Raible Designs

Can you test all of AppFuse?

I'll admit, it's time for me to get a G5. I can no longer test everything in AppFuse in one fell swoop. When I try to run this Ant build file (which I'd like to use with CruiseControl) on my Mac and Linux machines, I get OutOfMemory errors. My PowerBook has ANT_OPTS set to "-Xmx768m" and my Fedora Core 3 box has it set to "-Xms1024M -Xmx1024M". Both machines have 1 GB of RAM. The build dies a lot sooner on Linux (15 minutes), and the PowerBook gets really close to finishing (42 minutes). I'm guessing all the tests would take about 50 minutes on the PowerBook. There are currently 21 AppFuse combinations tested by this script. Spring is used in all of these, so I've eliminated that as a listed option.

NOTE: If you're trying this on Windows, remove the "fixcrlf" call at the beginning of the "test" target.

1. Struts + Hibernate
2. Struts + Hibernate and iBATIS
3. Struts + iBATIS
4. Struts with AppGen - Generic
5. Struts with AppGen - Detailed
6. Spring MVC + Hibernate
7. Spring MVC + iBATIS
8. Spring MVC with AppGen - Generic
9. Spring MVC with AppGen - Detailed
10. WebWork + Hibernate
11. WebWork + iBATIS
12. WebWork with AppGen - Generic
13. WebWork with AppGen - Detailed
14. JSF + Hibernate
15. JSF + iBATIS
16. JSF with AppGen - Generic
17. JSF with AppGen - Detailed
18. Tapestry + Hibernate
19. Tapestry + iBATIS
20. Tapestry with AppGen - Generic
21. Tapestry with AppGen - Detailed

So, the question is - can your machine run all the tests for AppFuse? If so, let me know your specs. I'd love to get this setup for CruiseControl, but if I can't even run it with Ant, I doubt CruiseControl will be any better. I realize I could split things up, but I prefer to have one build file.

Pick the web framework you think is cool

Ever since I started adding additional web frameworks into AppFuse, people have asked me "which framework should I use?" I've often told them "use what you know." If you have in-house knowledge of Struts, use it. I thought this was good advice because I believed that existing knowledge leads to greater productivity.

Lately, I've started to change my philosophy. I'm starting to think it's more important to use the web framework you're passionate about. The one you want to learn more about. After reading Kathy Sierra's "Does it really matter if your tool is cool?", it seems this is a good idea. She writes:

Coolness (or just perceived coolness, it really doesn't matter) is linked to passion. The cooler you perceive your tools to be, the more passionate you are about those tools. And passion, while it might lead to the "everything is a nail" syndrome, has an extraordinary amount of value!

Obviously there's quality of life... a life with passion is certainly more fun than one without. And the more passion, the greater the chances that a person has what psychologists label optimal experiences. And the more optimal experiences one has, the more likely one is to describe life as being "happy". So, passion = optimal experiences = happiness. And research says happy people are generally more productive. Certainly they're more spirited and fun to be around...

So I guess passion leads to greater productivity, not existing knowledge. So which web framework do you think is cool? Which one are you passionate about?

If I had to choose based on my passionate choice, and the one that I think is the coolest, I'd have to go with Tapestry or possibly JSF (JSF would be a lot cooler if it let me put my JSPs in the WEB-INF directory instead of in the root). These are the frameworks I want to learn more about. 6 months from now? Maybe Laszlo or JDNC.

Speaking at MySQL Users Conference

Looks like I'll be speaking at the MySQL User Conference in April 2005. This conference is at the Santa Clara Convention center, where SD West was last year.

Congratulations! You have been accepted as a presenter for
the MySQL Users Conference 2005 at the Westin Santa Clara, Santa Clara,
California, April 18, 2005 - April 21, 2005.

The following has been accepted as a 3 hour tutorial class for the
event:

"Developing Test-Driven Web Applications With Spring and Hibernate"

The tutorial classes are scheduled for Monday, April 18, and we will
send the exact time schedule shortly.

They wanted a fancier title than all the AppFuse ones I had cooked up - that's why it's titled Developing Test-Driven Web Applications With Spring and Hibernate. Now I just need to figure out what kind of app to develop in 3 hours. With AppGen and AppFuse Generator, it takes a lot of fun out of the development process. Or maybe it puts the fun back in?

If there's a JUG nearby that'd like to know a bit more about AppFuse or Spring, let me know.

[DJUG] JMS and Spring

Tonight's DJUG should be a fun one. First, I hope to learn some JMS tips and tricks from Chris Huston then I'm doing a presentation on Spring. I asked the group what they wanted to know about Spring last week and I got a wide range of answers. There should be a good mix of newbies and experienced Spring users. I'll give you a link to my presentation, but I have to warn you that there's not much there. I tend to show a lot of code in and do demos when I present, so my presentations tend to be kinda thin. My two goals for tonight are 1) keep it under an hour so we can all get to the bar and 2) inspire Spring-mania among the crowd.

   Download Presentation »

[ANN] AppFuse 1.7 Released

This release adds support for JSF/MyFaces and Tapestry as web framework options. AppGen has been updated to work with both of these frameworks and I added new tutorials as well. You can read about my integration experience in a previous post.

After I released AppFuse 1.6.1, I knew the only way I was going to get Tapestry and JSF support done was if I stayed close to the code and started the next release. I never envisioned developing the Tapestry and JSF versions of AppFuse at the same time, but it turned out to be very efficient. If you want a comparison of all the different web frameworks in AppFuse (and AppFuse Light) - you can checkout my Comparing Web Frameworks presentation. If you want more in-depth coverage - it'll be in the next Chapter of Spring Live.

• Download
• Release Notes
• Learn more about AppFuse
• Live Demos:
  • Struts + Spring + Hibernate
  • Spring + iBATIS
  • WebWork + Spring + Hibernate
  • JSF + Spring + Hibernate
  • Tapestry + Spring + Hibernate

If you find any issues, let us know.

Integrating JSF and Tapestry into AppFuse

Well it looks like I accomplished my goal for the year: integrate Spring MVC, WebWork, Tapestry and JSF into AppFuse. I decided to integrate JSF and Tapestry at the same time so I could get a good feel for their differences. Also, I figured there would be a lot of similarities I could re-use between the two. I found this to be a great idea. Often I'd use the first framework as a template and the second would go much quicker. It turned out to be a good strategy because I often found bugs in the first while working on the second. I really enjoyed developing with both JSF and Tapestry - here's my notes from my development marathon over the last week:

Tapestry

• For Tapestry, I created a patched version of the 3.0 source. I did this because I wanted some non-standard things, like friendly URLs, a global properties file and a popup calendar that works with IE/XHTML. The Tapestry Community was gracious enough to supply the source - so I didn't have to do much patching myself.
• Pure HTML, like Tapestry has, is ssoooooo much nicer to work with. The syntax highlighting in HomeSite is fully functional again! I've been an HTML developer since 94 and I felt like it was 97 all over again - when we didn't write apps, just static HTML.
• Overriding the default Tapestry ValidationDelegate was pretty easy - and there's even an example in Tapestry in Action. I was able to add asterisks for required fields and error messages next to the fields fairly easily. Erik Hatcher also hooked me up with a Label component for non-validating fields.
• For the contrib:Table component, you can easily i18n column headings by using "keyName:propertyName" as the column value. However, if your keyName has a period in it (i.e. user.username), you can't override the ValueBlock b/c user.username is an invalid OGNL expression. I patched Tapestry to solve this.
• The ability to use <span key="keyName"/> to render i18n keys is awesome. So simple.
• Tapestry has a very rich validation framework that requires virtually no configuration. No setting up your resource bundle, etc. It just works. Client-side too.
• It would be nice to show all the client-side validation errors in a single dialog instead of one-at-a-time (WebWork does this too).

JSF/MyFaces

• I like how you don't have to create mappings - just link to the .jsp with an .html extension.
• For some reason, when I save a user and server-side validation occurs, the user's username and roles disappear. Good thing client-side validation is available.
• It was easy to override the Labels to add asterisks thanks to some code from David Geary on the MyFaces mailing list. In order to make it work, I had to ditch my HTML <table> and use an <h:panelGrid>. Now my JSP is Tag Soup. I think JSF is going to have to ditch JSP if they want to get anywhere. Hopefully JSF will soon support HTML templates like Tapestry and parse them with a Servlet Filter or something.
• It's unfortunate that I have to specify a "styleClass" attribute on all my <h:message> tags - I'd like to just set a default for these tags (others too).
• I ditched JSF's message setting and opted for setting my own List of messages in the session and then grabbing them out with a MessageFilter. This was so much easier to implement than the standard JSF message setting stuff.
• I'd rather not have to specify <f:loadBundle> at the top of each page. It's going to be the same for my whole app - it'd be nice to set a default bundle and variable name that all tags could access.
• It was quite a bit easier to integrate JSF into AppFuse than Tapestry. This was mainly due to the fact that I could re-use a lot of the JSP code, as well as the WebWork Actions are pretty close to the JSF Managed Beans.
• Spring Rocks - it never caused any issues with either framework. I just wish MyFaces wouldn't warn that it can't find a variable that it's already found. I had to turn logging down to FATAL so I don't get any meaningless messages from MyFaces.
• With JSF, why do I have to specify the supported locales in faces-config.xml? Why can't it look up the available bundles like JSTL with Spring/WebWork/Struts does?

So after all of this, which is my favorite? Unfortunately, there is no clear winner. They're both pretty cool, but not that much better than Struts, Spring or WebWork. In reality, I like them all, that's why they're all integrated into AppFuse!

Update: I forgot to mention that I was very pleased with the latest version of Canoo's WebTest. It now uses HtmlUnit at its core and its JavaScript support has vastly improved. I wouldn't have been able to do integration testing on the JSF version without this (updated) library. Not only did it work great, but it found XHTML issues in my code - that rocks! The JSF and Tapestry versions of AppFuse are the only ones that run Canoo tests with JavaScript turned on. This is mainly because the old tests worked fine w/o JavaScript and I didn't want to break them.

The Future of the J2EE Web Tier

There's a chat in a few hours on the future of the J2EE Web Tier. I'll be sitting in and hoping to learn something. The alignment of the JSP EL and JSF EL will be nice - but we really want HTML Templating for JSF - like Tapestry. After developing Tag Soup JSPs for JSF and HTML-editor-friendly pages for Tapestry, I can say there's definitely a big difference. Tapestry templates are much easier to read. However, if you have an existing JSP app, you can migrate to JSF easier.

Edit Screens with JSF

I'm working with JSF this morning and I'm finding one thing particularly annoying. I'm working on a simple master/detail screen and I'm tweaking the detail screen to fit my needs. It's just a <form> with some form elements. I change something, run "ant deploy-web" and hit "refresh" to see my updated page. Since everything in JSF is a post, I get prompted to re-submit the form. Fine, I agree - then I'm returned to the list screen. Argggh - why can't I just view the form again?! This might just be a MyFaces nuance, I'm not sure. Anyone know of a workaround?

Wanna see the bug/feature in action? Go to http://demo.raibledesigns.com/equinox-jsf/userList.html, click on a row - and after the edit screen displays, hit refresh on your browser. In an ideal world, you'd see the form again, but nope - you get the list instead.

AppFuse Tapestry/JSF Status

There's 3 phases of adding a new web framework to AppFuse. The first phase is integration and configuration. This is the fun part and involves adding JARs and configuring everything so the framework actually works. At the end of this phase, I'm usually pretty enthusiastic about my progress and think I can finish the whole project in a few more days. Then comes the "features" phase, when I start coding AppFuse features with the framework. This part always takes wwaaaaaaayyyy longer than I anticipate. This is the part where I realise previously done things (from other framework implementations) won't work and I have a long road ahead of me. For instance, with Tapestry and JSF, I have to figure out how to do the following: Country drop-down based on locale (currently a JSP tag, so should work with JSF), multi-select checkbox, and placing an asterisk next to required fields.

The asterisk isn't too hard if you do it the "WebWork way" - where you simply specify required="true" on JSP Tag. However, I'd prefer to have it read from the validation engine, so this will probably take some digging on how to do it with JSF/Tapestry. For the country drop-down, I'll probably have to create a Tapestry Component. I believe both frameworks have a multi-select checkbox component. After working with Tapestry's contrib:Table component for a few hours, I miss the Display Tag. The contrib:Table works, but it's a LOT more difficult to configure than the Display Tag. It also blows up if you click the column headings too many times. Also, it doesn't have any exporting features like the Display Tag. Sure, it might not need them, but a lot of folks have come to rely on these and it's a handy feature. Furthermore, another unfortunate thing I found in Tapestry this morning is it doesn't seem to read the locale from the request. So if you change your browser's language, it won't switch the language. You actually have to logout and kill the session to switch the locale. Bummer.

My main problem with the 2nd phase of the project is choosing whether to "do it right" or "get it done". I often start out just trying to get shit done, but end up being a perfectionist and trying to do it right. This phase took a couple of weeks to get through with WebWork. Ugh - I'd rather just get this stuff done, but I don't think it's gonna happen. I think I'll be working on the "features" phase for quite some time. Oh well, at least I'll learn the ins and outs of each framework.

The final "finishing up" phase is one of the best. It's when everything works and I write the installation scripts and tutorials. This is slightly painful b/c there's nothing new to discover, but it's also nice because there's nothing new to learn or get tripped up on.

AppFuse 1.7 estimated release date? I was hoping for the next couple of weeks, but I'd better stick with the end of the year. I'm sure there's going to be a fair amount of banging my head against the wall in the next few weeks.

The AppFuse Generator

I found the AppFuse Generator project in my comments last night. Richard So seems to have created a nice code-generation tool for AppFuse. It looks like it can create/modify all the files you need to CRUD a database table. I took a brief look at the code and it's all based on Velocity templates, so you should be able to easily tweak things.

This tool does seem to generate the DAOs/Managers - which can lead to more code to maintain. It would be nice if it could be modified to be similar to AppGen where there's a "detailed" version (that generates everything) and a "default" version (which only generates the web tier classes). The default version could use the generic "dao" and "manager" beans. I wonder if this tool supports running/installing the same table more than once? This currently doesn't work too well with AppGen, but shouldn't be too hard to fix.

In reality, I'm pumped that Richard has created this, as well as a project to back it up. I especially like that he's going to try and create an Eclipse Plug-in as part of this project. Nice work Richard!