Raible Designs

Dream Bus

This is a 23-window bus, and looks to be a bit older than mine (a '66 21-window). However, it has the same paint job I'm dreamin' of. Sure is beautiful.

Found at vwtrends.com.

Upgraded to Roller 2.1

I upgraded this site to Roller 2.1 yesterday. I did encounter a few issues while upgrading, but nothing too major. If you see any issues let me know.

For the record, this blog has had 2244 entries and 7380 comments since I started it in 2002. I wonder what the highest numbers are on a Roller-based blog?

CSS Framework Design Contest

Over the past 2 weeks, I've managed to raise $900 for the CSS Framework Design Contest. Thanks to friends, AppFuse users and SourceBeat their donations. You guys rock!

With this cash, I hope to give away 3 prizes: an iPod (60GB), an iPod (30GB) and a 2GB Nano. Of course, if the winners decide they'd rather donate the money to charity, that's cool too. Any additional donations I receive I'm going to send to the Elena Steinberg Memorial Fund.

Here's the rules of the contest: Create a theme (mostly CSS, images allowed) that makes the CSS Framework look good (download source files). This framework is simply a structured bit of XHTML for page layout, and a number of CSS files for positioning. What's missing is a number of good-looking themes to make this framework look even better. I have aspirations of creating something like CSS Zen Garden - but with more of a web-application flavor.

I'll use the same submission guidelines as the CSS Zen Garder, but add that your themes should be Apache licensed. In my mind, this simply means that anyone can use your theme - they simply have to retain your contact information in a comment w/in the stylesheet itself. I'd like to distribute (or at least make available) the top themes to AppFuse users - so they aren't stuck with a single theme. In addition, it probably wouldn't be too hard to make these into Roller themes.

The CSS themes from this contest should be usable in corporate intranets, as well as customer facing applications. Sure, wacky designs are cool, but sharp and clean are better. Extra points will likely be given for themes that pretty up how forms are laid out and displayed. Ajaxian.com links to some good examples, particularly Wufoo.

I've created a CSS Design Contest project in AppFuse's JIRA - so please submit your entries there. The contest ends on March 31st, 2006 at midnight MST. After that, the winners will be decided using some sort of voting mechanism. I hope to create an application to showcase all the entries in the next week or two.

For inspiration, you might checkout Open Web Design and Open Source Web Design.

Good luck folks - may the best design win!

Spring Fundamentals in Boston almost sold out...

If you're looking to learn Spring and live near Boston, I'm coming to town on March 14th to teach our Spring Fundamentals course. We're getting pretty close to capacity, so sign up now before it's sold out!

And yes, I will be staying in Boston on Friday night for St. Patty's day. Should be a good time for sure.

MacBook Pro Battery Life

I leave my MacBook Pro at the office these days, and keep it plugged in most of the time. However, some folks have asked about battery life, so I figured I'd test it out today. I unplugged it when I got in and waited for it to sleep. 2 hours and 23 minutes. This is on par with my old PowerBook, but it's quite different from what MacRumors says (3hr 17min). I have a keyboard, mouse and 20" cinema display hooked up to it, but the display has its own power, so I doubt that effects the results.

Which Ajax enabled framework should you use as an Enterprise Java developer?

Paul Browne asks (and answers) "which Ajax enabled framework should you use as an Enterprise Java developer?":

Paul goes on to show you how he researched the Ajax-enabled Java frameworks that are currently available and gives a set of criteria he used. His conclusions?

• Use AjaxAnywhere if you need to add Ajax functionality to an existing Struts application.
• For new applications with Ajax, use AppFuse. While he recommends the Struts version, I recommend using the other flavors first (Spring MVC, WebWork, Tapestry or MyFaces).
• For the future (which I believe is what he means by medium-term), use a JSF implementation. AppFuse currently uses MyFaces, and it's likely we'll keep improving that (possibly with a Shale front-controller or some nifty things the Spring team has been adding).

Sun's Guerilla Cannibal Team

James Governor:

It's not every day you get listed with a line-up like that! Like Simon Phipps commented - where should I send my resume? Looks like I owe the RedMonk guys a beer or 6.

DbUnit Tip: Turn off foreign key constraints when importing into MySQL

One of the issues I've had with using DbUnit is getting tables to load in the proper order from XML. The XML datasets I use to load table data are flat and don't really have any notion of foreign keys and such. Therefore, when you get into a situation where tables have a circular reference, using DbUnit can be a real bitch. I ran into this situation yesterday.

Luckily, I was able to figure out a solution thanks to the help of Mark Matthews. Just add "sessionVariables=FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0" to your JDBC URL. Here's how the "db-load" target in AppFuse looks with this in place:

    <target name="db-load" depends="prepare"
        description="Loads the database with sample data">
        <property name="operation" value="CLEAN_INSERT"/>
        <property name="file" value="metadata/sql/sample-data.xml"/>
        <dbunit driver="${database.driver_class}"
            supportBatchStatement="false" 
            url="${database.url}&amp;sessionVariables=FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0"
            userid="${database.username}" password="${database.password}">
            <operation type="${operation}" src="${file}" format="xml" transaction="true"/>
        </dbunit>

    </target>

Does your preferred database have a similar mechanism for turning off foreign key checks using the connection URL?

Why I like Tomcat 5.5.12 better than Tomcat 5.5.15

Here's what happens with Tomcat 5.5.15:

alotta:~/dev/appfuse mraible$ export CATALINA_HOME=$TOOLS_HOME/apache-tomcat-5.5.15
alotta:~/dev/appfuse mraible$ ant deploy;tstart
Buildfile: build.xml

...

deploy:
    [unwar] Expanding: /Users/mraible/Work/appfuse/dist/webapps/appfuse.war into
 /opt/dev/tools/apache-tomcat-5.5.15/webapps/appfuse

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 3 seconds
Using CATALINA_BASE:   /opt/dev/tools/apache-tomcat-5.5.15
Using CATALINA_HOME:   /opt/dev/tools/apache-tomcat-5.5.15
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: /opt/dev/tools/apache-tomcat-5.5.15/temp
Using JRE_HOME:       /Library/Java/Home
alotta:~/dev/appfuse mraible$ ant reload
Buildfile: build.xml

reload:
   [reload] FAIL - Encountered exception java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: 
org/apache/log4j/spi/VectorWriter

BUILD FAILED
/Users/mraible/Work/appfuse/build.xml:1063: FAIL - Encountered exception 
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/log4j/spi/VectorWriter

Total time: 1 second
alotta:~/dev/appfuse mraible$ 

Here's what happens with Tomcat 5.5.12:

alotta:~/dev/appfuse mraible$ export CATALINA_HOME=$TOOLS_HOME/apache-tomcat-5.5.12
alotta:~/dev/appfuse mraible$ ant deploy;tstart

...

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 4 seconds
Using CATALINA_BASE:   /opt/dev/tools/apache-tomcat-5.5.12
Using CATALINA_HOME:   /opt/dev/tools/apache-tomcat-5.5.12
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: /opt/dev/tools/apache-tomcat-5.5.12/temp
Using JRE_HOME:       /Library/Java/Home
alotta:~/dev/appfuse mraible$ ant reload
Buildfile: build.xml

reload:
   [reload] OK - Reloaded application at context path /appfuse

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 3 seconds
alotta:~/dev/appfuse mraible$ 

Looks like I'll be sticking with 5.5.12 for the foreseeable future.

Canoo WebTest Firefox Plugin

Canoo WebTest now has a Firefox plugin, similar to Selenium IDE. I gave it a 2-minute test using Deer Park (a.k.a. Firefox) on my MacBook Pro. Thumbs down, not intuitive enough. Of course, if it had a video like Selenium's video, it might be easier to figure out.