Raible Designs

Building a website with an Open Source CMS

I think the open source community has done an excellent job of figuring out how to create frameworks for developing web applications. But what about websites. You know, the web presence that every company wants - for minimal cost. For most companies, it's nothing more than 5-10 pages that tells a bit about the company, show some management folks and tells you how to get to their offices.

I've developed many websites over the years, many that were static, but more that were dynamic. The unfortunate thing about all of them is they required someone technical to update them. Often, the client had to contact me if they wanted anything new on the site. I've often thought there was a better solution - and I think I'm at a point where I know what customers want, and I know how to provide it. The solution is a Content Management Solution (CMS). One of the biggest problems with static websites is they're not dynamic enough. A CMS can alleviate this problem by reducing the bottleneck that a traditional "webmaster" creates.

In my mind, there are a couple of things that make a good CMS: 1) it's open source (to minimize costs to the client) and 2) it's easy to customize. On the customization front, my demands are a bit more rigorous - mainly because I know what many folks want in a website. Here are my main criteria for a good open source CMS - when it's used to power a regular ol' client-updateable website:

• Design customization: I should be able to customize all the (X)HTML that's generated using one or two files (like SiteMesh allows). It should be possible to change the look and feel of *everything* by modifying some CSS. It should also be possible to use Mike Stenhouse's CSS Framework to simplify layout choices for clients. Ideally, a web designer or regular ol' HTML person could do the customization.
• Static-looking URLs: The site should look like a static site. The URLs should be all lowercase and end with .html. It should be possible to modify all the URLs to look as if all pages are static. Apache's mod_rewrite and the URL Rewrite Filter are great tools for making this happen, but it'd be nice if the administration of the application allowed for setting these rules.
• It shouldn't look like a CMS: No login links, no registration links, etc.
• Ability to easily add dynamic content: It should be easy to add dynamic content - such as RSS Feed headlines to pages.
• Menu Customization: In the application, it should be possible to create menus (both main and local navigation) and configure a page to highlight a menu when a particular page is shown.
• Versioning of pages: In case someone messes something up, it should be easy enough to revert back to a previous version.
• Easy to use: It should be possible to train a marketing person (with little technical knowledge) how to use the system in 10-15 minutes.

For technical companies (such as Virtuas), there are a few additional requirements I'd like to see:

• Articles with syntax highlighting: It should be easy to publish articles with code that's colorized. The Java2HtmlPlugin for JSPWiki is a good example of this. I currently don't know of any for XHTML, XML or scripting languages like Ruby or Python.
• File Upload: For uploading white papers and other technical publications.

So I've started looking at open source CMS's that fill my requirements. Last weekend, I wrote a solution that fills all of these requirements using SiteMesh, JSPWiki, CSS Framework, Acegi Security and the URL Rewrite Filter. It only took me about 6 hours to complete, but after completing it - I started wondering if I really wanted to start another open source project and maintain it. The answer is no, I don't want to create something new - I want to use something that's already out there. However, since I do have something that satisfies all my requirements, I will use it if I can't tweak an existing OS CMS enough.

Here are a list of CMS's that I'll be looking at in the next week or so. If you're associated with any of these projects, please leave a comment and let me know how many of my requirements you satisfy.

• Daisy
• Magnolia
• Bricolage
• phpWebsite
• Mambo/Joomla

I'm a bit hesitant on Daisy b/c it requires XSLT knowledge for design customization. Magnolia has long URLs and doesn't appear like a static site - and the PHP ones often have .php in their URLs. It should be an interesting investigation to see if these (seemingly) heavyweight solutions can solve a few simple requirements.

Stripes

Greg Hinkle writes about a new JDK 5-only Java web framework called Stripes.

Stripes is a presentation framework for building web applications using the latest Java technologies. The main driver behind Stripes is that web application development in Java is just too much work! It seems like every existing framework requires gobs of configuration. Struts is pretty feature-light and has some serious architectural issues. Others, like WebWork 2 and Spring-MVC are much better, but still require a lot of configuration, and seem to require you to learn a whole new language just to get started.

I dig the fact that someone is trying to create a web framework that requires less configuration. It's also very cool that they've released it as 1.0 (rather than 0.1 as many OS projects do) and it also seems to be well documented. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like there's any support for Spring or dependency injection.

Personally, I don't mind the configuration required by WebWork or Spring MVC - but then again, I use AppFuse and tend to generate most of the configuration code using AppGen. Even so, it would be nice to get away from the configuration requirement. Hopefully more framework authors will find ways to reduce or even eliminate the XML hell we have in Java web frameworks. Kudos to the Tapestry developers for doing this in their 4.0 release.

I like the convention over configuration that Rails uses. It's this same mantra that I've been trying to develop AppFuse with for the past few years. The problem with Java web frameworks is developers want configuration choices - even if they never bother to use them.

CSS Table Gallery

From CSS Beauty:

CSS Table Gallery. Showcase of how CSS and data tables can work together to create usable and pretty results.

I like Chrome de la chrome. Hopefully the available designs will grow so we can pick and choose the ones we want to use in our apps. I might have to use Chrome de la chrome with the Display Tag in the next AppFuse or Equinox release.

Using Acegi Security for Remember Me and SSL Switching

I spent some time yesterday converting AppFuse's homegrown Remember Me and SSL Switching system to using Acegi Security. Thanks to Justin Spears, who provided the original motivation. It was much easier than I thought it would be, and resulted in the deleting of 7 classes in AppFuse. Not only that, but only one of them had a test for it, so the test coverage has naturally gone up as well. I'll trade 40 lines of XML for 1214 lines of Java any day - especially when I can get the support of an open-source framework.

If you're interested in using this code over 1.8.2, you can checkout the latest code from CVS (or download it from http://appfuse.org/nightly). The only other change currently in CVS is changing from "tomcat" to "user" as the default User role. Below is a list of classes that were removed as part of this move to Acegi:

• src/dao/org/appfuse/model/UserCookie.java
• src/service/org/appfuse/util/RandomGUID.java
• src/web/org/appfuse/webapp/action/LoginServlet.java
• src/web/org/appfuse/webapp/filter/LoginFilter.java
• src/web/org/appfuse/webapp/taglib/SecureTag.java
• src/web/org/appfuse/webapp/util/SslUtil.java
• test/web/org/appfuse/webapp/action/LoginServletTest.java

I should also mention that I owe a big thanks to Virtuas - who pays me to work on AppFuse these days.

[ANN] AppFuse 1.8.2 Released

This release is mostly a bug fix release with no new features. It also includes upgrades to Acegi Security and the Spring Framework. Thanks to all the sponsors who have contributed products and free hosting to the AppFuse project.

• Download
• Release Notes
• Learn more about AppFuse

To see how AppFuse works, please see the following demos:

• Demo of Features in Flash
• 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 the AppFuse Issue Tracker.

P.S. I have the Acegi integration done for Remember Me and SSL Switching in another project, so that support should be in CVS sometime next week. Thanks to Justin Spears for his help on this issue.

PowerBook Dent

A fair amount of PowerBook owners I know have corner dings in their laptops. It usually comes from dropping it in a parking lot or something similar. I've managed to escape this problem for a number of years now. Until today. I'm writing this post on my PowerBook, but my hard drive is currently my iPod because I can't boot up off the regular hard drive. I'm heading to the Apple Store in short order to see if they can fix the hard drive.

At least I have a decent story behind it. I was riding my bike downtown today, and while riding off the curb onto Larimer street - I popped a wheelie. I had too much oomph - and the front wheel started to head for the sky. Normally when this happens, you hop off the back of the bike and you're good to go. Not today, my shoes wouldn't snap out of my pedals - so WHAM, splat, boom. I hit the pavement like Whiley Coyote off a cliff. Right in the middle of the street too - good thing no cars were coming. Most of my left side hurt like a mother and my left elbow has some nice road rash - but nothing out of the ordinary from a bike wreck.

After riding off with stars in my eyes, I headed to Chipotle for lunch. After lunch, I broke out my laptop to work on Spring Live. When I pulled it out, I noticed the left-corner dent and thought, "Not bad, could have been a lot worse." Moments later, all my open applications froze up. When I tried to reboot, I got the blue Mac folder with the ? on it. In other words, "I can't find your hard drive." And so another PowerBook repair adventure begins...

Google is helping developers make more money

From Relax, Bill Gates; It's Google's Turn as the Villain:

Google, Mr. Hoffman said, has caused "across the board a 25 to 50 percent salary inflation for engineers in Silicon Valley" - or at least those in a position to weigh competing offers. A sought-after computer programmer can now expect to make more than $150,000 a year.

Thanks Google - we appreciate the inflation.

A List Apart 4.0

I've always enjoyed A List Apart, so it's great to see they've got so much new stuff:

New design. New structure. New server. New publishing system powered by Ruby on Rails. As the dog days of summer draw to a close, we present A List Apart 4.0. So buy a tee shirt already.

Beautiful, just beautiful.

What do you want to see at Java in Action?

I'm presenting two sessions at Java in Action in October. The first one is a 3-hour tutorial on Comparing Java Web Frameworks, while the second is about Developing Next Generation Web Applications with Ajax in Spring. I'm in the process of writing both of these, and I'm interested to see what Java developers would like to see in these talks.

The tutorial is probably the toughest one because my normal presentation usually only takes about an hour to deliver. For a similar presentation, see Craig McClanahan's The Evolution of Web Application Architectures. I could talk about the history like Craig does, or I could talk about the different frameworks and their features like I usually do. However, I want something more interactive and fun for attendees. I was thinking of live-coding for 20 minutes with each framework, and showing the differences, but that's not a whole lot of fun either. Maybe I could divide the class into 5 groups, educate each of them on features of the framework, and then we could have some sort of debate? Showing code is always something that developers are interested in, so I'll have to figure out how to work that in as well. If you're planning on attending this tutorial - I'd love to hear suggestions.

I'm also curious on what you'd like to see in the 2nd presentation? I was planning on using Equinox (or possibly AppFuse), to show how to use DWR, Prototype and script.aculo.us. A couple of examples I'm thinking of showing are in-page updates and sortable/pageable tables. Any other cool effects or tricks you'd like to see?

Sorry for the cross-post from JRoller, but I wanted to reach the largest possible audience. Please leave comments on the JRoller entry.

Prettying up JSPWiki's URLs

Recently, AppFuse user Charlse Li sent me an e-mail with a "PostfixURLConstructor" class designed to pretty up JSPWiki's URL. With the patch he sent, I was able to change URLs from /wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=AppFuse to /wiki/AppFuse.html. Applying the patch was quite easy, but maintaining backwards compatibility and security required a little more work. Below are the steps I went through to get everything working properly:

• Download postfixurlconstructor.zip and extract to your hard-drive. Copy the "com" directory to your wiki/WEB-INF/classes directory.
• Change the <url-pattern> of the WikiServlet in web.xml from /wiki/* to *.html.
• Add the following two lines to your WEB-INF/jspwiki.properties file:
  
  jspwiki.urlConstructor = PostfixURLConstructor
jspwiki.PostfixURLConstructor.postfix = .html

This is all you need to do to change the default URL schema. However, if you're like me and you've had a JSPWiki instance setup for awhile, you'll need to maintain backwards-compatibility. I wanted to make sure the old URLs mapped to the new ones. In addition, the "edit URL" changed from Edit.jsp?page=PageName to pageName.html?do=Edit. Since web.xml and <security-constraint> can't contain regular expressions, I used the ultra-cool UrlRewriteFilter to solve both issues. Here's the steps I went through to configure it properly:

• Download UrlRewriteFilter 2.5.1 and extract the JAR to your WEB-INF/lib directory.
• Change your web.xml to use a 2.3 DTD instead of a 2.2 DTD and add the filter and filter-mapping to web.xml.
• Create a WEB-INF/urlrewrite.xml file with the following contents:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCENGINE urlrewrite PUBLIC "-//tuckey.org//DTD UrlRewrite 2.5//EN"
    "http://tuckey.org/res/dtds/urlrewrite2.5.dtd">

<urlrewrite>
    <rule>
        <from>^/Wiki.jsp\?page=(.*)$</from>
        <to type="redirect">$1.html</to>
    </rule>

    <rule>
        <from>^/(.*).html\?do=Edit$</from>
        <to type="redirect">Edit.jsp?page=$1</to>
    </rule>
</urlrewrite>

That's it - restart your server and you should be good to go. Thanks for the patch and instructions Charlse!

Update: There does seem to be a couple of issues. The 1st is that none of the attachments are resolving correctly (example). The 2nd that when I try to edit a page, it always shows up with the Main page's text. I'm not going to back out the change just yet, but I will if I can't fix it in the next several hours.

Update 2: I ended up backing out this change, but left in a forward from *.html to Wiki.jsp?page=$1 so all URLs in this post should still work. The "not being able to edit" was the major reason I rolled back to the old URL schema. The attachment issue seems to be related to my browser's cache. Clearing it fixed the problem.