Raible Designs

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.

WebWork Books

What is it about WebWork that makes it so hard to write books about? I remember talking to Kris Thompson (a.k.a. the guy that quit blogging) last summer about WebWork in Action. At that time, it was "almost done". Over a year later and it's still "due out next month" (or is it done?). Almost as bad is Matthew Porter's WebWork Live, which was started late last year. I remember Matthew saying he expected to finish the initial version in March - and there's still not an ERP almost 10 months later.

Here's my guess: the Manning book has been done for months, but the publishing process takes months. As for Porter, my guess is he's too busy providing outstanding support at Contegix to work on the book. Any good conspiracy theories out there? Maybe WebWork has too many patterns that need to be documented?

Using Acegi Security for Remember Me and SSL Switching

I spent some time yesterday converting AppFuse's homegrown Remember Me and SSL Switching system to using Acegi Security. Thanks to Justin Spears, who provided the original motivation. It was much easier than I thought it would be, and resulted in the deleting of 7 classes in AppFuse. Not only that, but only one of them had a test for it, so the test coverage has naturally gone up as well. I'll trade 40 lines of XML for 1214 lines of Java any day - especially when I can get the support of an open-source framework.

If you're interested in using this code over 1.8.2, you can checkout the latest code from CVS (or download it from http://appfuse.org/nightly). The only other change currently in CVS is changing from "tomcat" to "user" as the default User role. Below is a list of classes that were removed as part of this move to Acegi:

• src/dao/org/appfuse/model/UserCookie.java
• src/service/org/appfuse/util/RandomGUID.java
• src/web/org/appfuse/webapp/action/LoginServlet.java
• src/web/org/appfuse/webapp/filter/LoginFilter.java
• src/web/org/appfuse/webapp/taglib/SecureTag.java
• src/web/org/appfuse/webapp/util/SslUtil.java
• test/web/org/appfuse/webapp/action/LoginServletTest.java

I should also mention that I owe a big thanks to Virtuas - who pays me to work on AppFuse these days.

Using CruiseControl with Subversion

This morning, I had the pleasure of setting up an AppFuse-based project to run under CruiseControl. Normally, this is very easy to do because I have the CruiseControl setup files and instructions. However, this project uses Subversion instead of CVS. Luckily, Subversion is easy to use and I was able to modify things to work quite easily. Below are the steps you can take to modify your AppFuse project to run under CruiseControl and Subversion.

• Download svant and extract it to your work directory.
• In build.xml, change your "cvs" target to "svn" and change the tasks appropriately.
  
  

      <path id="svn.classpath">
          <fileset dir="svnant-1.0.0-rc1/lib" includes="*.jar"/>
      </path>
          
      <taskdef resource="svntask.properties" classpathref="svn.classpath"/>
      
      <target name="svn">
          <delete dir="checkout/appfuse"/>
          <svn>
              <checkout url="https://svn.java.net/svn/appfuse/trunk" 
                  revision="HEAD" destPath="checkout/appfuse" />
          </svn>
      </target>
  

• Modify the "test" target in build.xml to depend on "svn".
• In config.xml, change the <modificationset> to be <svn LocalWorkingCopy="/home/cc/work/checkout/appfuse"/> instead of the <cvs> equivalent.

The instructions have been documented on the wiki and checked into AppFuse's CVS.

Integrating Lucene with Hibernate

The code_poet has an interesting post on using a Hibernate interceptor to index objects for Lucene searching. I've been thinking about integrating Lucene into AppFuse (or at least providing a tutorial) for quite some time. Hopefully this post will serve as a starting point when I do. I wonder how much the Lucene code can be simplified by the Spring support in the Spring Modules project?

First Magazine Article: Challenges in the J2EE Web Tier

It's official - I've written (and published) my first article in a magazine. If you received the July issue of Java Developer's Journal, you'll see my article titled Challenges in the J2EE Web Tier.

Over the course of its life, the J2EE Web Tier has faced many challenges in easing Web application development. While it's a scalable, enterprise-ready platform, it isn't exactly developer-friendly. Particular challenges to Web developers include the need for a standard Web framework, compatible expression languages, and availability of components. Several Web frameworks have been developed to resolve these issues, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. This article discusses the unique challenges of the J2EE Web Tier and how various technologies have attempted resolve them. By learning from and competing with each other, these Web technologies play an important role in pushing the limits of excellence to produce ever-higher standards of Web application development.

Enjoy!

Failed upgrade to Struts 1.2.7

Yesterday I made an attempt to upgrade AppFuse to use Struts 1.2.7 instead of 1.2.4. Everything seemed to go smoothly until I started running my Canoo WebTests with JavaScript enabled. It turns out there's a major bug (IMO) in Struts 1.2.7 where the JavaScript rendered by Commons Validator can't handle the Struts' <form> tag in XHTML mode. I tried a nightly build (20050809), but it's not fixed there either, so I backed out the upgrade.

The interesting thing about Struts 1.2.7 is SpikeSource has certified this release. Are they not testing JavaScript as part of their certification test?

Another thing I attempted to upgrade yesterday was Canoo WebTest from build574 to build976. No dice - mainly because of issues with Prototype (I think). The worst part is everything works fine in a browser. Even worse is I still have a problem with build574, but it doesn't cause the tests to fail. Times like this make me wish Selenium was more polished and ready to use. I talked with some ThoughtWorkers last week and they said the Java driver is ready for a 1.0 release, but one of the committers wanted to make sure all language drivers were ready first (at least that's what I remember).

Things I learned from OSCON

While at OSCON last week, I learned quite a few things. Many of these are my own opinions, so feel free to disagree with them.

Ruby is very cool

The main reason (for me) that Ruby is cool is because it's new. I don't have to know any of its history to know what makes it tick. It's easy to learn and has powerful language features that make it easy to use. I think the primary reason people, particularly Java developers, are excited about it is because it releases them from all the shackles they're accustomed to with Java. I have absolutely no plan to ditching Java and jumping to Ruby, but I do want to learn it so I can use it when it's a better fit than Java.

How to learn Ruby and retain that knowledge is the hard part. My current plan is to buy Programming Ruby and Agile Development with Rails. Unfortunately, I realize that I probably won't be able to finish these b/c I'll get bored and both will likely serve as more of a reference than a knowledge creator. I haven't been able to read a technology book cover-to-cover in several years. I couldn't even finish The Pragmatic Programmer for crying out loud. I realize that the best way to learn is to do, but the best way to do is to get paid to do. To facilitate this, I hope to develop some apps we can use at Virtuas. Of course, I'll try to find good open-source solutions first.

Rails has a lot of great ideas

The interesting thing about Rails is many of its good ideas are from Ruby. The built-in Webbrick web server is part of the language. The only way to come close in the Java world is to embed Jetty or something like that. I'll definitely be looking into embedding Jetty into AppFuse in the near future. The other thing I really like about Rails, and that I've been doing in AppFuse a bit is convention over configuration. As part of AppFuse, I'm already making a lot of decisions for users. The next step seems to be making all decisions for users, but allow them to override. It'd be cool to write some code that sweeps through all classes at startup and auto-configures them, w/o the need for any XML. If nothing else, the XML could be generated using reflection.

The biggest thing I learned from Rails is I need to provide 1) an easier upgrade path and 2) better Ajax support. Because I'm supporting so many different web frameworks, solving #2 might be a bit tricky - but could be done by writing tag libraries or components. Hopefully the framework developers will beat me to it and I won't have to do anything. As far as #1, I'm hoping I can move to a single appfuse.jar that contains all the base classes. Hopefully I can use a little JSP pre-compile action to re-use the existing JSPs for user management/etc. If not, I can always use something like FreeMarker to store the default view files in a JAR.

Creating Passionate Users is all about inspiring emotion

Kathy Sierra's talk about inspiring emotions among your users to make them transparently excited about your product/company was a real eye-opener. I can totally see what she's talking about and I'm happy to say I'm already doing some of it. This blog seems to attract lots of readers, some more passionate than others, just by talking about web technologies and Java. This does translate into more business for Raible Designs, whether it's the title image or URL, it doesn't really matter. Folks do figure out that I have a company and I do work with the technologies I talk about.

To apply these concepts to AppFuse and Virtuas is a little more difficult. For AppFuse, I can probably teach people how to better use Hibernate, Spring and Ajax - and then show how AppFuse can simplify things. Building in easy-to-use Ajax support is probably essential to really get this going. For Virtuas, we could re-vamp our site to provide education about open source and its history - providing users with a way to become open source experts. It would also be cool to do real-time reporting of how we helped a company adopt open-source.

Ideas, ideas, I have lots of ideas after last week.

[OSCON] Spring MVC vs. WebWork Smackdown

Matthew Porter and I's Spring MVC vs. WebWork Smackdown presentation was a lot of fun this morning. We had a boxing bell (that I got off eBay) and had a good time ragging on the two frameworks. The only surprise was that Matthew actually ran some metrics on the Spring MVC vs. WebWork code in AppFuse and pointed out that the WebWork version required 25% less code than the Spring version. Oh well. The hard part about this presentation for me was trying to defend Spring MVC and saying it's better than WebWork. Matthew obviously felt strongly that WebWork was the better framework, whereas I like them both.

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.