Raible Designs

Updated Web Tier Specs for Java EE 5

Ed Burns (JSP Spec Lead) points out there's New Drafts of Java EE Web Tier: JSF 1.2, JSP 2.1, Servlet 2.5

I'm pleased to announce another revision of the Java EE Web Tier. In Jan Luehe's blog you can find out what's new in JSP 2.1 Proposed Final Draft 2 (PFD2). The Change Log for Servlet 2.5 will give you the scoop on the Servlet spec. This blog entry will show what's new in the JSF spec.

In JSF, the most visible new feature since the last draft of the spec is the addition of the invokeOnComponent() method on UIComponent. See below for more details.

This revision of the Java Web Tier is fully implemented in glassfish build 37, Sun's open source Java EE 5 Application Server, and the basis for the upcoming Java EE SDK.

I changed the link to Jan Luehe's blog because Ed's link seems to be incorrect. My guess is Java EE will be finalized and released before JavaOne. This is how Sun usually does things: work like mad until JavaOne, then take a week or two off to celebrate the release. Other rumors I've heard are that JBoss and Geronimo hope to release Java EE 5 compliant releases by or at JavaOne.

2006 is shaping up to be quite a year for the popular Java web frameworks. Tapestry 4.0, WebWork 2.2, JSF 1.2 and Spring MVC 2.0 (with form tag libraries and smart defaults). The question is, how long will it take for MyFaces to implement JSF 1.2? And when will we see a large-scale site deployed with JSF?

Why isn't Struts or your favorite framework in this list? Struts is being replaced by WebWork and the rest simply don't have the market share. No one has heard of RIFE or Wicket. However, that didn't stop me from encouraging SourceBeat to publish a Wicket book. Having good (published) documentation about a project is the first step to corporate adoption IMO.

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.

This week at Apache with Ted Husted

Ted Husted gives a nice review of what's happening at Apache with Struts and Roller. Pretty cool to see him offering Struts Training as well. I wonder if most Struts 1.x users will upgrade to Struts Action 2.0 (a.k.a. WebWork)?

Does JPOX suck?

There's an ongoing effort in Roller to migrate from Hibernate to JDO. Mostly, this is due to Apache's silly rule about no L/GPL dependencies - even if they're downloaded separately. I think this is a valiant effort, especially if JDO performs as well as Hibernate.

However, it was interesting to see the following message on the mailing list this morning:

i have experience using jdo, and jpox in particular, with a commercial product. first, you probably already know this, but jdo is dead (from a spec perspective anyway). it will be phased out in favor of ejb3 persistence. maybe that transition will be graceful, maybe not. i see jpox has ejb3 on their roadmap, but not sure what that means.

second, jpox has really, very atrocious performance issues. the jpox folks admit that performance is a low priority, as they are an ri. if someone wants the details on this, i can dig them up.

Interestingly enough, this message is from a Sun employee. It's interesting to hear someone from Sun say that "jdo is dead". What are you thoughts? Should Roller change their persistence backend just to satisfy Apache?

Of course, now you'll tell me your favorite Apache-licensed persistence framework and why it's worked so well for you. The real question is - are you willing to re-write Roller's backend using it?

Free Forums from Nabble.com

Nabble seems like a pretty cool site:

Our forums are truly public, democratic and absolutely free. Nabble's advanced community filtering gives you only the best content without the need for moderation. Find forums that interest you or easily start your own in minutes.

I first found out about Nabble a few days ago when I started seeing messages on the AppFuse mailing with a from address of "sent by Nabble.com". I did some searching and found they have a set of AppFuse Forums. The cool thing about these forums is they're not only a set of mailing list archives, but they also allow you post to the mailing list. Nabble forums are similar to Jive Forums (like OpenSymphony has) - they keep the forums and the mailing lists in synch, which is pretty cool IMO.

I spoke (via e-mail) with Will Lin - one of the co-starters of the Nabble project. Here are a few things he had to say about Nabble:

The goal of Nabble is to do the discussion right, just like Google did the search right. There are many problems with the current forms of discussions in mailing lists, message boards, user groups etc. Most importantly, (1) the search, most forum search are broken, a lot of people use Google's site:archive.domain.com to search discussion archive - what a hack, because Google does not index all the messages especially the recent ones.

In the mailing list case, developers get mad because users post dumb questions repeatedly, but the users don't have a good way to search past discussions ... (2) moderation, most discussions rely on one or two strong moderator to resolve spam and flame wars, with Nabble, all the members can work togeter to rate up (promote) top contributors, and rate down (drive out) spam and trouble makers; (3) cataloging - similar topic discussions should be able to be combined for browsing and search.

One of the coolest features of Nabble is you can create your own forum, and skin it however you like. I've done this for AppFuse, and created an easy to remember alias at http://appfuse.org/forums. You can also check out the easily-searchable Roller Archives, as well as many other OS project's mailing list archives.

Upgraded to Roller 2.0, Tomcat 5.5.12 and using Acegi Security

After a failed upgrade yesterday, I was able to successfully upgrade to Roller 2.0 today. The Editor UI is definitely nicer, and you can get a taste of it if you like by logging into my test user account. The username is "test" and password is "roller". You can also check out my planet page.

In addition to upgrading Roller, I upgraded Tomcat from 5.0.28 to 5.5.12 and everything seems to be humming along smoothly. I'm also running the Acegi integration patch for Roller instead of container-managed authentication. Hopefully this will help us identify any issues. I really like the Acegi integration so far, especially b/c the Remember Me stuff is checked at the root-level and I never have to click "Login" anymore. Good stuff.

Let me know if you see any issues.

Lots of Java activity in San Francisco

The last 24 hours here in San Francisco have been quite interesting. Yesterday, I had lunch with a group of AppFuse users. They work for a company a few blocks from my training class. Chipotle was on the way, so I grabbed a burrito on my route and had a great time talking with them about the various open source tools that AppFuse uses, as well as what's on the roadmap. Thanks for the cookies John!

After class yesterday, I had a Guinness with an AppFuse user that recently put a high-volume site into production. He said it's held up surprisingly well and AppFuse greatly simplified his ability to deliver the project on time. In fact, most of the features the client wanted were already built-in.

Last night was another hotbed for Java talk - from web frameworks to TSSS in Vegas. Matt Filios and I had dinner and drinks with Mike "wanna play poker" Cannon-Brookes, Crazy Bob, Patrick Linskey, Geoff Hendrey (I hope I got the name right) and a number of other guys whose names escape me. It was Mike's birthday, so I left early to avoid the chaos that Crazy Bob and Mike always seem to stir up.

To top it all off, this morning I ran into a couple of folks that read this blog. I was getting breakfast at a local bagel shop - when a guy came up to me and asked "Is your name Matt"? I answered yes, and we talked briefly about my trip out here. It was kinda wierd being recognized, but kinda cool at the same time. It was good to meet you Nadeem.

I'm heading home from this wonderfully warm place tonight, but I'm sure I'll be back in the near future.

Biled Again, this time because my design sucks

Looks like I've been biled again. Unlike the last time, this time Hani doesn't offer any specifics, he merely says that my OSS efforts don't do anything other than the "very very basics".

Java, specifically, goes a long way towards ramming down a set of design principles. Said principles are followed fairly blindly by most practitioners. The OSS world is awash with examples of people who have read the right books, but have absolutely no skill or talent at conceptualising or grokking the underlying principles behind the books. To them, the design pattern is an end goal, not a tool. To pick one example (out of thousands), look at Matt Raible's OSS efforts. It has inheritance! It uses PATTERNS! It is LIGHTWEIGHT! Yet, I'd argue that it's very badly designed (if you don't believe me, just try getting it to do anything other than the very very basics.)

I'm assuming that Hani is speaking about AppFuse and Equinox, because my other efforts in OSS are minimal (Roller, Display Tag, XDoclet and Struts Menu). The reason I'm writing this post is because I'm curious to know what Hani tried to do that didn't work? Was it AppFuse/Equinox that failed? Or was it the underlying framework? Did he try to do indexed properties with WebWork or modify build.xml to deploy to Orion? Is the feature he's looking for something we can fix?

As a defense of my use of patterns, lightweight containers, etc. - it's not so much my doing that these happen to exist - they're more of a reflection on what user's want. It's a problem with Java developers in general - if you're not using patterns - users want to know why. Furthermore, most of the J2EE patterns in AppFuse are from the underlying frameworks, not from anything that I did.

As far as the design of AppFuse, I agree it could use some work. There's a lot of stuff in AppFuse that I don't use - so when I start a project with it - I usually rip out about 20-30% percent of it's features b/c I won't use them. Unfortunately, it's not that easy for others to do this b/c they don't know what they'll break if they remove a bunch of stuff. I'd like to move to a more modular, plug-in type architecture - but I have a feeling that that's the path to over-engineering. Even so, it would be pretty cool if it was possible to turn on/off features (even the use of a particular web framework) by changing a properties file.

What do you want to see at Java in Action?

I'm presenting two sessions at Java in Action in October. The first one is a 3-hour tutorial on Comparing Java Web Frameworks, while the second is about Developing Next Generation Web Applications with Ajax in Spring. I'm in the process of writing both of these, and I'm interested to see what Java developers would like to see in these talks.

The tutorial is probably the toughest one because my normal presentation usually only takes about an hour to deliver. For a similar presentation, see Craig McClanahan's The Evolution of Web Application Architectures. I could talk about the history like Craig does, or I could talk about the different frameworks and their features like I usually do. However, I want something more interactive and fun for attendees. I was thinking of live-coding for 20 minutes with each framework, and showing the differences, but that's not a whole lot of fun either. Maybe I could divide the class into 5 groups, educate each of them on features of the framework, and then we could have some sort of debate? Showing code is always something that developers are interested in, so I'll have to figure out how to work that in as well. If you're planning on attending this tutorial - I'd love to hear suggestions.

I'm also curious on what you'd like to see in the 2nd presentation? I was planning on using Equinox (or possibly AppFuse), to show how to use DWR, Prototype and script.aculo.us. A couple of examples I'm thinking of showing are in-page updates and sortable/pageable tables. Any other cool effects or tricks you'd like to see?

Sorry for the cross-post from JRoller, but I wanted to reach the largest possible audience. Please leave comments on the JRoller entry.

OSCON: Next week in Portland

I'm starting to get pretty pumped about OSCON next week in Portland. Unlike the rest of the conferences I attend, this one is close to home. My parents live in Salem, Oregon - which is a mere 40 miles south of Portland. I spent my last two years of high school in Salem, so I still have a few friends in the area too. To get the most out of the trip, I'm flying into Portland on Sunday and commuting from Salem to Portland for the first couple days.

On Monday, I'm going to do a Ruby-immersion day and spend it listening to Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson. I hope to come out of these sessions with enough knowledge to write a webapp in Rails. Since I'm aspiring to be an open source web frameworks expert, instead of Just Java - this seems like a good fit. In the next few months, I plan on learning more about Rails, as well as other open source web frameworks in general (any and all suggestions welcome).

Tuesday, I'm giving an AppFuse Tutorial and Wednesday I'll be duking it out with Matthew Porter. Other tutorials and sessions I hope to attend are Kathy Sierra's Creating Passionate Users, Joe Walnes' SiteMesh talk and I could probably stand to learn a bit more about Beehive.

Another reason this conference will be a lot of fun is because many of the SourceBeat Authors are attending. It's always a good time when you rendezvous with a bunch of smart developers. Last, but not least, if you're attending OSCON, you might want to check the New Sessions entry on O'Reilly's blog.