Raible Designs

Web Frameworks - which one should I learn?

I've seen a lot of talk about Web Frameworks these last couple of weeks - particularly JavaServer Faces, WebWork and Spring. There's also been great articles posted comparing Spring and WebWork as well as an Introduction to Spring from TSS. Spring, WebWork and JSF all look like excellent frameworks to me, but I also continue to believe that Struts is a great framework. And I would go so far as to say that it's the best web application framework. Yep, I said it - Struts is the best web application framework to learn if you are a web developer wondering what to learn. Why? Because it will get you a job.

I've continued to receive a fair amount of calls and e-mails over the last couple of weeks - and they're all calling because of my Struts experience. Good luck in finding a company that wants you to build their web application using WebWork or Spring. Maybe someday I'll be lucky enough to hire employees for Raible Designs and build web applications in my own office with my own employees. Then we'll get to choose whatever technology we want to build customers' apps. Until then, I'll stick with Struts and continue to be an employed developer.

I strongly believe the best way to learn anything is to get paid to do it. I've learned Struts over the past couple of years, not because I wanted to, but because someone else wanted me to - and they paid me to do it. Of course, there are some companies that will probably pay you to learn WebWork or Spring, but most would rather not.

Another thing to consider is that WW and Spring will probably someday develop "migrating from Struts" documentation. Sounds like a good idea to me - until then, and until someone pays me to learn the others, Struts is #1 for me.

Now it's your turn to tell me why my logic is flawed... if you can. ;-)

Skinning your applications and Apache+Tomcat on RH9

Here are a couple of links I found on mailing lists that might be of use:

• Xkins: Xkins framework uses Velocity to process snippets of HTML, but you can use any other template processor (Xkins comes with it's own default processor). Xkins also comes with Forms Tag Libs, that allows you to create forms using Xkins and comes with four Skins. Xkins Forms integrates with Struts framework. Xkins also fits perfect in JSF world, playing a role as a RenderKit, and can work with other presentation frameworks, (i.e. struts-layout).I'll stick with simple XHTML and CSS. If I need different layouts (HTML), I'll use a different base tile.
• John Turner has published a Tomcat 4.1.27 + Apache 2.0.47 HowTo. This is similar to mine, but looks much cleaner and to the point.

Later: I discovered the beauty of John's HowTo this evening. It allows you to specify one measly line in Apache's httpd.conf file and only a few lines in Tomcat's server.xml file and viola Tomcat configures itself! It sets up aliases and such for each webapp that you have deployed. As an example, here's dynamically created section for AppFuse:

#################### localhost:/appfuse ####################                                       
                                                                                                       
# Static files                                                                                     
Alias /appfuse "/opt/dev/tools/jakarta-tomcat-4.1.27/webapps/appfuse"                              
                                                                                                       
<Directory "/opt/dev/tools/jakarta-tomcat-4.1.27/webapps/appfuse">                         
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks                                                                 
    DirectoryIndex index.jsp                                                                       
</Directory>                                                                                  

# Deny direct access to WEB-INF and META-INF                                                       
#                                                                                                  
<Location "/appfuse/WEB-INF/*">                                                                 
    AllowOverride None                                                                             
    deny from all                                                                                  
</Location>                                                                                 
                                                                                                       
<Location "/appfuse/META-INF/*">                                                              
    AllowOverride None                                                                             
    deny from all                                                                                  
</Location>                                                                                   
                                                                                                       
JkMount /appfuse/j_security_check  ajp13                                                           
JkMount /appfuse/auth/*  ajp13                                                                     
JkMount /appfuse/register/*  ajp13                                                                 
JkMount /appfuse/passwordHint/*  ajp13                                                             
JkMount /appfuse/*.do  ajp13                                                                       
JkMount /appfuse/*.jsp  ajp13                                  

I had all of this working great - I even had Apache upgraded to 2.0.47 on OS X (serving localhost/~user files and everything)! And then I rebooted... Now in catalina.out, I'm getting the following - ugh...

BAD packet 256                                                                                      
In: : [B@c283b5 4/843                                                                               
01 00 03 47 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  | ...G............                                 
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  | ................ 

WTF?!

Solved: I got this solved fairly easily. I had modified /usr/sbin/apachectl so that the HTTPD variable pointed to /usr/local/apache2/bin/httpd rather than /usr/sbin/httpd. I fixed it by removing /usr/bin/apachectl and executing "ln -s /usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl /usr/sbin/apachectl". Now if I could only get the Rendezvous mod working on 2.0.x.

Precompile your JSPs for Tomcat 4.x

Filip Hanik has provided a nice Ant script for pre-compiling JSPs. Its designed to be run after you've deployed your application to Tomcat. On my current project, it took 1 minute 30 seconds to compile all our JSPs - making it a candidate for new QA and Production deployments only. I'll be adding this to AppFuse's next release and verifying it actually works before I release. I know the compile works, but I want to make sure that my .java and .class files aren't rebuilt the first time I hit a JSP (I've seen this before). Also, you might want to checkout my issues if you run into problems.

Update: I've verified that this really does work - Sweet!

JSF and Apache Axis at DJUG

I attended tonight's DJUG Meeting. The meeting was informative and well attended, but it was way too long. I just got home and it's a bit after 11:00. To put it in perspective, I arrived at 6:00. That's 4 1/2 hours of Java love. Elections contributed to the delay, as well as David Geary's 2 1/2 hour JSF presentation.

The basic concepts meeting covered Apache Axis, presented by Scott Davis. He showed us how easy it was to use Axis to create a web service and how to call it from the command line. The biggest highlight of his presentation (for me) was Keynote - his presentation software. It had wicked transitions and the slides looked awesome (good purchase Scott). Other cool software noted during Scott's preso was CodeTek's Virtual Desktop.

Next up was David Geary for a presentation on JSF. This guy has quite a resume: worked for Sun from 1994-97, member of the JSF and JSTL Expert Groups, author of 6 books, designed and implemented the Struts Template library (2nd committer to Struts after Craig). Books coming soon from David: Core JavaServer Faces, Core Rave, and Extreme Struts. Extreme Struts sounds very much like the Struts chapter I wrote for Pro JSP - XDoclet, StrutsTestCase, JUnit, Tiles and Validator. If you're looking for documentation on AppFuse or Struts-Resume, you'll find it in this book. If you don't remember, I wrote these apps for my chapters.

Most folks reading this blog probably know what JSF is. If you don't, it's a Java-based framework for building web applications. It is designed to replace Struts, but that probably won't happen until well after it's 1.0 release (March, Beta in December). JSF was also written to compete with .NET's WebForms, kinda like how JSP was developed to compete with ASP.

Sun's Project Rave is what supposedly will make JSF easy. Can Rave really be that much better than Eclipse or IDEA? Good luck Sun, those are two killer IDEs that are going to be very difficult to beat. And besides, has Sun ever produced any good applications? iPlanet sucks, so does Forte - comparing both to the other options out there.

I could go on and on about what I learned at this presentation, so let me just give you a brief synopsis. JSF generates JavaScript for you for event handling. The JSP tags are long and ugly, but they're named this way (i.e. <h:selectone_menu>) to distinguish a component (selectone) from a renderer (menu). David said he complained about this immensely when he joined the Expert Group, but now sees the point. No XML attributes are used in faces-config.xml - it's all entities. Reminds me of web.xml, lots of typing for not much information (what a pain - today's tool suck at deployment descriptors). JSF has no client-side validation - looks like Commons Validator will be around for quite some time. Especially since JSF requires you to specify your validation after each component in the JSP (vs. declaratively using the Validator). JSF EA4 does not work with Tiles - they're working vigorously to fix this. You can specify your navigation-rules separate from you actions in faces-config.xml (very cool feature).

If you know JSPs and Servlets, it's much easier to learn Struts (and presumably other webapp frameworks). If you know Swing, it'll be much easier to learn JSF. To me, this seems wrong. Some of the examples given tonight had HTML in .java files (for custom renderers). Are we reverting back to Servlets? Is Sun making a mistake with JSF? How is it better than WebWork or Struts? It seems to me to be an over-designed product developed by a bunch of Swing addicts.

My first impression of JSF is that it's going to be harder to teach to newbies (vs. Struts). Everyone says it's a standard so the tools vendors will come through and make it easy. The tools vendors haven't done shit for JSP and JSTL IMO, so how is JSF different? It's a good idea, it just needs to be simplified - a lot. KISS.

Time to hook up the Senior J2EE Developers in Denver

This is nuts - I'm getting at least one call or e-mail per day from recruiters and/or friends in Denver. Rather than posting these positions here (with Rates), if you're a Senior J2EE Developer in Denver, let me know. I'm going to start a list of folks with skills like mine so I can hook some brutha's up! I have 2 right now - both for J2EE/Web stuff.

Here are my requirements to get on my list:

• Must know Ant, meaning you've written a build.xml file before. Having read Java Development with Ant is a huge plus.
• Blogging is a plus - it means you're interested in Java and sharing your ideas (implying that you think outside of work).
• You've used Eclipse or IDEA and use one or the other on a regular basis. This implies that you know a good IDE can improve your productivity.
• Must know XHTML and CSS. I do, and I said skills like mine.
• You're able to checkout AppFuse from CVS, build it and run "test-all" with success. README.txt is your friend.

I reserve the right to delete any of your e-mails and resumes, and to hook my friends up over other folks. I don't want to get a flood of e-mails, I'm just trying to hook up good folks with good jobs. If I can get the rates, I'll let you know what they are.

RE: IDEA vs Eclipse

I love Eclipse and always have. However, it kinda sucks on OS X. It is slow like Marcus says. Actually, it's a LOT snappier on my new PowerBook, but it's still much slower than it is on Windows. On Windows, it runs lickedy split and is by far my favorite IDE - because it *looks* like Windows more than anything. Inspired by Marcus's post, I'm willing to give IDEA another try on my OS X - I probably won't get enough time in the 30 day trial to appreciate it (or switch to it), but I'll make an attempt. BTW, I've actually heard that many of the "IDEA Rules" advocates actually got it for free - at least some OS projects' committers got a free copy. I'm sure if there was a 6 month trial version, and folks actually got addicted to it (like I am with Eclipse), they'd sell more copies. I'd pay for Eclipse right now if it weren't free.

Later: I already have one pet peeve - why can't I install IDEA in an "idea" folder rather than in "IntelliJ-IDEA-3.0.5". I install all my "tools" in /opt/dev/tools (i.e. /opt/dev/tools/eclipse) and this makes it very easy to tar xzf any new versions over old ones - and it just looks better. I hate when installers make you install their apps to a particular directory.

AppFuse Refactorings

I did some refactorings of AppFuse yesterday - inspired by an e-mail I received from Jon. I basically de-coupled my Actions from Hibernate - tossing around a connection object in the constructors of my Managers and DAOs (rather than the method signatures). A little more casting, but no noticeable performance difference. I'll upload the source shortly.

Update: - Source has been released.

Test driving the new PowerBooks

I called my local Apple Store today to see if they had any new PowerBooks in. They did (though they've sold out of their 15" with combo/super drives for the day), and now I'm here test-driving the 17" with 1.33 Mhz and 512 MB RAM. It wouldn't be right if I didn't compare this machine against these performance numbers. So here goes:

• Opening Eclipse (3.0 M2): 10 seconds
• Opening Photoshop (7.0.1): 8 seconds
• Running "ant rebuild" on Roller (0.9.7.3): 32 seconds (ooh, this actually beats the 2 GHz machine I had at Comcast, by 4 seconds).
• Running "ant clean package-web" on AppFuse (0.9.1): 21 seconds (3 seconds slower than the 2 GHz Pentium)

I'm not as disappointed as I thought I'd be. Good thing I left my wallet in the car!

PowerBooks aren't cheap

I priced my ideal 15" and 17" laptops this morning. 15"/1GB RAM/5400 RPM/Extra Battery/AppleCare is $3,702.00, 17" version of the same is $4,002.00. Not much of a difference for a couple more inches on the screen. Is this the only difference between the two - or does the 15" have Aluminum and the 17" is the same as my old 15"/667 PowerBook?

Boy is it tempting to get one, but I can't seem to justify it. The only thing I can come up with is that I really *want* one, no need though. The mind wants, the pocketbook doesn't.

Anyone know when they'll be available in the Retail Stores - I'd love to take one for a test drive.

SSL switching with web.xml

Craig McClanahan explains how to force SSL using settings in your web.xml. Pretty cool stuff, I guess I didn't realize that you could have a <security-constraint> without having an <auth-constraint>. This sure seems a lot more straight forward than using SSLExt or a custom tag library.