Raible Designs

Discrimination by Light Rail

After a late night wrestling with AppFuse and Acegi Security, I decided to take it easy this morning and ride my bike to the Light Rail, then ride it downtown. I figured it might be a bit faster, and it'd also be nice to relax a bit more on the "commute". I arrived at the station as my train was leaving, so I quickly realized that it was probably not going to be faster, but it would probably take the same amount of time. I was still determined to be a sissy and not ride my bike to work. When the next train pulled up, the conductor got on the loud speaker and said "30th and Downing Station, No Bikes Sir." WTF?! I gave the guy a boboli¹ and grumbled to myself.

So I ended up riding to work today anyway. I took the Platte River Trail², which was a nice change of pace, but it was also closed in one spot, so I had to take a detour. Long story short: every time I try to cheat the ride to work by driving, taking the bus or light rail, it always backfires. Riding to work using the Wash Park/Cherry Creek Trail route is simply the fastest way to get here, bar none. Took me an hour to get here via Platte River. Oh well, at least it's a nice trail.

¹ Throw your hand in the air like you're flipping a pizza.
² Most of these pictures were actually on my ride, save the last one.

Fun with jWebUnit and Canoo WebTest

For the past few days, I've been messing around with jWebUnit and Canoo WebTest at my "day job". I say messing around because I've mainly been trying to overcome perceived bugs with both projects. I'm used to using Ant and both of these libraries "just work".

The problem I had with jWebUnit is that the setOption(selectName, optionLabel) didn't work for me. This turned out to be some sort of conflict with SiteMesh, and when I commented out the SiteMesh <filter-mapping>, everything worked as expected. This is quite strange since I use SiteMesh+jWebUnit with Equinox. I tried to reproduce the problem with Equinox by adding a <select> with <option> elements, but it all worked fine there. I'd blame it on Maven, but I was running my tests from IDEA. As a workaround, I subclassed SiteMesh's PageFilter and stopped processing when the user-agent.startsWith("httpunit"). This is very similar to the JCIFS and jWebUnit workaround we're using.

Before I figured out the jWebUnit/SiteMesh issue, I decided to try my favorite UI testing tool: WebTest. Since we're using Maven, I figured the Maven Canoo Webtest Plugin would be the way to go. This took me about a day to get working (so much for the ol' 10 minute test). Most of the problems where related to the fact that setting the properties didn't seem to have any effect. I ended up writing my web-tests.xml much like I would with Ant - with taskdefs and importing project.properties for the properties to take effect. Last night, after I couldn't get webtest to click a button, I decided to try the same XML file with Ant. I dropped it into AppFuse, changed a few settings and voila! - it all worked! "WTF?" I thought to myself. Turns out the Maven Plugin is from October 2004 and is based on build 543. I ended up rebuilding the plugin to build 733 and then everything worked fine. Here's the patch.

Now that I got them both working, I'm leaning towards using jWebUnit because I can use Java to get the last inserted id (for fullying CRUDing an object). With Canoo, I'd have to use our query interface, add a feature to sort by id (or somehow get the last record added), then click on it to edit the new record. To make matters worse, the API we're talking to right now let's us add records, but we can't fetch them back - no matter what we query by. We've tried both the web services interface and the EJB one with the same results.

Ahhh, the life of an enterprise developer - trying to make 3 systems talk to each other and all of them have broken (or non-existent APIs). For one system, we're actually going through their web interface with httpclient to do CRUD on records!

[DJUG] JUG Central and BPEL

Last night, I attended Denver's JUG meeting. Below are my notes from the event.

I'm at DJUG listening to Christian and Kris (from Adigio) talk about their experience with using Spring, WebWork, Hibernate, Lucene and SiteMesh to develop JUG Central (I wonder if they knew this name and concept already exists?). JSPs are for the view and MySQL powers the data. This presentation is designed to explain a bit about each framework, and also tips/tricks and pitfalls they experienced when developing the site. They started working on the application in August of last year and deployed it into production in December.

Christian said they weren't going to go into the how for each framework, but Kris has had quite a few slides on SiteMesh so far. I don't blame him - it's a great tool and only a handful of folks (of about 50-60) have heard of it.

SiteMesh Pitfalls: Poor integration with Velocity and some other frameworks. BTW, if you're using Tapestry - Erik Hatcher recently created a JIRA patch with a Tapestry Decorator.

Now Kris is talking about WebWork and since he's a framework junkie, apparently this is going to be the largest part of the presentation. I think one of the nicest parts of WebWork is its auto-type conversion. The only other frameworks I've seen that have this is are JSF and Tapestry. For those that like WebWork and don't like JSF - you might find it disturbing that the WebWork actions (and their tests) in AppFuse are very similar to the JSF managed beans. I would take it as a compliment if I were a WebWork developer.

One nice thing about XWork's action configuration is you can specify a "method" parameter for a particular action. Struts recently added this with its MappingDispatchAction. I'm using this on my current project and it works quite well. Kris really likes WebWork's front-page controller pattern - where you use the <ww:action> tag to execute the action when the page is loaded. Personally, I don't have a problem with going through actions to get to my view templates. Kris finished up his WebWork piece with a plug for AppFuse (thanks!) and WebWork in Action. Congrats to all the authors - wonder if it'll be published before WebWork Live?

Now Christian is talking about Hibernate and its mapping files - and how you can generate your database schema from them - or generate your mapping files from a database. They used XDoclet to generate the mapping files in this particular project.

Hibernate Pitfalls: Think about lazy-loading early. Problems arise when you try to share Hibernate-managed objects across (Hibernate) sessions transparently. Christian mentions that Spring's OpenSessionInViewFilter is a nice way to solve the problem.

Hibernate Tips: Spring simplifies using Hibernate and makes declarative transactions easy. Read Hibernate in Action before starting development. Plan to spend some time learning how to express your data model with Hibernate relationships (one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many, etc.).

Christian is now talking about Spring and how it works. After thinking and writing about Spring so much in the last year, I'll just skip over regurgitating this part. ;-) His main recommendation: use real injection instead of appContext.getBean("beanName").

Other tools used: Lucene for searching and POI for indexing Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. Velocity used for templating e-mail messages.

Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) with Business Process Execution Language (BPEL)
Presented by Kevin Geminiuc and Owen Newnan from Policy Studies

This point of this presentation is to communicate what it's like to implement BPEL in a J2EE Container. BPEL is a layer on top of web services. BPEL is a programming language that you can use to program business processes. Allows you to divorce your business process from being human-centric to being document-centric. At Policy Studies, they're using iLog JRules rules engine and Oracle's BPEL implementation.

Benefits:

• Process Visiblity
• Process Agility
• Powerful Language
• Open
• Backed by "the Big Boys" (BEA, Microsoft, IBM)

History: Formerly knows as BPEL4WS, WSBPEL. Open standards based. Orchestrates web services with SOA.

Where we are today: Emerging technology (prepare to bang your head against the wall). .NET and Java products exist, as well as J2EE container integration.

BPEL & WS Standards: BPEL, XPath, WSDL, WS-Addressing, SOAP, XML-Schema, WSIF (Axis), TBD (WS-ReliableMessaging and JSRs 207/208). Note that since BPEL depends on web services (which is not a truly reliable service). Because of this, there are some proprietary extensions available.

At this point, I became bored with the presentation and quit taking notes. While the speakers had good intentions with their knowledge sharing, their delivery needed some work. The code walkthrough and demos were presented with a monotonous and unexcited tone, and a handful of folks left during this part. In summary, BPEL looks like a good way to orchestrate your various business processes. It allows you to call web services, EJBs and whatnot simply by defining their locations and methods in XML.

In his demo, Kevin used Oracle's BPEL Designer, which is an Eclipse plugin that has a nice drag-n-drop editor for managing your BPEL XML files. He also used Oracle's BPEL Process Manager, which seemed to be a lot like Jetspeed - you just drop in the .ear and then deploy your processes to it. The only bad part about the Process Manager is it's administration/deployment interface only runs in IE.

If you're using BPEL in your projects, I'd be interested to hear the tools you're using. As far as open-source BPEL process engines, they mentioned Twister and ActiveBPEL.

Upgraded to Roller 1.0

Dave released Roller 1.0 yesterday, so I decided to spend 20 minutes and upgrade today. I have customized a few pieces in Roller and added a bunch of my own files, so I always build from CVS for this site. I did find a bug with twisty comments (fixed in CVS) when testing locally, but everything else appears to be working OK. Let me know if you see any issues and feel free to play with my test user if you like. Username is "test", password is "roller". Well done Dave!

Update: Remember Me seems to be broken. I thought I fixed it last week. I'll investigate further tomorrow.

Update 2: Strange... it works when I test it locally, but not on this site.

Solved: It turned out to be related to installing Roller as the root app, and only seems to affect Firefox. Fixed in CVS.

AppFuse distributed with Gentoo Linux?

According to the Gentoo Java Roadmap, AppFuse is on the list of apps to integrate. Nice! I'm going to rebuild my Windows 2000 Server as a Suse 9.2 box in the next couple of weeks, but I might have to reconsider and go with Gentoo. I was going to buy a gig o' RAM for the box, but it looks pretty spendy.

Today I added another item for AppFuse 1.8 in the roadmap: create an installer using MyJavaPack that can install Ant, AppFuse, MySQL and Tomcat. Basically, give developer's a way to install and start developing with AppFuse in under 5 minutes. Let me know if you're interested in helping out with this.

It figures...

Today is the first day I've had to go into an office since May of 2004. Today should be a 9" day here at Raible Designs - there's 12" of fresh powder at Vail. However, I managed to get a 3-day architecture-review contract so I'm heading to the client's site downtown. To enhance the commuting experience, it's colder than a witch's tit outside (2°F) and there's a few inches of fresh snow. I think I'll try the Light Rail (there's a station 1 mile from our house) and hope it's not too crowded.

[DJUG] JMS and Spring

Tonight's DJUG should be a fun one. First, I hope to learn some JMS tips and tricks from Chris Huston then I'm doing a presentation on Spring. I asked the group what they wanted to know about Spring last week and I got a wide range of answers. There should be a good mix of newbies and experienced Spring users. I'll give you a link to my presentation, but I have to warn you that there's not much there. I tend to show a lot of code in and do demos when I present, so my presentations tend to be kinda thin. My two goals for tonight are 1) keep it under an hour so we can all get to the bar and 2) inspire Spring-mania among the crowd.

   Download Presentation »

It's Dumping in Colorado

The mountains and ski resorts are getting dumped on right now. Here in Denver, we have about 3-4 inches and it's still snowing. It started yesterday and it's cold (14°F) right now. Check out this ski report for Vail Resorts this morning.

Vail (www.vail.com)
Temp. at 5am MST: -1F/-18C
Surface Conditions: Powder
Snowfall in last 24 hours: 10in.
Snowfall in last 7 days: 34in.
Mid-Mountain Base: 28in.
Percent of Terrain Open: 15%

Beaver Creek (www.beavercreek.com)
Temp. at 5am MST: -1F/-18C
Surface Conditions: Powder
Snowfall in last 24 hours: 11in.
Snowfall in last 7 days: 38in.
Mid-Mountain Base: 39in.
Percent of Terrain Open: 22%

Keystone (www.keystoneresort.com)
Temp. at 5am MST: -1F/-18C
Surface Conditions: Powder/Packed Powder
Snowfall in last 24 hours: 4in.
Snowfall in last 7 days: 13in.
Mid-Mountain Base: 28in.
Percent of Terrain Open: 13%

Breckenridge (www.breckenridge.com)
Temp. at 5am MST: -1F/-18C
Surface Conditions: Powder/Packed Powder
Snowfall in last 24 hours: 3in.
Snowfall in last 7 days: 17in.
Mid-Mountain Base: 22in.
Percent of Terrain Open: 14%

You can see that 1) there's not much terrain open and 2) it's fricken cold up there. Raible Designs has a "9-inch rule", which means if it snows 9 inches or more, all employees get the day off to go skiing. I think I'll wait until January to make this a mandatory rule.

Looks like the commute should be fun this morning. Days like today make it nice to have a 20-step commute (40 with a stop at the coffee pot).

Edit Screens with JSF

I'm working with JSF this morning and I'm finding one thing particularly annoying. I'm working on a simple master/detail screen and I'm tweaking the detail screen to fit my needs. It's just a <form> with some form elements. I change something, run "ant deploy-web" and hit "refresh" to see my updated page. Since everything in JSF is a post, I get prompted to re-submit the form. Fine, I agree - then I'm returned to the list screen. Argggh - why can't I just view the form again?! This might just be a MyFaces nuance, I'm not sure. Anyone know of a workaround?

Wanna see the bug/feature in action? Go to http://demo.raibledesigns.com/equinox-jsf/userList.html, click on a row - and after the edit screen displays, hit refresh on your browser. In an ideal world, you'd see the form again, but nope - you get the list instead.

[ANN] DisplayTag 1.0 RC2 Released

Fabrizio, the main man behind the Display Tag, has been fixing bugs and adding features at breakneck speed. Early this morning, he released the final 1.0 candidate for the Display Tag. Good stuff - thanks Fabrizio!

• Download
• Release Notes
• Maven Changes Report
• Demo