Raible Designs

My Review of Java Studio Creator (a.k.a. Rave)

I attended a Rave Demo at Sun in Broomfield today. The meeting actually had two parts - the first hour was a marketing schpeel about Sun's Enterprise Java System and the second hour was a demo of Java Studio Creator. The first hour was boring and very marketing esque - they did have an interesting price point though - $100 per employee. This is small business friendly, which is nice to see.

The Rave (a.k.a. Java Studio Creator) Demo was when things got good. Here's my notes from Dan Robert's presentation, followed by my impressions and comments. Dan is the Product Manager for JSC and was seemed to be very in tune with the tools marketing (i.e. all the good stuff from Intellij and Eclipse - and how JBuilder sucks).

What is it?

• New Java Development Tools initiative
  • For the corporate developers who write code, but don't understand all of the complexity of J2EE and just need to get their job done.
• A full fledged Java IDE
  • Visual Design Tools, 2-way editing, Editor, Debugger, Repository Management, and Project Management
  • Cool new Look and Feel
• Complementary to NetBeans and Java Studio
  • Even Enterprise developers can use it for Rapid Prototyping
  • Use Java Studio or any other tool to add persistence layers (heh, this is b/c they think that persistence can only be EJBs ;-))

What does it do?

• Quickly builds web applications that solve time-critical, real world problems
  • Complete web application creation for departments, workgroups and businesses of all sizes
  • Focus on easy to understand, event driven coding model
  • Simplifies access to existing infrastructure
  • All Java-standards based servers, all databases, all Web services, all desktops
  • Their main goal is to do web applications well, they'll catch up with the rest later

Standards-based solution for all developers

• A development solution based on 100% Java standards
• Delivers "Write Once, Run Anywhere"^TM benefits: portable apps, portable developer skillsets
• Quickly solves time-critical app development needs
  • Drag and Drop, rapid visual access to databasess and web services
  • consistent UI look/feel/behavior across all apps

Visual features to speed development

• Palette for widgets, custom graphics, code clips, etc...
• Query Editor

Simplified Access to Existing infrastructure

• Use any JDBC Compliant Database (3.0)
  • Drag in and automatically create DB connections to data-aware components
• Web Service Consumption
  • Easily pull in existing web services from Enterprise wide solutions or business partners

Java Studio Creator Roadmap

• Hammerhead:
  • 2-tier dynamic content web applications based on JSP and JSF with Page Flow design tools
  • Releases: Early Access Spring 04 (today!), FCS Summer 04 (at JavaOne)
• Thresher:
  • Minor Update Release
  • Focuses on Ease of Development and Stability
• Mako
  • Extended Client Support

Download today from http://www.sun.com/jscreator. OS X version will be available shortly after the release (JavaOne).

After the PowerPoint, Dan started into the Demo. The first thing I saw that was cool was that when he clicked on the "Run" button, it actually deploys the app and opens the browser to run it. What you see in the browser looks very similar to what you see in the IDE. The IDE looks very simple. My current client went with me and he remarked that it "looks a lot like Eclipse."

The IDE has lots of palettes, and the UI essentially looks very clean. The pallets can be docked just like in IDEA - which I like. It looks a lot more like a native Windows application than it does like Swing. Here are the palettes it has:

• Server Navigator
  • Data Sources
  • Web Services
  • Deployment Servers Palette
• User Defined
  • JSF Standard Components
  • JSF Validators / Converters
• Property Sheet
• Project Navigator

Dan then dragged a drop down component and a table component onto the page. Secondly, he added a stylesheet and it visually changed the background and fonts on the page. I asked him if there was an imbedded browser. He said they took a look at using Mozilla, but it was too much and apparently one of the "real smart" engineers wrote the embedded browser component from scratch. Dan said it was the same guy who wrote the demo from scratch in 2 minutes at JavaOne last year. The thing I found very cool was that the HTML that is written into the JSP is XHTML - none of this Netscape 4.x support. Fuck Netscape 4.x - I'm glad Sun had the foresight to drop support for it.

After adding the stylesheet, Dan used the Data Sources navigator to grab a table and drag it to the drop-down. Then he did the same for another table and the data grid. Using the Visual SQL Query Builder (which looks a lot like M$ Access) he linked two tables and added a new column from a 2nd table to the grid. He then showed us that JSC has pretty good support for 2-way editing. Edit the code, the visual representation changes. Edit the visual, the code changes. This seems to be a big problem with WYSIWIG editors, especially when it comes to dynamic webapps. It appears that they've done a pretty good job to solve this.

Next he showed us some cool features of the components. For the table, there is an "enable paging" checkbox - and for the drop-down, you can right-click and select "auto-submit on change." He then set a couple of converter types on the drop-down and had to hand-code the event handler for the drop-down. Two lines of very simple code and he was done. The code was simple enough that you could have guessed the syntax. Code completion popped up nicely as well. Apparently the JSF coding style is that each page (JSP) is backed by a Bean that contains different event handlers. The code looked pretty simple and all the data was retrieved via RowSets.

Bill Dudney was there and asked about testing tools (i.e. Cactus or JUnit). Dan's response was that these are usually used by more advanced Java developers and there's talk of it, but nothing has been done yet. Now he pulls up a very cool page navigation creator which he uses to drag and drop buttons and links to point to different pages. Then someone asked about cost - and here's what makes it great. Under $300. They also hope to have lots of add on components for JSF by JavaOne. Unfortunately, there's no tooling for building JSF components in Java Studio Creator. For more information checkout http://developers.sun.com/jscreator.

The main reason I really like Java Studio Creator was that you literally never had to see any JSF code - and you get all of the features I like to use in webapps. Furthermore, I've been training a couple of guys all week on JSPs and using JSTL's SQL tags to do CRUD on a database table. While it's simple stuff, since they've never done web development before, it's a bit advanced. I'm sure their eyes will glaze over tomorrow when I start showing them how to write JUnit Tests, DAOs and how to use Hibernate to CRUD an object. They'll probably fall asleep by the time I show them how to wire the DAOs to Hibernate using Spring. When they saw this demo today - there eyes lit up and they got inspired to do their projects again. It looks easy for them now. All they need is a JDBC 3.0 driver for DB2 and they should be able to rapidly develop webapps with Java Studio Creator. I don't blame them for wanting to use this tool - it greatly simplifies things.

After the meeting, I asked Dan about transactions and if it was possible to use Hibernate instead of the RowSet stuff. He said that since JSC is based on NetBeans, you could probably write a plugin to use Hibernate instead of RowSets. As far as I know, the main reason you'd use Hibernate is for caching - but rowsets probably have that too. I know that the spec lead for JSF is talking to the Spring developers about JSF-Spring integration, so maybe that will be a future option as well.

Another thing that's not currently supported is the use of great technologies like Tiles or Sitemesh. Sitemesh integration would likely be pretty easy - you'd just never see your decorated UI in the IDE. Tiles is definitely something on the roadmap, but they don't have a solution yet. Dan indicated that using "includes" in your JSPs should work just fine - rendering in the IDE as they would in your browser. Good stuff - I hope we start using it at my current project - I think it'll do wonders for productivity. Since it's based on standards (JSF and RowSets) - the generated code looked pretty clean too.

Make your JUnit Tests run faster when using Spring

JRoller is down, and has been down for an hour or so - so I've decided to post this Spring Live entry here.

I discovered an interesting thing today about Spring and my JUnit tests. I noticed that the VelocityEngine I was setting on my PositionManager was getting initialized once for each test* method in my Test. This means that since my PositionManagerTest has 10 test methods - it would load the context 10 times.

Loading the context so many times was because the following code was in my Test's parent's constructor:

    ctx = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("/applicationContext.xml");

I suppose I expected any constructor-iniatialized variables to be initialized once and only once. So I figured out a solution to make my JUnit tests run faster. By making the ctx variable static, and loading the file in the member variables definition, I greatly reduced the amount of time needed to run tests. Below is the new code I'm using:

    protected static ApplicationContext ctx = 
    	new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("/applicationContext.xml");

By doing this, the ApplicationContext is only set once, and my tests run much faster. Here's some performance comparisons from Struts Resume:

Average time to run "ant test-dao": 36 seconds
Average time to run "ant test-dao" after this change: 26 seconds

A 10 second improvement - that's crazy talk dontcha think?! I've tried it on single tests, as well as suites - and it seems to improve performance by approximately 30% across the board.

Because of this experience, I have to recommend that when you write JUnit tests that use Spring - you should initialize your ApplicationContext in a static member variable. It seems to be the best performing and logical choice. Of course, if I'm off my rocker - please let me know.

On a sidenote, it would be cool if Roller allowed me to turn off comments for a single post. I like how Simon posts stuff on java.net and then aggregates it to his personal weblog.

Struts Menu 2.2 Released!

View changelog or download. New features in this release include a EL tag that allows JSTL's EL expressions in all attributes, as well as the ability to use Struts Menu outside of a Struts application. I also took the time to add a database-driven example to the sample app.

For the database-driven menu (as well as the app I'm writing for Spring Live) - I'm using HSQL. I never even touched the sucker before last week and I gotta say - damn it's easy. Just drop the JAR into WEB-INF/lib and when you make a database connection - it'll create the database on-the-fly. Even better, if you're using Hibernate, you can set a property (hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto=create) and it'll create your tables on-the-fly too. Cool stuff - HSQL rocks for sample apps. I don't know if it's production worthy - but I certainly like what I've seen so far.

Password encryption with JavaScript

This morning, I found some scripts to do MD4, MD5 and SHA encryption with JavaScript. If I add these to AppFuse and Roller, it means that a user's password will never be sent in plain-text. Very nice - anyone using any of these scripts? Any reason I should use someone else's scripts instead of the ones I found?

Denver JUG and Rock Bottom Brewery

Last night was a fun night. First of all, Mike Clark spoke about TDD development at the DJUG and he wowed me with his presentation abilities. I think he could have presented on just about anything and it would've been entertaining. He had a fair amount of humor in his presentation and came off as a true Montanan (a.k.a. very cool guy). I talked with him after the meeting as a whole bunch of us were entering Rock Bottom Brewery and my suspicions where confirmed. I look forward to the next time I hang out with Mike.

At Rock Bottom, it was all about drinking beer and bullshitting about Java. I sat across from Rod Cope (Out of the Box) and next to Bruce Snyder (Geronimo/Castor). The topics ranged from Groovy (Rod is speaking about Groovy at the Denver NFJS) to Spring to Castor and Kids (Bruce has a little one that's a week and a half younger than Abbie). I had a great time talking to these guys and look forward to our next meeting. It won't be long until I see Bruce again - he's attending SD West next week. He reminded me that next Wednesday is St. Patty's day, so since I'm part Irish - it should be a fun night. St. Patty's day is also both my sister and Julie's sister's birthday - neat eh?

I didn't leave downtown until 1:00 a.m. - a great Java-infested night it was. Thanks for the conversations and the booze folks - I had a great time.

Replacing line breaks with HTML breaks in Velocity

Roller currently has an issue where line breaks in comments are not auto-converted to <br>'s. This problem only exists in the in-page comments and the twisty comments you see on this site. Today, I might've figured out the solution. It turns out that using Jakarta Common's StrutsUtils to replace new lines with <br>'s doesn't work:

#set($comments = $stringUtils.replace($comments, "\n", "<br />"))

However, using the String.replaceAll(new, old) in JDK 1.4 does work:

#set($comments = $comments.replaceAll("\n", "<br />"))

I figured this out on my current project and haven't tested it on Roller. Since I didn't find anything on this via Google - I though y'all might be interested.

Java.net vs. SourceForge

I think it's about time I moved AppFuse from the Struts project on SourceForge to its own project. That way, I'll have more control over controlling spam on mailing lists, adding developers and other such stuff. So the question is - should I stick with SF or move to java.net? I'm fairly happy with SF, except for their recent CVS hiccup and regular CVS outages. It's cool that java.net gives you a wiki, but I doubt I'll convert all my JSPWiki wiki pages to java.net's wiki syntax (whatever it is). So I guess the question is for you folks that have used both (i.e. OpenSymphony developers): Is java.net better than SF?

Dave asked this same question in June of last year - and Roller still lives on SourceForge. I wonder if that's any indication?

AppFuse 1.3 vs. 1.4

Mike Lawrence (the guy who wrote the AppFuse on Orion tutorial), sent me an e-mail yesterday asking about AppFuse 1.3 (the latest release) vs. 1.4 (still in CVS).

Spring
This looks like a pretty new framework. I wonder how stable it is? 

How far along are you with 1.4? You've made more changes to 1.3 to move
to 1.4 than I've made to 1.3. So, I'd be better off just taking your 1.4
base and integrating my changes.

Did you eliminate struts as the MVC framework?

Doesn't this invalidate your awesome AppFuse tutorials?

I'd really like to stay in sync with your new release, however, I've got
major production deadlines to meet. It would stink if I automated a
bunch of stuff for 1.3 that you couldn't use in 1.4. Yet, if I move to
1.4, will I be facing stability issues and no tutorial docs?

I figured it'd be better if I answer his questions here, as other folks might be wondering the same thing.

Spring - how stable is it?

As with most open source projects, the version number doesn't always indicate the stability of a product. Roller hasn't reached 1.0, but I would venture to say it's a mature and stable product. If you asked this question on the Spring mailing list, you'd likely received a lot of responses saying that it's very stable and used in many production systems. IMO, it's a very stable framework and likely to be the next Struts (in terms of popularity). I don't know that it's MVC framework will be that popular, but it's persistence support classes, declarative transactions and AOP framework are pretty slick. The fact that it integrates smoothly with all leading MVC frameworks is a nice touch too.

I think the best answer is - you need to work with Spring and then decide for yourself. I love writing one-line DAO methods for Hibernate...

How far along are you with 1.4?

If you're already started an application with AppFuse version x, then you should stick with AppFuse version x until your project is finished. It's often a real pain to upgrade an existing app to use the latest stuff, and probably unlikely you'll gain that much value. However, if you're not under a tight deadline - and you really need something in a more recent release - it makes sense to upgrade. The tutorial I wrote on upgrading a 1.3 app to 1.4 is probably a one-time thing. I don't plan to do an upgrade document between all releases.

That being said, if you have enchancements for AppFuse and want me to roll them into the main code base, the best way is to create patches for the CVS version and then it'll be easier for me to figure out what you changed.

Did you eliminate struts as the MVC framework?

Definitely not - Struts will remain as the standard MVC framework because it is the most popular and most AppFuse users will likely use it. When I add MVC alternatives, they will be packaged similar to the iBATIS option - so you'll have to install them. Most MVC options will likely rip out Struts and replace it with their own stuff.

Doesn't this invalidate your awesome AppFuse tutorials?

The tutorials will be updated to support the latest release. I hope to have some time in early March to update these. As soon as I do, I'll release 1.4.

I'd really like to stay in sync with your new release, however, I've got major production deadlines to meet. It would stink if I automated a bunch of stuff for 1.3 that you couldn't use in 1.4. Yet, if I move to 1.4, will I be facing stability issues and no tutorial docs?

Staying in synch with AppFuse as I push out new releases is probably a waste of your time. I did it with Struts Resume for a long time, and it's a lot of work trying to keep up. I firmly believe that each release of AppFuse has been a solid one - they just keep getting better. The only reason to upgrade is for new features and/or bug fixes. I believe that 1.4 will be just as stable as 1.3 and there will be tutorial docs when its released. As far as your automation stuff, the best way to get that added is send me patches against CVS.

BTW, Mike has integrated Middlegen into his AppFuse-based project. He's also working on generating stubs of a lot of the DAO/Manager/Action files - I believe that's his automation stuff. Thanks for giving back so much to AppFuse Mike - now if I only had more time to keep up with your enhancements. ;-)

Write your Java apps in Visual Studio.NET?

Apparently Visual MainWin allows you to write your webapps in C# and .NET and then deploy them to a J2EE server.

Visual MainWin for J2EE enables these organizations to deploy .NET and J2EE applications on a single J2EE infrastructure, eliminating the need to maintain two separate application servers or implement complex interoperability solutions between the .NET and J2EE platforms.

This product certainly won't do anything for me. I've heard that Visual Studio is a great IDE, but if I can't write Java in it - what's the point?

Then again, I'm biased. I have a friend who is a long-time Java developer. Lately, he's been developing in C# because that was the only gig he could get (in Nevada). He says that C# is a piece of sh*t compared to Java.

Update: My friend contacted me to set the record straight. To quote him, "C# is OK, its the .NET framework that sucks ass. The C# syntax is a total ripoff of Java anyways."

AppFuse Refactorings Part III: Remember Me

This is a continuing series on what I'm doing to make AppFuse a better application in Winter/Spring 2004. Previous titles include: Changing the Directory Structure and Spring Integration.

- - - -
AppFuse includes a Remember Me feature that works with Container-Managed Authentication. In version 1.3 it works by setting a few cookies: username, password and rememberMe. The last one being a simple flag that the user wants to be remembered. Then a LoginFilter checks for the rememberMe cookie, and if present, logs in the user using the other cookie values. The obvious issue with this is that the password being sent and stored on the user's browser.

This was easily solved in Tomcat 4 by placing the form-login-page and form-error-page under a "security" directory and then setting cookies on the /appfuse/security path. This way, since no other part of the app can access /appfuse/security, these cookies can never be retrieved in any part of the application. The problem is that this didn't work in Tomcat 5 since it forwards to the login page (rather than redirecting). Since forwarding is obviously a better solution (user's can't bookmark the login page), I needed a new way to implement the Remember Me feature.

To my knowledge, cookies can only be stolen if someone is able to login to your AppFuse app and insert JavaScript to send the "document.cookie" value to an external URL. So for AppFuse, it's likely that stealing cookies is not much of an issue. However, for applications like Roller, it is an issue - since other bloggers on the same server (i.e. JRoller) could put JavaScript on their blog to grab cookies from other users.

Just as I was about to give up searching for solutions, along came Charle's persistent cookie strategy. Here's how I implemented it in AppFuse. Hopefully it follows all the rules and is a good solution. Here's what I did make it happen.

- - - -
Step 1: Setting the cookie.
Scenario: A user logs in and selects the "Remember Me" checkbox.
What Happens: When a user clicks the Login button, they submit to a LoginServlet that redirects them to "j_security_check" to take advantage of Container-Managed Authentication. This servlet is responsible for ensuring an SSL Login (if enabled), encrypting the user's password (if enabled) and also sets a session variable to indicate the user wants to be remembered. After authenticating, the user will hit the ActionFilter, where the following code sits:

In the above code snippet, the UserManager.createLoginCookie(username) method is responsible for creating a new cookie string and storing this information in the database.

The RandomGUID is a class I found on Java Exchange. Once the rememberMe cookie was set, I had to configure LoginFilter.java (mapped to form-login-page and form-error-page) to look for this cookie. This brings us to Step 2.

- - - -
Step 2: Using the cookie to login the user.
Scenario: A User has already logged in successfully with "Remember Me" enabled.
What Happens: When the login page is served up to the user, the LoginFilter is invoked and it checks the validity of the "Remember Me" cookie.

The UserManager.checkLoginCookie(value) method looks up a record based on the random GUID, and if it finds a match, it creates a new GUID and saves it in the database. If null is returned, it means the cookieId doesn't exist, and the login proceeds as it normally would. Below is the guts of the checkLoginCookie() method.

You can see from this, that if the lookup succeeds - a new cookieId is saved and returned. If a not-null cookieId is returned, the remember me cookie is updated, the user is looked up and the Filter forwards an authentication request (with username/password) to the LoginServlet. The Filter also sets an attribute to let the application know that this user authenticated via cookies. This is important so that cookie-authenticated users cannot change passwords. When using cookie-authentication, the password field is hidden and a message warns the user that they must logout/login to change passwords.

Lastly, I had to come up with a solution to remove these login cookies.

- - - -
Step 3: Allow the user to clear their login cookies.
Scenario: A User has already logged in successfully with "Remember Me" enabled.
What Happens: For this, I implemented a simple solution. When a user logs out, all persistent login cookies are removed.

I don't know if it's best to divulge the details of AppFuse's cookie login strategy. However - it *is* open source - so folks can find figure it out if they really want to. By exposing it to the world, I hope to get the most robust solution possible.

Next up, how I replaced Hibernate with iBatis. Using Spring, it only took me a few hours! Pretty slick, eh? ;-)