Raible Designs

Outline for talk on Display Tag, Struts Menu and AppFuse in NYC

This weekend I'm preparing slides for my talk in NYC on the Display Tag and Struts Menu. I'm also going to do a bit about AppFuse since it includes and uses both libraries. I have an hour to talk, so I think I'll try to present for 50 minutes and leave the last 10 minutes for questions or simply quitting early. That means, realistically, I only have 15-20 minutes for each project. That sure seems like a lot now, but I'm sure it'll fly once I'm up there in front of everyone. I'm definitely nervous about this event - I've only ever done technical talks to team members, never to a large audience. I've done large audience (20-50 attendees) talks, but those where in college and covered growing up in Montana and business plan-type presentations. Oh well, I'm sure I'll get over my anxiety about 10 minutes into it.

The purpose of this post is to write down the topics I plan to cover and hopefully get some feedback from the more experienced presenters out there. I'd also like to get feedback from developers - as in what you'd like to see covered if you were attending.

• Introduction. Who am I, etc. (2 minutes)
• Struts Menu. What is it - it's history, etc. (3 minutes)
     - Features and Demo of sample app. Questions. (5 minutes)
     - Expression Language support and building menus from a database (including code). (10 minutes)
• The Display Tag. What is it - it's history, etc. (3 minutes)
     - Features and Demo of sample app. Questions (7 minutes)
     - Expression Language support and using to create an editable table (including code). (10 minutes)
• AppFuse. What is it - it's history, etc. (3-5 minutes)
     - Features, Libraries included, etc. Questions (5 minutes)

Great CSS Designs

While reading the latest issue of A List Apart this morning, I got sidetracked and visited the CSS Zen Garden, finally landing on David Shea's blog. There I found his listing of Great CSS Designs. There's some very nice sites in there.

In other news, today is one of those days that sucks to work from home. I can see the snow falling out my window, and it's snowed almost 2 feet in the last 48 hours at Vail, Breckenridge and Winter Park. Urgghh, the slopes are calling, but so is my pocketbook. Note to self: get your priorities straight next year so this doesn't happen again. This is the first year in the past 5 that I haven't bought a ski pass and I won't do it again. Oh well, at least it'll be a good night for a hockey game.

JAG - similar to AppFuse, but offers more choices

This afternoon, I stumbled upon the open source Java Application Generator on SourceForge:

JAG is an application that creates complete, working J2EE applications. It is intended to alleviate much of the repetitive work involved in creating such applications, while providing a means of quality assurance that the applications created will be of consistent quality.

Major differences include: JAG has a Swing GUI to create your app and it uses EJB 2.0 for its persistence layer. AppFuse has an Ant task (ant new) and uses Hibernate (or iBATIS) for the persistence layer. Both use Struts 1.1 with Tiles and Validator support. The question is - will they eventually offer Spring, WebWork and Tapestry options for the MVC layer? I doubt it...

BTW, my experience with java.net has been quite nice so far. I like the fact that I can use a pserver for developer CVS access (vs. SSH only at SF). I also like that I can approve e-mails just by replying to an e-mail (vs. using a web interface on SF). The best part, however, has to be that CVS commits and e-mail messages are immediately browse-able in the archives. This is rather convenient when you're a blogger that likes to link to source code and messages in (sudo) real-time.

AppFuse 1.4 Released!

This release involves many changes: re-arranging packages/directories, Spring integration, Remember Me refactorings and I also added iBATIS as a persistence option. I also spent a lot of time going through the tutorials to make sure they are up to date. I've been using AppFuse 1.4 for a few weeks on my current project, and I really do like the way Spring makes it easy to configure Hibernate, Transactions and Interface->Implementation relationships. If you're interested in upgrading your AppFuse 1.x app to use Spring, you can checkout this howto.

I also made the leap and moved the AppFuse project from SourceForge to java.net. This is mainly so I have more control over mailing lists and adding other developers. As of today, CVS files in SourceForge and Java.net are the same - but I'll only be updating Java.net from here on out. I also have released files in both projects, but will only use java.net in the future.

• Download (~11.5 MB for src, ~5.1 MB for bin).
• Release Notes
• Demo

I spent all weekend updating the tutorials and fixing release-related issues. Phew - I'm glad that's over. "So," you ask, "what's next?"

A week of vacation (my sister flies in tomorrow), followed by starting to write Spring Live and creating a Spring MVC option for AppFuse. Oh yeah, I'll also be at SD West in Santa Clara, CA - let me know if you plan on attending.

Generating indexed-property ready ActionForms with XDoclet

One of the issues with using XDoclet to generate your Struts ActionForms (from POJOs) is that out-of-the-box, your Forms will not support indexed properties. This means that if you have a List on an object (this list will likely contain other objects/forms), you have to extend the generated form to add the necessary setters for indexed properties. For example, if you have an addresses List on a PersonForm, you would need the following in order to edit those addresses in Struts.

The worst part is that you need to populate the addresses list with a bunch of empty AddressForm objects before Struts' auto-population will succeed. If you were coding the PersonForm by hand, you could code a reset() method such as the following:

Now for the best part - I figured out how to generate this code with XDoclet, so any lists on your Forms will be indexed-property ready. By using <nested:iterate> in your JSP, you can easily CRUD you indexed properties. Pretty slick IMHO. The template is a bit much to put on this site, and it's long lines won't fit in a <pre> - so you can temporarily view the template here. I'll add a link to it in AppFuse's CVS once it shows up there. One thing you'll notice in this template is a little Velocity-lovin':

<XDtVelocity:generator>
  #set( $method = $currentMethod.name)
  ## trim off the 'get'
  #set( $objectName = $method.substring(3, $method.lastIndexOf('s')))
</XDtVelocity:generator>

Thanks to Erik on Merrick's blog for the quick Velocity/XDoclet howto. It was especially helpful since the XDoclet site has no documentation on this feature.

For all you my framework is better junkies - a clear explanation of how your framework handles indexed properties would be appreciated.

Struts 1.2.0 Test Build Available

From the struts-dev mailing list:

The Struts 1.2.0 Test Build is now available here:

http://www.apache.org/~martinc/struts/v1.2.0/

This is the first Struts build being made available following the same
test-and-release process that has been used successfully by the Tomcat
team for some time. It is *not* an official Apache release.

Once feedback has been collected on the stability and general quality of
this build, a determination will be made as to whether it should be
promoted to Alpha status.

You can reference the Struts site for a list of what's changed since 1.1. To further assist you (if you're upgrading from 1.1), you might want to check out how I did it back in October. I tested this build with AppFuse and all tests pass - I didn't even have to change a single line of code. For that reason, this is now the Struts version that'll ship with AppFuse 1.4.

No Fluff Just Stuff

I had lunch today with Jay Zimmerman of No Fluff Just Stuff. I always enjoy getting together with Jay because he's from Montana and Montanans are generally nice folks. Among other things, he asked if I would be interested in speaking at a NFJS event or two. I said I'd think about it. However, I'm strongly considering it since it would probably be a good marketing tool.

I probably wouldn't do any events until sometime this summer. Now I just have to figure out what I'd speak on...

Upgraded to Tomcat 5.0.19 + thoughts on Resin

I spent 5 minutes tonight and upgraded this site to use Tomcat 5.0.19. Everything seems to be working fine, save for a couple of new messages in catalina.out:

24-Feb-2004 7:48:34 PM org.apache.jk.common.HandlerRequest decodeRequest
WARNING: Error registering request
24-Feb-2004 7:48:44 PM org.apache.jk.common.HandlerRequest invoke
INFO: Unknown message 0

After talking with Rick last weekend, I'm going to try and migrate to Resin as my main dev appserver. The motivating factor was hearing Resin and Orion are so much faster than Tomcat. Sure I've heard this many times before, but mostly from Jakarta-haters. Rick's opinion holds a bit more water for me. Of course, he mentioned that his findings where based on Resin 2.x and Tomcat 4.x. I'd love to see a performance comparison between the latest versions of Orion, Resin and Tomcat.

I hope to modify AppFuse so it can easily run with Tomcat or Resin with a simple property switch. I've already started that process, but I hit a small snag.

I also hope to migrate this site to Resin 3.x soon. If nothing else, it'd be nice to learn more about Resin - and we all know the best way to learn a new technology is to interact with it on a daily basis.

NYC: DisplayTag and Struts Menu

At the NYC Conference, I'm going to be talking about The Display Tag and Struts Menu. I figure the best presentations are ones that cover new features or introduce something new. So I'm hoping to add the following features to the two libraries in the next month. Please let me know if there are other's you'd really like to see - or ones that'd make the audience go *wow*.

DisplayTag: I'd like to add this pagination enhancement so you can get easy interaction between the records displayed and the records fetched. I'd also like to see sorting by property, not be contents. Lastly, I hope to add an example that does CRUD on a table using JSTL and simple checkbox and input fields.

Struts Menu: A lot of users are interested in seeing a menu that's created from a database table. This shouldn't be too difficult because examples are out there. I was also thinking of adding support for the Joust Outliner, but it doesn't look like it's still developer or actively used. If there's interest, I'll add it.

If you think I'm blogging a lot today (don't you work Raible?), it's because I'm on babysitting duty. Abbie is sick with a fever and Julie had to go to work - so my work day starts when she gets home. I've got the little one tied up with a little Winnie the Pooh action right now...

Later: The DHTML Kitchen has some nice menus, but they're not free. Anyone know of open source menus like these?

Speaking at MySQL User Conference

I've been accepted to present a 30 minute session on AppFuse at the MySQL User Conference in Orlando! I would have never thought to even apply, but Mark Matthews sent me an e-mail and convinced me to give it a shot. Now I'm pumped that I did. Here is the abstract for Easy Java Development with MySQL:

Using my open source AppFuse application, I will show how easy it is to setup a MySQL database using Ant, create the Tables using Hibernate/Ant and populate it using DBUnit.

Other events I'm speaking at in the next couple of months include a one-day conference in NYC on Developing Webapps using Open Source Tools and a Basic Concepts presentation on AppFuse at Denver's JUG in June.

Now the only question is - should I use PowerPoint/Keynote or enhance my simply preso app to write these presentations?