Raible Designs

Verizon V640 ExpressCard - works like a charm

As mentioned previously, I've been waiting on a Verizon V640 ExpressCard for my MacBook Pro. It arrived this week, and I had a chance to try it out yesterday. I plugged it in, waiting a few minutes, entered the root password, and voila! - I was online. Pretty slick stuff. Bandwidth tests show the speed is around 512 KB/sec. With all the wireless issues I've had, this thing is a nice treat. Who knows if I'll even bother to use wireless anymore!

Speaking of MacBooks, it seems that the first ones produced were some of the best. I have 3 co-workers with machines, and while one works great, the others have some serious issues. One randomly reboots (without warning) and the other guy's has been in the shop for a week b/c it has kernel panics 2-3 times per day. Besides the wireless, the only other issue I have is mine doesn't work on some projectors. Since I'm doing a lot of training and conferences in the next few months - I should probably get that looked at.

The neighborhood just keeps getting better

When Julie, Abbie and I first moved to our neighborhood, Julie was a little apprehensive. She liked living out in the burbs, and we were planning on living here for a few months while another house was being built in The Ranch. Meanwhile, I loved the neighborhood. I went to school at DU (a mere 8 blocks away) and considered the area my "old stomping grounds."

After a couple months, The Ranch house fell through (price went up 60K) and we decided to double the size of our house. We rented the house next door while ours was being built. Last year, that house was leveled and a nice 2-story, full basement house was put in. It sold a couple months ago for $750K. When we remodeled our house, we did it because we needed the space, not because we thought its value would skyrocket.

Today, I couldn't ask for a better location to live in. I was disappointed when the excellent Italian restaurant (literally 50 feet from our house) was replaced with Little India. However, I love Indian food and we've grown to love the new place. The wine tastings (Wednesdays and Fridays) at Little's Liquors are great, and the fact that I can take out the trash and pick up a bottle of wine in under a minute is phenomenal. The fact that Safeway is 1.5 blocks away is great, we walk there several times per week. Heck, even the first Chipotle ever built is only 6 blocks away. Not to mention Jerusalem's, the best Middle-Eastern food in town.

My motivation for writing this post is because a new Sushi place has moved into our neighborhood. Julie mentioned it last week, and I had a chance to check it out today. I was very impressed when I walked in and discovered it was a John Hollys. I've only eaten at one John Hollys (near Park Meadows Mall), but it was excellent. Needless today, lunch was scrumptious today and I'm looking forward to eating there again. The Sushi Den is pretty close by as well, but it's probably a mile away - unlike John Hollys at a 1/2 block.

AppFuse 2.0 Status

Last week I managed to get AppFuse to compile with Maven 2, this week I got all the tests passing. This week, I struggled with Maven's WAR dependencies and how AppFuse will be used by end-users. It was frustrating, but I think I got most everything figured out. Unfortunately, there's still many issues to be sorted out.[Read More]

Label placement in web forms

From Swapnonil Mukherjee:

Matteo Penzo has published an excellent article about the placement and alignment of labels in data entry forms. His research, though much more scientific and thorough, confirms what I had said earlier, about the importance of right aligning form labels.

In AppFuse 1.9.2, we added support for the CSS Framework and Wufoo-style forms. The new form layout appears to satisfy many of Matteo's suggestions. The only things we aren't doing are: 1) we're using bold labels instead of plain text and 2) we're using labels for drop-downs, instead of making the first element the label. I suppose the bold labels isn't much of an issue b/c we're not using heavy input borders. As for labels and <select> elements, I think the way we're doing things is good enough. If it works for Wufoo, it works for us!

High Performing Java Web Frameworks

Steven Haines appears to be gearing up for a showdown among Java web frameworks. In his Web Frameworks article (found via dzone), Steven notes the following:

He goes on to say that he's planning on comparing a number of web frameworks, and his study will give special attention to how these frameworks perform. He'll be comparing Struts 1.x, Struts 2.x, Shale and Spring MVC. If you think your framework can compete, Steven invites you to send him an e-mail.

If anyone has a compelling reason why we should add an additional framework, please contact me and I will be glad to consider it in this endeavor.

I'm looking forward to reading Steven's articles, I just hope I can find them again when they're published.

AppFuse 2.0 Status

I managed to get most of AppFuse's code moved over to a Maven 2 structure this week. I have tests working in the hibernate/ibatis projects, as well as the service project, but not in the web tier projects yet. I do have everything compiling though.

[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Reactor Summary:
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] AppFuse ............................................... SUCCESS [2.228s]
[INFO] AppFuse Common Data Module ............................ SUCCESS [1.681s]
[INFO] AppFuse Hibernate Module .............................. SUCCESS [0.809s]
[INFO] AppFuse iBATIS Module ................................. SUCCESS [0.630s]
[INFO] AppFuse Data Modules .................................. SUCCESS [0.008s]
[INFO] AppFuse Service Module ................................ SUCCESS [0.696s]
[INFO] AppFuse Common Web Module ............................. SUCCESS [2.817s]
[INFO] AppFuse JSF Module .................................... SUCCESS [4.410s]
[INFO] AppFuse Spring MVC Module ............................. SUCCESS [4.038s]
[INFO] AppFuse Struts 2 Module ............................... SUCCESS [4.954s]
[INFO] AppFuse Tapestry Module ............................... SUCCESS [4.042s]
[INFO] AppFuse Web Modules ................................... SUCCESS [0.007s]
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESSFUL
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 26 seconds
[INFO] Finished at: Fri Aug 18 15:06:54 MDT 2006
[INFO] Final Memory: 11M/26M
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

If you'd like to review any of the work done thus far, I've uploaded my latest work to:

http://static.appfuse.org/downloads/appfuse2-20060817.zip

The major issue I've encountered to date can be reviewed on the Maven user mailing list. If you happen to try things out, the best thing to do is post feedback to the dev list. I'm considering another device-free weekend, so I may not respond until Monday.

Comparing Open Source Application Servers

With all the recent hubbub about GlassFish, I decided to do a quick performance test this morning. I downloaded all the most recent versions of the various open source application servers, deployed AppFuse 1.9.3 (Struts version) on them, and ran "ant test-canoo" to see if any of them were faster than the other. This was by no means a scientific, isolated test. It also didn't take into account any performance tuning you should do on these servers, I just used the out-of-the-box settings.

I ran these tests on my MacBook Pro (2.16 GHz Intel Core Duo, 2 GB DDR2 SDRAM) with my JAVA_OPTS set to:

-Xms768M -Xmx768M -XX:MaxPermSize=512m -Djava.awt.headless=true

When typing "java -version" at the command line, I got:

java version "1.5.0_06"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_06-103)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.5.0_06-57, mixed mode, sharing)

Servers tested (in no particular order):

• JBoss 4.0.4
• GlassFish B48
• JOnAS 4.7.6
• Resin 3.0.21
• Geronimo 1.1

I'm pleased to note that all servers allowed me to deploy appfuse.war without using a console or command-line tool. They all support dropping the WAR in some sort of auto-deploy directory. Very cool! Secondly, I was able to successfully deploy AppFuse on all of them with no changes to AppFuse nor the server. Quite impressive.

My test consisted of the following:

• Copying appfuse.war into the appropriate directory
• Starting the server
• Running "ant test-canoo" from my $APPFUSE_HOME directory once
• Running "ant test-canoo" 3 times, recording the numbers for each run

Here's what I found:

Since I know you're going to ask about Jetty and Tomcat (the two main servlet-only containers), I ran the numbers on those too. First off, I tried Jetty 6 RC0. No dice - I got the following error when trying to start the server.

java.lang.IllegalStateException: Cannot initialize context because there is already a root application 
context present - check whether you have multiple ContextLoader* definitions in your web.xml!
        at org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoader.initWebApplicationContext(ContextLoader.java:173)

Since AppFuse deploys on all the above app servers, as well as Jetty 5.1.x, I'll chalk this up to a bug in Jetty 6. I used Jetty 5.1.11 for this test because I already had it installed on my machine.

I don't know that these numbers mean anything, but it was a fun experiment. For those of you who think these numbers might mean something, here's the rankings:

1. Tomcat 5.5.17
2. Resin 3.0.21
3. JBoss 4.0.4
4. Jetty 5.1.11/GlassFish B48 (tie)
5. Geronimo 1.1
6. JOnAS 4.7.6

Of course, the better test would be hammering each server with 1000 concurrent users (or a number higher than that) and comparing how each server holds up.

AppFuse Roadmap updated for 2.0

I've updated the AppFuse Roadmap for the upcoming 2.0 version. The current plan is to have a few milestone releases before the final 2.0 release. I can't promise any specific release date because of developer's schedules and current commitments. However, my hope is we can have it done by the end of this year.

Milestone 1

• Maven 2 integration
• Migrate from CVS to Subversion
• Remove XDoclet, putting generated files into source tree
• Get all flavors (WARs) deployed and running on Tomcat and Jetty Maven Plugin
• Spring 2.0: Upgrade XML to XSDs, annotations where appropriate
• Upgrade WebWork to Struts 2
• Documentation - move to new Confluence or DocBook-based system for 2.0 documentation

Milestone 2

• JDK 5, Annotations and JSP 2.0
• Archetypes for creating new AppFuse projects
• Documentation, including screencasts for tutorials

Milestone 3

• Integrate XFire by default (for existing classes and generated classes)
• Code Generation/AppGen - hopefully with the AppFuse Maven Plugin
• Documentation

2.0 Nice to haves

• TestNG replacing JUnit
• Hibernate Validation Annotations (hard part is hooking it into the web frameworks)
• Tomcat Plugin for Maven (that operates like Jetty's plugin)
• JPA Support
• Support for JDK 1.4 using something like Retroweaver
• Support for using Ant to build/test/deploy AppFuse-based projects
• Someone to do all the documentation ;-)

Let me know if there's anything that seems to be missing from this list.

If you can't wait until the end of this year, you may take a look at Patrick Lightbody's newly announced Project Able. He has a lot of good ideas in there that I hope to learn from.

A device-free weekend

This weekend, I did something I haven't done in a while (if ever). I left my laptop at work, and I promised myself to not touch a keyboard all weekend. When my phone's battery died on Saturday morning, and I realized I'd left my charger at work, I decided to go no-devices all the way. Of course, I still watched TV and enjoyed my car stereo, but being computer-free felt liberating. It was an awesome weekend, and I'm thinking about doing it from now on.

Saturday, Julie and I had a great time watching Superman, IMAX, in 3D. It was killer. The whole movie wasn't 3D, but the 4 scenes in 3D were incredible. I highly recommend it. On Sunday, we had kickass seats to The International thanks to Virtuas. We sat on the 18th hole and watched golf while getting free cocktails served to us for several hours. It didn't suck by any means.

Tutorial: How to Create an AJAX-based file upload progress bar

Helge Tesgaard has written a nice tutorial on How to Create an AJAX-based file upload progress bar with AppFuse 1.9.3. Check it out if you have a need for such a thing. I especially like Helge's comment on productivity towards the end.