Raible Designs

[ANN] Equinox 1.5 Released

This release's major new feature is dependency downloading using Maven 2's Ant tasks. The main reason I used Maven 2 over Ivy is because I've heard rumors that Ant 1.7 will include dependency downloading - and they're planning on integrating the work that Maven has already done.

One of the nice things about using Maven 2's Ant Tasks, is you can download Maven 2 and generate your Eclipse or IDEA (possibly even Netbeans) project files using "mvn eclipse:eclipse" or "mvn idea:idea". You can also use Maven 2 to build and test things if you like. The only thing that doesn't currently when using Maven to test Equinox is the web tests with Cargo. I can try to get those working if there's enough demand. For now, you'll have to use Ant if you want to test the UI.

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

• Removed packaged JARs in favor of Maven 2's Ant Tasks. Dependencies are now downloaded on-demand, greatly reducing the size of Equinox-based applications.
• By specifying compile, test and runtime dependencies in a pom.xml file, Equinox applications can now be built with Maven 2. The only difference between building with Maven 2 and Ant (at this time) is that the M2 build does not support testing with Cargo. However, there is an M2 Cargo plugin so this shouldn't be hard to fix if you have that itch.
• Added DWR, Script.aculo.us and Prototype to simplify Ajax development.
• Added Beandoc support - simply run "ant beandoc" to see javadoc-style documentation of Spring context files.
• Refactored UserManagerTest to be UserManagerImplTest; renamed UserManagerIntegrationTest to UserManagerTest.
• Changed BaseDAOTestCase to extend AbstractTransactionalDataSourceSpringContextTests.
• [Hibernate] Added example ehcache.xml to web/WEB-INF/classes for default cache settings.
• [JSF] Removed client-side validation because corejsf-validator.jar causes issues with Spring's Ant-style path matching.
• [Spring] Fixed number editor and edit logic in UserFormController.
• [Struts] Fixed issue with installation where ContextLoaderPlugin was loading ApplicationContext a 2nd time b/c the listener was not being commented out.
• Dependent packages upgraded:
  • Cargo 0.6
  • Hibernate 3.1
  • iBATIS 2.1.6
  • JPOX 1.1.0 Beta 4
  • MyFaces 1.1.1
  • PostgreSQL JDBC Driver 8.1 Build 404
  • Spring 1.2.6
  • Struts 1.2.8

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

Demos:

• Spring
• JSF
• Struts
• Tapestry
• WebWork

The basic Equinox download contains all the various web and persistence framework options in the "extras" folder. If you have issues replacing the web framework or persistence engine, please enter an issue in JIRA and I'll build and upload a customized version for you.

Remotely debug your app in Eclipse

Levent Gurses has a nice blog entry on Remote Debugging with Eclipse. I was able to use his instructions a couple months ago to attach to a remote instance of WebLogic (8.1 SP4) to debug an application. The beauty of his instructions is I had it all working in about 5 minutes. Yesterday I realized you could use the settings in *any* application server, and remotely debug it - or at least you should be able to. Today I noticed he added instructions for Tomcat and JBoss. Good stuff - thanks Levent!

Here's the settings you need in your startup script - just in case Levent's blog is down the next time I need this info.

-Xdebug -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=n,address=1044

Equinox 1.5 Beta 1 Released

This release is mainly to test out dependency downloading using Maven 2's Ant tasks. In addition, a few bugs have been fixed, but there's quite a few more on the roadmap. I plan to fix all of these before releasing 1.5 in a couple weeks.

Please test out this release if you have a chance. One of the nice things about using Maven 2's Ant Tasks, is you can download Maven 2 and generate your Eclipse or IDEA (possibly even Netbeans) project files using "mvn eclipse:eclipse" or "mvn idea:idea". You can also use Maven 2 to build and test things if you like. The only thing that doesn't currently work with Maven is the web tests with Cargo. I can try to get those working if there's enough demand. For now, you'll have to use Ant if you want to test the UI.

The download is much smaller now - barely over 1MB vs. ~20MB for 1.4. Most of the size comes from the Maven 2 Ant Tasks - which is a 869KB JAR. Of course, I could've made the distribution even smaller and required you to download the JAR and put it in $ANT_HOME/lib, but I decided to make things easier by including it.

For more information about installing the various options, see the README.txt file. Currently, you can use the following persistence frameworks:

• Hibernate
• iBatis
• JDO (JPOX
• OJB
• Spring JDBC

And a number of web frameworks too, as listed below with links to demos.

• Spring MVC
• JSF (MyFaces)
• Struts
• Tapestry
• WebWork

Update: I forget to mention that I owe a big thanks to Carlos Sanchez. He (and the other Maven developers) have been great in helping to resolve all the issues I found with transitive dependencies.

Clustering OSCache

For the past few days, I've been tuning and configuring OSCache in a clustered (WebLogic) environment. While setting it up was fairly easy, there was some fundamental concepts that took me a bit to figure out.

First of all, I chose to use JavaGroups instead of JMS. The primary reason behind this was it was easier to configure, but I also discovered that if you use JMS - you have to have a unique "cache.cluster.jms.node.name" property in your oscache.properties file on each server. This means to use OSCache with JMS, you have to build two different EARs. At least that's my impression. If you've figured out a better way to do this, please let me know.

In the application I'm working on, there are 4 different caches: one for Hibernate, and several other ones we've created with OSCache and Spring. For the past week, I developed a feature where we cache a user's account information across the cluster. The feature is more like an HttpSession than a cache b/c it's designed to replicate an authentication token (similar to a session id) across all the master servers.

After much head pounding, I discovered that OSCache doesn't update other nodes in a cluster for inserts and updates. It only broadcasts flushes. After understanding how OSCache works, it was much easier for me to code the solution (sans OSCache). If you'd like to see OSCache support replicating a cache across a cluster, vote for CACHE-96.

Subversion options for open source projects?

I've been using Subversion on quite a few projects lately and I have a hard time switching back to CVS. I currently use CVS for most open source projects, particularly AppFuse and Equinox - which I work on the most. A discussion started this morning on the AppFuse Mailing List about moving to Subversion. While I'd love to do this, I'd prefer to do it at java.net - so I don't have to completely abandon our hosted environment there. However, I don't think java.net is planning to offer Subversion anytime soon. If we move source control to somewhere else, we're pretty much just using it for the mailing list. Then again, the mailing list archive kinda sucks and you can't get it archived by mail-archive.com.

That being said, it might be nice to host everything ourselves. This might allow us to get something like Jive Forums setup. WebWork uses it and it has a pretty cool feature that the mailing list and forums are integrated (messages go to both). While the idea of self-hosting sounds appealing, it also sounds like it might be a lot of work. For hosted SVN options, it seems that there's JavaForge, Codehaus (which I believe is invite-only) and CVSDude. Any other options you know of?

First Magazine Article: Challenges in the J2EE Web Tier

It's official - I've written (and published) my first article in a magazine. If you received the July issue of Java Developer's Journal, you'll see my article titled Challenges in the J2EE Web Tier.

Over the course of its life, the J2EE Web Tier has faced many challenges in easing Web application development. While it's a scalable, enterprise-ready platform, it isn't exactly developer-friendly. Particular challenges to Web developers include the need for a standard Web framework, compatible expression languages, and availability of components. Several Web frameworks have been developed to resolve these issues, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. This article discusses the unique challenges of the J2EE Web Tier and how various technologies have attempted resolve them. By learning from and competing with each other, these Web technologies play an important role in pushing the limits of excellence to produce ever-higher standards of Web application development.

Enjoy!

San Francisco Giants

This evening, Matt Filios and I headed down the street to Giants Stadium to watch the Giants play the Braves. The park was very cool, the Guinness was good - and the Giants won in the bottom of the ninth. It was an awesome game and our 20th row seats behind home plate were pretty nice too.

eXtremeTable - another table tag for sorting and paging

From the AppFuse mailing list and the Spring Forums, I learned about eXtremeTable. This JSP Tag looks similar to the Display Tag, except that it includes support for checkboxes and filtering columns out-of-the-box. If you've used this tag, please let me know how it's working for you.

[JavaOne] Programming Puzzlers with the Google Guys

I'm sitting in a session titled "Yet More Programming Puzzlers" by Joshua Block and Neal Gafter. The other two sessions I chose for this time slot were Groovy and EJB 3. The main reason I chose this session is I've seen these guys in action before and they're excellent speakers. As part of this conference, I'd like to learn a bit about technology - but I'm more interested in becoming a better speaker. This is only my second of the day, with the first being the general session this morning. The afternoon has been spent networking, doing some Virtuas booth time, and presentation a short talk on AppFuse on the java.net booth.

In other news, it's pretty cool to see that BEA is going to start supporting Spring and Struts in its tools and servers.

The BEA WebLogic Workshop and other tools will be designed to allow applications to be built or blended from leading open source frameworks, including Apache Beehive, the Spring Framework and Apache Struts, and can then be deployed on BEA WebLogic Server. BEA will also certify the BEA WebLogic Workshop tools for Apache Geronimo and Apache Tomcat.

The Google Guys session? Entertaining and packed. All chairs were filled and many people were standing in the back and on the sides.

Presentations: Acegi Security and Spring Web Flow

I just noticed that the javaBin site has published the talks I did at the Norway JUGs. Here are two additional presentations that I didn't post last time:

• Acegi Security
• Spring Web Flow

In the near future, I hope to start taking more of Kathy Sierra's advice and reducing my presentations to almost nothing. This will diminish their value when I post them, but hopefully make the presentations a lot more fun to attend.