Raible Designs

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.

J3Unit

Over the weekend, I learned about J3Unit - a new object oriented JavaScript testing framework.

J3Unit is an object-oriented unit testing framework for JavaScript. J3Unit runs JavaScript tests directly in the web browser and can be automated using JUnit and Jetty. J3Unit builds on previous work by JSUnit and Script.aculo.us to provide a better way to automate JavaScript unit tests. Object-oriented JavaScript unit tests are written using the Script.aculo.us Test.Unit.Runner object, which is in turn built upon the prototype JavaScript library.

J3Unit has 3 modes of operation: Static Mode, Local Browser Mode, and Remote Browser Mode

To me, this looks similar to Selenium. I'd definitely like to explore using this package or Selenium in AppFuse.

Currently, AppFuse uses Canoo WebTest, which is based on HtmlUnit. The current version of HtmlUnit doesn't support Prototype, or any libraries that depend on it. The good news is "This will be quite simple to fix".

Vongo

It's not everyday that the project you've been working on gets announced all over the news (even locally!).

It's been a fun project to work on - with some pretty cool technology powering it all.

Use Ant to auto-build your AppFuse project in Eclipse

One of the issues that AppFuse has is it's not that IDE-friendly. When I first started creating AppFuse (December 2002), Eclipse had already been released. However, I only used it as a fancy text editor, and didn't structure AppFuse to be Eclipse-friendly. Most of the unfriendliness is caused by XDoclet, but there's a way to fix that. Rather than using the default "Java Builder" to auto-build your Eclipse project, you can use Ant. Below is a set of instructions that show how to configure Eclipse 3.1 to use Ant as the builder for an AppFuse project.

Step 1: Right-click on your project and go to Properties. Select the Builder menu on the left and click the "New" button.

Step 2: Select "Ant Build" in the Configuration Type dialog.

Step 3: In the Properties window, select the appropriate locations for Buildfile and Base Directory (in the Main tab). In the Targets tab, set everything to the default target. Finally, in the Classpath tag set Ant Home to where you have Ant installed.

Personally, I haven't used this setup to work on an AppFuse project yet, but it seems quite useful. Hat tip to Erik Weibust to showing me how to do this while at The Spring Experience.

The future of the DisplayTag Library

From the displaytag-devel mailing list:

I am sorry if I am asking a stupid question but is there any activity going on in the project? There are no new releases for almost a year... Neither are there any news on the project page. In our project we have modified the 1.0 version a bit and would like to share these changes with the community.

Fabrizio's response:

See http://displaytag.sourceforge.net now

the website was frozen to the last 1.0 release, also due an extensive refactoring to the build/documentation system (migration to maven 2, splitting of optional modules and examples, ...) but activity on the project never stopped.

1.1 is now near, and I switched the default homepage to the 1.1 documentation. Warning: it's not released yet, but nightly builds are up.

The biggest feature of 1.1 has to be the ability to do external sorting and paging.

If you're looking for Ajax support in the displaytag, look no further than AjaxTags. I haven't been able to get ajax:displayTag working in my projects because I'm using a newer version of Prototype. However, it looks like the next version of AjaxTags supports the latest version of Prototype.

In addition to AjaxTags, you can also use AjaxAnywhere. Here's the code you'll need to do that (after adding AjaxAnywhere to your project):

<aa:zone name="userTable">

<display:table name="users" class="list" requestURI="" id="userList" export="true" 
    excludedParams="*" pagesize="5" sort="list">
    <display:column property="id" sort="true" href="editUser.html"
        paramId="id" paramProperty="id" titleKey="user.id"/>
    <display:column property="firstName" sort="true" titleKey="user.firstName"/>
    <display:column property="lastName" sort="true" titleKey="user.lastName"/>
    <display:column titleKey="user.birthday" sort="true" sortProperty="birthday">
        <fmt:formatDate value="${userList.birthday}" pattern="${datePattern}"/>
    </display:column>
</display:table>

</aa:zone>

<script type="text/javascript">
    ajaxAnywhere.getZonesToReaload = function() { return "userTable" }
    ajaxAnywhere.onAfterResponseProcessing = function() { replaceLinks() }
    function replaceLinks() {
        // replace all the links in <thead> with onclick's that call AjaxAnywhere
        var sortLinks = $('userList').getElementsByTagName('thead')[0]
                                     .getElementsByTagName('a');
        ajaxifyLinks(sortLinks);
        if (document.getElementsByClassName('pagelinks').length > 0) {
            var pagelinks = document.getElementsByClassName('pagelinks')[0]
                                    .getElementsByTagName('a');
            ajaxifyLinks(pagelinks);
        }
    }
    function ajaxifyLinks(links) {
        for (i=0; i < links.length; i++) {
            links[i].onclick = function() {
                ajaxAnywhere.getAJAX(this.href); 
                return false;
            }
        }
    }
    replaceLinks();
</script>

Libraries used in above code: AjaxAnywhere 1.0.2, DisplayTag 1.0 and Prototype 1.4.0_pre4. You can also see a demo online or download the code.

[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.

New AppFuse Documentation: Axis, Handling Complex POJOs and Korean Translation

A few AppFuse enthusiasts have been hard at work, writing new documentation and tutorials. First of all, Mika Göckel has written a HowTo implement Axis tutorial - complete with an installation package! I tried it out last night, and it works quite well with AppFuse 1.8.2. If you're using a build from CVS, you'll need to make some modifications because web.xml is no longer generated. Hopefully we can fix that and get this "extras" package into CVS this week.

The 2nd tutorial is titled Handling complex objects with XDoclet, Hibernate and Struts. This one is written by the AppFuse committer Thomas Gaudin. Thomas has now written 5 tutorials, all of which include source code and step-by-step instructions.

Last, but certainly not least, DongGuk Lee has translated a large amount of AppFuse's documentation to Korean. I'm amazed that the QuickStart Guide and Tutorials have now been translated to 6 Languages!

Thanks for the contributions everyone - you guys rock!

Remotely debug your app in Eclipse

Levent Gurses has a nice blog entry on Remote Debugging with Eclipse. I was able to use his instructions a couple months ago to attach to a remote instance of WebLogic (8.1 SP4) to debug an application. The beauty of his instructions is I had it all working in about 5 minutes. Yesterday I realized you could use the settings in *any* application server, and remotely debug it - or at least you should be able to. Today I noticed he added instructions for Tomcat and JBoss. Good stuff - thanks Levent!

Here's the settings you need in your startup script - just in case Levent's blog is down the next time I need this info.

-Xdebug -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=n,address=1044

Equinox: the name conflicts with an Eclipse project

I just received the following e-mail from an anonymous user via my contact page.

You might have already heard, but the Eclipse guys have started a new 
project also called Equinox, which is their implementation of the OSGi 
framework (which is my first choice for building modular enterprise apps 
these days).

http://www.eclipse.org/equinox

Not sure who had the name first, but I can see this getting more 
confusing as both products continue to gain mindshare and blog coverage.

First of all, I am aware of this thanks to Euxx. I don't know which project started first, but Google still seems to prefer mine over Eclipse's. Eclipse's Equinox project is #46 when searching for equinox, while mine is up to #9.

If I could think of a better name, I'd change. However, being #9 on Google makes it pretty tempting to keep the "Equinox" name.