Raible Designs

Struts Menu 2.2 Released!

View changelog or download. New features in this release include a EL tag that allows JSTL's EL expressions in all attributes, as well as the ability to use Struts Menu outside of a Struts application. I also took the time to add a database-driven example to the sample app.

For the database-driven menu (as well as the app I'm writing for Spring Live) - I'm using HSQL. I never even touched the sucker before last week and I gotta say - damn it's easy. Just drop the JAR into WEB-INF/lib and when you make a database connection - it'll create the database on-the-fly. Even better, if you're using Hibernate, you can set a property (hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto=create) and it'll create your tables on-the-fly too. Cool stuff - HSQL rocks for sample apps. I don't know if it's production worthy - but I certainly like what I've seen so far.

No more Struts in services layer

Yesterday, I did some more refactoring on AppFuse and got rid of Struts in AppFuse's services layer. Basically, I was using business delegates (a.k.a. Managers) to convert POJOs -> ActionForms and vise versa. So now the question is - why do I even need Managers and why don't I just talk directly to DAOs (as most sample webapps do)? I think the best justification is that Managers can be used by rich client apps and it abstracts the DAO implementation a bit more.

The question is - is there any point to using Managers in a webapps that will always be webapps (no rich client)? To be honest, probably not - but it does make for easy testing of the business logic. The main reason I did a Struts-purge is to get ready for adding other MVC options - most of which allow me to use POJOs in my view. I'm looking forward to adding Spring and WebWork support and I'm willing to bet these solutions will be a bit cleaner. Unfortunately, neither of these frameworks offer client-side validation support, but the good news is it's coming.

The best part about yesterday's refactoring? I ended up deleting more code than I added - which is always a good thing.

[DisplayTag] SQL Tags and Editable Tables

Fabrizio (the lead developer on the display tag project), took my hack for supporting JSTL's SQL Tag and turned it into a nice feature. The display tag now supports Maps and you can iterate through JSTL's Results using the regular tag or the EL-enabled version. Download nightly build - now automated!

As an exercise for the NYC conference, I implemented an editable table using the display tag. It's a bit ugly, but it does work. You're more than welcome to use it and improve it. ;-) To see it, checkout the following demo pages in AppFuse:

• SQL Tag with Display Tag
• Editable Display Tag Table
• Editable Table with SQL Tags

Any feedback would be great.

Denver JUG and Rock Bottom Brewery

Last night was a fun night. First of all, Mike Clark spoke about TDD development at the DJUG and he wowed me with his presentation abilities. I think he could have presented on just about anything and it would've been entertaining. He had a fair amount of humor in his presentation and came off as a true Montanan (a.k.a. very cool guy). I talked with him after the meeting as a whole bunch of us were entering Rock Bottom Brewery and my suspicions where confirmed. I look forward to the next time I hang out with Mike.

At Rock Bottom, it was all about drinking beer and bullshitting about Java. I sat across from Rod Cope (Out of the Box) and next to Bruce Snyder (Geronimo/Castor). The topics ranged from Groovy (Rod is speaking about Groovy at the Denver NFJS) to Spring to Castor and Kids (Bruce has a little one that's a week and a half younger than Abbie). I had a great time talking to these guys and look forward to our next meeting. It won't be long until I see Bruce again - he's attending SD West next week. He reminded me that next Wednesday is St. Patty's day, so since I'm part Irish - it should be a fun night. St. Patty's day is also both my sister and Julie's sister's birthday - neat eh?

I didn't leave downtown until 1:00 a.m. - a great Java-infested night it was. Thanks for the conversations and the booze folks - I had a great time.

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?

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.

Going Pragmatic on CVS and Unit tests

After reading this thread comparing JUnit in Action to Pragmatic Unit Testing, I broke down and bought both the CVS and Unit testing books. They're short and sound sweet - just how I like 'em. I'm hoping I can knock each one out in a few days.

I definitely need to learn more about using (when/how) Mock Objects for unit testing - my fingers are crossed that this book has the answers I'm looking for.

Good Ant Tip

Nick has an Ant tip that I can put to good use.

This A little-known Ant feature is the hyphenated target name. If you have a target name that starts with a "-", such as "-test-setup", you will not be able to call that target from the command line. Developers creating utility targets in their build.xml files can use this to avoid confusing other developers with irrelevant support targets.

There are a fair amount of internal targets in AppFuse that don't need to be visible and can't be really be called from the command line. Last time I checked, IDEA and Eclipse both allowed hiding of internal targets - so I rarely see these, but it might be a good idea to make them more explicit. I'll put it on my what-I-can-do-when-I-get-bored list.

[ANN] Spring 1.0 RC1 Released

Download or read the (rather long) set of release notes. The good thing is that all tests pass with AppFuse - so that seems like a good release to me! You can also read a condensed version of the release notes.

Changes since 1.0 M4 include:
 
- restructured core, beans and util packages
- reworked PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer, now also able to resolve system properties
- new ReloadableResourceBundleMessageSource, supporting hot reloading of message definition files
 
- support for transaction suspension, via new propagation behaviors REQUIRES_NEW and NOT_SUPPORTED
- javax.transaction.TransactionManager support in JtaTransactionManager, for transaction suspension
- support for local JOTM and XAPool instances
 
- support for CLOB handling in DefaultLobCreator and OracleLobCreator
- new "evict", "saveOrUpdateCopy" and overloaded "delete" and "update" methods in HibernateTemplate
- revised Hibernate-JTA synchronization, respecting a registered Hibernate TransactionManagerLookup
 
- support for Hessian and Burlap 3.x
- removed deprecated "beanName" property from BaseCommandController
- various refinements and minor renamings in the web support
 
- revised distribution JAR files, now one full spring.jar and various fine-grained module-specific JARs
- refined framework build process to work standalone
- new sample application "imagedb", illustrating BLOB/CLOB support, multipart file upload, Velocity view

[ANNOUNCE] Hibernate 2.1.2 Released

Hibernate 2.1.2 has been released. Looks like they fixed a whole sh*tload of bugs. Read the Release Notes or Download. All tests pass in AppFuse!