Raible Designs

Skiing in Colorado - it's looking good this year

The last couple of weeks have been frustrating. Actually, it's really been the last couple of years. You see, I live in Denver, Colorado - a city that's close to some of the best skiing on the planet. Furthermore, skiing here is pretty cheap. Starting about 10 years ago, all the resorts reduced their "season pass" prices from thousands to hundreds. You can get a ski pass to Keystone, Breckenridge, A-Basin, Vail and Beavercreek (5 mountains!) for a mere 350 bucks.

When Julie first moved here, we were pretty regular skiiers. We both got passes and went skiing almost every weekend. In 1999-2000, I worked for a .com that had a "9-inch" rule, where we got to go skiing whenever it snowed more than 9 inches the night before. This happened to coincide with one of the best ski seasons ever, and we managed to ski an average of 3 days per week (including weekends). Needless to say, I went from being a decent "black skier" to skiing chutes and bumbs with ease.

Then the kids came. The first year it wasn't so bad. When Abbie was first born, I had my first book deal, and I started AppFuse - so I didn't notice the winter pass me by. That was the first year I didn't buy a pass in quite a few years. The next year, I made sure to buy a season pass and barely got my money's worth (only skiing 5 times). I bought one again last year, and still only made it up 4 times. This year I didn't buy one.

For the last 2 weeks, I've gotten a 9" snow report in my inbox almost every day! It is dumping in Colorado this year and looks to be one of the best ski seasons ever. This year I'm planning on taking Abbie up with me, and getting her started on the "slopes." The problem? Why haven't I been up there yet? Work - how bad does that suck? And it's not real work IMO. It's open source and conference preparation. Ugh.

I need to get in shape, I need to find a client with a 9" rule - and I need to get to the hills! Ahhh, the good ol' days. I miss 'em.

Note to self: mountain biking and skiing should have a higher priority than any of this career mumbo jumbo.

Ant colored logging on Windows

In the past, I've had issues getting Ant's AnsiColorLogger to work on Windows with Cygwin. Thanks to a friend of mine, Steve DeRidder, I was finally able to figure out a working solution. Here's what you need to do if you're using Cygwin.

Install the "rxvt" component of Cygwin through its update tool. Once you've done that, there are two options for integration:

• Right-click context menu: Download rxvt_reg.reg to your hard drive. Edit it with a text editor to point to your Cygwin installation and save it. Then right click on the file and "merge" it into your registry.
• Shortcut: Create a new shortcut with the following command (all on one line, adjust your Cygwin path accordingly):

  C:\Tools\cygwin\bin\rxvt.exe -bg white -fg black -sr -sl 5000 -fn "Fixedsys" 
  -ls -e /usr/bin/bash --login -c "exec /bin/bash -rcfile ~/.bashrc"
  

Thanks for the tip Steve!

Free Forums from Nabble.com

Nabble seems like a pretty cool site:

Our forums are truly public, democratic and absolutely free. Nabble's advanced community filtering gives you only the best content without the need for moderation. Find forums that interest you or easily start your own in minutes.

I first found out about Nabble a few days ago when I started seeing messages on the AppFuse mailing with a from address of "sent by Nabble.com". I did some searching and found they have a set of AppFuse Forums. The cool thing about these forums is they're not only a set of mailing list archives, but they also allow you post to the mailing list. Nabble forums are similar to Jive Forums (like OpenSymphony has) - they keep the forums and the mailing lists in synch, which is pretty cool IMO.

I spoke (via e-mail) with Will Lin - one of the co-starters of the Nabble project. Here are a few things he had to say about Nabble:

The goal of Nabble is to do the discussion right, just like Google did the search right. There are many problems with the current forms of discussions in mailing lists, message boards, user groups etc. Most importantly, (1) the search, most forum search are broken, a lot of people use Google's site:archive.domain.com to search discussion archive - what a hack, because Google does not index all the messages especially the recent ones.

In the mailing list case, developers get mad because users post dumb questions repeatedly, but the users don't have a good way to search past discussions ... (2) moderation, most discussions rely on one or two strong moderator to resolve spam and flame wars, with Nabble, all the members can work togeter to rate up (promote) top contributors, and rate down (drive out) spam and trouble makers; (3) cataloging - similar topic discussions should be able to be combined for browsing and search.

One of the coolest features of Nabble is you can create your own forum, and skin it however you like. I've done this for AppFuse, and created an easy to remember alias at http://appfuse.org/forums. You can also check out the easily-searchable Roller Archives, as well as many other OS project's mailing list archives.

RE: WebWork joins Struts

From the struts-dev mailing list:

Between the Clarity hubbub and the Java Web Alignment brouhaha, it came up that WebWork would like to merge with another framework. Ted and Don followed up with the two core WebWork developers, Patrick Lightbody and Jason Carreira. As it turns out, they are very interested in merging WebWork with Struts. An archive of our discussions is available as a Quick Topic thread.

As some of you know, the underlying idea behind Ti was to use WebWork as the core of Struts Action Framework 2.x. Conceptually, WebWork and Struts 1.x are very similar. We've often said, without embarrassment, that WebWork does many things better than Struts 1.x. Meanwhile, WebWork has the ability to provide a layer of almost full backwards-compatibility for Struts 1.x, and we have already demonstrated we can integrate Beehive's (very cool) Page Flow with WebWork.

Patrick Lightbody:

Yes, it's true. The WebWork development team (Jason and I) have been working with the Struts development team (Don Brown and Ted Husted) and have come to the conclusion that the best thing for Java community would be to merge WebWork in to Struts.

Read Ted's email here, but the gist of it is this: WebWork is a great technology, and Struts is a great community. It's a perfect match and bringing the two together will only be better for WebWork and Struts users alike. The only down side for me is that I'll be working less with OpenSymphony, but I believe that is a small price for all the great benefits that come from this merger.
...
With this renewed energy, larger development team, and larger community, the combined efforts of Struts and WebWork will surely make the Struts platform the easiest, fastest, and most powerful Java web framework available. We hope that all the WebWork users and developers are as excited about this as we are and are ready to take WebWork to the next level.

IMO, this is good for both Struts and WebWork. WebWork gets the additional marketing it needs, and Struts users get a kick-ass framework to develop with. If you're a Struts user and haven't tried WebWork, prepare to be impressed. I was and still am.

I plan to upgrade AppFuse and Equinox to WebWork 2.2 as soon as its released. Hopefully I'll be able to migrate both the Struts and WebWork versions to SAF 2.0 w/in a few months.

Are you doing client-side validation in your JSF applications?

Are you doing client-side validation in your JSF application? I am in Equinox and AppFuse, but it seems somewhat primitive. I'm using David Geary's corejsf-validator.jar from his Core JSF book. It hooks into Commons Validator, and while it does work - it has some issues. First of all, if you have it in your classpath when testing, it screws up Ant-style path matching in Spring (applicationContext*.xml doesn't work). Secondly, it puts all the JavaScript validation functions right in your page, rather than in an external file that can be cached by your browser.

In reality, I believe that JSF should include client-side validation as part of the spec. After all, all of the other popular Java web frameworks support it. Then again, Rails is growing in popularity and AFAIK, it doesn't support it. In addition, the popular Java webapps I've seen (JIRA, Confluence, Jive Forums) don't use it either. I'm not trying to advocate that we should all be using client-side validation in our apps, I'm merely saying it should be an option in the standard web framework for Java.

The only public (and open source) option I've found is the Commons Validator support in Shale. Will this work in a MyFaces application w/o Shale? Are there other client-validation frameworks for JSF I don't know about? Or is the best option "don't use client-side validation with JSF?"

Lots of Java activity in San Francisco

The last 24 hours here in San Francisco have been quite interesting. Yesterday, I had lunch with a group of AppFuse users. They work for a company a few blocks from my training class. Chipotle was on the way, so I grabbed a burrito on my route and had a great time talking with them about the various open source tools that AppFuse uses, as well as what's on the roadmap. Thanks for the cookies John!

After class yesterday, I had a Guinness with an AppFuse user that recently put a high-volume site into production. He said it's held up surprisingly well and AppFuse greatly simplified his ability to deliver the project on time. In fact, most of the features the client wanted were already built-in.

Last night was another hotbed for Java talk - from web frameworks to TSSS in Vegas. Matt Filios and I had dinner and drinks with Mike "wanna play poker" Cannon-Brookes, Crazy Bob, Patrick Linskey, Geoff Hendrey (I hope I got the name right) and a number of other guys whose names escape me. It was Mike's birthday, so I left early to avoid the chaos that Crazy Bob and Mike always seem to stir up.

To top it all off, this morning I ran into a couple of folks that read this blog. I was getting breakfast at a local bagel shop - when a guy came up to me and asked "Is your name Matt"? I answered yes, and we talked briefly about my trip out here. It was kinda wierd being recognized, but kinda cool at the same time. It was good to meet you Nadeem.

I'm heading home from this wonderfully warm place tonight, but I'm sure I'll be back in the near future.

RE: Is Ajax gonna kill the web frameworks?

James is asking "Is Ajax gonna kill the web frameworks?" From my personal experience, I can definitely say that Ajax is going to give web frameworks a run for their money. However, I doubt it's going to completely replace web frameworks. There's many companies out there that aren't willing to commit to developing a JavaScript-only UI - not even Google. GMail has a non-javascript version that's used when you disable JavaScript in your browser.

That being said, I'd much rather work on a project that embraces and uses Ajax over a web framework. However, even if you decide to use Ajax, doesn't the same framework proliferation problem still exist? DWR, Scriptaculous, Prototype, AjaxTags, AjaxAnywhere, Rico, Dojo, JSON-RPC - which Ajax frameworks are the best ones to use? If one of these projects joins Apache, will it become the de-facto Ajax framework like Struts did?

Rocky Mountain Software Symposium

This afternoon, the Rocky Mountain Software Symposium returns to Denver for the final show of the year. Of course, this conference is better known as No Fluff Just Stuff, Denver. Lucky for me, I'll be presenting all my sessions tomorrow so I'll at least get one day this weekend to relax. It looks to be a good show, with lots of interesting sessions. Here's mine:

• 8:45 - 10:15 AM: Test-Driven Development with Spring and Hibernate
• 1:45 - 3:15 PM: Developing Web Applications with Spring and Ajax
• 3:30 - 5:00 PM: Spring's AOP and Transaction Frameworks

After the presentation class I attended last week, I think all these should be renamed. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to re-organize the presentations, but if I could change the titles, they'd be something like this.

• Write better code faster with Spring and Hibernate, use AppFuse to simplify both
• Make your webapps suck less by using Ajax
• Use Spring AOP and Transaction Frameworks, because they're so damn easy

Update: PDFs of my presentations, as well as the Ajax demo is available from Equinox's downloads section. Make sure and view the README if you want to run the demo and see how to view the Ajax features.

Editing Java webapps instead of edit/deploy/reload

For the last few years, I've always done Java webapp development the hard way. Yeah, I'm the guy that makes Dion cringe (although I'm pretty sure he's not referring directly to me). I edit a class/jsp/xml file and run "ant deploy reload". Then I wait a few seconds for my context to reload in Tomcat. Luckily, I do mostly test-first development, so it's rare that I have to open my browser to test stuff. However, with the power of CSS and Ajax, manual testing in a browser is becoming more and more useful (although Selenium may solve that).

I've long resisted the power of the IDE, b/c I've always trusted Ant and felt confortable with the command line. However, I'm ready for a change. I'm ready to start developing Equinox and AppFuse-based applications using the edit/save/auto-reload cycle. So how do I get started? Where's the instructions for setting up my IDEs to work this way?

I prefer to use Eclipse and IDEA for development - so I'll likely try to get this working in both. If I get it working, I'll make sure and provide good documentation so others can do the same. I'm also willing to make any changes in project structure to make this happen; modifying build.xml (or pom.xml) to accomodate shouldn't be too difficult.

Spring MVC the most popular web framework among AppFuse users

At the beginning of October, I did an informal poll on the AppFuse mailing list to see which web framework users were developing their applications with. Surprisingly, Spring came out on top, and the component frameworks (JSF and Tapestry) are the least used. I find this interesting b/c AppFuse lowers the barriers and reduces the learning curve for all of these frameworks.

If you're an AppFuse user and didn't respond on the mailing list, please leave a comment with the web framework you're using.

On a related note, I noticed that java.net added RSS Feeds for mailing lists today. This means if you have an RSS Reader, you can subscribe to the AppFuse user mailing list.

Heh, I just subscribed and there's no messages in the feed. Maybe this feature needs a little more work.