Raible Designs

Label placement in web forms

From Swapnonil Mukherjee:

Matteo Penzo has published an excellent article about the placement and alignment of labels in data entry forms. His research, though much more scientific and thorough, confirms what I had said earlier, about the importance of right aligning form labels.

In AppFuse 1.9.2, we added support for the CSS Framework and Wufoo-style forms. The new form layout appears to satisfy many of Matteo's suggestions. The only things we aren't doing are: 1) we're using bold labels instead of plain text and 2) we're using labels for drop-downs, instead of making the first element the label. I suppose the bold labels isn't much of an issue b/c we're not using heavy input borders. As for labels and <select> elements, I think the way we're doing things is good enough. If it works for Wufoo, it works for us!

High Performing Java Web Frameworks

Steven Haines appears to be gearing up for a showdown among Java web frameworks. In his Web Frameworks article (found via dzone), Steven notes the following:

He goes on to say that he's planning on comparing a number of web frameworks, and his study will give special attention to how these frameworks perform. He'll be comparing Struts 1.x, Struts 2.x, Shale and Spring MVC. If you think your framework can compete, Steven invites you to send him an e-mail.

If anyone has a compelling reason why we should add an additional framework, please contact me and I will be glad to consider it in this endeavor.

I'm looking forward to reading Steven's articles, I just hope I can find them again when they're published.

AppFuse 2.0 Status

I managed to get most of AppFuse's code moved over to a Maven 2 structure this week. I have tests working in the hibernate/ibatis projects, as well as the service project, but not in the web tier projects yet. I do have everything compiling though.

[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Reactor Summary:
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] AppFuse ............................................... SUCCESS [2.228s]
[INFO] AppFuse Common Data Module ............................ SUCCESS [1.681s]
[INFO] AppFuse Hibernate Module .............................. SUCCESS [0.809s]
[INFO] AppFuse iBATIS Module ................................. SUCCESS [0.630s]
[INFO] AppFuse Data Modules .................................. SUCCESS [0.008s]
[INFO] AppFuse Service Module ................................ SUCCESS [0.696s]
[INFO] AppFuse Common Web Module ............................. SUCCESS [2.817s]
[INFO] AppFuse JSF Module .................................... SUCCESS [4.410s]
[INFO] AppFuse Spring MVC Module ............................. SUCCESS [4.038s]
[INFO] AppFuse Struts 2 Module ............................... SUCCESS [4.954s]
[INFO] AppFuse Tapestry Module ............................... SUCCESS [4.042s]
[INFO] AppFuse Web Modules ................................... SUCCESS [0.007s]
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESSFUL
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 26 seconds
[INFO] Finished at: Fri Aug 18 15:06:54 MDT 2006
[INFO] Final Memory: 11M/26M
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

If you'd like to review any of the work done thus far, I've uploaded my latest work to:

http://static.appfuse.org/downloads/appfuse2-20060817.zip

The major issue I've encountered to date can be reviewed on the Maven user mailing list. If you happen to try things out, the best thing to do is post feedback to the dev list. I'm considering another device-free weekend, so I may not respond until Monday.

Comparing Open Source Application Servers

With all the recent hubbub about GlassFish, I decided to do a quick performance test this morning. I downloaded all the most recent versions of the various open source application servers, deployed AppFuse 1.9.3 (Struts version) on them, and ran "ant test-canoo" to see if any of them were faster than the other. This was by no means a scientific, isolated test. It also didn't take into account any performance tuning you should do on these servers, I just used the out-of-the-box settings.

I ran these tests on my MacBook Pro (2.16 GHz Intel Core Duo, 2 GB DDR2 SDRAM) with my JAVA_OPTS set to:

-Xms768M -Xmx768M -XX:MaxPermSize=512m -Djava.awt.headless=true

When typing "java -version" at the command line, I got:

java version "1.5.0_06"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_06-103)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.5.0_06-57, mixed mode, sharing)

Servers tested (in no particular order):

• JBoss 4.0.4
• GlassFish B48
• JOnAS 4.7.6
• Resin 3.0.21
• Geronimo 1.1

I'm pleased to note that all servers allowed me to deploy appfuse.war without using a console or command-line tool. They all support dropping the WAR in some sort of auto-deploy directory. Very cool! Secondly, I was able to successfully deploy AppFuse on all of them with no changes to AppFuse nor the server. Quite impressive.

My test consisted of the following:

• Copying appfuse.war into the appropriate directory
• Starting the server
• Running "ant test-canoo" from my $APPFUSE_HOME directory once
• Running "ant test-canoo" 3 times, recording the numbers for each run

Here's what I found:

Since I know you're going to ask about Jetty and Tomcat (the two main servlet-only containers), I ran the numbers on those too. First off, I tried Jetty 6 RC0. No dice - I got the following error when trying to start the server.

java.lang.IllegalStateException: Cannot initialize context because there is already a root application 
context present - check whether you have multiple ContextLoader* definitions in your web.xml!
        at org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoader.initWebApplicationContext(ContextLoader.java:173)

Since AppFuse deploys on all the above app servers, as well as Jetty 5.1.x, I'll chalk this up to a bug in Jetty 6. I used Jetty 5.1.11 for this test because I already had it installed on my machine.

I don't know that these numbers mean anything, but it was a fun experiment. For those of you who think these numbers might mean something, here's the rankings:

1. Tomcat 5.5.17
2. Resin 3.0.21
3. JBoss 4.0.4
4. Jetty 5.1.11/GlassFish B48 (tie)
5. Geronimo 1.1
6. JOnAS 4.7.6

Of course, the better test would be hammering each server with 1000 concurrent users (or a number higher than that) and comparing how each server holds up.

AppFuse Roadmap updated for 2.0

I've updated the AppFuse Roadmap for the upcoming 2.0 version. The current plan is to have a few milestone releases before the final 2.0 release. I can't promise any specific release date because of developer's schedules and current commitments. However, my hope is we can have it done by the end of this year.

Milestone 1

• Maven 2 integration
• Migrate from CVS to Subversion
• Remove XDoclet, putting generated files into source tree
• Get all flavors (WARs) deployed and running on Tomcat and Jetty Maven Plugin
• Spring 2.0: Upgrade XML to XSDs, annotations where appropriate
• Upgrade WebWork to Struts 2
• Documentation - move to new Confluence or DocBook-based system for 2.0 documentation

Milestone 2

• JDK 5, Annotations and JSP 2.0
• Archetypes for creating new AppFuse projects
• Documentation, including screencasts for tutorials

Milestone 3

• Integrate XFire by default (for existing classes and generated classes)
• Code Generation/AppGen - hopefully with the AppFuse Maven Plugin
• Documentation

2.0 Nice to haves

• TestNG replacing JUnit
• Hibernate Validation Annotations (hard part is hooking it into the web frameworks)
• Tomcat Plugin for Maven (that operates like Jetty's plugin)
• JPA Support
• Support for JDK 1.4 using something like Retroweaver
• Support for using Ant to build/test/deploy AppFuse-based projects
• Someone to do all the documentation ;-)

Let me know if there's anything that seems to be missing from this list.

If you can't wait until the end of this year, you may take a look at Patrick Lightbody's newly announced Project Able. He has a lot of good ideas in there that I hope to learn from.

Tutorial: How to Create an AJAX-based file upload progress bar

Helge Tesgaard has written a nice tutorial on How to Create an AJAX-based file upload progress bar with AppFuse 1.9.3. Check it out if you have a need for such a thing. I especially like Helge's comment on productivity towards the end.

How accurate are java.net's top project statistics?

Yesterday, java.net updated their Top Ranked Projects page to reflect the top projects for July 2006. I've always thought these were fairly accurate. However, a couple of weeks ago, I did a bit of investigating (since GlassFish always seems to top all categories) and I found some interesting information. First of all, when last month's stats were first published, I noticed that DWR was on top of the "mailing list traffic" category. I did some investigating, and found the following:

DWR: 62 + 522 + 1 + 3 + 1 = 589
AppFuse: 65 + 134 + 542 + 21 = 762

So I thought, am I missing something? Why does AppFuse rank lower. I posted a question to the java.net forums, and got the following response:

I have a typo in my spreadsheet where I ran the numbers. Let me recheck and fix.

Thanks to Helen for her honesty, but isn't this something that could easily be automated? This would eliminate any calculation errors? Especially since there seems to be issues with the previous month's statistics.

For June 2006 (excluding AppFuse's issues and cvs lists):

GlassFish: 184 + 204 + 28 + 80 + 2 + 36 + 4 + 11 + 17 = 566
AppFuse: 684 + 19 = 703

AppFuse had more mailing list traffic, yet GlassFish is #1 and AppFuse is #3. Is java.net trying to make GlassFish look more popular than it is?

7 simple reasons to use AppFuse

IBM developerWorks published my "Seven simple reasons to use AppFuse" article today. Here's a summary:

Getting started with open source tools for the Java™ platform such as Spring, Hibernate, or MySQL can be difficult. Throw in Ant or Maven, a little Ajax with DWR, and a Web framework -- say, JSF -- and you're up to your eyeballs just trying to configure your application. AppFuse removes the pain of integrating open source projects. It also makes testing a first-class citizen, allows you to generate your entire UI from database tables, and supports Web services with XFire. Furthermore, AppFuse's community is healthy and happy -- and one of the few places where users of different Web frameworks actually get along.

While you're there, you might be interested in reading the "Introduction to Spring 2 and JPA" tutorial. I don't know if we'll get JPA support into AppFuse 2.0, but it's certainly a possibility.

As far as AppFuse 2.0, here's the current structure I've started on for Maven 2:

appfuse
    - data
        - hibernate
        - ibatis
    - service
        - pom.xml
        - src
    - web
        - jsf
        - spring
        - struts
        - tapestry

After code is moved into the directory structure above (or completely re-written), I'd like to move to working on creating single module archetypes and multi-project archetypes (data, service, web) with Maven 2.

After getting the Maven 2 structure checked in, hopefully we can start looking at replacing AppGen. Scott Ryan has done a fair amount of work on this so far with his AppFuse Maven Plugin.

I plan on documenting the plan of attack and milestone features for 2.0 sometime this week.

Update: I started working on the Maven 2 conversion last night. The above structure has changed slightly. Now there's a project in data and web (notice the pom.xml and src in these directories). These projects will contain the classes/files that are common to their sub-projects. The fact that these projects even exist will likely be transparent to the end user.

Dream Machine

Well done Apple, you've created my dream machine. Too bad it's so damn expensive. My ideal configuration is as follows:

• Two 3GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon
• 4GB (4 x 1GB)
• Hard Drive - Bay 1: 250GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
• Hard Drive - Bay 2: 500GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
• 2 x NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT 256MB
• Apple Cinema HD Display (23" flat panel)
• 2 x SuperDrives
• Both Bluetooth 2.0+EDR and AirPort Extreme
• Apple Wireless Keyboard and Apple wireless Mighty Mouse
• AppleCare
• Subtotal: $6,436.00

The nice thing about owning one of these bad boys is you could run several copies of Linux and Windows (using VMWare and/or Parallels). I could literally buy one machine and have 5 in a matter of hours. Hmmm, I should probably bump up that ram to 8GB.

It's tempting, but that's a lot of cash to shell out for a machine. Then again, the more write-offs the better.

Moving from CVS to SVN at java.net

I like java.net. Ever since I moved AppFuse to java.net from SourceForge (in February 2004), I've been very happy with their service. I can't recall having an issue with CVS, and if I did, it was during a scheduled outage. The only thing that's ever made me consider moving AppFuse to another site was java.net's lack of Subversion.

A lot has changed in the last year, and now java.net does support Subversion. However, if you want a project converted from CVS to SVN, you have three options:

• Drop and re-create your project, losing all of your mailing-list/forum history
• Create an entirely new project, which gives you similar results to the first option
• Pay to have your repository converted

Since I like being at java.net (uptime being the major factor here), I've decided to go with option #3. It's costing $750 to convert AppFuse from CVS to SVN, and Virtuas has agreed to sponsor the move. I like that we'll be using SVN soon, but it does seem odd that we actually have to pay for it. AFAIK, moving a SourceForge project from CVS to SVN doesn't cost anything.

In recent days, I've thought about moving AppFuse to Google Code, but it looks like they might be having some early growing pains.