Raible Designs

2010 - A Year in Review

2010 was a heckuva year, possibly one of my all-time favorites. It started with lots of anticipated fun and ended with lots of travel, skiing and relaxing and I'm only just now finding time to write this post. I had a lot of goals when I started 2010; the top two being my favorite:

• Happiness
• Girl

The rest of my goals involved running, skiing, mountain biking and finishing The Bus. I also had some professional goals that involved open source, conferences, publishing articles and learning new technologies. I accomplished about 75% of my personal goals and 50% of my professional goals. I'm pretty happy with these percentages considering how much fun I had last year.

In December 2009, I started working with Time Warner Cable as their Chief Architect of Web Development. I was hired to help them build a team of hard-working developers that could quickly build their online video presence. In January, we started getting our ducks in a row with some Agile Training in Virginia, followed by hiring some Agile Coaches. The only technical post I had during this process was about development infrastructure stacks. Both at TWC and my current gig, I've found myself enjoying the following stack:

• Source Control: SVN
• Source Viewer: FishEye
• Wiki: Confluence
• Bug Tracker: JIRA
• Continuous Integration: Hudson

We tried Git for a couple months at TWC, but ended up reverting to SVN after we had "code deleted" issues during one of our most intense development cycles. When the kids and I weren't skiing, we worked on documenting How to be a Super Hero and The Adventures of Upside Down Man.

In February, I refreshed my Grails knowledge, later learning that it was tough to teach Grails to developers that didn't know Java. First of all, a lot of Grails and Groovy books are targeted at Java Developers. Secondly, the developers I was trying to sell it to had more interest in learning Java. Since I failed to sell Grails, we ended up using Spring + jQuery to build our app. I don't think was a bad decision as most of our development ended up being UI: ActionScript/Flex, Objective-C and jQuery/HTML.

My laptop was stolen from my living room in early February. It worked out nicely in the end since I didn't lose any data (thanks to good backups) and my business insurance covered the loss. My parents came out and helped me finish remodeling my guest room. I posted about My Future of Web Frameworks Presentations and became a proud father when "Jack was flying past both Abbie and I and giggling while doing it".

By the beginning of March, we'd hired a team of 10 at TWC and I took a trip to Jackson Hole to celebrate.

The thing I enjoyed the most about this trip was how well the group jelled. Kudos to Chris for assembling such an awesome group and putting such a spectacular trip together. Can't wait for next year.

The next week, I flew to Las Vegas for The ServerSide Java Symposium and enjoyed sessions on Cloud, Web Service APIs, Flex, Spring 3 and Cameron's Lessons Learned from the Internet Age. I posted my Future of Web Frameworks and GWT vs. Flex Smackdown presentations after the conference.

I ended March with The Trifecta.

For Easter, I purchased an iPad and reviewed it a few days later. Seven months later, I'm not enthralled with the iPad, but I do think it's a heckuva lot better than the Galaxy Tab. I don't use it much, except for movies when traveling. My kids are its primary users, mostly using it for games and Netflix.

We visited my parents in Oregon and celebrated my Mom's retirement.

The picture I took of my Mom and Abbie that weekend is one of my all-time favorites.

At the end of April, I said farewell to the ski season, getting in 25 days; a personal best. I'm happy to report I have 10 days in so far this year, so my goal of 30 days looks to be well on track. No helicopter attempts yet, but hopefully soon.

I ended the month with a work trip to Seattle and painting the town red with my sister and Mya.

I returned to Denver and turned off my TV for a month. I wrote about my experience in early June. For Memorial Day Weekend, I went mountain biking in Moab and had a blast at the Desert Rocks Music Festival. The Porcupine Rim ride took us 4.5 hours and we tracked 26.75 miles. The several points in the trail with "death on the right" were truly epic.

June started with our annual Ride to Red Rocks. I slept six hours and did the 25-mile off-road Elephant Rock ride the next morning. The next morning I hopped on a plane to Ireland for the Irish Software Show. My sister joined me and we had an incredible time with Jamie, Rob, John and Josh.

Upon returning to work, I got to have an awkward conversation with my client about all the vacation I was taking.

For Father's Day, my parents drove to Denver and we packed up the camping gear for a fun weekend at The Great Sand Dunes. After The Dunes, my parents and kids drove to The Cabin, camping out and touring Yellowstone along the way. That Thursday, June 24th, I attended my good friend Jason's birthday party in Lodo.

That's the night I met Trish.

I saw her switch from a Martini to a Guinness and I knew I had to talk to her. I introduced myself and quickly found myself conflicted with having a soon-to-expire iPhone 4 reservation at the Apple Store. I rushed out to grab the phone, returning because there was something special about Trish. We talked for a couple hours that night ... me mesmerized, her smiling a lot. I was dumbfounded to find such a cool person existed in the world. At the end of the night, I got her number and drove home with a feeling that my life was about to change.

The next day, I began a road trip to The Last Best Place for a Montana Summer Vacation.

During that trip, Trish and I exchanged occasional text messages and I told many friends about the kick-ass girl I met. It was another great Montana vacation.

My favorite part of this year's trip to The Cabin was seeing it as a home again. My Mom retired in April and my parents moved back to Montana shortly after. Seeing how happy they are there is truly magical. I especially enjoy the thought of visiting them and all the wonderful folks in the Swan Valley many, many times in the future.

The kids and I drove like bats out of hell and made it back to Denver (950 miles) in 14.25 hours. I quickly scheduled a first date with Trish that Wednesday, and went back to work at TWC with a renewed energy. After our first date, I formed a sort of perma-grin. That Friday was my birthday. I've been having a blast with Trish ever since.

July ended with a trip to the Lost Coast for Jess and Lili's Wedding.

The reception afterwards was a truly spectacular party that lasted well into the evening. Clint and I vowed to go to bed early, but we ended up having so much fun we closed the place down. Jess and Lili were an instrumental part in creating a spectacular night, especially with their wedding dance and infectious happiness.

In August, I celebrated this blog's 8th birthday and we started our "60-Day Push" at work. The goal of our 60-Day Push was to re-write our Video Portal, iPad and Sony Blu-ray apps from scratch, without politics dictating their features. We hired Method for design, chose our own features and went to work. I wrote about the success of this effort in October.

I neglected to write about the Denver Cruisers Saints and Sinners ride or how much fun we had listening to B.B. King at Red Rocks.

Abbie and Jack's first day of school was on August 16th.

At the end of August, we celebrated Jack's 6th Birthday and attended my Cousin Amy's Wedding in Missouri.

September rolled in, we finished the majority of the work in our 60-Day Push and Trish and I drove up to Estes Park for an epic weekend at the Scottish-Irish Festival. We rode our bikes in the parade (by accident), enjoyed a few pints and even did a bit of fly-fishing near our riverside accommodations.

We listened to the 1st 2010 Broncos game while driving back from Estes and slipped into a Rockies game shortly after losing. Our sadness over the Broncos loss was erased within a couple hours as we celebrated Jason Giambi's walk-off home run. Unfortunately, the Rockies didn't make it to the post-season, but the Broncos looked good at their home opener.

October came quickly and I wrote How's the ol' Team Doing and defended the Age of Frameworks. At the end of October, we moved into TWC's Lodo Office on Wynkoop. That weekend, we dressed up as superheros for Halloween.

November started off with Abbie's birthday and Trish got to meet the kids for the first time. From there, we went into traveling-like-madmen mode. We enjoyed suite seats at the Broncos vs. Kansas City game, then flew to Amsterdam for Devoxx the next morning (performing an AppFuse release along the way). I presented on Thursday and posted my Comparing JVM Web Frameworks presentation shortly after. I wrote about our trip while at The Cabin for Thanksgiving.

I flew back from Montana, stopped in at the Lodo office for a couple days, then hopped on a plane to the Rich Web Experience with Trish. My presentations went well, sparked some controversy, and we raced to Key West to celebrate the end of the conference season.

I returned to Denver for my last week at TWC, enjoyed a couple days of skiing, then headed to Utah for an interview with Overstock.com. While I enjoyed my time at TWC, my contract duration was up and being a full-time employee didn't give me the vacation time I tend to enjoy. My interview with Overstock.com was two days, with the 2nd day on the slopes at Snowbird. I was very impressed by the company, people and interview process and agreed to work there on the way to the airport.

I returned to Denver for Trish's Birthday Weekend at Breckenridge, then flew down to Naples on Wednesday to spend Christmas with her family. It was my first time meeting her parents, but that didn't stop us from having a great time talking, beach-going, golfing and relaxing.

We returned to Denver, I tried to get AppFuse 2.1 finished and then we celebrated New Years with friends in Steamboat.

As I reminisce about last year, I can't help but smile. While I've been a happy person for a while, having someone to share your life with is a special thing. I feel like I dreamed up Trish a couple years ago. I was looking for someone that liked to do my favorite activities: mountain biking, skiing, traveling the world and enjoying good beer. I found that and more in Trish and couldn't be happier.

I didn't write as many technical posts on this blog as I'd like to, but I attribute that mostly to the lack of learning new things at TWC. At Overstock.com, I expect that to change and hope to have more technical articles in the coming year.

At the end of last year's Year in Review, I wrote:

I hope to speak at (or attend) 3 conferences, finish up The Bus and do a whole bunch of skiing and mountain biking.

I accomplished all but one goal: finishing The Bus. In 2011, I plan on doing two main things: keep rockin' it with Trish and finishing The Bus. Everything else is gravy.

It's gonna be a spectacular year.

How I Calculated Ratings for My JVM Web Frameworks Comparison

When I re-wrote my Comparing JVM Web Frameworks presentation from scratch, I decided to add a matrix that allows you to rate a framework based on 20 different criteria. The reason I did this was because I'd used this method when choosing an Ajax framework for Evite last year. The matrix seemed to work well for selecting the top 5 frameworks, but it also inspired a lot of discussion in the community that my ratings were wrong.

I expected this, as I certainly don't know every framework as well as I'd like. The mistake I made was asking for the community to provide feedback on my ratings without describing how I arrived at them. From Peter Thomas's blog:

What you are doing is adjusting ratings based on who in the community shouts the loudest. I can't help saying that this approach comes across as highly arrogant and condescending, you seem to expect framework developers and proponents to rush over and fawn over you to get better ratings, like waiters in a restaurant trying to impress a food-critic for Michelin stars.

I apologize for giving this impression. It certainly wasn't my intent. By having simple numbers (1.0 == framework does well, 0.5 == framework is OK and 0 == framework not good at criteria) with no rationalization, I can see how the matrix can be interpreted as useless (or to put it bluntly, as something you should wipe your ass with). I don't blame folks for getting angry.

For my Rich Web Experience presentation, I documented why I gave each framework the rating I did. Hopefully this will allow folks to critique my ratings more constructively and I can make the numbers more accurate. You can view this document below or on Google Docs.

In the end, what I was hoping to do with this matrix was to simply highlight a technique for choosing a web framework. Furthermore, I think adding a "weight" to each criteria is important because things like books often aren't as important as REST support. To show how this might be done, I added a second sheet to the matrix and made up some weighting numbers. I'd expect anyone that wants to use this to downloaded the matrix, verify the ratings are accurate for your beliefs and weight the criteria accordingly.

Of course, as I and many others have said, the best way to choose a web framework is to try them yourself. I emphasized this at the end of my presentation with the following two slides.

My Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Online Video Presentation

This week I've had the pleasure of speaking at The Rich Web Experience in Fort Lauderdale. I did two talks, one on Comparing JVM Web Frameworks and one titled Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Online Video. Both talks had full rooms and very engaged audiences.

In the video talk, there were some audience members that knew way more than me about the topic. This made for a very interactive session and one of the most fun presentations I've ever done. It was also cool to talk about a lot of things I've learned over the last year (for more details on that, check out my team status or team hiring posts). If you don't have Flash installed, you can download a PDF of this presentation.

The first talk about Comparing JVM Web Frameworks was largely an extension of the one I presented at Devoxx two weeks ago. The main differences between this one and the last one is I extended it a bit and took into account some community feedback. However, this seemed to simply inspire anger, so I'll pass on embedding it here. You can view it on Slideshare or download the PDF.

My Comparing Web Frameworks slides often inspire harsh words, but folks really seem to like the presentation. I encourage you to watch my Devoxx presentation on Parleys.com to see for yourself.

This marks the end of 2010 conferences for me. I had a blast speaking at The Rich Web Experience, as well as TheServerSide Java Symposium, The Irish Software Show and Devoxx. Now it's time to sit back, relax, get some powder days in and find my next gig.

Hope y'all have a great holiday season!

An Awesome Trip to Amsterdam and Antwerp for Devoxx 2010

I've often heard that Devoxx (formerly Javapolis) is one of the best Java-related conferences in the world. I've also heard it has the best speaking and viewing facilities (a movie theater) of any conference. When I was invited to speak earlier this year, I jumped at the opportunity. When I met Trish last summer, I even used it in a pickup line: "Wanna go to Belgium with me in November?"

Last week was one of the most memorable weeks of my life. It all started with a tremendously fun Broncos vs. Chiefs game at Invesco Field in Denver. Trish's company, FishNet Security, was hosting a tailgate party and had rented a suite for the game. I was irrationally confident that the Broncos would win, so proceeded to place bets with many of her co-workers. Since FishNet is headquartered out of Kansas City, most of the folks in the suite were Kansas City fans. You can imagine my excitement when the CEO's wife agreed to chug a beer every time the Broncos scored. I talked a couple of other folks into the same bet and proceeded to giggle and grin for the duration of the 49-29 routing.

I tell this story because it put us in the perfect mood to begin our trip to Devoxx the next day.

Trish and I left Denver at noon on Monday, stopped in Chicago for a 2-hour layover and continued to Amsterdam on an overnight flight. In Chicago, we journeyed into the Red Carpet Club, where I performed a long overdue release of AppFuse. We'd both started to come down with my kids' cold, so we popped some NyQuil a couple hours into the flight and slept through the night.

Amsterdam
We arrived in Amsterdam on Tuesday morning and proceeded on a walkabout of the city. We stumbled into Dam Square, found some breakfast and checked our bags into a nearby hotel. Our first stop was the Van Gogh Museum, where we proceeded to enjoy the audio tour and learn about the life and works of Van Gogh. From there, we headed to the Heineken Brewery for a tour and some extra cold beers. While walking back to Amsterdam Central Station to catch a train to Antwerp, we stopped in at the Ice Bar to experience drinks in sub-zero temperatures. All the brochures said it was the #1 attraction in Amsterdam, but that was obviously just good marketing. Regardless, we enjoyed the "4D" experience and cool bartender tricks.

Amsterdam is one of my favorite cities in the world, offering some of the best scenes and photo opportunities I've ever seen. We marveled at a gorgeous sunset over a canal on our walk back to the train station.

On the train to Antwerp, we scarfed down delicious bread and cheese, chased it with wine and watched a movie on my iPad. Upon arrival, we were instantly mesmerized by the architecture and beauty of the Antwerpen Centraal Station. We hailed a taxi and proceeded to our accommodations at the Holiday Inn Express.

Devoxx
I knew that Devoxx was a great conference and I could learn a lot by attending. However, it was also my first time in Belgium and I knew there was a lot to learn by exploring too. Much to my delight, while lying in bed on Wednesday morning, I quickly realized I could get all the key highlights via Twitter. I also learned that, as a speaker, I'd get full access to all the sessions via Parleys.com. So Wednesday was spent registering for the conference and traveling to Antwerp's shopping district to explore and drink a few delicious Belgium beers.

On Thursday, we woke up early and walked the 35 minute journey to the conference to catch The Future Roadmap of Java EE talk. The session was so packed that many overflow rooms were created and we nestled ourselves into the front row of one across the hall. My talk on Comparing JVM Web Frameworks was next and I fought the crowd to get into the keynote room to deliver it. I don't know how many people attended (est. 500), but it was definitely the largest audience I'd ever spoken in front of. Based on Twitter mentions, the majority of people seemed to enjoy it and that put a smile on my face for the rest of the day.

Since Trish and I didn't have time for breakfast, we walked back to the hotel, dropped off my laptop and headed downtown to find some grub. We found Madre Tierra, had a delicious breakfast and continued on to Cathedral of Our Lady. The artwork inside was amazing, as demonstrated by the pictures below.

That evening, we joined the Java Posse dinner at Pelgrom. This was a fun dinner where we got to sit with Dick Wall and Carl Quinn on one side and Mark Reinhold, Chet Haase and Romain Guy on the other. Good food, great beer and excellent conversation. From there, we met up with James Ward and other Adobe folks before attending the Devoxx party to close the night.

Friday, we slept in and tracked down some delicious Belgium Waffles at Désiré de Lille before catching a train to Ghent. We arrived at sunset, but that didn't stop Trish's Nikon D300 from capturing many spectacular shots throughout the night.

On Saturday, we began our journey back to the US, starting with taking the fast train from Antwerp to Amsterdam. We checked into a fancy hotel and snuggled in for a cozy dinner at Tibet Restaurant. We spent most of the night walking around, taking sweet photos and making our Irish heritage proud.

Traveling to Belgium and speaking at Devoxx was definitely a highlight of my life. Not only were the sites fantastic, but the conference attendees were super nice and I had the best travel partner in the world. The beers were delicious, the food was excellent and I can't wait to return in the future. Thanks to the Devoxx Crew for having me!

To see all the pictures I took on this trip, check out my Devoxx 2010 set on Flickr.

My Comparing JVM Web Frameworks Presentation from Devoxx 2010

This week, I've been having a great time in Antwerp, Belgium at the Devoxx Conference. This morning, I had the pleasure of delivering my Comparing JVM Web Frameworks talk. I thoroughly enjoyed giving this presentation, especially to such a large audience. You can view the presentation below (if you have Flash installed) or download it here.

Unlike previous years, I chose to come up with a spreadsheet matrix that shows why I chose the 5 I did. This spreadsheet and rankings given to each framework are likely to be debated, as I don't know all the frameworks as well as I'd like to. Also, the missing column on this spreadsheet is a "weighting" column where you can prioritize certain criteria like I've done in the past when Comparing Ajax Frameworks. If you believe there are incorrect numbers, please let me know and I'll try to get those fixed before I do this talk again at The Rich Web Experience.

One thing that doesn't come across in this presentation is that I believe anyone can use this matrix, and weightings, to make any of these frameworks come out on top. I also believe web frameworks are like spaghetti sauce in The Ketchup Conundrum. That is, the only way to make more happy spaghetti sauce lovers was to make more types of spaghetti sauce. You can read more about this in my There is no "best" web framework article.

Update: If you disagree with the various ratings I gave to web frameworks in this presentation, please provide your opinions by filling out this survey. Thanks to Sebastien Arbogast for setting this up.

Update: Sebastien has posted his survey results at JVM Web Framework Survey, First Results.

Update 12/6: A video of this presentation is now available on Parleys.com.

P.S. My current gig is ending in mid-December. If you're looking for a UI Architect with a passion for open source frameworks, please let me know.

How's the ol' Team Doing?

Back in March, I wrote about How We Hired a Team of 10 in 2 Months:

This week, we on-boarded 3 of our final 4 developers. I breathed a big sigh of relief that the hiring was over and we could get back to slinging code and making things happen. As luck would have it, I received an e-mail from my boss on Tuesday that the hiring engine is starting up again and we need to hire 6 more developers. While I'm not anxious to start the Hiring Engine again, I am glad to know it works well and it has helped us build a great team.

We never ended up hiring those additional 6 developers, but we've had quite a ride since March. One of the first commenters on my original post wrote:

I hope that whirlwind of hiring works out for you Matt. But, don't you think it's a bit early to be declaring success?

At that time, we still had a lot of work to do to become a successful team. However, by the end of March, we'd finished our first deliverable - converting a somewhat slow ColdFusion/jQuery/Video webapp into a fast Java/jQuery/Video webapp. The slowness wasn't due to ColdFusion, but mostly performance, caching and YSlow-type optimizations. At that time, we surprised the folks that were in charge of our app. They didn't think we'd finish so fast and it took them awhile to decide what to do with our work.

While we were waiting for the product folks to launch our app in April/May, we decided to experiment with developing some new clients. So we wrote an iPhone app, an Android App, an iPhone/Android/iPad/HTML5 version of our webapp and a Blu-ray client. All of these applications used our webapp's backend RESTful services and we were able to learn the SDKs and implement all the apps in a matter of weeks. In May, we demoed all our clients and got rave reviews from executives. We celebrated that afternoon with a big sigh of relief.

The glowing from our many-clients demo was short-lived. A week later, we were asked to enhance our iPad app to include TV-Remote type features, namely channel-changing and DVR functionality. After freaking out and trying to figure out how to deliver such an app in a week, the demo was rescheduled and we were afforded 2 weeks to build the app. After much frantic development, we were able to complete the app in time and the demo was published to YouTube a couple months later.

In June, if you asked me if we were a successful team, I would've definitely said "Yes!" We'd been asked to develop apps for 3 different demos and we delivered on-time.

The remainder of June and July we slipped into a bit of limbo where we weren't asked to develop anything, but simply maintain and enhance the stuff we'd already developed. After a few weeks of doing this, several of us began to wonder if the apps we'd developed would ever see the light of day. We expressed this concern to our VP and a new idea was hatched: The 60-Day Push.

The 60-Day Push was designed to eliminate politics and meetings and allow us to develop a 3-screen (PC, iPad, TV) experience for our video content. We decided to aim high and try to complete most of the work in 30-days, so we could do executive demos of our progress. We started all our applications from scratch, split into Services, Portal, TV and iPad teams and worked with Method to implement a slick design for all our apps. I'm proud to say we delivered yet again and there were many proud moments as we demoed to the top executives of the company.

In early September, after doing several demos, we were approved to launch and we've been working towards that goal ever since. We feel we have several weeks of work to coax our DemoWare into RealWorldWare, but the momentum is there and the end of the tunnel is in sight.

As a further sign of our success, we're moving into a new office in LoDo next week. This also means the End of an Era, where the Raible Designs' office across from Forest Room 5 will cease to exist. We (Goodwill, Scotty, Country Bry and I) first moved into this office while working for Evite in April 2009. It's been a fantastic location, a facilitator of extensive collaboration and host to many dart games, FACs, bird-dog spottings and way too many Mom Jokes.

As part of our transition, I'll be looking for renters to fill out the rest of my lease (through March 2010). If you're looking for a sweet location for 5-6 people in Denver's Highlands (near the REI store downtown), please let me know.

Also, there's a good chance my team will continue to grow as we move our apps into production and start ramping up for millions of users. If you're a strong Web or Java developer with social skills and a Ditchdigger attitude, I'd love to hear from you. We probably won't be hiring until January, but that doesn't mean we can't start talking now.

RE: Moving from Spring to Java EE 6: The Age of Frameworks is Over

Last Tuesday, Cameron McKenzie wrote an interesting article on TheServerSide titled Moving from Spring to Java EE 6: The Age of Frameworks is Over. In this article, Cameron says the following:

J2EE represents the past, and Java EE 6 represents the future. Java EE 6 promises us the ability to go beyond frameworks. Frameworks like Spring are really just a bridge between the mistakes of the J2EE past and the success of the Java EE 6 future. Frameworks are out, and extensions to the Java EE 6 platform are in. Now is the time to start looking past Spring, and looking forward to Seam and Weld and CDI technologies.

He then links to an article titled Spring to Java EE - A Migration Experience, an article written by JBoss's Lincoln Baxter. In this article, Lincoln talks about many of the technologies in Java EE 6, namely JPA, EJB, JSF, CDI and JAX-RS. He highlights all the various XML files you'll need to know about and the wide variety of Java EE 6 application servers: JBoss AS 6 and GlassFish v3.

I don't have a problem with Lincoln's article, in fact I think it's very informative and some of the best documentation I've seen for Java EE 6.

I do have some issues with Cameron's statements that frameworks are mistakes of the J2EE past and that Java EE 6 represents the future. Open source frameworks made J2EE successful. Struts and Hibernate came out in the early days of J2EE and still exist today. Spring came out shortly after and has turned into the do-everything J2EE implementation it was trying to fix. Java EE 6 might be a better foundation to build upon, but it's certainly not going to replace frameworks.

To prove my point, let's start by looking at the persistence layer. We used to have Hibernate based on JDBC, now we have JPA implementations built on top of the JPA API. Is JPA a replacement for all persistence frameworks? I've worked with it and think it's a good API, but the 2.0 version isn't available in a Maven repo and Alfresco recently moved away from Hibernate (which == JPA IMO) to iBATIS for greater data access layer control and scalability. Looks like the age of frameworks isn't over for persistence frameworks.

The other areas that Java EE 6 covers that I believe frameworks will continue to excel in: EJB, CDI, JSF and JAX-RS. Personally, I don't have a problem with EJB 3 and think it's a vast improvement on EJB 2.x. I don't have an issue with CDI either, and as long as it resembles Guice for dependency injection, it works for me. However, when you get into the space I've been living in for the last couple years (high-traffic public internet sites), EJB and things like the "conversation-scope" feature of CDI don't buy you much. The way to make web application scale is to eliminate state and cache as much as possible, both of which Java EE doesn't provide much help for. In fact, to disable sessions in a servlet-container, you have to write a Filter like the following:

public class DisabledSessionFilter extends OncePerRequestFilter {

    /**
     * Filters requests to disable URL-based session identifiers.
     */
    @Override
    protected void doFilterInternal(final HttpServletRequest request,
                                    final HttpServletResponse response,
                                    final FilterChain chain)
            throws IOException, ServletException {

        HttpServletRequestWrapper wrappedRequest = new HttpServletRequestWrapper(request) {

            @Override
            public HttpSession getSession(final boolean create) {
                if (create) {
                    throw new UnsupportedOperationException("Session support disabled");
                }
                return null;
            }

            @Override
            public HttpSession getSession() {
                throw new UnsupportedOperationException("Session support disabled");
            }
        };

        // process next request in chain
        chain.doFilter(wrappedRequest, response);
    }
}

What about JAX-RS? Does it replace the need for frameworks? I like the idea of having a REST API in Java. However, its reference implementation is Jersey, which seems more like a framework than just Java EE. If you choose to use JAX-RS in your application, you still have to choose between CXF, Jersey, RESTEasy and Restlet. I compared these frameworks last year and found the Java EE implementation lacking in the features I needed.

Finally, let's talk about my-least-framework-web-framework: JSF. The main reason I don't like JSF is because of its 1.x version. JSF 1.0 was released a year before the Ajax term was coined (see timeline below). Not only did it take forever to develop as a spec, but it tried to be a client-component framework that was very stateful by default.

Now that JSF 2.0 is out, it has Ajax integrated and allows you to use GET instead of POST-for-everything. However, the only people that like Ajax integrated into their web frameworks are programmers scared of JavaScript (who probably shouldn't be developing your UI). Also, the best component development platform for the web is JavaScript. I recommend using an Ajax framework for your components if you really want a rich UI.

Sure you can use the likes of Tapestry and Wicket if you like POJO-based web development, but if you're looking to develop a webapp that's easy to maintain and understand, chances are that you'll do much better with traditional MVC frameworks like Spring MVC and Struts 2. The simplicity and popularity of Rails and Grails further emphasize that developers prefer these types of web frameworks.

Another reason I don't like JSF: there's very few developers in the wild happy with it. The major promoters of JSF are book authors, trainers, Java EE Vendors and MyFaces developers. Whenever I speak at conferences, I ask folks to raise their hands for the various web frameworks they're using. I always ask the JSF users to keep their hands up if they like it. Rarely do they stay up.

So it looks like we still need web frameworks.

Eberhard Wolff has an interesting post where he defends Spring and talks about the productivity comparisons between Spring and Java EE. He recommends using Grails or Spring Roo if you want the level of productivity that Ruby on Rails provides. That's a valid recommendation if you're building CRUD-based webapps, but I haven't developed those in quite some time. Nowadays, the apps I develop are true SOFEA apps, where the backend serves up XML or JSON and the frontend client is HTML/JavaScript/CSS, Android, iPad or Sony Blu-Ray players. On my current project, our services don't even talk to a database, they talk to a CMS via RESTful APIs. We use Spring's RestTemplate for this and HttpClient when it doesn't have the features we need. Not much in Java EE 6 for this type of communication. Sure, Jersey has a client, but it's certainly not part of the Java EE spec.

As far as getting Ruby on Rails' zero-turnaround productivity, I don't need Grails or Spring Roo, I simply use IDEA and JRebel.

Conclusion
I don't see how new features in Java EE 6 can mean the age of frameworks is over. Java SE and J2EE have always been foundations for frameworks. The Java EE 6 features are often frameworks in themselves that can be used outside of a Java EE container. Furthermore, Java EE 6 doesn't provide all the features you need to build a high-scale web app today. There's no caching, no stateless web framework that can serve up JSON and HTML and no hot-reload productivity enhancements like JRebel. Furthermore, there's real excitement in Javaland for languages like Scala, Groovy and JRuby. All of these languages have web frameworks that've made many developers happy.

Here's to the Age of Frameworks - may it live as long as the JVM!

P.S. If you'd like to hear me talk about web frameworks on the JVM, I'll be speaking at The Colorado Springs Open Source Meetup and Devoxx 2010 in the near future.

Happy 8th Birthday to this blog!

Eight years ago today, this blog was born in the wee hours of the morning. I was inspired to start it after reading Dave Johnson's article on Roller. I have to say, it's been a great ride and I remember the early days like they were yesterday. Many of the Java bloggers wrote daily and shared short tips, tricks and snippets on their blogs; much in the same way we do on Twitter today.

A lot has happened in my life since this blog was started: Abbie was born, Jack was born, I started AppFuse, wrote Spring Live, had some really cool gigs and gained a whole new perspective on my life.

For those long time readers, you might've noticed the vacation posts have picked up recently and the technology posts have subsided somewhat. The good news is this indicates I'm having a lot of fun; the bad news is I'm not learning as much as I'd like. Hopefully that'll change soon and I'll be writing about developing apps for the online video space in the near future. There's a good chance the posts about my life and how much fun I'm having will continue, especially as Abbie and Jack continue to grow into world-class skiers.

As usual, I have many ambitions for this fall, including helping Apache Roller, finishing AppFuse 2.1 and learning how to play the guitar. Along the way, I'll be helping build/release some kick-ass software for a major cable provider, building a sauna in my basement and enjoying the hell out of Devoxx 2010. You can sure I'll be blogging about these along the way, as well as many years into the future.

Thanks for reading all these years, it's been a fantastic experience.

Scaling Flash Movies to match Browser Zoom Levels

Recently I was tasked with figuring out how to scale the Flash assets in the web application I'm working on. In the app, there's two different Flash assets: a Spotlight (cycles through images) and a Video Player. Before I started working on the issue, our assets would stay the same fixed size no matter what the browser zoom level. You can see this issue in action by going to Hulu or Fancast and zooming in/out (Command +/- on Mac, Control +/- on Windows). The Flash assets don't scale with the browser's text.

I found a lot of references for how to trap and handle resizing in JavaScript, so that's the initial path I took. I ended up having issues trapping the resize event in IE, as well as persisting the appropriate zoom level on page reload. Because of this, I ended up using a pure ActionScript solution that works much better. This article shows how I implemented both solutions.

Regardless of implementation, the first change I had to make was to move the height and width from the Flash asset (object/embed/JS) to its surrounding tag (<section> in our app). Then I changed the height/width to 100% on the Flash asset.

JavaScript Implementation
To allow zooming in ActionScript, I modified our main class to expose a "zoom" method to JavaScript:

ExternalInterface.addCallback("zoom", _zoom);

...

private function _zoom(scale:Number):void {
    _view.scaleX = _view.scaleX * scale;
    _view.scaleY = _view.scaleY * scale;
}

var windowHeight;
var documentHeight;

$(document).ready(function() { 
    ...
    windowHeight = $(window).height();
    documentHeight = $(document).height();

    $(window).resize(resizeWindow);
}

// Resize Flash assets when page is zoomed
function resizeWindow() {
    var newWindowHeight = $(window).height();
    var newDocumentHeight = $(document).height();
    // if document height hasn't changed, it's a browser window resize
    // event instead of a text zoom - don't change anything
    if (newDocumentHeight === documentHeight) {
        return;
    } else {
        documentHeight = newDocumentHeight;
    }
    var scale = (windowHeight / newWindowHeight); 

    var player = getFlashMovie('playerId');
    if (player && player.zoom) {
        player.zoom(scale);
    }
    var spotlight = getFlashMovie('spotlightId');
    if (spotlight && spotlight.zoom) {
        spotlight.zoom(scale);
    }

    windowHeight = newWindowHeight;
}

This seemed to work well in Firefox, Safari and Opera, but not in IE. I found this explanation about why it might not work, but I was unsuccessful in getting IE to recognize a resize/zoom event.

To fix scaling in our Spotlight asset, I used a similar solution. However, since the Spotlight didn't have all its elements in a container (they were being added directly to the stage), I had to refactor the code to add a SpotlightView (extends Sprite) that contains the bulk of the code.

Browsers persist the zoom level you've set for a site. The problem with the solution used here is it only scales up and down properly if you start from scale = 1 and revert to scale = 1 before leaving the site. If you zoom in and close your browser, when you come back the flash movies will be scale = 1 while the rest of the site is zoomed in. To solve this problem, I attempted to save the scale value in a cookie. This worked, and I was able to read the cookie in the *.as files to scale the movie correctly. However, I experienced some issues with this approach and didn't like having to delete cookies when I wanted the Flash assets to scale correctly.

ActionScript Implementation
After discovering issues with the JavaScript implementation, I did some research to see if it was possible to listen for the browser resize event in ActionScript. The Flash Fluid Layouts and Stage Resize in AS3 tutorial clued me in that the stage could listen for a resize event.

stage.addEventListener(Event.RESIZE, resizeListener); 

After adding the above line in the initialization, I added a resizeListener function that scales based on the default dimensions. It also ensures no scaling happens in full screen mode.

private function resizeListener(e:Event):void {
    // don't scale if entering full screen mode
    if (stage.displayState == StageDisplayState.FULL_SCREEN)  {
        _view.scaleX = 1;
        _view.scaleY = 1;
    } else {
        _view.scaleX = stage.stageWidth / 964;
        _view.scaleY = stage.stageHeight / 586;
    }
}

For the Spotlight asset, there are a number of different layouts (home, featured and news). The main class has a resizeListener function that scales accordingly to which layout type is being used.

private function resizeListener(e:Event):void {
    var type:String = _view.getLayoutType();

    if (type == "featured") { 
        _view.scaleX = stage.stageWidth / 958;
       _view.scaleY = stage.stageHeight / 180;
   } else if (type == "home") { 
        _view.scaleX = stage.stageWidth / 964;
        _view.scaleY = stage.stageHeight / 428;
    } else if (type == "news") {
        _view.scaleX = stage.stageWidth / 964;
        _view.scaleY = stage.stageHeight / 189;
    }
}

Because the layout type isn't set until the XML is loaded, I listen for that event in my URLLoader.

xmlLoader.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, resizeListener);

With the pure ActionScript implementation, the zoom level is automatically persisted. The Event.RESIZE event is fired by the Flash plugin when the page first loads if the dimensions are not the default.

That's it! Special thanks to James Ward for clueing me into scaleX and scaleY. Hopefully Hulu and Comcast can use this tutorial to scale their video players too.

My Presentations from The Irish Software Show 2010

This week I've been enjoying Dublin, Ireland thanks to the 2nd Annual Irish Software Show. On Wednesday night, I spoke about The Future of Web Frameworks and participated in a panel with Grails, Rails, ASP.NET MVC and Seaside developers. It was a fun night with lots of lively discussion. Below is my presentation from this event.

This morning, I delivered my Comparing Kick-Ass Web Frameworks talk. This presentation contains updated statistics for various metrics comparing Rails vs. Grails and Flex vs. GWT.

Thanks to all who attended my talks this week!

P.S. I believe audio was recorded on Wednesday night, but I'm unsure how it turned out. I'm pretty sure no recordings were done on this morning's session.