Raible Designs

2006 - A Year in Review

Looking back at 2006, it's amazing to see everything that happened. One of the main reasons I started this blog was to provide a history of my life. Now it's time to cash in on that cool feature and look back at the last 12 months.

In early January, I finished working on the Vongo project. I eventually had to shut off comments for my post on Vongo because there were so many complaints. The good news is I didn't work on the UI or service part of it, just the Spring/Hibernate/XFire backend. A week later, Apple announced the MacBook Pro and I purchased one immediately. I still have the same machine and couldn't be happier. A week after that, I quietly released AppFuse 1.9, went to the Broncos vs. Patriots game, then left the next morning for Cancun to celebrate my dad's 60th. I got to watch the Broncos season end after returning from Cancun. January 2006 is one for the books - I scored good tickets to two playoff games and spent a week in Cancun! I'd relive that month without hesitation.

In February, I began playing with Maven 2 , figured out how to use Tiles with WebWork and did a fundraiser for the CSS Framework design contest. I even posted some pictures of my ride to work. Prior to freezing my ass off, Jack had a rough week with Rotavirus and ended up in the Emergency Room.

At the end of February, I received my MacBook Pro and fell in love with everything but the wireless. My posts on the MacBook Pro and wireless issues still get comments weekly from other folks having similar problems.

On February 22nd, Daniel Steinberg's daughter Elena died of bacterial meningitis. Julie made me stop reading Daniel's Dear Elena blog because I was such an emotional wreck. I saw Daniel at a couple of conferences this year, but didn't talk to him until The Spring Experience in December. I didn't know what to say to him. He erased all my apprehensions with a simple "Thanks", a smile and a handshake. It's good to see you're still writing about Elena Daniel. I still have a hard time reading your posts.

February ended with a beautiful 72°F day.

In March, I started the CSS Framework design contest, rode to work in the rain and flew to Boston and Vegas. Memories of St. Patrick's Day in Boston with friends still brings a smile to my face. TheServerSide show in Vegas was a lot of fun and it was the first BOF I hosted with free beer. I later got to meet Mike Stenhouse (the inventor of The CSS Framework) in December and hosted two more "BOFs with Beer" at the Colorado Software Summit and The Spring Experience. Cost difference? Vegas: $800, Keystone: $350, Hollywood, FL: $220.

At the end of March, I came down with a nasty case of Carpal Tunnel. After seeing a specialist that massaged the hell out of my arm, everything was back to normal. I haven't had any issues since - but I also haven't had many multiple-no-sleep-night coding sprints in a while either.

In April, I quit working on AppFuse and moved to Rails. I posted my Tips for Productivity and Happiness at Work (my most popular blog entry of all time), shipped my bus off to the shop and celebrated Julie and I's 6th anniversary. Then I rebooted this site and lived it up in New York City.

May brought CSS Design Contest winners and a 2-week trip to San Francisco for The Ajax Experience and JavaOne. The highlight of that trip was the weekend I spent in Wine Country.

In June, AppFuse 1.9.2 and Seam 1.0 were unleashed. Tim O'Brien had an interesting post titled What Web Application framework should you use?. I responded and Struts became a more focused project. Shale moved to a TLP shortly after. We started planning Raible Road Trip #10 and I began traveling to Washington, DC for a project. Going for beers at Brickskeller was the highlight of our trip that week.

July introduced me to cancelled flights and redeyes and Jason Carreira started JSR 303. AppFuse 1.9.3 was released and Julie sold her house to the first people that looked at it. At the end of the month, Jim Goodwill and I drove to OSCON in Portland. Having beers with Bryan and Scott at The Kennedy School was a highlight of that trip. Following OSCON, the family and I headed to Montana for a week.

August was great, probably because I'd just hit 7 states in 7 days. I published an article on IBM developerWorks and had a device-free weekend (which I definitely need to do more often). I began working on AppFuse 2.0, a new sushi restaurant moved into our neighborhood and I got a new EVDO card (which I later lost in November). Jack turned 2 on August 28th.

In September, we got a new puppy. I traveled to the drunkest city in America, Las Vegas and New England. Julie met me in Boston and we had a blast at our good friends' (Chris and Julie's) wedding.

October brought the release of Spring 2.0 and a 2-week project for me at OpenLogic. Abbie and Jack got their pictures taken at school and I spent at week in Keystone at The Colorado Software Summit.

In November, my sister Kalin brought some hard cider to Abbie's 4th birthday. I attended Denver's NoFluff and hugged my kids. Jack and I had a boys weekend and we headed to The Cabin on Raible Road Trip #11.

To end the year, I did a bit more travel - first to Boise then to Florida for The Spring Experience. After a week of vacation in Florida, we returned to Denver for The Blizzard of 2006. Finally, we drove up to Steamboat for Christmas and took the kids skiing.

All in all, it's been a fabulous year. Watching the kids grow up, start to play together and even have conversations with each other has been very cool. I traveled more than I wanted to, but I also got to visit a lot of cities that I'd never been to. My goals for the year? To be happy, ski more and enjoy a few car bombs with family and friends.

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do you get open source frameworks past the red tape?

From an e-mail I received earlier this month, with a subject of "Acceptance red tape":

After requesting permission to use the Spring Framework for the business logic and data access layers of an application, how do you fight something like this? Spring is not an approved Framework for the ********** environment. We understand the benefits of the framework. However, we have not certified it in our environment. Additionally, we have concerns that this framework will not gain long standing traction among the J2EE community. We would like to reduce the number of frameworks used in our environment, and do not want to be left with "legacy" frameworks that have little acceptance or support as is the case with the pico container. This is a response from one of our clients after asking about the use of a framework in our development after another vendor had used the PicoContainer without their permission. We have Spring experience and we love it. My responses have been to ask what they have certified that we could use and to ask their business staff to override their tech staff. I'm caught needing to redesign an aging J2EE application with an awfully over-architected original design confined to EJB 2.1, JSP 2.0, Servlet 2.4, and JDK 1.4.X in a very short amount of time. The additional responses were that they have only certified Struts and although both the business staff and the tech staff admit they know the benefits of Spring, neither of them are allowing us to use it.

My response:

Wow - I don't know what to say, especially when they say "Additionally, we have concerns that this framework will not gain long standing traction among the J2EE community." They're probably using Struts and they thinks it's wonderful, eh?

I could compose a long response with lots of details, but the fact that they prefer EJB over Spring is baffling. Spring is so much easier to program with, it's not even funny. Granted, EJB does have its place, but it's often used as a hammer for a problem that doesn't exist.

Have you experienced similar "Acceptance red tape" in your company? If so, how did you work around or work through it?

Continuum, Luntbuild, Pulse and NetBeans

Last night, I did a bit of playing with technologies new to me. First of all, I got AppFuse 2.0 running on Continuum. This was was easy enough, I just had to add <scm> information to each pom.xml. Thanks to those who recommended this approach. I thought it was a silly solution until I realized "mvn site" produced the wrong information when <scm> wasn't present for sub-modules.

Since I was playing with Continuous Integration tools, I decided to give Cerberus, LuntBuild, and Pulse a spin. My goal was to give each server the old "college try" and see if I could get them running with minimal effort. I don't know where I heard about Pulse, but it was somehow included in my tests.

Cerberus didn't work with my Cygwin/Ruby setup, so I was done with it quickly. LuntBuild worked pretty well, but the interface and configuration seemed kinda clunky. I also found it strange that it uses a 4.x version of Jetty - seems kinda old. I was surprised to see that it uses Tapestry for its web framework. Pulse was the nicest one with a kick-ass (ajaxified) user inferface, powered by Acegi, WebWork and Hibernate (according to its JARs). It was definitely the easiest to setup and use. While Pulse isn't free for commercial use, it is free for open source projects, as well as small teams.

Summary: Continuum, LuntBuild and Pulse seem to be the best tools for building Maven 2 projects. While CruiseControl works, and works well, it does require you to customize XML from the command line, whereas these tools allow you to do everything through a web interface.

Toward the end of the night, I downloaded NetBeans 5.5 and installed its Maven 2 Plugin. I was surprised at how full-featured this plugin is. I was able to build, test and run the AppFuse web modules in the embedded Tomcat without issues. It's definitely a cool plugin. As for NetBeans, it seemed pretty sluggish and I couldn't figure out how to get Ctrl+Shift+R functionality, which is a must for me these days. Also, I couldn't get the JSF support working for the AppFuse JSF Module, seemingly caused by the Maven plugin (project properties only has Maven options). Since NetBeans works so well with Maven 2, and it's much more full-featured than Eclipse, it seems natural to recommend it to AppFuse 2 users. Of course, I like IDEA a lot more, but there's no Maven 2 plugin that I know of.

AppFuse 1.9.4 Released

This release's major new features are upgrading to Spring 2.0, Hibernate 3.2, and Facelets + Ajax4JSF integration for the JSF option. In addition, many libraries have been fixed and a few bugs have been squashed.

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
• 7 Simple Reasons to use 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 something like the following to your ~/.bashrc file.

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

Equinox (a.k.a. AppFuse Light) 1.7 Released!

This release's major new features are upgrading to Spring 2.0, Hibernate 3.2, an Ajax + Spring MVC version, an Acegi Security + Spring MVC version and Struts 2.0 as an optional web framework. It's highly likely that the "extras/security" package can be installed with other web frameworks, but it's only been tested with Spring MVC. Furthermore, this release provided all of the different combinations that Equinox provides - all 50 of them!

All of the frameworks used in Equinox, as well as most of its build/test system is explained in Spring Live. A summary of the changes are below (detailed release notes can be found in JIRA):

• Added extras/spring-ajax with examples of ajaxified displaytag (with AjaxAnywhere), in-place editing (Script.aculo.us), in-page updates (DWR) and lightbox (Lightbox gone Wild) popups.
• Added extras/security with Acegi Security integration for authentication and authorization.
• Automated creation and testing of all possible combinations for distribution.
• Converted from JSP to Facelets for JSF/MyFaces option.
• Integrated Ajax4JSF into JSF/MyFaces option.
• Added Struts 2.0.1 as web framework.
• Upgraded to Spring 2.0, including improved XML syntax and JSP Form Tags
• Added Cargo settings to pom.xml so it's possible to run web tests from Maven.
• Changed dataSource bean to use a connection pool.
• Added popup calendar (using jscalendar) to Spring MVC and Struts 2.
• Added OpenSessionInViewFilter for Hibernate and OpenPersistenceManagerInViewFilter for JDO/JPOX.
• Fixed foreign-language encoding issues with Spring's CharacterEncodingFilter.
• Changed from DAO to Dao to be more consistent with other projects.
• Dependent packages upgraded:
  • Canoo WebTest 1393
  • Cargo 0.8
  • Commons Validator 1.3.0
  • DWR 1.1.1
  • FreeMarker 2.3.8
  • jMock 1.1.0
  • JPOX 1.1.1
  • Hibernate 3.2
  • MyFaces 1.1.4
  • Spring 2.0
  • Spring Modules Validation 0.5
  • Struts 1.2.9
  • Tapestry 4.0.2
  • WebWork 2.2.4
• Dependent packages added:
  • Acegi Security 1.0.2
  • Ajax4JSF 1.0.2
  • AjaxAnywhere 1.2-rc2
  • Facelets 1.1.11
  • Struts 2.0.1

Download. For more information about installing the various options, see the README.txt file.

Demos:

• Spring · Spring + Ajax · Spring + Acegi
• JSF + Facelets
• Struts 1 · Struts 2
• Tapestry
• WebWork

Thanks to all the users of Equinox for making this a great release!

P.S. I'm fully aware that this project's name conflicts with an Eclipse project.

Confluence installed for AppFuse 2.0 Documentation

The last item on the AppFuse Roadmap for 2.0 M1 is setting up the documentation system. I'm still undecided on whether Confluence or DocBook is a better system to use. However, I am certain that using a wiki to document an open source project is the lowest barrier to entry. For more on this topic, see my post from a month ago. In an ideal world, Confluence could be used as an authoring tool, and everything could be exported to DocBook for storing in SVN. Even better, pages that are "core" to AppFuse could be automatically saved in Subversion, and built using Maven's DocBook (or Confluence) support. Who knows, this is still new territory for me, and I feel like I'm losing momentum just thinking about it.

So far, I've installed Confluence 2.2.9 at http://dev.appfuse.org, but this will change in the coming weeks. I plan on eventually moving it to appfuse.org and leaving the demos on the demo.appfuse.org server. Hopefully there won't be too many 404s when we make the change.

Currently, I have Adaptavist's Builder installed for managing/manipulating themes. I've done some work with the default theme, but I think we can do much better. One cool thing I did find was the Page Tree Plugin that allows for Ajaxified tree menus like Stripes has.

Thanks to Atlassian and Adaptavist for the free product licenses.

New weather.com site built using AppFuse

From Jeff C (a Sr Developer for forgetaway.com, a new unit of weather.com) in Lightweight Java Development with Webwork, Spring, and iBatis:

Our new site, ForGetaway.com, launched 2 weeks ago, and its built on WebWork, Spring, and iBatis. Using those 3 frameworks as the backbone of the site was a great experience. I think that combination of frameworks can be considered lightweight, especially from a development standpoint.
...
Even the development/testing process is quick. Thanks to Matt Raible's AppFuse (which was used to get this app started), we have a sweet build.xml file that allows us (on our dev machines) to reload our app by having the build script talk to tomcat. So, even when a properties file or java class or static field changes, its just a matter of running the reload task in the build.xml file and tomcat reloads the app with all changes in under 5 seconds. Yeah, rails is probably quicker, but i can spare 5 seconds of my time to let my changes get reloaded by tomcat.

Reloading your application in Tomcat to see your changes sucks. However, AppFuse 2.0 will allow you to use the Maven 2 Jetty Plugin, which aims to eliminate the whole deploy cycle. This plugin is powered by Jetty 6, which has been rewritten for Continuations, NIO, Servlet 2.5. Hopefully we'll start to see more appserver plugins written for Maven 2.

I love hearing success stories like Jeff's. That's why I (and many others) work on AppFuse - to simplify Java web development. We know that it's more painful to develop web applications in Java than in scripting languages, but we continue to do it because tools like AppFuse make it enjoyable. Even though tools and languages are important for simplification, I believe that most project's success is determined by people. If you have good people, effective processes and a lack of politics - a project should have no problem being successful, regardless of the tools.

Did you know the new SourceBeat site is also powered by AppFuse? We chose the WebWork+Spring+Hibernate combination and were quite pleased at how easy it was to develop everything. We had 90% of the site done in the first two weeks of development.

In other AppFuse-related news, the demos have been running solid for 70 days straight. I'll admit that's not a very log time, but it does prove there's no memory or connection leaks in the software. The number of currently active sessions is as follows:

• /appfuse (Struts): 456
• /appfuse-jsf: 206
• /appfuse-spring: 105
• /appfuse-tapestry: 94
• /appfuse-webwork: 178
• /spring-kickstart: 17
• /struts-resume: 36
• /wiki: 256

The default session timeout is set to 10 minutes in AppFuse.

Comparing Web Frameworks Presentation

I've uploaded my Comparing Web Frameworks presentation I delivered today. This presentation is still somewhat outdated - all the stats I have in it are from February of this year (2006). I've also updated the Equinox framework-comparison page to have links to some more readable papers.

TSS runs on Tomcat?

Looks like TheServerSide.com runs on Tomcat - or at least that's what their 404 page says. I don't know which is better - TSS's 404, Javablog's 404 (blank page) or JavaLobby's. It's hard to believe that major sites like these don't have better 404 pages.

For those of you who want to add a 404 page to your Java-based webapp, it's as simple as adding the following to your web.xml:

    <error-page>
        <error-code>404</error-code>
        <location>/404.jsp</location>
    </error-page>

Props to InfoQ for implementing a 404 page, even if it is rather useless.