Raible Designs

What do we need to do to make WebWork/Action 2 the best framework for *everything*?

From Ted Husted on the Struts mailing list:

Seriously, hype aside, engineer to engineer, if we can use the new standalone Tiles with WebWork, and use Ajax to store the state of UI controls, what else do we need to do to make WebWork/Action 2 the best framework for *everything*?

My reply:

The tag documentation (and documentation in general) for WebWork is difficult to navigate. Struts' documentation has generally made it easier to find stuff.

I think the hardest part of WebWork/Action 2 is providing the path for migration. If Struts 1.x applications can run in Struts Action 2.x, and users can create new Actions following WW's APIs - that will be truly awesome.

Another that would be cool is smart defaults. For example, having Actions that end with "Action" be available at the "everythingbeforeAction" URL. Spring has something similar coming in 2.0 - and it's mainly just done by extending a certain class.

http://jroller.com/page/raible?anchor=an_example_of_smart_defaults

So if I have UserAction, it's automatically available at /users, /user/edit, /user/save, etc. Default CRUD in a sense. No xwork.xml required by default. But users can override. Default everything w/o requiring annotations, but allow overriding. Or maybe there's different default schemas - a CRUD one, store front, etc.

Ajax stuff that I think WW already has: in-page updates, sortable/pageable lists with something like the displaytag - but with Ajax. There's a lot of these components already available for this stuff, so it might just be a matter of documenting how to integrate them.

Promoting Maven 2 for building might be an easy way of promoting inclusion of 3rd party libraries. Add 3 lines of XML, use this code in your JSP/template, boom - you're good to go. Those that don't like Maven can use the Ant tasks and pom.xml.

Archetypes could be pretty big too - create starter applications that users can use. Even better, provide a means to upgrade the archetypes. Of course, that might be a Maven thing - and editing pom.xml to change versions really isn't that hard.

Above all else - to become the best MVC framework for Java - documentation and easy migration are essential.

Just my $0.02 of course.

What's your opinion?

[CSS Fundraiser] Brrrrrrrr

At 14°F, it was definitely a cold ride to work this morning. It took about a mile and a half before my face when numb. Then I stopped to snap some pictures, which made my fingers go numb. However, the sun was out and it is a beautiful morning in Denver.

Why am I doing this? To raise money for a CSS Design contest.

Tuesday Morning Update: Last night's ride home was pretty warm - 35°F. This morning's ride was fairly nice too (31°F). Here's proof from last night.

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.

Updated Web Tier Specs for Java EE 5

Ed Burns (JSP Spec Lead) points out there's New Drafts of Java EE Web Tier: JSF 1.2, JSP 2.1, Servlet 2.5

I'm pleased to announce another revision of the Java EE Web Tier. In Jan Luehe's blog you can find out what's new in JSP 2.1 Proposed Final Draft 2 (PFD2). The Change Log for Servlet 2.5 will give you the scoop on the Servlet spec. This blog entry will show what's new in the JSF spec.

In JSF, the most visible new feature since the last draft of the spec is the addition of the invokeOnComponent() method on UIComponent. See below for more details.

This revision of the Java Web Tier is fully implemented in glassfish build 37, Sun's open source Java EE 5 Application Server, and the basis for the upcoming Java EE SDK.

I changed the link to Jan Luehe's blog because Ed's link seems to be incorrect. My guess is Java EE will be finalized and released before JavaOne. This is how Sun usually does things: work like mad until JavaOne, then take a week or two off to celebrate the release. Other rumors I've heard are that JBoss and Geronimo hope to release Java EE 5 compliant releases by or at JavaOne.

2006 is shaping up to be quite a year for the popular Java web frameworks. Tapestry 4.0, WebWork 2.2, JSF 1.2 and Spring MVC 2.0 (with form tag libraries and smart defaults). The question is, how long will it take for MyFaces to implement JSF 1.2? And when will we see a large-scale site deployed with JSF?

Why isn't Struts or your favorite framework in this list? Struts is being replaced by WebWork and the rest simply don't have the market share. No one has heard of RIFE or Wicket. However, that didn't stop me from encouraging SourceBeat to publish a Wicket book. Having good (published) documentation about a project is the first step to corporate adoption IMO.

Large sites powered by Java web frameworks and Tiles + WebWork

Yesterday, I delivered a Comparing Web Frameworks seminar that included Struts, Spring MVC, WebWork, JSF and Tapestry. This was for a client that's in the process of re-working an extremely high traffic site (50+ servers currently) from Servlets + JSPs to a web framework. They love the idea of Tiles (and know how to use it) as well as plan on integrating many Ajax features.

We quickly eliminated Struts because of ActionForms since they're planning on moving to persisted POJOs. Spring MVC and JSF had a notch up because they work with Tiles. However, JSF has reportedly had scalability issues. Furthermore, it's the most-complained about framework out there. One attendee noted how she was impressed with the low number of complaints about WebWork.

WebWork doesn't integrate with Tiles (but probably will soon) and they were concerned about SiteMesh performance with large pages (1MB + of text). While I believe SiteMesh can do almost everything that Tiles can do, I also agree that Tiles is a good technology. Furthermore, the "advanced features" of SiteMesh to be largely undocumented, which can be a barrier for adopting it as a "development standard".

Spring MVC was dinged because it doesn't have built-in Ajax support like WebWork and Tapestry (via Tacos). However, it's support for Tiles might just make it the one they choose - especially since they plan on using Spring in the middle-tier/backend. While they loved the idea of Tapestry, they didn't think they could afford the learning curve and I don't know enough about the @Border component to verify if it has all of Tile's functionality.

One interesting thing that came up was the list of high-volume sites using these various web frameworks. Tapestry seems to come out on top when you look at the list of well-known sites. However, I'm sure there are plenty I don't know about. If you know of high-volume sites using any of these five frameworks, please let me know. I'm looking for major sites with millions of hits per day. Here's my current list (extra points for fancy templating with SiteMesh/Tiles + Ajax widgets):

• Struts: None that I know of off the top of my head, but I'm sure there are plenty.
• Spring MVC: None that I know of.
• WebWork: JavaBlogs (don't know if this exactly qualifies as high-volume, there aren't that many Java developers). WebWork also has a few products based on it (i.e. Jive, JIRA, Confluence), but these companies also employ WebWork committers.
• JSF: None that I know of.
• Tapestry: NHL.com, TheServerSide.com (similar comments to JavaBlogs) and Zillow.com.

Thanks!

Related: How To use Tiles like SiteMesh and SourceLab's Web application technologies comparison (with performance numbers!).

Update: FWIW, I figured out How to use Tiles with WebWork and wrote a short howto for doing dependency injection with SiteMesh.

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).

This week at Apache with Ted Husted

Ted Husted gives a nice review of what's happening at Apache with Struts and Roller. Pretty cool to see him offering Struts Training as well. I wonder if most Struts 1.x users will upgrade to Struts Action 2.0 (a.k.a. WebWork)?

Learn about WebWork 2.2 and Tapestry 4.0 via Podcasts

I've said in the past that Podcasts are boring. I still think this is true for the most part, but that's largely because most of them aren't appealing to me. However, this week I've found a couple of good ones. Tapestry 4.0 and WebWork 2.2 have recently been released, and now you can listen to interviews with both project's primary developers: Patrick Lightbody of WebWork and Howard Lewis Ship of Tapestry/Hivemind. The easiest way I've found to subscribe and listen to podcasts is to download iTunes. You also may want to checkout The Java Podcasters article on ONJava.com.

I hope to upgrade both Equinox and AppFuse to these releases in the near future, I just need to find the time. I also hope to change the default web framework in AppFuse to Struts Action 2 as part of AppFuse 2.0. This will allow us to ditch Struts and WebWork and only support 4 web frameworks (SA2, Spring MVC, Tapestry and JSF).

Does JPOX suck?

There's an ongoing effort in Roller to migrate from Hibernate to JDO. Mostly, this is due to Apache's silly rule about no L/GPL dependencies - even if they're downloaded separately. I think this is a valiant effort, especially if JDO performs as well as Hibernate.

However, it was interesting to see the following message on the mailing list this morning:

i have experience using jdo, and jpox in particular, with a commercial product. first, you probably already know this, but jdo is dead (from a spec perspective anyway). it will be phased out in favor of ejb3 persistence. maybe that transition will be graceful, maybe not. i see jpox has ejb3 on their roadmap, but not sure what that means.

second, jpox has really, very atrocious performance issues. the jpox folks admit that performance is a low priority, as they are an ri. if someone wants the details on this, i can dig them up.

Interestingly enough, this message is from a Sun employee. It's interesting to hear someone from Sun say that "jdo is dead". What are you thoughts? Should Roller change their persistence backend just to satisfy Apache?

Of course, now you'll tell me your favorite Apache-licensed persistence framework and why it's worked so well for you. The real question is - are you willing to re-write Roller's backend using it?