Raible Designs

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.

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.

AppFuse 1.9.3 Released

This release is primarily a bug fix release, but also contains upgrades to several dependent libraries, including Acegi Security 1.0.1.

To install and configure AppFuse for development, see the QuickStart Guide. Thanks to all the sponsors who have contributed products and free hosting to the project.

• Download
• Release Notes
• Learn more about AppFuse

To see how AppFuse works, please see the following demos (username: mraible, password: tomcat):

• Struts + Spring + Hibernate
• Spring + iBATIS
• WebWork + Spring + Hibernate
• JSF + Spring + Hibernate
• Tapestry + Spring + Hibernate

Comments and issues can be sent to the mailing list or posted to JIRA.

Note: If you're building AppFuse on Linux, you should be aware of some non-English encoding issues. The solution is to add the following to your ~/.bashrc file.

export LC_CENGINE=en_US
export LANG=en_US
export LANGUAGE=en_US

Buildix - CruiseControl, Trac and Subversion for VMWare

From the CruiseControl mailing list a few minutes ago:

Just passing on the info... this is one of those projects I also wanted/intended to do. I'm glad someone beat me to it!

http://buildix.thoughtworks.com

It includes CruiseControl, Trac, Subversion all on a single live cd or vm ware image. Very nice!

After installing Ubuntu on VMWare server last weekend, I was getting ready to create something similar to this. I'm glad I saw this as it seems to be a much more complete package than the one I was going to create. I'd prefer Ubuntu over Debian/KNOPPIX, but since Ubuntu is based on Debian, it probably doesn't matter.

A couple additions I'd like to see are Maven 1, 2 and Continuum pre-installed. I doubt that'll happen though since CruiseControl is a Thoughtworks-sponsored project. Regardless, if I had a Buildix with those options, I'd likely use (and recommend) it for every future project. A lot of clients already have bug tracking and source control installed, so the build server is the main thing that interests me.

RE: What Web Application framework should you use?

Tim O'Brien has an interesting post titled What Web Application framework should you use?. The first thing I noticed about this post is the permalink. It looks like he started with "Isn't Rails supposed to change...", which makes me wonder what the rest of the title was. In this post, he rags on Java Web Frameworks and the lack of a clear path for choosing one. He ends up predicting that many will stick with Struts 1.x (poor bastards) and those that aren't tied to Java should move to Rails. I don't have a problem with folks moving to Rails, but I would like to comment on the Java Web Framework space and Tim's comments.

He says:

Prediction: The confusion over what is happening over at Struts is going to discourage people from continuing to use it. The Struts team did the right thing in recognizing that Struts 1.x was a dead-end, but that project needs a single public message. Is it Struts Action or is it Struts Faces? Or is it two frameworks capitalizing on the Struts brand name?

I think what is going on in the Struts project is definitely two frameworks capitalizing on a brand name. That was a concious choice on the project's part when they chose to start creating sub-projects. The interesting thing about Struts Shale is it's largely a prototype for JSF 2.0. Furthermore, it was rejected by many Struts developers as becoming Struts 2.0. Why? Because JSF sucks. Especially when used with JSP - which is what most folks are doing.

JSF continues to be the most over-hyped under-used framework in Javaland. If you read the blogs of first-time users, you'll find many complaints and issues on how things work. Granted, most of these problems are with JSP and the implementation, but still. If I were in charge of JSF, I'd dump JSP altogether, bundle Facelets with it and allow more flexible page navigation (including controller-to-page). Don't get me wrong, I like the ideas behind JSF, I just don't like the implementation (or the fact I have to wait years for things to be fixed in the spec).

That being said, I've yet to meet an unhappy WebWork fan. If you find someone that still likes Struts, ask them if they've used WebWork. Chances are they'll say no. As far as Tapestry is concerned, the learning curve is too high. It's been rejected time and time again by my clients because of the learning curve. Are they going to fix this? Yep, they're going to re-write the whole damn thing - again! Every major point release of Tapestry throws backwards-compatibility out the window. Furthermore, I've heard once you get over the learning curve, it's a joy to work with. I've also met people at conferences that've used it over a year and say they're still struggling with its concepts.

Spring MVC - I wish I had bad things to say about it, but I don't. It (obviously) has the best Spring integration, but I've found WebWork much more pleasurable to work with. Sure, Spring has a ThrowawayController, but with a name like that, you can tell it's a second-class citizen.

Inspired by Tim's post, here's my prediction:

Struts Action 2 will be the best choice for developing Java-based web frameworks. Not only does it support JSF, but it's easy to learn, test and use. Furthermore, it seems to be the most often used framework in major software products and web sites.

How's that for a clear message? Struts Action 2 is the shiznit, now let's get back to developing applications.

Disclaimer: This is my opinion with a lot of stuff thrown in to get folks riled up. I've never put a JSF, Tapestry or Spring MVC application into production (except for AppFuse of course), so most of my opinions are likely without foundation. In wonder how many applications Mr. O'Brien has put into production with these frameworks?

[DJUG] Portlets and Portal Architecture with Scott Ryan

The genesis of this talk is Scott's has talked to a lot of developers about web development and most don't understand all the features you get from portal servers. A lot of developers don't know how to sell them to upper management. Typically, they're very expensive, but you get a lot of functionality and features for the price. Portal servers are not just glorified web applications.

You all know what portals are, right? Yahoo is probably the most famous. RockyMountainNews.com uses a portal server, so does Denver Post. The top commercial offerings are BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, Plumtree, Vignette, ATG and Microsoft Sharepoint. The first version of WebSphere was based on Jetspeed 1 and it was a pretty bad implementation. Plumtree was bought by WebLogic and is apparently a combination of .NET and SOA. Microsoft claims they're adding more portal-like stuff, but currently it's very document-management centric (reminds me of Alfresco).

On the open source side, the players are Liferay, Jetspeed, JBoss Portal, Exo, Metadot, Plone, PHP-Nuke and Magnolia. I didn't know Magnolia was a portal server, must be a new feature. Liferay is Scott's favorite, Jetspeed is pretty good, but not much out of the box.

Portals all started because companies had disparate websites and wanted a way of combining them into a single dashboard. Pieces of a portal:

• Single Sign-on with a unified security model.
• Security/Administration: Portals usually have a content-management component, which allow delegated administration. It's difficult to organize this initially, because of the need to create a hierarchical organizational structure of permissions.
• Personalization: out-of-the-box you can customize the look-n-feel. A lot of times these are driven by rules engines, particularly in the open source arena. Content can often be customized so you can add/remove items that you're interested in.
• Content Management: always comes with a portal because a portal is usually responsible for displaying content. Some include workflow and administration features, like locking, version and administration. JSR-170 defines an interface for accessing CMS systems.
• Collaboration: this is the hot thing this year. Forums, discussions, blogs, RSS feeds, real-time chat, etc.
• Administration: Creation of users, groups and roles. Page and portal layouts, themes, skins and CSS. Selective rights to users to modify desktops and portal attributes.
• Search: Federated search, content repository and meta data search. Web page, database and file system search.
• Interaction Management: Rule-based personalization, campaign execution and management. Event and behavior tracking. Content/Product centric marketing.
• Commerce: Catalog, shopping cart, etc.

For doing portlet development, Scott recommends using a more native technology (i.e. Struts, JSF, PHP, JSP, etc.) and enabled it as a portlet using bridges. Development interfaces are offered via the web or many commons IDEs. You will need some XML, HTML, JSP, CSS and graphics experience to totally enable a portal. Sounds similar to the stuff you need to know for Ajax, eh?

Portals require a mix of development and configuration skill sets. The mix of configuration and development is determined by the platform. Try to lean away from the proprietary features but don't run away from them. Look for pre-build portlets, themes, skins, etc.

One big gotcha of portlet development is source code management. When Scott started developing with portlets, there was no such dev/test/prod setup - vendors just expected him to modify prod. Vignette has a "car" file archive, Liferay has a "lar" archive. These files allow you to easily deploy the changes required for a portlet to work. Apparently, this is still a space that needs a lot of work to allow good source-code control and the ability to rollback updates.

When rolling out a portal for an organization, it's important to start small and build features incrementally.

At this point, my laptop died - as in it went completely black. I hit the power button and it started up again, complete with the loud "bong" for all to hear. A few seconds after restarting, it went black again, so I gave up. After Scott's talk finished, I opened up and tried again - and now it's working.

The rest of Scott's presentation was very cool - he did demos of Liferay's and WebLogic's portals. Liferay looks very cool and a lot of their features remind me of Netvibes.com.

Seam 1.0

I've posted my thoughts on Seam 1.0 to my Virtuas blog. What are your thoughts?

It's great to see the release of Seam 1.0. Seam is similar to many full-stack frameworks like Rails, Rife and AppFuse in that it gives you all the pieces you'll need to build a kick-ass web application.

I've blogged my thoughts on Seam before, so there's no need to do that again. I like the idea, especially the lack of interfaces and the 3-files-for-each page idea. However, I don't know that this concept will fly with Java developers. I agree there's a need to simplify, but many of us are mesmerized by the de-coupling that Spring gives us. So now we're programming to interfaces, and every-so-often swapping implementations. I don't know that we can switch to this simpler model. And then there's the "EJB" thing. I think there will be a fair amount of developers that don't use EJB3 simply because it has the "EJB" name. The best thing the EJB Expert Group could have done for EJB3 would be to give it a new name.

The other thing I worry about with Seam is that it wasn't developed from an existing application. AFAIK, it didn't get extracted from a real-world application that had all the problems that Seam solves. I know that Gavin is a smart guy, and he's probably seen these problems in the real world, but there's nothing like developing a real-world application with a technology - and then extracting the framework from that.

In reality, I'm probably jealous. Seam has some really cool features, JBoss has done a great job of marketing it, and it seems to be a really cool way to develop applications. If I'm going to make AppFuse a direct competitor to Seam, it's gonna be quite the uphill battle.

[ANN] AppFuse 1.9.2 Released

This release includes CSS Framework integration, EMMA code-coverage support and AppGen sub-package support. Thanks to the CSS Framework Design Contest Winners, Doug Hays and Mika Göckel for their help with this release.

To install and configure AppFuse for development, see the QuickStart Guide. Thanks to all the sponsors who have contributed products and free hosting to the AppFuse project.

• Download
• Release Notes
• Learn more about AppFuse

To see how AppFuse works, please see the following demos (username: mraible, password: tomcat):

• Struts + Spring + Hibernate
• Spring + iBATIS
• WebWork + Spring + Hibernate
• JSF + Spring + Hibernate
• Tapestry + Spring + Hibernate

TIP: If you login as an administrator, you can change the theme by appending ?theme=themename to the URL. The default theme can be set in web/WEB-INF/web.xml.

Comments and issues can be sent to the mailing list or posted to JIRA.

NOTE: This release contains Acegi Security 1.0 RC2 rather than the recently released 1.0. This is because a couple issues were found with the 1.0 release. When Acegi Security 1.0.1 (or 1.1) is released, all AppFuse users are encouraged to upgrade.

This (hopefully) marks the last release from AppFuse 1.x. AppFuse 2.0 development should start shortly. See the roadmap for more details. I'd like to say it'll be done in the fall, but I already said it'd be done two months ago.

P.S. For those of you that won the CSS Framework Design Contest, I'll be contacting you within the week to get you your prizes.

Update: If you're building AppFuse on Linux, you should be aware of some non-English encoding issues. The solution is to add something like the following to your ~/.bashrc file.

export LC_CENGINE=en_US
export LANG=en_US
export LANGUAGE=en_US