Raible Designs

[ANN] AppFuse 1.8 Released!

This release of AppFuse replaces Container Managed Authentication (CMA) with Acegi Security. Other major features include numerous bug fixes to AppGen and a refactoring of build.xml to use Ant 1.6 features. Eclipse and IDEA project files were also improved so you can easily run tests from within your IDE. A MyJavaPack all-in-one installer was also added so you can download everything you need for AppFuse at once. Eclipse and its plugins were not included in the initial release, but may be in a future release.

• Download
• Release Notes
• Learn more about AppFuse

If you find any issues, let us know.

Update: You can now see Demos and Videos.

Using DWR with Spring and Hibernate

For the past few weeks, I've been developing an application using Struts, Spring, Hibernate and the DWR project for my XmlHttpRequest framework. As you might remember, I used JSON-RPC for Ajax stuff on my last project. I found DWR to be much more full-featured and easier to use. This post is meant to capture some issues I encountered so others won't have to jump the hurdles that I did. For those of you that get bored quickly, here's a movie (QuickTime) of the app's Ajax features.

I've been using version 0.4 of DWR, and I haven't had a chance to try out version 0.5. When I first started using it, I ran into a ThreadDeath problem that was easily resolved by changing a log.debug message to System.out.println. I tried to reproduce this issue yesterday and couldn't, so who knows what that was all about. As far as configuring DWR in your webapp, that's pretty easy to do, and well documented. See the project's documentation or this Spring MVC HowTo.

Here are a few things I remember from my development experience.

• The examples are great, especially how to dynamically edit a table.
• When developing, make sure to set the "debug" init-param to "true". This allows you to go to http://location:8080/yourapp/dwr and see a screen that allows you to call methods on your exposed classes.
• In WEB-INF/dwr.xml, you need to specify a converter for each POJO you want to expose to your UI via JavaScript. I started out by converting a whole package, but found this to be *extremely* slow (we have a package of around 50 DTOs). So I changed it to be only the DTOs I was using. This turned out to take about 30 seconds to do the conversion, and was again unacceptable. The problem turned out to be that the converter was invoking all the lazy-loaded children for each DTO. My final solution was to create a NameValue object and only convert that. Then in my Spring bean, I populate it from DAOs and DTOs. I'm using Spring's OSIVF for Hibernate to ensure that DWR doesn't invoke lazy-loading.
• I had to override a few of DWR's JavaScript functions in util.js b/c they didn't work for me. I changed showById() and toggleDisplay() to use style.display='' instead of style.display='block' b/c this is what I've always used and block doesn't work that well. I also changed useLoadingMessage() to have a cleaner-looking load message.
• I used the Fade Anything Technique in this project and found that IE likes to have full 6-digit hex values for colors in CSS rules. The shorter 3-digit hex values simply don't work in IE.
• Using "test" buttons that only showed up for my username proved to be a great way to test the UI and the Ajax stuff. These buttons called a number of JavaScript functions to drive the UI and wait between invoking different functions using window.setTimeout.

All in all, using DWR was a great experience and I definitely plan to use it more in my projects. The client loves the app - especially since it's wicked fast and seems to work like a desktop app.

Java2Html Plugin for JSPWiki causes downtime

There's an annoying thing that currently happens with the Java code on my wiki: selecting code to copy doesn't work in Firefox (try it). Any easy workaround is to use IE. However, I found a solution yesterday after communicating with the author of the Java2HtmlPlugin for JSPWiki. His solution was to upgrade to the latest version (4.1) of the library. I did the upgrade yesterday morning, tweaked a couple of stylesheets and called it good. The copying was working and everything seemed to be fixed.

In the last 24 hours, this site has crashed around 8 times - seemingly every two hours. This is strange b/c it's been up a week at a time prior to that, as well as the fact that my ISP has scripts to restart Tomcat if it's not responsive. The only thing I changed was the java2html.jar, so I'm guessing that was the problem. I backed out the change this morning - and copying with Firefox is going to suck once again. Hopefully that change fixes the stability of this site.

Update: This site crashed 3 times today even after I backed out yesterday's change. It must be something else. It's wierd that it's crashing now after having several weeks of excellent stability.

BabyBash - kids love it!

A few months ago, I saw Toby Reyelts' post about a game he wrote called BabyBash. I downloaded it when I first saw it and let Abbie play it. She loved it immediately, and would ask me to play it whenever she saw I was "working" on the computer. Of course, she'd say "Daddy - no working" first, and then say "play Abbie's game?".

Then I lost the link for a couple of months and this conversation turned very sour. A couple of weeks ago, I found the link and vowed to never let it go again. This morning, I gave Jack a run at the game (he's almost 8 months now) and he loved it too! It probably doesn't hurt that they're playing it on a 23" display.

If you've have small children, you should really let them try this game. Thanks Toby - you rock!

JSF needs better tools

In general, I don't like the fact that JSF is designed for tools vendors. However, after seeing a Visual Studio .NET 2005 demo - I can understand why that's Sun's motivation. Visual Studio is *very* cool and seems to greatly simplify ASP.NET development. That's why it's disturbing to see Why do JSF tools suck so bad?.

If the JSF Tools are going to suck (compared to Visual Studio), why don't we just make it more developer-friendly (instead of being so tools-friendly)? Of course, the better solution is to make the tools better, but that doesn't seem to be happening. Maybe we should just try to get Visual Studio to support JSF.

At the MySQL Conference in San Jose

I arrived in San Jose at 10:00 this morning to give a 3-hour tutorial on developing test-driven webapps with Spring and Hibernate [download PDF]. This was just a fancy name for developing webapps with AppFuse, but the session seemed to go over pretty well nevertheless. In the first half of the class, there were a couple of sleepers, but I cranked down the A/C for the second half and everyone stayed awake (although some were shivering). I never thought I could ramble on for 3-hours, but it wasn't that hard. I did end up doing mini-presentations on Spring and Comparing Web Frameworks, but all in all, I think it went pretty well. Very few people in the room had heard of any of the Java web frameworks, and only 6 were familiar with Spring and Hibernate. It was a tough crowd, but AppGen's code generation (hopefully) showed it's easy to create CRUD-based webapps with AppFuse. Note to self: make a video of that.

I have a free pass to the MySQL Conference, but I doubt I'll attend many sessions. I have a lot on my plate for AppFuse 1.8, Acegi integration into Roller, and some updates for Spring Live. It should be a good week, hopefully I'll get a lot done. This weekend should be awesome - Julie shows up on Friday for our 5-year anniversary party.

The best part of the conference so far? Talking shop over beers with the locals (crew from c|net and AppFuse user Phil Hershkowitz).

Why Wicket looks cool

I like the looks of Wicket for a couple of reasons - without even using the framework yet.

• Its project homepage looks good. If you're using a Java web framework, chances are you're developing UIs too. If you don't know how to make sites look good - it's time to find a new line of work IMO. Of course, learning how to make good-looking UIs is another option.
• Its Wicket Stuff project. It provides Hibernate, fValidate and Spring integration. It also appears to provide an option to use Velocity for your templates. I'm not sure what the Velocity integration provides - since HTML templates (ala Tapestry) should do everything that's needed.

What I don't like about the project:

• The Buzz page has a quote that's (apparently) from this site. Unfortunately, it looks like I said it - which I didn't.
• There's no books being written about it. If it's really that good - where's the books? Ruby on Rails will have 3 by the end of this year. Any good framework should inspire books to be written about it.
• The Wicket Stuff project has no documentation. Javadocs don't cut it. Tutorials are king.

I hope this project succeeds - Tapestry needs some competition and I don't think JSF is providing it. If JSF adds HTML Templates (or I figure out how to use Java Studio Creator to manage an AppFuse+JSF project), that's a different story.

Using Ivy in AppFuse

I'll admit, the thought of not checking in JARs to AppFuse's CVS is intriguing. With Ivy, I think I could pull off the current setup, plus a dynamic-downloading system. By current setup, I mean that the JARs are distributed in your "lib" directory and you can build your app w/o downloading any dependencies. I like this because I can develop AppFuse and not worry about my internet connection.

Dion doesn't get my love for checking in JARs. The main reason I do it is because it takes me a less time to download a new release and check it into CVS than it takes me to find that same release in Maven's Repo. Case in point: Hibernate 3.

I love the idea of Ivy, and mockhaug makes it sounds great, but I don't want to have to create a bunch of metadata whenever I want to use something like Hibernate 3. Then again, if Ivy is ever going to catch on, someone has to do it.

In conclusion, I'm still not convinced I should integrate Ivy into AppFuse - sounds like maintaining and uploading dependencies would be a lot more work than just checking in JARs. If there was a person responsible for creating Ivy metadata every time a new release came out, I might think different.

Closures with CollectionUtils

Here's a pretty nifty trick for using closure's with Jakarta Commons CollectionUtils:

I wonder if there's any performance hit from doing things this way vs. a good ol' Iterator? Hat tip to Anand Subramanian.

More Tapestry+Ajax Components

Tacos is "library of useful Tapestry components", created by Viktor Szathmary. Today, he published a new release with support for Partial Page Rendering and Partial Forms. I especially like that Viktor incorporates the Fade Anything Technique as part of the components. Even better, these components work fine with JavaScript turned off. Well done Viktor! Too bad I can't use Tapestry at my day job.