Raible Designs

Comparing JVM Web Frameworks at vJUG

2014-02-06T10:54:17-07:00

A couple months ago, I was invited to speak at Virtual JUG - an online-only Java User Group organized by the ZeroTurnaround folks. They chose my Comparing JVM Web Frameworks presentation and we agreed I'd speak yesterday morning. They used a combination of Google Hangouts, live streaming on YouTube and IRC to facilitate the meeting. It all went pretty smoothly and produced a comfortable speaking environment. To practice for vJUG, I delivered the same talk on Tuesday night at the Denver Open Source Users Group.

The last time I delivered this talk was at Devoxx France in March 2013. I didn't change any of the format this time, keeping with referencing the Paradox of Choice and encouraging people to define constraints to help them make their decision. I did add a few new slides regarding RebelLabs' Curious Coder’s Java Web Frameworks Comparison: Spring MVC, Grails, Vaadin, GWT, Wicket, Play, Struts and JSF and The 2014 Decision Maker’s Guide to Java Web Frameworks.

I also updated all the pretty graphs (which may or may not have any significance) with the latest stats from Dice.com, LinkedIn, StackOverflow and respective mailing lists. Significant changes I found compared to one year ago:

Job Listings on Dice.com
- Play Framework job listings increased almost 4x
- Tapestry jobs are 1/3 of what they were a year ago
- Wicket jobs are 1/2 of what they were a year ago
- JavaScript framework jobs are up quite a bit: Ember.js up ~300%, AngularJS up 900%, Backbone up 160%
LinkedIn Skills
- Rails down ~30%
- Grails up 25%
- Play Framework up 200%
- Spring Roo up 40%
- Ember.js up 300%
- AngularJS up 840%
- Backbone up 200%

As you can tell from these findings, AngularJS has gained quite a bit of mindshare in the last year. There's a lot of companies looking for JavaScript skills and quite a few folks have added JavaScript frameworks to their LinkedIn profiles.

You can watch the recording on YouTube or click play in the embedded video below.

You can also quickly browse the slide deck below, download the PDF or view it on SlideShare.

Thanks to all the folks who attended these talks. And thanks to @dosug and @virtualjug for giving me the opportunity to speak.

JSR 303 and JVM Web Framework Support

2011-03-08T11:33:24-07:00

Emmanuel Bernard recently sent an email to the JSR 303 Experts Group about the next revision of the Bean Validation JSR (303). Rather than sending the proposed changes privately, he blogged about them. I left a comment with what I'd like to see:

+1 for Client-side validation. I'd love to see an API that web frameworks can hook into to add "required" to their tags for HTML5. Or some service that can be registered so the client can make Ajax requests to an API to see if an object is valid.

Emmanuel replied that most of the necessary API already exists for this, but frameworks have been slow to adopt it.

Hi Matt,

The sad thing is that the API is present on the Bean Validation side but presentation frameworks are slow to adopt it and use it :(

RichFaces 4 now has support for it but I wished more presentation frameworks had worked on the integration. If you can convince a few people or have access to a few people, feel free to send them by me :)

The integration API is described here. Let me know if you think some parts are missing or should be improved. We should definitely do some more buzz around it.

In the interest of generating more buzz around it, I decided to do some research and see what JVM Frameworks support JSR 303. Here's what I've come up with so far (in no particular order):

Struts 2 has an open issue, but doesn't seem to support JSR 303. Since I did a quick-n-dirty google search for most of these, I'm not sure if they support client-side JavaScript or HTML5's required. If you know of other JVM-based web frameworks that support JSR 303, please let me know in the comments.

AppFuse 2.1 Milestone 2 Released

2010-11-15T15:28:57-07:00

I'm pleased to announce the 2nd milestone release of AppFuse 2.1. This release includes upgrades to all dependencies to bring them up-to-date with their latest releases. Most notable are Spring 3 and Struts 2.1. This release fixes many issues with archetypes and contains many improvements to support Maven 3. For more details on specific changes see the 2.1.0 M2 release notes.

What is AppFuse?
AppFuse is an open source project and application that uses open source frameworks to help you develop Web applications quickly and efficiently. It was originally developed to eliminate the ramp-up time when building new web applications. At its core, AppFuse is a project skeleton, similar to the one that's created by your IDE when you click through a wizard to create a new web project. If you use JRebel with AppFuse, you can achieve zero-turnaround in your project and develop features without restarting the server.

Release Details
Archetypes now include all the source for the web modules so using jetty:run and your IDE will work much smoother now. The backend is still embedded in JARs, enabling you to choose with persistence framework (Hibernate, iBATIS or JPA) you'd like to use. If you want to modify the source for that, add the core classes to your project or run "appfuse:full-source".

AppFuse comes in a number of different flavors. It offers "light", "basic" and "modular" and archetypes. Light archetypes use an embedded H2 database and contain a simple CRUD example. In the final 2.1.0 release, the light archetypes will allow code generation like the basic and modular archetypes. Basic archetypes have web services using CXF, authentication from Spring Security and features including signup, login, file upload and CSS theming. Modular archetypes are similar to basic archetypes, except they have multiple modules which allows you to separate your services from your web project.

AppFuse provides archetypes for JSF, Spring MVC, Struts 2 and Tapestry 5. The light archetypes are available for these frameworks, as well as for Spring MVC + FreeMarker, Stripes and Wicket.

Please note that this release does not contain updates to the documentation. Code generation will work, but it's likely that some content in the tutorials won't match. For example, you can use annotations (vs. XML) for Spring MVC and Tapestry is a whole new framework. I'll be working on documentation over the next several weeks in preparation for the 2.1 final release.

For information on creating a new project, please see the QuickStart Guide.

If you have questions about AppFuse, please read the FAQ or join the user mailing list. If you find bugs, please create an issue in JIRA.

Thanks to everyone for their help contributing patches, writing documentation and participating on the mailing lists.

AppFuse 2.1 Milestone 1 Released

2009-11-19T07:16:36-07:00

The AppFuse Team is pleased to announce the first milestone release of AppFuse 2.1. This release includes upgrades to all dependencies to bring them up-to-date with their latest releases. Most notable are Hibernate, Spring and Tapestry 5.

What is AppFuse?
AppFuse is an open source project and application that uses open source tools built on the Java platform to help you develop Web applications quickly and efficiently. It was originally developed to eliminate the ramp-up time found when building new web applications for customers. At its core, AppFuse is a project skeleton, similar to the one that's created by your IDE when you click through a wizard to create a new web project.

Release Details
Archetypes now include all the source for the web modules so using jetty:run and your IDE will work much smoother now. The backend is still embedded in JARs, enabling you to choose which persistence framework (Hibernate, iBATIS or JPA) you'd like to use. If you want to modify the source for that, add the core classes to your project or run appfuse:full-source.

In addition, AppFuse Light has been converted to Maven and has archetypes available. AppFuse provides archetypes for JSF, Spring MVC, Struts 2 and Tapestry 5. The light archetypes are available for these frameworks, as well as for Spring MVC + FreeMarker, Stripes and Wicket.

Other notable improvements:

Added Compass support thanks to a patch from Shay Banon.
Upgraded from XFire to CXF for Web Services.
Moved Maven repository to Sonatype's OSS Repository Hosting for snapshots and releasing to Maven Central. There are no longer any AppFuse-specific artifacts, all are available in central. Thanks to Sonatype for this great service and its excellent repository manager.
Upgraded to Canoo WebTest 3.0. Now if we could just get its Maven Plugin moved to Codehaus.
Added Ajaxified Body to AppFuse Light archetypes.
Infrastructure upgrades, including JIRA 4, Confluence 3, FishEye 2, Bamboo 2 and Crowd 1.6. Many thanks to Atlassian and Contegix for their excellent products and services.
For more details on specific changes see the release notes.

Please note that this release does not contain updates to the documentation. Code generation will work, but it's likely that some content in the tutorials won't match. For example, you can use annotations (vs. XML) for dependency injection and Tapestry is a whole new framework. I'll be working on documentation over the next several weeks in preparation for Milestone 2.

AppFuse is available as several Maven archetypes. For information on creating a new project, please see the QuickStart Guide.

To learn more about AppFuse, please read Ryan Withers' Igniting your applications with AppFuse.

The 2.x series of AppFuse has a minimum requirement of the following specification versions:

Java Servlet 2.4 and JSP 2.0 (2.1 for JSF)
Java 5+

If you have questions about AppFuse, please read the FAQ or join the user mailing list. If you find bugs, please create an issue in JIRA.

Thanks to everyone for their help contributing code, writing documentation, posting to the mailing lists, and logging issues.

AppFuse Light converted to Maven modules, upgraded to Tapestry 5 and Stripes 1.5

2008-12-20T18:42:03-07:00

This past week, I stayed up a couple of late nights to do some of the AppFuse Light work I wrote about in October. I converted all web frameworks to Maven modules, as well as made them inherit from the appfuse-web project. Below is what the new module structure looks like:

At this point, the project is ready to import into AppFuse's SVN project. Here's a list of other changes I made:

Modules now depend on AppFuse's backend and allow you to use Hibernate, JPA or iBATIS as the persistence framework. Implementations for Spring JDBC, OJB and JDO have been removed.
Upgraded to JWebUnit 2.1, which now uses HtmlUnit under the hood and has much better JavaScript support. It also has Selenium support, but I've yet to try it.
Ajaxified Body integrated into all frameworks. You can easily turn it off by modifying the global.js file.
Prototype and Scriptaculous loaded from Google's Ajax Libraries CDN.
Upgraded to Tapestry 5. Mad props to Serge Eby and his tapestry5-appfuse project for showing me how to do this. Serge became a committer on AppFuse recently, so hopefully we'll continue to see great things from the Tapestry 5 support. I really like the clean URLs and minimum configuration required in Tapestry 5. It's testing framework is nice too, but I believe it could be improved.
Upgraded to Stripes 1.5. This was easy and painless. I'm definitely a fan of Stripes and look forward to reading the Stripes book on my bookshelf.
Dropped support for: Struts 1.x, WebWork, Spring MVC + Velocity.

If you want to try any of these applications, you can create archetypes using the following commands:

svn co https://appfuse-light.dev.java.net/svn/appfuse-light/trunk appfuse-light
cd appfuse-light/preferred-web-framework
mvn archetype:create-from-project
cd target/generated-sources/archetype
mvn install
cd ~/dev
mvn archetype:generate # The new archetype should show up as an option

Next steps include figuring out a way to flatten the inherited dependencies and plugins so archetype:create-from-project can create truly standalone projects. Please let me know if you have any questions.

Dojo/Comet support in Java Web Frameworks

2008-12-18T15:58:37-07:00

This week I'm doing a research project for a client. The main purpose of the project is to find out which Java-based web framework works best with Dojo and Comet. Here's the key requirement from the client:

It's all about Comet, we want Comet everywhere we can put it, but we want to isolate the icky bits of fiddling with pages with JavaScript. We're kind of wed to the Dojo implementation of the client-side bit, so we may as well use more of the Dojo widgets for a richer UI. For us, "works best with" needs to pay a certain amount of consideration to "fits naturally with", if you understand what I mean. I know that any framework that lets you spit out raw HTML will let you hand code in your Dojo / Comet, but that's certain to become very tiresome very quickly.

The candidate frameworks they asked me to look at are Wicket and Tapestry 5. They're willing to upgrade to Struts 2 since they're already using Struts 1. However, they don't feel that action-based frameworks naturally lead to rich UIs, so they'd prefer a component-based framework. They're currently using Seam for an administration-type application and feel it's too heavy for their customer-facing application.

Here's what I've found so far in my research. Please let me know if anything is incorrect.

Tapestry 5 doesn't have Dojo or Comet support (Prototype and Scriptaculous are the baked-in Ajax frameworks).
Struts 2 has old (version 0.4.3) and somewhat deprecated Dojo support. The developers seem to be in favor of removing it and promoting people hand-code Dojo instead. Struts 2 doesn't have support for Comet.
Wicket has support for Dojo 1.1 that includes Comet support. This was written by Stefan Fußenegger and posted to the mailing list last month. I e-mailed Stefan and asked him about documentation. His response: "I lost my ambition to document it properly since I didn't receive any feedback on the mailing list. :)"

At this point, it seems that if the client really wants to use Dojo, they should use Wicket, and possibly pay Stefan to document it properly. However, they're willing to consider other options, as long as they have Comet support.

One option I thought of is to use DWR and its Reverse Ajax/Comet support. Another option would be to add better Dojo support to Tapestry 5. However, I don't think this is possible since the Prototype/Scriptaculous code is generated by the framework and would likely require a changes to switch it to Dojo.

Are there any other Java-based web frameworks that support easily creating Dojo widgets and working with Comet? Keith Donald tweeted that Spring MVC has Dojo support. However, I believe it's only for widgets and it still requires you to write JavaScript. If your framework doesn't have Dojo/Comet support, how hard would it be to add it?

Update: I also posted this question on LinkedIn. Make sure and check my question for additional thoughts from folks.

Upgrading Hibernate to 3.4.0 and AppFuse for Tapestry 5

2008-09-17T09:35:45-06:00

Last night I spent an hour upgrading AppFuse to Hibernate 3.4.0.GA. I tried the same thing a week ago, but failed miserably. When Hibernate Core Modules (3.3) (a Maven dependency howto) showed up on the Hibernate blog, I was re-inspired. I discovered some interesting things along the way (at least in my setup).

You need to use JBoss's Maven Repository
The latest Hibernate releases aren't in the central Maven repo yet. If they're not in there two weeks after the release, I doubt they'll be there anytime soon. Best to plan on adding http://repository.jboss.com/maven2 as a permanent repository. As a bonus, you can remove http://download.java.net/maven/2 since JTA is in JBoss's repo.

Javassist is not an optional dependency
If I remove the Javassist dependency, here's the error I get:

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: javassist/util/proxy/MethodFilter

Seems reasonable right? What if I add in the dependency on Hibernate's cglib instead?

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: javassist/util/proxy/MethodFilter

OK, so apparently you can't switch between Javassist and hibernate-cglib-repack as stated in Hibernate's Maven dependency howto. Of course, I do believe their instructions are correct, they just don't work in my setup. Versions I'm using: hibernate-core-3.3.1.GA and hibernate-annotations-3.4.0.GA.

Not including SLF4J is a bad idea
If you don't include a dependency on SLF4J (and you're using Spring), you get a nice cryptic error message.

Caused by: org.springframework.beans.BeanInstantiationException: Could not instantiate bean class 
[org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.annotation.AnnotationSessionFactoryBean]: 
Constructor threw exception; nested exception is java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError
        at org.springframework.beans.BeanUtils.instantiateClass(BeanUtils.java:115)
        at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.SimpleInstantiationStrategy.instantiate(SimpleInstantiationStrategy.java:61)
        at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.instantiateBean(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:877)
        ... 48 more
Caused by: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError
        at java.lang.Class.forName0(Native Method)
        at java.lang.Class.forName(Class.java:164)
        at org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.LocalSessionFactoryBean.class$(LocalSessionFactoryBean.java:174)
        at org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.LocalSessionFactoryBean.(LocalSessionFactoryBean.java:174)
        at org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.annotation.AnnotationSessionFactoryBean.(AnnotationSessionFactoryBean.java:64)
        at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance0(Native Method)
        at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.java:39)
        at sun.reflect.DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.java:27)
        at java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstance(Constructor.java:494)
        at org.springframework.beans.BeanUtils.instantiateClass(BeanUtils.java:100)

Hibernate's JPA now uses PersistenceException instead of EntityExistsException
In previous releases, Hibernate's ConstraintViolationException was wrapped in a javax.persistence.EntityExistsException. In Hibernate's EntityManager 3.4.0.GA, it's wrapped in a javax.persistence.PersistenceException.

Of course, these errors could be caused by Spring or Maven, but my hunch is they're more related to Hibernate and it's new more modular dependencies. You can view the full changeset for upgrading Hibernate 3.2.6.ga to 3.3.1.GA via FishEye.

Tapestry 5 version of AppFuse
In other AppFuse-related news, Serge Eby has created a Tapestry 5 version of AppFuse. You can see his alpha-level work in Google Code's tapestry5-appfuse project. I haven't had a chance to take a look at Serge's work yet, but I'm eager to do so. Hopefully we can get it back into the main project sooner than later. As far as Wicket and Stripes support, I haven't forgot about those - just having trouble finding the time and motivation to do the work.

AppFuse 2.0.2 Released

2008-05-11T23:25:40-06:00

The AppFuse Team is pleased to announce the release of AppFuse 2.0.2. This release includes upgrades to Spring Security 2.0, jMock 2.4, the ability to customize code generation templates and many bug fixes.

For information on upgrading from 2.0.1, see the Release Notes or changelog. AppFuse 2.0.2 is available as a Maven archetype. For information on creating a new project using AppFuse, please see the QuickStart Guide or the demos and videos.

To learn more about AppFuse, please read Ryan Withers' Igniting your applications with AppFuse.

The 2.0 series of AppFuse has a minimum requirement of the following specification versions:

Java Servlet 2.4 and JSP 2.0 (2.1 for JSF)
Java 5+

If you've used AppFuse 1.x, but not 2.x, you'll want to read the FAQ. Join the user mailing list if you have any questions.

Thanks to everyone for their help contributing code, writing documentation, posting to the mailing lists, and logging issues.

Please post any issues you have with this release to the mailing list.

All Java web frameworks should support hot deploy of a single class

2008-01-24T15:11:18-07:00

In Anyone else using Groovy?, Tim Fennell (inventor of Stripes) raves at how much he likes Groovy now that it supports Java 5 features. He writes that Groovy might offer a solution to make development with Stripes faster:

The other thing I've been wondering about is that if there were enough demand for it we could try adding "improved" groovy support. E.g. throw your groovy actions under WEB-INF and we'll use groovy's built in stuff to do auto-reloading etc.

Gregg Bolinger responds with an excellent idea:

It would be really cool if Stripes could automatically discover and load changes to action beans (including new ones) without the entire app restarting, regardless of what the action bean is written in. But I realize that is a pretty tall order. :)

I agree that it might be a tall order, but I don't think it's impossible. In fact, I think all Java-based web frameworks should support hot deploy of a single class. We shouldn't have to buy JavaRebel to do this. It should be mandatory.

When an application reaches a certain size, the startup time can get pretty lengthy. This is lost development time. Furthermore, if any part of the development cycle takes longer than 15 seconds, there's a good chance developers will do something else (check their e-mail, move onto another task, etc.). Multi-tasking may be a good skill to have, but it's a horrible way to be productive.

Of the frameworks I'm familiar with, only Tapestry 5 and Seam support reloading single classes without restarting the whole application. Why can't the other frameworks "borrow" Tapestry 5's code? Maybe someone should just buy ZeroTurnaround and give away JavaRebel for free.

If I had one wish for 2008, it would be for all Java web frameworks to support this feature. Pretty Please?

AppFuse 2.0.1 Released

2007-11-26T09:29:43-07:00

The AppFuse Team is pleased to announce the release of AppFuse 2.0.1. This release squashes a number of bugs and includes an upgrade to Spring 2.5. To learn more about Spring 2.5's features, see InfoQ's What's New in Spring 2.5: Part 1 article.

For information on upgrading from 2.0, see the 2.0.1 Release Notes or changelog. AppFuse 2.0.1 is available as a Maven archetype. For information on creating a new project using AppFuse, please see the QuickStart Guide or the demos and videos.

What is AppFuse? Click here to find out.

The 2.0 series of AppFuse has a minimum requirement of the following specification versions:

Java Servlet 2.4 and JSP 2.0 (2.1 for JSF)
Java 5+

If you've used AppFuse 1.x, but not 2.x, you'll want to read the FAQ. Join the user mailing list if you have any questions.

Thanks to everyone for their help contributing code, writing documentation, posting to the mailing lists, and logging issues.

We greatly appreciate the help from our sponsors, particularly Atlassian, Contegix, JetBrains, and Java.net. Atlassian and Contegix are especially awesome: Atlassian has donated licenses to all its products and Contegix has donated an entire server to the AppFuse project. Thanks guys - you rock!

Please post any issues you have with this release to the mailing list.

AppFuse 2.0 Released!

2007-09-18T15:22:20-06:00

I'm extremely happy to announce we've finally finished developing AppFuse 2.0. The road to AppFuse 2.0 has been a long journey through Mavenland, annotations and generics. Thanks to all the developers, contributors and users for helping test, polish and prove that AppFuse 2 is an excellent solution for developing Java-based applications. Your time, patience and usage of AppFuse has made it the strong foundation it is today. Last but certainly not least, thanks to all the great Java developers who wrote the frameworks that AppFuse uses - we're truly standing on the shoulders of giants.

What is AppFuse? Click here to find out.

AppFuse 2.0 is available as a Maven archetype. For information on creating a new project using this release, please see the QuickStart Guide or the demos and videos.

If you've used AppFuse 1.x, but not 2.x, you'll might want to read our Frequently Asked Questions. If you have any questions or issues, please post them to the user mailing list. The Maven Reference Guide has a map of Ant » Maven commands. Maven for Newbies might also be useful if you've never used Maven before. There is some support for Ant in this release.

AppFuse 2.0 contains over 200 pages of documentation, downloadable as a PDF (3 MB). You can also download all its dependencies and install them in your local repository if you want to work offline.

For more information, please see the 2.0 Release Notes. The 2.0 series of AppFuse has a minimum requirement of the following specification versions:

Java Servlet 2.4 and JSP 2.0 (2.1 for JSF)
Java 5+

New features in AppFuse 2.0 include:

Maven 2 Integration
Upgraded WebWork to Struts 2
JDK 5, Annotations, JSP 2.0, Servlet 2.4
JPA Support
Generic CRUD backend
Full Eclipse, IDEA and NetBeans support
Fast startup and no deploy with Maven Jetty Plugin
Testable on multiple appservers and databases with Cargo and profiles

We appreciate the time and effort everyone has put toward contributing code and documentation, posting to the mailing lists, and logging issues.

We're also grateful for the help from our sponsors, particularly Atlassian, Contegix, JetBrains, and Java.net. Atlassian and Contegix are especially awesome: Atlassian has donated licenses to all its products and Contegix has donated an entire server to the AppFuse project. Thanks guys - you rock!

Comments and issues should be posted to the mailing list.

Does Struts 2 suck?

2007-09-05T11:21:57-06:00

As far as I can tell, Struts 2 sucks. To be fair, so does Stripes. Why? Because there's no developer feedback for invalid properties or OGNL Expressions. What does this mean? It means if you fat-finger a property name, nothing happens. The OGNL exception is swallowed and you never know you did anything wrong. Furthermore, no one seems to care. The XWork folks will help you build, but not solve the problem. This seems like a major deal-breaker to me, However, I also believe it can be fixed - so maybe there's hope.

To demonstrate the problem, I did an experiment. I used the "user details" page in AppFuse Light to fat-finger a property name for the following frameworks: Struts 1, WebWork, Struts 2, JSF, Spring MVC, Stripes, Tapestry and Wicket. First, I tried changing the "lastName" property to "LastName" to see if the framework's property evaluation was case-sensitive. I found that with WebWork/Struts 2, Stripes and Tapestry, the property is not case-sensitive. I prefer case-sensitivity, but maybe that's because I prefer Unix over Windows.

The 2nd thing I tried was changing "lastName" to "pastName" to see if I'd get an error. An error occurred for all the frameworks mentioned, except for WebWork/Struts 2 and Stripes. This makes me believe these frameworks suck. The both use OGNL, so they could blame it on that, but Tapestry uses OGNL and it presents an error message. After this small experiment, my conclusion is the following frameworks have the best developer feedback:

Struts 1
JSF
Spring MVC
Tapestry
Wicket*

* Wicket seems like it needs some work as all it presents is "Internal Error" and makes you dig through your log files to find the problem.

Without good developer feedback, how can you have good productivity?

Dear Struts 2 and Stripes Developers,

What do you think about improving your error messages for invalid properties and expressions? Is this a feature you think you could add? We'd love it if you did.

Sincerely,

Your Users

Click here for some screenshots of how a fat-fingered property looks in various frameworks:

Update: Stripes doesn't suck and Wicket has excellent error reporting. See my comment below for more details.

Update 2: I've created a patch to (hopefully) solve this issue in XWork. If you have any feedback on ways to improve this patch, I'd love to hear about it.

AppFuse 2.0 RC1 Released

2007-09-04T01:42:15-06:00

The AppFuse Team is pleased to announce the release of AppFuse 2.0 RC1! This release marks a huge step in the march to releasing AppFuse 2.0. This release puts the finishing touches on the AppFuse Maven Plugin (AMP), which offers CRUD generation, as well as the ability to change AppFuse from "embedded mode" to "full source" (like 1.x). In addition, we've addressed over 100 issues in preparation for the final 2.0 release. We hope to fix any bugs related to this release and release 2.0 Final in the next week or two.

The videos still represent how M5 works, but things have been simplified (now you don't need to run appfuse:install after appfuse:gen).

AppFuse 2.0 is available as a Maven archetype. For information on creating a new project using this release, please see the QuickStart Guide or the Hello World video.

If you've used AppFuse 1.x, but not 2.x, you'll want to read the FAQ. Join the user mailing list if you have any questions. The Maven Reference Guide has a map of Ant » Maven commands. Maven for Newbies might also be useful if you've never used Maven before. There is some support for Ant in this release.

For more information, please see the 2.0 RC1 Release Notes. The 2.0 series of AppFuse has a minimum requirement of the following specification versions:

Java Servlet 2.4 and JSP 2.0 (2.1 for JSF)
Java 5+

We appreciate the time and effort everyone has put toward contributing code and documentation, posting to the mailing lists, and logging issues.

We also greatly appreciate the help from our sponsors, particularly Atlassian, Contegix, JetBrains, and Java.net. Atlassian and Contegix are especially awesome: Atlassian has donated licenses to all its products and Contegix has donated an entire server to the AppFuse project. Thanks guys - you rock!

Comments and issues should be posted to the mailing list.

Update: I've uploaded a 247-page PDF version of the RC1 documentation to java.net. This PDF contains the relevant pages from the wiki that help you develop with AppFuse 2.0. Who knew I'd end up writing another book?

Open Source Web Frameworks' Mailing List Traffic - June 2007

2007-07-26T14:12:29-06:00

Who knows if these stats mean anything, but it does make a pretty graph. Current mailing list traffic leaders in the web framework space: Rails, Flex and GWT. For those frameworks with dev and users lists, these stats are from the users lists. If you find these numbers to be inaccurate, please let me know.

Here's the numbers in case you want to create your own graphs:

Rails: 4056
Flex: 3558
GWT: 2305
Django: 1951
Wicket: 1718
Struts: 1689
Grails: 1307
MyFaces: 1283
Tapestry: 1268
TurbyGears: 797
Stripes: 206
OpenLaszlo: 189

OSCON 2007: Comparing Java Web Frameworks

2007-07-25T16:50:55-06:00

This afternoon I delivered my Comparing Java Web Frameworks talk at OSCON in Portland. I told attendees I'd post it here afterwards, so here it is:Download Comparing Java Web Frameworks Presentation (5.1 MB)

For comments on this presentation from earlier this year, see related postings from ApacheCon EU and JA-SIG. This presentation is pretty much the same as the one from ApacheCon and JA-SIG, except it has a different theme and I chopped out the Sweetspots section (due to time constraints).

Portland is great this time of year, but unfortunately I won't be sticking around. I'm heading down to Salem to work remotely for a couple of days, returning for the Oregon Brewers Festival on Friday and heading back to Denver on Saturday. I'll be glad when July is over - I've traveled to a new state every week.

How popular is your web framework?

2007-07-13T11:43:29-06:00

From the Struts user mailing list:

Since its release in June 2001, Apache Struts has become the most popular web framework for Java. Six years later, by any objective measure, Struts is still Java's most popular web framework.

In February and March 2007, the group released both Struts 1.3.8 and Struts 2.0.6 to the general public, and Struts downloads zoomed to over 340,000 a month from the Apache site alone. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Most copies of Struts are downloaded from an network of mirrors or obtained from Maven repositories.

So how popular is Struts compared to the other heavy hitters like Spring and Hibernate? Spring has about 1/2 as many (80K) downloads in the same period and so does Hibernate. How do MyFaces, Wicket and Tapestry stack up? Here's their best download numbers in the past few months:

MyFaces: ~12K (and that's only because of a rate 3-times-normal spike)
Tapestry: ~12K
Wicket: ~10K

Sorry JSF, you appear to be losing. Badly. This is an incorrect statement as pointed out by commentors. Thanks for keeping me honest guys.

Disclaimer: Yes, I realize that these statistics are not very accurate, especially considering Maven. Unfortunately, until Maven has repository download stats, this information is the best we've got.

A couple of good blog posts

2007-05-24T09:50:37-06:00

Here's a couple of good blog entries I've enjoyed reading over the past few days - in case you missed them:

Warner is spot on when it comes to Tapestry's biggest problem. Let's hope Tapestry 5 is the end-all-be-all that Howard thinks it will be. As for Gavin's post, I like it because it's mostly true and the f-bomb makes it enjoyable to read. ;-)

AppFuse 2.0 M5 Released - now with CRUD generation and XFire support

2007-05-23T17:49:10-06:00

The AppFuse Team is pleased to announce the release of AppFuse 2.0 M5! This release marks a milestone in the features of AppFuse 2.x. This release adds CRUD code generation, full source support (just like 1.x) and XFire integration. In addition, we've fixed all the issues related to switching persistence frameworks, and you should now be able to easily switch from using Hibernate to to iBATIS or JPA. The videos have been updated for M5. The Easy CRUD with Struts 2 video shows how code generation currently works.

AppFuse 2.0 is available as a Maven archetype. For information on creating a new project using this release, please see the QuickStart Guide or the Hello World video.

If you've used AppFuse 1.x, but not 2.x, you'll want to read the FAQ and join the user mailing list if you have any questions. The Maven Reference Guide has a map of Ant » Maven commands. Maven for Newbies might also be useful if you've never used Maven before. There is some support for Ant in this release.

For more information, please see the 2.0 M5 Release Notes. If you'd like to use AppFuse offline (or download everything at once), you may want to grab the dependencies and extract them into your ~/.m2/repository directory.

The 2.0 series of AppFuse has a minumum requirement of the following specification versions:

Java Servlet 2.4 and JavaServer Pages (JSP) 2.0
Java 5 for Development (Java 1.4 for deployment using the Retrotranslator Plugin)

Comments and issues should be posted to the mailing list.

We appreciate the time and effort everyone has put toward contributing code and documentation, posting to the mailing lists, and logging issues. We also greatly appreciate the help from our sponsors, particularly Atlassian, Cenqua, Contegix, JetBrains, Java.net and KGBInternet. Without them, working on this project wouldn't be nearly as much fun.

Update: The videos are much lower quality than the ones I originally recorded (13 MB vs. 70 MB). If you want to view the high quality videos (they're much clearer), you can download them from java.net. If someone has a better way to compress these (I just used QuickTime's Export feature), please let me know.

Also, this release contains the first release of the AppFuse Maven Plugin. This plugin is largely based on Hibernate Tools. We modified many of the FreeMarker templates from Hibernate Tools to default to certain annotations, as well as clean up the formatting. These templates are currently available in AppFuse's SVN. Hopefully making them available is enough to satisfy Hibernate's LGPL license.

Help me help you (market your web framework)

2007-04-26T13:58:30-06:00

Rather than trolling through google searches, mailing list archives and Amazon book searches, I'd like to try something new. For those projects represented in my Comparing Java Web Frameworks talks (MyFaces, Spring MVC, Stripes, Struts 2, Tapestry and Wicket), would you be interested in helping me gather statistics? I think by allowing projects to gather their own statistics, we'll get a more accurate number of their statistics. Here's the questions I need you to answer:

How many tools (i.e. IDE plugins) are available for your web framework?
How many jobs are available for your framework on Dice.com? What about Indeed.com?
How many messages where posted to your user mailing list (or forum) in March 2007?
How many books are available for your framework?

Of course, if you don't have time, I'll be more than happy to gather these statistics myself. However, those that do answer might get some extra marketing love during my talk. Answering in a comment or sending me an e-mail are the best ways to provide your findings. Thanks!

Update: Alastair asks for further clarification. Here goes:

> If you have lots of IDE tooling available, it probably means the configuration for the framework is overly complex and unmanageable without tooling.

While this may be true, if your framework is hot or uber productive, people want tools. Especially new developers. Remember there's a plethora of new Java developers every year and a lot of them prefer tool-based solutions. Good or bad, IDEs are nice and people like to use them. I've had many clients dismiss frameworks simply because no tools were available.

> The framework with the largest number of jobs available is probably Struts 1. Enough said.

Yes, you're definitely right. However, Struts 1 is not in this comparison - I dropped it because I don't want to recommend it to anyone.

> People only post to user lists when they are stuck. If the framework is hard to use, there will be lots of e-mails. If it has a steep learning curve, and/or the documentation is poor, this will be particularly so. On the other hand, an active list might point to a large active user base. Who knows which is which from a raw figure?

What about community? Mailing lists and their activity is a sign of an active community. Even though SiteMesh is a mature and good solution, its community sucks. There's little support, no new features, no bug fixes. An open source project w/o a community is tough for a company to adopt. Also, the best communities do a lot more than answer questions on mailing lists. They develop their applications, get advice, offer advice and sometimes even hang out. The Struts list used to have threads 30-50 messages long about development philosophies. When you joined the mailing list, you felt like you were a part of something, not just a user of a product.

> If your framework is fairly stable, and someone has written a fabulous tome on it that is universally acknowledged as "the bible", few people would bother writing another book for it.

I don't agree - this just means there's no market for other books because not that many people are using it. Look at Grails, Groovy, GWT and Rails - there's been quite a few books on each and no slowdown in sight. Then again, there weren't many Ant books and that was/is hugely popular. I'm willing to change this question to "How many good does your framework have?", but that's up to everyone's own interpretation. Again, lots of books means there's an active community outside the immediate mailing list - it's a sign the general "market" is interested and the framework fills a need.

Of course, I am interested in asking the questions that developers want to see answered. Do you have suggestions for replacement (or new) questions? Remember, people like hard facts, not wishy washy statements about how productive and OO your framework is. Every framework can be uber productive if you have the right developer(s) and they're genuinely interested in getting stuff done.

What web framework are you using with AppFuse?

2007-04-25T11:05:04-06:00

As part of my upcoming Comparing Java Web Frameworks talk, I'd like to show some statistics of web framework usage in AppFuse. Please vote for the one you're using by clicking on the link below. I'm mostly looking for current AppFuse users. By that, I mean folks that have used 1.x or 2.x on a project in the last 6 months, or plan on using it in the next month or two.

You'll need to create an account and login to vote. To do this, go to View > Account > Sign Up (after clicking on the link below).

http://appfuse.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=986

I'll compile the results of this poll on Friday morning (April 27th), so you have until then for your vote to be counted!

On a related note, if anyone knows how to get the monthly posting statistics from Spring MVC's forums, I'd love to hear about it. My "mailing list traffic" slide has excluded them for the past couple of years because I've been unable to get a count of monthly postings.

NOTE: If you vote by adding a comment to this entry, it won't be counted.

Update: Thanks to the 64 of you that voted. Here's the results of the poll:

As I said last time, I find the results interesting because AppFuse lowers the barriers and reduces the learning curve for all of these frameworks.

Equinox (a.k.a. AppFuse Light) 1.7.1 Released!

2007-04-21T17:27:33-06:00

Equinox 1.7.1 contains a number of dependency updates, and not much else. This will be the last release with the Equinox name. This project is changing its name to AppFuse Light and will be referred to by that name going forward. The project will be moving its source code to http://appfuse-light.dev.java.net. The equinox.dev.java.net project will remain because Cool URIs don't change. In addition to the name change, I'd like to try to merge the AppFuse and Equinox user communities. Since the technologies are so similar, and AppFuse 2.x will use some of Equinox's Ant scripts, it makes sense to bring these projects closer together.

In AppFuse Light 1.8, I plan on adding support for Stripes and Wicket as well as integrating the CSS Framework (like AppFuse uses).

50 possible combinations are available for download:

Web Frameworks: JSF (MyFaces), Spring MVC (with Ajax, Acegi Security, JSP, FreeMarker or Velocity), Struts 1.x, Struts 2.x, Tapestry, WebWork
Persistence Frameworks: Hibernate, iBATIS, JDO (JPOX), OJB, Spring JDBC

All of the frameworks used in Equinox, as well as most of its build/test system is explained in Spring Live. Going forward, documentation will be put on the AppFuse site.

A summary of the changes in this release are below:

Removed custom JavaScript and CSS for MyFaces Tomahawk's
Dependent packages upgraded:
- Ajax4JSF 1.0.6
- Cargo 0.9
- Commons Collections 3.2
- Commons DBCP 1.2.2
- Commons Lang 2.3
- Commons Validator 1.3.1
- DWR 2.0 RC2
- FreeMarker 2.3.9
- JPOX 1.1.7
- JUnit 3.8.2
- Hibernate 3.2.1
- iBATIS 2.3.0
- MyFaces and Tomahawk 1.1.5
- Spring 2.0.4
- Spring Modules Validation 0.8
- Struts 2.0.6
- Tapestry 4.1.1
- Velocity 1.5
- Velocity Tools 1.3
- WebWork 2.2.5

For more information about installing the various options, see the README.txt file. Live demos (thanks to Contegix!) are available at:

If you have any questions, please read the comments from the 1.7 release or ask them on the AppFuse mailing list.

Comparing Java Web Frameworks: Proposed Outline

2007-04-17T09:13:22-06:00

I'm just now starting to create my Comparing Java Web Frameworks presentation for ApacheCon Europe. According to Dave, I'm way late on submitting my presentation. However, I haven't received any late notifications from ApacheCon's organizing committee, so I don't feel too bad.

I think it's interesting how most conferences don't spend much time organizing from a speaker's perspective. The Colorado Software Summit and NFJS are two exceptions. As a speaker, you always know exactly what's going on, what the deadlines are and where you're supposed to be when. With ApacheCon, I feel like I'm in the dark on almost everything - including if I have a hotel room or not. I guess that's the difference between a volunteer organization and conferences where the organizers make money.

Luckily, I've done this presentation quite a few times in the past, so it's mostly an update rather than a rewrite. The biggest changes: dropping Struts 1 and adding Stripes and Wicket. Of course, I could keep Struts 1 since it's not much additional work, but since I only have 50 minutes for the talk (10 minutes for QA), it makes sense to drop it. And yes, I know many of you'd like to see Grails, Seam, GWT, RIFE and Click added to this presentation - but no one wants to sit through a presentation on 11 web frameworks in 45 minutes.

Here's the abstract for the session:

One of the most difficult things to do (in Java web development) today is pick which web framework to use when development an application. The Apache Software foundation hosts most of the popular Java web frameworks: Struts, MyFaces, Tapestry and Wicket. This session will compare these different web frameworks, as well as Spring MVC and Stripes. It will briefly explain how each works and the strengths and weaknesses of each. Tips, tricks and gotcha's will be plentiful. Lastly, it will provide attendees with a sample application that utilizes all 6 frameworks, so they can compare line-by-line how the frameworks are different. This sample application will include the following features: sortable/pageable list, client and server-side validation, success and error messages as well as some Ajax functionality. The frameworks will be rated on how easy they make it to implement these features.

Without further ado, here's my proposed outline:

Introductions (5 minutes)
Pros and Cons (15 minutes, ~2 minutes for each)
Sweetspots (10 minutes)
Smackdown - evaluation criteria includes (15 minutes)
- Ajax support
- Bookmark-ability
- Validation (including client-side)
- Testability (esp. out-of-container)
- Post and redirect
- Internationalization
- Page decoration
- Community and Support
- Tools
- Marketability of skills (can it help you get a job)
- Job count (is there a demand for skills on Dice)
Conclusion (5 minutes)
Q and A (10 minutes)

During the Pros and Cons, I won't be showing any code like I usually do - there's just not enough time. I'm also adding in a discussion on these frameworks' sweetspots. The Pros and Cons section is largely my opinion, and I think it's important to hear the framework authors' opinions as well.

In evaluation criteria, I'm dropping List screens and Spring Integration. All these frameworks have good Spring support and most support some sort of page-able/sortable list. I can add either of those back in based on your suggestions.

Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

AppFuse 2.0 M4 Released

2007-03-24T16:33:21-06:00

The AppFuse Team is pleased to announce the release of AppFuse 2.0 M4! This release marks a milestone in the usability of AppFuse 2.x. A lot of folks (including myself) have been using AppFuse 2.0 on projects and have fixed quite a few issues. In addition to polishing the tutorials, we've fixed a fair amount of i18n bugs and packaging issues with modular archetypes.

We were hoping to get AMP's code generation and XFire integrated in M4, but were it's going to have to wait until M5.

AppFuse 2.0 is available as a Maven archetype. For information on creating a new project using this release, please see the QuickStart Guide.

If you've used AppFuse 1.x, but not 2.x, you'll want to read the FAQ and join the user mailing list if you have any questions. The Maven Reference Guide has a map of Ant » Maven commands.

The 2.0 series of AppFuse has a minumum requirement of the following specification versions:

Java Servlet 2.4 and JavaServer Pages (JSP) 2.0
Java 5 for Development (Java 1.4 for deployment using the Retrotranslator Plugin)

For more information, please see the 2.0 M4 Release Notes. To see how AppFuse 2.x works, please see the video demos.

Comments and issues should be sent to the mailing list.

Large sites powered by Java web frameworks and Tiles + WebWork

2006-02-15T11:55:57-07:00

Yesterday, I delivered a Comparing Web Frameworks seminar that included Struts, Spring MVC, WebWork, JSF and Tapestry. This was for a client that's in the process of re-working an extremely high traffic site (50+ servers currently) from Servlets + JSPs to a web framework. They love the idea of Tiles (and know how to use it) as well as plan on integrating many Ajax features.

We quickly eliminated Struts because of ActionForms since they're planning on moving to persisted POJOs. Spring MVC and JSF had a notch up because they work with Tiles. However, JSF has reportedly had scalability issues. Furthermore, it's the most-complained about framework out there. One attendee noted how she was impressed with the low number of complaints about WebWork.

WebWork doesn't integrate with Tiles (but probably will soon) and they were concerned about SiteMesh performance with large pages (1MB + of text). While I believe SiteMesh can do almost everything that Tiles can do, I also agree that Tiles is a good technology. Furthermore, the "advanced features" of SiteMesh to be largely undocumented, which can be a barrier for adopting it as a "development standard".

Spring MVC was dinged because it doesn't have built-in Ajax support like WebWork and Tapestry (via Tacos). However, it's support for Tiles might just make it the one they choose - especially since they plan on using Spring in the middle-tier/backend. While they loved the idea of Tapestry, they didn't think they could afford the learning curve and I don't know enough about the @Border component to verify if it has all of Tile's functionality.

One interesting thing that came up was the list of high-volume sites using these various web frameworks. Tapestry seems to come out on top when you look at the list of well-known sites. However, I'm sure there are plenty I don't know about. If you know of high-volume sites using any of these five frameworks, please let me know. I'm looking for major sites with millions of hits per day. Here's my current list (extra points for fancy templating with SiteMesh/Tiles + Ajax widgets):

Struts: None that I know of off the top of my head, but I'm sure there are plenty.
Spring MVC: None that I know of.
WebWork: JavaBlogs (don't know if this exactly qualifies as high-volume, there aren't that many Java developers). WebWork also has a few products based on it (i.e. Jive, JIRA, Confluence), but these companies also employ WebWork committers.
JSF: None that I know of.
Tapestry: NHL.com, TheServerSide.com (similar comments to JavaBlogs) and Zillow.com.

Thanks!

Related: How To use Tiles like SiteMesh and SourceLab's Web application technologies comparison (with performance numbers!).

Update: FWIW, I figured out How to use Tiles with WebWork and wrote a short howto for doing dependency injection with SiteMesh.