Matt RaibleMatt Raible is a Web Developer and Java Champion. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

The Angular Mini-Book The Angular Mini-Book is a guide to getting started with Angular. You'll learn how to develop a bare-bones application, test it, and deploy it. Then you'll move on to adding Bootstrap, Angular Material, continuous integration, and authentication.

Spring Boot is a popular framework for building REST APIs. You'll learn how to integrate Angular with Spring Boot and use security best practices like HTTPS and a content security policy.

For book updates, follow @angular_book on Twitter.

The JHipster Mini-Book The JHipster Mini-Book is a guide to getting started with hip technologies today: Angular, Bootstrap, and Spring Boot. All of these frameworks are wrapped up in an easy-to-use project called JHipster.

This book shows you how to build an app with JHipster, and guides you through the plethora of tools, techniques and options you can use. Furthermore, it explains the UI and API building blocks so you understand the underpinnings of your great application.

For book updates, follow @jhipster-book on Twitter.

10+ YEARS


Over 10 years ago, I wrote my first blog post. Since then, I've authored books, had kids, traveled the world, found Trish and blogged about it all.
You searched this site for "grails". 129 entries found.

You can also try this same search on Google.

My Future of Web Frameworks Presentation

Earlier this week, I tweeted about a history of web frameworks timeline I created for my upcoming Future of Web Frameworks talk at TSSJS Vegas 2010. I immediately received a lot of feedback and requests for adding new frameworks and releases. The image below is the result of that Twitter conversation. Thanks to everyone who contributed.

History of Web Frameworks

Back in November, I wrote about my proposals for TSSJS. I've been thinking a lot about web frameworks lately and I can't help but think we live in a very exciting time. As a Java developer, I've been exposed to one of the most vibrant language ecosystems on the planet. As Tim Bray talks about, the Java Platform has 3 legs: the language, the virtual machine and a huge, immense library of APIs (both in the JDK and in open source libraries). The diagram below is something I created based on Tim's podcast.

Java has 3 Legs

Tim says, "One of those legs is replaceable and that's the language." And he's right, there's many Java.next languages that run efficiently on the JVM. This is one of the most exciting parts of being a Java web developer today. There's many proven web frameworks and languages that you can pick to build your next web application.

The best part is many of the best web frameworks run on the JVM. Not only that, but the best code editors are the IDEs that you're familiar with and have grown to love. Furthermore, much of the literature for Java.next languages is written for Java developers. As someone who knows Java, you have wealth of web frameworks and languages just waiting for you to learn them.

To create my presentation on the future of web frameworks, I followed the outline I posted previously. I plan on explaining the evolution and history of web frameworks and how we got to where we are today. From there, I'll be speculating on what web applications we'll be developing in the future. Finally, I'll touch on the necessary features of web frameworks that will allow us to develop these applications.

Of course, I haven't actually presented this talk yet, so it's likely to change in the coming weeks before the conference. The good news is this gives you the opportunity to provide constructive criticism on this presentation and help make it better. I realize that a presentation rarely represents the conversation that takes place during a conference. However, I believe it can portray the jist of my thinking and lead to a meaningful conversation in the comments of this post. Below is the presentation I created - thanks in advance for any feedback.

For those who will be joining me at TSSJS ... it's gonna be a great show. St. Patrick's Day in Vegas, what more could you ask for? ;-)

Update: This article has been re-posted on Javalobby and contains additional community feedback in the comments.

Posted in Java at Feb 26 2010, 08:55:39 AM MST 5 Comments

Reviews for Grails: A Quick-Start Guide and Kanban and Scrum

A couple weeks ago, I had a business trip from Denver to Washington, DC. Since I didn't have any coding to do on the flight, I brought along a couple books and was surprisingly able to finish them both en route. Tech books that can be read in a single flight are my favorite. Another book I recall doing this with was First Steps in Flex back in December.

The books I read were Dave Klein's Grails: A Quick-Start Guide and Henrik Kniberg and Mattias Skarin's Kanban and Scrum minibook. Below are short reviews of each book.

Grails: A Quick-Start Guide
I've developed a few Grails applications, so I didn't expect to learn a whole lot from this book, but I was pleasantly surprised. Not only did it introduce all the basic concepts in a clear and concise way, it actually made it fun to read. The first chapter does a good job of introducing Groovy; showing you how to use closures and the easy-to-use collections API. From there, you dive into learning about the project, which is actually a real-life web application called TekDays.com. Then the foundational Iteration Zero is planned and executed.

In Chapter 3, you dive right into creating domain classes and their relationships. All the different mapping types are covered: one-to-one, one-to-many and the good ol' many-to-many. Since this is often a difficult part of an application, it's always nice to see how much Grails simplifies it. I liked the Ajax section in Chapter 7 and especially the part where it showed how to do a TagLib to show threaded comments in a forum.

Chapter 7 (Security) was a little disappointing in that it showed how to hand-roll your own security rather than using the Spring Security plugin (formerly Acegi) or the Shiro plugin (formerly JSecurity). I'd especially have liked to see how to do Ajax authentication where a token is generated for the client and included as a header in each subsequent request.

Other than that, I really enjoyed Chapter 10 where I learned how to implement search using dynamic finders, Hibernate's Criteria API and the Searchable Plugin (which gets its awesomeness from Compass). Implementing Compass in Java requires many, many annotations. In Grails, it's as simple as adding the following to your domain class.

static searchable = true

I truly enjoyed this book, especially with its Agile Development patterns that used iterations to get things done. Grails: A Quick-Start Guide is a code-intensive journey that gets up you to speed on Grails quickly and efficiently. It's very much like the framework itself. It eliminates the yak shaving and allows you learn without distractions. Kudos to Dave Klein for creating such an enjoyable and easy-to-read book.

Kanban and Scrum
In my career, I've used Scrum on quite a few projects. Of course, it's not the processes that typically make a team successful. Rather, it's often the gelling of the team members, as well as respect for coding practices that are proven to create higher quality code - specifically TDD and pair programming. Before reading this book, I'd heard a bit about Kanban, most of it from Marty Haught's Lean Teams: Doing more with less presentation.

This book did a great job of showing the differences between the two approaches: how Scrum promotes iterations whereas Kanban promotes cycle time. The most interesting part of the book is the Case Study in the 2nd half. This section shows how a team used various techniques to develop a well-oiled development machine. I think the most important thing to note from this section is how the team was willing to change, learn and grow based on their experiences - in a very rapid fashion.

In my current gig, I'm helping a team of developers move from waterfall to agile processes. We're leveraging many aspects of Scrum and agile by using a coach, iterations, daily standups, TDD, continuous integration and creating "as built" documentation when we finish developing a feature. The "As Built" documentation is something I picked up from working at Chordiant and I've found it to be a great way of education developers (and outsiders) how things were done in an iteration.

One thing we've seen in our first few weeks is that iterations don't work for all teams or individuals. A Kanban model fits much better for them. Having a Kanban board allows them to visualize (and control) their workload in a much more efficient manner. We haven't started implementing actual boards on a wall, we're just using spreadsheets for now. However, we do have two Agile Coaches starting this week so I expect things to improve rapidly.

Back to the book. More than anything, I enjoyed reading this book because it made me excited about the changes I'm helping implement and I believe in many of the practices in both Scrum and Kanban. I enjoy iterations and structured expectations around development, but I can see how Kanban would work better for folks in operations and infrastructure. I look forward to implementing the best parts of both worlds and hopefully a similar Case Study of what worked and what didn't. With any luck, we'll be able to learn, evolve and produce at a much higher level than previous waterfall practices achieved.

Posted in Java at Feb 01 2010, 09:29:40 AM MST 5 Comments

2009 - A Year in Review

I wrote my first "year in review" post in 2005 and continued the tradition in 2006 and 2008. This year, my December was filled with unplanned circumstances, a new job and a houseful of family for the holidays, so I never had time to sit down and write this post. As things are returning to normal, I figured it's about time I kicked off 2010 with one of my favorite writing reflections.

Experts Only 2009 started off with a bang: I wrote about my Mom nailing a bear's nuts to a tree after she killed it. My new gig (at Evite) started out fun with choosing an Ajax framework and a Tech Meetup in LA. My bike got stolen, I started running to work and traveled to Tahoe without an ID.

February started off with an epic weekend at Silverton. I went to Web Directions North and attended many good talks:

I wrote my first GWT-related entry and a few posts related to independent consulting.

I ended February with a couple more GWT-related entries.

On the top In March, I bought a new 15" MacBook Pro and shipped it back shortly after to get a 256 GB SSD. I still have nothing but good things to say about the machine. I discovered Nexus is awesome and the kids and I went on our first hike of the year.

My GWT Journey continued with GXT MVC, modularization and optimization. I got a new office and new bike and proudly witnessed my Dad's Retirement.

April came and I got Drunk on Software, had a blast at Holly and Jason's Wedding and published our Ajax Framework Analysis Results.

Mr. and Mrs. Harris

At the end of April, I started building the kids a treehouse and inspired smiles with two new kittens. On May 7th, I had PRK eye surgery and wrote about my experience in early June. I continue to be extremely happy with the results.

Day 3 - They love it! Day 4 - Floor completed Jack and Olivia Abbie and Mittens

May ended with Ryan and Breanne's Wedding in Playa Del Carmen. Having so many great friends around and the Nuggets vs. Lakers playoffs the same week made this one of the best vacations of my life.

Ready for the Ceremony Vows Mariachi Band Mr. and Mrs. Johnson

June brought the news that the Colorado Software Summit was over. There's been several times in the past few months that I've missed the annual experience. Can someone please start a conference at a Colorado mountain resort in the near future? Pretty please! I've always experienced this conference with Bruce and we continued another tradition (riding to Red Rocks) with 2nd Row seats at Big Head Todd.

My GWT posts continued with a Facebook-style Autocomplete, Implementing OAuth, JSON Parsing with JavaScript Overlays and a preview of GWT 2.0. I wrote about implementing SOFEA with GWT and Grails at Evite.com and had a blast at the Great Sand Dunes on Father's Day.

Abbie and Cookie at The Dunes

My job hunt began and I started a month-long vacation in Montana with Raible Road Trip #13. Vacationing for a summer month in Montana has been one of my goals for several years. Accomplishing it this year made me extremely happy and I hope to make it a summer tradition.

July was an awesome month in 2009. Granted, April and May were special with tropical weddings, but Montana in July is a particularly tasty treat. My Summer Vacation in Montana attempts to capture how much fun we had. It was particularly enjoyable because my parents, children and many life-long friends were involved.

View of the Missions from Holland Falls Ready for the Celebrate the Swan Race Horseshoes Floor Pouring Crew

As summer began to set, I decided to get back into speaking at conferences, starting with the Rich Web Experience. I wrote about initial GWT work at my new client, which included an interesting experience with Java REST Frameworks. The month ended with one of my favorite holidays: Jack's Birthday.

September was nice and uneventful. I learned about Concurrency on the JVM Using Scala, started using MVP with GWT and learned how to do more with less. I also ran in a 10K.

October started out with a family trip to Washington for my sister's fabulous wedding. People flew in from all over the US and we had a sweet condo on Lake Chelan for the week. Playing golf, wine tasting and celebrating with good people made for a great start to the fall season.

Kalin and Mya

Abbie and Charles In November, I started writing more, mostly because I was gearing up for upcoming talks and thinking about / working on AppFuse. I celebrated Abbie's Birthday, did some website optimization and chuckled at the comments about my hunting season adventure.

Right before Thanksgiving, I got a call from my client letting me know that their budget had run out my contract would end soon. Luckily, I had an interview setup the next day and had great success in finding a new gig.

I ended November with a trip to Oregon for Thanksgiving and ran in the Oregon Mid-Valley Road Race. The followed week, I flew with my kids and parents to The Rich Web Experience and learned about Objective-J and Cappuccino. I had a near-perfect (high 70s, no lines) Disney World experience with my family, watched the Ducks with the Civil War and compared kick-ass web frameworks.

Kids at Loews Portofino, Universal Studios Florida

In December, I didn't do much blogging - mostly because I arrived home from Florida to discover a waterfall in my guest room. The water pipes were routed through the ceiling, had busted from the cold, and water was pouring everywhere. Dealing with that and starting a new job occupied most of my time and I never got a chance to write much down. I ran in the Jingle Bell 5K and watched the Broncos lose a lot. Shortly after, my family came for Christmas and a good time was had by all.

As I reflect back on last year, my biggest surprise is that I got into running. I ended up running in 5 races last year and even enjoyed doing it a few times. It's still not my favorite activity (skiing and mountain biking win that title), but I enjoy it enough to do it a couple times each week. The goals I wrote down for last year were: visit 3 foreign countries, take 3 months of vacation and spend 1 month in Montana. I only made it to 1 foreign country (Mexico), but I did take 2 months of vacation and got my month in Montana. I'll take that.

In 2010, I hope to speak at (or attend) 3 conferences, finish up The Bus and do a whole bunch of skiing and mountain biking. More than anything, I plan to continue having a lot of fun with my family and implementing a lot of cool technologies along the way.

It's gonna be a great year.

Posted in Roller at Jan 11 2010, 10:06:09 AM MST Add a Comment

Grails OAuth and LinkedIn APIs

Back in November, I wrote about how to talk to LinkedIn APIs with GWT. A week later, I figured out how to do it with Grails and contributed a patch to the grails-oauth plugin.

Since then, a few folks have asked how I did it. Since code speaks louder than words, I took some time and 1) verified the oauth plugin works as expected and 2) created an example application demonstrating functionality. You can find the results in my fork of grails-oauth on GitHub. You can also view the example online.

Below is a quick tutorial explaining how to integrate LinkedIn into your Grails application.

  1. Download and install Grails 1.1.2.
  2. Run grails create-app to create your application.
  3. Add the following to the bottom of grails-app/conf/Config.groovy:
    oauth {
        linkedin {
            requestTokenUrl="https://api.linkedin.com/uas/oauth/requestToken"
            accessTokenUrl="https://api.linkedin.com/uas/oauth/accessToken"
            authUrl="https://api.linkedin.com/uas/oauth/authorize"
            consumer.key="XXX"
            consumer.secret="XXX"
        }
    }
    
    You can get your consumer.key and consumer.secret at https://www.linkedin.com/secure/developer. Make sure to set the OAuth Redirect URL to http://localhost:8080/{your.app.name}/oauth/callback for testing.
  4. Download the oauth-plugin, extract it and build it using grails package-plugin. Install it in your project using grails install-plugin path/to/zip.
  5. Add a link to the GSP you want to invoke LinkedIn Authentication from:
    <g:oauthLink consumer='linkedin' returnTo="[controller:'profile']">
        Login with LinkedIn
    </g:oauthLink>
    
  6. Create grails-app/controllers/ProfileController.groovy to access your LinkedIn Profile.
    class ProfileController {
        def apiUrl = "http://api.linkedin.com/v1/people/~"
        def oauthService
        
        def index = {
     
            if (session.oauthToken == null) {
                redirect(uri:"/")
            }
     
            if (params?.apiUrl) apiUrl = params.apiUrl
            
            def response = oauthService.accessResource(
                    apiUrl, 'linkedin', [key:session.oauthToken.key, secret:session.oauthToken.secret], 'GET')
     
            render(view: 'index', model: [profileXML: response, apiUrl: apiUrl])
        }
     
        def change = {
            if (params?.apiUrl) {
                println("Setting api url to " + params.apiUrl)
                apiUrl = params.apiUrl
            }
            
            redirect(action:index,params:params)
        }
    }
    
  7. Create grails-app/views/profile/index.gsp to display the retrieved profile and allow subsequent API calls.
    <html>
    <head><title>Your Profile</title></head>
    <body>
    <a class="home" href="${createLinkTo(dir:'')}">Home</a>
    <g:hasOauthError>
        <div class="errors">
            <g:renderOauthError/>
        </div>
    </g:hasOauthError>
    
    <g:form url="[action:'change',controller:'profile']" method="get">
        Your LinkedIn Profile:
        <textarea id="payload" style="width: 100%; height: 50%; color: red">${profileXML}</textarea>
        <p>
            <g:textField name="apiUrl" value="${apiUrl}" size="100%"/>
            <br/>
            <g:submitButton name="send" value="Send Request"/>
        </p>
    </g:form>
    </body>
    </html>
    
  8. Start your app using grails run-app and enjoy.

As mentioned earlier, you can download the grails-oauth-example or view it online.

One improvement I'd like to see is to simplify the parsing of XML into a Profile object, much like the linkedin gem does for Rails.

If you're interested in learning more about LinkedIn and OAuth, I encourage you to checkout Taylor Singletary's presentation LinkedIn OAuth: Zero to Hero.

Update: I updated the oauth-plugin so it's backwards-compatible with OAuth 1.0 and added Twitter to the example application to prove it. If you're seeing "Cannot invoke method remove() on null object", it's likely caused by your redirect URL pointing to an application on a different domain.

Posted in Java at Dec 22 2009, 03:37:57 PM MST 7 Comments

Comparing Kick-Ass Web Frameworks at The Rich Web Experience

Yesterday, I delivered my Comparing Kick-Ass Web Frameworks talk at the Rich Web Experience in Orlando, Florida. Below are the slides I used:

Although it's difficult to convey a presentation in a slide deck, I can offer you my conclusion: there is no "best" web framework. I believe web frameworks are like spaghetti sauce in that everyone has different tastes and having so many choices is necessary to satisfy everyone. You can read more about the plural nature of perfection in Malcolm Gladwell's The Ketchup Conundrum (a written version of What we can learn from spaghetti sauce). Even though there is no "best" web framework, I believe GWT, Flex, Rails and Grails are frameworks that every web developer should try. They really do make it fun to develop web applications.

You can find the slides for my other RWE talk at Building SOFEA Applications with GWT and Grails.

Kudos to Jay Zimmerman for putting on a great show in Orlando this year. I had a great time talking with folks and learning in the sessions I attended. I particularly enjoyed bringing my parents and kids and staying at such a nice resort. Disney World (Magic Kingdom) and Universal Studios was very enjoyable due to the short lines. Also, the weather was perfect - especially considering the freezing cold in Denver this week. ;-)

Posted in Java at Dec 04 2009, 08:16:48 AM MST 3 Comments

Building SOFEA Applications with GWT and Grails

Last night, I spoke at the Denver Java User Group meeting. The consulting panel with Matthew, Tim and Jim a lot of fun and I enjoyed delivering my Building SOFEA Applications with GWT and Grails presentation for the first time. The talk was mostly a story about how we enhanced Evite.com with GWT and Grails and what we did to make both frameworks scale. I don't believe the presentation reflects the story format that well, but it's not about the presentation, it's about the delivery of it. ;-)

If you'd like to hear the story about this successful SOFEA implementation at a high-volume site, I'd recommend attending the Rich Web Experience next month. If you attended last night's meeting and have any feedback on how this talk can be improved, I'd love to hear it.

Posted in Java at Nov 12 2009, 09:30:09 AM MST 11 Comments

The Future of Web Frameworks at TSSJS

Caesars Palace For TSSJS Vegas 2010, I submitted two proposals for talks: GWT vs. Flex Smackdown and The Future of Web Frameworks. As of today, the 2nd is the only one that shows up on the conference agenda, but hopefully the former will get accepted too. Here's a description of this talk:

With rich Ajax applications and HTML5 on the horizon, are web frameworks still relevant? Java web frameworks like Struts and Spring MVC were all the rage 5 years ago. Component-based frameworks like Tapestry, JSF and Wicket made it easier to create re-usable applications. But what about the Mobile Web and offline applications?

Are Titanium, Adobe Air and Gears the future? If you're embracing the RESTfulness of the web, do you even need a web framework, or can you use use JAX-RS with an Ajax toolkit?

These questions and many more are examined, answered and debated in this lively session. Bring your opinions and experiences to this session to learn about what's dead, what's rising and what's here to stay. If you're a web framework fan, this session is sure to please.

I believe this talk will be a lot of fun to create and deliver. To create it, I'd like to make it a collaborative effort with the web framework community (users and developers). To kick things off, below is an initial rough outline/agenda:

  • Title
  • Introduction
  • Problem/Purpose
  • Agenda
    • How did we get here?
    • Where are we going?
    • How do we get there?
    • Q and A
  • History of Web Frameworks
    • Deep History (CGI, etc.)
    • Java's Rise
    • PHP
    • Rails -> Grails
    • Ajax Frameworks
    • RESTify!
    • SOFEA, APIs, etc.
  • The Future
    • HTML5
    • GWT, Cappucino and Spoutcore (compare to Java and compilers)
    • The Binary Players (Flex, JavaFX and Silverlight)
    • Getting Rich
    • Speed (is it a problem? YES!)
    • IE 6 will die.
    • Chrome OS
    • The Mobile Web
    • Desktop Webapps (Titanium, AIR, etc.)
    • Or is this the present? Future is bleeding edge.
  • Getting There: It's all about the APIs
    • Allows for any client
    • Web Framework skills transfer to desktop - and phone!
    • Speed will continue to be *very* important
    • Innovation, something we haven't thought of
  • Fallout
    • Interest in server-side frameworks will continue, but frameworks will become unmaintained
    • Ajax Frameworks will continue to innovate
    • HTML5 Frameworks?
    • IE 6 (hopefully!)
    • Desktop and Mobile with Web Technologies
    • Watch out for the next big thing! (or What do you think is the next big thing?)
  • Conclusion
  • Q and A

Is there anything I'm missing that's important for the future of web frameworks? Are there items that should be removed? Any advice is most welcome.

Reminder: I'll be speaking at tomorrow's DJUG if you'd like to discuss your thoughts in person.

Posted in Java at Nov 10 2009, 01:24:39 PM MST 11 Comments

JavaScript and CSS Concatenation with wro4j

This past weekend, I decided it was about time to fix my YSlow score on this site. I did the easiest thing first by moving all my JavaScript files to the bottom of each page. Then I turned on GZip compression using Roller's built-in CompressionFilter. These changes helped, but the most glaring problem continued to be too many requests. To solve this, I turned to wro4j (as recommended on Twitter) to concatenate my JS and CSS files into one.

I have to say, I'm very happy with the results. I'm now sitting at a YSlow (V2) score of 75; 90 if I use the "Small Site or Blog" ruleset. I believe I can improve this by adding expires headers to my images, js and css. More than anything, I'm impressed with wro4j, its great support and easy setup. I was looking for a runtime solution (b/c I didn't want to have to rebuild Roller) and it seems to be perfect for the job. Furthermore, wro4j minifies everything on the fly and they'll have an expires header filter in the next release.

JAWR and the YUI Compressor are other alternatives to this filter, but I'm currently sold on wro4j. First of all, it passed the 10-minute test. Secondly, it didn't require me to modify Roller's build system.

At this point, if I'm going to implement JS/CSS concatenation and minification in AppFuse and Roller, wro4j seems like the best option. If you disagree, I'd love to hear your reasoning.

TIP: See Javascript Compression in Nexus for information on using YUI Compressor with Maven.

Posted in Roller at Nov 09 2009, 10:44:44 AM MST 16 Comments

Consulting, SOFEA, Grails and GWT at next week's Denver JUG

Next Wednesday, I'll be at Denver's JUG meeting to talk about Independent Consulting and Building SOFEA Applications with Grails and GWT. The first talk will be a a panel discussion among local independent consultants, including James Goodwill, Matthew McCullough, Tim Berglund and myself.

This session explores the trials and tribulations of an independent consultant. How do you find contracts? Should you setup an LLC, an S-Corp or just be a sole proprietorship? What about health insurance and benefits? Are recruiters helpful or hurtful? Learn lots of tips and tricks to get your dream job and your ideal lifestyle.

The Grails and GWT talk is a preview of a talk I'll be doing at the Rich Web Experience in December. Below is a rewrite of the abstract in first-person.

Earlier this year, I participated in a major enhancement of a high-traffic well-known internet site. The company wanted us to quickly re-architect their site and use a modern Ajax framework to do it with. An Ajax Framework evaluation was done to help the team choose the best framework for their skillset. The application was built with a SOFEA architecture using GWT on the frontend and Grails/REST on the backend.

This talk will cover how Bryan Noll, Scott Nicholls, James Goodwill and I came to choose GWT and Grails, as well as stumbling blocks we encountered along the way. In addition, we'll explore many topics such as raw GWT vs. GXT/SmartGWT, the Maven GWT Plugin, modularizing your code, multiple EntryPoints, MVP, integration testing and JSON parsing with Overlay Types.

If you're in Denver next Wednesday night (November 11th), you should stop by the Denver JUG meeting. It'll be a fun night and there's sure to be a few beers afterward. ;-)

Posted in Java at Nov 05 2009, 10:52:37 PM MST 5 Comments

A Letter to the AppFuse Community

The last AppFuse release was way back in May 2008. Many folks have asked when the next release would be ever since. Often, I've said "sometimes this quarter", but obviously, that's never happened. For that, I apologize.

There are many reasons I haven't worked on AppFuse for the past 18 months, but it mostly comes down to the fact that I didn't make time for it. The good news is I'm working on it again and will have a release out sometime this month. Unfortunately, it probably won't be a 2.1 final release, but there's so many things that've changed, I feel like a milestone release is a good idea. Here's a brief summary of changes so far:

  • Changed archetypes to include all source and tests for the "webapp" portion of the application. No more warpath plugin, merging wars and IDE issues. Using "mvn jetty:run" should work as expected.
  • Moved from Spring XML to Annotations.
  • AppFuse Light converted to Maven modules and now depends on AppFuse's backend.
  • Published easier to use archetype selection form in the QuickStart Guide.
  • Published archetype selection form for AppFuse Light. I do plan on combining these forms as soon as I figure out the best UI and instructions for users to choose AppFuse or AppFuse Light.
  • Upgraded all libraries to latest released versions (Spring 3 hasn't had a final release yet).
  • Upgraded to Tapestry 5 thanks to Serge Eby. I still need to complete tests and code generation for tests.
  • Added Compass support thanks to a patch from Shay Banon.
  • Upgraded from XFire to CXF for Web Services.
  • Moved Maven repository to Sonatype's OSS Repository Hosting for snapshots and releasing to Maven Central. There are no longer any AppFuse-specific artifacts, all are available in central.

I realize there's many full-stack frameworks that do the same thing as AppFuse with less code. Examples include Ruby on Rails, Grails, Seam, Spring Roo and the Play framework. However, there seems to be quite a few folks that continue to use AppFuse and it stills serves the community as a nice example of how to integrate frameworks. Furthermore, it helps me keep up with the latest framework releases, their quirks and issues that happen when you try to integrate them. In short, working on it helps me stay up to speed with Java open source frameworks.

For those folks that like the 1.x, Ant-based version of AppFuse, there will not be a 1.9.5 release. I know I promised it for years, but it's simply something I will not use, so I'd rather not invest my time in it. I'm sorry for lying to those that expected it.

So what's the future of AppFuse? Will it continue to integrate web frameworks with Spring and popular persistence frameworks? Possibly, but it seems more logical to align it with the types of Ajax + REST applications I'm creating these days. I'm currently thinking AppFuse 3.0 would be nice as a RESTful backend with GWT and Flex UIs. I might create the backend with CXF, but it's possible I'd use one of the frameworks mentioned above and simply leverage it to create the default features AppFuse users have come to expect.

More than anything, I'm writing this letter to let you know that the AppFuse project is not dead and you can expect a release in the near future.

Thanks for your support,

Matt

Posted in Java at Nov 04 2009, 12:17:17 AM MST 44 Comments