Raible Designs

Upgraded to Tomcat 5.0.19 + thoughts on Resin

I spent 5 minutes tonight and upgraded this site to use Tomcat 5.0.19. Everything seems to be working fine, save for a couple of new messages in catalina.out:

24-Feb-2004 7:48:34 PM org.apache.jk.common.HandlerRequest decodeRequest
WARNING: Error registering request
24-Feb-2004 7:48:44 PM org.apache.jk.common.HandlerRequest invoke
INFO: Unknown message 0

After talking with Rick last weekend, I'm going to try and migrate to Resin as my main dev appserver. The motivating factor was hearing Resin and Orion are so much faster than Tomcat. Sure I've heard this many times before, but mostly from Jakarta-haters. Rick's opinion holds a bit more water for me. Of course, he mentioned that his findings where based on Resin 2.x and Tomcat 4.x. I'd love to see a performance comparison between the latest versions of Orion, Resin and Tomcat.

I hope to modify AppFuse so it can easily run with Tomcat or Resin with a simple property switch. I've already started that process, but I hit a small snag.

I also hope to migrate this site to Resin 3.x soon. If nothing else, it'd be nice to learn more about Resin - and we all know the best way to learn a new technology is to interact with it on a daily basis.

Spring 1.0 will support iBATIS 2.0

According to this post on the Spring forums, Juergen has just added support for iBATIS SQL Maps 2.0. Very nice!

NYC: DisplayTag and Struts Menu

At the NYC Conference, I'm going to be talking about The Display Tag and Struts Menu. I figure the best presentations are ones that cover new features or introduce something new. So I'm hoping to add the following features to the two libraries in the next month. Please let me know if there are other's you'd really like to see - or ones that'd make the audience go *wow*.

DisplayTag: I'd like to add this pagination enhancement so you can get easy interaction between the records displayed and the records fetched. I'd also like to see sorting by property, not be contents. Lastly, I hope to add an example that does CRUD on a table using JSTL and simple checkbox and input fields.

Struts Menu: A lot of users are interested in seeing a menu that's created from a database table. This shouldn't be too difficult because examples are out there. I was also thinking of adding support for the Joust Outliner, but it doesn't look like it's still developer or actively used. If there's interest, I'll add it.

If you think I'm blogging a lot today (don't you work Raible?), it's because I'm on babysitting duty. Abbie is sick with a fever and Julie had to go to work - so my work day starts when she gets home. I've got the little one tied up with a little Winnie the Pooh action right now...

Later: The DHTML Kitchen has some nice menus, but they're not free. Anyone know of open source menus like these?

Construction on our house starts next week!

We finally closed on our construction loan to double the size of our (675 square foot) house this morning! It took us 2 months to get a loan because of some credit issues our builder had. We stuck with him because we interviewed a bunch of builders/architects and he seems like the best fit for us. He also came highly recommended from the folks he's done remodels for. So while I'm pumping out code this spring, I'll get to listen to a team of construction workers tear this place apart.

We will have to move out about a month or so after they begin. Luckily, our neighbors (who are wicked cool) just bought a new house and we're in negotiations with their landlord to move in there. Hopefully it all works out as planned. I expect this place will be done when Munchkin #2 is about 2-3 months old - or right around Abbie's 2nd birthday. Happy Day!

Speaking at MySQL User Conference

I've been accepted to present a 30 minute session on AppFuse at the MySQL User Conference in Orlando! I would have never thought to even apply, but Mark Matthews sent me an e-mail and convinced me to give it a shot. Now I'm pumped that I did. Here is the abstract for Easy Java Development with MySQL:

Using my open source AppFuse application, I will show how easy it is to setup a MySQL database using Ant, create the Tables using Hibernate/Ant and populate it using DBUnit.

Other events I'm speaking at in the next couple of months include a one-day conference in NYC on Developing Webapps using Open Source Tools and a Basic Concepts presentation on AppFuse at Denver's JUG in June.

Now the only question is - should I use PowerPoint/Keynote or enhance my simply preso app to write these presentations?

Java.net vs. SourceForge

I think it's about time I moved AppFuse from the Struts project on SourceForge to its own project. That way, I'll have more control over controlling spam on mailing lists, adding developers and other such stuff. So the question is - should I stick with SF or move to java.net? I'm fairly happy with SF, except for their recent CVS hiccup and regular CVS outages. It's cool that java.net gives you a wiki, but I doubt I'll convert all my JSPWiki wiki pages to java.net's wiki syntax (whatever it is). So I guess the question is for you folks that have used both (i.e. OpenSymphony developers): Is java.net better than SF?

Dave asked this same question in June of last year - and Roller still lives on SourceForge. I wonder if that's any indication?

Whaddya think - comments as wiki pages?

Dan sent me the following in an e-mail and I think he might be onto something:

...what if the comments where organized as
a wiki page themselves (meaning a single wiki page for all comments
to an article)?  This way, the readers could work together to
construct a "follow-up" to the article in an organized,
collaborative manner.

Maybe the problem with comments is the fact that they are linear
(even if threaded) and go on without end.  A wiki would allow some
structure to be established in the comments.  The best part would be
that comments could then have the chance to evolve into core wiki
pages overtime, even though they begin only as a collection of
comments, links and ideas...wait, isn't that what a wiki is anyway?

It sure sounds good. From an implementation perspective, this might be easy to do in Roller with a comment type that uses an <iframe> that points to a JSPWiki installation. A simpler solution might be that users are allowed to edit their own comments. In Roller, we could set a cookie after the user added the comments - allowing them to see an edit/delete link when they return. Whaddya think? Is there a better way for comments to compliment blogs?

While we're talking about comments for blogs - I remember seeing a cool comment-alert system a while back. I can't seem to find it now. If you're spotted a cool alert system you'd like to see in Roller, let me know!

Tucson Rocked - long live the Saguaro

We arrived back in Denver safe and sound this evening. The only casualty was we forgot Abbie's pack n' play in DIA's parking lot. Doh! Maybe we can call and get it back tomorrow.

Erik Hatcher recommended some good spots to check out. We had dinner at El Charro's in downtown Tucson. We also spent a day touring Saguaro National Park and the Desert Museum. We played lots of Pinochle and my Aunt and Mom had a great time with Abbie.

My Aunt Mary Craig is quite a woman. She grew up in Montana during the great depression and her mom and dad (Hilma and Hank) were gold miners. They never made any real money off of it, but my Aunt has many stories about living in mining camps and helping her dad out when she was a kid. Her most amazing feat was going back to school in her 40s, getting her CPA and becoming the head of the Department of Revenue for the State of Montana. After that, she went on a speaking tour of the US about her childhood and how she became of the of the top 10 business women in Montana (at the time).

Meeting with Rick Hightower was a real treat and I got a lot of great ideas, and a ton of motivation from our meeting. I expected to sip Starbucks for about an hour, but time flew and we ended up talking for around 3 hours! Heckuva guy - he had a lot of knowledge and a great perspective on the whole independent consultant lifestyle I live.

Unlike most vacations where I drag myself back to the computer, I abandoned all electronics for the weekend and now I'm super motivated to pound out some code this week. My sister flies into town a week from today for a few days, so I've only got 7 days until the next vacation begins. Family Rocks!

Heading to Tucson

We're leaving in a few hours to go to Tucson, AZ for the weekend. We're flying to see my Great Aunt Mary and her friend Judy - and my Mom is going to meet us there as well. Hopefully it'll be a nice relaxing weekend since there will be 3 ladies fawning over Abbie. I'm also meeting up with Rick Hightower since he lives there. The snow is supposed to start in Denver this afternoon - good timing eh?

I've never been to Tucson, but here's a webcam so you can checkout the weather there while I'm gone. Have a great weekend, I'll be back on Monday night.

Simplify your AppFuse Managers

I figured out a way to remove any ActionForm references from my Managers yesterday. It was pretty simple, but I thought others might benefit from this knowledge. Basically, you just need to add a couple methods to your BaseManager.java file. Here is the latest one from CVS HEAD. Then you can pretty much eliminate any *Form references in your Manager by using the convert(Object) method. This method will convert POJOs <-> Forms and vise versa. You will likely have to do some tweaks on the package names if you're using anything < v1.4. Looking at this diff of the UserManager before and after this change will show you what's changed.

I started this task thinking I could remove the need for Forms in my classpath when compiling the service layer. However, I soon discovered that my Tests have Forms all over the place - since they replicate what my Actions will pass in. Oh well, at least my code is a bit cleaner now.

Of course, this code will become even simpler when I start using an MVC Framework that allows my POJOs to be my data handlers on the UI. These frameworks make me question if I even need Managers. Then again, it's nice to unit test what your DAOs are returning/receiving from the web layer.