Raible Designs

SOFEA: Also known as SOUI

InfoQ asks Does the rise of Service Oriented UI (SOUI) means the death of server-assisted MVC? A similar thread was started on JavaLobby last week: Web frameworks peaking toward obsolescence. A month ago, TSS posted a whitepaper titled Life above the Service Tier.

As far as I can tell, Nolan Wright and Jeff Haynie haven't read the Life above the Service Tier article - where the very same architecture is called SOFEA. Nolan and Jeff are calling it SOUI. Is there a difference that you can see? I don't think there is. However, I do think there's a better acronym out there that could spark more interest in this type of architecture. After all, isn't the tipping point often triggered by good timing and clever marketing?

As I mentioned previously, I really like the ideas behind SOFEA/SOUI. However, I don't think it will replace the existing frameworks we use to develop web applications. Those have been very successful and will continue to be. The internet is growing - there's lots of room for new applications developed with new architectures. As long as this new architecture is scalable and maintainable, I can't think of a good reason why it won't succeed.

Introducing the Cadillac named Snow White

Today I completed something I've been hoping to do for a couple months now - I bought a new car! I started looking a few weeks ago and today I let Janet the Used Car Sales Lady talk me into buying a 2004 Cadillac Escalade. I was planning on buying a used Yukon, but took a fully-loaded one for a test-drive this morning and found it to be sluggish and kind of a rough ride. Since I like the look of the Escalade, I decided to test-drive one of those this afternoon. 2 hours later, I'd made a screaming deal that I couldn't pass up. I wanted the shorter SUV, but ended up with the longer one. Oh well, I went from a car to an SUV to get more room so I don't feel too bad.

The main reason I wanted to get an SUV (and a big one at that) was because I've found my Honda Accord to be too small to cart the kids around in. While it works, it's tough to pack any sort of gear (bikes, skis, etc.) with us. I know, I could have boughten a roof rack and taken my 12" subs out of the trunk to free up some room, but I was ready for a truck. After the Blizzard of 2006, I didn't want to get snowed in for days at a time. Also, the kids and I got Winter Park/Copper Ski passes so I want to be able to take them skiing a lot this winter.

Disclaimer: I realize this is about the least green thing I could do and I'm not helping the environment at all. My only justification is 1) I had a very low carbon footprint the first 16 years of my life growing up at the cabin with no electricity or running water and 2) I don't really drive a whole lot. I averaged around 7,000 miles a year on my Honda - having only 36,000 miles after 5 years. With this one, I'll probably drive it a fair bit this winter and hardly drive it at all next summer and beyond. By then, hopefully the Bus is done and I can cruise around town in the sweetest ride I've ever owned.

As for the name "Snow White" - that was Abbie's idea. We'll see if it sticks.

Update: I forgot to mention one of my favorite features - a direct iPod hookup. I can navigate playlists from the stereo in the car. The display is only limited to 8 characters, but it's a lot better than broadcasting over FM.

Upgrading AppFuse to Spring 2.5

Last night, I spent a few minutes upgrading AppFuse to Spring 2.5 RC1. According to InfoQ, Spring 2.5 is a drop-in upgrade for Spring 2.0. However, if you're using Maven, it's not quite that easy. The good news is it is easy, you just need to change your pom.xml a bit. The steps I used to upgrade AppFuse are listed below:

• Add a repository for Spring's milestone releases:

  <repository>
      <id>spring-milestone</id>
      <url>http://s3.amazonaws.com/maven.springframework.org/milestone</url>
  </repository>
  

• Change artifactId of "spring-mock" to be "spring-test".
• Change version to be 2.5-rc1.

At this point, if you're using "spring" as your artifactId (instead of the smaller fine-grained dependencies), you'll likely get the following error in a Spring MVC application:

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: 
org/springframework/web/servlet/handler/AbstractUrlHandlerMapping

This happens because Spring MVC is no longer included in the uber spring.jar. You'll need to add a dependency on "spring-webmvc" to solve this problem. Unfortunately, this JAR is dependent on the fine-grained modules, so you may have to modify your pom.xml to depend on the fine-grained modules - or exclude them all from spring-webmvc.

The good news is Spring has excluded all the invalid commons-logging dependencies for you so you don't have to anymore.

After getting all the dependencies straightened out - I ran the integration tests:

org.springframework.beans.NotReadablePropertyException: Invalid property 
'fileUpload' of bean class [org.appfuse.webapp.controller.FileUpload]: Bean 
property 'fileUpload' is not readable or has an invalid getter method: Does the 
return type of the getter match the parameter type of the setter?

Looking at uploadForm.jsp, I'm guessing the problem happens because of the following code:

<spring:bind path="fileUpload.file">
<input type="file" name="file" id="file" class="file medium" value="<c:out value="${status.value}"/>"/>
</spring:bind>

Confirmed - changing the "path" attribute to "file" fixes the problem. I also found out that setting the "value" on an <input type="file"> doesn't work, so wrapping the field with <spring:bind> doesn't make a whole lot of sense anyway.

To conclude, it doesn't look like the first release candidate of Spring 2.5 is exactly a drop-in upgrade for Spring 2.0, but it's pretty darn close. I'm sure by the time it's released, it will be. I'd encourage you to try 2.5 in your Spring-dependent projects to see if you find any issues.

Update: I was successfully able to migrate AppFuse from using the uber JAR to fine-grained JARs. However, I ran into a couple issues in the process. The first is that even though I'm including spring-aop in the appfuse-service module, it's not pulled in for the web frameworks (which depend on appfuse-service). Explicitly declaring spring-aop as a dependency for the appfuse-web module fixes this. Secondly, I had to modify my Acegi Security exclusions so it wouldn't include dependencies that no longer exist in 2.5.

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.acegisecurity</groupId>
    <artifactId>acegi-security-tiger</artifactId>
    <version>${acegi.version}</version>
    <exclusions>
        <exclusion>
            <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-dao</artifactId>
        </exclusion>
        <exclusion>
            <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-jdbc</artifactId>
        </exclusion>
        <exclusion>
            <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-remoting</artifactId>
        </exclusion>
        <exclusion>
            <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-support</artifactId>
        </exclusion>
    </exclusions>
</dependency>

The last external hard drive I'll ever need?

Today I pre-ordered a 1TB LaCie 2big Network (2-disk RAID) hard drive. Looks pretty beefy eh?

Why did I get this? Because it's time to get serious about backup. I currently have 3 external hard drives and none of them are big enough to backup everything. I also tend to use them as alternative storage rather than backup. I'm running out of space on my Linux box ... the list goes on. In reality, you can never have too much disk space can you?

I have a 250 GB Lacie d2 that I'm using on my MacBook Pro with Time Machine. I also have a Lacie Rugged that I use when I travel. I try to backup before I go to do major things - like a training class or speak a conference. That way, if my laptop dies, I can use someone else's Mac and be good to go. If there are no Macs, I keep all my materials in Subversion. Lastly, I have a 200 GB Maxtor that I use as a backup on my Windows box.

My ideal solution is 1) each machine has its own backup hard drive and 2) each machine can store files on a central server. I used to use Samba on Linux, but it seems easier to use my Airport Extreme and a big ol' drive like this Lacie. What's your setup and/or advice?

January 30, 2008 Update: Because of the feedback on my post, I never purchased this hard drive. I still need a back up solution and I'm thinking of using Apple's new Time Capsule. If it works with Windows and Linux - I'm sold.

Happy Birthday Abbie!

5 years sure goes by quick when you're a parent. It's hard to believe that 1) I started blogging over 5 years ago and 2) Abbie turns 5 years old today. It's pretty cool to be able to look back at previous birthdays: the birthday, #1, #3 and #4. I don't know what happened for #2, but I sure feel bad for not blogging the event.

Congratulations kiddo - you've turned into a beautiful (and awfully smart) little girl.

P.S. Don't tell her I called her a "little" girl - she's obviously a "big" girl.

RE: Life above the Service Tier

Yesterday I wrote the following:

I hope to develop with Flex, Grails, GWT or YUI + Struts 2 in the next 6 months. These seem like the most exciting technologies for Java web development in 2008.

This post is meant to explain why I think these are the most exciting technologies going forward.

A few weeks ago, a very interesting paper was posted on TSS: Life above the Service Tier. In this paper, Ganesh Prasad, Rajat Taneja and Vikrant Todankar introduce a new architectural style they're calling SOFEA, for Service-Oriented Front-End Architecture. To summarize:

The principles of SOFEA are:

0. Decouple the three orthogonal Presentation Tier processes of Application Download, Presentation Flow and Data Interchange. This is the foundational principle of SOFEA.

1. Explore various Application Download options to exploit usefully contrary trade-offs around client footprint, startup time, offline capability and a number of security-related parameters.

2. Presentation Flow must be driven by a client-side component and never by a server-side component.

3. Data Interchange between the Presentation Tier and the Service Tier must not become the weakest link in the end-to-end application chain of data integrity.

4. Model-View-Controller (MVC) is a good pattern to use to build the Presentation Tier.

Their paper can be downloaded from Life above the Service Tier.

I read this paper earlier this week and enjoyed reading it as well as thinking about the concepts it introduces. First of all, I believe SOFEA only applies to web applications and isn't a valid architecture pattern for web sites. While it may work for web sites, the traditional mechanisms (serving pages from the server side) seems to work well and isn't going away anytime soon.

So if SOFEA is the way of the future for developing web applications, where does that leave all the web frameworks that serve up pages server-side? This includes all Java web frameworks, Ruby on Rails and PHP. I think it leaves them in an interesting situation. They can still be usable if they can serve up the Application Download and the Data Interchange, but otherwise, they seem pretty much useless with this new architecture.

Is a SOFEA architecture a silver-bullet? I doubt it as there's still a lot of unanswered questions. How does SOFEA solve i18n and validation? Is it possible to re-use server-side validation rules in the client-side architecture? Granted this is probably a client-side framework feature rather than a SOFEA concept, but I still think it deserves some thought.

I don't know if i18n is that much of an issue for most applications. Most of the gigs I've consulted on in recent years were English-only, with no plans for internationalization. Validation is often server-side too. However, I believe server-side validation is often done simply because the web framework being used did not provide good client-side validation. How does i18n work in a JavaScript application? Can you bundle i18n scripts in the Application Download and have those read on the client-side - or do you serve up a different version of the application for different locales?

I think the most interesting part of SOFEA is how simple the backend becomes. With Spring and Hibernate (and some type of remoting) it should be easy to develop your SOA backend. But how do you publish those services? Do you still use a web framework on top to handle validation and such, or do you just markup POJOs with @WebService annotations?

Will 2008 be the year for SOFEA applications? It's definitely possible. I'm thinking of starting a Denver SOFEA user group to discuss and promote this architecture style. If I did - would you be interested in attending?

Flex and Grails Made Easy

I love how easy it is to start new projects these days. It was very difficult when I started creating AppFuse way back in 2002. We've come a long way baby!

Here's a couple of easy ways to get started with Flex and Grails:

• Quickstart flex development with this maven archetype
• Grails development in IntelliJ IDEA

I hope to develop with Flex, Grails, GWT or YUI + Struts 2 in the next 6 months. These seem like the most exciting technologies for Java web development in 2008.

My Upgrade to Leopard

By now, you've seen many stories about upgrading to Leopard. Here's mine.

In the past, I would've slapped the DVD in, selected upgrade and prayed for the best. Now I'm older and (apparently) wiser. First, I cloned my hard drive with SuperDuper!. Then I attempted to upgrade. I started the process on Saturday morning and didn't check it until Saturday afternoon. At that point, I was greeted with the lovely blue screen of death. I didn't even bother to look up the problem - instead opting for the clean install.

The next time I checked (Sunday evening), the installation was completed. I registered, clicked through some stuff and started copying files from my backup drive. On Sunday night, I closed the lid on my laptop and haven't used it since. I guess new operating systems don't excite me as much as they used to. Then again, I do have two MacBooks, so I don't really need the Leoparded one.

It could be that I'm burned out on technology - or it could be the Rockies and Broncos performance this past weekend has got me bummed. Who knows - the good news is there's lot of trick-or-treating to be done in the next couple of days and I'm sure to cheer up with the kids around.

Xebia Web Framework Contest

I found an interesting blog post today about a contest (English translation) a French company (Xebia) had with some Java web frameworks.

Overall, I think it's a good summary of the strengths and weaknesses of the various frameworks.

The Perfect Day for a Homecoming

Today was a great day and a terrific start to a fun-filled weekend. The morning, I delivered my last talk at the Colorado Software Summit then drove home on a beautiful Colorado day. See proof below:

I got home just in time to meet the tow truck who was hauling my bus home. The shop were it was at was too slow. I've been talking to MotorWorks Restorations (in the Springs) and I hope to get it into their shop w/in the next couple of weeks. After they've completed the body and paint (and possibly electrical), I hope to rebuild the engine, finish the interior and have it on the road by next summer.

I missed my delivery of Leopard this morning, but I can still get it before Monday if I can make it to the Fedex store before 7PM tonight. With happy hour starting at 5:30 and the Homecoming DU Hockey game at 7, this day just keeps getting better.

Hope y'all have a great weekend!