Raible Designs

Why no more than 500 connections?

I recently updated my status on LinkedIn to read:

Matt is determined not to have 500+ connections. Will start removing connections soon.

A couple of days later, I received the following message from a connection:

I noticed the other day you mentioned that you are determined to not have over 500 LinkedIn connections. I'm wondering what the reason is? Not just because LinkedIn shows 500+ after that, is it? As you work for LinkedIn, I assume there's some other reason. I'm interested to know what it is...

I joined LinkedIn May 27, 2003, 22 days after it initially launched. For the first few years, I accepted invitations when I received them. Some folks I knew, some I didn't. When I started consulting for LinkedIn last summer, I had somewhere between 200 and 300 connections. Most of them were people who had contacted me, not folks I had contacted.

One day, I used the import webmail contacts feature to pull in my contacts from Gmail. My number of connections quickly jumped by 100 and it's increased quite a bit since then (mostly due to co-workers from LinkedIn). Of the almost 500 connections I have, I believe there's a good 100-200 of them that are folks I don't know, have never had contact with, and will likely never benefit from being "connected" with.

I guess the main reason I'm planning on trimming my connections is to make my network higher quality. I admit I'm somewhat motivated by the 500+ icon, but it's also a genuine feeling that there's quite a few folks I won't benefit from being connected to. I'm not a LION after all. I believe my LinkedIn network should resemble my real-world network.

What's your opinion? Should I have folks in my network that know me, but I don't know them?

Talks for the Colorado Software Summit

I'm looking forward to another great year at the Colorado Software Summer in October. I submitted a couple abstracts back in April and have recently been granted the opportunity to change one.

The reason for the change is Yan Pujante (founder at LinkedIn) is going to do my talk on Building LinkedIn's Next Generation Architecture with OSGi and Spring. Since he's been very integral in writing the existing codebase, as well as the move to OSGi, it seemed more appropriate for him to do this talk. I'd like to keep my talk on Appcelerator, but I'm having a hard time deciding between four other options.

If you're planning on attending CSS this year, let me know which one you'd like to see most.

• What's New (or coming) in Spring 3.0
• Implementing Spring Security, OpenID and OAuth
• Comparing RESTful Web Frameworks: Struts 2 vs. Spring MVC
• How Yahoo's Rules for High Performance Web Sites made LinkedIn 50% Faster

I could see changing the first option to Spring Web specifically. I could also see adding Rails and Grails to the 3rd choice. The 4th one is a lofty goal as the project has just begun. If we succeed, it could be a great talk.

Should we change AppFuse to be Struts 2-specific?

Dusty recently posted an interesting idea to the AppFuse developers mailing list:

After thinking/coding/reading for a while I think the more interesting task is: Retool AppFuse to be one or more Struts2 plugins based on various higher level app patterns. (AppFuse Facebook, AppFuse Employee DB, AppFuse Blog, AppFuse Basic LDAP, AppFuse Basic Crowd).

This all comes from the fact, that I have been wanting to refactor the AppFuse web layer for Struts. One of the interesting aspects of AppFuse is that it works pretty much the same across all its web frameworks. It does so with some lowest common denominator abstractions that can be ported and look and work the same across frameworks. I have picked my tool(s): Struts 2 and Ruby On Rails when I want to pretend I am young again. I know Spring MVC, JSF, etc. but I have no desire to build significant apps on those platforms. It's not because they suck and Struts2 rules, it is because I know Struts 2 the best, I am most efficient there and it provides everything I need to build great webapps (Let's not devolve to a framework debate). So, I would rather have a more Struts 2-specific web stack, that really leverages conventions born and raised there. The nice thing about the Struts 2 web stack is that it is complemented nicely by AppFuse's data/service layer, since unlike Grails or Rails, Struts 2 has no data or service layer. [Read More »]

Seems like a good idea to me. What do you think?

Someday I'd like to come up with a "compatibility test" that allows others to improve upon the ideas in AppFuse and develop their stacks independently. A suite of Selenium tests that require extensionless URLs might be a good start.

Which one do you believe Daddy?

Abbie: Which one of these do you believe Daddy?

Abbie: Mommy and I believe the 2nd one is right.
Me: I agree.

LinkedIn Groups

This afternoon, I noticed there's a LinkedIn "GlassFish" group now available and it reminded me of a couple things:

• LinkedIn currently doesn't have a way to search for groups, but Jason Bailes has setup a LinkedIn Groups Search with Google Custom Search. Thanks Jason!
• I created a Apache Software Foundation group on LinkedIn a few months ago. If you're a committer or member, you're more than welcome to join the group.

LinkedIn Groups don't provide a whole lot of functionality at this point, but I've heard there's big things in store for them. Chances are they'll be very valuable in the future.

AppFuse + DisplayTag: External Sorting and Paging Example

Chris Barham has posted an excellent example of how to do external sorting and paging to the AppFuse mailing list:

I've put together a new AppFuse project which demonstrates how to enhance the List screens. DisplayTag as provided has issues with large datasets, (it retrieves all the records every time), and sorting via column headings does not work for the entire dataset, only those on screen at the time.

I've built a project which addresses these issues, using Hibernate Criteria and extensions to DisplayTags PaginatedList interface which gets DisplayTag to hand off all requests for sorting and paging to the new implementation of PaginatedList.

The Google Code project is checked in to: http://code.google.com/p/pagingappfuse/ feel free to check out the code and comment. (instructions here: http://code.google.com/p/pagingappfuse/source/checkout)

There are instructions regarding the steps taken on the project wiki page here: http://code.google.com/p/pagingappfuse/wiki/PagingSorting

Cheers,
Chris

Nice work - thanks Chris!

Spring MVC vs. JSF and The State of Spring Web

Alternative Adult has only posted a couple times in 2008, but his entries have peaked my interest.

Spring MVC or JSF+?
My business unit is trying to standardize if we can on a single Java-based Web framework going forward to simplify the Web development process, especially as individual developers move from one division to another, or centralized support groups need to maintain multiple applications from multiple divisions.

At the enterprise level within my company, the architecture group says that they will provide support for either Spring MVC or JSF+ (where the + represents the accompanying technologies you would use to provide a more maintainable application and a more rich user experience, e.g. Facelets, Richfaces, etc.).

Now my business unit is trying to decide which of these two frameworks, Spring MVC or JSF+, is the most appropriate to standardize upon for our development community. [Read More]

...and...

State of Spring Web
For those that are interested, the following is a summary of the notes I captured from a conversation with SpringSource on the state of Spring Web. [Read More]

Good stuff Michael - keep it coming.

Extensionless URLs with Java Web Frameworks

Last week, I had a go of making a Spring MVC application use extensionless URLs. I did some googling, found some tips on the Spring Forums and believe I arrived at a solid solution. Using the UrlRewriteFilter (version 3), I was able to create a rule that looks for any URLs without an extension. If it finds one, it appends the extension and forwards to the controllers. This rule is as follows (where *.html is my servlet-mapping for DispatcherServlet in web.xml):

  <rule>
    <from>^([^?]*)/([^?/\.]+)(\?.*)?$</from>
    <to last="true">$1/$2.html$3</to>
  </rule>

As long as I hand-write all my URLs without an extension (<a href="home"> vs. <a href="home.html">), this seems to work. To combat developers that use "home.html", one solution is to require all links to be wrapped with <c:url value="url"/> (or some other macro that call response.encodeURL()). If you can convince everyone to do this, you can write an outbound-rule that strips the .html extension from URLs.

  <outbound-rule>
    <from>^(.*)\.html(\?.*)?$</from>
    <to last="false">$1$2</to>
  </outbound-rule>

In an ideal world, it'd be possible to modify the <a> tag at the very core of the view framework you're using to automatically encode the URL of any "href" attributes. I don't think this is possible with JSP, FreeMarker, Facelets or any other Java Web Framework templates (i.e. Tapestry or Wicket). If it is, please let me know.

Below is my final urlrewrite.xml with these rules, as well as my "welcome-file" rule at the top.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCENGINE urlrewrite PUBLIC "-//tuckey.org//DTD UrlRewrite 3.0//EN"
  "http://tuckey.org/res/dtds/urlrewrite3.0.dtd">

<urlrewrite>
  <rule>
    <from>/$</from>
    <to type="forward">home</to>
  </rule>

  <rule>
    <from>^([^?]*)/([^?/\.]+)(\?.*)?$</from>
    <to last="true">$1/$2.html$3</to>
  </rule>

  <outbound-rule>
    <from>^(.*)\.html(\?.*)?$</from>
    <to last="false">$1$2</to>
  </outbound-rule>

</urlrewrite>

If you have other solutions for extensionless URLs with Java web frameworks, I'd love to hear about them. With any luck, 2008 will be the year we drop extensions (and path-mappings) from our URLs. The stat packages might not like it, but I do.

AppFuse Light 1.8.2 Released

AppFuse Light 1.8.2 is a bug fixes release that includes upgrades for Spring, Spring Security, Hibernate, Wicket, Tapestry and many others. In addition, Spring bean definitions were replaced with annotations (@Repository, @Service and @Controller). See the Release Notes for more information on what's changed since the last release.

AppFuse Light now offers 60 possible combinations for download:

• Web Frameworks: JSF (MyFaces), Spring MVC (with Ajax, Acegi Security, JSP, FreeMarker or Velocity), Stripes, Struts 1.x, Struts 2.x, Tapestry, WebWork, Wicket
• Persistence Frameworks: Hibernate, iBATIS, JDO (JPOX), OJB, Spring JDBC

If you have any questions about this release, please subscribe to the AppFuse user mailing list by sending a blank e-mail to [email protected]. You can also post questions in a forum-like fashion using Nabble: http://appfuse.org/forum/user.

Issues with AntRun Plugin and Maven

I started seeing the following error today when using Maven and the AntRun Plugin.

[INFO] [antrun:run {execution: default}]
[INFO] Executing tasks
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[ERROR] BUILD ERROR
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Error executing ant tasks
	
Embedded error: java.lang.IllegalAccessError: tried to access method 
org.apache.tools.ant.launch.Locator.decodeUri(Ljava/lang/String;)Ljava/lang/String; 
from class org.apache.tools.ant.AntClassLoader

Searching the internet provided no results, so I was pretty stumped - especially since this error didn't happen on my MacBook Pro. It happened on AppFuse's Bamboo server (Linux), but not locally. Luckily, I was able to reproduce it on my Windows box and discovered the solution: upgrade to a newer version of Maven. I was using 2.0.6/2.0.7 and upgrading to 2.0.9 fixed the problem.

BTW, when is the Ant project going to release a new version of Ant? The current 1.7.0 version doesn't support spaces in path names, which seems like a pretty big issue to me (especially for Windows users).