Raible Designs

Back from Boston, getting ready for Vegas

I had a fantastic time in Boston this past weekend. A college buddy of mine lives there with his girlfriend, and another college buddy flew in from NY. Friday night was a ton of fun, and I found it amusing that the bar we were at used the default background from Windows XP as their "mood setting theme" on many of their TVs.

We survived the night quite well thanks to Berocca and enjoyed our Saturday touring my friend's hometown, Gloucester. The flight home on Sunday was nice and it was awesome walking into a house with kids screaming "Daddy!!". I took the day off yesterday to spend some time with the fam. We made the most out of it with a trip to the Natural History Museum, and some sledding in the fresh snow.

Today, I'm back in the office with no motivation to work. I can't believe how many things I have on my plate right now. Unfortunately, the 100+ e-mails I need to answer, the AppFuse bugs I need to fix, and the Spring Live chapters I need to update will all have to wait. My schedule doesn't permit any real work this week. Instead, I have to fly out to Vegas tomorrow for TheServerSide Java Symposium. The schedule looks really good, so I hope to learn a lot at this show. Julie's flying in Friday night, so it should it be another fun week. With March Madness in full force this week, Vegas is sure to be a crazy place.

Tech Meetup Thursday in Boston

From the comments in my last entry, it looks like there's a few folks interested in a "geek dinner" on Thursday in Boston. I don't really like to call them "geek dinners" because the name makes me think of a bunch of social misfits sitting around talking about bytecode manipulation. IMO, a better name is "tech meetup" - which follows the line of thinking we have for our Denver Tech Meetups: meet somewhere, drink some beer, eat some food - and talk about whatever.

If you're interested, leave a comment on this post and we'll try to come up with a good location. I'm game for anything - so I'll let you locals pick the spot. How does 7:00 Thursday night sound?

Jetty 6 Maven Plugin now works with SiteMesh (and Equinox)

The 1.6 version of Equinox contains commented-out settings for Maven 2 Jetty Plugin. The reason these are commented-out is because this plugin didn't work with SiteMesh at the time. I checked again today, and it looks like they got it fixed. See Brett's post titled Developing with Jetty: Where Have You Been All My Life? to see why this plugin is so cool.

Using this plugin (or the JettyLauncher in Eclipse) makes it pretty damn easy to do develop Java webapps. There's no longer a deploy cycle, just save and refresh your browser. IMO, it's almost as good as using a scripting language or developing with HTML/CSS/JavaScript.

I'd love to see someone develop a TomcatLauncher, a WinstoneLauncher and Maven 2 Plugins for both. AppFuse works with Winstone 0.8.1 (a wicked fast servlet container with a good story behind its name).

In other Jetty news, Jan Bartel posted a nice tutorial today titled How To Use JOTM as the XA Transaction Manager in Jetty6.

Struts is (far and away) most popular web framework deployed on JBoss

From this month's JBoss Newsletter:

These results are certainly interesting. My guess is most "Other" frameworks are ones developed in-house.

Does this means I shouldn't ditch Struts 1.x support in AppFuse 2.0? Possibly, but since AppFuse works best for starting new applications - it makes sense to say "use the good stuff or you're on your own."

TSSJS BOF: Web Framework Sweet Spots

I'm leading a BOF at this year's TSS Java Symposium titled Web Framework Sweet Spots.

The objective of this BOF is to discuss the various open source web frameworks and what each does well. Matt kicks off the discussion by highlighting the good features of various frameworks, (results of pre-conference discussions with various framework authors to get their opinions on what problems their framework solves best) as well as debunk some myths based on audience members real-world experiences.

Yesterday, I sent an e-mail the authors of the most popular web frameworks in JavaLand. In my opinion, these are (in alphabetical order): Cocoon, JSF, RIFE, Seam, Spring MVC, Spring Web Flow, Struts, Trails, Tapestry, WebWork and Wicket. If your framework isn't on this list, I'm sorry. If you can prove to me that yours is more popular than one of the ones listed here, I'll send you the questionnaire and add you to the list. I've received a few responses, and I doubt all authors will respond, so there might be some room.

If you're going to be at Caesar's Palace for TSSJS 2006, I invite you to stop by on Friday night at 6:30. I've asked the TechTarget folks several times about getting beer served at this BOF, but they keep ignoring the question. I think it's time to contact Caesar's - since it is legal to have a beer pretty much anywhere in Vegas.

CSS Framework Design Contest

Over the past 2 weeks, I've managed to raise $900 for the CSS Framework Design Contest. Thanks to friends, AppFuse users and SourceBeat their donations. You guys rock!

With this cash, I hope to give away 3 prizes: an iPod (60GB), an iPod (30GB) and a 2GB Nano. Of course, if the winners decide they'd rather donate the money to charity, that's cool too. Any additional donations I receive I'm going to send to the Elena Steinberg Memorial Fund.

Here's the rules of the contest: Create a theme (mostly CSS, images allowed) that makes the CSS Framework look good (download source files). This framework is simply a structured bit of XHTML for page layout, and a number of CSS files for positioning. What's missing is a number of good-looking themes to make this framework look even better. I have aspirations of creating something like CSS Zen Garden - but with more of a web-application flavor.

I'll use the same submission guidelines as the CSS Zen Garder, but add that your themes should be Apache licensed. In my mind, this simply means that anyone can use your theme - they simply have to retain your contact information in a comment w/in the stylesheet itself. I'd like to distribute (or at least make available) the top themes to AppFuse users - so they aren't stuck with a single theme. In addition, it probably wouldn't be too hard to make these into Roller themes.

The CSS themes from this contest should be usable in corporate intranets, as well as customer facing applications. Sure, wacky designs are cool, but sharp and clean are better. Extra points will likely be given for themes that pretty up how forms are laid out and displayed. Ajaxian.com links to some good examples, particularly Wufoo.

I've created a CSS Design Contest project in AppFuse's JIRA - so please submit your entries there. The contest ends on March 31st, 2006 at midnight MST. After that, the winners will be decided using some sort of voting mechanism. I hope to create an application to showcase all the entries in the next week or two.

For inspiration, you might checkout Open Web Design and Open Source Web Design.

Good luck folks - may the best design win!

Which Ajax enabled framework should you use as an Enterprise Java developer?

Paul Browne asks (and answers) "which Ajax enabled framework should you use as an Enterprise Java developer?":

Paul goes on to show you how he researched the Ajax-enabled Java frameworks that are currently available and gives a set of criteria he used. His conclusions?

• Use AjaxAnywhere if you need to add Ajax functionality to an existing Struts application.
• For new applications with Ajax, use AppFuse. While he recommends the Struts version, I recommend using the other flavors first (Spring MVC, WebWork, Tapestry or MyFaces).
• For the future (which I believe is what he means by medium-term), use a JSF implementation. AppFuse currently uses MyFaces, and it's likely we'll keep improving that (possibly with a Shale front-controller or some nifty things the Spring team has been adding).

DbUnit Tip: Turn off foreign key constraints when importing into MySQL

One of the issues I've had with using DbUnit is getting tables to load in the proper order from XML. The XML datasets I use to load table data are flat and don't really have any notion of foreign keys and such. Therefore, when you get into a situation where tables have a circular reference, using DbUnit can be a real bitch. I ran into this situation yesterday.

Luckily, I was able to figure out a solution thanks to the help of Mark Matthews. Just add "sessionVariables=FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0" to your JDBC URL. Here's how the "db-load" target in AppFuse looks with this in place:

    <target name="db-load" depends="prepare"
        description="Loads the database with sample data">
        <property name="operation" value="CLEAN_INSERT"/>
        <property name="file" value="metadata/sql/sample-data.xml"/>
        <dbunit driver="${database.driver_class}"
            supportBatchStatement="false" 
            url="${database.url}&amp;sessionVariables=FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0"
            userid="${database.username}" password="${database.password}">
            <operation type="${operation}" src="${file}" format="xml" transaction="true"/>
        </dbunit>

    </target>

Does your preferred database have a similar mechanism for turning off foreign key checks using the connection URL?

Why I like Tomcat 5.5.12 better than Tomcat 5.5.15

Here's what happens with Tomcat 5.5.15:

alotta:~/dev/appfuse mraible$ export CATALINA_HOME=$TOOLS_HOME/apache-tomcat-5.5.15
alotta:~/dev/appfuse mraible$ ant deploy;tstart
Buildfile: build.xml

...

deploy:
    [unwar] Expanding: /Users/mraible/Work/appfuse/dist/webapps/appfuse.war into
 /opt/dev/tools/apache-tomcat-5.5.15/webapps/appfuse

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 3 seconds
Using CATALINA_BASE:   /opt/dev/tools/apache-tomcat-5.5.15
Using CATALINA_HOME:   /opt/dev/tools/apache-tomcat-5.5.15
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: /opt/dev/tools/apache-tomcat-5.5.15/temp
Using JRE_HOME:       /Library/Java/Home
alotta:~/dev/appfuse mraible$ ant reload
Buildfile: build.xml

reload:
   [reload] FAIL - Encountered exception java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: 
org/apache/log4j/spi/VectorWriter

BUILD FAILED
/Users/mraible/Work/appfuse/build.xml:1063: FAIL - Encountered exception 
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/log4j/spi/VectorWriter

Total time: 1 second
alotta:~/dev/appfuse mraible$ 

Here's what happens with Tomcat 5.5.12:

alotta:~/dev/appfuse mraible$ export CATALINA_HOME=$TOOLS_HOME/apache-tomcat-5.5.12
alotta:~/dev/appfuse mraible$ ant deploy;tstart

...

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 4 seconds
Using CATALINA_BASE:   /opt/dev/tools/apache-tomcat-5.5.12
Using CATALINA_HOME:   /opt/dev/tools/apache-tomcat-5.5.12
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: /opt/dev/tools/apache-tomcat-5.5.12/temp
Using JRE_HOME:       /Library/Java/Home
alotta:~/dev/appfuse mraible$ ant reload
Buildfile: build.xml

reload:
   [reload] OK - Reloaded application at context path /appfuse

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 3 seconds
alotta:~/dev/appfuse mraible$ 

Looks like I'll be sticking with 5.5.12 for the foreseeable future.

Roller on Geronimo

Jeff has posted a nice tutorial showing how to run Roller on Geronimo. Note that he's using a HEAD build of Geronimo, so you might have to build Geronimo yourself or wait for the next release. I've heard rumors the next release will ship with a Web-only version (i.e. Tomcat and JMS), so that might be a good fit for Roller. As for pre-compiling JSPs, that's on my to do list.

There's been a few "how to run Roller (or AppFuse)" on X server lately. IMO, the best howto is no howto - it just works. I recently tried AppFuse 1.9 on JOnAS and it ran w/o any changes. Since it uses a Spring-managed connection pool and doesn't require any server configuration, this is how things should work. I've had similar results with AppFuse on Jetty and JBoss (and Tomcat of course).