Raible Designs

Talks for the Colorado Software Summit

I'm looking forward to another great year at the Colorado Software Summer in October. I submitted a couple abstracts back in April and have recently been granted the opportunity to change one.

The reason for the change is Yan Pujante (founder at LinkedIn) is going to do my talk on Building LinkedIn's Next Generation Architecture with OSGi and Spring. Since he's been very integral in writing the existing codebase, as well as the move to OSGi, it seemed more appropriate for him to do this talk. I'd like to keep my talk on Appcelerator, but I'm having a hard time deciding between four other options.

If you're planning on attending CSS this year, let me know which one you'd like to see most.

• What's New (or coming) in Spring 3.0
• Implementing Spring Security, OpenID and OAuth
• Comparing RESTful Web Frameworks: Struts 2 vs. Spring MVC
• How Yahoo's Rules for High Performance Web Sites made LinkedIn 50% Faster

I could see changing the first option to Spring Web specifically. I could also see adding Rails and Grails to the 3rd choice. The 4th one is a lofty goal as the project has just begun. If we succeed, it could be a great talk.

Should we change AppFuse to be Struts 2-specific?

Dusty recently posted an interesting idea to the AppFuse developers mailing list:

After thinking/coding/reading for a while I think the more interesting task is: Retool AppFuse to be one or more Struts2 plugins based on various higher level app patterns. (AppFuse Facebook, AppFuse Employee DB, AppFuse Blog, AppFuse Basic LDAP, AppFuse Basic Crowd).

This all comes from the fact, that I have been wanting to refactor the AppFuse web layer for Struts. One of the interesting aspects of AppFuse is that it works pretty much the same across all its web frameworks. It does so with some lowest common denominator abstractions that can be ported and look and work the same across frameworks. I have picked my tool(s): Struts 2 and Ruby On Rails when I want to pretend I am young again. I know Spring MVC, JSF, etc. but I have no desire to build significant apps on those platforms. It's not because they suck and Struts2 rules, it is because I know Struts 2 the best, I am most efficient there and it provides everything I need to build great webapps (Let's not devolve to a framework debate). So, I would rather have a more Struts 2-specific web stack, that really leverages conventions born and raised there. The nice thing about the Struts 2 web stack is that it is complemented nicely by AppFuse's data/service layer, since unlike Grails or Rails, Struts 2 has no data or service layer. [Read More »]

Seems like a good idea to me. What do you think?

Someday I'd like to come up with a "compatibility test" that allows others to improve upon the ideas in AppFuse and develop their stacks independently. A suite of Selenium tests that require extensionless URLs might be a good start.

Which one do you believe Daddy?

Abbie: Which one of these do you believe Daddy?

Abbie: Mommy and I believe the 2nd one is right.
Me: I agree.

Integrating Compass 2.0 into AppFuse

Last week, Chris Barham showed us an example of how to implement external sorting and paging with AppFuse + DisplayTag. This week, he's at it again with a tutorial titled Searching in AppFuse 2.0.2 with Compass 2.0 and Lucene 2.3.2.

From a message he sent to the mailing list:

I've extended the previous DisplayTag external sorting and paging project to implement full search capability across the domain objects by using Compass 2.0 - http://www.compass-project.org.

Although there are a number of tutorials around for Compass and AppFuse, I thought I'd update as Compass has just gone to version 2.0 and has new features, (annotations etc).

Search results in the example are displayed in plain HTML with Compass' own paging feature, and also using DisplayTag with its paging external feature, (both on the same search results page in the example).

Code is in a branch off the original project called branches/search - check it out with:

svn checkout http://pagingappfuse.googlecode.com/svn/branches/search/ appfusecompass

Instructions on how to implement Compass are here:
http://code.google.com/p/pagingappfuse/wiki/CompassSearching

Cheers,
Chris

Again, great work Chris! We really appreciate your contributions.

LinkedIn Groups

This afternoon, I noticed there's a LinkedIn "GlassFish" group now available and it reminded me of a couple things:

• LinkedIn currently doesn't have a way to search for groups, but Jason Bailes has setup a LinkedIn Groups Search with Google Custom Search. Thanks Jason!
• I created a Apache Software Foundation group on LinkedIn a few months ago. If you're a committer or member, you're more than welcome to join the group.

LinkedIn Groups don't provide a whole lot of functionality at this point, but I've heard there's big things in store for them. Chances are they'll be very valuable in the future.

It's a beautiful night in Denver

It's a pleasant 68°F in Denver tonight. Rather than working in the house, I thought I'd step out into the backyard. It's quite nice out here - I might have to do this more often.

An afternoon in Rocky Mountain National Park

Today was one of those days I hope I do more often as a single parent. Ever since ski season ended, I've had a hard time entertaining the kids on weekends. I don't have them every weekend - Julie and I each get them a week at a time. However, for the past couple times I've had them, our weekends have been rather lame. We've still done stuff, but it's usually only a couple hours at a time. The last time I had them we went to Bass Pro Shops, got them some fishing gear and headed out to a local lake. However, once their lines got tangled and they started frolicking in the mud (while I tried to untangle them), I felt like my mission failed.

I don't know what was so special about today, but I think it was simply getting out of the city and into the hills. This morning we had breakfast with Julie, headed to REI for a new tent and then drove up to Rocky Mountain National Park to look at some animals and take a hike. We stopped in Estes Park for some ice cream and playground action and then headed into the park to gaze at some Elk and hike along a small creek. Evidence is contained in the pictures below and in a set on Flickr.

We bought the tent this morning because we were planning on camping with the Colorado Bus Club before Volkswagens On The Green (VWOTG) tomorrow. However, Abbie's cold started to get pretty bad this afternoon, so we decided to camp in the backyard instead.

Tomorrow should be a lot of fun. The forecast is 86°F and the VWOTG show is always inspiring.

AppFuse + DisplayTag: External Sorting and Paging Example

Chris Barham has posted an excellent example of how to do external sorting and paging to the AppFuse mailing list:

I've put together a new AppFuse project which demonstrates how to enhance the List screens. DisplayTag as provided has issues with large datasets, (it retrieves all the records every time), and sorting via column headings does not work for the entire dataset, only those on screen at the time.

I've built a project which addresses these issues, using Hibernate Criteria and extensions to DisplayTags PaginatedList interface which gets DisplayTag to hand off all requests for sorting and paging to the new implementation of PaginatedList.

The Google Code project is checked in to: http://code.google.com/p/pagingappfuse/ feel free to check out the code and comment. (instructions here: http://code.google.com/p/pagingappfuse/source/checkout)

There are instructions regarding the steps taken on the project wiki page here: http://code.google.com/p/pagingappfuse/wiki/PagingSorting

Cheers,
Chris

Nice work - thanks Chris!

Spring MVC vs. JSF and The State of Spring Web

Alternative Adult has only posted a couple times in 2008, but his entries have peaked my interest.

Spring MVC or JSF+?
My business unit is trying to standardize if we can on a single Java-based Web framework going forward to simplify the Web development process, especially as individual developers move from one division to another, or centralized support groups need to maintain multiple applications from multiple divisions.

At the enterprise level within my company, the architecture group says that they will provide support for either Spring MVC or JSF+ (where the + represents the accompanying technologies you would use to provide a more maintainable application and a more rich user experience, e.g. Facelets, Richfaces, etc.).

Now my business unit is trying to decide which of these two frameworks, Spring MVC or JSF+, is the most appropriate to standardize upon for our development community. [Read More]

...and...

State of Spring Web
For those that are interested, the following is a summary of the notes I captured from a conversation with SpringSource on the state of Spring Web. [Read More]

Good stuff Michael - keep it coming.

Extensionless URLs with Java Web Frameworks

Last week, I had a go of making a Spring MVC application use extensionless URLs. I did some googling, found some tips on the Spring Forums and believe I arrived at a solid solution. Using the UrlRewriteFilter (version 3), I was able to create a rule that looks for any URLs without an extension. If it finds one, it appends the extension and forwards to the controllers. This rule is as follows (where *.html is my servlet-mapping for DispatcherServlet in web.xml):

  <rule>
    <from>^([^?]*)/([^?/\.]+)(\?.*)?$</from>
    <to last="true">$1/$2.html$3</to>
  </rule>

As long as I hand-write all my URLs without an extension (<a href="home"> vs. <a href="home.html">), this seems to work. To combat developers that use "home.html", one solution is to require all links to be wrapped with <c:url value="url"/> (or some other macro that call response.encodeURL()). If you can convince everyone to do this, you can write an outbound-rule that strips the .html extension from URLs.

  <outbound-rule>
    <from>^(.*)\.html(\?.*)?$</from>
    <to last="false">$1$2</to>
  </outbound-rule>

In an ideal world, it'd be possible to modify the <a> tag at the very core of the view framework you're using to automatically encode the URL of any "href" attributes. I don't think this is possible with JSP, FreeMarker, Facelets or any other Java Web Framework templates (i.e. Tapestry or Wicket). If it is, please let me know.

Below is my final urlrewrite.xml with these rules, as well as my "welcome-file" rule at the top.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCENGINE urlrewrite PUBLIC "-//tuckey.org//DTD UrlRewrite 3.0//EN"
  "http://tuckey.org/res/dtds/urlrewrite3.0.dtd">

<urlrewrite>
  <rule>
    <from>/$</from>
    <to type="forward">home</to>
  </rule>

  <rule>
    <from>^([^?]*)/([^?/\.]+)(\?.*)?$</from>
    <to last="true">$1/$2.html$3</to>
  </rule>

  <outbound-rule>
    <from>^(.*)\.html(\?.*)?$</from>
    <to last="false">$1$2</to>
  </outbound-rule>

</urlrewrite>

If you have other solutions for extensionless URLs with Java web frameworks, I'd love to hear about them. With any luck, 2008 will be the year we drop extensions (and path-mappings) from our URLs. The stat packages might not like it, but I do.