Raible Designs

My Future of Web Frameworks Presentation

Earlier this week, I tweeted about a history of web frameworks timeline I created for my upcoming Future of Web Frameworks talk at TSSJS Vegas 2010. I immediately received a lot of feedback and requests for adding new frameworks and releases. The image below is the result of that Twitter conversation. Thanks to everyone who contributed.

Back in November, I wrote about my proposals for TSSJS. I've been thinking a lot about web frameworks lately and I can't help but think we live in a very exciting time. As a Java developer, I've been exposed to one of the most vibrant language ecosystems on the planet. As Tim Bray talks about, the Java Platform has 3 legs: the language, the virtual machine and a huge, immense library of APIs (both in the JDK and in open source libraries). The diagram below is something I created based on Tim's podcast.

Tim says, "One of those legs is replaceable and that's the language." And he's right, there's many Java.next languages that run efficiently on the JVM. This is one of the most exciting parts of being a Java web developer today. There's many proven web frameworks and languages that you can pick to build your next web application.

The best part is many of the best web frameworks run on the JVM. Not only that, but the best code editors are the IDEs that you're familiar with and have grown to love. Furthermore, much of the literature for Java.next languages is written for Java developers. As someone who knows Java, you have wealth of web frameworks and languages just waiting for you to learn them.

To create my presentation on the future of web frameworks, I followed the outline I posted previously. I plan on explaining the evolution and history of web frameworks and how we got to where we are today. From there, I'll be speculating on what web applications we'll be developing in the future. Finally, I'll touch on the necessary features of web frameworks that will allow us to develop these applications.

Of course, I haven't actually presented this talk yet, so it's likely to change in the coming weeks before the conference. The good news is this gives you the opportunity to provide constructive criticism on this presentation and help make it better. I realize that a presentation rarely represents the conversation that takes place during a conference. However, I believe it can portray the jist of my thinking and lead to a meaningful conversation in the comments of this post. Below is the presentation I created - thanks in advance for any feedback.

For those who will be joining me at TSSJS ... it's gonna be a great show. St. Patrick's Day in Vegas, what more could you ask for?

Update: This article has been re-posted on Javalobby and contains additional community feedback in the comments.

AppFuse 2.0.1 Released

The AppFuse Team is pleased to announce the release of AppFuse 2.0.1. This release squashes a number of bugs and includes an upgrade to Spring 2.5. To learn more about Spring 2.5's features, see InfoQ's What's New in Spring 2.5: Part 1 article.

For information on upgrading from 2.0, see the 2.0.1 Release Notes or changelog. AppFuse 2.0.1 is available as a Maven archetype. For information on creating a new project using AppFuse, please see the QuickStart Guide or the demos and videos.

What is AppFuse? Click here to find out.

AppFuse is an open source project and application that uses open source tools built on the Java platform to help you develop Web applications quickly and efficiently. It was originally developed to eliminate the ramp-up time found when building new web applications for customers. At its core, AppFuse is a project skeleton, similar to the one that's created by your IDE when you click through a wizard to create a new web project.

AppFuse 1.x uses Ant to create your project, as well as build/test/deploy it. AppFuse 2.0 uses Maven 2 to create your project as well as build/test/deploy it. IDE support is much better in 2.0 because you can generate the IDE project files with Maven plugins. AppFuse 1.x uses XDoclet and JDK 1.4+.

This project was started in April 2003.

The 2.0 series of AppFuse has a minimum requirement of the following specification versions:

• Java Servlet 2.4 and JSP 2.0 (2.1 for JSF)
• Java 5+

If you've used AppFuse 1.x, but not 2.x, you'll want to read the FAQ. Join the user mailing list if you have any questions.

Thanks to everyone for their help contributing code, writing documentation, posting to the mailing lists, and logging issues.

We greatly appreciate the help from our sponsors, particularly Atlassian, Contegix, JetBrains, and Java.net. Atlassian and Contegix are especially awesome: Atlassian has donated licenses to all its products and Contegix has donated an entire server to the AppFuse project. Thanks guys - you rock!

Please post any issues you have with this release to the mailing list.

AppFuse 2.0 Released!

I'm extremely happy to announce we've finally finished developing AppFuse 2.0. The road to AppFuse 2.0 has been a long journey through Mavenland, annotations and generics. Thanks to all the developers, contributors and users for helping test, polish and prove that AppFuse 2 is an excellent solution for developing Java-based applications. Your time, patience and usage of AppFuse has made it the strong foundation it is today. Last but certainly not least, thanks to all the great Java developers who wrote the frameworks that AppFuse uses - we're truly standing on the shoulders of giants.

What is AppFuse? Click here to find out.

AppFuse is an open source project and application that uses open source tools built on the Java platform to help you develop Web applications quickly and efficiently. It was originally developed to eliminate the ramp-up time found when building new web applications for customers. At its core, AppFuse is a project skeleton, similar to the one that's created by your IDE when you click through a wizard to create a new web project.

AppFuse 1.x uses Ant to create your project, as well as build/test/deploy it. AppFuse 2.0 uses Maven 2 to create your project as well as build/test/deploy it. IDE support is much better in 2.0 because you can generate the IDE project files with Maven plugins. AppFuse 1.x uses XDoclet and JDK 1.4+.

This project was started in April 2003.

AppFuse 2.0 is available as a Maven archetype. For information on creating a new project using this release, please see the QuickStart Guide or the demos and videos.

If you've used AppFuse 1.x, but not 2.x, you'll might want to read our Frequently Asked Questions. If you have any questions or issues, please post them to the user mailing list. The Maven Reference Guide has a map of Ant » Maven commands. Maven for Newbies might also be useful if you've never used Maven before. There is some support for Ant in this release.

AppFuse 2.0 contains over 200 pages of documentation, downloadable as a PDF (3 MB). You can also download all its dependencies and install them in your local repository if you want to work offline.

For more information, please see the 2.0 Release Notes. The 2.0 series of AppFuse has a minimum requirement of the following specification versions:

• Java Servlet 2.4 and JSP 2.0 (2.1 for JSF)
• Java 5+

New features in AppFuse 2.0 include:

• Maven 2 Integration
• Upgraded WebWork to Struts 2
• JDK 5, Annotations, JSP 2.0, Servlet 2.4
• JPA Support
• Generic CRUD backend
• Full Eclipse, IDEA and NetBeans support
• Fast startup and no deploy with Maven Jetty Plugin
• Testable on multiple appservers and databases with Cargo and profiles

We appreciate the time and effort everyone has put toward contributing code and documentation, posting to the mailing lists, and logging issues.

We're also grateful for the help from our sponsors, particularly Atlassian, Contegix, JetBrains, and Java.net. Atlassian and Contegix are especially awesome: Atlassian has donated licenses to all its products and Contegix has donated an entire server to the AppFuse project. Thanks guys - you rock!

Comments and issues should be posted to the mailing list.

Sun changes its ticker tymbol to JAVA

When I first read The Rise of JAVA - The Retirement of SUNW, I didn't think much of it. I believe I read it on some sort of news website, so I didn't realize folks would be so passionate about it. Reading the comments on Jonathan's blog is quite entertaining and smells somewhat of a TSS thread - except there's no back-and-forth banter. Dave provides a good roundup of reactions in Blogs on Sun's new stock ticker.

For me, one of the most interesting things to fall out of this is James Duncan Davidson's Remembering Java Naming Blunders Past.

Back in 1998 or so, there were a bunch of people in Cupertino?working in a building that used to belong to Apple?working to finish up the largest and most complicated release of the JDK to that date: JDK 1.2. Compared to JDK 1.0 and 1.1, it was enormous. It had slipped schedule a few times. And there were lots of changes and new APIs everywhere. So many that it was the first release where it was almost impossible to know how to use every Java API out there.

The powers that be really wanted to commorate this in a big way. They wanted to make a big splash when they officially launched the new version of Java in December of 98 at the Java Business Expo in New York. So, they decided to rename Java. I found out about this, along with all the other engineers working on Java, at an all-hands meeting in Cupertino.

The name was? wait for it? Java2000.

I met James at a MySQL Conference a few years back and he's full of stories like this. If you ever get a chance to hear one of his stories about the early days of Java at Sun - I highly recommend it.

Upgrading to Tomcat 6

Erik did it, so I tried it as well. This site is now running Tomcat 6.0.10 and it has to be the least painful major Tomcat upgrade I've ever done. By major, I mean upgrading from one version number (5.5.17) to the next. Apparently, no XML files changed (like they did from 4.1.x -> 5.0.x -> 5.5.x) because I was able to copy over conf/server.xml and conf/Catalina/** without any issues. The only change I had to make was to copy commons-logging.jar from Roller's WEB-INF/lib to JSPWiki's.

I have seen a couple of the following errors in my log files since I upgraded, so if you see any strange behavior, please let me know.

2-Mar-2007 12:36:10 AM org.apache.tomcat.util.http.Parameters processParameters
WARNING: Parameters: Character decoding failed. Parameter skipped.
java.io.CharConversionException: EOF
        at org.apache.tomcat.util.buf.UDecoder.convert(UDecoder.java:83)
        at org.apache.tomcat.util.buf.UDecoder.convert(UDecoder.java:49)
        at org.apache.tomcat.util.http.Parameters.urlDecode(Parameters.java:410)
        at org.apache.tomcat.util.http.Parameters.processParameters(Parameters.java:392)
        at org.apache.tomcat.util.http.Parameters.processParameters(Parameters.java:508)
        at org.apache.tomcat.util.http.Parameters.handleQueryParameters(Parameters.java:266)
        at org.apache.catalina.connector.Request.parseParameters(Request.java:2404)
        at org.apache.catalina.connector.Request.getParameterValues(Request.java:1089)
        at org.apache.catalina.connector.RequestFacade.getParameterValues(RequestFacade.java:396)
        at javax.servlet.ServletRequestWrapper.getParameterValues(ServletRequestWrapper.java:189)
        at org.acegisecurity.wrapper.SavedRequestAwareWrapper.getParameter(SavedRequestAwareWrapper.java:325)
        at org.apache.roller.ui.rendering.velocity.deprecated.OldPageRequest.(OldPageRequest.java:164)
        at org.apache.roller.ui.rendering.velocity.deprecated.RedirectServlet.figurePageRedirect(RedirectServlet.java:285)
        at org.apache.roller.ui.rendering.velocity.deprecated.RedirectServlet.doGet(RedirectServlet.java:131)

I tested AppFuse 2.0 on Tomcat 6.0.10 earlier today and impressed that 1) Cargo worked perfectly and 2) most of the web frameworks worked. Which one didn't? You guessed it - good ol' JSF. That's OK though, the JSF version of AppFuse (MyFaces 1.1.5 with Facelets 1.1.11) doesn't work with Jetty 6.1.1 either. The good news is I found a workaround - removing the el-api dependency from my pom.xml makes it work on both.

    <dependency>
        <groupId>javax.el</groupId>
        <artifactId>el-api</artifactId>
        <version>1.2</version>
    </dependency>

If I remove this dependency, everything works fine on Tomcat 6.0.10 and Jetty 6.1.1. Unfortunately, it seems this dependency is needed for Tomcat 5.x. Hopefully some fancy stuff with Maven profiles can fix this incompatibility.

AppFuse 2.0 Status

We're working hard on AppFuse 2.0. The good news is things are coming along really nicely. There's quite a few developers working on the project now and they've been a tremendous help. If I knew the move to Maven 2 would've inspired so much help, I would've done it a long time ago! We've got most of the archetypes created and we just need to work on documentation for the 2.0 release M1 release. As far as the roadmap is concerned, we've finished most of the code for an M2 release, but we still need to do documentation. I'm hoping to release 2.0 M1 on Thursday of next week.

If you want to try it, you can checkout the Hello World with AppFuse 2.0 video. After that, feel free to take it for a test drive using the QuickStart Guide.

New features in AppFuse 2.0:

• Maven 2 Integration
• Upgraded WebWork to Struts 2
• JDK 5, Annotations, JSP 2.0, Servlet 2.4
• JPA Support
• Generic CRUD backend
• Full Eclipse, IDEA and NetBeans support
• Fast startup and no deploy with Maven Jetty Plugin
• Testable on multiple appservers with Cargo and profiles

Speaking of goodies, I uploaded a bunch of AppFuse desktop backgrounds to Flickr. Thanks to Max Hays of Timberline Group for creating these.

Only 26 days left until the AppFuse 2.0 Release Party! Location TBD.

[TSE] Keynote: The Bigger Picture with Adrian Colyer

We've seen a lot of things over the last few days, but what about the big picture? It's not just about the Spring Framework anymore, but there's also a lot of sub-projects: SFW, SWF, SWS, S-OSGi. Then there's Enterprise services: clustering, persistence, messaging and scheduling. Industry trends: SOA, Web 2.0/RIA, RAD stacks.

Agenda

• Spring portfolio: unifying themes, fitting the pieces together (by layer) and future direction
• Facing the feature: my boss says I need a SOA, from auto-suggest to RIA and the quest for ever-increasing productivity

[Read More]

How do you get open source frameworks past the red tape?

From an e-mail I received earlier this month, with a subject of "Acceptance red tape":

After requesting permission to use the Spring Framework for the business logic and data access layers of an application, how do you fight something like this? Spring is not an approved Framework for the ********** environment. We understand the benefits of the framework. However, we have not certified it in our environment. Additionally, we have concerns that this framework will not gain long standing traction among the J2EE community. We would like to reduce the number of frameworks used in our environment, and do not want to be left with "legacy" frameworks that have little acceptance or support as is the case with the pico container. This is a response from one of our clients after asking about the use of a framework in our development after another vendor had used the PicoContainer without their permission. We have Spring experience and we love it. My responses have been to ask what they have certified that we could use and to ask their business staff to override their tech staff. I'm caught needing to redesign an aging J2EE application with an awfully over-architected original design confined to EJB 2.1, JSP 2.0, Servlet 2.4, and JDK 1.4.X in a very short amount of time. The additional responses were that they have only certified Struts and although both the business staff and the tech staff admit they know the benefits of Spring, neither of them are allowing us to use it.

My response:

Wow - I don't know what to say, especially when they say "Additionally, we have concerns that this framework will not gain long standing traction among the J2EE community." They're probably using Struts and they thinks it's wonderful, eh?

I could compose a long response with lots of details, but the fact that they prefer EJB over Spring is baffling. Spring is so much easier to program with, it's not even funny. Granted, EJB does have its place, but it's often used as a hammer for a problem that doesn't exist.

Have you experienced similar "Acceptance red tape" in your company? If so, how did you work around or work through it?

Continuum, Luntbuild, Pulse and NetBeans

Last night, I did a bit of playing with technologies new to me. First of all, I got AppFuse 2.0 running on Continuum. This was was easy enough, I just had to add <scm> information to each pom.xml. Thanks to those who recommended this approach. I thought it was a silly solution until I realized "mvn site" produced the wrong information when <scm> wasn't present for sub-modules.

Since I was playing with Continuous Integration tools, I decided to give Cerberus, LuntBuild, and Pulse a spin. My goal was to give each server the old "college try" and see if I could get them running with minimal effort. I don't know where I heard about Pulse, but it was somehow included in my tests.

Cerberus didn't work with my Cygwin/Ruby setup, so I was done with it quickly. LuntBuild worked pretty well, but the interface and configuration seemed kinda clunky. I also found it strange that it uses a 4.x version of Jetty - seems kinda old. I was surprised to see that it uses Tapestry for its web framework. Pulse was the nicest one with a kick-ass (ajaxified) user inferface, powered by Acegi, WebWork and Hibernate (according to its JARs). It was definitely the easiest to setup and use. While Pulse isn't free for commercial use, it is free for open source projects, as well as small teams.

Summary: Continuum, LuntBuild and Pulse seem to be the best tools for building Maven 2 projects. While CruiseControl works, and works well, it does require you to customize XML from the command line, whereas these tools allow you to do everything through a web interface.

Toward the end of the night, I downloaded NetBeans 5.5 and installed its Maven 2 Plugin. I was surprised at how full-featured this plugin is. I was able to build, test and run the AppFuse web modules in the embedded Tomcat without issues. It's definitely a cool plugin. As for NetBeans, it seemed pretty sluggish and I couldn't figure out how to get Ctrl+Shift+R functionality, which is a must for me these days. Also, I couldn't get the JSF support working for the AppFuse JSF Module, seemingly caused by the Maven plugin (project properties only has Maven options). Since NetBeans works so well with Maven 2, and it's much more full-featured than Eclipse, it seems natural to recommend it to AppFuse 2 users. Of course, I like IDEA a lot more, but there's no Maven 2 plugin that I know of.

Equinox (a.k.a. AppFuse Light) 1.7 Released!

This release's major new features are upgrading to Spring 2.0, Hibernate 3.2, an Ajax + Spring MVC version, an Acegi Security + Spring MVC version and Struts 2.0 as an optional web framework. It's highly likely that the "extras/security" package can be installed with other web frameworks, but it's only been tested with Spring MVC. Furthermore, this release provided all of the different combinations that Equinox provides - all 50 of them!

All of the frameworks used in Equinox, as well as most of its build/test system is explained in Spring Live. A summary of the changes are below (detailed release notes can be found in JIRA):

• Added extras/spring-ajax with examples of ajaxified displaytag (with AjaxAnywhere), in-place editing (Script.aculo.us), in-page updates (DWR) and lightbox (Lightbox gone Wild) popups.
• Added extras/security with Acegi Security integration for authentication and authorization.
• Automated creation and testing of all possible combinations for distribution.
• Converted from JSP to Facelets for JSF/MyFaces option.
• Integrated Ajax4JSF into JSF/MyFaces option.
• Added Struts 2.0.1 as web framework.
• Upgraded to Spring 2.0, including improved XML syntax and JSP Form Tags
• Added Cargo settings to pom.xml so it's possible to run web tests from Maven.
• Changed dataSource bean to use a connection pool.
• Added popup calendar (using jscalendar) to Spring MVC and Struts 2.
• Added OpenSessionInViewFilter for Hibernate and OpenPersistenceManagerInViewFilter for JDO/JPOX.
• Fixed foreign-language encoding issues with Spring's CharacterEncodingFilter.
• Changed from DAO to Dao to be more consistent with other projects.
• Dependent packages upgraded:
  • Canoo WebTest 1393
  • Cargo 0.8
  • Commons Validator 1.3.0
  • DWR 1.1.1
  • FreeMarker 2.3.8
  • jMock 1.1.0
  • JPOX 1.1.1
  • Hibernate 3.2
  • MyFaces 1.1.4
  • Spring 2.0
  • Spring Modules Validation 0.5
  • Struts 1.2.9
  • Tapestry 4.0.2
  • WebWork 2.2.4
• Dependent packages added:
  • Acegi Security 1.0.2
  • Ajax4JSF 1.0.2
  • AjaxAnywhere 1.2-rc2
  • Facelets 1.1.11
  • Struts 2.0.1

Download. For more information about installing the various options, see the README.txt file.

Demos:

• Spring · Spring + Ajax · Spring + Acegi
• JSF + Facelets
• Struts 1 · Struts 2
• Tapestry
• WebWork

Thanks to all the users of Equinox for making this a great release!

P.S. I'm fully aware that this project's name conflicts with an Eclipse project.