best web framework to fit his needs.

Struts, WebWork, Stripes, Spring MVC, Wicket, Tapestry, JSF, etc, or even rolling your own. With so many J2EE web application frameworks to choose from, how do you decide which one to use? Several articles (e.g. JavaServer Faces vs Tapestry) and presentations (e.g. Comparing Web Frameworks) already exist, but they generally concentrate on a small subset of the available frameworks.

This can be a daunting task, but it sounds like he's got a good plan:

Clearly this is a massive task so, to reduce the scope, I'm going to focus on what it takes to build a read only web application. If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say that the 80-20 rule applies. 80% of a web application is read only and 20% is interactive (e.g. HTML forms, AJAX, etc). Of course, this is changing with technologies like AJAX, but we're still on the upward curve. Traditionally, that 20% is the most complex and is an area where many web application frameworks claim their unique selling points. For this reason, I may iterate over the evaluation process to take into account how the frameworks help web developers build interactive webapps. For now, I'm going to look at whether the frameworks make doing the 80% easy.

Notice that Simon has added a couple frameworks that I haven't worked with: Stripes and Wicket. It should be interesting to see his findings. Not every framework is designed to do the same thing, so it'll be cool to find out which one Simon thinks is the best for read-only applications.