Raible Designs

Integrating GWT into AppFuse

I've been interested in integrating GWT into AppFuse ever since I blogged about it 4 years ago. A few months after that post, I wrote about Enhancing Evite.com with GWT and Grails. After Evite, I had a gig near Boston where I developed with GXT for the remainder of the year. When all was said and done, I ended up spending a year with GWT and really enjoyed my experience. I haven't used it much since.

GWT is scheduled to be integrated into AppFuse in version 4.0. That's quite a ways off. The good news is you might not have to wait that long, thanks to Iván García Sainz-Aja. Iván let us know about his work a couple weeks ago in an email to the appfuse-dev mailing list.

web/gwt> mvn -P gwtDebug -Dgwt.inplace=true gwt:compile jetty:run  

As you can imagine, I was very excited to hear about Iván's work. So I cloned his repo, built gwt-bootstrap locally and checked it out. Functionality wise, it was great! However, when I dug into the source code, I found a whole lotta code.

To see how the GWT flavor compared to the other implementations in AppFuse, I created a cloc report on the various web frameworks in AppFuse. I'm sure these reports could be adjusted to be more accurate, but I believe they give a good general overview. I posted some graphs that displays my findings in visual form.

When I sent this to the mailing list, Ivan responded that it was a lot of code and estimated 12 new files would be needed to CRUD an entity. This sure seems like a lot to me, but he defended this yesterday and noted that his implementation follows many of GWT's latest best practices: MVP pattern, Activities and Places, EventBus, Gin and Guice. He also shared a wiki page with explanations and diagrams of how things work.

The reason I'm writing this post is to get more feedback on this implementation. First of all, does GWT really require this much code? Secondly, are there other GWT implementations that reduce a lot of the boilerplate? SmartGWT, Vaadin* and Errai come to mind.

If you were starting a new GWT project and using AppFuse, how would you want it implemented?

* Vaadin 7 claims it can be used as a drop-in replacement for GWT. I tried replacing the gwt-servlet and gwt-user dependencies with Vaadin's, but it didn't work.

What's the best way to compare JVM Web Frameworks?

I've been comparing web frameworks ever since 2004. It was the first time I'd ever proposed a talk for a conference. ApacheCon was in Vegas that year and my buddy Bruce suggested I speak at it. I submitted the talk, got accepted and went to work learning the frameworks I was talking about. At the time, I had a lot of Struts experience and I'd made a good living learning it, consulting on it and blogging about it. However, there was a new kid on the block (Spring MVC) that was garnishing attention and some other frameworks (WebWork and Tapestry) that had a lot of high praise from developers. I was inspired to learn why so many people hated Struts.

Fast forward 8 years and I'm still comparing web frameworks. Why? Because there still seems to be a large audience that's interested in the topic. Witness InfoQ's Top 20 JVM Web Frameworks, which was one of their most-read articles for two months in a row. One of the beauties of the Java Community is that it's very diverse. There's tons of folks that are part of this community and, like it or not, several folks that are former Java Developers. However, these developers still seem to maintain an interest in the community and it's still one of the largest pools of talent out there. Java is still quite viable and only seems to be getting better with age.

So the topic of web frameworks on the JVM is still hot, and I still like to write about it. For those of you still enthusiastic about the topic, you're in luck. The two best websites for the Java Community, InfoQ and DZone (formerly Javalobby) are still very interested in the topic too!

2012 - A Year in Review

I wrote my first year in review blog entry way back in 2005. That means this year's is number 8. Since they keep getting longer every year, I figured I'd try something different this year and use sections similar to Remy Sharp.

• Professional
  • Business
  • Speaking
  • Projects
• Personal
• 2013

Professional

I spent the entirety of the year with one client: Taleo. Oracle bought them in February. In June, the transition to Oracle happened. My tasks and projects haven't changed much since the transition, but it has been a real pain to get paid on time. My contract with them is through the end of May. I hope to take July off (to get married) and August off (to honeymoon) and start a new gig in September.

I did minimal Java work throughout the year and spent most of my time doing CSS and JavaScript. I love doing front-end work much more than back-end, so day-to-day, it was very satisfying.

AppFuse 2.2.1 Released!

The AppFuse Team is pleased to announce the release of AppFuse 2.2.1. This release includes upgrades to all dependencies to bring them up-to-date with their latest releases. Most notable are Hibernate 4, Struts 2.3.7, Apache CXF 2.7.0 and Spring Security 3.1.3. In addition, we've integrated HTML5, Twitter Bootstrap, jQuery and replaced Compass with Hibernate Search. Last but not least, we've added full support for Java 7 and integrated many security improvements. For more details on specific changes see the release notes.

What is AppFuse?
AppFuse is a full-stack framework for building web applications on the JVM. It was originally developed to eliminate the ramp-up time when building new web applications. Over the years, it has matured into a very testable and secure system for creating Java-based webapps.

Demos for this release can be viewed at http://demo.appfuse.org. Please see the QuickStart Guide to get started with this release.

A number of blog posts were written about features that went into this release while it was being developed:

• Improving AppFuse's PageSpeed with Apache
• New Liquibase and wro4j Tutorials from J. García
• AppFuse News: GitHub, Hibernate Search and The Future
• Refreshing AppFuse's UI with Twitter Bootstrap
• Upgrading AppFuse to Spring Security 3.1 and Spring 3.1
• Integrating OAuth with AppFuse and its REST API

If you have questions about AppFuse, please read the FAQ or join the mailing list. If you find any issues, please report them on the users mailing list.

Thanks to everyone for their help contributing patches, writing documentation and participating on the mailing lists.

We greatly appreciate the help from our sponsors, particularly Atlassian, Contegix and JetBrains. We highly recommend using the new IntelliJ IDEA 12 for developing web applications.

November Travels to Kauai and Wenatchee

For the last two Novembers, we've celebrated Abbie's birthday, watched the Broncos beat the Chiefs and then headed to Antwerp, Belgium for Devoxx.

2010 was awesome. 2011 was even better.

This year, we chose to celebrate my parent's 40th wedding anniversary instead. It wasn't a hard choice, since they chose Hawaii as their destination of choice. After visiting last year and this summer, we're pretty much in when anyone suggests Hawaii. We got our flights for $10, rented an awesome beach-front house and had a great time with my parents and sisters.

Below was the view from our backyard.

The purpose of this post is to 1) show off some of Trish's spectacular photos and 2) tell you a bit about what we enjoyed.

First of all, the location was fantastic. If you get a chance to stay at Nani Nani Hale, I highly recommend it. We could walk to the beach in seconds and spent a few hours each day on the lanai, enjoying each other's company, playing games, napping and reading. The sunsets were spectacular.

We felt like we never had to leave and really enjoyed the relaxing atmosphere.

We did a lot of surfing; almost every day.

It was awesome seeing my parents so happy after all these years.

And it was great spending so much time with my family and their long-time friends Mike and Mai from Montana.

Thanksgiving in Wenatchee
We flew back from Hawaii on Monday, November 19th. A red eye brought us to Denver, where we picked up Abbie and Jack and headed to Washington on Wednesday.

My sister and her wife recently moved from Chelan to Wenatchee and Thanksgiving at their house was the name of the game. My parents were already there, since they started their journey to Hawaii from Seattle. We rented another nice VRBO and enjoyed ourselves while cooking, watching football, playing games, hot-tubbing and watching movies.

I love Trish's panorama of Wenatchee in the early morn.

The kids had fun...

As for the adults? I'll let the photo speak for itself.

For more pictures, see Trish's Kauai 2012 and Wenatchee 2012 albums.

Improving AppFuse's PageSpeed with Apache

One of the most important things when developing webapps is to make them fast. With AppFuse, we've tried to incorporate many of the 14 rules for faster-loading websites. We had a gzip filter before it was cool (2003) and replaced it with the one from EhCache. However, users experienced issues with both of these, both with XFire/CXF and WebWork/Struts 2 and JSPs. Because of these issues, we disabled gzipping a few releases ago.

This article is designed to show you how you can make your AppFuse webapp faster, without modifying any code. The good news is this applies to any webapp that you can deploy behind Apache.

Last Friday, I sent an email to the good folks at Contegix to see if they could install mod_pagespeed on the Apache server that sits in front of *.appfuse.org. My goal was to improve the YSlow and PageSpeed scores of the apps hosted on demo.appfuse.org. I discovered they were getting a dismal score of 24 and figured we could do a lot better. mod_pagespeed speeds up your site and reduces page load time by automatically applying web performance best practices. It seemed like an easy solution.

Unfortunately, we were unable to use mod_pagespeed. From the guys at Contegix:

Attempting to install mod_pagespeed as you requested, we find that it requires Apache httpd 2.2 and libstdc++ 4.1.2, both of which are unsupported in RHEL4. To get mod_pagespeed to work on your present operating system basically means re-rolling the core components, which would make them unsupported. I'm afraid mod_pagespeed is simply not an option on your present configuration.

Since I still wanted to improve performance, I opted for another route instead: using mod_deflate (for gzipping) and mod_expires (for expires headers). I also turned on KeepAlive as recommended by PageSpeed Insights.

mod_deflate
mod_deflate was already installed in Apache (version 2.0.52), so all I had to do was configure it. On RHEL4, Apache is installed at /etc/httpd and there's a conf.d directory that contains all the configuration files. I created a file at /etc/httpd/conf.d/deflate.conf and populated it with the following:

#
# mod_deflate configuration
#
<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
    SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
    
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain text/html text/xml text/css application/xml application/xhtml+xml application/rss+xml application/javascript application/x-javascript
    
    DeflateCompressionLevel 9
    
    BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
    BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
    BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
    
    DeflateFilterNote Input instream
    DeflateFilterNote Output outstream
    DeflateFilterNote Ratio ratio
    
    LogFormat '"%r" %{outstream}n/%{instream}n (%{ratio}n%%)' deflate
    
</IfModule>

At first, I had separate lines for all the different content types (as recommended by this article). The Contegix support crew figured out the solution (everything needed to be on one line) in 14 minutes, updated the config and verified it worked using an http compression testing page.

mod_expires
mod_expires was already installed, so I added a config file at /etc/httpd/conf.d/expires.conf. I used this howto and asked Contegix for help when it didn't work. Their response took quite a bit longer this time (49 minutes), but they once again figured it out:

It appears that FilesMatch does not like to play will JkMount. It does work using content type.

My final config for expires.conf:

<IfModule mod_expires.c>
    ExpiresActive On
    
    <FilesMatch "\.(jpe?g|png|gif|js|css)$">
        ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 week"
    </FilesMatch>
    
    ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 week"
    ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 week"
    ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 week"
    ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 week"
    ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 1 week"
    ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 1 week"
</IfModule>

I used "1 week" because we're changing things quite a bit right now and we haven't integrated resource fingerprinting yet.

KeepAlive
The last thing I did to improve performance was to turn on KeepAlive by editing /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf and changing Off to On.

#
# KeepAlive: Whether or not to allow persistent connections (more than
# one request per connection). Set to "Off" to deactivate.
#
KeepAlive On

Summary
As a result of these changes, our PageSpeed score went from 24 to 96 and YSlow went from a 90 to a 98. When I started this experiment, I was only trying to fix demo.appfuse.org. However, it also improved the speed of all the other *.appfuse.org sites, including Confluence, Bamboo, JIRA and FishEye. Thanks for all the help Contegix! There's a good chance you've given me back a few minutes in each day.

Originally posted on the AppFuse Blog.

Why the bias against JSF?

In my last post about InfoQ's Top 20 Web Frameworks for the JVM, I received a thought-provoking comment from henk53:

There is one little thing that does bother me in those presentations, and that's your fairly obvious bias against JSF.
...
If you are presenting yourself as, more or less, an authority on comparing web frameworks, then having a fairly obvious biased against one of them is just peculiar. I, all of my team, and various clients distrust your ranking of JSF. We do look at your data if the choice is between other frameworks, but as soon as JSF comes into the picture we just look elsewhere.

I'm not really sure where this bias comes from. Yes, JSF 1.0 sucked and 1.2 was only marginally better, but 2.0 is really cool and productive and there are SUPERB component and utility libraries now like PrimeFaces and OmniFaces. As a researcher of this topic I think you should keep up the date and not stick to some old grudge.

This is true, I am biased against JSF. It all started with my first JSF experience back in August 2004. If you remember correctly, 2004 was a big year: JSF 1.0, Spring 1.0 and Flex 1.0 were all released. The "AJAX" term was coined in early 2005.

By 2007 and 2008, JSF still hadn't gotten any better. In late 2009, JSF 2.0 was released and I upgraded in March 2011. As you can see from the aforementioned post, I ran into quite a few issues upgrading. JSF was also the hardest one to get working with extension-less URLs.

Most of my issues with JSF come from having maintained an application built with it since 2004. If I were to start a new application without any legacy migration issues, I imagine it wouldn't be as difficult. However, if you compare it to Struts 2 and Spring MVC, I've had little-to-no issues upgrading those applications over the years.

Also, I'm not just biased against JSF, but most component-based web frameworks. Just ask the Tapestry and Wicket folks. They've felt my criticisms over the years. My reason for preferring request-based frameworks like Struts 2/Spring MVC and Grails/Play has been because I've never seen the appeal in component-based frameworks. Often I've found that their components are just widgets that you can get from any decent JavaScript framework. And chances are that JavaScript framework can work with any web framework. Also, I've worked on a lot of high-traffic web applications that require statelessness for scalability.

I see the value in component-based frameworks, I just don't think components should be authored on the server-side. Most of the Java-based component frameworks require 2+ files for components (one for the component, one for the view, possibly one for the config). I love GWT's component concept in that you can just extract a class and re-use it. With JS frameworks, you can often just include a script. These days, when I think of good component-based frameworks, I think of jQuery UI and Twitter Bootstrap.

All that being said, there's a lot of folks praising JSF 2 (and PrimeFaces moreso). That's why I'll be integrating it (or merging your pull request) into the 2.3 release of AppFuse. Since PrimeFaces contains a Bootstrap theme, I hope this is a pleasant experience and my overall opinion of JSF improves.

In other component-based frameworks in AppFuse news, Tapestry 5 has gotten really fast in the last year. I imagine this is because we have a Tapestry expert, Serge Eby, working on it. And we're planning on adding Wicket in the 2.3 release.

So even though I prefer request-based frameworks with REST support and Bootstrap, that doesn't mean everyone does. I'll do my best to be less-biased in the future. However, please remember that my view on web frameworks is as a developer, not an analyst. And aren't developers supposed to be opinionated?

InfoQ's Top 20 Web Frameworks for the JVM

Back in early October, InfoQ.com published a community research article titled Top 20 Web Frameworks for the JVM. Their goal seemed to be fairly simple:

Using the new community research tool, we at InfoQ want to get YOUR opinions on the relative importance and maturity of a variety of web frameworks that are targeted for the JVM. Please vote by dragging each practice across two dimensions – how important is the framework relative to the other frameworks, and how much is it actually used in real teams and projects.

When I first saw this article, I noticed some strange web frameworks listed. Namely, Netty, SiteMesh and Spark. I haven't heard of many folks using Netty for a web framework, but I'm sure it's possible. SiteMesh is certainly not a web framework and I've never even heard of Spark. And where is GWT and Vaadin? Regardless of the choices, I went ahead and voted.

Last week, InfoQ posted their top content for October on Facebook.

• Top 20 Web Frameworks for the JVM 25,992 PV
• Ruby on Rails vs. Node.js at LinkedIn 11,904 PV
• Mobile Webdev: The Horror 11,150 PV
• A Brief Introduction to REST 8,872 PV
• Kanban and Scrum - making the most of both 7,665 PV

First of all, it's interesting to see that JVM Web Frameworks is still a hot topic for developers. Whenever I do my Comparing JVM Web Frameworks talk at conferences, I always see a few jabs about "he's still doing that talk!?" Yes, it seems strange that a talk I first did in 2004 is still in high demand.

Secondly, I think InfoQ does good in showing how the frameworks ranked and showing their heatmaps. Below are their rankings from 1109 participants.

According to this research, the top 5 web frameworks for the JVM are Spring MVC, Play, Grails, JSF and Struts (I hope those surveyed meant Struts 2, not Struts 1).

In my research from last February (slide 21), I ranked them (with no particular weightings) as Grails, GWT, JRuby on Rails, Spring MVC and Vaadin. So I guess you could say I got 2 out of 5 right (Grails and Spring MVC). Not bad considering InfoQ didn't even consider GWT and Vaadin.

Another intriguing data point in this study is each frameworks' heatmap. For example, below are heatmaps for the top 4 frameworks.

Notice how Grails and Spring MVC are both hotter in the bottom right corner? It seems the community's overall opinions of these two frameworks are more aligned than JSF and Play, which a fair amount of folks rank as hyped and unimportant.

What I really like about this research is it's the community's opinions, visualized. It also confirms that some of my favorite frameworks are still on top. I don't know if JSF belongs as a top framework, however it seems a lot of folks do. I recently thought about removing it from AppFuse, but decided to keep it (at least for the next release). I hope InfoQ does more research projects like this, especially if they get their list of web frameworks right.

AppFuse News: GitHub, Hibernate Search and The Future

It's been a while since I've written anything about AppFuse, but since the project has had quite a bit of activity lately, now seems like a good time.

GitHub
First of all, we moved the source code from java.net to GitHub way back in June. Thanks to Serge for helping with this process and making it quick and painless. For some reason, shortly after moving, we started having quite a few build issues with Bamboo. I was able to diagnose the problem as not enough memory on our server. Thankfully, Contegix was able to add another 2GB of RAM to our box and get everything back up-to-snuff.

New Committer: J. Garcia
J. Garcia has been a regular voice on the users and developers mailing list for several months. He's recently started contributing a lot of patches in JIRA and seems genuinely interested in the success of AppFuse. That's why we voted and added him as a committer. To prove this was a smart move, he recently replaced Compass with Hibernate Search and upgraded to Hibernate 4. As part of this work, he removed iBATIS support, which brings me to my next point.

The Future
In mid-August, I sent an email to the community, asking them "Anyone using iBATIS?"

I'm thinking of replacing AppFuse's Data Tier with Spring Data, especially because it has NoSQL and REST support. There's a good intro on InfoQ today:

http://www.infoq.com/articles/spring-data-intro

Does anyone see an issue with this? The lack of iBATIS support could be an issue, but I doubt it since if we wanted to continue supporting it, we should move to MyBATIS.

Everyone agreed this was a good idea and it seemed like a logical time to remove iBATIS support. In addition, I posted a roadmap I jotted down in early May. Since we've missed all the dates so far, I've removed them from the listing below. We hope to get 1-2 releases done by the end of this year, with 2.2 in the next 2-3 weeks.

2.2
Hibernate 4
Hibernate Search
Bootstrap
H5BP

2.3
AMP for all light modules
Wicket
PrimeFaces

2.4
JSR 303 (might require removing or developing client-side support)
Mockito instead of jMock/EasyMock

2.5
AMP one-to-many
Spring Data
MyBatis (if there's interest in adding it back in)

2.6
wro4j for concatenation and minimizing JS and CSS
pjax - https://github.com/defunkt/jquery-pjax

2.7
Scala example
Gradle example
Article about examples

3.0
GWT

Maven Central Statistics
To prove there's still a fair amount of folks using AppFuse, here's some statistic from Sonatype's OSS Repository Hosting Service.

From this screenshot, you can see that AppFuse artifacts are downloaded around 7,000 times per month. The following graph is even more interesting. Apparently, around 3,000 new projects are created with AppFuse archetypes each month.

The AppFuse Name
Finally, I recently discovered that ShoreTel decided to name a new product AppFuse. I guess this signifies two things: 1) it's a good name for a product and 2) someone didn't do their research before naming it. At this point, I'm not too concerned, but it is an interesting development.

Core HTML5 Canvas Book Review

I've known David Geary for quite some time, from our original meeting in the blogosphere to speaking on the No Fluff Tour. At first, I had trouble respecting the guy because he was such a JSF Fanboy. However, over the years, he's switched to Ruby on Rails, GWT and now he's all about HTML5. Specifically, HTML5's <canvas> element. When David asked me if I'd like a copy of his lastest book, I jumped at the opportunity.

I received it in the mail shortly before heading to Hawaii this summer. I started reading it by the pool the next day.

I was immediately impressed that the book was printed in color. The first copy I ever saw of my Spring Primer was in color and it really popped. Geary's book does the same and I'm glad the publisher decided the extra cost of printing was worth it. In the preface (and in a recent blog post), David explains how he wrote the book code-first in the Zen tradition, so you can read it without reading. I saw him write somewhere that he spent 2 years, 60 hours per week writing it. It really shows - the sheer amount of code and knowledge in this book is amazing.

Looking back at the Table of Contents, I remember getting overwhelmed early on. Not overwhelmed in that I didn't understand how things were working, but more like "there's too much in here to try and remember it all". I haven't used algebra since high school, and right there on page 53 it says:

To do anything interesting with Canvas, you need a good basic understanding of basic mathematics, especially working with algebraic equations, trigonometry, and vectors.

Reading the book poolside wasn't a huge motivator to refresh my algebraic knowledge, but I did enjoy David's brief 10-page refresher. In Chapter 2 on Drawing, the book dives into the low-level API that canvas offers for drawing rectangles, circles and polygons. It also goes on to show you how to do gradients, patterns and shadows as well as all there is to know about paths, stroking and filling. This is when it hits you that <canvas> is more about JavaScript than HTML. In fact, it's usually only a couple lines of HTML and a whole lotta JavaScript.

In Chapter 3, you learn about text and how to work with fonts and paragraphs. David even spends 10 pages showing you how to implement a Paragraph, complete with positioning the cursor, adding new lines and working with backspace. It really makes you appreciate what HTML offers you with the good ol' <p> and <input type="text">.

Chapter 4 is where you learn about working with images and video, using offscreen canvases and working with a canvas within a canvas. I believe I was back in Colorado when I started reading this chapter. It's also where I succumbed to the fact that this was an excellent reference book and not something I was going to read, learn from and start using the next week. It feels like a book I'll refer back to many times when using <canvas> on a project. The amount of knowledge in the book seems akin to Rod Johnson's J2EE Development without EJB. I remember getting the general gist of Rod's ideas while reading the book, but not knowing how to put them into use. Then the Spring Framework was introduced and everything became clear. As I read Geary's book, I thought the same thing - someone really needs to develop a simpler API for Canvas.

As I read on, through chapters on Animations, Sprites, Physics, Collision Detection and Game Development, it hit me - maybe that's what David is doing!

Throughout the book, David builds a framework for working with Shapes, animating them and finally, for putting them to work in a gaming environment. The Ungame is nice in that it shows you how to use a game engine for building your own games. Then he goes on to show you a Pinball game that looks overly complex, but breaks it down into terms you can understand.

The last chapter is on Mobile development. It explains in detail about the viewport metatag, media queries for CSS and touch events. The section on iOS5 is good, but does make the book seem slightly outdated with iOS6 coming out next week. I'm sure all of the content is still relevant, but it almost seems like labeling it iOS5+ would've been better. In the final pages of the book, you learn how using a canvas that requires typing on a touch device might suck. David shows you how to implement a Virtual Keyboard to handle these situations, since the native keyboard won't pop up unless you're typing into HTML controls like <input> and <textarea>.

I read this book to learn more about Canvas and what it was capable of. I learned all it can do and much, much more. I learned how animations and timing can be different between browsers and how you might need to create a polyfill for requestAnimationFrame for it to work consistently.

More than anything, I recognized that this is one of the few technical books I've read in a long time that's become an instant valuable resource. With other books, the information is often available online. Not so with Geary's book. To me, it seems like the best resource available for learning and using HTML5 Canvas.

Well done, David, well done.