Raible Designs

Back in Denver

After living out of a suitcase for most of December, it was nice to arrive back in Denver last night. I left here on December 3rd to travel to Boise, Idaho to teach a Spring course. From there, I flew to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida to attend The Spring Experience. This was an excellent show, and I blogged most of the sessions I attended. To read about my AppFuse talk on Saturday night, see my Spring Live blog.

After TSE, I spent the next week with my family in Florida. We drove up to Disney World on the 2nd day of our vacation and had a blast. No one was there, so lines where short and the kids couldn't stop smiling.

While watching the kids' faces light up at Disney was cool, driving Julie's Mom's Cayenne Turbo S around all week was a highlight for me. It was definitely a gas-guzzler, but 520 horses is an awful lot of fun. It rained a lot the remainder of the week - almost 8 inches in 12 hours one day. Even when raining, the temperature still hovered around 80°F all week long. As crazy as it sounds, I'm actually happy to get back to the cool weather in Denver (high of 30°F today).

I'll be in the office all week, trying to tie up some loose ends before the end of the year. This weekend, it's back to vacation mode for another week. This time we'll be heading up to Steamboat for skiing, holiday cheer and (hopefully) lots of snow.

[TSE] Hop into Real Object Oriented (ROO) with Ben Alex

This session's goals are to:

• To detail the "ROO" DDD architecture
• To show you how productive ROO can be
• To profile an Australian project using ROO

ROO is more of an implementation than an architecture. So what is ROO? It's not an Australian marsupial or an Australian airline. It's a Domain-Driven Design (DDD) implementation.

Real Object Oriented (ROO) is both an architectural approach and a framework with code generation.[Read More]

[TSE] Building Modern Web Applications with Mike Stenhouse

Mike Stenhouse is the creator of the CSS Framework we use in AppFuse. Mike is going to talk about the tools he uses to develop web applications. Mike works solely on the front-end, no backend work.

"In 2007 we’ll witness the increasing dominance of open internet standards. As web access via mobile phones grows, these standards will sweep aside the proprietary protocols promoted by individual companies striving for technical monopoly. Today’s desktop software will be overtaken by internet-based services that enable users to choose the document formats, search tools and editing capability that best suit their needs." -- Eric Schmidt, CEO Google

Web Standards is a methodology and philosophy, not just valid CSS and XHTML. The main philosophy behind web standards is progressive enhancement. The methodology behind web standards is a 3-step process.[Read More]

[TSE] Keynote: The Bigger Picture with Adrian Colyer

We've seen a lot of things over the last few days, but what about the big picture? It's not just about the Spring Framework anymore, but there's also a lot of sub-projects: SFW, SWF, SWS, S-OSGi. Then there's Enterprise services: clustering, persistence, messaging and scheduling. Industry trends: SOA, Web 2.0/RIA, RAD stacks.

Agenda

• Spring portfolio: unifying themes, fitting the pieces together (by layer) and future direction
• Facing the feature: my boss says I need a SOA, from auto-suggest to RIA and the quest for ever-increasing productivity

[Read More]

[TSE] The Holy Grails of Web Frameworks with Guillaume LaForge

Under the hood, Grails uses Spring MVC. It has support for "flash scope" between requests.

I find it funny that flash scope is so popular these days, we've had this in AppFuse for four years. However, web frameworks didn't add native support for it until it had a name (provided by Rails). To be fair to Struts Classic, they had support for it before Rails was even invented.

Rather than JSPs, Grails uses Grails Server Pages, which look much like JSPs. Grails uses SiteMesh by default and allows you to easily change the layout used with a meta tag.

<meta name="layout" content="main"/>

Most of the dynamic attributes in a GSP are rendered using the various "g" tags. There's dynamic taglibs for logic (if, else, elseif), iterating, linking, ajax (remoteFunction, remoteLink, formRemote, submitToRemote), form (select, currencySelect, localeSelect, datePicker, checkBox), rendering (render*, layout*, paginate), validation (eachError, hasError, message) and UI (i.e. richtexteditor). [Read More]

Selenium Plugin for Maven

On the Maven users mailing list, Mick Knutson recently posted a question asking if there's a Maven 2 plugin for Selenium. Since we're hoping to move from Canoo WebTest to Selenium for AppFuse, this piqued my interest. It looks like the Geronimo guys have created a plugin and they run their Selenium tests from TestNG. While another user agrees, Wendy Smoak recommends following what Shale does.

While these solutions sound doable, David Santiago Turiño seems to suggest the best solution: Mavenium. The main limitation of Mavenium seems to be it only supports HTML-based tests. Since I expect most AppFuse users to generate their tests using the Selenium IDE, I doubt this will be an issue.

Is anyone using this plugin? If so, do you think it's the best way to integrate Selenium into AppFuse? We'd like to implement the most popular and easiest to use mechanism.

[TSE] Using Dynamic Languages with Spring with Rod Johnson and Guillaume LaForge

Spring 2.0 has dynamic language support. To make it work, you do need a Java interface as a contract between callers and dynamic beans. There's no special requirements on the interface. It's a "POJI" and doesn't have to extend or implement anything. For example:

There's 3 ways of configuring Groovy beans:

1. GroovyScriptFactory <bean> element defining source location and properties
2. <lang:groovy> element from a <lang> namespace
3. POBD (Plain old <bean> definition) - this is unique for Groovy since it can be compiled into Java bytecode

[Read More]

[TSE] Rapid Web Application Development with Rob Harrop

There's a couple of other sessions I should probably go to, namely Juergen's talk on Transactions and Mark Fisher's Message Driven POJOs Rock! However, transactions is generally a pretty boring topic and I don't see myself developing any MDPs in the next two weeks. If you don't use your knowledge in two weeks, you generally lose it, so I'll wait to learn more about MDPs until someone pays me to. I know a fair bit already, so I don't know that there's a whole lot more to learn.

I'm attending Rob Harrop's Rapid Web Application Development Essentials talk. With any luck, I'll learn some new tips that we can use in AppFuse.[Read More]

In Boise, heading to Florida on Thursday

This week, I'm in Boise, Idaho teaching a Spring Fundamentals course. It's cold here, just like it is in Denver this week.

I'm heading out early Thursday morning (Country Bry is teaching a Hibernate class that day) for The Spring Experience in Florida.

I'll be staying with Julie's Mom in West Palm Beach, so hopefully the commute to the show won't be too bad. My AppFuse session is on Saturday night, but I'm expecting a light showing after Terracotta's recent announcement. Jonas Bonér is doing a session at the same time as mine. Maybe if I bring a bunch of beer, I can still draw a crowd.

Timelines in OmniGraffle

Earlier this week, I needed to create timeline graphics for my What's new in AppFuse 2.0 presentation. I found a Timeline script for OmniGraffle and was able to create some pretty nifty images with it. Below are the two timelines I created, one for the History of AppFuse and one for The Future.

I'll be delivering this presentation at our seminar later this afternoon. With free knowledge and a complementary happy hour afterwards, why would you miss it?

It looks like Denver weather will make it interesting for attendees to get downtown. Hopefully most folks will take the light rail in. That's my plan.