Raible Designs

[TSE] Rapid Web Application Development with Rob Harrop

There's a couple of other sessions I should probably go to, namely Juergen's talk on Transactions and Mark Fisher's Message Driven POJOs Rock! However, transactions is generally a pretty boring topic and I don't see myself developing any MDPs in the next two weeks. If you don't use your knowledge in two weeks, you generally lose it, so I'll wait to learn more about MDPs until someone pays me to. I know a fair bit already, so I don't know that there's a whole lot more to learn.

I'm attending Rob Harrop's Rapid Web Application Development Essentials talk. With any luck, I'll learn some new tips that we can use in AppFuse.[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?

Should I rename Equinox to AppFuse LE?

I'm curious to know if folks think I should rename Equinox to "AppFuse LE"? LE stands for "Light Edition" in this context, but I'm open to other suggestions. Even though my Equinox project is ranked higher than Eclipse's Equinox project, it's obvious there's a name clash. It seems to make sense for me to change the name since it's a one-man project and Eclipse is a huge organization. AppFuse LE seems like a good descriptive name, as does "AppFuse Light" and "Spring Kickstart".

Eventually, I'd like to figure out a way to merge AppFuse and Equinox. If users could start with something like Equinox (no features) and plug-in the various features, that'd be pretty cool. Some web frameworks (i.e. Struts 2) have a plugin feature, but most don't. I figure we can leverage Struts 2 for all frameworks, and convert to specific frameworks' plugin features if they're added. Of course, we're also looking at OSGi and Spring's OSGi support for our plugin architecture. The only problem with OSGi is it looks pretty complicated compared to Struts 2's plugin system.

The other advantage of changing the name is I could create a new java.net project with SVN support and not have to pay for the CVS -> SVN conversion. Of course, leaving the name the same also makes it pretty easy as there would be no additional work for me.

Thoughts?

DJUG Tonight: Google Maps and Struts 2

If you're in the Denver area, tonight's DJUG should be a good one. Scott Davis is presenting on how to Roll your own Google Maps and I'm talking about Migrating from Struts 1 to Struts 2. I've seen Scott's presentation and it's very good. He explains the basics of CSS and JavaScript so even if you're new to web stuff, you won't be lost.

The nice thing about being the main speaker is I can almost guarantee that the talk will finish on time, pending questions and answers of course. With any luck, we'll be at the Rock Bottom by 8:30. Here's the current agenda:

5:30-6 p.m. Food and Networking
6-7 p.m. Basic Concepts
7-7:15 p.m. Break and Announcements
7:15-8:15 p.m. Main Meeting
8:15-8:30 p.m. Questions and Answers
8:30 p.m. Door Prizes

Update: Download Migrating from Struts 1 to Struts 2 (PDF, 4.7 MB).

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

If you're interested in learning about Struts 2 or AppFuse, I'm doing a number of speaking engagements in the next month:

• November 8th at Denver's JUG - Migrating from Struts 1 to Struts 2
• November 11th at No Fluff Rocky Mountain - Migrating from Struts 1 to Struts 2 and Seven simple reasons to use AppFuse
• November 16th at Denver's JBoss User Group - Seven simple reasons to use AppFuse

How's that for getting some mileage out of my CSS presentations?

I don't know who will be doing the Basic Concepts talk at DJUG, but I'm pretty sure Chris Maki will be presenting on JPA at the JBoss User Group meeting.

In addition to these local talks, I'll also be talking at The Spring Experience on What's new in AppFuse 2.0. Since my talk is at 9:30 p.m. on Saturday night, I'm looking into getting some free beer to bribe people into showing up.

AppFuse 1.9.4 Released

This release's major new features are upgrading to Spring 2.0, Hibernate 3.2, and Facelets + Ajax4JSF integration for the JSF option. In addition, many libraries have been fixed and a few bugs have been squashed.

To install and configure AppFuse for development, see the QuickStart Guide. Thanks to all the sponsors who have contributed products and free hosting to the AppFuse project.

• Download
• Release Notes
• 7 Simple Reasons to use AppFuse

To see how AppFuse works, please see the following demos (username: mraible, password: tomcat):

• Struts + Spring + Hibernate
• Spring + iBATIS
• WebWork + Spring + Hibernate
• JSF + Spring + Hibernate
• Tapestry + Spring + Hibernate

Comments and issues can be sent to the mailing list or posted to JIRA.

Note: If you're building AppFuse on Linux, you should be aware of some non-English encoding issues. The solution is to add something like the following to your ~/.bashrc file.

export LC_CENGINE=en_US
export LANG=en_US
export LANGUAGE=en_US

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.

Confluence installed for AppFuse 2.0 Documentation

The last item on the AppFuse Roadmap for 2.0 M1 is setting up the documentation system. I'm still undecided on whether Confluence or DocBook is a better system to use. However, I am certain that using a wiki to document an open source project is the lowest barrier to entry. For more on this topic, see my post from a month ago. In an ideal world, Confluence could be used as an authoring tool, and everything could be exported to DocBook for storing in SVN. Even better, pages that are "core" to AppFuse could be automatically saved in Subversion, and built using Maven's DocBook (or Confluence) support. Who knows, this is still new territory for me, and I feel like I'm losing momentum just thinking about it.

So far, I've installed Confluence 2.2.9 at http://dev.appfuse.org, but this will change in the coming weeks. I plan on eventually moving it to appfuse.org and leaving the demos on the demo.appfuse.org server. Hopefully there won't be too many 404s when we make the change.

Currently, I have Adaptavist's Builder installed for managing/manipulating themes. I've done some work with the default theme, but I think we can do much better. One cool thing I did find was the Page Tree Plugin that allows for Ajaxified tree menus like Stripes has.

Thanks to Atlassian and Adaptavist for the free product licenses.

MyFaces + Facelets vs. Shale

At some point, I plan on replacing the JSF+JSP combination in AppFuse with JSF+Facelets. However, I'm wondering if this is just an interim step to a more full-featured framework like Shale and its Clay templates. Has anyone out there tried both Shale and MyFaces+Facelets? If so, which one worked best for you?

Should we use Shale for the JSF framework in AppFuse or is MyFaces + Facelets good enough?

Can JSP-based components (particularly Ajax ones) be used with Clay and/or Facelets? What's the best Ajax-enabled component library available for JSF? I know there's more everyday, so I'm looking for first-hand, real-world experience here. Thanks in advance for any advice or stories you'd like to share!

RE: Five things I hate about AppFuse

Karsten Voges has written a nice critique of AppFuse titled Five things I hate about AppFuse. I started a new JSF+Hibernate project with AppFuse yesterday, so I definitely feel some of his pain. Let's examine his points one-by-one:

1. It's nice to choose between the usage of JSP 2.0 or before, but making the changes (to all jsps and the web.xml) every time I build my app sucks.

I absolutely agree. I spent a good hour modifying build.xml, web.xml, etc. to switch my app from JSP 1.2 to JSP 2.0 yesterday. You can modify your build.xml to permanently switch to JSP 2.0, but it doesn't get everything. I'll create a separate script for 1.9.3 and the upcoming 1.9.4 to make this cleaner.

2. Seperating the classes in web, services and dao is good, but I hate the building of jar-Files for the different layers. Just take the classes under dao and service and copy them into the war or move them over to the webapps folder as it is done with the web classes!

Yeah, I've proposed doing this a couple of times on the user mailing list. It always gets shot down by existing users. I'm sure it'd be possible to write a script to do this, but it'd be no fun to write.

3. Eclipse crashed with OutOfMemory errors. Always when trying to open the build file. The build file is really, really long, with lots of stuff in there. IMO 50% of it could be deleted.

Hmmm, I rarely have OOM errors with Eclipse, but I also used Bruce's tip for increasing Eclipse's available memory. If you're using Windows, here's how to bump up Eclipse's memory.

4. Generation of Hibernate-Mapping files. I really hate it to look within a jarfile how the Hibernate mapping file looks like. It is nice to get it generated, but I prefer to be able make adjustments to it by hand to try out things quickly. And it is quite hard to enter special SQL statements in an Hibernate file, if it gets overwritten all the time.

You can create/modify the Hibernate mapping files by hand if you prefer. From the FAQ:

If you have an @hibernate.class tag on a POJO - hibernatedoclet will generate the mapping file into build/dao/gen. If you have a mapping file (*.hbm.xml) file for your POJO in the src/dao/**/model/* directory, it will overwrite the generated version. If you don't want to worry about the two conflicting - just remove the @ sign from @hibernate.class in your POJO and put your hbm.xml file in the model directory.

No build.xml modification are need for this to work. The "package-dao" target will include these mapping files. If you want to get rid of the hibernatedoclet process, you can do that- but make sure and run it first - and then copy all of the generated hbm.xml files into your model directory.

5. I don't like to get my struts.xml merged from many sources. I like to have one struts-config file holding all my struts configuration.

I agree this is kinda painful, but so is developing with Struts. You should be able to move the generated struts-config.xml into web/WEB-INF and remove the <strutsconfigxml> from build.xml to get the behavior you're looking for.

As far as throwing out the build.xml, I'm actually planning on doing that with my current project. I will keep it in place for the development phase, but I hope to move the application into a large build system once I'm done. Since it's all Java code and XML in the end, this shouldn't be hard to do. I did it when migrating to Maven 2, so I know it's possible. As far as Karsten's opinion of Maven 2, he may be right - but I hope to make a strong effort to make it very useable when using AppFuse. In fact, I hope to make it possible for users to use their IDE their entire time, with no need to run any Maven commands. Of course, that could be a pipe dream - only time will tell.

As far as sounding like the BileBlog, the more you rag on AppFuse, the better. Remember, screaming users are a good thing.