Raible Designs

How do you sell good technology to average developers?

I received some interesting questions from someone who attended my talks at the Spring Forward conference last week. Below are the questions and my responses:

One of the things I'm working through in our hidebound stick-in-the-mud biggish company is: if you concoct a brilliant framework around the really right technology, how do you make it usable by mere mortals, that is average to below average developers?

Document, document, document. Assume nothing when you write the documentation (on a wiki or whatnot). Newbies love step-by-step tutorials. If your kick-ass framework is any good, you should be able to automate and hide complex pieces so they never need to know about them until they're interested.

I think AppFuse really helps in this regard, but I'm dealing with people who most naturally will use ColdFusion or ASP with no separation of concerns whatsover. They are are pretty blown away by lightweight J2EE and thus tend to reject it out of hand as being hippies' wet dreams.

I had a class a couple weeks back that was 1/2 PHP developers. They didn't like the idea of Java either - mainly because they're used to doing UI development and such. PHP, CF and ASP developers are UI developers that would prefer not to compile/deploy code. So you need to do things that make their job easier and allow them to be UI developers. Create a Generic DAO and Manager using Generics that allows them to CRUD any object - so they won't need to write backend code. Heck, you might even separate responsibilities so they're doing mostly web development. Of course, with web development, you'll still need to write Controllers and such. If you can use something like Maven 2 + the Jetty Plugin, there's no deploy cycle. Save, refresh your browser and voila - change is there. That's what these folks are used to and that's what they want to see when developing Java. Getting rid of the deploy cycle is an excellent idea IMO.

What do you think? How do you make Java development easier for developers of a company "switching to Java"? I've had a fair amount of clients in recent months switching from .NET or PHP to Java. It's a rare case that developers are actually happy about the move. Of course, when I'm done telling them about all the great frameworks and tools they can use, they're even more petrified. There's just too many for them to keep track of, especially if they're new to the stuff. AppFuse definitely simplifies things, but I doubt it makes development as simple as plain 'ol PHP or .NET. Then again, after you learn how to use the frameworks in AppFuse, it can be extremely productive to develop with (and scalable to boot!).

AppFuse used in Rails for Java Developers book

I received an interesting e-mail from Stuart Halloway this afternoon:

Subject: AppFuse rocks! and ...

Hi Matt,

I have been using AppFuse to generate many of the Java examples we use for comparison in the new book. Thanks for AppFuse -- I'd be miserable without it. I'd be happy to get you a comp copy of the book if you want it. (And delighted if you have any feedback on my use of AppFuse... :-) ).

Cheers,
Stuart

Hopefully Stuart and Justin don't make AppFuse and Java look too bad.

If you're familiar with AppFuse (or the frameworks it leverages) and want to learn Ruby on Rails, Rails for Java Developers should treat you well. I've never read one of Stuart or Justin's books, but I've heard them speak. They're both incredibly enjoyable to listen to.

Posted with permission from Stuart.

New weather.com site built using AppFuse

From Jeff C (a Sr Developer for forgetaway.com, a new unit of weather.com) in Lightweight Java Development with Webwork, Spring, and iBatis:

Our new site, ForGetaway.com, launched 2 weeks ago, and its built on WebWork, Spring, and iBatis. Using those 3 frameworks as the backbone of the site was a great experience. I think that combination of frameworks can be considered lightweight, especially from a development standpoint.
...
Even the development/testing process is quick. Thanks to Matt Raible's AppFuse (which was used to get this app started), we have a sweet build.xml file that allows us (on our dev machines) to reload our app by having the build script talk to tomcat. So, even when a properties file or java class or static field changes, its just a matter of running the reload task in the build.xml file and tomcat reloads the app with all changes in under 5 seconds. Yeah, rails is probably quicker, but i can spare 5 seconds of my time to let my changes get reloaded by tomcat.

Reloading your application in Tomcat to see your changes sucks. However, AppFuse 2.0 will allow you to use the Maven 2 Jetty Plugin, which aims to eliminate the whole deploy cycle. This plugin is powered by Jetty 6, which has been rewritten for Continuations, NIO, Servlet 2.5. Hopefully we'll start to see more appserver plugins written for Maven 2.

I love hearing success stories like Jeff's. That's why I (and many others) work on AppFuse - to simplify Java web development. We know that it's more painful to develop web applications in Java than in scripting languages, but we continue to do it because tools like AppFuse make it enjoyable. Even though tools and languages are important for simplification, I believe that most project's success is determined by people. If you have good people, effective processes and a lack of politics - a project should have no problem being successful, regardless of the tools.

Did you know the new SourceBeat site is also powered by AppFuse? We chose the WebWork+Spring+Hibernate combination and were quite pleased at how easy it was to develop everything. We had 90% of the site done in the first two weeks of development.

In other AppFuse-related news, the demos have been running solid for 70 days straight. I'll admit that's not a very log time, but it does prove there's no memory or connection leaks in the software. The number of currently active sessions is as follows:

• /appfuse (Struts): 456
• /appfuse-jsf: 206
• /appfuse-spring: 105
• /appfuse-tapestry: 94
• /appfuse-webwork: 178
• /spring-kickstart: 17
• /struts-resume: 36
• /wiki: 256

The default session timeout is set to 10 minutes in AppFuse.

Maven, Cargo, Struts 2 and working outside

Life is pretty good today. I'm currently working outside - in a courtyard area near the 30th Street Station in Philadelphia. There's 4 restaurants in the courtyard, all with outside seating. It's 72°F and beautiful. I plan to work for a few hours, then hop on the 5:00 train to NYC.

The reason I'm writing this post is to point out a few useful tidbits I've picked up today. First of all, Andrew Glover has written a developerWorks article on Cargo titled In pursuit of code quality: Repeatable system tests. In this article, he shows how to use jWebUnit as well as DbUnit. While the article uses Ant, Andrew mentions that Cargo also works with Maven (and has a Java API too).

Equinox uses jWebUnit, Maven and Cargo, but it doesn't currently support running Cargo from Maven. The major reason for this is I tried to automate running jWebUnit tests from the antrun-plugin and couldn't get it to work (I only tried for 10 minutes). Does anyone have any insight for including jWebUnit tests alongside your regular tests, excluding them from Maven's "test" phase, and running them in the "integration-test" phase? The good news is AppFuse 2.0 uses Maven as well, and we have Cargo + Canoo WebTest working just fine. BTW, did you know that Mergere’s Maestro (a free product) includes Equinox? If you're looking to learn Continuum and you're familiar with Equinox, downloading Maestro is probably a good start.

Speaking of web testing, I've been playing with Selenium lately. I was able to easily integrate it into Thomas and I's Spring 2.0 Kickstart application thanks to these Maven and Selenium integration instructions. The only issues I've run into so far are specifying an initial URL that works in Selenium core as well as Selenium IDE and integrating Selenium with CruiseControl. If you're interested in learning more about Selenium checkout Catching up with Selenium on InfoQ.

Last, but certainly not least, Struts 2.0 was released today. I've already integrated this into the Struts version of AppFuse 2.0. If you like living on the bleeding, you could dig in and try it out today. Unfortunately, I haven't had a chance to put a whole lot of documentation together yet. I hope to install Confluence on appfuse.org sometime this week to start documenting how bad-ass AppFuse 2.0 will be .

Speaking of 2.0 releases, wasn't Spring 2.0 Final supposed to be released yesterday?

Comparing Web Frameworks Presentation

I've uploaded my Comparing Web Frameworks presentation I delivered today. This presentation is still somewhat outdated - all the stats I have in it are from February of this year (2006). I've also updated the Equinox framework-comparison page to have links to some more readable papers.

Integrating Hibernate Validator with Spring MVC

Remember when I wrote about Better client-side validation with Prototype back in May? Ted Bergeron responded to my post with the following comment:

Now that I am using Hibernate Annotations Validator, I stopped using commons validator. You can use the hibernate validator without using hibernate for persistence. I wrote some jsp 2.0 tag files to handle binding my form fields with spring mvc, and I use reflection to check for the validation annotations. This makes it no work to have a js calendar for all Date fields, or have class="required" added to all fields that have a @NotNull annotation. I'd be happy to send you the code for appfuse 2.0.

Ted followed up by sending me the code. I took a look at it, and reviewed a well-written PDF he'd written for his work. I told him he should publish it as an article, hooked him up with some folks at IBM developerWorks - and voila! Ted's article, titled Hibernate can meet your validation needs was published yesterday. Nice work Ted!

I'm looking forward to trying to leverage Hibernate Validation annotations for all the web frameworks in AppFuse. Should be interesting hacking into the cores of the frameworks to modify how their validation engines work.

Integrating Compass with AppFuse and the Display Tag

ChenRanHow has written up a detailed tutorial on how to integrate Compass with AppFuse and the Display Tag. From his mailing list post:

• Part 0. Overview of the practice
• Part 1. Setup env, add Compass and related library to AppFuse
• Part 2. Create ant tasks for create and delete index
• Part 3. Use annotation to make Compass resource mapping
• Part 4. Create Struts action to perform search
• Part 5. Make DisplayTag work with Compass

Thanks ChenRanHow!

Another great tutorial was recently written by Luciano Fiandesio. If you're looking to use Quartz, checkout Luciano's (well styled) AppFuse and Quartz tutorial.

In other AppFuse news, FanYang has started translating the documentation to Japanese, Mike McMahon has converted the appfuse-hibernate module to annotations, CruiseControl is continually testing, Mike Horwitz has solved most of the "Maven doesn't read a WARs dependencies" issue, and Scott Ryan is still hard at work on the code generation plugin. Even better - we've asked Scott to come aboard as a committer and he's accepted. Welcome aboard Scott - we appreciate all the work you're doing.

As far as progress on AppFuse 2.0, we're almost done with the Maven 2 conversion. The only thing left is figuring out how to get Mike's maven-warpath-plugin to hook into the Eclipse and IDEA plugins to they generate project files correctly. After that, it's time to start on documentation. I'm still torn on if we should use Confluence or DocBook. However, after looking at Spring's documentation for the past week, I think DocBook is probably the better choice. Then again, Stripes' Confluence Wiki looks nice and organized.

What do you think? What's the best way to write documentation for an open source project? Which system do you prefer to read? From experience, I prefer reading Spring's documentation over trying to find stuff in WebWork's wiki.

We've had great success with AppFuse users contributing to the documentation via a wiki, and I'd hate to create a documentation system that gets away from that. Maybe a DocBook/Confluence combination is the way to go? It looks like the CeltiXFire folks are having a similar debate.

AppFuse 2.0 Status

Last week I managed to get AppFuse to compile with Maven 2, this week I got all the tests passing. This week, I struggled with Maven's WAR dependencies and how AppFuse will be used by end-users. It was frustrating, but I think I got most everything figured out. Unfortunately, there's still many issues to be sorted out.[Read More]

Label placement in web forms

From Swapnonil Mukherjee:

Matteo Penzo has published an excellent article about the placement and alignment of labels in data entry forms. His research, though much more scientific and thorough, confirms what I had said earlier, about the importance of right aligning form labels.

In AppFuse 1.9.2, we added support for the CSS Framework and Wufoo-style forms. The new form layout appears to satisfy many of Matteo's suggestions. The only things we aren't doing are: 1) we're using bold labels instead of plain text and 2) we're using labels for drop-downs, instead of making the first element the label. I suppose the bold labels isn't much of an issue b/c we're not using heavy input borders. As for labels and <select> elements, I think the way we're doing things is good enough. If it works for Wufoo, it works for us!

High Performing Java Web Frameworks

Steven Haines appears to be gearing up for a showdown among Java web frameworks. In his Web Frameworks article (found via dzone), Steven notes the following:

He goes on to say that he's planning on comparing a number of web frameworks, and his study will give special attention to how these frameworks perform. He'll be comparing Struts 1.x, Struts 2.x, Shale and Spring MVC. If you think your framework can compete, Steven invites you to send him an e-mail.

If anyone has a compelling reason why we should add an additional framework, please contact me and I will be glad to consider it in this endeavor.

I'm looking forward to reading Steven's articles, I just hope I can find them again when they're published.