Raible Designs

Weekend Update

Yikes! I can't believe it's been a whole week since I last blogged. Actually, with my workload it's not that surprising. Don't let anyone ever tell you that working for an open source consulting and support company is easy. When we started, we dreamed of working a couple of weeks a month, and working on open source the rest of the time. Business has really started to pick up in 2006, so that dream is quickly fading. Regardless, this week was a good one.

I managed to get Equinox upgraded to Tapestry 4.0 and WebWork 2.2. Both of these releases are much nicer than their predecessors and I plan to do a write-up next week. I especially dig how WebWork 2.2 allows you to do a popup calendar with less code than both JSF or Tapestry. It really is a kick-ass web framework and only getting better.

Other than that, I had some fun with Maven 2 - converting all the Spring Fundamentals labs to use it. The invalid-POM situation continues to be atrocious and shows no sign of improving soon. I really like the idea of the Jetty 6 Maven Plugin, but unfortunately, it doesn't seem to play nice with SiteMesh. Lastly, I had some fun getting JOTM to work on Tomcat 5.5.x. All in all, I learned a lot this week, just didn't have much time to write about it.

In AppFuse News, Mika Göckel wrote tutorial on integrating XFire with AppFuse. Mika also authored a tutorial on AppFuse + Axis. He obviously knows his way around AppFuse - so we nominated and accepted him as a committer. Welcome aboard Mika! Finally, Brian Topping has converted a version of AppFuse to Maven 2. With any luck, AppFuse will be an archetype that you can install from Maven someday.

I'm flying out to San Francisco for a 1-day seminar next week and my MacBook Pro couldn't arrive any sooner (12 days and counting).

RE: WebWork joins Struts

From the struts-dev mailing list:

Between the Clarity hubbub and the Java Web Alignment brouhaha, it came up that WebWork would like to merge with another framework. Ted and Don followed up with the two core WebWork developers, Patrick Lightbody and Jason Carreira. As it turns out, they are very interested in merging WebWork with Struts. An archive of our discussions is available as a Quick Topic thread.

As some of you know, the underlying idea behind Ti was to use WebWork as the core of Struts Action Framework 2.x. Conceptually, WebWork and Struts 1.x are very similar. We've often said, without embarrassment, that WebWork does many things better than Struts 1.x. Meanwhile, WebWork has the ability to provide a layer of almost full backwards-compatibility for Struts 1.x, and we have already demonstrated we can integrate Beehive's (very cool) Page Flow with WebWork.

Patrick Lightbody:

Yes, it's true. The WebWork development team (Jason and I) have been working with the Struts development team (Don Brown and Ted Husted) and have come to the conclusion that the best thing for Java community would be to merge WebWork in to Struts.

Read Ted's email here, but the gist of it is this: WebWork is a great technology, and Struts is a great community. It's a perfect match and bringing the two together will only be better for WebWork and Struts users alike. The only down side for me is that I'll be working less with OpenSymphony, but I believe that is a small price for all the great benefits that come from this merger.
...
With this renewed energy, larger development team, and larger community, the combined efforts of Struts and WebWork will surely make the Struts platform the easiest, fastest, and most powerful Java web framework available. We hope that all the WebWork users and developers are as excited about this as we are and are ready to take WebWork to the next level.

IMO, this is good for both Struts and WebWork. WebWork gets the additional marketing it needs, and Struts users get a kick-ass framework to develop with. If you're a Struts user and haven't tried WebWork, prepare to be impressed. I was and still am.

I plan to upgrade AppFuse and Equinox to WebWork 2.2 as soon as its released. Hopefully I'll be able to migrate both the Struts and WebWork versions to SAF 2.0 w/in a few months.

Editing Java webapps instead of edit/deploy/reload

For the last few years, I've always done Java webapp development the hard way. Yeah, I'm the guy that makes Dion cringe (although I'm pretty sure he's not referring directly to me). I edit a class/jsp/xml file and run "ant deploy reload". Then I wait a few seconds for my context to reload in Tomcat. Luckily, I do mostly test-first development, so it's rare that I have to open my browser to test stuff. However, with the power of CSS and Ajax, manual testing in a browser is becoming more and more useful (although Selenium may solve that).

I've long resisted the power of the IDE, b/c I've always trusted Ant and felt confortable with the command line. However, I'm ready for a change. I'm ready to start developing Equinox and AppFuse-based applications using the edit/save/auto-reload cycle. So how do I get started? Where's the instructions for setting up my IDEs to work this way?

I prefer to use Eclipse and IDEA for development - so I'll likely try to get this working in both. If I get it working, I'll make sure and provide good documentation so others can do the same. I'm also willing to make any changes in project structure to make this happen; modifying build.xml (or pom.xml) to accomodate shouldn't be too difficult.

What's the best way to integrate Ajax into a Java webapp?

I received an e-mail over the weekend asking how to integrating Ajax into into the various web frameworks covered in my Java Web Framework Comparison Whitepaper. Below is my reply:

The best thing that I've seen is to use DWR, Prototype and Scriptaculous.
These will work with all web frameworks, and if you're using Spring on the backend -
DWR makes it easy to expose your beans as JavaScript objects.

Also, there's a number of tag library solutions that greatly simplify things:

  http://javawebparts.sf.net
  http://ajaxanywhere.sf.net
  http://ajaxtags.sf.net

I haven't used the first one, but I have used AjaxAnywhere and saw a demo of
AjaxTags from its developers.  They both look like they could be very useful.

For those of you using Ajax in your Java webapps - what's your advice? Do you use these same libraries or other ones?

This post was partially motivated by my desire to reiterate things that are so obvious.

Seam

I have to admit, there's something about Seam that intrigues me. Maybe it's because they put up a really nice-looking demo (I'm a sucker for eye-candy), or maybe it's because it seems to be well documentated, or maybe it's the fact that it's based on J2EE standard technologies (EJB3 and JSF). It could also be that I greatly respect the work of Gavin King (who's always been respectful to me when I asked Hibernate questions back in the day).

It could be the lack of configuration, but I think it's the simplicity that gets me. A POJO (Entity Bean), a Session Bean for your business logic, and a view page (w/ Facelets no less, which is very cool). Other new frameworks this year include Wicket and Stripes. While these frameworks look cool, I really like the idea of a full-stack framework much better (I do use AppFuse after all). Well done Gavin - Seam looks very cool IMO.

On a related note, I upgraded AppFuse to MyFaces 1.1.0 yesterday w/ minimal effort. You can grab the latest from CVS if you'd like to get started with MyFaces quickly.

Should I change AppFuse's default web framework?

Currently, the default web framework in AppFuse is Struts. It's nothing fancy like Shale or Struts Ti, but rather Struts Classic. Even though Struts is not dead it's a pain in the ass to work with compared to other MVC frameworks like Spring MVC and WebWork. Yesterday, on the AppFuse Mailing List, I kicked off an informal poll about switching to a different default web framework. I think most of the people that choose Struts w/ AppFuse are choosing it b/c it's the default. Making another framework the default would likely same quite a few users a lot of headaches.

So which one should I make the default? Here's my thoughts from the mailing list thread:

I like Spring MVC and WebWork better than Struts, but I believe that WebWork is much easier to understand and develop with. Unfortunately, it's not well documented or marketed, so it's a bit difficult when you run into snags. Of course, if you contact the user community via forums or e-mail, answers flow quickly.
...
I'd like to use the framework that's simplest to understand. Right now, in my eyes, that's WebWork. I think JSF and Tapestry are excellent too (as component-based frameworks), but Tapestry's learning curve is difficult and JSF has a lot of issues (like everything is a post). Hopefully things will get better with JSF 1.2, but it's probably another 6 months before MyFaces supports 1.2 - let alone the app servers.
...
Maybe we should just drop Struts altogether - or replace it with Struts Ti? Unfortunately, it'll probably be a while before it's ready for production (I doubt it's that useable now).

Of course, if a WebWork Book was out - this move would be a lot easier. I did talk to Patrick Lightbody on IM yesterday and he said "it's done" and supposedly he has copies, but I haven't seen anything on the WebWork Blog to prove this.

A related question: how much would it hurt AppFuse if I dropped Struts altogether and went with something like Wicket instead? I'd like to keep that cap at 5 web frameworks. If I dropped Struts and added Wicket, I might lose potential users, which might not be a bad thing.

Stripes

Greg Hinkle writes about a new JDK 5-only Java web framework called Stripes.

Stripes is a presentation framework for building web applications using the latest Java technologies. The main driver behind Stripes is that web application development in Java is just too much work! It seems like every existing framework requires gobs of configuration. Struts is pretty feature-light and has some serious architectural issues. Others, like WebWork 2 and Spring-MVC are much better, but still require a lot of configuration, and seem to require you to learn a whole new language just to get started.

I dig the fact that someone is trying to create a web framework that requires less configuration. It's also very cool that they've released it as 1.0 (rather than 0.1 as many OS projects do) and it also seems to be well documented. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like there's any support for Spring or dependency injection.

Personally, I don't mind the configuration required by WebWork or Spring MVC - but then again, I use AppFuse and tend to generate most of the configuration code using AppGen. Even so, it would be nice to get away from the configuration requirement. Hopefully more framework authors will find ways to reduce or even eliminate the XML hell we have in Java web frameworks. Kudos to the Tapestry developers for doing this in their 4.0 release.

I like the convention over configuration that Rails uses. It's this same mantra that I've been trying to develop AppFuse with for the past few years. The problem with Java web frameworks is developers want configuration choices - even if they never bother to use them.

Java Jobs: broken down by web framework

I updated my Web Framework Comparison presentation today. Rather than updating the graph that shows today's job availability, I did one that compares today to 6 months ago. Struts is still the clear winner (and growing). Spring is definitely growing. Tapestry has about the same amount of jobs (9 vs. 8). WebWork lost 10 opening (down to 4) and the demand for JSF skills has grown as well.

Is WebWork a dying framework? I've heard folks complain about its small community, and there still aren't any books is only one book about it. Is that a jab at Patrick, Jason and Kris - or a jab at Manning? I'm not sure. The good news is WebWork in Action and WebWork Live should both be out this summer.

My search criteria for all of these was "framework and java" from the front page on dice.com. I did filter a bunch out for WebWork b/c there's some product called "WebWorks" that folks want to hire for.

In my own experience, these numbers are not as accurate as you might think. Since I gave my original presentation, I've been contacted a number of times to work on projects. It's about even between Struts, Spring MVC, WebWork and JSF. I haven't had a single inquiry to do Tapestry development. The bad part about Struts jobs is there's so many of them, that rates are likely pretty low (i.e. 35-45/hour), whereas the others can get you upwards of 80-90/hour.

So what do these numbers mean? Do they mean you should tailor your learnings and skills to the most popular frameworks? In a sense, it's important to do so. If nothing else, Struts skills are import so you can migrate all the Struts applications to your favorite framework. However, I don't think these numbers are that important when choosing a framework to start your project with. I think the most important thing in choosing a framework is passion. Which one do you want to work with the most? It's likely that your productivity will be higher if you're enthusiastic about the framework, rather than bored with all the skills you've accumulated using it. Then again, if you're motivated by productivity more than enthusiasm - using your skills to crank out applications quickly is probably a good idea.

You might think that the number of skilled developers for framework X is important too. I don't think it is. I think the most important thing is to hire smart developers. A good developer can come up to speed on any framework in 2 weeks and be highly productive in 4 weeks. If not, the developer isn't that smart or the framework isn't that good.

Just for kicks, I did some searching for other web frameworks as well:

• Rife: 0
• Wicket: 0
• Echo: 3
• Ruby on Rails: 1
• ASP .NET: 2876

Now the question is - what kind of rates are these skills getting? I'd like to know what the average Rails and ASP .NET developers make. In Denver, Java developers seem to make between 65-85/hour when they're experienced contractors.

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.

[TSSS] Days 1 and 2

I'm sitting in the EJB3 BOF right now. The room is packed, but it seems most folks are uninterested and the moderators are just talking amongst themselves. Seems like a good time to blog since this BOF doesn't interest me whatsoever. Yesterday, I arrived at 8:00, took a cab to the Imperial Palace (where we're staying) and then headed over to Caesar's for the conference. I registered, assured we could drink beer during the sessions, and attended the (rather dry) keynote. Hani has a good synopsis of this talk.

After the keynote, I went to Patrick and Jason's WebWork talk for about 10 minutes. I soon realized it was an intro to WebWork and left to try and learn something. I went to Craig McClanahan's talk on "The Development of Web Application APIs and Standards for Java." His talk was pretty good, and covered "de facto" versus "de jure" standards. De facto standards are ones that evolve from the community through widespread usage, whereas de jure standards are imposed on the community (like JSF). Again, Hani has the full scoop on this talk.

Next, I went to Dion and Ben's talk on Ajax applications. They talked about XHTML/CSS and how XMLHttpRequest makes rich client-side applications possible. I think the whole Ajax thing is pretty funny. It's something that's been available for several years and my guess is most folks just didn't know about it. I've been using XMLHttpRequest for a couple of years now, and it's interesting to see it become popular all of a sudden. It's quite nice actually. I've been writing HTML/JavaScript for over 10 years, so I find Ajax development pretty easy. I hope to add support for Ajax-type features in AppFuse before this summer.

I wonder when/if the community will realize the power XSL processing in the browser? Since we're all developing XHTML applications now, our pages are XML and we could easily start leveraging client-side XSLT to do some pretty cool stuff. With a client-side XSL sheet, you could do page decoration (like SiteMesh) just by adding one line to your pages. For example:

<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="styles/global.xsl"?>

The only problem with client-side XSLT is your pages have to be well-formed XML or everything bombs. With HTML, if you screw something up, chances are the browser will still render it correctly.

After the Ajax review, I had lunch and headed down to the Casino for some beers and gambling. I came back in time for Rod's "Why J2EE Projects Fail." It was a good talk, but there wasn't any revolutionary or new information provided. After his talk, I was motivated to learn more about Web Services Security, but instead opted for beers with Crazy Bob, JIRA Mike and Neon Dion. A couple of beers turned into several, and I found myself having dinner with the SourceBeat guys (Bill, Matt and Jim) a couple hours later. Steak and Lobster was my plate of choice and it tasted quite good. The rest of the night was spent gambling, drinking and harassing Pai Gow Poker dealers. We had breakfast around 2 and made it to bed by 3. Total cost of the trip so far: $300.

I slept in until noon today, after which Jim and I headed back to the conference for some lunch and afternoon sessions. Lunch was good and followed by Oracle demoing JDeveloper and coding EJB3 and JSF with it. I've often wondered about the cost of Oracle's ADF JSF implementation and actually got an answer from one of the attendees. I think he was an Oracle employee but he basically said you have to buy at least 1 copy of JDeveloper ($999) and you get a runtime license for ADF Faces as part of that. That sucks because Oracle's implementation looks like one of the most full-featured ones available. Why should I have to buy a tool I'll never use just to use ADF Faces?

After lunch, we attended Rod's "Advanced Spring Framework" and Craig's "JSF: Dead on Arrival or Raging Success". Rod's Spring presentation covered some advanced Spring features: autowiring, inner-beans, lists, instantiation choices, factory beans and template bean definitions. The presentation was good, and I was pleasantly surprised to find I knew most of the things he covered. Colin spoke about using JDK 5 annotations for transaction demarcation and Keith talked about Spring Web Flow. The Spring Web Flow stuff looks cool, especially since the other framework developers are listening and liking what they see. Craig even mentioned that he'll probably ditch what he's put together in Shale and use Spring Web Flow instead.

Craig's talk about JSF was rather boring, but most of these sessions are (mainly because there isn't a whole lot of new information). Craig did manage to pimp Java Studio Creator a bit. I find JSC demos to be quite funny since it hides so much code with code-folding. In the demo, Craig showed us a 10-line Java class that made JSF (and JSC) look like good stuff. Jim and I noticed code-folding was turned on and the class was actually 120 lines long! This is more of a problem with JSC then JSF IMO. The one nice thing about this talk was learning that a JSF 2.0 BOF is tonight. The main goal of the BOF is to see what the community wants in 2.0. I hope to attend and express a desire for HTML templates like Tapestry has.

Tonight kinda sucks because all the good BOFs (Spring, Tapestry and JSF 2.0) are at the same time (7:30). I'm hoping to hop around between them and get some good networking in. After the BOFs, OpenSymphony is hosting an open bar - so that should be a good time. Hopefully we can scare up a few free carbombs. For more blogs and coverage of the conference, see the TSSS 2005 blogger list.