Raible Designs

Frustrating day with Linux

I can tell I've been getting a little burned out the last few days. I think it had a lot to do with our builder's death last week. I came to realize that working my ass off just doesn't have that many rewards. For most of the weekends this summer, I've been getting up at 4 and working for a few hours until Julie and Abbie get up. Then I do it again on Monday morning. This weekend I didn't get up before 9. And today I slept until 8 - even though I had planned to get up at 4. To make matters worse, rather than putting in hours for my client today, I spent the entire day wrestling with Linux.

I really wanted to get my new Cinema Display working with Suse and Fedora. I'm almost to the conclusion that it "ain't gonna happen". This sucks b/c now I have to leave one of my huge-n-heavy CRT monitors on my desk. Days like today, where I banged my head against the wall all day, are quite discouraging. My office is in turmoil - with open boxes all over the floor, monitors strewn about and video cards piling up on my desk. Some days are better than others. Hopefully my frustrations from today will turn into some type of writing zone later this week.

Update: I finally gave up and hooked my two Linux boxes up to my old KVM switch and a crappy ol' keyboard/mouse that I had lying around. Then I was planning on hooking my PowerBook and XP box up to my new DVI KVM switch. Wouldn't you know it - it doesn't fricken work. The connector on the cinema display is too fat to even plug into the KVM switch. My guess is that no one is using these displays with a KVM or maybe there's a special switch I have to get. Oh well, I guess I can manually switch the monitor b/w OS X and XP if I really need to.

My JSF Experience

Of all the MVC Frameworks I've developed with in the last few weeks (Struts, Spring MVC, WebWork and Tapestry) - JSF was by far the worst. And it's not the implementations that are the problem, it's the spec itself (as far as I can tell). Plain and simple, it does not simplify web development.

I spent 3 days developing a simple JSF app - most of it which I had done in the first day. The last 2 days have been spent migrating to MyFaces and trying to find clean ways to do things. My perspective on JSF after this experience? Run away. Run far, far away. All of the above mentioned frameworks are MUCH superior to this technology. Let's get on with the things I learned.

• MyFaces handles duplicate posts nicely. If you hit "reload" on your browser after saving a record, you get presented with an empty form rather than a duplicate record. I believe I got a duplicate record with Sun's RI.
• The ability to specify an "action" attribute on a button (or a link) and them map that action to a page (in faces-config.xml) is pretty cool.
• Every button or link clicked results in a form post. That's just wrong - why can't I have true links like the web is supposed to? So much for bookmarks.
• Saving state on the client results in enormously long URLs and/or hidden fields.
• JSF support is fairly non-existent. Unlike the other MVC frameworks, the MyFaces mailing list has hardly any traffic and the Sun forums aren't much better.
• The MyFaces website seems to be down whenever I want to look something up on it, like right now.
• I did find some CRUD examples, like this this one, but was disappointed to find that i18n is not considered for setting success messages. I ended up using the solution described in this post. 6 lines of code to set a success message - you've got to be kidding me! Most frameworks have a simple 1-2 liner.
• Waiting for JSPs to compile the first time has surprisingly become painful after using Tapestry, Velocity and FreeMarker for the last 2 weeks.
• Integration with Spring is fairly easy (code is in CVS), but MyFaces spits out an error when it shouldn't be.
• Validation messages are ugly. For instance, when a required field isn't filled in, I get: "lastName": Value is required. I was able to override the default messages, but I was never able to use the label of the field (vs. the field's id).
• The <h:messages> tag is practically worthless. Sure it's great for displaying messages (error and success), but that's about it. It has a "layout" attribute that doesn't even work in Sun's RI, and in MyFaces it just wraps a <span> with a <ul><li> or a <table>. Both of these layouts are useless b/c you can't set a css class on them. I ended up using "table" and having to set a generic CSS rule (width: 100%) in order to get the message/error bar to show across the top of my page. This tag also doesn't allow you to escape HTML.
• The <h:dataTable> component is nothing like the displaytag. MyFaces claims to have a pageable/sortable component, but it requires custom logic/methods in your managed-bean. Yuck. I ended up using <h:dataTable>, which has neither sorting or paging. This is only because I couldn't get an <h:commandLink> working inside a displaytag column.
• JSF-created apps are pretty much untestable. Managed-beans are testable, but the UI seems really difficult with jWebUnit and Canoo's WebTest. IMO, it should be possible to specify a URL to edit a record (i.e. editUser.html?id=2). With JSF and my master/detail app, the link to edit actually sets about 5 hidden form fields with JavaScript and then submits the form. I could probably figure the URL out, but it'd be ugly. Also, the MyFaces <h:dataTable> will not render an "id" attribute if you specify one. This is needed to verify tables and their data with jWebUnit.
• When using "ant reload" to reload my application (using Tomcat's Ant Tasks), I kept encountering a ThreadDeath error. This seems to be specific to MyFaces as I never saw it with other frameworks or Sun's RI.

Like Tapestry, I felt like I was banging my head against the wall a fair amount. However, with Tapestry (and all the other frameworks), I was able to get exactly the behavior I wanted w/o too much work. I could produce clean and user-friendly error messages - (Tapestry already had clean required messages built in). I was able to write a jUnitWebTest to test all CRUD activities. With JSF, I was able to test one thing - adding a new record. I couldn't edit it b/c the JavaScript support (which I tend to not use) puked every time it encountered a JSF-generated JavaScript function.

My opinion after all of this? If you know Struts, Spring MVC and WebWork are fairly easy to learn. WebWork is simpler and elegant, but Spring MVC supports more view options out-of-the-box. Tapestry is cool, but you'll have to invest a lot of time into learning it and you'll probably get caught up in its cult and forever be claiming "Tapestry Rocks!" which can get annoying to your fellow developers. Finally, I can confirm that SiteMesh rocks - it worked for all the frameworks I used and I never had to change a single line of code.

Whatever you do, don't use JSF. Not yet anyway.

RE: Why use Maven

Warner has a post about why he likes Maven. He might not know it, but he's actually ripping on AppFuse, its directory structure, and build file. I like getting ripped on, so that doesn't bother me. What bother's me is that Warner has comments turned off so no one can get him back.

The main reason that AppFuse uses Ant over Maven is speed. Maven runs much slower than Ant. Period. Also, with an open source project like AppFuse - I try to appeal to the larger audience, who likely has Ant installed. Other OS projects I work on (displaytag and struts-menu) both use Maven and people have a lot harder time trying to build from source b/c of Maven issues. Lastly, I like having a complete download - rather than download-dependencies-after-you-download-the-project like Maven does. I realize if I did use Maven I could package the dependencies in the app - which is likely what I'd do anyway since the main repositories seem to be constantly out-of-date.

Recently, I had a similar experience to Warner. As part of my current contract, I was tasked to write a couple of Maven sample apps. Warner came to my rescue and helped me out a lot, but I felt like I was jumping through a lot of hoops to do simple stuff that was already done in the Ant version of my app. I guess I'm just not a Maven guy. A project that's done right, regardless of if it's done with Ant or Maven, should build by typing "ant" or "maven" - or at least provide you help on what you need to type. Some projects, like Spring and Struts, actually allow you to use either one out-of-the-box. That's a pretty cool idea and likely keeps everyone happy.

It sounds like Warner has re-worked AppFuse to work with Maven. Care to donate your couple hours of work? I wouldn't use it personally, but there has been interest in a Maven version. Some folks seem to like slow build tools.

Your order has shipped

Let's hope it's in Denver when I get home on Sunday...

______________________________________________________________

Item Product   Product                        Total   Total   
     Number    Description                    Ordered Shipped 
______________________________________________________________

001 M9178LL/A  APPLE CIN HD DISPLAY 23" FLAT      1     1 

Yeah baby - I've been waiting to get one of these bad boys for years!

Eclipse Tips

From my Eclipse HowTo for Spring Live:

TIP: In order to clean up the project view in Eclipse, you can hide the files you don't need. First of all, make sure you're in the Java Perspective (Window → Open Perspective). Then click the little (down) arrow in the top right corner of the Package Explorer pane. Select Filters, check the "Name Filter Patterns" and type "*.jar" (no quotes) in the text field. Then in the list of elements, scroll down and check Referenced Libraries. Click OK to continue.

Another useful Eclipse trick is to use abbreviated package names. You probably won't need it on this project, but its nice on projects where you're inflicted with super.long.package.name.syndrome. Go to Window → Preferences → Java → Appearance. Check the "Compress all package names" checkbox and type "1." (no quotes) in the text field.

Want more tips? Ask Bill.

Eclipse Plugins Updated for 3.0

I finally got around to updating my Eclipse Plugins package for Eclipse 3.0 → Download or read the Release Notes. Below is a list of plugins included in this download. I dropped Lomboz and JSEditor b/c they didn't work at all with 3.0 on Windows - which I expect is the largest user base. Additions include CSS Editor and Doclipse.

• XMLBuddy 2.0.10 - XML Editor
• Colorer 0.6.0 - General Syntax Highlighter (JSPs, HTML, CSS, etc.)
• Jalopy 1.0b11 - Source Code Formatter
• Easy Explorer 1.0.1 - Open Explorer/Finder
• Tomcat Launcher 3.0 beta - Run and debug Tomcat
• CSS Editor 0.0.4
• Doclipse 0.7.0 - a Javadoc tag plug-in

Colorer and Jalopy don't work on OS X, so I wouldn't even bother installing them. Colorer has issues on Linux too. For OS X, I'd recommend buying a subscription to My Eclipse. It's only $30 and if you can afford a Mac, what's another $30? For a source code formatter on OS X, I recommend buying IDEA - it's only $200 - same cost principle applies. I tend to use IDEA a lot more on the Mac simply b/c it's faster and you don't need to install all these plugins. However, I've been stuck a lot in Eclipse-land lately because of it's multiple-project-in-one-pane support - as well as it copies and pastes code nicely into Word.

In addition to these plugins, I recommend installing the Spring IDE Plugin if you're using Spring [HowTo] - and Spindle if you're using Tapestry. Hopefully, distributions like this will become unnecessary with the introduction of the Web Tools project.

10 minutes into Tapestry

As I'm trying to figure out the JARs required by Tapestry, I find that commons-upload.jar is required by default.

2004-07-21 17:12:47 StandardWrapperValve[tapestry]: Servlet.service() for servlet tapestry threw exception
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/commons/fileupload/FileUploadException
	at org.apache.tapestry.request.RequestContext.(RequestContext.java:153)

Huh?! That's wierd - I'm not doing any file uploading... (I know, this type of message belongs on the mailing list - I just thought it was funny )

DJUG: JavaServer Faces and Java Studio Creator

Tonight's DJUG meeting looks to be another dandy one. Bill Dudney is doing a talk on JavaServer Faces and Java Studio Creator.

This talk will take you through the basics of building a JavaServer Faces application. You will understand how to build a basic JSF application. We will build an application manually and then build it again with Java Studio Creator. If time permits, we'll compare the two implementations to identify when and how to use JSCreator effectively.

I'm mainly looking forward to it because I know Bill uses a PowerBook and Creator sucks on the Mac - even though Bill doesn't think so. Should be fun heckling him from the crowd. Of course, I'm also looking forward to learning more about JSF since I'll be using it next week.

[ANN] Maven 1.0 Released!

Can you believe it?! Maven 1.0 is (finally) released: Download or read the Release Notes. Normally, I probably wouldn't care so much, but I've been engrossed in Maven for the past couple of weeks. My favorite features are the ability to type "maven eclipse" or "maven idea" to generate Eclipse/IDEA project files. Wow - 4 announcement posts in a row - that's a personal record!

[ANN] AppFuse Light 1.0 - a.k.a. Equinox

For those of you looking for an AppFuse Light, I have good news for you. I've actually been sitting on it for several months now, but now I'm prepared to release it. It's name is Equinox and it's much, much simpler than AppFuse. Equinox has only one build-time dependency (CATALINA_HOME being set for the servlet-api.jar). There's no code generation and no features - not even security. However, it supports building, testing and deploying from Ant, and even has support for managing Tomcat out-of-the-box.

To get started with Equinox, you can download the QuickStart Chapter from Spring Live. This chapter shows you how to develop a simple webapp using Struts, Spring and Hibernate - which talks to an HSQL database. Struts and Spring are integrated using the ContextLoaderPlugin and all tests are designed to be run out-of-container using JUnit and StrutsTestCase. Equinox ships with project files for both Eclipse and IDEA so you can develop and run the tests in either of these top-notch IDEs. There's also a demo available. Thanks to Boér Attila for the kick-ass CSS.

If you like what you see in the QuickStart Chapter, there's much more in the other ERP chapters of Spring Live - now available for download. Too see what's in the other chapters, checkout the Chapter Summaries.

This is a nice milestone - feels good to have made it this far. Have a good weekend!