Raible Designs

Struts is (far and away) most popular web framework deployed on JBoss

From this month's JBoss Newsletter:

These results are certainly interesting. My guess is most "Other" frameworks are ones developed in-house.

Does this means I shouldn't ditch Struts 1.x support in AppFuse 2.0? Possibly, but since AppFuse works best for starting new applications - it makes sense to say "use the good stuff or you're on your own."

Pennies in the Radio

Julie took her car in to the stereo shop today b/c the radio was cutting out every once in a while. Actually, it was better than that - it'd quit working when she'd drive over a bump, and then start working again when she hit the next bump. The stereo shop called a few minutes ago to tell us what the problem was: someone has stuffed pennies into the radio, and they'd somehow fallen down and were shorting out the wiring below. I wonder who that someone was?

If you have a good "my life as a parent" story, I'd love to hear it.

AppFuse Videos

I know I said I'd never do an AppFuse video, but after having many requests - I decided to go ahead and make a couple. The first one is a demo of creating a new project and then installing and browsing that project in your browser - to see all the out-of-the-box features.

• http://demo.appfuse.org/setup.html

The 2nd one basically all the stuff that's done in the tutorials - using Spring MVC for the web framework. I create a Person.java object and then use AppGen to generate all the code for it. In this one, I make a number of mistakes (but solve them all). I thought about going fully happy-path, but then decided it was important to show some gotchas that might occur.

• http://demo.appfuse.org/appgen.html

I used the trial version of Camtasia Studio to create these videos. Thanks to Keith at KGB Internet for hosting the demo site for AppFuse. If you need Tomcat hosting, Keith offers an excellent service at a very good price.

Update: You can also download these videos for off-line use.

Update 2: I updated these videos for AppFuse 1.9.3.

Brrrrrrrr

I attended the Java User Group meeting tonight and managed to document a good portion of it. I hope to post it in the morning when I wake up. After the meeting, a number of us headed to the local brewery and enjoyed some brewskis together. We left around 11:20 and I made it home (riding my bike) at midnight. While it was 19°F when I rode to work this morning, the 26°F on the way home seemed a lot colder. Maybe it was the beer. Anyway, it's good to be home. Let's hope it warms up before I ride back in in 5 hours.

Resin slower than Tomcat, fails the AppFuse Test

As part of AppFuse 1.6, I was hoping to supply the option to use Resin instead of Tomcat. In reality, hardly anyone has asked for this on the mailing list - but since so many folks say that "Resin is better" - I figured I'd give it a whirl. I hate to be the guy that spoils all the Resin users mantra, but it seems like Tomcat is the better server. Why? Speed, compliance and shit works. Here are some things I found:

• Server startup time when AppFuse is only app installed (deleted work directories before starting):
  • Resin: 25 seconds
  • Tomcat: 14 seconds
  I also found that Resin loads my StartupListener twice b/c it's defined in web.xml and XDoclet puts it in the generated TLD. I think the best solution is to add a flag to XDoclet to allow you to exclude listeners from the TLD when it's generated. I commented out the entry in web.xml for this test.
• Running "ant test-canoo" which runs through all the JSPs using Canoo's WebTest (server already started):
  • Resin: 1st run (no compiled JSPs) - 53 seconds, 2nd run (compiled JSPs) - 24 seconds.
  • Tomcat: 1st run (no compiled JSPs) - 49 seconds, 2nd run (compiled JSPs) - 14 seconds.

I did have to hack a number of things to even run the tests (which verifies titles, success messages, etc.) on Resin. First of all, SiteMesh seems to puke with if you try to use <dispatcher>FORWARD</dispatcher> on the filter-mapping. I had to comment this out, resulting in a lots of HTML Tidy errors during the tests ( Error: <content> is not recognized!). I also had to turn off Resin's fast-jstl to bypass this bug. Finally, I had to revert the displaytag to using the non-EL version (which required changing titleKey -> title and name="${listName}" -> name="listName"). It seems that Resin enables EL even if you're using a 2.3 DTD. With Tomcat, and I believe the spec says this, EL is only enabled if you use a 2.4 XSD.

So there you have it folks, not only is Resin 3.0.9 slower than Tomcat 5.0.28 (JDK 1.4.2, Windows XP), but it's not standards compliant. Of course, the speed could be due to my using the open source version (with performance enhancements turned off) - but I'd think the other (albeit minor) stuff should be easy to fix. Everytime I try to use Resin, I end up finding bugs and going back to Tomcat. I guess this is another one of those days. I don't think I'll include a Resin installer as part of 1.6, but I might distribute one later if I can get these issues solved. I wonder if I should give Orion a run for its money?

P.S. Since I know people are going to ask: Tomcat 5.5.3 with JDK 5.0 took 9 seconds to startup. Running "test-canoo"? First run: 37 seconds, second: 14 seconds. Looks like the new compiler is quite a bit faster.

Tom McQueeney's Blog

What happen's when you're a Java Developer and your wife is a kick-ass designer? You end up with a rockin' Roller theme. Tom McQueeney is DJUG's President and his wife, Renee, is an awesome designer. Not only that, she's a Sun Certified Enterprise Architect. Tom and Renee, this site looks incredible - I especially like how the "blog" part of it is just another page and it looks so seemless. Tom's personal site looks a lot better than many corporate sites I've seen.

Make your JUnit Tests run faster when using Spring

JRoller is down, and has been down for an hour or so - so I've decided to post this Spring Live entry here.

I discovered an interesting thing today about Spring and my JUnit tests. I noticed that the VelocityEngine I was setting on my PositionManager was getting initialized once for each test* method in my Test. This means that since my PositionManagerTest has 10 test methods - it would load the context 10 times.

Loading the context so many times was because the following code was in my Test's parent's constructor:

    ctx = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("/applicationContext.xml");

I suppose I expected any constructor-iniatialized variables to be initialized once and only once. So I figured out a solution to make my JUnit tests run faster. By making the ctx variable static, and loading the file in the member variables definition, I greatly reduced the amount of time needed to run tests. Below is the new code I'm using:

    protected static ApplicationContext ctx = 
    	new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("/applicationContext.xml");

By doing this, the ApplicationContext is only set once, and my tests run much faster. Here's some performance comparisons from Struts Resume:

Average time to run "ant test-dao": 36 seconds
Average time to run "ant test-dao" after this change: 26 seconds

A 10 second improvement - that's crazy talk dontcha think?! I've tried it on single tests, as well as suites - and it seems to improve performance by approximately 30% across the board.

Because of this experience, I have to recommend that when you write JUnit tests that use Spring - you should initialize your ApplicationContext in a static member variable. It seems to be the best performing and logical choice. Of course, if I'm off my rocker - please let me know.

On a sidenote, it would be cool if Roller allowed me to turn off comments for a single post. I like how Simon posts stuff on java.net and then aggregates it to his personal weblog.