Raible Designs

AppFuse Book!

David Whitehurst (an AppFuse committer) has taken on the task of writing a book on AppFuse 2.0. I don't envy him, but it looks like he's got a lot of good ideas.

If you'd like to help David shape AppFuse Primer, please post a comment on his blog.

Maven 2 hates Commons Logging

It's true that most people hate commons-logging, but Maven 2 hates it even more. There are many open source projects that use this library, so you're likely to depend on it when you never intended to. Of course, this is Maven 2's transitive dependencies fault - but currently there's no option to turn transitivity off. I tried changing to SLF4J, but that causes some Maven plugins to fail.

Since the Maven team refuses to fix this (even though it's an *obvious* exception to their rule about not changing anything), I've fixed it myself. The AppFuse repo has a fixed version of commons-logging's pom.xml. To get the fixed version of commons-logging, delete it from your local repo, then add AppFuse's repository to your pom.xml:

    <repositories>
        <repository>
            <id>appfuse</id>
            <url>http://static.appfuse.org/repository</url>
        </repository>
    </repositories>

Since the burden of this issue clearly rests upon the shoulders of the commons-logging developers - can we please get a new release with a fixed pom? Pretty please?

Update: I tried to get slf4j to work again today. While I succeeded, I found a critical bug. The bug is that log messages don't print out the method name, just debug(), info() or whatever from your classes. It's possible to fix this by using slf4j instead of clogging. However, that won't help you get method names printed when cranking up the logging for 3rd party libraries like Spring and Hibernate. Since this won't be fixed, it seems better to stick with commons-logging. I doubt I'd have any luck getting all the libraries that AppFuse uses to move away from commons-logging.

Simplified UI Tags in Struts 2

Struts 2.0.3 contains a much needed simplification of its UI tag libraries. Before 2.0.3, you had to define a property three times (in the value, label and name attributes):

<s:textfield label="%{getText('user.firstName')}" name="user.firstName" 
    value="%{user.firstName}" cssClass="text medium"/>

In 2.0.3+, you can use the "key" attribute to replace all these attributes. For example:

<s:textfield key="user.firstName" cssClass="text medium"/>

One of the things I really like about WebWork/Struts 2 is the previous examples have the ability to write out the entire form row, rather than just an input field. Even better, the markup rendered is customizable via FreeMarker templates.

The bad news is Struts 2.0.3 never got released because the struts-annotations project hasn't had a release yet (good ol' Mavenism). The good news is Struts 2.0.4 is rumored to be out by the end of the month. In the meantime, if you're using Maven 2, you can use AppFuse's repository to get the goods. Here's the repo settings you're need:

<repositories>
    <repository>
        <id>appfuse</id>
        <name>AppFuse Repository</name>
        <url>http://static.appfuse.org/repository</url>
    </repository>
    <repository>
        <id>struts-203-staging</id>
        <name>Apache Struts 2.0.3 Staging Repository</name>
        <url>http://people.apache.org/builds/struts/2.0.3/m2-staging-repository</url>
    </repository>
</repositories>

Yeah, I could just advise you to use AppFuse 2.0 - but we're having a hard enough time supporting our existing users.

The Adventure is Over

After 1 year and 7 months, the big adventure is over. It was a great ride with lots of really cool people. As of Tuesday, operations at Virtuas have ceased to exist and everyone was let go. It's not a big surprise - most of us knew it was coming. I won't go into the details of why it was shutdown because I don't think it's that important. Suffice to say, it was a great job and I really enjoyed working with the folks I did.

So what does this mean for me? What's next?

I hope to go back to doing independent consulting like I was before Virtuas. When I was doing my own thing, I never had to travel, earned good rates and enjoyed 40-hour work weeks. That sounds pretty nice after the once-a-month traveling I was doing.

What does this mean for AppFuse 2.0? I hope the release schedule won't change, but it might. I was hoping to get a fair bit done this week, but it's been nuts with the shutting down festivities and the "moving out" drama. With any luck, I'll get a gig soon and I can concentrate on AppFuse development (and relaxing) until my start date.

If you're looking to hire an enthusiastic Web + Java Developer, please take a look at my resume or send me an e-mail.

AppFuse 2.0 Status

We're working hard on AppFuse 2.0. The good news is things are coming along really nicely. There's quite a few developers working on the project now and they've been a tremendous help. If I knew the move to Maven 2 would've inspired so much help, I would've done it a long time ago! We've got most of the archetypes created and we just need to work on documentation for the 2.0 release M1 release. As far as the roadmap is concerned, we've finished most of the code for an M2 release, but we still need to do documentation. I'm hoping to release 2.0 M1 on Thursday of next week.

If you want to try it, you can checkout the Hello World with AppFuse 2.0 video. After that, feel free to take it for a test drive using the QuickStart Guide.

New features in AppFuse 2.0:

• 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 with Cargo and profiles

Speaking of goodies, I uploaded a bunch of AppFuse desktop backgrounds to Flickr. Thanks to Max Hays of Timberline Group for creating these.

Only 26 days left until the AppFuse 2.0 Release Party! Location TBD.

Bamboo

After reading Tim's post about Bamboo yesterday, I downloaded and tried it out. I'm very impressed, as I usually am with Atlassian products. As a first impression, I think it's better than all the open source products, but not quite as good as Pulse. Bamboo has a nice UI, but Pulse has a lot more Ajax goodies that make it more usable (IMHO of course).

P.S. I think it's ironic that both Pulse and Bamboo build AppFuse 2.0 (Maven 2-based) just fine, but Continuum hasn't had a successful build yet.

SiteMesh 2.3?

Did you know the SiteMesh folks released version 2.3 back in October? Here's proof. Unfortunately, there's no release notes and the release hasn't been uploaded to Maven's repository. There are release notes in JIRA, but not all of them seemed to be fixed. What's up with that? Did you guys forget how to manage a project?

[TSE] Hop into Real Object Oriented (ROO) with Ben Alex

This session's goals are to:

• To detail the "ROO" DDD architecture
• To show you how productive ROO can be
• To profile an Australian project using ROO

ROO is more of an implementation than an architecture. So what is ROO? It's not an Australian marsupial or an Australian airline. It's a Domain-Driven Design (DDD) implementation.

Real Object Oriented (ROO) is both an architectural approach and a framework with code generation.[Read More]

[TSE] The Holy Grails of Web Frameworks with Guillaume LaForge

Under the hood, Grails uses Spring MVC. It has support for "flash scope" between requests.

I find it funny that flash scope is so popular these days, we've had this in AppFuse for four years. However, web frameworks didn't add native support for it until it had a name (provided by Rails). To be fair to Struts Classic, they had support for it before Rails was even invented.

Rather than JSPs, Grails uses Grails Server Pages, which look much like JSPs. Grails uses SiteMesh by default and allows you to easily change the layout used with a meta tag.

<meta name="layout" content="main"/>

Most of the dynamic attributes in a GSP are rendered using the various "g" tags. There's dynamic taglibs for logic (if, else, elseif), iterating, linking, ajax (remoteFunction, remoteLink, formRemote, submitToRemote), form (select, currencySelect, localeSelect, datePicker, checkBox), rendering (render*, layout*, paginate), validation (eachError, hasError, message) and UI (i.e. richtexteditor). [Read More]

Selenium Plugin for Maven

On the Maven users mailing list, Mick Knutson recently posted a question asking if there's a Maven 2 plugin for Selenium. Since we're hoping to move from Canoo WebTest to Selenium for AppFuse, this piqued my interest. It looks like the Geronimo guys have created a plugin and they run their Selenium tests from TestNG. While another user agrees, Wendy Smoak recommends following what Shale does.

While these solutions sound doable, David Santiago Turiño seems to suggest the best solution: Mavenium. The main limitation of Mavenium seems to be it only supports HTML-based tests. Since I expect most AppFuse users to generate their tests using the Selenium IDE, I doubt this will be an issue.

Is anyone using this plugin? If so, do you think it's the best way to integrate Selenium into AppFuse? We'd like to implement the most popular and easiest to use mechanism.