Raible Designs

Spring Training in Norway

A week from today, I'm heading to Norway to do some training on Spring. It's going to be a good trip and I have my work cut out for me. I'll be talking about Spring, Hibernate, AppFuse, Acegi Security as well as Ajax and Spring Web Flow. I'll also be presenting at the two JUGs in Norway:

• Stavanger JUG, May 25th: Test-Driven Developing with Spring and Hibernate. I also plan on talking about Spring Web Flow for a good portion of this meeting.
• Oslo JUG, May 26th: Advanced Spring MVC, Spring Web Flow and Acegi Security.

I'll try to post outlines for my presentations in the next week or so.

Tutorial: Date Handling with AppFuse and Struts

An AppFuse user known as "thogau" has taken the time to create a very nice looking tutorial titled Handling dates with AppFuse and Struts. Great stuff thogau!

Short Week

There's nothing like trying to get a bunch of hours in on a short week. I thought I would be able to get in a full week, by working 13-hour days. We leave on Thursday for West Palm Beach (Julie's birthday present) - so I'm trying to avoid the opportunity cost of missing 2 days this week. I managed to get in 13 yesterday by riding to work at 4:30 and starting the day early. Today, my luck hasn't been so good. It's 1:20 p.m. and I still haven't made it into the office. Julie had Jury Duty this morning and she's still downtown getting interviewed. Oh well, the kids and I had fun this morning: a stroller ride to the bagel store, riding the swings at Wash Park and a picnic in the park for lunch. Now they're both sleeping and as frustrated as I am that I'm not getting my hours in - I realize that this is probably as good as a day gets. I might as well have a beer during their naps!

[Colorado Software Summit] Spring and Comparing Web Frameworks

I'm pleased to announce that I'll be speaking at the Colorado Software Summit in October. I'll be doing a presentation on Spring and one on Comparing Web Frameworks. The abstracts are on my very own speaker page. I've never been to this conference, so I'm definitely looking forward to it - especially since it's only an hour away from my house. The only downside to the conference (for speakers) is you have to deliver each presentation 3 times. Of course, this is great if you're an attendee. Now I just need to figure out a way to get SourceBeat to sponsor my condo for the week.

I originally did my Web Frameworks Comparison (PDF) last year at ApacheCon. I'm looking to revamp it this year - so please let me know if have any suggestions for improvements.

[OSCON] AppFuse Tutorial and Spring MVC vs. WebWork

Now that the OSCON 2005 site is up, I might as well advertise the two things I'm doing: an AppFuse Tutorial and a session titled WebWork vs. Spring MVC Smackdown with Matthew Porter. I wasn't planning on doing the AppFuse Tutorial, but I was asked to do it - so what the heck. The title has "Struts" in it, but I'm willing to do whichever one (JSF, Struts, Spring MVC, Tapestry or WebWork) the audience chooses. If we're good, maybe we'll have an Eclipse Plugin done by this conference to simplify the new project and code generation process.

The Sleep Factor

I get a fair amount of e-mail from folks asking me how I manage all my extra-curricular activities (i.e. AppFuse, Spring Live, etc.). They're usually looking for a better way to manage their own time, and hoping I have some tips. My answer is usually the same - "I don't sleep much". When I'm super productive , I get about 4 hours of sleep a night, and I can pull that off for around 3 days in a row before I have to crash for 8 hours or more.

It's a brutal way to get things done, but it works quite well. Last night, I took the sleep factor to a whole new level. I didn't sleep at all and I'm back in the office ready for a day of demos and cranking out code. I expect to start hallucinating sometime this afternoon.

AppFuse Videos

I know I said I'd never do an AppFuse video, but after having many requests - I decided to go ahead and make a couple. The first one is a demo of creating a new project and then installing and browsing that project in your browser - to see all the out-of-the-box features.

• http://demo.appfuse.org/setup.html

The 2nd one basically all the stuff that's done in the tutorials - using Spring MVC for the web framework. I create a Person.java object and then use AppGen to generate all the code for it. In this one, I make a number of mistakes (but solve them all). I thought about going fully happy-path, but then decided it was important to show some gotchas that might occur.

• http://demo.appfuse.org/appgen.html

I used the trial version of Camtasia Studio to create these videos. Thanks to Keith at KGB Internet for hosting the demo site for AppFuse. If you need Tomcat hosting, Keith offers an excellent service at a very good price.

Update: You can also download these videos for off-line use.

Update 2: I updated these videos for AppFuse 1.9.3.

Keeping development and production databases in synch

We're getting ready to put the app I developed into production and we're facing an interesting issue. This app is designed to be a simple interface for mapping an "attribute value" from one system to another system. Currently, we do this with SQL in our dev database, and then copy these tables' data to production when we deploy.

However, with this application, we now have the ability to push out the "mapping responsibility" to our users. The problem is that if our users enter the data in production, we have to figure out a way to synch between dev and prod. We constantly need to enter our own mappings in while we're developing - so there's always going to be data entered in both dev and prod databases.

Is it possible to share the same sequence tables b/w Oracle instances and use triggers to do a second insert into dev when someone does something in prod (or vise versa)? I suppose a manual solution is possible - where we make sure and enter values into prod when we enter them into dev, but that's just ugly.

Update: TheServerSide has additional coverage of this topic.

AppFuse Demos moved to demo.appfuse.org

I bought the appfuse.org domain name sometime last year. I haven't done anything with it for the most part and I've just pointed it to this site. It's amazing how many people actually use it - it's my 4th largest referrer! The demo site I have at Kattare (demo.raibledesigns.com) has a whole slew of demos installed on it, so I contacted Keith (at kgbinternet.com) to set me up a new domain for AppFuse-only demos. These can now be found at http://demo.appfuse.org or by clicking on of the URLs below. The site is currently running AppFuse 1.8 with JDK 5 and Tomcat 5.5.7.

• Struts + Spring + Hibernate
• Spring + iBATIS
• WebWork + Spring + Hibernate
• JSF + Spring + Hibernate
• Tapestry + Spring + Hibernate

The "Issues" link on this site won't work yet - I'm in the process of setting up JIRA at http://issues.appfuse.org. Hopefully we'll have it done sometime this week. Contegix has been gracious enough to offer free hosting of AppFuse's JIRA instance.

Update: AppFuse's JIRA is now up. Thanks again to Atlassian for a great product and to Contegix for hosting it. The quick installation and support from Contegix has been outstanding.

[ANN] AppFuse 1.8 Released!

This release of AppFuse replaces Container Managed Authentication (CMA) with Acegi Security. Other major features include numerous bug fixes to AppGen and a refactoring of build.xml to use Ant 1.6 features. Eclipse and IDEA project files were also improved so you can easily run tests from within your IDE. A MyJavaPack all-in-one installer was also added so you can download everything you need for AppFuse at once. Eclipse and its plugins were not included in the initial release, but may be in a future release.

• Download
• Release Notes
• Learn more about AppFuse

If you find any issues, let us know.

Update: You can now see Demos and Videos.