Raible Designs

How can Nabble be improved?

I recently received the following e-mail from the founders of Nabble:

You are the first person (literally) to recognize the value of Nabble. So far, Nabble has been well received. But it needs more users. There are a lot of open source projects archived on Nabble, but how do we go about letting people know about us? We would like project owners to link to us and skin us like you did with appfuse, but I am not sure how to do it. You know many people in the open source world, so we would really like to hear your thoughts and advice.

For example, should I go and announce Nabble on a project list? If so, should I do it on the dev list or user list? Is this considered OK or spam? Or should I contact the mailing list owner by private email? What nabble feature do you consider most useful to the project owners?

My response to the first paragraph:

I would suggest e-mailing project owners and pointing out projects like AppFuse and Maven that've taken the time to "skin" their forums. I'm guessing you could get some real good traction at Apache because they like to keep everything on mailing lists. People like your forums because they can post (and subscribe to) a single message. AFAIK, you can't do this with any other mailing list archive. Maybe you could write an article for TSS or InfoQ that tells all the features and highlights projects that are using it.

As far as announcing Nabble on a project list, I said:

I would do it on the dev list, but sending private e-mail is probably OK as well. I don't think it will be perceived as spam. Sending it to the dev list might skip a step for the project founder. You could also offer to "skin" forums for folks - so it looks like their project sites. I think the most useful feature for end-users is search and easy browsing. It's *much* better than the archiving/browsing tool that Apache uses.

One thing that might attract for folks is vanity URLs. I don't know if it's possible, but something as simple as appfuse.nabble.com might be attractive to some people, or having some sort of path-based URL, for example archive.nabble.com/java/java.net/appfuse. That way it'd be easier for folks to "guess" the URLs of mailing list archives.

What's your advice? What should Nabble do to get more users? Maybe if folks new about Nabble's RSS feeds, they'd use it more. I'm currently subscribed to Maven, Wicket, Shale and Stripes, just to name a few.

AppFuse at the Denver JBoss User Group

Last night, I presented "Seven Simple Reasons to use AppFuse" at the Denver JBoss User Group. I was definitely surprised to present this talk to a packed room of developers. One person joked afterwards that there might've been a lot of Microsoft folks there, all fearing that Vista was going to doom their future. It was at a Microsoft building, so I guess it's possible. This presentation is similar to my developerWorks article with the same title.

Download Seven Simple Reasons to use AppFuse (PDF, 6.3 MB)

If you're interested in learning more about Lightweight Java technologies, Virtuas is hosting a free seminar later this month. After the seminar, we'll be sponsoring a happy hour at the Rock Bottom Brewery.

Boys Weekend

Julie and Abbie left on a jet plane this morning to spend the weekend in South Carolina. Abbie's best friend, Annabelle, moved there in May of this year. Julie thought it'd be fun to get them together again, as well as attend a Doodlebops concert. So the girls are off, and it's me and the boy for the weekend. We plan on having a great time.

First off, the new Light Rail opens today and Jack loves trains. So we're going to hit the grand opening in about an hour, and then he's going to join me in "going to work". I don't know how long he'll last in the office, but I'm sure he'll have fun regardless. Tomorrow, there's a DU hockey game, as well as free passes on the Light Rail all day. Should be a fun weekend, especially with all of the good football on tap. Now it's time to head out for some pancakes and eggs, I'm not much of a cook when Mommy's out of town.

Is XMLC a dead project? Is anyone using it?

From an e-mail I received a while back:

I'm interested in hearing your opinion of XMLC? And when will we see it in AppFuse? ;-) Seems to me that with it's base in xml and all the ajax and SOA hubub that it could be primed for a resurgence. And what about BarracudaMVC as an AppFuse option?

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Learn about Geronimo tonight and AppFuse on Thursday

If you happen to be in downtown Denver tonight, and you're interested in Geronimo, you may want to stop by the Rock Bottom Brewery for the Geronimo Special Interest Group. IBM is sponsoring the food and beverages and Bill Dudney will be providing the conversation. I highly recommend attending if you can as there will be a plethora of good beverages for all. I won't be missing it.

Also, for those interested in learning more about AppFuse, I'll be speaking at the Denver JBoss User Group on Thursday night. There's a lot of cool stuff happening in AppFuse's SVN right now. This is, in large part, caused by a number of new committers: Mike Horwitz, Bryan Noll and David Whitehurst.

Mike has done a lot of work to allow Maven to recognize a WAR's dependencies. Furthermore, he's in the process of trying to get this functionality added to the maven-war-plugin. Bryan Noll (a.k.a. "Country Bri") has recently converted the data module to have a Generics-based generic DAO implementation for Hibernate and iBATIS. Bryan has recently become an OpenJPA committer as well - so feel free to start harassing him about doing the JPA implementation for AppFuse. Finally, David has been working feverishly on the AppFuse Maven Plugin that replaces AppGen. Welcome aboard gents and thanks for all your contributions so far!

ICEfaces gets open sourced

As far as JSF Ajax frameworks are concerned, there seems to be two major players: Ajax4jsf and ICEfaces. I don't know that either one is a true open source project (where developers are from multiple companies), but Spring isn't either, so I don't know that it actually matters. I think it interesting that both products don't seem to care about capitalization, but I digress.

Today, ICEsoft announced they've open-sourced ICEfaces. Was this inspired by Java going GPL?¹ I doubt it, these things take time and it's likely that ICEsoft had this one in the cooker for quite a while. I do think it's interesting that the major JSF component vendors (Oracle, Exadel and now ICEsoft) have all open-sourced their products. Must be a tough market out there.

Apparently, ICEfaces works with Facelets, so it should work with AppFuse and Equinox. Looking through ICEfaces documentation and sample apps, they seem to be missing a straight-forward "here's how to integrate it into your existing application" guide. They do show how to modify your web.xml, but there doesn't seem to be a short, concise guide to what configuration settings you need to add to your faces-config.xml. I was somewhat motivated to write such a guide this morning, but lost motivation quickly as I realized it might be quite the effort. If someone wants to create the Maven bundles for ICEfaces, I'll try to carve out some time later this week to write up instructions for integrating ICEfaces into Equinox and AppFuse.

Unfortunately, integrating ICEfaces into your project is only the beginning. The hard part is choosing which is a better Ajax toolkit: ADF Faces/Trinidad, Ajax4jsf or ICEfaces? Trinidad and ICEfaces seem to be more about components, whereas Ajax4jsf is more about Ajaxifying regular ol' JSF components. So I think Ajax4jsf still remains, and ICEfaces looks like a better out-of-the-box component library than Trinidad. I guess time will tell.

Update: I forgot to mention Infragistics NetAdvantage as a JSF Ajax framework. OpenLogic decided to use Infragistics in the project I started for them. I was able to get it working in AppFuse fairly easily, but it's kinda ugly from a setup standpoint. They require you to copy a bunch of static files (images, stylesheets and scripts) into your project. Yech.

[1] Stephen O'Grady has an excellent writeup on this: And Sun Said, Set My Java Free: The Open Source Q&A.

DJUG Tonight: Google Maps and Struts 2

If you're in the Denver area, tonight's DJUG should be a good one. Scott Davis is presenting on how to Roll your own Google Maps and I'm talking about Migrating from Struts 1 to Struts 2. I've seen Scott's presentation and it's very good. He explains the basics of CSS and JavaScript so even if you're new to web stuff, you won't be lost.

The nice thing about being the main speaker is I can almost guarantee that the talk will finish on time, pending questions and answers of course. With any luck, we'll be at the Rock Bottom by 8:30. Here's the current agenda:

5:30-6 p.m. Food and Networking
6-7 p.m. Basic Concepts
7-7:15 p.m. Break and Announcements
7:15-8:15 p.m. Main Meeting
8:15-8:30 p.m. Questions and Answers
8:30 p.m. Door Prizes

Update: Download Migrating from Struts 1 to Struts 2 (PDF, 4.7 MB).

Voting Sucks

This morning, I stopped by my local voting center to vote. When I got there, the line seemed awful long (maybe a 30 minute wait), so I left. My goal was to come back around 2:30 in the afternoon, when the line would (hopefully) be a lot shorter. Of course, I got caught up with work and didn't make it back until 5:00.

It figures, now I'm standing in an enormously long line (est. 2-3 hour wait). Oh well, it's a nice night - currently 68°F. I can't help but think that there's quite a few folks who won't vote because the lines are so long. I know I'm awful tempted to abandon ship. ;-)

Update: My total time standing in line turned out to be 2:45. Apparently, the long waits were due to overwhelmed computer systems. Here's a great quote:

The system became so bogged down by 1 p.m. that election officials were forced to shut down the computers and reboot them, Dillard said.

Sounds like they were running Windows, doesn't it? The one cool part of the night was Mayor Hickenlooper came by to thank all the everyone for their patience.

Chelan Hard Cider

My sister, Kalin, flew in last night for Abbie's birthday. With her, she brought a case of her hard cider from Chelan Cider Company. It's was pretty impressive watching her pull all of it out of her luggage. It should be a good weekend for sure.

Kalin's blog can be found at blog.chelancider.com.

Continuum, Luntbuild, Pulse and NetBeans

Last night, I did a bit of playing with technologies new to me. First of all, I got AppFuse 2.0 running on Continuum. This was was easy enough, I just had to add <scm> information to each pom.xml. Thanks to those who recommended this approach. I thought it was a silly solution until I realized "mvn site" produced the wrong information when <scm> wasn't present for sub-modules.

Since I was playing with Continuous Integration tools, I decided to give Cerberus, LuntBuild, and Pulse a spin. My goal was to give each server the old "college try" and see if I could get them running with minimal effort. I don't know where I heard about Pulse, but it was somehow included in my tests.

Cerberus didn't work with my Cygwin/Ruby setup, so I was done with it quickly. LuntBuild worked pretty well, but the interface and configuration seemed kinda clunky. I also found it strange that it uses a 4.x version of Jetty - seems kinda old. I was surprised to see that it uses Tapestry for its web framework. Pulse was the nicest one with a kick-ass (ajaxified) user inferface, powered by Acegi, WebWork and Hibernate (according to its JARs). It was definitely the easiest to setup and use. While Pulse isn't free for commercial use, it is free for open source projects, as well as small teams.

Summary: Continuum, LuntBuild and Pulse seem to be the best tools for building Maven 2 projects. While CruiseControl works, and works well, it does require you to customize XML from the command line, whereas these tools allow you to do everything through a web interface.

Toward the end of the night, I downloaded NetBeans 5.5 and installed its Maven 2 Plugin. I was surprised at how full-featured this plugin is. I was able to build, test and run the AppFuse web modules in the embedded Tomcat without issues. It's definitely a cool plugin. As for NetBeans, it seemed pretty sluggish and I couldn't figure out how to get Ctrl+Shift+R functionality, which is a must for me these days. Also, I couldn't get the JSF support working for the AppFuse JSF Module, seemingly caused by the Maven plugin (project properties only has Maven options). Since NetBeans works so well with Maven 2, and it's much more full-featured than Eclipse, it seems natural to recommend it to AppFuse 2 users. Of course, I like IDEA a lot more, but there's no Maven 2 plugin that I know of.