Raible Designs

AppFuse News: Liquibase and wro4j Tutorials from J. García

New committer J. García has been doing a lot of work to improve i18n in AppFuse 2.2, as well as our Struts 2 support. In addition, he's written a couple articles that show you how to integrate Liquibase and wro4j in your AppFuse applications. Thanks for the great documentation J!

• Adding web resource fingerprinting to AppFuse with wro4j
• Automatic DB migration for Java web apps with Liquibase

The 2.2 release is coming along, and we're down to 16 open issues. I've updated the Hibernate, JPA, Services and Web Services tutorials and hope to finish the web tutorials in the next week. You can try the latest code using the QuickStart Guide or check it out on the demo site:

• http://demo.appfuse.org/appfuse-jsf
• http://demo.appfuse.org/appfuse-spring
• http://demo.appfuse.org/appfuse-struts
• http://demo.appfuse.org/appfuse-tapestry

Please see this thread on the mailing list if you have any questions or suggestions.

In related news, Roger Hughes has a good article titled Ten Things You Can Do With Spring Security. Since AppFuse uses Spring Security extensively, hopefully you can use some of Roger's tips to improve the security of your app.

The Well-Grounded Java Developer Book Review

After finishing Core HTML5 Canvas, I dived into the next book on my list: The Well-Grounded Java Developer by Ben Evans and Martijn Verburg. I've known about this book since April of last year when I received an email from Martijn. He wanted to use some of my graphs and research on JVM Web Frameworks as evidence that many frameworks aren't meeting developer's needs and to support their coverage of Grails in the book.

I agreed and also did a quick review on Chapter 13, Rapid Web Development. In June of this year, I received another email saying the book was done and they'd send me a free copy. I received the book in early August, but didn't start reading it until mid September.

• Developing with Java 7
• Vital techniques
• Polyglot programming on the JVM
• Crafting the polyglot project

Developing with Java 7
The first two chapters on Java 7 and NIO.2 (aka JSR-203) were great in that I started learning new things immediately. While I knew about most of the changes (strings in switch statements, improved exception handling, try-with-resources, diamond syntax, etc.), it was a nice refresher and motivated me to install Java 7 and start using it on a daily basis. The NIO.2 chapter covers the new filesystem support with Path, the Files helper class and Asynchronous I/O.

It was around this same time that I started on Coursera's Functional Programming Principles in Scala. I quickly realized the course was going to take quite a bit of my free time (5-7 hours per week). It was a good challenge to try and read for 30 minutes a day as well as stay on top of my Scala homework. However, it was also highly rewarding in all the knowledge I received in the last two months.

Vital techniques
This section covers Dependency Injection, Concurrency, Class files, and Bytecode and Performance Tuning. I skimmed through the DI chapter but slowed down to try and get my head around concurrency. Then I thanked my lucky stars I haven't had to deal with it much. I found the class files and bytecode chapter mildly interesting but perked up again to learn more about how to do performance tuning, VisualVM, and the new G1 garbage collector.

Polyglot programming on the JVM
The polyglot programming section was largely a reinforcement of my existing knowledge since I've used Groovy and Scala quite a bit. The chapter on Clojure was an eye-opener since I hadn't used Clojure before. I wasn't quite convinced of its merits, but I did learn enough to read and understand its syntax. Reading the Scala chapter while doing the Coursera course made me realize that Ben and Martijn really packed a lot into each language's chapter. This section is really a great intro to all these languages, especially if you've never worked with them before.

Crafting the polyglot project
While the final section was good, I learned the least in this section. While the concepts discussed in this section are important, they're also things I've been using for years: TDD, CI, and Rapid Web Development (with Grails). This section touched on Hibernate when discussing TDD and I thought to myself - it's strange they don't have cover Hibernate (or JPA) as part of being a well-grounded Java developer. My guess is the authors assumed most Java devs already know it.

The final chapter had a lot of tips on staying well-grounded (what's coming in Java 8, how the JVM is supporting polyglot programming, future concurrency trends, and new directions in the JVM).

I really enjoyed this book and feel I became a more knowledgeable Java developer by reading it. It contained a lot of high-level concepts as well as nitty-gritty details. In my opinion, the sign of a great book is one that you feel you'll refer back to as a reference guide. The first half of this book definitely feels like something I'll refer back to. The second half I'll recommend to Java developers wanted to get caught up with the latest trends.

Nice work Ben and Martijn!

Happy 40th Anniversary Mom and Dad!

Today marks 40 years since my parents got married back in '72. For the past week, we've been living it up and celebrating this wondrous event in Hanalei, Kauai. We rented a house on the beach and when I'm not cranking out code for a client, we've been surfing, riding bikes and enjoying the frequent rain shower. There's no place I'd rather be or people I'd rather be with.

Happy Anniversary Mom and Dad!

To commemorate this occasion, I decided to interview them about that special day way back when.

Me: So what made you decide to propose?

Dad: Well, it was the $50 check (from her Dad). We weren't gonna get married. We knew she was pregnant. He was the last to know. Her dad came up (to the cabin) and gave me a check. I said "50 bucks, I'll marry anyone for 50 bucks!" So we got married to please the parents. I liked them both even though her mom cried when she first met me (because we were living in sin).

Me: What was your wedding like?

Mom: We went to the county courthouse. I had a nice dress. My friends, Barbie and Betsy both came. My ex-boyfriend was the Best Man (because Dad didn't know anyone in town). We went to the Justice of the Peace and the secretary gave us a look of disdain. She was dismissed for lunch by her boss. Dad had long hair and a hunting knife on his belt and got escorted out by a detective (for having a weapon) shortly after the ceremony. Then we walked across the street to the liquor store, bought a bottle of champagne and walked around the block drinking it with the wedding party. Then we got in the truck (a '52 International half-ton) and drove home. It actually made it.

Dad: It was one of the few times it made it.

Why the bias against JSF?

In my last post about InfoQ's Top 20 Web Frameworks for the JVM, I received a thought-provoking comment from henk53:

There is one little thing that does bother me in those presentations, and that's your fairly obvious bias against JSF.
...
If you are presenting yourself as, more or less, an authority on comparing web frameworks, then having a fairly obvious biased against one of them is just peculiar. I, all of my team, and various clients distrust your ranking of JSF. We do look at your data if the choice is between other frameworks, but as soon as JSF comes into the picture we just look elsewhere.

I'm not really sure where this bias comes from. Yes, JSF 1.0 sucked and 1.2 was only marginally better, but 2.0 is really cool and productive and there are SUPERB component and utility libraries now like PrimeFaces and OmniFaces. As a researcher of this topic I think you should keep up the date and not stick to some old grudge.

This is true, I am biased against JSF. It all started with my first JSF experience back in August 2004. If you remember correctly, 2004 was a big year: JSF 1.0, Spring 1.0 and Flex 1.0 were all released. The "AJAX" term was coined in early 2005.

By 2007 and 2008, JSF still hadn't gotten any better. In late 2009, JSF 2.0 was released and I upgraded in March 2011. As you can see from the aforementioned post, I ran into quite a few issues upgrading. JSF was also the hardest one to get working with extension-less URLs.

Most of my issues with JSF come from having maintained an application built with it since 2004. If I were to start a new application without any legacy migration issues, I imagine it wouldn't be as difficult. However, if you compare it to Struts 2 and Spring MVC, I've had little-to-no issues upgrading those applications over the years.

Also, I'm not just biased against JSF, but most component-based web frameworks. Just ask the Tapestry and Wicket folks. They've felt my criticisms over the years. My reason for preferring request-based frameworks like Struts 2/Spring MVC and Grails/Play has been because I've never seen the appeal in component-based frameworks. Often I've found that their components are just widgets that you can get from any decent JavaScript framework. And chances are that JavaScript framework can work with any web framework. Also, I've worked on a lot of high-traffic web applications that require statelessness for scalability.

I see the value in component-based frameworks, I just don't think components should be authored on the server-side. Most of the Java-based component frameworks require 2+ files for components (one for the component, one for the view, possibly one for the config). I love GWT's component concept in that you can just extract a class and re-use it. With JS frameworks, you can often just include a script. These days, when I think of good component-based frameworks, I think of jQuery UI and Twitter Bootstrap.

All that being said, there's a lot of folks praising JSF 2 (and PrimeFaces moreso). That's why I'll be integrating it (or merging your pull request) into the 2.3 release of AppFuse. Since PrimeFaces contains a Bootstrap theme, I hope this is a pleasant experience and my overall opinion of JSF improves.

In other component-based frameworks in AppFuse news, Tapestry 5 has gotten really fast in the last year. I imagine this is because we have a Tapestry expert, Serge Eby, working on it. And we're planning on adding Wicket in the 2.3 release.

So even though I prefer request-based frameworks with REST support and Bootstrap, that doesn't mean everyone does. I'll do my best to be less-biased in the future. However, please remember that my view on web frameworks is as a developer, not an analyst. And aren't developers supposed to be opinionated?

InfoQ's Top 20 Web Frameworks for the JVM

Back in early October, InfoQ.com published a community research article titled Top 20 Web Frameworks for the JVM. Their goal seemed to be fairly simple:

Using the new community research tool, we at InfoQ want to get YOUR opinions on the relative importance and maturity of a variety of web frameworks that are targeted for the JVM. Please vote by dragging each practice across two dimensions – how important is the framework relative to the other frameworks, and how much is it actually used in real teams and projects.

When I first saw this article, I noticed some strange web frameworks listed. Namely, Netty, SiteMesh and Spark. I haven't heard of many folks using Netty for a web framework, but I'm sure it's possible. SiteMesh is certainly not a web framework and I've never even heard of Spark. And where is GWT and Vaadin? Regardless of the choices, I went ahead and voted.

Last week, InfoQ posted their top content for October on Facebook.

• Top 20 Web Frameworks for the JVM 25,992 PV
• Ruby on Rails vs. Node.js at LinkedIn 11,904 PV
• Mobile Webdev: The Horror 11,150 PV
• A Brief Introduction to REST 8,872 PV
• Kanban and Scrum - making the most of both 7,665 PV

First of all, it's interesting to see that JVM Web Frameworks is still a hot topic for developers. Whenever I do my Comparing JVM Web Frameworks talk at conferences, I always see a few jabs about "he's still doing that talk!?" Yes, it seems strange that a talk I first did in 2004 is still in high demand.

Secondly, I think InfoQ does good in showing how the frameworks ranked and showing their heatmaps. Below are their rankings from 1109 participants.

According to this research, the top 5 web frameworks for the JVM are Spring MVC, Play, Grails, JSF and Struts (I hope those surveyed meant Struts 2, not Struts 1).

In my research from last February (slide 21), I ranked them (with no particular weightings) as Grails, GWT, JRuby on Rails, Spring MVC and Vaadin. So I guess you could say I got 2 out of 5 right (Grails and Spring MVC). Not bad considering InfoQ didn't even consider GWT and Vaadin.

Another intriguing data point in this study is each frameworks' heatmap. For example, below are heatmaps for the top 4 frameworks.

Notice how Grails and Spring MVC are both hotter in the bottom right corner? It seems the community's overall opinions of these two frameworks are more aligned than JSF and Play, which a fair amount of folks rank as hyped and unimportant.

What I really like about this research is it's the community's opinions, visualized. It also confirms that some of my favorite frameworks are still on top. I don't know if JSF belongs as a top framework, however it seems a lot of folks do. I recently thought about removing it from AppFuse, but decided to keep it (at least for the next release). I hope InfoQ does more research projects like this, especially if they get their list of web frameworks right.

Happy Birthday Abbie!

This weekend, we celebrated Abbie's 10th birthday. And we did it in style, with a limo to dinner at the Melting Pot and a slumber party with all her friends.

Today is her actual birthday and it's hard to believe we now have a 10 year old. I guess that means it's also my 10th Anniversary of becoming a father. And it's Trish's 2nd Anniversary of meeting the kids. Phew! That's a lot for one day.

Abbie is really into horses these days. Trish competed in Hunter Jumper riding when she grew up in Puerto Rico. She won all kinds of awards and fell in love with the horses and the sport. Since Abbie loved riding this summer at Trish's Boot Camp and in Hawaii, we enrolled her in horseback riding classes. So far, she's having a great time and has even won some ribbons at her first show.

She's also been playing quite a bit of basketball, a sport I love. She started last spring at the YMCA, continued this fall and is starting with another league through her school this week. I'm sure she'll tear it up on the slopes this year too, just like in years past. I can't wait to root for her basketball team and race her down the mountain this winter.

To see Abbie on her birthday through the years, checkout my past Happy Birthday posts: #0, #1, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8 and #9.