Raible Designs

Missed that one - XDoclet 1.2 Released

I must've been asleep at the wheel the week before Christmas - XDoclet 1.2 Final got released (already blogged here) and I didn't notice.

I integrated OSCache's Filter into my project today and needed to order the <filter-mapping>s in my project so cacheFilter comes first. I stumbed upon the order attribute, but it appears to be XDoclet2-only feature. XDoclet 1.2 just seems to ignore it. Oh well, I guess I'll just resort to putting all my filter-mappings in an XDoclet fragment (metadata/web/filter-mappings.xml) like Roller does.

On another note, it was easy to integrate oscache since Hibernate 2.1.x ships with oscache.jar (I wonder which version it is?). If you're using AppFuse 1.2, it's in there and I encourage you to look into using it. I got inspired after reading Dave's Improving Web Application Performance and Scalability chapter in Pro JSP. I finished reading it earlier this week, and have found that it's a great reference for JSTL (and probably JSP 2.0 when I start using it).

WebSphere version 6.0 - when's will it release?

Today I discovered that WebSphere is one of the first appservers to support J2EE 1.4. Too bad it's a developer release and not a real release. At my current project, we've been developing on Tomcat 4.1.29 (and MySQL) because it's the only platform I've tested AppFuse on. We plan to migrate to WebSphere and DB2 in the coming months. They currently have a license for WebSphere 4.x, which I heard sucks - especially (IMO) because it only supports Servlets 2.2 and JSP 1.1. Luckily, the app we're deploying to production will be the first Java-based webapp, so we will hopefully be able to use WebSphere 5.1.

I just wish 6.0 was out as a real release, then we could start using JSP 2.0 and leave all those damn <c:out value="..."/>'s behind.

AppFuse 1.2 Released!

This is primarily a bug fix release. Here are the details from the release notes:

• Backed out Http Post for Remember Me. It was not redirecting user to the page they originally requested. Using reponse.sendRedirect does send the user to the proper location. Turned on password encryption (SHA) to protect any passwords that end up in log files. Turned off encryption in Tomcat.
• Changed configuration parameters in servlet context to be in a hashmap.
• Improvements to StrutsGen tool to generate list screen as well and to fill in more missing elements.
• Changed to close Hibernate session when object not found in BaseDAOHibernate.
• Fixed bug in UserAction.save: when creating a new user, role defaults to "tomcat" regardless of what the user chooses.
• Dependent packages upgraded:
  • Hibernate 2.1.1
  • Struts Menu 2.1
  • WebTest Build 379

Download (~11.9 MB for src, ~4.3 MB for bin) or View Release Notes.

For more information on AppFuse, check out the AppFuse Wiki Page or FAQ.

JSF 1.0 - Proposed Final Draft Spec and Beta Reference Implementation

From Craig McClanahan on the struts-dev mailing list:

I'm pleased to announce that the Proposed Final Draft version of the JavaServer Faces 1.0 Specification, and a corresponding Beta release of the Reference Implementation, is now available at:

http://java.sun.com/j2ee/javaserverfaces/download.html

Please send any feedback and comments strictly about JavaServer Faces to [email protected].

I'm also finishing up an update to the Struts-Faces Integration Library, and will be making it available (via nightly builds) very soon. Feel free to ask any questions about how to use Struts and JavaServer Faces here on the STRUTS-USER list.

Sweet! It's almost time to try JSF in a webapp. I'd love to offer a web layer for AppFuse in JSF. But then again, I'd like to offer WW2 and Tapestry options too. I just need to figure out how to give the developer that option when building. The main problem is it'd probably be a pain in the ass to maintain all 4 implementations. But then again, that's what unit tests are for!

In other news, a nice patch has been proposed for the DisplayTag that would give it JSTL's EL support.

[ANNOUNCE] Ant 1.6 Released!

Big news baby - the best Java tool in the world has a new release. I don't know that I'll use any of the new features (such as antlib, macrodef, presetdef, ssh tasks), but I do love to upgrade. Downloading now...

Later: It looks like Canoo's WebTest is not compatible with Ant 1.6. Reverting back to 1.5.4.

C:\Source\appfuse\test\web\web-tests.xml:29: Task must be of type "Step": invoke at 
C:\Source\appfuse\test\web\login.xml:1:  is of type org.apache.tools.ant.UnknownElement

Line 29 is: <canoo name="login">. I've notified the webtest mailing list, hopefully there will be a resolution shortly.

Hibernate's AdminApp - a demo of WW2 and Hibernate

After looking at Hibernate's AdminApp, as well as other WW2 apps - I've noticed something. WW2 developers don't seem to give a rats ass about referencing their POJOs in their Actions, or using Hibernate directly in their actions. At first glance, I think to myself, "boy that sure makes things easier." But then again - doesn't that tightly couple your web layer to your persistence layer?

I can understand the POJO reference in Actions - I'm about to give up on doing a parent/child relationship with Hibernate where the children are converted to ActionForms and then converted back (Hibernate loves to tell me "a different object with the same identifier value was already associated with the session: 1").

It would be SO much easier (with this particular problem) if I could just toss up POJOs to my view. The thought of importing "persistence.User" into my Action makes me cringe though. I don't know why, it just does. I need to get out of this patterns mindset I've been in for the last couple of years and get back to what really matters - simple, easy to learn, and fast to develop. I'm tired of banging my head against the wall with Struts and Hibernate.... I've been doing it for two days. It's not Hibernate, and it's not Struts, it's me... (thud, thud, thud).

Eclipse Plugins on OS X and 3.0 M5

I did a bit of tinkering yesterday and today and finally got the Colorer plugin to work on OS X. From the Colorer Forums, you can now see how to build the colorer plugin for OS X and how to get the plugin working with Eclipse M5. I also discovered that the Lomboz plugin now supports M5 too (even on OS X!).

So, you ask, "What happened to using IDEA?" I do use it, but not as much as Eclipse. The main problem I have with IDEA is that I can't have more than one project open at a time. I typically copy code from AppFuse and it's just easier in Eclipse - I can even copy a whole class and it renames the package for me. And now that I've discovered the Ant View in Eclipse, they're pretty much equal to me. Another reason for targeting Eclipse is there's more users. Most of the folks that download AppFuse use Eclipse - so being aligned with the my "users" (all 6 of them) makes things much easier.

Using Anthill with AppFuse

Want to use Anthill to automate your build/test/deploy process? Here's an easy way to do it with AppFuse.

AppFuse 1.1 Released!

This biggest feature in this release is Documentation. I finally found the time to write up some Tutorials on developing with AppFuse. They're on my wiki and also in the "docs" folder of the binary and source downloads. In writing this documentation, I went through almost all aspects of the code with a fine-tooth comb made sure it's doing what I want it to do (lots of improvements from this).

I was finally able to get things working with J2EE 1.4, which basically involved removing j2ee.jar from my MailUtil's classpath and just including activation.jar and mail.jar. If you're not there yet, simply change the paths for activation.jar and mail.jar in properties.xml (look for common.compile.classpath). You can use j2ee.jar instead of mail.jar and activation.jar with J2EE 1.3 and 1.4 B2.

I was also able to get all unit tests to pass on Tomcat 5, and the "setup-tomcat" target now supports Tomcat 5. I wasn't able to get "Remember Me" to work - see the tomcat-user mailing list for more details.

Included in this release are upgrades to Hibernate 2.1 Final and Display Tag 1.0 B2. For a complete changelog, view the README.txt in CVS.

• Download (~13.4 MB for src, ~4.3 MB for bin)
• Release Notes
• API Documentation and Source
• Mailing List

For more information on AppFuse, check out the AppFuse Wiki Page or FAQ.

Export JSPWiki pages to HTML using Hula

This morning, I discovered Hula - a Java client API to the WikiRPCInterface. The nice feature I really like is that it allows you to export your wiki pages to static html. Here's how to set it up on your JSPWiki:

• Uncomment the XML RPC servlet-mappings in web.xml.
• Download Hula.
• Rename hula.zip to hula.jar and put it into JSPWiki's WEB-INF/lib.
• Copy apps/*.jsp to webapps/JSPWiki/.

You can use my trimmed down version if you like, it only has hula.jar and the JSPs.

Now I can write all my AppFuse documentation on the wiki and bundle it with the downloads - very nice.