Raible Designs

OpenLaszlo Tutorial and AppFuse with DWR

A few web development nuggets:

• Web clients fatten up with OpenLaszlo - good article about using OpenLaszlo on developerWorks.
• AJAX using DWR in AppFuse - a tutorial showing how to use DWR in AppFuse, written by Josip Mihelko. Please try it out and let us know how we can improve it.

I also noticed a recently updated howto on the AppFuse wiki: Spring Rich Client with AppFuse by Radim Burget. The amount of documentation being produced by the AppFuse community is truly awesome. Thanks everyone!

Update: XFire is crazy fast. If you like, you can see for yourself in AppFuse using OpenLaszlo as a client. Hopefully we can include XFire in a coming release, along with Maven 2 integration.

MacBook Pro: Kicking ass and taking names

I received my MacBook Pro this morning, and I've spent the day setting it up, doing some development and running some performance comparisons. The setup was easy: I just booted my PowerBook into Firewire mode and copied over all the files I needed. Everything works for the most part. I did have some issues with IDEA and Eclipse, but got both working after doing a few try and try-again shenanigans. Eclipse was crashing when I'd browse to set my workspace; typing it in manually fixed the problem. IDEA hung the first time I opened it; killing it and restarting fixed the problem.

As far as performance, this thing fricken' rocks! Safari launches in under a second and you're browsing before the dock icons hits the top of its first bounce. Firefox is a different story (likely b/c it hasn't been compiled for x86) - it takes 10 seconds to launch. The good news is once it's up, there doesn't seem to be any performance issues. Safari is amazing though - the speed does wonders for GMail and it actually feels like a desktop application.

When I mentioned yesterday that I was going to compare the MacBook to my desktop, Rob Williams said it wasn't a fair comparison. I agree - but I really wanted this machine to be the best machine I could possibly buy. With my (very unofficial) performance tests, it appears like it is. It's faster than my dual-core AMD 64 desktop machine that has 3 GB of RAM. Now, I have had the desktop for a couple months, so it's possible I'm suffering from OS Rot, but still - it's impressive it keeps up. Here are the numbers from my Performance Comparisons page:

For the tests below, I used Java version "1.5.0_06" and had the following variables set: JAVA_OPTS=Xms256M -Xmx384M, $ANT_OPTS=-Xmx256m. I used the CVS version of AppFuse (1.9.1-dev).

A couple of interesting things to note:

• When I first got my desktop, it's numbers were 00:14 for "ant clean package-web" and 01:29 for "ant setup test-all". The MacBook Pro? 00:12 and 01:28. The Windows box had 1 GB of RAM when I ran those tests, but no matter how I tweaked the memory settings once I put 3 GB of RAM in, I've never gotten better numbers.
• My PowerBook has been dog slow for several months now. When looking up the OS X version on it - I noticed it lists the memory as 512 MB. WTF?! I've had 1 GB in it every since I first bought it! What happened? Did half my RAM go bad or did someone steal half of it during a repair? Oh well, at least I now know the reason it was so damn slow.

Conclusion: The MacBook Pro is one of the best machines you can buy (laptop or desktop) for Java development. As for the battery life? I'm still doing the "calibration", so I'm not quite sure. Nor do I care - I plan on having this thing hooked up to my 20" cinema display that Virtuas was kind enough to get for me. The display combined with a mouse, keyboard and iCurve is a very nice setup.

Update: I pulled out the memory from my PowerBook and put it back in. Upon reboot, it resulted in the correct (1 GB) memory setting. The numbers above appear to be accurate regardless. I ran some tests again and times were actually slower (maybe because I'm on battery power).

New AppFuse Tutorials: Cobertura, EasyMock, Laszlo and Acegi ACLs

Peter Schneider-Manzell has been busy lately. He's written a bunch of new AppFuse tutorials:

• How to integrate the code coverage tool Cobertura
• How to integrate EasyMock for mock testing
• How to use AppFuse + XFire with OpenLaszlo
• How to integrate Acegi Security's ACLs in AppFuse

Great stuff Peter - thanks for taking the time to put these together!

In related news, we've started an AppFuse Frappr group - if you're an AppFuse user, make sure and sign up.

Upgrading Equinox to WebWork 2.2.1

In addition to upgrading Tapestry last week, I also upgraded Equinox to WebWork 2.2.1 (from 2.1.5). The commit log can be found on Fisheye. The changes I had to make were pretty minor:

• WebWork 2.2.1 easily integrates with Spring - you just need to add webwork.objectFactory=spring to your webwork.properties file. This isn't a whole lot different from 2.1.5, except that you can get rid of the SpringObjectFactoryListener from web.xml.
• ServletDispatcher has been deprecated in favor of FilterDispatcher - which should map to <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>. Using a filter for the controller is an obvious improvement, and it's pretty slick how WebWork can now add CSS and JavaScript to your pages on-the-fly.
• WebWork now has a <ww:datepicker> component which makes it possible to do easily do popup calendars like you can with Tapestry and JSF. Unfortunately, it seems you still can't set a global date format using a ResourceBundle.
• AltSyntax is on my default, which means you'll need to change "'literal string'" to "literal string" and "variable" to "%{variable}". This is much easier to read and a welcome change. It's unfortunate that ${} can't be used, but that's JSP's fault, not WebWork's.
• FreeMarker is required, even if you're just using JSP. This is because the JSP tags' HTML is generated using FreeMarker templates (I think).
• The taglib URI has changed from "webwork" to "/webwork". I wonder why they don't use the full URL like most tag libraries?
• Exception mappings have been added so you can easily map a particular exception to a specific view. This allowed me to remove a custom interceptor I'd previously wrote.
• The DTD for xwork.xml has changed from xwork-1.0.dtd to xwork-1.1.1.dtd.
• The only issues I found were that the validator interceptor makes it difficult to override "excludeMethods" and client-side validation renders duplicate messages when you click submit multiple times.
• When I deployed the latest Equinox demo to Contegix, we had some issues with the stylesheet the datepicker stuffs in the <head>. Basically, mod_caucho 3.0.14 wasn't returning the proper content-type for the stylesheet (even though it was for the rest). Upgrading to Resin 3.0.17 with mod_proxy fixed the problem.

Hopefully this helps you upgrade to WebWork 2.2.1.

Upgrading Equinox to Tapestry 4.0

Last week, I upgraded Equinox from Tapestry 3.0.3 to Tapestry 4.0. The commit log can be found on Fisheye. Here are some details that might help you upgrade.

• Tapestry 4.0 doesn't support Spring out of the box. This was surprising to me b/c one of the advertised features of Tapestry 4.0 (or Hivemind actually) was native Spring support. Luckily, Howard released the tapestry-spring project which solves this problem. Dropping the JAR in your classpath is enough to get built-in integration. It'd be nice to see this library become part of tapestry (possibly in the tapestry-contrib.jar).
• Tapestry-Flash makes it easy to do success messages when redirecting. Furthermore, it's nice to see how to do redirecting w/o throwing a PageRedirectException.
• PageRenderListener has changed to PageBeginRenderListener.
• When using <inject> for a property, I had to remove any public abstract void setXXX methods as I got an error otherwise. Luckily, the error message told me exactly what to do.
• Injecting dependencies during testing is fairly simple using the Creator class. Equinox's UserFormTest.java has a good example of this. I did have to create a MockRequestCycle and a MockPageService, but both were pretty easy to write.
• Friendly URLs are much easier to implement in Tapestry 4.0. However, Tapestry still doesn't allow you to use the same extension for everything - so I ended up with .html, .direct, .sdirect and .svc extensions. I'd prefer a single extension, but oh well.
• You'll need to change all your *.page files to use the new 4.0 DTD. I don't think this is absolutely necessary, but it does simplify things.
• As part of the 4.0 DTD, <property-specification> has changed to <property> and the "type" attribute is not allowed (b/c it's inferred using reflection I assume). In addition, <binding name="foo" expression="bar"> has changed to <binding name="foo" value="bar"> and <context-asset> has changed to <asset>. Also, <message-binding> has been removed in favor of <binding>. The userForm.page diff shows detailed changes.
• @Conditional has changed to @If.
• The issue where Tapestry sets the focus on the first required field still occurs. An easy workaround is to make the first field required.
• The @DatePicker component has changed from using the "format" attribute to using the "translator" attribute for formatting dates. The popup calendar also seems to have changed - I had to add new CSS rule to colorize the header properly.

Hopefully this simplifies your Tapestry 4.0 upgrade.

New MacBook Pro has shipped!

A week ago, Apple announced that it was shipping MacBook Pros with faster processors. At the time, this seemed like an excuse for Apple to change the shipping date from February 15th to the 28th. Since I was already disappointed by the extra 2-week wait, I upgraded to the 2.16 GHz chip. This bumped my ship date back even further - to March 17th.

However, I just received an e-mail from Apple saying that my laptop has shipped! WTF? Either there's a glitch in their system or I'm gonna be one happy camper at the end of this week.

Fundraiser for CSS Framework Design Contest

A week ago, I received a $250 donation for "AppFuse Development". This is a significant amount of cash, and unfortunately the committers can't do a "beer at the local pub". We've decided that a good thing to do with the money is to use it to buy a prize for a CSS Framework Design Contest. The AppFuse Logo Contest went well, but I also gave away an iPod to the winner.

This contest will be a bit different. First of all, the CSS Framework is not AppFuse-specific at all. It's just 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 templates 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. Hopefully we can use the same submission guidelines as well as offer the contest's themes for anyone to use. 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.

I hope to start this contest as soon as I've raised some funds for good prizes. Of course, donating good prizes is most welcome too. In order to provide some motivation, I'm going to do something that will hopefully inspire you to donate. It's butt-ass cold in Denver this week, and it's not warming up anytime soon. Here's the current forecast from the local news channel:

So to try and raise money, I'm going to ride my bike to work every day this week. Will this inspire folks to donate? I don't know, but it's worth a try. I'll try to be in the office by 9, and won't be home before 5. This should ensure that it's good and cold out. Furthermore, I'll blog about my ride everyday, and hopefully snap some pictures as well. It's supposed to snow tonight, so this should be good.

Remember, anything will help - and all donations will go to a good cause. I plan on starting the actual design contest next week sometime. Now it's time to donate using the button below - and watch me freeze my ass off this week!

RIFE: Which template syntax looks best to you?

Geert Bevin of the RIFE project asks:

Many times I have wondered why people are so reluctant to investigate RIFE. After having asked around a bit, the most recurring critique was that our template syntax is too arcane at the initial glance. Somehow the look of the tags syntax pushes people away without them ever checking out any of the features of our framework.

Ironically, none of the users consider the syntax to be a problem. Many even love how it stands out while still being totally invisible to a browser or an XHTML editor.

Still, initial adoption seems to be all about appearances, so I think this issue needs to be addressed. That's why I'm asking you, the non-rife users which alternate syntax looks best to you. [Read More »]

I'm one of those folks that thinks RIFE's current template syntax is difficult to understand. I was scared away from RIFE for this reason alone. It's good to see them asking the community for a better formula.

There's one thing I've learned from leading an open source project: your users aren't always right. Just because they like the way things are done, it doesn't make it the best way to do it. Often, developers merely like something because they've learned it, and would rather not learn something new. Look at all the folks that prefer Struts, yet have never tried another web framework.

Personally, I like Velocity's variable style, which is now used by JSP 2.0. Most new Java web developers are going to learn JSP. If you can make the transition from JSP to your template syntax easier, you'll likely get more users.

Redirect-after-Post in Tapestry 4.0

I just noticed a good Tapestry nugget on Howard's blog. With Tapestry 3.0, one of the things I complained about was the need to throw an exception when redirecting. With 4.0, it looks like you can plug-in this flash component and get exactly the flash message functionality I try to put in all the web frameworks that AppFuse supports. Now I just need to figure out how to do @InjectObject("engine-service:page") without using annotations.

I'm hoping to upgrade AppFuse to WebWork 2.2 and Tapestry 4.0 in the next few days.

Weekend Update

Yikes! I can't believe it's been a whole week since I last blogged. Actually, with my workload it's not that surprising. Don't let anyone ever tell you that working for an open source consulting and support company is easy. When we started, we dreamed of working a couple of weeks a month, and working on open source the rest of the time. Business has really started to pick up in 2006, so that dream is quickly fading. Regardless, this week was a good one.

I managed to get Equinox upgraded to Tapestry 4.0 and WebWork 2.2. Both of these releases are much nicer than their predecessors and I plan to do a write-up next week. I especially dig how WebWork 2.2 allows you to do a popup calendar with less code than both JSF or Tapestry. It really is a kick-ass web framework and only getting better.

Other than that, I had some fun with Maven 2 - converting all the Spring Fundamentals labs to use it. The invalid-POM situation continues to be atrocious and shows no sign of improving soon. I really like the idea of the Jetty 6 Maven Plugin, but unfortunately, it doesn't seem to play nice with SiteMesh. Lastly, I had some fun getting JOTM to work on Tomcat 5.5.x. All in all, I learned a lot this week, just didn't have much time to write about it.

In AppFuse News, Mika Göckel wrote tutorial on integrating XFire with AppFuse. Mika also authored a tutorial on AppFuse + Axis. He obviously knows his way around AppFuse - so we nominated and accepted him as a committer. Welcome aboard Mika! Finally, Brian Topping has converted a version of AppFuse to Maven 2. With any luck, AppFuse will be an archetype that you can install from Maven someday.

I'm flying out to San Francisco for a 1-day seminar next week and my MacBook Pro couldn't arrive any sooner (12 days and counting).