Raible Designs

Comparing JVM Web Frameworks at vJUG

A couple months ago, I was invited to speak at Virtual JUG - an online-only Java User Group organized by the ZeroTurnaround folks. They chose my Comparing JVM Web Frameworks presentation and we agreed I'd speak yesterday morning. They used a combination of Google Hangouts, live streaming on YouTube and IRC to facilitate the meeting. It all went pretty smoothly and produced a comfortable speaking environment. To practice for vJUG, I delivered the same talk on Tuesday night at the Denver Open Source Users Group.

The last time I delivered this talk was at Devoxx France in March 2013. I didn't change any of the format this time, keeping with referencing the Paradox of Choice and encouraging people to define constraints to help them make their decision. I did add a few new slides regarding RebelLabs' Curious Coder’s Java Web Frameworks Comparison: Spring MVC, Grails, Vaadin, GWT, Wicket, Play, Struts and JSF and The 2014 Decision Maker’s Guide to Java Web Frameworks.

I also updated all the pretty graphs (which may or may not have any significance) with the latest stats from Dice.com, LinkedIn, StackOverflow and respective mailing lists. Significant changes I found compared to one year ago:

2013 - A Year in Review

2013 was an amazing year: Trish and I got married, celebrated on a 'round-the-world honeymoon and invested in a new 4x4 VW Bus. I finally achieved my goal of vacationing 25% and I got to spend more than two months in the presence of my wonderful parents.

For this Year in Review post, I'll use the same format as I did last year:

• Professional
  • Speaking
  • Projects
• Personal
• 2014

Professional

For the last few years, I've generally had one client per year. That changed this year when my contract with Oracle ended in May. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to develop a cool dashboard application before I finished. I wrote about it in a four-part series.

You shouldn't have to worry about front end optimization

After writing yesterday's article on optimizing AngularJS apps with Grunt I received an interesting reply from @markj9 on Twitter.

I clicked on the provided link, listened to the podcast (RR HTTP 2.0 with Ilya Grigorik) and discovered some juicy bits at around 27:00. The text below is from the podcast's transcript at the bottom of the page.

Using Grunt with AngularJS for Front End Optimization

I'm passionate about front end optimization and have been for years. My original inspiration was Steve Souders and his Even Faster Web Sites talk at OSCON 2008. Since then, I've optimized this blog, made it even faster with a new design, doubled the speed of several apps for clients and showed how to make AppFuse faster. As part of my Devoxx 2013 presentation, I showed how to do page speed optimization in a Java webapp.

I developed a couple AngularJS apps last year. To concat and minify their stylesheets and scripts, I used mechanisms that already existed in the projects. On one project, it was Ant and its concat task. On the other, it was part of a Grails application, so I used the resources and yui-minify-resources plugins.

The Angular project I'm working on now will be published on a web server, as well as bundled in an iOS native app. Therefore, I turned to Grunt to do the optimization this time. I found it to be quite simple, once I figured out how to make it work with Angular. Based on my findings, I submitted a pull request to add Grunt to angular-seed.

Below are the steps I used to add Grunt to my Angular project.

AppFuse 3.0 Released!

The AppFuse Team is pleased to announce the release of AppFuse 3.0. This release is AppFuse's first release as a 10-year old and includes a whole slew of improvements.

• Java 7 and Maven 3 are now minimal requirements
• Replaced MyFaces and Tomahawk with PrimeFaces for JSF
  
  • Removed SiteMesh in favor of JSF's built-in layout support
• Added Wicket support
• Migrated from jMock to Mockito for tests
• Integrated wro4j and WebJars
• Migrated to Bootstrap 3 and defaulted to Bootswatch's Spacelab theme

In addition, this release includes upgrades to all dependencies to bring them up-to-date with their latest releases. Most notable are Spring 4, Spring Security 3.2 and Bootstrap 3. For more details on specific changes see the release notes.

What is AppFuse?
AppFuse is a full-stack framework for building web applications on the JVM. It was originally developed to eliminate the ramp-up time when building new web applications. Over the years, it has matured into a very testable and secure system for creating Java-based webapps.

Demos for this release can be viewed at http://demo.appfuse.org. Please see the QuickStart Guide to get started with this release.

If you have questions about AppFuse, please read the FAQ or join the user mailing list. If you find any issues, please report them on the users mailing list. You can also post them to Stack Overflow with the "appfuse" tag.

Thanks to everyone for their help contributing patches, writing documentation and participating on the mailing lists.

We greatly appreciate the help from our sponsors, particularly Atlassian, Contegix, and JetBrains. Atlassian and Contegix are especially awesome: Atlassian has donated licenses to all its products and Contegix has donated an entire server to the AppFuse project.

JavaOne 2013: Videos of Presentations on Parleys

This year marked my first time speaking at JavaOne. It seems to have gone well, especially since audience feedback resulted in a JavaOne Rock Star Award. I'm very humbled to be listed with some really great speakers. Congratulations to all the other Rock Stars - as well as everyone that had the courage to submit and present a talk this year!

If you happen to watch these and have any feedback, please leave a comment or send a tweet to @mraible.

A Webapp Makeover with Spring 4 and Spring Boot

A typical Maven and Spring web application has a fair amount of XML and verbosity to it. Add in Jersey and Spring Security and you can have hundreds of lines of XML before you even start to write your Java code. As part of a recent project, I was tasked with upgrading a webapp like this to use Spring 4 and Spring Boot. I also figured I'd try to minimize the XML.

This is my story on how I upgraded to Spring 4, Jersey 2, Java 8 and Spring Boot 0.5.0 M6.

When I started, the app was using Spring 3.2.5, Spring Security 3.1.4 and Jersey 1.18. The pom.xml had four Jersey dependencies, three Spring dependencies and three Spring Security dependencies, along with a number of exclusions for "jersey-spring".

Upgrading to Spring 4
Upgrading to Spring 4 was easy, I changed the version property to 4.0.0.RC2 and added the new Spring bill of materials to my pom.xml. I also add the Spring milestone repo since Spring 4 won't be released to Maven central until tomorrow.

<dependencyManagement>
    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-framework-bom</artifactId>
            <version>${spring.framework.version}</version>
            <type>pom</type>
            <scope>import</scope>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>
</dependencyManagement>

<repositories>
    <repository>
        <id>spring-milestones</id>
        <url>http://repo.spring.io/milestone</url>
        <snapshots>
            <enabled>true</enabled>
        </snapshots>
    </repository>
</repositories>

Devoxx 2013 + a Nordic Countries Speaking Tour

Two weeks ago, Trish and I boarded a flight for one of our favorite conferences: Devoxx. After a brief layover in Frankfurt, we arrived in Amsterdam and took a train to Antwerp. Within hours, we'd settled into our hotel near the center of Antwerp and strolled over to the dungeonous, yet cozy, Pelgrom restaurant. We were hoping for a delicious dinner, but found much more. We ran into James Ward, Dick Wall and a number of other enthusiastic speakers from the conference. Since I had to speak the next day, we didn't stay long, but we did share a number of laughs with some great people.

Tuesday (November 12), was a University Day at Devoxx, and I had my talk that afternoon. I spent a couple hours finishing up my talk that morning, then grabbed a taxi to head to the conference. I was honored with the opportunity to speak in Room 8, which is a huge theater that holds several hundred people.

I presented a lengthened version of The Modern Java Web Developer presentation I did early this year (at Denver's JUG and JavaOne). Based on your feedback, I chose to do deep dives on AngularJS, Bootstrap and Page Speed. I've always enjoyed speaking at Devoxx because attendees are so enthusiastic and passionate about the conference. I received an immense amount of feedback, both in praises and criticisms. The critics indicated there were too many buzzwords and not enough substance. Others complained that the AngularJS Lipsync that I did was too deep.

I made sure to review and process everyone's comments, and then used them to improve the presentation throughout the following week. I learned to elaborate on the fact that many of the technologies were important to know about, but not important to know through-and-through. I made sure to mention that the use of CoffeeScript and LESS is often limited (or embraced) by team members and their willingness to try new things. If you're not writing thousands of lines of JavaScript or CSS, it probably doesn't make sense to use these languages. Furthermore, if your team members are struggling to write JavaScript or CSS, introducing a new language is probably not the best thing. I also reminded people to be skeptical of new technology, but also to be open-minded and give everything a chance. The 10-minute, download-and-try test, is a great way to do that.

You can find my presentation below, download it from my presentations page, or view it on SlideShare.

Within this presentation, there are links to each of the deep dives. The last two are screencasts that I added audio to a few days ago.

Bootstrap 3 | AngularJS Deep Dive | Page Speed Demo

The Modern Java Web Developer Bootcamp at Devoxx

At this year's Devoxx, I'll be delivering my first University session. University talks are in depth presentations of 3 hours (= 75m + 30m break + 75m). I'm calling it The Modern Java Web Developer Bootcamp and my goal is to teach people some new concepts and techniques that'll make them more valuable developers. My session's hashtag is #dv13-javaweb$ to exemplify the important takeaways: Java is back, web development is fun and you can make more money.

Three hours is quite a bit longer than I'm used to, but I'm confident I can fill the time with lots of knowledge. My plan is to enhance my presentation from JavaOne and add a few demos. Currently, I'm thinking of developing the following additional content:

• HTTP Overview (with SPDY)
• Polymer and Web Components
• Bootstrap 3 Overview
• HTML5 Storage
• API Framework Comparison (Play, Grails, Dropwizard)
• Load Testing
• Performance Monitoring (including RUM)
• Internal Cloud Options

For demos, I'd like to show a few that provide real value to attendees and teach them how to do something they haven't done before. The ones below are candidates I'm thinking of, and I'd like to pick three for the final presentation.

• Browser Tools Demo
• Developing with Bootstrap Demo
• AngularJS Demo
• Refactor an app from Spring to Java EE, no XML, all Java 8
• Page Speed Improvement Demo
• Security Demo (add LDAP to Angular app + OWASP ZAP)

If you could pick three real-time tutorials from the choices above, which ones would you choose?

I'm also thinking of adding some stories about impressive loads served with very little hardware and real-time dashboard development. If you have a story about either of these, please let me know. I'd be happy to credit you (or your company) and talk about any technical implementation details you're willing to provide.

Writing for InfoQ

A little over six months ago, I received an email from Charles Humble, the lead Java editor at InfoQ.com. He asked me to comment on his Struts 1 Reaches End Of Life. I happily obliged, and my thoughts were published as part of the article.

After that brief interaction, Charles and I started talking about the possibility of writing for InfoQ. I said I'd be interested and things have been progressing steadily from there. Today, I'm proud to announce that my first InfoQ article has been published. If you missed JavaOne, or attended but didn't see the keynotes, you might enjoy reading JavaOne 2013 Roundup: Java 8 is Revolutionary, Java is back.

If you did attend JavaOne, or simply watched the JavaOne Keynotes and found something particularly intriguing, I'd love to hear about it.