Raible Designs

greendimes - powered by AppFuse

greendimes is a company that helps you to stop receiving junk mail. From their web site:

There are dozens of companies that sell your name to make a buck (actually, lots of bucks). We'll make sure you're taken off their mailing lists. How?

Well, we'll call, email and write these companies to make sure they leave you alone! This isn't easy. These companies change their policies and their contact info often. And even if you do go through the effort of validating every company's policies and contact info and write to each one, you could still get junk mail from them. Why?

Because when you move, donate money to charity, buy something from a catalog or do one of a hundred other seemingly innocent things, your name gets sold! That's why we're a recurring service -- we're going to contact these companies on your behalf a LOT, just to make sure you're kept off of these lists and people stop selling your name and address.

We keep you off.
Just because you're off doesn't mean you stay off. Just about anything you do -- refinance, move, get a new credit card, etc. -- puts you back on. So, we will regularly request your information be removed from existing lists and we add new junk mailers to our list regularly.

Sounds like a pretty cool service to me.

How do I know it's powered by AppFuse? Because they're still using the AppFuse favicon, and because I recently saw they're hiring a Senior Software Engineer with AppFuse experience listed as a bonus.

[CSS 2006] Mike Milinkovich's Keynote

I'm sitting in Mike Milinkovich's Keynote at the Colorado Software Summit in Keystone, Colorado. Mike is the Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation - his picture can be seen on his IT Conversations page. Mike had fun getting up here - driving through the snow - and waiting on the freeway for a couple hours while the "rock slide" was cleared.

Mike's presentation is titled "All About Platforms, Lessons learned from Eclipse". Mike used to work for Oracle, and he's been at the Eclipse Foundation for 2 years. Before that, he was at WebGain. The company that "would not believe that Visual Cafe sucked". He's been in the Tools Business for a long time, and has never bothered to learn Java. He used to do a lot in SmallTalk and that's they last time he programmed. The "repository thingy" in Visual Age for Java was his fault.[Read More]

[CSS 2006] To ESB or not to ESB?

Do you have to have an ESB to have a SOA?

I'm sitting in Denise Hatzidakis's talk titled "To ESB or not to ESB" as requested by Mick Huisking. Dinese is the Chief Technologist at Perficient, Inc.. It's interesting, on her opening slide she has a @perficient.com e-mail address, as well as an @us.ibm.com address.

"SOA stands for Same Old Architecture"

This talk focuses on using an ESB and how to build it. There's a lot of ESB products out there. An ESB is not about a product - it's about what kind of connectivity you need between your systems.[Read More]

AppFuse 1.9.4 Released

This release's major new features are upgrading to Spring 2.0, Hibernate 3.2, and Facelets + Ajax4JSF integration for the JSF option. In addition, many libraries have been fixed and a few bugs have been squashed.

To install and configure AppFuse for development, see the QuickStart Guide. Thanks to all the sponsors who have contributed products and free hosting to the AppFuse project.

• Download
• Release Notes
• 7 Simple Reasons to use AppFuse

To see how AppFuse works, please see the following demos (username: mraible, password: tomcat):

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

Comments and issues can be sent to the mailing list or posted to JIRA.

Note: If you're building AppFuse on Linux, you should be aware of some non-English encoding issues. The solution is to add something like the following to your ~/.bashrc file.

export LC_CENGINE=en_US
export LANG=en_US
export LANGUAGE=en_US

Equinox (a.k.a. AppFuse Light) 1.7 Released!

This release's major new features are upgrading to Spring 2.0, Hibernate 3.2, an Ajax + Spring MVC version, an Acegi Security + Spring MVC version and Struts 2.0 as an optional web framework. It's highly likely that the "extras/security" package can be installed with other web frameworks, but it's only been tested with Spring MVC. Furthermore, this release provided all of the different combinations that Equinox provides - all 50 of them!

All of the frameworks used in Equinox, as well as most of its build/test system is explained in Spring Live. A summary of the changes are below (detailed release notes can be found in JIRA):

• Added extras/spring-ajax with examples of ajaxified displaytag (with AjaxAnywhere), in-place editing (Script.aculo.us), in-page updates (DWR) and lightbox (Lightbox gone Wild) popups.
• Added extras/security with Acegi Security integration for authentication and authorization.
• Automated creation and testing of all possible combinations for distribution.
• Converted from JSP to Facelets for JSF/MyFaces option.
• Integrated Ajax4JSF into JSF/MyFaces option.
• Added Struts 2.0.1 as web framework.
• Upgraded to Spring 2.0, including improved XML syntax and JSP Form Tags
• Added Cargo settings to pom.xml so it's possible to run web tests from Maven.
• Changed dataSource bean to use a connection pool.
• Added popup calendar (using jscalendar) to Spring MVC and Struts 2.
• Added OpenSessionInViewFilter for Hibernate and OpenPersistenceManagerInViewFilter for JDO/JPOX.
• Fixed foreign-language encoding issues with Spring's CharacterEncodingFilter.
• Changed from DAO to Dao to be more consistent with other projects.
• Dependent packages upgraded:
  • Canoo WebTest 1393
  • Cargo 0.8
  • Commons Validator 1.3.0
  • DWR 1.1.1
  • FreeMarker 2.3.8
  • jMock 1.1.0
  • JPOX 1.1.1
  • Hibernate 3.2
  • MyFaces 1.1.4
  • Spring 2.0
  • Spring Modules Validation 0.5
  • Struts 1.2.9
  • Tapestry 4.0.2
  • WebWork 2.2.4
• Dependent packages added:
  • Acegi Security 1.0.2
  • Ajax4JSF 1.0.2
  • AjaxAnywhere 1.2-rc2
  • Facelets 1.1.11
  • Struts 2.0.1

Download. For more information about installing the various options, see the README.txt file.

Demos:

• Spring · Spring + Ajax · Spring + Acegi
• JSF + Facelets
• Struts 1 · Struts 2
• Tapestry
• WebWork

Thanks to all the users of Equinox for making this a great release!

P.S. I'm fully aware that this project's name conflicts with an Eclipse project.

Abbie and Jack - October 2006

Abbie and Jack had their picture taken at school this week. The picture turned out so cute, I couldn't help but post it. It's hard to believe that Abbie was born 4 years ago and Jack is just over two. They sure grow up fast!

Integrating Facelets and Ajax4JSF with MyFaces

I spent a few hours tonight integrating Facelets into an AppFuse-based application. The integrating was fairly easy thanks to the work Thomas Gaudin did back in January. For the most part, it was just a matter of 1) replacing <fmt:message> tags with #{text['key']} tags, 2) replacing the <%@ include file="/common/taglibs.jsp"%> at the top of each page with Facelet's namespace tags and 3) renaming the pages from *.jsp to *.xhtml. The only thing that tripped me up was I thought the "c" namespace was the same as JTLS's URI, but it's actually a whole new URI. Thanks to the Facelets developers for a much-needed fix for JSF.

After I got Facelets integrated and working, I dove into integrating Ajax4JSF. Two hours later and I have the simple repeater demo working. What took so long? I spent an hour staring at (and googling for) the solution to the following error:

PhaseListenerManager.informPhaseListenersBefore(74) | Exception in PhaseListener RENDER_RESPONSE(6) beforePhase.
java.lang.NullPointerException
        at com.sun.facelets.FaceletViewHandler.writeState(FaceletViewHandler.java:759)
        at org.ajax4jsf.framework.renderer.AjaxRendererUtils.writeState(AjaxRendererUtils.java:850)
        at org.ajax4jsf.framework.renderer.AjaxRendererUtils.encodeAreas(AjaxRendererUtils.java:740)
        at org.ajax4jsf.framework.renderer.AjaxContainerRenderer.encodeAjax(AjaxContainerRenderer.java:128)
        at org.ajax4jsf.ajax.UIAjaxRegion.encodeAjax(UIAjaxRegion.java:210)

The solution turned out to be removing the FaceletsViewHandler from faces-config.xml:

<view-handler>com.sun.facelets.FaceletViewHandler</view-handler>

Also, it seems the following is required in web.xml:

    <context-param>
        <param-name>org.ajax4jsf.VIEW_HANDLERS</param-name>
        <param-value>com.sun.facelets.FaceletViewHandler</param-value>
    </context-param>

Hopefully this helps others googling for the exception above.

RE: Experience First-Hand the Most Productive Way to Develop Enterprise JSF Applications

In Experience First-Hand the Most Productive Way to Develop Enterprise JSF Applications, Steve Muench writes:

If you are a developer responsible for creating enterprise J2EE web applications that work with database data, this new step-by-step tutorial should be eye-opening for you.

The tutorial does indeed look nice, but at 69 (printed) pages, is it really a tutorial? Seems more like a book to me.

Equinox 1.7 will include all framework combinations

Whenever I've done an Equinox release in the past, I've just uploaded the main zip file to java.net. This made it difficult for end-users because they were forced to install any optional frameworks themselves. While I've usually been successfull doing this, many users have had issues. Therefore, Equinox 1.7 will include *all* combinations as part of the release. See the Equinox Roadmap to see what still needs to be done for 1.7.

How many combinations are there? 35! That's right - there's 5 web frameworks (+ FreeMarker and Velocity for Spring MVC) as well as 5 persistence frameworks. CruiseControl is spitting out the combinations if you'd like to try them now. When I wrote the script to create everything this weekend, I was a bit worried about combining them and all getting all the tests to pass. Amazingly enough, all the tests passed on the first try. Thank you Spring, you separate layers quite nicely.

If you're interested in how this all works, take a look at release.xml. This file handles the artifact creation, as well as testing and uploading to java.net. I was hoping to create Maven 2 archetypes for all the combinations as well, but it doesn't look like it can be automated. I'd love to figure out a way generate archetypes from an existing project.

MyFaces + Facelets vs. Shale

At some point, I plan on replacing the JSF+JSP combination in AppFuse with JSF+Facelets. However, I'm wondering if this is just an interim step to a more full-featured framework like Shale and its Clay templates. Has anyone out there tried both Shale and MyFaces+Facelets? If so, which one worked best for you?

Should we use Shale for the JSF framework in AppFuse or is MyFaces + Facelets good enough?

Can JSP-based components (particularly Ajax ones) be used with Clay and/or Facelets? What's the best Ajax-enabled component library available for JSF? I know there's more everyday, so I'm looking for first-hand, real-world experience here. Thanks in advance for any advice or stories you'd like to share!