Raible Designs

Simplified UI Tags in Struts 2

Struts 2.0.3 contains a much needed simplification of its UI tag libraries. Before 2.0.3, you had to define a property three times (in the value, label and name attributes):

<s:textfield label="%{getText('user.firstName')}" name="user.firstName" 
    value="%{user.firstName}" cssClass="text medium"/>

In 2.0.3+, you can use the "key" attribute to replace all these attributes. For example:

<s:textfield key="user.firstName" cssClass="text medium"/>

One of the things I really like about WebWork/Struts 2 is the previous examples have the ability to write out the entire form row, rather than just an input field. Even better, the markup rendered is customizable via FreeMarker templates.

The bad news is Struts 2.0.3 never got released because the struts-annotations project hasn't had a release yet (good ol' Mavenism). The good news is Struts 2.0.4 is rumored to be out by the end of the month. In the meantime, if you're using Maven 2, you can use AppFuse's repository to get the goods. Here's the repo settings you're need:

<repositories>
    <repository>
        <id>appfuse</id>
        <name>AppFuse Repository</name>
        <url>http://static.appfuse.org/repository</url>
    </repository>
    <repository>
        <id>struts-203-staging</id>
        <name>Apache Struts 2.0.3 Staging Repository</name>
        <url>http://people.apache.org/builds/struts/2.0.3/m2-staging-repository</url>
    </repository>
</repositories>

Yeah, I could just advise you to use AppFuse 2.0 - but we're having a hard enough time supporting our existing users.

Bamboo

After reading Tim's post about Bamboo yesterday, I downloaded and tried it out. I'm very impressed, as I usually am with Atlassian products. As a first impression, I think it's better than all the open source products, but not quite as good as Pulse. Bamboo has a nice UI, but Pulse has a lot more Ajax goodies that make it more usable (IMHO of course).

P.S. I think it's ironic that both Pulse and Bamboo build AppFuse 2.0 (Maven 2-based) just fine, but Continuum hasn't had a successful build yet.

SiteMesh 2.3?

Did you know the SiteMesh folks released version 2.3 back in October? Here's proof. Unfortunately, there's no release notes and the release hasn't been uploaded to Maven's repository. There are release notes in JIRA, but not all of them seemed to be fixed. What's up with that? Did you guys forget how to manage a project?

[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]

ICEfaces gets open sourced

As far as JSF Ajax frameworks are concerned, there seems to be two major players: Ajax4jsf and ICEfaces. I don't know that either one is a true open source project (where developers are from multiple companies), but Spring isn't either, so I don't know that it actually matters. I think it interesting that both products don't seem to care about capitalization, but I digress.

Today, ICEsoft announced they've open-sourced ICEfaces. Was this inspired by Java going GPL?¹ I doubt it, these things take time and it's likely that ICEsoft had this one in the cooker for quite a while. I do think it's interesting that the major JSF component vendors (Oracle, Exadel and now ICEsoft) have all open-sourced their products. Must be a tough market out there.

Apparently, ICEfaces works with Facelets, so it should work with AppFuse and Equinox. Looking through ICEfaces documentation and sample apps, they seem to be missing a straight-forward "here's how to integrate it into your existing application" guide. They do show how to modify your web.xml, but there doesn't seem to be a short, concise guide to what configuration settings you need to add to your faces-config.xml. I was somewhat motivated to write such a guide this morning, but lost motivation quickly as I realized it might be quite the effort. If someone wants to create the Maven bundles for ICEfaces, I'll try to carve out some time later this week to write up instructions for integrating ICEfaces into Equinox and AppFuse.

Unfortunately, integrating ICEfaces into your project is only the beginning. The hard part is choosing which is a better Ajax toolkit: ADF Faces/Trinidad, Ajax4jsf or ICEfaces? Trinidad and ICEfaces seem to be more about components, whereas Ajax4jsf is more about Ajaxifying regular ol' JSF components. So I think Ajax4jsf still remains, and ICEfaces looks like a better out-of-the-box component library than Trinidad. I guess time will tell.

Update: I forgot to mention Infragistics NetAdvantage as a JSF Ajax framework. OpenLogic decided to use Infragistics in the project I started for them. I was able to get it working in AppFuse fairly easily, but it's kinda ugly from a setup standpoint. They require you to copy a bunch of static files (images, stylesheets and scripts) into your project. Yech.

[1] Stephen O'Grady has an excellent writeup on this: And Sun Said, Set My Java Free: The Open Source Q&A.

Spring 2.0, AppFuse and Equinox

Spring 2.0 was released today. I hope to do an AppFuse 1.9.4 and Equinox 1.7 release in the near future - both containing the latest and greatest stuff from Spring 2.0. Hopefully the 2.0 release shows up in the Maven repo (here or here) in the near future.

Thanks to Interface21 and all the Spring Developers for such a stellar product.

Update: More Spring-related releases - Spring Web Flow 1.0 RC4 and Acegi Security 1.0.2.

Lessons learned from using VMWare, Ubuntu and Maven 2 in a Training class

Last week I taught a Spring 2.0 training class in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This class was different from previous classes because I made a VMWare image of Ubuntu for students to use when doing the labs. They also used Maven 2 and all the computers were without an internet or network connection (yikes!). Eclipse was used for the IDE and Maven's Jetty plugin was used for any web development activities. I'm pleased to say it worked out pretty well, but there were a couple of things I thought I'd write down for others trying this approach.

First of all, this was my first experience using VMWare in a classroom setting. In the past, I've had students setup their own environments. I've also built machines at the training facilities - and had their staff ghost the image for students. I think having students setup their own environments is a good idea, but I've had mixed results. There's always some folks in class that have no interest in knowing how things are setup and would rather everything "just works". These folks are usually disappointed when they have to spend 20 minutes installing a bunch of software. There's always a couple who don't read the instructions thoroughly and install things in the wrong locations. And then you have the folks that want to work on their Linux or OS X laptops. I can generally work it all out b/c I know Windows, Linux and OS X - but this is generally not a good avenue for instructors unfamiliar with multiple operating systems.

The second method - building a machine at the training facility (or client site) and having it replicated - works very well. However, it's often difficult to get private courses (at client sites) to use this method, and students don't get to walk away with anything. The VMWare option, however, allows you to burn the image to a DVD and give students everything from the course, including the computer they worked on.

I've thought of using the VMWare earlier this year, but never seriously considered it until I spoke with Howard Lewis Ship at this year's OSCON. He said he'd used it for a couple classes, and it worked great. He gave me a sample DVD and I used it to start creating my DVD (thanks Howard!). The nicest thing about using this DVD was we were able to brand it for students, as well as setup all 18 machines in the classroom in less than an hour.

Here is a list of issues I found with using a VMWare setup in the classroom:

• I downloaded the Ubuntu 5.10 image to begin with. After upgrading to 6.06 and installing all the standard Java development software (less than 100MB), my image was 8GB. I was able to shrink it to 4GB and zip it to 2GB, but it's still quite large. Maybe installing 6.06 from scratch would slim things down.
• On my home machine (dual core AMD with 3GB RAM), the VMWare image ran very fast, with no noticeable performance issues. I used VMWare Server at home, and VMWare Player during the class because it didn't require a (free) serial number. I had it set to 768MB of RAM at both locations, but the machines were noticeably slower (and close to unusable) in the classroom. The classroom machines were 2.5GHz with 1.5GB of RAM.
• Since I knew most developers would be Windows users, I gave students the option to have me build their Windows environment. One student took me up on the offer and the only painful part was getting the Maven repo to the students machines. I had the Windows setup software on the DVD, so I was able to use that, but then needed to copy my local Maven repo to a thumb drive to transfer that. In the future, I'll put the Maven repo (only 36.5 MB) on the DVD.

All in all, using VMWare in the classroom turned out to be a good experience. It's likely we'll use it for most of our classes, but we'll also fall back to setting up a Windows environment for those students who don't like Ubuntu. As far as using Maven 2, it's been working great too - most of the students didn't even know it was used b/c they did everything in their IDE.

Integrating Hibernate Validator with Spring MVC

Remember when I wrote about Better client-side validation with Prototype back in May? Ted Bergeron responded to my post with the following comment:

Now that I am using Hibernate Annotations Validator, I stopped using commons validator. You can use the hibernate validator without using hibernate for persistence. I wrote some jsp 2.0 tag files to handle binding my form fields with spring mvc, and I use reflection to check for the validation annotations. This makes it no work to have a js calendar for all Date fields, or have class="required" added to all fields that have a @NotNull annotation. I'd be happy to send you the code for appfuse 2.0.

Ted followed up by sending me the code. I took a look at it, and reviewed a well-written PDF he'd written for his work. I told him he should publish it as an article, hooked him up with some folks at IBM developerWorks - and voila! Ted's article, titled Hibernate can meet your validation needs was published yesterday. Nice work Ted!

I'm looking forward to trying to leverage Hibernate Validation annotations for all the web frameworks in AppFuse. Should be interesting hacking into the cores of the frameworks to modify how their validation engines work.

What's a good portable USB Drive?

After finding Mark's HOWTO Rip DVD Movies To Your iPod Using Free Software, I've started ripping some DVDs to my hard drive. On the list: Top Secret, Old School and Office Space. I imagine my hard drive will fill up pretty fast, so I'm in the market for a portable USB (or Firewire) Drive. Know of any good ones? I'll probably head down to the Apple Store tomorrow and pick one up.

Monday I'm heading out on a whirlwind trip to Milwaukee, followed by a weekend in Vegas. I'm teaching a class where we use Maven 2, so it might be a good idea to take the Maven repo with me. Especially since it's rumored the classroom won't have internet access. The good news is I have an Ubuntu VMWare image that already contains all the necessary JARs. Hopefully I can convince all the students to use it.

Update: In a perfect world, I could use my 60 GB iPod as a fat USB drive. However, it doesn't just "plugin and work" on a Windows box like thumb drives do.

Update 2: I ended up getting the LaCie Rugged All-Terrain Hard Drive. It was a little pricy, but it's tough to assign a value to a backup drive. With 120 GB, I should be able to use SuperDuper! to clone my hard drive and have plenty of room for movies.

rsync -v -t -l -r ftp.ibiblio.org::maven2 ~/.m2/repository

...is a wonderful thing. Looks like the Maven 2 repo is currently at 7.28 GB.

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.