Raible Designs

ICEfaces gets open sourced

As far as JSF Ajax frameworks are concerned, there seems to be two major players: Ajax4jsf and ICEfaces. I don't know that either one is a true open source project (where developers are from multiple companies), but Spring isn't either, so I don't know that it actually matters. I think it interesting that both products don't seem to care about capitalization, but I digress.

Today, ICEsoft announced they've open-sourced ICEfaces. Was this inspired by Java going GPL?¹ I doubt it, these things take time and it's likely that ICEsoft had this one in the cooker for quite a while. I do think it's interesting that the major JSF component vendors (Oracle, Exadel and now ICEsoft) have all open-sourced their products. Must be a tough market out there.

Apparently, ICEfaces works with Facelets, so it should work with AppFuse and Equinox. Looking through ICEfaces documentation and sample apps, they seem to be missing a straight-forward "here's how to integrate it into your existing application" guide. They do show how to modify your web.xml, but there doesn't seem to be a short, concise guide to what configuration settings you need to add to your faces-config.xml. I was somewhat motivated to write such a guide this morning, but lost motivation quickly as I realized it might be quite the effort. If someone wants to create the Maven bundles for ICEfaces, I'll try to carve out some time later this week to write up instructions for integrating ICEfaces into Equinox and AppFuse.

Unfortunately, integrating ICEfaces into your project is only the beginning. The hard part is choosing which is a better Ajax toolkit: ADF Faces/Trinidad, Ajax4jsf or ICEfaces? Trinidad and ICEfaces seem to be more about components, whereas Ajax4jsf is more about Ajaxifying regular ol' JSF components. So I think Ajax4jsf still remains, and ICEfaces looks like a better out-of-the-box component library than Trinidad. I guess time will tell.

Update: I forgot to mention Infragistics NetAdvantage as a JSF Ajax framework. OpenLogic decided to use Infragistics in the project I started for them. I was able to get it working in AppFuse fairly easily, but it's kinda ugly from a setup standpoint. They require you to copy a bunch of static files (images, stylesheets and scripts) into your project. Yech.

[1] Stephen O'Grady has an excellent writeup on this: And Sun Said, Set My Java Free: The Open Source Q&A.

Continuum, Luntbuild, Pulse and NetBeans

Last night, I did a bit of playing with technologies new to me. First of all, I got AppFuse 2.0 running on Continuum. This was was easy enough, I just had to add <scm> information to each pom.xml. Thanks to those who recommended this approach. I thought it was a silly solution until I realized "mvn site" produced the wrong information when <scm> wasn't present for sub-modules.

Since I was playing with Continuous Integration tools, I decided to give Cerberus, LuntBuild, and Pulse a spin. My goal was to give each server the old "college try" and see if I could get them running with minimal effort. I don't know where I heard about Pulse, but it was somehow included in my tests.

Cerberus didn't work with my Cygwin/Ruby setup, so I was done with it quickly. LuntBuild worked pretty well, but the interface and configuration seemed kinda clunky. I also found it strange that it uses a 4.x version of Jetty - seems kinda old. I was surprised to see that it uses Tapestry for its web framework. Pulse was the nicest one with a kick-ass (ajaxified) user inferface, powered by Acegi, WebWork and Hibernate (according to its JARs). It was definitely the easiest to setup and use. While Pulse isn't free for commercial use, it is free for open source projects, as well as small teams.

Summary: Continuum, LuntBuild and Pulse seem to be the best tools for building Maven 2 projects. While CruiseControl works, and works well, it does require you to customize XML from the command line, whereas these tools allow you to do everything through a web interface.

Toward the end of the night, I downloaded NetBeans 5.5 and installed its Maven 2 Plugin. I was surprised at how full-featured this plugin is. I was able to build, test and run the AppFuse web modules in the embedded Tomcat without issues. It's definitely a cool plugin. As for NetBeans, it seemed pretty sluggish and I couldn't figure out how to get Ctrl+Shift+R functionality, which is a must for me these days. Also, I couldn't get the JSF support working for the AppFuse JSF Module, seemingly caused by the Maven plugin (project properties only has Maven options). Since NetBeans works so well with Maven 2, and it's much more full-featured than Eclipse, it seems natural to recommend it to AppFuse 2 users. Of course, I like IDEA a lot more, but there's no Maven 2 plugin that I know of.

Export your Facelets pages into PDF, PNG and SVG

Jacobus Steenkamp has an interesting article on java.net: Combine JSF Facelets and the Flying Saucer XHTML Renderer. In this article, Jacobus shows how you can use a filter and the Flying Saucer project to export a Facelets page to PDF, PNG or SVG. Pretty cool stuff if you ask me. I don't know if I'll ever have a need for it, but it's nice to know that this functionality exists.

Shameless plug: Equinox 1.7 and AppFuse 1.9.4 both include Facelets for their JSF options.

[CSS 2006] Day 3

This morning, I gave both my talks back-to-back and was done by noon. After lunch, I attended Scott Blum's Taming AJAX with GWT. It was a good talk with some impressive demos. I definitely need to dig into GWT more - it looks like very cool technology. I can't help but think it's the "widget framework" that JSF was supposed to be.

I was planning on heading back to Denver tonight, but it started snowing and Julie said they expect 10" in East Denver. Who knows if it'll actually snow that much (the weatherfolks are often wrong), but I don't want to be on the roads.[Read More]

AppFuse 1.9.4 Released

This release's major new features are upgrading to Spring 2.0, Hibernate 3.2, and Facelets + Ajax4JSF integration for the JSF option. In addition, many libraries have been fixed and a few bugs have been squashed.

To install and configure AppFuse for development, see the QuickStart Guide. Thanks to all the sponsors who have contributed products and free hosting to the AppFuse project.

• Download
• Release Notes
• 7 Simple Reasons to use AppFuse

To see how AppFuse works, please see the following demos (username: mraible, password: tomcat):

• Struts + Spring + Hibernate
• Spring + iBATIS
• WebWork + Spring + Hibernate
• JSF + Spring + Hibernate
• Tapestry + Spring + Hibernate

Comments and issues can be sent to the mailing list or posted to JIRA.

Note: If you're building AppFuse on Linux, you should be aware of some non-English encoding issues. The solution is to add something like the following to your ~/.bashrc file.

export LC_CENGINE=en_US
export LANG=en_US
export LANGUAGE=en_US

Equinox (a.k.a. AppFuse Light) 1.7 Released!

This release's major new features are upgrading to Spring 2.0, Hibernate 3.2, an Ajax + Spring MVC version, an Acegi Security + Spring MVC version and Struts 2.0 as an optional web framework. It's highly likely that the "extras/security" package can be installed with other web frameworks, but it's only been tested with Spring MVC. Furthermore, this release provided all of the different combinations that Equinox provides - all 50 of them!

All of the frameworks used in Equinox, as well as most of its build/test system is explained in Spring Live. A summary of the changes are below (detailed release notes can be found in JIRA):

• Added extras/spring-ajax with examples of ajaxified displaytag (with AjaxAnywhere), in-place editing (Script.aculo.us), in-page updates (DWR) and lightbox (Lightbox gone Wild) popups.
• Added extras/security with Acegi Security integration for authentication and authorization.
• Automated creation and testing of all possible combinations for distribution.
• Converted from JSP to Facelets for JSF/MyFaces option.
• Integrated Ajax4JSF into JSF/MyFaces option.
• Added Struts 2.0.1 as web framework.
• Upgraded to Spring 2.0, including improved XML syntax and JSP Form Tags
• Added Cargo settings to pom.xml so it's possible to run web tests from Maven.
• Changed dataSource bean to use a connection pool.
• Added popup calendar (using jscalendar) to Spring MVC and Struts 2.
• Added OpenSessionInViewFilter for Hibernate and OpenPersistenceManagerInViewFilter for JDO/JPOX.
• Fixed foreign-language encoding issues with Spring's CharacterEncodingFilter.
• Changed from DAO to Dao to be more consistent with other projects.
• Dependent packages upgraded:
  • Canoo WebTest 1393
  • Cargo 0.8
  • Commons Validator 1.3.0
  • DWR 1.1.1
  • FreeMarker 2.3.8
  • jMock 1.1.0
  • JPOX 1.1.1
  • Hibernate 3.2
  • MyFaces 1.1.4
  • Spring 2.0
  • Spring Modules Validation 0.5
  • Struts 1.2.9
  • Tapestry 4.0.2
  • WebWork 2.2.4
• Dependent packages added:
  • Acegi Security 1.0.2
  • Ajax4JSF 1.0.2
  • AjaxAnywhere 1.2-rc2
  • Facelets 1.1.11
  • Struts 2.0.1

Download. For more information about installing the various options, see the README.txt file.

Demos:

• Spring · Spring + Ajax · Spring + Acegi
• JSF + Facelets
• Struts 1 · Struts 2
• Tapestry
• WebWork

Thanks to all the users of Equinox for making this a great release!

P.S. I'm fully aware that this project's name conflicts with an Eclipse project.

Integrating Facelets and Ajax4JSF with MyFaces

I spent a few hours tonight integrating Facelets into an AppFuse-based application. The integrating was fairly easy thanks to the work Thomas Gaudin did back in January. For the most part, it was just a matter of 1) replacing <fmt:message> tags with #{text['key']} tags, 2) replacing the <%@ include file="/common/taglibs.jsp"%> at the top of each page with Facelet's namespace tags and 3) renaming the pages from *.jsp to *.xhtml. The only thing that tripped me up was I thought the "c" namespace was the same as JTLS's URI, but it's actually a whole new URI. Thanks to the Facelets developers for a much-needed fix for JSF.

After I got Facelets integrated and working, I dove into integrating Ajax4JSF. Two hours later and I have the simple repeater demo working. What took so long? I spent an hour staring at (and googling for) the solution to the following error:

PhaseListenerManager.informPhaseListenersBefore(74) | Exception in PhaseListener RENDER_RESPONSE(6) beforePhase.
java.lang.NullPointerException
        at com.sun.facelets.FaceletViewHandler.writeState(FaceletViewHandler.java:759)
        at org.ajax4jsf.framework.renderer.AjaxRendererUtils.writeState(AjaxRendererUtils.java:850)
        at org.ajax4jsf.framework.renderer.AjaxRendererUtils.encodeAreas(AjaxRendererUtils.java:740)
        at org.ajax4jsf.framework.renderer.AjaxContainerRenderer.encodeAjax(AjaxContainerRenderer.java:128)
        at org.ajax4jsf.ajax.UIAjaxRegion.encodeAjax(UIAjaxRegion.java:210)

The solution turned out to be removing the FaceletsViewHandler from faces-config.xml:

<view-handler>com.sun.facelets.FaceletViewHandler</view-handler>

Also, it seems the following is required in web.xml:

    <context-param>
        <param-name>org.ajax4jsf.VIEW_HANDLERS</param-name>
        <param-value>com.sun.facelets.FaceletViewHandler</param-value>
    </context-param>

Hopefully this helps others googling for the exception above.

RE: Experience First-Hand the Most Productive Way to Develop Enterprise JSF Applications

In Experience First-Hand the Most Productive Way to Develop Enterprise JSF Applications, Steve Muench writes:

If you are a developer responsible for creating enterprise J2EE web applications that work with database data, this new step-by-step tutorial should be eye-opening for you.

The tutorial does indeed look nice, but at 69 (printed) pages, is it really a tutorial? Seems more like a book to me.

MyFaces + Facelets vs. Shale

At some point, I plan on replacing the JSF+JSP combination in AppFuse with JSF+Facelets. However, I'm wondering if this is just an interim step to a more full-featured framework like Shale and its Clay templates. Has anyone out there tried both Shale and MyFaces+Facelets? If so, which one worked best for you?

Should we use Shale for the JSF framework in AppFuse or is MyFaces + Facelets good enough?

Can JSP-based components (particularly Ajax ones) be used with Clay and/or Facelets? What's the best Ajax-enabled component library available for JSF? I know there's more everyday, so I'm looking for first-hand, real-world experience here. Thanks in advance for any advice or stories you'd like to share!

RE: Five things I hate about AppFuse

Karsten Voges has written a nice critique of AppFuse titled Five things I hate about AppFuse. I started a new JSF+Hibernate project with AppFuse yesterday, so I definitely feel some of his pain. Let's examine his points one-by-one:

1. It's nice to choose between the usage of JSP 2.0 or before, but making the changes (to all jsps and the web.xml) every time I build my app sucks.

I absolutely agree. I spent a good hour modifying build.xml, web.xml, etc. to switch my app from JSP 1.2 to JSP 2.0 yesterday. You can modify your build.xml to permanently switch to JSP 2.0, but it doesn't get everything. I'll create a separate script for 1.9.3 and the upcoming 1.9.4 to make this cleaner.

2. Seperating the classes in web, services and dao is good, but I hate the building of jar-Files for the different layers. Just take the classes under dao and service and copy them into the war or move them over to the webapps folder as it is done with the web classes!

Yeah, I've proposed doing this a couple of times on the user mailing list. It always gets shot down by existing users. I'm sure it'd be possible to write a script to do this, but it'd be no fun to write.

3. Eclipse crashed with OutOfMemory errors. Always when trying to open the build file. The build file is really, really long, with lots of stuff in there. IMO 50% of it could be deleted.

Hmmm, I rarely have OOM errors with Eclipse, but I also used Bruce's tip for increasing Eclipse's available memory. If you're using Windows, here's how to bump up Eclipse's memory.

4. Generation of Hibernate-Mapping files. I really hate it to look within a jarfile how the Hibernate mapping file looks like. It is nice to get it generated, but I prefer to be able make adjustments to it by hand to try out things quickly. And it is quite hard to enter special SQL statements in an Hibernate file, if it gets overwritten all the time.

You can create/modify the Hibernate mapping files by hand if you prefer. From the FAQ:

If you have an @hibernate.class tag on a POJO - hibernatedoclet will generate the mapping file into build/dao/gen. If you have a mapping file (*.hbm.xml) file for your POJO in the src/dao/**/model/* directory, it will overwrite the generated version. If you don't want to worry about the two conflicting - just remove the @ sign from @hibernate.class in your POJO and put your hbm.xml file in the model directory.

No build.xml modification are need for this to work. The "package-dao" target will include these mapping files. If you want to get rid of the hibernatedoclet process, you can do that- but make sure and run it first - and then copy all of the generated hbm.xml files into your model directory.

5. I don't like to get my struts.xml merged from many sources. I like to have one struts-config file holding all my struts configuration.

I agree this is kinda painful, but so is developing with Struts. You should be able to move the generated struts-config.xml into web/WEB-INF and remove the <strutsconfigxml> from build.xml to get the behavior you're looking for.

As far as throwing out the build.xml, I'm actually planning on doing that with my current project. I will keep it in place for the development phase, but I hope to move the application into a large build system once I'm done. Since it's all Java code and XML in the end, this shouldn't be hard to do. I did it when migrating to Maven 2, so I know it's possible. As far as Karsten's opinion of Maven 2, he may be right - but I hope to make a strong effort to make it very useable when using AppFuse. In fact, I hope to make it possible for users to use their IDE their entire time, with no need to run any Maven commands. Of course, that could be a pipe dream - only time will tell.

As far as sounding like the BileBlog, the more you rag on AppFuse, the better. Remember, screaming users are a good thing.