Raible Designs

[TSE] Spring-OSGI with Adrian Colyer

One of the first questions people ask about OSGi is "what the heck is it?"

Most people don't even know what it is. OSGi stands for Open Services Gateway initiative. From the very beginning, it was designed to be lightweight and dynamic. This is the major difference between it and other containers. It's always been designed to have things added and removed. Now it's tagline is: "The Dynamic Module System for Java".

It's designed to allow you to partition a system into a number of modules (a.k.a. bundles). There's strict visibility rules (similar to protected and private). There's a resolution process (dependencies are satisfied) and it understands versioning.

It's dynamic! Modules can be installed, started, stopped, uninstalled and updated - all at runtime.[Read More]

Selenium Plugin for Maven

On the Maven users mailing list, Mick Knutson recently posted a question asking if there's a Maven 2 plugin for Selenium. Since we're hoping to move from Canoo WebTest to Selenium for AppFuse, this piqued my interest. It looks like the Geronimo guys have created a plugin and they run their Selenium tests from TestNG. While another user agrees, Wendy Smoak recommends following what Shale does.

While these solutions sound doable, David Santiago Turiño seems to suggest the best solution: Mavenium. The main limitation of Mavenium seems to be it only supports HTML-based tests. Since I expect most AppFuse users to generate their tests using the Selenium IDE, I doubt this will be an issue.

Is anyone using this plugin? If so, do you think it's the best way to integrate Selenium into AppFuse? We'd like to implement the most popular and easiest to use mechanism.

[TSE] Designing Stateful Web Application Control Flow with Erwin Vervaet

Spring Web Flow (SWF) does not fit into an application or a feature where free-flow navigation is required. It works best where you need to lock down and control navigation. SWF is not designed to be a web framework, but rather to solve the specific problem of navigation and state management between many pages.

Erwin is a Senior consultant at Ervacon and has extensive experience using Java SE and Java EE. He is the inventor and co-lead of the Spring Web Flow project.[Read More]

[TSE] Using Dynamic Languages with Spring with Rod Johnson and Guillaume LaForge

Spring 2.0 has dynamic language support. To make it work, you do need a Java interface as a contract between callers and dynamic beans. There's no special requirements on the interface. It's a "POJI" and doesn't have to extend or implement anything. For example:

There's 3 ways of configuring Groovy beans:

1. GroovyScriptFactory <bean> element defining source location and properties
2. <lang:groovy> element from a <lang> namespace
3. POBD (Plain old <bean> definition) - this is unique for Groovy since it can be compiled into Java bytecode

[Read More]

[TSE] Rapid Web Application Development with Rob Harrop

There's a couple of other sessions I should probably go to, namely Juergen's talk on Transactions and Mark Fisher's Message Driven POJOs Rock! However, transactions is generally a pretty boring topic and I don't see myself developing any MDPs in the next two weeks. If you don't use your knowledge in two weeks, you generally lose it, so I'll wait to learn more about MDPs until someone pays me to. I know a fair bit already, so I don't know that there's a whole lot more to learn.

I'm attending Rob Harrop's Rapid Web Application Development Essentials talk. With any luck, I'll learn some new tips that we can use in AppFuse.[Read More]

Florida Bound

I'm getting ready to hop on a plane at the Boise airport. I'll be stopping in Denver to pick up our puppy and then flying to Ft. Lauderdale to attend The Spring Experience conference. Should be a fun weekend. I'll be staying on Singer Island, which sounds pretty nice after being in cold Idaho all week.

Update: It doesn't look like I'm going to make Rod's Keynote tonight. Hopefully someone else will blog it.

Facelets 1.1.12 Released

From Jacob's blog:

Facelets 1.1.12 was just uploaded to Java.net and includes many small bug fixes for JSF 1.1 (MyFaces 1.1.4) and JSF 1.2 (RI 1.2_03b5).

Download Here

This release is considered 'draft' until users call it stable for production use. More information is found over at Facelets' web site.

In most cases, when an open source project says "more information can be found on our website", you expect to go to the website and see more information. Not so with Facelets. All I could find was this announcement. How about a detailed list of bug fixes?

Update: I found the magic link on the mailing list which I subscribe to with Nabble's RSS Feed.

Timelines in OmniGraffle

Earlier this week, I needed to create timeline graphics for my What's new in AppFuse 2.0 presentation. I found a Timeline script for OmniGraffle and was able to create some pretty nifty images with it. Below are the two timelines I created, one for the History of AppFuse and one for The Future.

I'll be delivering this presentation at our seminar later this afternoon. With free knowledge and a complementary happy hour afterwards, why would you miss it?

It looks like Denver weather will make it interesting for attendees to get downtown. Hopefully most folks will take the light rail in. That's my plan.

Free Seminar: Lightweight Java for 2007

If you happen to live near Denver, you won't want to miss our Lightweight Java For 2007 Seminar this week. It starts this Wednesday at 1:00 PM. We'll be doing talks on JPA, Spring 2.0, JSF + Ajax and AppFuse 2.0. The seminar is free and should be a good opportunity to learn about what's hot in Java these days.

All attendees will receive a complementary copy of a book on Java Technologies, seminar materials, and will be entered into a raffle for an iPod and other great prizes! Directly following the event, join the Virtuas gang for complimentary drinks and hors d'oeuvres at Rock Bottom Brewery from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM.

Raible Road Trip #11

Sometime before midnight tonight, we'll be departing on Raible Road Trip #11. This time we're going to The Cabin for Thanksgiving. Of course, we'd prefer to fly, but neither ticket prices nor arrival times are cooperating, so we're doing the road trip.

It's a 15 hour drive, which is pretty brutal for the kids. In an attempt to alleviate their pain, and get there in one fell swoop, we're going to try something new. We're going to leave at night (as soon as Julie's done with her Barenaked Ladies concert) and drive straight through. I'm in the midst of conditioning myself for the drive. What does that mean? It means I slept in yesterday, took a nap in the afternoon, and then stayed up all night. The good news is I got quite a bit of work done. The bad news is I didn't get nearly as much done as I'd hoped.

As I write this, it's almost fully light out. I should probably hit the sack and get plenty of rest for tonight. The Cabin doesn't have internet access nor cell phone service, so I'll be completely out of touch for a week. Should be nice.