Raible Designs

New MacBook Pro and iMac

Almost a month ago, I wrote about how I was hoping to increase my developer happiness by getting a new iMac and MacBook Pro. I received a lot of good advice in the comments and proceeded to order place my order with the Business Group at the Aspen Grove Apple Store the following Monday. I have to admit, the paperwork to get a lease on the equipment was kinda painful, but I was happy to get a 7% discount for being a business customer. It took until Wednesday for my order to be placed and everything started shipping the following weekend.

To make my new machines as fast as possible, I purchased OWC's Turnkey Upgrade Program for my iMac, with the 240GB OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G SSD and 16GB RAM. I also ordered a 480GB Pro 6G SSD and 8GB RAM for my laptop. I received the laptop about two weeks ago and the iMac a few days later. Instead of building my new laptop from my old one, I chose to simply use Lion and copy all my apps and data over manually. I sent the iMac to OWC as soon as I received it and got it back about 3 days later. I was out of town on business last week, and when I arrived home Thursday night, I found all my new equipment waiting for me. I built my iMac by cloning the drive from my laptop and installed the new SSD and memory into my new laptop.

For the last week, I've been very happy with the speed improvements and the wicked fast snappiness of opening apps, compiling programs and IntelliJ indexing in only a few seconds. However, on October 24th, I received a strange email from Aspen Grove Business with the subject MacBook Pro Price Reduction. I quickly replied, asking if new MacBook Pro's came out in the last couple days. I received no response, but learned a couple days ago that indeed they had. One of my office mates bought a new machine and said he got a 2.5GHz processor, while mine had a 2.3GHz.

Today, I packed up my new laptop and drove down to the Aspen Grove store to see if I could exchange it for a faster one. They hesitantly agreed to exchange it, as long as I put the original hard drive and memory back into it. I drove to my office, which was only a couple miles away in downtown Littleton. I put in the original disk and memory back in and returned to the Apple Store. 20 minutes later, I was walking out with a new, new MacBook Pro and happy to get the fastest Apple laptop on the market. The funny thing about this experience is it's the 3rd time in a row I've experienced buying an Apple laptop and returning it shortly after for a newer one. My last laptop purchase (March 2009) and Trish's 13" MacBook Pro (in March) were the first two.

I'm writing this post to thank Apple for having such great customer service. I've been very close to experiencing buyer's remorse (because I missed laptop upgrades by a few days) and Apple has always been very gracious in helping me out. In fact, with this latest purchase, they said there was a $400 difference between my two-week-old laptop and the latest 2.5GHz. Then they only charged me $50 for "being such a great business customer".

Thanks Apple, you rock!

Hyperproductive JSF 2.0 with Ed Burns at Jazoon

This morning, I attended Ed Burn's Talk on Hyperproductive JSF 2.0 at Jazoon. As you might know, I've been a critic of JSF for many years. However, it is one of the most used Java web frameworks, so I was hoping to learn how it's improved in the latest version. Below are my notes from Ed's presentation.

Ed's Plan for our Time Investment:

1. Define a productive development environment
2. JSF for greenfield and brownfield projects
3. List the top 9 productivity killers with JSF projects and solutions

"I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it." -- Pablo Picasso

Software is an executable representation of knowledge, a byproduct of learning how to solve a problem. Knowledge is something that changes as more information comes in. A productive environment makes it as easy as possible to learn how to solve a problem. Learning is an iterative process. Early iterations don't need to be optimal. Later iterations do ... and they need to be maintainable. First is the hardest. Fast iterations are they key. Spring Roo and Play are examples of frameworks that make the first iteration very fast.

You should use a tool to jumpstart JSF development: copy from an old project, use a Maven archetype or use your IDE. With greenfield development, you don't have to bother learning the byproduct of other people's learning. It's a great opportunity to pad your resume with the latest hot technologies. With brownfield development, it's vitally important to understand the existing solution and hidden assumptions. You're also much more constrained in your technology choices. If you want to change, you'll need to come up with a migration strategy, which can be difficult. JSF works well for both because it's not just a runtime framework, it's also a conceptual framework. You need to understand how your framework handles data conversion, validation, page flow, persistence integration, I18N, L10N, A11Y, Web standards and user friendliness.

Top 9 JSF Productivity Killers:

1. Time wasting deployment step
2. The perils of "there's more than one way to do it"
3. Lengthy and painful developer on-boarding process
4. Misused logging and misunderstood error messages
5. Phantoms
6. Under-utilized developer tools
7. Premature optimization
8. Difficulty in doing TDD
9. Lack of an app framework

Time wasting deployment step
ZeroTurnaround solves this problem with JRebel, but there's other ways to do it. Some of the killers of flow state: 1) one large war file, 2) underutilizing dynamic language features, 3) complex server environment and 4) build process is redoing work unnecessarily. To stop the time wasting deployment step, the most important things you can do are as follows:

• Configure your IDE correctly. In Eclipse, compile directly into WEB-INF/classes and use continuous compilation. With NetBeans, use GlassFish.
• Don't do control-flow programming in XML.

Ed then showed a simple demo that showed how you can use Groovy to create a JSF UI Component. He also mentioned that Groovy can be used to author any JSF artifact. The benefit of this is you can simply edit and save a .groovy file without having to recompile or redeploy. Unfortunately, using Groovy didn't eliminate the XML syntax for pages or the XML for defining UI components.

The perils of "there's more than one way to do it"
JSF is very flexible, but flexibility is, more often than not, abused. There's a lack of convention for common things (e.g. master-detail, JSF concepts like converter, validator, etc.). The best way to fix this is to establish the norms for a project and stick with them. For example, Neil Griffin has a good blog entry for the different kind of managed beans you can create. Develop recommendations like Neil's and use them on all your projects.

Lengthy developer on-boarding process
Stick with standards when possible (at least have a common project description and build system across projects). Be committed to periodic cleanup cycles, including documenting for re-use. Pick one JSF component library and stick with it. Support for mixing and switching component libraries has improved with JSF 2, but it's still recommended you use only one.

Misused logging and misunderstood error messages
JSF is notorious for cryptic error messages and very long stack traces. It's still a problem, but the JSF Team is still working on improving them. Good tip: use the <ui:debug> tag. Its recordStateSize="true" attribute can be especially useful. If you're using PrimeFaces, add trace=true to request URLs.

Phantoms
Phantoms is when running code is not the same as the code you are modifying or wrong version of library gets picked up. You should have the capability to hit breakpoints anywhere in your entire software stack, including core Java sources. This is one of the most useful things about open source software. Solutions to phantoms: 1) put a timestamp on every redeploy and have the timestamp appear in the system log 2) write the running library stack to the system log (each library and version being used) and make it easy to compare one developer's runtime stack with another's 3) consider doing all work in tightly controlled VMs (checkout the VM at the beginning of the day, do your work, commit your changes and throw your VM away at the end of the day).

Under-utilizing developer tools
Make sure everyone has the fastest machines available and as much screen real estate as desired. Hardware is much cheaper than developer time. Another tip is to use Hudson as your butler. It's not just the team CI server. In other words, take advantage of automation wherever you can.

Premature Optimization
Keep in mind the trade-offs between readability and performance. When using frameworks such as JSF, don't try to outsmart the implementation. Rather, use the framework as intended and use open-source contributions to treat performance problems. Example, EL expressions got a lot faster between EE5 and EE6. If you spent time trying to optimize EL expressions, you might've been wasting your time.

Difficulty in doing TDD
Try to figure out why TDD is difficult in your company. For JSF, strongly consider JBoss's JSFUnit. Write your testcases to extend from Cactus ServletTestCase and leverage HtmlUnit (JSFUnit does this for you).

Lack of an app framework
Create common components: login panel, CRUD components, etc. If you don't have an app framework, build one over time.

Conclusion
This was an interesting talk by Ed. The dynamics of the room where a bit interesting. Jazoon is held in a movie theater, much like Devoxx. However, it appears there's a spotlight on the speaker that makes it very difficult to see the audience. I don't remember having this problem at Devoxx. Ed asked the audience quite a few questions, but it seemed he had a lot of difficulty in seeing if folks raised their hands. This made for some periods of awkward silence.

Personally, I was hoping to learn some new whizbang tips about JSF that I was not aware of. Unfortunately, I didn't learn anything new and wasn't that impressed with the Groovy demo.

I think Ed's tips about things outside of JSF were good, especially buying developers good hardware. I've seen many companies, including my current client, skimp on developer hardware and cause developer frustration because of it. I think it's great when companies provide developers top-of-the-line hardware and eliminate frustration over CPU and memory resources. LinkedIn and Time Warner Cable both provide their developers with Mac Pros and MacBook Pros as well as huge monitors. IMO, this is one of the best benefits you can provide your engineers.

2010 - A Year in Review

2010 was a heckuva year, possibly one of my all-time favorites. It started with lots of anticipated fun and ended with lots of travel, skiing and relaxing and I'm only just now finding time to write this post. I had a lot of goals when I started 2010; the top two being my favorite:

• Happiness
• Girl

The rest of my goals involved running, skiing, mountain biking and finishing The Bus. I also had some professional goals that involved open source, conferences, publishing articles and learning new technologies. I accomplished about 75% of my personal goals and 50% of my professional goals. I'm pretty happy with these percentages considering how much fun I had last year.

In December 2009, I started working with Time Warner Cable as their Chief Architect of Web Development. I was hired to help them build a team of hard-working developers that could quickly build their online video presence. In January, we started getting our ducks in a row with some Agile Training in Virginia, followed by hiring some Agile Coaches. The only technical post I had during this process was about development infrastructure stacks. Both at TWC and my current gig, I've found myself enjoying the following stack:

• Source Control: SVN
• Source Viewer: FishEye
• Wiki: Confluence
• Bug Tracker: JIRA
• Continuous Integration: Hudson

We tried Git for a couple months at TWC, but ended up reverting to SVN after we had "code deleted" issues during one of our most intense development cycles. When the kids and I weren't skiing, we worked on documenting How to be a Super Hero and The Adventures of Upside Down Man.

In February, I refreshed my Grails knowledge, later learning that it was tough to teach Grails to developers that didn't know Java. First of all, a lot of Grails and Groovy books are targeted at Java Developers. Secondly, the developers I was trying to sell it to had more interest in learning Java. Since I failed to sell Grails, we ended up using Spring + jQuery to build our app. I don't think was a bad decision as most of our development ended up being UI: ActionScript/Flex, Objective-C and jQuery/HTML.

My laptop was stolen from my living room in early February. It worked out nicely in the end since I didn't lose any data (thanks to good backups) and my business insurance covered the loss. My parents came out and helped me finish remodeling my guest room. I posted about My Future of Web Frameworks Presentations and became a proud father when "Jack was flying past both Abbie and I and giggling while doing it".

By the beginning of March, we'd hired a team of 10 at TWC and I took a trip to Jackson Hole to celebrate.

The thing I enjoyed the most about this trip was how well the group jelled. Kudos to Chris for assembling such an awesome group and putting such a spectacular trip together. Can't wait for next year.

The next week, I flew to Las Vegas for The ServerSide Java Symposium and enjoyed sessions on Cloud, Web Service APIs, Flex, Spring 3 and Cameron's Lessons Learned from the Internet Age. I posted my Future of Web Frameworks and GWT vs. Flex Smackdown presentations after the conference.

I ended March with The Trifecta.

For Easter, I purchased an iPad and reviewed it a few days later. Seven months later, I'm not enthralled with the iPad, but I do think it's a heckuva lot better than the Galaxy Tab. I don't use it much, except for movies when traveling. My kids are its primary users, mostly using it for games and Netflix.

We visited my parents in Oregon and celebrated my Mom's retirement.

The picture I took of my Mom and Abbie that weekend is one of my all-time favorites.

At the end of April, I said farewell to the ski season, getting in 25 days; a personal best. I'm happy to report I have 10 days in so far this year, so my goal of 30 days looks to be well on track. No helicopter attempts yet, but hopefully soon.

I ended the month with a work trip to Seattle and painting the town red with my sister and Mya.

I returned to Denver and turned off my TV for a month. I wrote about my experience in early June. For Memorial Day Weekend, I went mountain biking in Moab and had a blast at the Desert Rocks Music Festival. The Porcupine Rim ride took us 4.5 hours and we tracked 26.75 miles. The several points in the trail with "death on the right" were truly epic.

June started with our annual Ride to Red Rocks. I slept six hours and did the 25-mile off-road Elephant Rock ride the next morning. The next morning I hopped on a plane to Ireland for the Irish Software Show. My sister joined me and we had an incredible time with Jamie, Rob, John and Josh.

Upon returning to work, I got to have an awkward conversation with my client about all the vacation I was taking.

For Father's Day, my parents drove to Denver and we packed up the camping gear for a fun weekend at The Great Sand Dunes. After The Dunes, my parents and kids drove to The Cabin, camping out and touring Yellowstone along the way. That Thursday, June 24th, I attended my good friend Jason's birthday party in Lodo.

That's the night I met Trish.

I saw her switch from a Martini to a Guinness and I knew I had to talk to her. I introduced myself and quickly found myself conflicted with having a soon-to-expire iPhone 4 reservation at the Apple Store. I rushed out to grab the phone, returning because there was something special about Trish. We talked for a couple hours that night ... me mesmerized, her smiling a lot. I was dumbfounded to find such a cool person existed in the world. At the end of the night, I got her number and drove home with a feeling that my life was about to change.

The next day, I began a road trip to The Last Best Place for a Montana Summer Vacation.

During that trip, Trish and I exchanged occasional text messages and I told many friends about the kick-ass girl I met. It was another great Montana vacation.

My favorite part of this year's trip to The Cabin was seeing it as a home again. My Mom retired in April and my parents moved back to Montana shortly after. Seeing how happy they are there is truly magical. I especially enjoy the thought of visiting them and all the wonderful folks in the Swan Valley many, many times in the future.

The kids and I drove like bats out of hell and made it back to Denver (950 miles) in 14.25 hours. I quickly scheduled a first date with Trish that Wednesday, and went back to work at TWC with a renewed energy. After our first date, I formed a sort of perma-grin. That Friday was my birthday. I've been having a blast with Trish ever since.

July ended with a trip to the Lost Coast for Jess and Lili's Wedding.

The reception afterwards was a truly spectacular party that lasted well into the evening. Clint and I vowed to go to bed early, but we ended up having so much fun we closed the place down. Jess and Lili were an instrumental part in creating a spectacular night, especially with their wedding dance and infectious happiness.

In August, I celebrated this blog's 8th birthday and we started our "60-Day Push" at work. The goal of our 60-Day Push was to re-write our Video Portal, iPad and Sony Blu-ray apps from scratch, without politics dictating their features. We hired Method for design, chose our own features and went to work. I wrote about the success of this effort in October.

I neglected to write about the Denver Cruisers Saints and Sinners ride or how much fun we had listening to B.B. King at Red Rocks.

Abbie and Jack's first day of school was on August 16th.

At the end of August, we celebrated Jack's 6th Birthday and attended my Cousin Amy's Wedding in Missouri.

September rolled in, we finished the majority of the work in our 60-Day Push and Trish and I drove up to Estes Park for an epic weekend at the Scottish-Irish Festival. We rode our bikes in the parade (by accident), enjoyed a few pints and even did a bit of fly-fishing near our riverside accommodations.

We listened to the 1st 2010 Broncos game while driving back from Estes and slipped into a Rockies game shortly after losing. Our sadness over the Broncos loss was erased within a couple hours as we celebrated Jason Giambi's walk-off home run. Unfortunately, the Rockies didn't make it to the post-season, but the Broncos looked good at their home opener.

October came quickly and I wrote How's the ol' Team Doing and defended the Age of Frameworks. At the end of October, we moved into TWC's Lodo Office on Wynkoop. That weekend, we dressed up as superheros for Halloween.

November started off with Abbie's birthday and Trish got to meet the kids for the first time. From there, we went into traveling-like-madmen mode. We enjoyed suite seats at the Broncos vs. Kansas City game, then flew to Amsterdam for Devoxx the next morning (performing an AppFuse release along the way). I presented on Thursday and posted my Comparing JVM Web Frameworks presentation shortly after. I wrote about our trip while at The Cabin for Thanksgiving.

I flew back from Montana, stopped in at the Lodo office for a couple days, then hopped on a plane to the Rich Web Experience with Trish. My presentations went well, sparked some controversy, and we raced to Key West to celebrate the end of the conference season.

I returned to Denver for my last week at TWC, enjoyed a couple days of skiing, then headed to Utah for an interview with Overstock.com. While I enjoyed my time at TWC, my contract duration was up and being a full-time employee didn't give me the vacation time I tend to enjoy. My interview with Overstock.com was two days, with the 2nd day on the slopes at Snowbird. I was very impressed by the company, people and interview process and agreed to work there on the way to the airport.

I returned to Denver for Trish's Birthday Weekend at Breckenridge, then flew down to Naples on Wednesday to spend Christmas with her family. It was my first time meeting her parents, but that didn't stop us from having a great time talking, beach-going, golfing and relaxing.

We returned to Denver, I tried to get AppFuse 2.1 finished and then we celebrated New Years with friends in Steamboat.

As I reminisce about last year, I can't help but smile. While I've been a happy person for a while, having someone to share your life with is a special thing. I feel like I dreamed up Trish a couple years ago. I was looking for someone that liked to do my favorite activities: mountain biking, skiing, traveling the world and enjoying good beer. I found that and more in Trish and couldn't be happier.

I didn't write as many technical posts on this blog as I'd like to, but I attribute that mostly to the lack of learning new things at TWC. At Overstock.com, I expect that to change and hope to have more technical articles in the coming year.

At the end of last year's Year in Review, I wrote:

I hope to speak at (or attend) 3 conferences, finish up The Bus and do a whole bunch of skiing and mountain biking.

I accomplished all but one goal: finishing The Bus. In 2011, I plan on doing two main things: keep rockin' it with Trish and finishing The Bus. Everything else is gravy.

It's gonna be a spectacular year.

How I Calculated Ratings for My JVM Web Frameworks Comparison

When I re-wrote my Comparing JVM Web Frameworks presentation from scratch, I decided to add a matrix that allows you to rate a framework based on 20 different criteria. The reason I did this was because I'd used this method when choosing an Ajax framework for Evite last year. The matrix seemed to work well for selecting the top 5 frameworks, but it also inspired a lot of discussion in the community that my ratings were wrong.

I expected this, as I certainly don't know every framework as well as I'd like. The mistake I made was asking for the community to provide feedback on my ratings without describing how I arrived at them. From Peter Thomas's blog:

What you are doing is adjusting ratings based on who in the community shouts the loudest. I can't help saying that this approach comes across as highly arrogant and condescending, you seem to expect framework developers and proponents to rush over and fawn over you to get better ratings, like waiters in a restaurant trying to impress a food-critic for Michelin stars.

I apologize for giving this impression. It certainly wasn't my intent. By having simple numbers (1.0 == framework does well, 0.5 == framework is OK and 0 == framework not good at criteria) with no rationalization, I can see how the matrix can be interpreted as useless (or to put it bluntly, as something you should wipe your ass with). I don't blame folks for getting angry.

For my Rich Web Experience presentation, I documented why I gave each framework the rating I did. Hopefully this will allow folks to critique my ratings more constructively and I can make the numbers more accurate. You can view this document below or on Google Docs.

In the end, what I was hoping to do with this matrix was to simply highlight a technique for choosing a web framework. Furthermore, I think adding a "weight" to each criteria is important because things like books often aren't as important as REST support. To show how this might be done, I added a second sheet to the matrix and made up some weighting numbers. I'd expect anyone that wants to use this to downloaded the matrix, verify the ratings are accurate for your beliefs and weight the criteria accordingly.

Of course, as I and many others have said, the best way to choose a web framework is to try them yourself. I emphasized this at the end of my presentation with the following two slides.

My Comparing JVM Web Frameworks Presentation from Devoxx 2010

This week, I've been having a great time in Antwerp, Belgium at the Devoxx Conference. This morning, I had the pleasure of delivering my Comparing JVM Web Frameworks talk. I thoroughly enjoyed giving this presentation, especially to such a large audience. You can view the presentation below (if you have Flash installed) or download it here.

Unlike previous years, I chose to come up with a spreadsheet matrix that shows why I chose the 5 I did. This spreadsheet and rankings given to each framework are likely to be debated, as I don't know all the frameworks as well as I'd like to. Also, the missing column on this spreadsheet is a "weighting" column where you can prioritize certain criteria like I've done in the past when Comparing Ajax Frameworks. If you believe there are incorrect numbers, please let me know and I'll try to get those fixed before I do this talk again at The Rich Web Experience.

One thing that doesn't come across in this presentation is that I believe anyone can use this matrix, and weightings, to make any of these frameworks come out on top. I also believe web frameworks are like spaghetti sauce in The Ketchup Conundrum. That is, the only way to make more happy spaghetti sauce lovers was to make more types of spaghetti sauce. You can read more about this in my There is no "best" web framework article.

Update: If you disagree with the various ratings I gave to web frameworks in this presentation, please provide your opinions by filling out this survey. Thanks to Sebastien Arbogast for setting this up.

Update: Sebastien has posted his survey results at JVM Web Framework Survey, First Results.

Update 12/6: A video of this presentation is now available on Parleys.com.

P.S. My current gig is ending in mid-December. If you're looking for a UI Architect with a passion for open source frameworks, please let me know.

RE: Moving from Spring to Java EE 6: The Age of Frameworks is Over

Last Tuesday, Cameron McKenzie wrote an interesting article on TheServerSide titled Moving from Spring to Java EE 6: The Age of Frameworks is Over. In this article, Cameron says the following:

J2EE represents the past, and Java EE 6 represents the future. Java EE 6 promises us the ability to go beyond frameworks. Frameworks like Spring are really just a bridge between the mistakes of the J2EE past and the success of the Java EE 6 future. Frameworks are out, and extensions to the Java EE 6 platform are in. Now is the time to start looking past Spring, and looking forward to Seam and Weld and CDI technologies.

He then links to an article titled Spring to Java EE - A Migration Experience, an article written by JBoss's Lincoln Baxter. In this article, Lincoln talks about many of the technologies in Java EE 6, namely JPA, EJB, JSF, CDI and JAX-RS. He highlights all the various XML files you'll need to know about and the wide variety of Java EE 6 application servers: JBoss AS 6 and GlassFish v3.

I don't have a problem with Lincoln's article, in fact I think it's very informative and some of the best documentation I've seen for Java EE 6.

I do have some issues with Cameron's statements that frameworks are mistakes of the J2EE past and that Java EE 6 represents the future. Open source frameworks made J2EE successful. Struts and Hibernate came out in the early days of J2EE and still exist today. Spring came out shortly after and has turned into the do-everything J2EE implementation it was trying to fix. Java EE 6 might be a better foundation to build upon, but it's certainly not going to replace frameworks.

To prove my point, let's start by looking at the persistence layer. We used to have Hibernate based on JDBC, now we have JPA implementations built on top of the JPA API. Is JPA a replacement for all persistence frameworks? I've worked with it and think it's a good API, but the 2.0 version isn't available in a Maven repo and Alfresco recently moved away from Hibernate (which == JPA IMO) to iBATIS for greater data access layer control and scalability. Looks like the age of frameworks isn't over for persistence frameworks.

The other areas that Java EE 6 covers that I believe frameworks will continue to excel in: EJB, CDI, JSF and JAX-RS. Personally, I don't have a problem with EJB 3 and think it's a vast improvement on EJB 2.x. I don't have an issue with CDI either, and as long as it resembles Guice for dependency injection, it works for me. However, when you get into the space I've been living in for the last couple years (high-traffic public internet sites), EJB and things like the "conversation-scope" feature of CDI don't buy you much. The way to make web application scale is to eliminate state and cache as much as possible, both of which Java EE doesn't provide much help for. In fact, to disable sessions in a servlet-container, you have to write a Filter like the following:

public class DisabledSessionFilter extends OncePerRequestFilter {

    /**
     * Filters requests to disable URL-based session identifiers.
     */
    @Override
    protected void doFilterInternal(final HttpServletRequest request,
                                    final HttpServletResponse response,
                                    final FilterChain chain)
            throws IOException, ServletException {

        HttpServletRequestWrapper wrappedRequest = new HttpServletRequestWrapper(request) {

            @Override
            public HttpSession getSession(final boolean create) {
                if (create) {
                    throw new UnsupportedOperationException("Session support disabled");
                }
                return null;
            }

            @Override
            public HttpSession getSession() {
                throw new UnsupportedOperationException("Session support disabled");
            }
        };

        // process next request in chain
        chain.doFilter(wrappedRequest, response);
    }
}

What about JAX-RS? Does it replace the need for frameworks? I like the idea of having a REST API in Java. However, its reference implementation is Jersey, which seems more like a framework than just Java EE. If you choose to use JAX-RS in your application, you still have to choose between CXF, Jersey, RESTEasy and Restlet. I compared these frameworks last year and found the Java EE implementation lacking in the features I needed.

Finally, let's talk about my-least-framework-web-framework: JSF. The main reason I don't like JSF is because of its 1.x version. JSF 1.0 was released a year before the Ajax term was coined (see timeline below). Not only did it take forever to develop as a spec, but it tried to be a client-component framework that was very stateful by default.

Now that JSF 2.0 is out, it has Ajax integrated and allows you to use GET instead of POST-for-everything. However, the only people that like Ajax integrated into their web frameworks are programmers scared of JavaScript (who probably shouldn't be developing your UI). Also, the best component development platform for the web is JavaScript. I recommend using an Ajax framework for your components if you really want a rich UI.

Sure you can use the likes of Tapestry and Wicket if you like POJO-based web development, but if you're looking to develop a webapp that's easy to maintain and understand, chances are that you'll do much better with traditional MVC frameworks like Spring MVC and Struts 2. The simplicity and popularity of Rails and Grails further emphasize that developers prefer these types of web frameworks.

Another reason I don't like JSF: there's very few developers in the wild happy with it. The major promoters of JSF are book authors, trainers, Java EE Vendors and MyFaces developers. Whenever I speak at conferences, I ask folks to raise their hands for the various web frameworks they're using. I always ask the JSF users to keep their hands up if they like it. Rarely do they stay up.

So it looks like we still need web frameworks.

Eberhard Wolff has an interesting post where he defends Spring and talks about the productivity comparisons between Spring and Java EE. He recommends using Grails or Spring Roo if you want the level of productivity that Ruby on Rails provides. That's a valid recommendation if you're building CRUD-based webapps, but I haven't developed those in quite some time. Nowadays, the apps I develop are true SOFEA apps, where the backend serves up XML or JSON and the frontend client is HTML/JavaScript/CSS, Android, iPad or Sony Blu-Ray players. On my current project, our services don't even talk to a database, they talk to a CMS via RESTful APIs. We use Spring's RestTemplate for this and HttpClient when it doesn't have the features we need. Not much in Java EE 6 for this type of communication. Sure, Jersey has a client, but it's certainly not part of the Java EE spec.

As far as getting Ruby on Rails' zero-turnaround productivity, I don't need Grails or Spring Roo, I simply use IDEA and JRebel.

Conclusion
I don't see how new features in Java EE 6 can mean the age of frameworks is over. Java SE and J2EE have always been foundations for frameworks. The Java EE 6 features are often frameworks in themselves that can be used outside of a Java EE container. Furthermore, Java EE 6 doesn't provide all the features you need to build a high-scale web app today. There's no caching, no stateless web framework that can serve up JSON and HTML and no hot-reload productivity enhancements like JRebel. Furthermore, there's real excitement in Javaland for languages like Scala, Groovy and JRuby. All of these languages have web frameworks that've made many developers happy.

Here's to the Age of Frameworks - may it live as long as the JVM!

P.S. If you'd like to hear me talk about web frameworks on the JVM, I'll be speaking at The Colorado Springs Open Source Meetup and Devoxx 2010 in the near future.

My Incredible Trip to Ireland

If you ever get a chance to travel to Ireland, take it! I don't know when I heard these words, or how they came into my head, but I remembered them clearly when I was first introduced to Barry Alistair by Jeff Genender. Soon after, I was able to negotiate my way into being a speaker at The 2010 Irish Software Show.

The show was last week and I had a blast traveling to Dublin to speak and explore. My sister came me on this trip, but missed a connection in Seattle and had to join me a day late. I left Denver at noon on Monday and arrived at Dublin Airport at 7 am. I was on the same flight as Josh Long and thoroughly enjoyed my iPad as a travel companion. When I got off the plane, my battery life was at 60% and I'd been watching movies and listening to music for 6 hours.

I took a cab through the misty, cool morning to my hotel. I grabbed a coffee, cleaned up, and walked a few blocks to Trinity College for the conference. I made it in time for the opening keynote by Chris Horn. It was an interesting talk, focusing on what needed to happen to make Ireland the Innovation Hub of Europe. After that, I attended Tim Berglund's session on Complexity Theory and Software Development. After lunch and a few more talks, I teamed up with Andres Almiray and Josh Long for a pint at the hotel bar.

That evening, we attended Jeff Genender's talk on Getting into Open Source. The free drinks loosened everyone up and Jeff did a great job with a humorous presentation on how to get Committer Status. After Jeff's talk, about 10 of us headed to a Moroccan restaurant for a late dinner. I was in bed around midnight.

Wednesday morning, my sister arrived in my hotel room at 8 and promptly fell into bed. I set my alarm to sleep an hour and closed the Vegas-style, no-light-allowed curtains. We awoke much later (12:30) than we'd planned (9:00). We quickly got up and headed for some sight-seeing in Dublin. First off, we hit Dublinia and Christ Church Cathedral. Both sites were spectacular and we both learned a lot about the history of Dublin. From there, we skipped across the bridge to The Old Jameson Distillery for a tour and a bit of whiskey.

The picture below was taken on the Ha'penny Bridge as we were heading back from Jameson. The expression of the girl on the left is priceless.

A couple hours later and I was delivering my talk on The Future of Web Frameworks. The crowd was lively; the Guinness I drank while talking was lovely. My session was followed by a Web Framework Experts Panel with Peter Ledbrook (Grails), Jamie van Dyke (Rails), Shay Friedman (ASP.NET MVC), Julian Fitzell (Seaside) and myself (Java Frameworks). The debate was good and there was much discussion about the right apps for each framework and how important statelessness is for scalable applications. After 3 hours of talking, my sister and I headed back to the hotel. I was particularly happy about the evening since it was the first time a family member of mine had seen me speak.

Correction from my Dad: This wasn't the first time a family member saw me speak. He attended my talk at ApacheCon EU 2007.

A block from the hotel, we spotted a nice looking pub (Doyles) and stopped in for a pint. As we bellied up to the end of the bar, we recognized Jamie (from the panel) and got introduced to his friend Rob. We quickly got lost in conversation, stories and laughter and were surprised when we discovered it was 2:30am. Since I had a talk first thing in the morning, we ducked out shortly after.

Thursday started with my talk Comparing Kick-Ass Web Frameworks. Then my sister and I did some more site-seeing, starting at the Guinness Storehouse. We met Josh and John Willis as they were leaving and they advised we go straight to The Gravity Bar at the top. We took there advise and were getting great views of Dublin and savoring sweet pints of Guinness moments later. The tour facility was freakin' awesome and I loved how it was shaped like a pint glass.

We grabbed some gear from the gift shopped and landed (by accident) at The Brazen Head (Ireland's Oldest Pub, Est. 1198) for a pint of cider and Guinness. Since my sister used to be in the cider business, she was particularly happy there was so much on tap in Ireland.

From the pub, we headed to John Willis's session on The Cambrian Cloud Explosion. Following John's session, we headed to the Speaker's Dinner for a very fun evening with the hosts and speakers of the conference.

On Friday, we woke up in the early afternoon and quickly decided the Book of Kells was our best chance of getting some site seeing in. After visiting the Book of Kells, my favorite quote of the conference happened in the courtyard.

Josh looked at Jamie (with his bad hangover) and exclaimed, "My God Man. Your skin is so white it's hurting my eyes!". You probably had to be there (or know Josh) to enjoy the humor, but I wanted to capture the memory in this post so I could laugh whenever I read this in the future. After that, Jamie, Josh, Kalin and I enjoyed a Starbuck's patio talking about living in the South of France for a couple hours. Then we walked 2 blocks to the Porterhouse Brewing Co. to watch the World Cup and enjoy more interesting conversations.

Jamie left the conference that evening and we joined a whole slew of other speakers for dinner at an excellent Lebanese restaurant near Temple Bar. Good times where had afterwards at a nearby Silent Disco.

Saturday, we woke up early to catch a tour bus out to Glendalough with Josh and John. The bus ride was not pleasant, but the destination was spectacular. We hung out there for several hours, exploring the buildings, walking to the lake and humoring each other.

Our last night in Dublin was an early, relaxing one. As you can tell, I really enjoyed this trip, particularly hanging out with my sister and all the cool people we met. I can easily say that this trip registers as one of my favorite conference experiences to date.

To see all the pictures I took on this trip, check out my Irish Software Show 2010 set on Flickr.

My Presentations from The Irish Software Show 2010

This week I've been enjoying Dublin, Ireland thanks to the 2nd Annual Irish Software Show. On Wednesday night, I spoke about The Future of Web Frameworks and participated in a panel with Grails, Rails, ASP.NET MVC and Seaside developers. It was a fun night with lots of lively discussion. Below is my presentation from this event.

This morning, I delivered my Comparing Kick-Ass Web Frameworks talk. This presentation contains updated statistics for various metrics comparing Rails vs. Grails and Flex vs. GWT.

Thanks to all who attended my talks this week!

P.S. I believe audio was recorded on Wednesday night, but I'm unsure how it turned out. I'm pretty sure no recordings were done on this morning's session.

What's New in Spring 3.0

This morning, I attended Rod Johnson's What's New in Spring 3.0 keynote at TSSJS. Rod ditched his slides for the talk and mentioned that this might be risky. Especially since he was pretty jetlagged (flew in from Paris at 11pm last night). Below are my notes from his talk.

The most important thing for the future of Java is productivity and cloud computing. The focus at SpringSource is heavily on productivity and not just on improving the Spring codebase. If you look at the comparisons out there between Rails and Spring, it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. The philosophy with Spring has always been the developer is always right. However, if you look at something like Rails, you'll see it's far more prescriptive. That layer of opinionated frameworks is important in that it improves your productivity greatly.

SpringSource is putting a lot of emphasis on improving developer productivity with two opinionated frameworks: Grails and Spring Roo. To show how productive developers can be, Rod started to build a web app with Spring Roo. As part of this demo, he mentioned we'd see many of the new features of Spring 3: RestTemplate, @Value and Spring EL.

Rod used STS to write the application and built a Twitter client. After creating a new project using File -> New Roo Project, a Roo Shell tab shows up at the bottom. Typing "hint" tells you what you should do write away. The initial message is "Roo requires the installation of a JPA provider and associated database." The initial command is "persistence setup --provider HIBERNATE --database HYPERSONIC_IN_MEMORY". After running this, a bunch of log messages are shown on the console, most of them indicating that pom.xml has been modified.

The first file that Rod shows is src/main/resources/META-INF/spring/applicationContext.xml. It's the only XML file you'll need in your application and includes a PropertyPlaceHolderConfigurer, a context:component-scan for finding annotations and a transaction manager.

After typing "hint" again, Roo indicates that Rod should create entities. He does this by running "ent --class ~.domain.Term --testAutomatically". A Term class (with a bunch of annotations) is created, as well as a number of *.aj files and an integration test. Most of the files don't have anything in them but annotations. The integration test uses @RooIntegrationTest(entity=Term.class) on its class to fire up a Spring container in the test and do dependency injection (if necessary). From there, Rod demonstrated that he could easily modify the test to verify the database existed.

private SimpleJdbcTemplate jt;

@Autowired
public void init(DataSource ds) {
    this.jt = new SimpleJdbcTemplate(ds);
}

@Test 
public void testDb() {
    jt.queryForInt("SELECT COUNT(0) FROM TERM");
}

Interestingly, after running the test, you could see a whole bunch of tests being run, not just the one that was in the class itself. From there, he modified the Term class to add two new properties: name and searchTerms. He also used JSR 303's @NotNull annotation to make the fields required.

@Entity
@RooJavaBean
@RooToString
@RooEntity
public class Term {

    @NotNull
    private String name;

    @NotNull
    private String searchTerms;
}

Next, Rod added a new test and showed that the setters for these properties were automatically created and he never had to write getters and setters. This is done by aspects that are generated beside your Java files. Roo is smart enough that if you write toString() methods in your Java code, it will delete the aspect that normally generates the toString() method.

To add fields to an entity from the command lie, you can run commands like "field string --fieldName text --notNull" and "field number --type java.lang.Long --fieldName twitterId --notNull". The Roo Shell is also capable of establishing relationships between entities.

After successfully modifying his Entities, Rod started creating code to talk to Twitter's API. He used RestTemplate to do this and spent a good 5 minutes trying to get Eclipse to import the class properly. The best part of this demo was watching him do what most developers do: searching Google for RestTemplate to get the package name to import.

After awkward silence and some fumbling, he opened an existing project (that had the dependencies properly configured) and used Java Config to configure beans for the project. This was done with a @Configuration annotation on the class, @Value annotations on properties (that read from a properties file) and @Bean annotations for the beans to expose. The first time Rod tried to run the test it failed because a twitter.properties file didn't exist. After creating it, he successfully ran the test and successfully searched Twitter's API.

The nice thing about @Configuration is the classes are automatically picked up and you don't need to configure any XML to recognize them. Also, in your Java classes, you don't have to use @Autowired to get @Bean references injected.

After this, Rod attempted to show a web interface of the application. He started the built-in SpringSource tc Server and proceeded to show us Tomcat's 404 page. Unfortunately, Tomcat seemed to startup OK (no errors in the logs), but obviously something didn't work well. For the next few silent moments, we watched him try to delete web.xml from Eclipse. Unfortunately, this didn't work and we weren't able to see the scaffolding the entities that Rod created.

At this point, Rod opened a completed version of the app and was able to show it to us in a browser. You could hear the murmur of the crowd as everyone realized he was about to show the the Twitter search results for #tssjs. Most of the tweets displayed were from folks commenting about how some things didn't work in the demo.

In summary, there's some really cool things in Spring 3: @Configuration, @Value, task scheduling with @Scheduled and one-way methods with @Async.

Final points of SpringSource and VMWare: they're committed to Java and middleware. Their big focus is providing an integrated experience from productivity to cloud. There's other languages that are further along than Java and SpringSource is trying to fix that. One thing they're working on is a private Java cloud that companies can use and leverage as a VMWare appliance.

I think there's a lot of great things in Spring 3 and most users of Roo seem to be happy with it. It's unfortunate that the Demo Gods frowned upon Rod, but it was cool to see him do the "no presentation" approach.

What's Happening in the Java World?

This morning at TheServerSide Java Symposium I attended James Gosling's keynote. Below are my notes from his talk.

The unifying principle for Java is the Network - it ties everything together. Enterprise, Desktop, Web, Mobile, HPC, Media and Embedded. The most important thing in the Java world is the acquisition of Sun by Oracle. James is showing a slide of Duke in a fish tank with a "Snorcle!" title above it.

Obligatory statistics for Java:

• 15 million JRE downloads/week (doesn't count tax season in Brazil)
• 10 billion-ish Java enabled devices (more devices than people)
• 1 billion-ish Java enabled desktops
• 100 million-ish TV devices
• 2.6 billion-ish mobile devices
• 5.5 billion-ish smart cards
• 6.5 million professional Java developers

Java has become "Learn Once, Work Anywhere". Most college students worldwide have taken a Java course in school. James' daughter is in college but isn't interested in Java, mostly because her dad's name is all over the textbooks.

Java EE 6 was approved September 30, 2009. It was many years in the making; the result of large-scale community collaboration. It was built by hardware manufacturers, users, developers and academia. Because of all the politics involved, many engineers had to become diplomats. Most software engineers are from the wrong Myers-Brigg quadrant for this type of negotiation. Needless to say, the process was interesting.

New and Updated APIs in Java EE 6: Servlet 3.0, JAX-RS 1.1, Bean Validation 1.0, DI 1.0, CDI 1.0, Managed Beans 1.0, JASPIC 1.1, EJB 3.1, JPA 2.0 and many others. Also new is the Web Profile. It's the first Java EE profile to be defined. It's a fully-functional, mid-size stack for modern web application development. It's complete, but not the kitchen sink. It's what most people use when building a modern web application in Java.

Java EE 6 adds dependency injection with DI (JSR-330) and CDI (JSR-299). @Resource is still around, but an @Inject annotation has been added for typesafe injection. It has automatic scope management (request, session, etc.) and is extensible via a BeanManager API.

GlassFish is the world's most downloaded app server (1 million-ish downloads/month). GFv2 was the EE 5 reference implementation. GFv3 is the reference implementation for EE 6. But it's not just a reference implementation, it's a benchmark-winning mission-critical large-scale app server. The FCS was released on December 10, 2009.

Goals of Java EE: ease of use, right-sizing and extensibility. Now Roberto Chinnici (EE 6 spec lead) and another guy are on stage showing a NetBeans and GlassFish demo. With Servlet 3.0, you don't need a web.xml file, you just need a WEB-INF directory. There's a new @WebServlet annotation that lets you specify a "urlPattern" value for the servlet-mapping. A new @EJB annotation allows you to easily inject EJBs into your servlet. Roberto wired in an EJB, hit Ctrl+S and refreshed his browser and it all worked immediately. In the background, NetBeans and GlassFish did the redeployment and initialized the EJB container in milliseconds.

@ManagedBeans and @SessionScope and @Named are all part of CDI. When using @Named, the beans become available to JSTL and you can access them using ${beanName.property}. Interestingly, the CDI annotations are in difference packages: javax.annotation.ManagedBean and javax.enterprise.context.RequestScoped.

As David Geary mentions, it's great to see the influence that Ruby on Rails has had on Java EE.

Long demo of JEE6 in NetBeans. Spent quite a bit of time extolling the virtues of hot deploy. Thanks, RoR!

Now Roberto is showing us the admin console of GlassFish and how modular it is. He's installing a JMS module, but it's interesting to see that there's a Ruby Container installed by default. Apache Felix is the underlying OSGI implementation used by GlassFish. You can telnet into it and see the status of all the bundles installed. After installing the full-profile, Roberto shows that you can restart the server from the console.

Isn't the whole point of OSGI that you don't have to restart anything!?

The GlassFish management console is definitely impressive and visually appealing. Apparently, it's extensible too, so you could easily write plugins to monitor your application and provide memory statistics.

Changing topics, one of the things that nice about Java is its a two-level spec. The important thing in the Java world isn't the language, it's the virtual machine. The magic is in the VM! Scala, Ruby/Rails, Groovy/Grails, Python, PHP, JavaScript, JavaFX and many others. In the same breath of talking about Java.next languages, James mentioned JavaFX Script. It's a new declarative scripting language for GUIs. It's similar to Flash or Silverlight, but it's much better because it has the Java VM under it.

At the current rate that we're going with CPUs and cores, there's a good chance we'll have 5220 cores on our desktops by 2030. If you find the concurrency libraries scary, get over it.

For the rest of talk, James talked about what he's hacking on these days. He's helping build an Audi TTS for the Pikes Peak Road Rally in Colorado. The goal is to figure out a way to keep the vehicle above 130 MPH for the whole race. Sounds like a pretty cool project to me.

I don't think there was a whole lot of new information covered in James' talk, but I really do like Java EE 6's Web Profile. However, I think it's something most of the community has been using for many years with Tomcat + Spring + Hibernate. Now it's simply been standardized. If you happen to work at one of those companies that frowns on open source and smiles at standards, you've finally caught up with the rest of us.