Raible Designs

Weekend Update

Yikes! I can't believe it's been a whole week since I last blogged. Actually, with my workload it's not that surprising. Don't let anyone ever tell you that working for an open source consulting and support company is easy. When we started, we dreamed of working a couple of weeks a month, and working on open source the rest of the time. Business has really started to pick up in 2006, so that dream is quickly fading. Regardless, this week was a good one.

I managed to get Equinox upgraded to Tapestry 4.0 and WebWork 2.2. Both of these releases are much nicer than their predecessors and I plan to do a write-up next week. I especially dig how WebWork 2.2 allows you to do a popup calendar with less code than both JSF or Tapestry. It really is a kick-ass web framework and only getting better.

Other than that, I had some fun with Maven 2 - converting all the Spring Fundamentals labs to use it. The invalid-POM situation continues to be atrocious and shows no sign of improving soon. I really like the idea of the Jetty 6 Maven Plugin, but unfortunately, it doesn't seem to play nice with SiteMesh. Lastly, I had some fun getting JOTM to work on Tomcat 5.5.x. All in all, I learned a lot this week, just didn't have much time to write about it.

In AppFuse News, Mika Göckel wrote tutorial on integrating XFire with AppFuse. Mika also authored a tutorial on AppFuse + Axis. He obviously knows his way around AppFuse - so we nominated and accepted him as a committer. Welcome aboard Mika! Finally, Brian Topping has converted a version of AppFuse to Maven 2. With any luck, AppFuse will be an archetype that you can install from Maven someday.

I'm flying out to San Francisco for a 1-day seminar next week and my MacBook Pro couldn't arrive any sooner (12 days and counting).

AppFuse News: GlassFish, free demo hosting for java.net projects and Facelets

Some interesting news from the AppFuse world:

• Jerome Dochez, the GlassFish architect, has written a tutorial on how to run Spring in GlassFish. This was followed up by Vince Kraemer and his how to run Equinox on GlassFish (this should work on AppFuse as well). Thanks guys - these are great write-ups.
• java.net now offers free hosting for project demos - the first demo deployed is from the AtLeap project, which was originally created from AppFuse.
• Thomas Gaudin has created a version of AppFuse with JSF + Facelets. Nice work Thomas! Hopefully we can get this (and ADF Faces) integration into the next release.

Learn about WebWork 2.2 and Tapestry 4.0 via Podcasts

I've said in the past that Podcasts are boring. I still think this is true for the most part, but that's largely because most of them aren't appealing to me. However, this week I've found a couple of good ones. Tapestry 4.0 and WebWork 2.2 have recently been released, and now you can listen to interviews with both project's primary developers: Patrick Lightbody of WebWork and Howard Lewis Ship of Tapestry/Hivemind. The easiest way I've found to subscribe and listen to podcasts is to download iTunes. You also may want to checkout The Java Podcasters article on ONJava.com.

I hope to upgrade both Equinox and AppFuse to these releases in the near future, I just need to find the time. I also hope to change the default web framework in AppFuse to Struts Action 2 as part of AppFuse 2.0. This will allow us to ditch Struts and WebWork and only support 4 web frameworks (SA2, Spring MVC, Tapestry and JSF).

Spring Workshops from Virtuas

I'm pleased to announce that my company, Virtuas, has decided to start offering public workshops for many prominent open source projects. These include Spring, Geronimo, Tomcat, Hibernate and JSF/MyFaces.

I'll be teaching the first Spring course in Denver February 21st - 24th, followed by one in Boston in mid-March. It should be a fun class, especially since I'm adding a bunch of stuff regarding Spring 2.0. Since I know you're going to ask the price -- and it's not posted on virtuas.com -- it's $2,495 per person for 1-4 people from the same company/group/etc., $1,995 per person for five or more people.

In other Virtuas news, we've recently signed partnership agreements with IBM and Covalent. We also re-worked our site with Andreas Viklund's "andreas08" theme from Open Source Web Design. Thanks to the power of Drupal, all we had to do to change the whole site was modify one PHP template and one CSS file. Thanks to both Andreas and Drupal for vastly simplifying our new look-n-feel.

Update: It looks like Andreas's theme has been made into a Drupal theme. Nice.

Improving JSF in AppFuse

I've noticed the number of AppFuse users using JSF starting to pick up lately. This is probably mostly because Sanjiv Jivan and Thomas Gaudin (both committers) have started to use it on their projects. Thomas has been nice enough to write a couple of interesting blog entries on JSF and AppFuse. Click on the links below to read more.

• Non English AppFuse applications with JSF
• ADF faces integration in AppFuse

[ANN] Equinox 1.5 Released

This release's major new feature is dependency downloading using Maven 2's Ant tasks. The main reason I used Maven 2 over Ivy is because I've heard rumors that Ant 1.7 will include dependency downloading - and they're planning on integrating the work that Maven has already done.

One of the nice things about using Maven 2's Ant Tasks, is you can download Maven 2 and generate your Eclipse or IDEA (possibly even Netbeans) project files using "mvn eclipse:eclipse" or "mvn idea:idea". You can also use Maven 2 to build and test things if you like. The only thing that doesn't currently when using Maven to test Equinox is the web tests with Cargo. I can try to get those working if there's enough demand. For now, you'll have to use Ant if you want to test the UI.

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

• Removed packaged JARs in favor of Maven 2's Ant Tasks. Dependencies are now downloaded on-demand, greatly reducing the size of Equinox-based applications.
• By specifying compile, test and runtime dependencies in a pom.xml file, Equinox applications can now be built with Maven 2. The only difference between building with Maven 2 and Ant (at this time) is that the M2 build does not support testing with Cargo. However, there is an M2 Cargo plugin so this shouldn't be hard to fix if you have that itch.
• Added DWR, Script.aculo.us and Prototype to simplify Ajax development.
• Added Beandoc support - simply run "ant beandoc" to see javadoc-style documentation of Spring context files.
• Refactored UserManagerTest to be UserManagerImplTest; renamed UserManagerIntegrationTest to UserManagerTest.
• Changed BaseDAOTestCase to extend AbstractTransactionalDataSourceSpringContextTests.
• [Hibernate] Added example ehcache.xml to web/WEB-INF/classes for default cache settings.
• [JSF] Removed client-side validation because corejsf-validator.jar causes issues with Spring's Ant-style path matching.
• [Spring] Fixed number editor and edit logic in UserFormController.
• [Struts] Fixed issue with installation where ContextLoaderPlugin was loading ApplicationContext a 2nd time b/c the listener was not being commented out.
• Dependent packages upgraded:
  • Cargo 0.6
  • Hibernate 3.1
  • iBATIS 2.1.6
  • JPOX 1.1.0 Beta 4
  • MyFaces 1.1.1
  • PostgreSQL JDBC Driver 8.1 Build 404
  • Spring 1.2.6
  • Struts 1.2.8

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

Demos:

• Spring
• JSF
• Struts
• Tapestry
• WebWork

The basic Equinox download contains all the various web and persistence framework options in the "extras" folder. If you have issues replacing the web framework or persistence engine, please enter an issue in JIRA and I'll build and upload a customized version for you.

RE: Oracle donates ADF Faces to Apache MyFaces

I read the news initially on the AMIS Technology blog, which points to the original news-breaker on the IT-eye Weblog. This is huge for the JSF community IMO. The main compelling feature behind component-based frameworks is components. Without components, there's not much point in them.

By christmas a website and mailing list will be available for the incubator project. You will also be able to download the source code. By New Year a subversion repository should be available with the source code. And the intention is to move out of incubator by JavaOne 2006, which I think is in May.

So why is Oracle doing this? Well it's obvious that Java needs to have a good component based framework to compete with .NET. And Oracle believes that JSF can be this Framework, but a good implementation is needed, which is what ADF Faces provides.

What does ADF Faces, or better Apache Faces Cherokee contain? More than 100 components, an Html AJAX renderkit (but it doesn't use HttpXmlRequest, but iframes), a dialog framework, personalization, skinning, and a lot more.

I wonder if Oracle has a solution for the "everything is a post" problem?

JSF is cool, and easy to be productive in, but so is Tapestry, WebWork and Spring MVC. I find it somewhat ironic that the Struts committers turned down Shale as Struts 2.0, but they voted in WebWork.

I think component-based frameworks might be the way of the future. However, after playing with OpenLaszlo for the past few weeks - I can't help but think that this is what component-based frameworks should be. Many components, easy to use, and the output is a rich-client out-of-the-box. In addition to the Flash output they have now, I've heard rumblings that OpenLaszlo may support other outputs in the future (i.e. XHTML/Ajax).

It's pretty cool to see continued excitement and innovation in Java. Competition is good, and will only make each of these frameworks stronger and easier to use.

RE: WebWork joins Struts

From the struts-dev mailing list:

Between the Clarity hubbub and the Java Web Alignment brouhaha, it came up that WebWork would like to merge with another framework. Ted and Don followed up with the two core WebWork developers, Patrick Lightbody and Jason Carreira. As it turns out, they are very interested in merging WebWork with Struts. An archive of our discussions is available as a Quick Topic thread.

As some of you know, the underlying idea behind Ti was to use WebWork as the core of Struts Action Framework 2.x. Conceptually, WebWork and Struts 1.x are very similar. We've often said, without embarrassment, that WebWork does many things better than Struts 1.x. Meanwhile, WebWork has the ability to provide a layer of almost full backwards-compatibility for Struts 1.x, and we have already demonstrated we can integrate Beehive's (very cool) Page Flow with WebWork.

Patrick Lightbody:

Yes, it's true. The WebWork development team (Jason and I) have been working with the Struts development team (Don Brown and Ted Husted) and have come to the conclusion that the best thing for Java community would be to merge WebWork in to Struts.

Read Ted's email here, but the gist of it is this: WebWork is a great technology, and Struts is a great community. It's a perfect match and bringing the two together will only be better for WebWork and Struts users alike. The only down side for me is that I'll be working less with OpenSymphony, but I believe that is a small price for all the great benefits that come from this merger.
...
With this renewed energy, larger development team, and larger community, the combined efforts of Struts and WebWork will surely make the Struts platform the easiest, fastest, and most powerful Java web framework available. We hope that all the WebWork users and developers are as excited about this as we are and are ready to take WebWork to the next level.

IMO, this is good for both Struts and WebWork. WebWork gets the additional marketing it needs, and Struts users get a kick-ass framework to develop with. If you're a Struts user and haven't tried WebWork, prepare to be impressed. I was and still am.

I plan to upgrade AppFuse and Equinox to WebWork 2.2 as soon as its released. Hopefully I'll be able to migrate both the Struts and WebWork versions to SAF 2.0 w/in a few months.

Equinox 1.5 Beta 1 Released

This release is mainly to test out dependency downloading using Maven 2's Ant tasks. In addition, a few bugs have been fixed, but there's quite a few more on the roadmap. I plan to fix all of these before releasing 1.5 in a couple weeks.

Please test out this release if you have a chance. One of the nice things about using Maven 2's Ant Tasks, is you can download Maven 2 and generate your Eclipse or IDEA (possibly even Netbeans) project files using "mvn eclipse:eclipse" or "mvn idea:idea". You can also use Maven 2 to build and test things if you like. The only thing that doesn't currently work with Maven is the web tests with Cargo. I can try to get those working if there's enough demand. For now, you'll have to use Ant if you want to test the UI.

The download is much smaller now - barely over 1MB vs. ~20MB for 1.4. Most of the size comes from the Maven 2 Ant Tasks - which is a 869KB JAR. Of course, I could've made the distribution even smaller and required you to download the JAR and put it in $ANT_HOME/lib, but I decided to make things easier by including it.

For more information about installing the various options, see the README.txt file. Currently, you can use the following persistence frameworks:

• Hibernate
• iBatis
• JDO (JPOX
• OJB
• Spring JDBC

And a number of web frameworks too, as listed below with links to demos.

• Spring MVC
• JSF (MyFaces)
• Struts
• Tapestry
• WebWork

Update: I forget to mention that I owe a big thanks to Carlos Sanchez. He (and the other Maven developers) have been great in helping to resolve all the issues I found with transitive dependencies.

Are you doing client-side validation in your JSF applications?

Are you doing client-side validation in your JSF application? I am in Equinox and AppFuse, but it seems somewhat primitive. I'm using David Geary's corejsf-validator.jar from his Core JSF book. It hooks into Commons Validator, and while it does work - it has some issues. First of all, if you have it in your classpath when testing, it screws up Ant-style path matching in Spring (applicationContext*.xml doesn't work). Secondly, it puts all the JavaScript validation functions right in your page, rather than in an external file that can be cached by your browser.

In reality, I believe that JSF should include client-side validation as part of the spec. After all, all of the other popular Java web frameworks support it. Then again, Rails is growing in popularity and AFAIK, it doesn't support it. In addition, the popular Java webapps I've seen (JIRA, Confluence, Jive Forums) don't use it either. I'm not trying to advocate that we should all be using client-side validation in our apps, I'm merely saying it should be an option in the standard web framework for Java.

The only public (and open source) option I've found is the Commons Validator support in Shale. Will this work in a MyFaces application w/o Shale? Are there other client-validation frameworks for JSF I don't know about? Or is the best option "don't use client-side validation with JSF?"