Raible Designs

AppFuse News: GitHub, Hibernate Search and The Future

It's been a while since I've written anything about AppFuse, but since the project has had quite a bit of activity lately, now seems like a good time.

GitHub
First of all, we moved the source code from java.net to GitHub way back in June. Thanks to Serge for helping with this process and making it quick and painless. For some reason, shortly after moving, we started having quite a few build issues with Bamboo. I was able to diagnose the problem as not enough memory on our server. Thankfully, Contegix was able to add another 2GB of RAM to our box and get everything back up-to-snuff.

New Committer: J. Garcia
J. Garcia has been a regular voice on the users and developers mailing list for several months. He's recently started contributing a lot of patches in JIRA and seems genuinely interested in the success of AppFuse. That's why we voted and added him as a committer. To prove this was a smart move, he recently replaced Compass with Hibernate Search and upgraded to Hibernate 4. As part of this work, he removed iBATIS support, which brings me to my next point.

The Future
In mid-August, I sent an email to the community, asking them "Anyone using iBATIS?"

I'm thinking of replacing AppFuse's Data Tier with Spring Data, especially because it has NoSQL and REST support. There's a good intro on InfoQ today:

http://www.infoq.com/articles/spring-data-intro

Does anyone see an issue with this? The lack of iBATIS support could be an issue, but I doubt it since if we wanted to continue supporting it, we should move to MyBATIS.

Everyone agreed this was a good idea and it seemed like a logical time to remove iBATIS support. In addition, I posted a roadmap I jotted down in early May. Since we've missed all the dates so far, I've removed them from the listing below. We hope to get 1-2 releases done by the end of this year, with 2.2 in the next 2-3 weeks.

2.2
Hibernate 4
Hibernate Search
Bootstrap
H5BP

2.3
AMP for all light modules
Wicket
PrimeFaces

2.4
JSR 303 (might require removing or developing client-side support)
Mockito instead of jMock/EasyMock

2.5
AMP one-to-many
Spring Data
MyBatis (if there's interest in adding it back in)

2.6
wro4j for concatenation and minimizing JS and CSS
pjax - https://github.com/defunkt/jquery-pjax

2.7
Scala example
Gradle example
Article about examples

3.0
GWT

Maven Central Statistics
To prove there's still a fair amount of folks using AppFuse, here's some statistic from Sonatype's OSS Repository Hosting Service.

From this screenshot, you can see that AppFuse artifacts are downloaded around 7,000 times per month. The following graph is even more interesting. Apparently, around 3,000 new projects are created with AppFuse archetypes each month.

The AppFuse Name
Finally, I recently discovered that ShoreTel decided to name a new product AppFuse. I guess this signifies two things: 1) it's a good name for a product and 2) someone didn't do their research before naming it. At this point, I'm not too concerned, but it is an interesting development.

Core HTML5 Canvas Book Review

I've known David Geary for quite some time, from our original meeting in the blogosphere to speaking on the No Fluff Tour. At first, I had trouble respecting the guy because he was such a JSF Fanboy. However, over the years, he's switched to Ruby on Rails, GWT and now he's all about HTML5. Specifically, HTML5's <canvas> element. When David asked me if I'd like a copy of his lastest book, I jumped at the opportunity.

I received it in the mail shortly before heading to Hawaii this summer. I started reading it by the pool the next day.

I was immediately impressed that the book was printed in color. The first copy I ever saw of my Spring Primer was in color and it really popped. Geary's book does the same and I'm glad the publisher decided the extra cost of printing was worth it. In the preface (and in a recent blog post), David explains how he wrote the book code-first in the Zen tradition, so you can read it without reading. I saw him write somewhere that he spent 2 years, 60 hours per week writing it. It really shows - the sheer amount of code and knowledge in this book is amazing.

Looking back at the Table of Contents, I remember getting overwhelmed early on. Not overwhelmed in that I didn't understand how things were working, but more like "there's too much in here to try and remember it all". I haven't used algebra since high school, and right there on page 53 it says:

To do anything interesting with Canvas, you need a good basic understanding of basic mathematics, especially working with algebraic equations, trigonometry, and vectors.

Reading the book poolside wasn't a huge motivator to refresh my algebraic knowledge, but I did enjoy David's brief 10-page refresher. In Chapter 2 on Drawing, the book dives into the low-level API that canvas offers for drawing rectangles, circles and polygons. It also goes on to show you how to do gradients, patterns and shadows as well as all there is to know about paths, stroking and filling. This is when it hits you that <canvas> is more about JavaScript than HTML. In fact, it's usually only a couple lines of HTML and a whole lotta JavaScript.

In Chapter 3, you learn about text and how to work with fonts and paragraphs. David even spends 10 pages showing you how to implement a Paragraph, complete with positioning the cursor, adding new lines and working with backspace. It really makes you appreciate what HTML offers you with the good ol' <p> and <input type="text">.

Chapter 4 is where you learn about working with images and video, using offscreen canvases and working with a canvas within a canvas. I believe I was back in Colorado when I started reading this chapter. It's also where I succumbed to the fact that this was an excellent reference book and not something I was going to read, learn from and start using the next week. It feels like a book I'll refer back to many times when using <canvas> on a project. The amount of knowledge in the book seems akin to Rod Johnson's J2EE Development without EJB. I remember getting the general gist of Rod's ideas while reading the book, but not knowing how to put them into use. Then the Spring Framework was introduced and everything became clear. As I read Geary's book, I thought the same thing - someone really needs to develop a simpler API for Canvas.

As I read on, through chapters on Animations, Sprites, Physics, Collision Detection and Game Development, it hit me - maybe that's what David is doing!

Throughout the book, David builds a framework for working with Shapes, animating them and finally, for putting them to work in a gaming environment. The Ungame is nice in that it shows you how to use a game engine for building your own games. Then he goes on to show you a Pinball game that looks overly complex, but breaks it down into terms you can understand.

The last chapter is on Mobile development. It explains in detail about the viewport metatag, media queries for CSS and touch events. The section on iOS5 is good, but does make the book seem slightly outdated with iOS6 coming out next week. I'm sure all of the content is still relevant, but it almost seems like labeling it iOS5+ would've been better. In the final pages of the book, you learn how using a canvas that requires typing on a touch device might suck. David shows you how to implement a Virtual Keyboard to handle these situations, since the native keyboard won't pop up unless you're typing into HTML controls like <input> and <textarea>.

I read this book to learn more about Canvas and what it was capable of. I learned all it can do and much, much more. I learned how animations and timing can be different between browsers and how you might need to create a polyfill for requestAnimationFrame for it to work consistently.

More than anything, I recognized that this is one of the few technical books I've read in a long time that's become an instant valuable resource. With other books, the information is often available online. Not so with Geary's book. To me, it seems like the best resource available for learning and using HTML5 Canvas.

Well done, David, well done.

We bought a boat!

I've always enjoyed whitewater rafting. I think the first time I did it was in college and I immediately fell in love. Through the years, I've been on many trips with family and friends. However, it wasn't until this summer that I realized it was something I should do more often. It was Trish's friends, Chris and Bryce, that started it all. They bought a raft last year and we floated down the Colorado River with them a couple times over Memorial Day Weekend. Then we went to Montana and enjoyed a couple days on the Middle Fork of the Flathead with Dr. Barton and a bunch of raft guides. That weekend in July, we realized we'd done more rafting than any other outdoor activities (mountain biking, camping and even golfing). That's when we decided to buy our own.

We had a lot of help in the process of buying a raft. First of all, I sat down with my friend Dr. Barton and made a list of all the things we'd need. The good doctor was a whitewater guide in Montana for 5 years, has rescued trips from the wilderness and has even rafted the Grand Canyon - so I considered him a good source of information. After composing the list of necessary gear, we headed to Down River Equipment on August 26th, the last day of their end-of-season sale. It took us an hour to pick out the raft we wanted (a Pro 140) and gather up all the gear (frame, cooler, oars, dry box/bags, lifejackets, koozies, etc.). We asked them to have it ready by Friday and headed home.

Last Friday, we picked up a raft trailer from Trailer Source an hour before they closed, then journeyed to Down River where Mike (the owner) and Matt (the guy who helped us the previous Sunday) helped us setup our oars and load up our new boat. There was much rejoicing.

Saturday, we took it on its Maiden Voyage on the Colorado River, floating from Radium to Rancho del Rio. According to this page, there were some Class III rapids, but they all felt like Class II. I guided and rowed the boat most of the time while our 7 passengers (and 2 dogs) enjoyed cold beverages, great scenery and relaxing in the sun. It took us a bit longer (4 hours) than expected (2 hours), but we all thought it was well worth it.

Abbie's First Golf Game
After a long day of floating on Saturday, we decided to chill on Sunday with a little golf. We split the kids up for the weekend (Jack went with his mom), so we figured the proper way to treat our only child was to take Abbie to play her first real game of golf at Pole Creek. We played 9 holes and both Abbie and I had a great time trying out our new clubs. We received a nice kids golfing tip from someone at the driving range: have them tee off from the 150 marker so they have a chance to par the hole.

The course had a 50% discount for kids and we never saw anyone behind us the entire game. We were especially impressed when the course photographer offered us a framed set of Abbie pics for $15.

We don't know how many more days of rafting we'll get in this year, but next year should be epic. We're hoping to do multi-day trips on the Green River, the Smith River and fly into Schafer Meadows for a journey through the Bob Marshall Wilderness. I grew up only 10 miles from "The Bob" and I've never been in it. I can't wait!