Raible Designs

San Francisco - here I come!

I'm sitting in Denver's aiport, getting ready to jump on a plane and head to San Francisco for the Ajax Experience. Like most No Fluff shows, this one has 2-3 sessions I'd like to see during each time block. My primary goals are 1) to learn a lot 2) to blog about each session I attend, and 3) to get a good sense of what each Ajax framework does well. Hopefully there will be lots of demos I can link to.

On Friday night, a few AppFuse enthusiasts and I are getting together at the Thirsty Bear. If you'd like to join us, leave a comment and show up around 8:00.

AppFuse plans for the week

Like most Java open source projects, I hope to release a new version of AppFuse this week before JavaOne. There's a couple reasons for this: 1) so I have the latest and greatest to demo during talks and 2) so the article I'm writing is up-to-date. Unfortunately, with both AppFuse and Equinox it's a bit difficult to make sure I'm using the latest and greatest for everything. This is because they're both very thin layers on top of their underlying dependencies.

I'm willing to bet that a few of these dependencies will have new releases this week, as developers scramble to get a bunch of stuff done before JavaOne. Here's my release predictions for this week:

• Acegi Security 1.0
• DWR 2.0
• Hibernate 3.2
• Spring 2.0

My current plan is to fix outstanding issues for 1.9.2 and then hold off to do the release until this weekend. Hopefully that gives each project enough time to pump out a release. If you happen to be involved with any of the projects that AppFuse depends on - and you're not planning on releasing before JavaOne, please let me know.

The 1.9.2 release of AppFuse will (hopefully) be the last one in the 1.x series. Work on 2.0 will begin towards the end of this month. See the roadmap for the cool stuff coming in 2.0.

As far as the CSS Design Contest, I'll announce the winners tomorrow. I also plan to fix this site in IE tonight and take another stab at making the header images and colors easier on the eyes.

Integrating Google Maps, Mule and ActiveMQ with AppFuse

Stephen Pasco has written a nice tutorial on how to integrate Google Maps, Mule and ActiveMQ with AppFuse.

Here's the scenario: Upon opening a Google map client, within a web browser, the user clicks on the map creating points (Figure 1). With each point created, a message is immediately sent to the ESB containing the point's longitude and latitude. A second, remote client instantly receives the sent longitude and latitude coordinates and displays them on a separate Google map (Figure 2). [Read More »]

Good stuff - thanks for the writeup Stephen!

Heading to the Big Apple

May is shaping up to be quite the travel month. Next week I'm heading to New York City to put on a 5-day seminar for a client. Topics include: Web Frameworks, JSF, Ajax, Spring, Spring Web Flow, Hibernate, Caching and Performance, Deploying to Production, Comparing CMS Applications, eCommerce in Web Applications, Sharing with RSS and Atom, Acegi Security, Storing User Preferences, Source Control with Subversion and Coding Standards/Project Management. Yeah, a whole slew of stuff. There's nothing like doing a customized seminar when the client gets to pick whatever topics they like.

The only things I'm a little light on are Comparing CMS Applications, eCommerce and Storing User Preferences. For Comparing CMS Applications, I'm going to talk about Alfresco, Drupal, Joomla, Magnolia, OpenCMS and Plone. I'll be talking about ease of installation, ease of use, community and support, extensibility and performance. One thing I plan to do is zing CMS providers about eating their own dogood. As far as I can tell, neither Alfresco nor Magnolia use their own CMS for their websites. Of course, they might not be developing a "CMS for the web", but that's what most folks tend to use CMS's for IMO. It should be interesting to see if the Java solutions have decreased their installation times. Drupal, Joomla and Plone all took under a minute to install (on OS X) the last time I tried. If you happen to work on one of these applications and want to point out a kick-ass site developed with your software, please leave a comment.

As far as eCommerce solutions, most of the applications I've worked on recently just hook in with PayPal. This seems like the best solution because you eliminate the headache of credit card processing and in-house security/fraud preventation. If you've recently developed an e-commerce enabled application, what solution did you use? Did it work well for you? I'm also interested in solutions that were utter failures or a pain in the ass to use.

Lastly, as far as storing user preferences - I can only think of 3 ways to do it: cookies, database tables, and using the Java Preferences API. I'm sure I'm missing something. What solutions have worked well for you?

After returning from NYC, I'll be in Denver for 5 days before flying out to San Francisco for The Ajax Experience and JavaOne. In the midst of all the travel, I hope to finish up the CSS Design Contest, release Equinox 1.7/AppFuse 1.9.2 and do some performance tests with the T2000.

Shale Remoting Library

Ed Burns on JSF AJAX Components:

These components leverage the Dojo Toolkit and make use of the JSF PhaseListener approach for serving up JavaScript files and handling AJAX requests on the JSF server. This approach was innovated by the Blueprints and JSF teams and generalized in the Shale Remoting library, which these components leverage to great effect.

Click on the Shale Remoting link to see the good stuff.

How do you determine a good MaxPermSize?

I know I'll probably get beat up for not knowing my JVM Turning parameters. I admit that I should know them better than I do. Hopefully this post will help us all understand them a bit better.

Ever since I upgraded appfuse.org to AppFuse 1.9.1, it's been experiencing OOM issues. They've been so bad that the site is lucky if it stays up for more than an hour. I've done a fair amount of performance testing on a single AppFuse application (and gotten very good numbers), so I was pretty puzzled by the whole situation.

To reproduce the problem, I downloaded all 5 demos to my machine and began profiling with JProfiler. Nothing stood out, but I was able to reproduce the problem by clicking through all the different applications. While testing, I had my JAVA_OPTS set to -Xms256M -Xmx384M.

After staring at JProfiler for hours, I gave up and sent my findings to the AppFuse mailing list. After going back and forth with several ideas, Sanjiv came up with the winner.

Did you try increasing the max perm size (-XX:MaxPermSize=256m)? Max Perm size is running out of memory and not necessarily the main memory. Class metadata stuff is placed in the perm memory (google for more details) and since we're using Spring, Hibernate and Tapestry which all use a lot of reflection, proxying etc, it's not surprising that max perm size is running out of memory.

Based on his advice, I added -XX:MaxPermSize=256m to my JAVA_OPTS, fired up JProfiler/Tomcat and began hammering my local instance with WAPT. 15 minutes later, with 20 simultaneous users, the heap and memory were humming along nicely with no issues. I made the change on appfuse.org and it's been up every since.

This experience has motivated me to start adding "-XX:MaxPermSize=256m" to all my JAVA_OPTS. Is this a good idea? If so, is 256m a good value to use? If not, what's the best way to determine (or guess) the proper value for this setting?

[ANN] AppFuse 1.9.1 Released

This release includes improvements and upgrades to Tapestry 4.0.1, WebWork 2.2.2, as well as support for using AppGen to reverse engineer database tables (using Middlegen). iBATIS is now supported by AppGen and a Create DAO tutorial has been put together for iBATIS. iBATIS and Middlegen support were provided by Bobby Diaz - thanks Bobby! Also, a big thanks goes to Mika Göckel for writing an XFire Tutorial and installer. 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
• Learn more about AppFuse

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

• Demo of Features in Flash (needs to be updated, things are much easier now)
• 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.

What happened to Middlegen?

In AppGen (AppFuse's code generator), I recently integrated support for generating CRUD code (and tests!) from database tables thanks to APF-95 from Bobby Diaz. Previously, it was only possible to generate code from POJOs, but now both are supported. The "mapping files from tables" is done using Middlegen.

Unfortunately, Middlegen seems to be a dead project, especially since its main web site is missing (fixed!). I'd love to use another project that generates XDoclet tags in hbm.xml files, but I don't believe there is one. AFAIK, the Hibernate Tools project does not support XDoclet with its tools. Anyone know where the Middlegen documentation is located? All the documentation used to be on their site.

The good news is the solution I have works, and it works well. However, I definitely look forward to re-writing AppGen. XDoclet as a templating language sucks, and reading XDoclet tags to determine how to generate the UI seems pretty hackish. Hopefully we can use APT and FreeMarker (or Velocity) to process annotations and spit out code in a future release.

Update: The Middlegen website was lost, due some heavy server upgrades. The problem has been fixed and it's back up and running. Now I don't feel so bad about using Middlegen since the project appears to be alive and well.

Done with AppFuse, moving to Ruby on Rails

For the last few weeks, I've been building an application with Ruby on Rails. While I enjoy its simplicity and the ability to get things done quickly, the thing I really like is there's a whole team of developers supporting this framework. If I develop an application with AppFuse, chances are I'll find a bug or two, and then I'll have to spend additional time that night fixing it. Furthermore, I'm beginning to loath the compile/deploy cycle that AppFuse requires you to do.

As a result of my experience with Rails, and my decision to use it for all future web development, it makes no sense for me to keep maintaining AppFuse. Virtuas has decided to start a Rails Practice and I'm going to be the Practice Leader for it. In addition, I'll be writing a "Rails Live" book for SourceBeat. Hopefully we'll have an ERP out for that by the end of this summer.

If you live near Denver, have a lot of experience with Spring, and are interested in becoming the Spring Practice Leader for Virtuas, please let me know.

Tapestry 4.0 support in AppFuse's CVS

I spent the last couple of days upgrading AppFuse from Tapestry 3.0.3 to Tapestry 4.0.1. While the integration isn't as clean as I'd like it to be, everything works and all tests pass, so that's good. I did post a few remaining issues to the Tapestry mailing list, but there's nothing major. While the upgrade was frustrating (it took me 4 hours to figure out I needed "validators" instead of "validator"), I feel I know a fair bit more about Tapestry now. Furthermore, my experience on the Tapestry user mailing list was incredible. Yesterday, for every question I'd send, I'd get 2-3 replies in a matter of minutes. It was like having my own personal Tapestry consultant by my side. It goes to show that Tapestry is a thriving community, with a lot of folks willing to help out. Thanks guys - I really appreciate the help.

Update: You can view the FishEye Changelog to see what the upgrade entailed.