Raible Designs

Biled Again, this time because my design sucks

Looks like I've been biled again. Unlike the last time, this time Hani doesn't offer any specifics, he merely says that my OSS efforts don't do anything other than the "very very basics".

Java, specifically, goes a long way towards ramming down a set of design principles. Said principles are followed fairly blindly by most practitioners. The OSS world is awash with examples of people who have read the right books, but have absolutely no skill or talent at conceptualising or grokking the underlying principles behind the books. To them, the design pattern is an end goal, not a tool. To pick one example (out of thousands), look at Matt Raible's OSS efforts. It has inheritance! It uses PATTERNS! It is LIGHTWEIGHT! Yet, I'd argue that it's very badly designed (if you don't believe me, just try getting it to do anything other than the very very basics.)

I'm assuming that Hani is speaking about AppFuse and Equinox, because my other efforts in OSS are minimal (Roller, Display Tag, XDoclet and Struts Menu). The reason I'm writing this post is because I'm curious to know what Hani tried to do that didn't work? Was it AppFuse/Equinox that failed? Or was it the underlying framework? Did he try to do indexed properties with WebWork or modify build.xml to deploy to Orion? Is the feature he's looking for something we can fix?

As a defense of my use of patterns, lightweight containers, etc. - it's not so much my doing that these happen to exist - they're more of a reflection on what user's want. It's a problem with Java developers in general - if you're not using patterns - users want to know why. Furthermore, most of the J2EE patterns in AppFuse are from the underlying frameworks, not from anything that I did.

As far as the design of AppFuse, I agree it could use some work. There's a lot of stuff in AppFuse that I don't use - so when I start a project with it - I usually rip out about 20-30% percent of it's features b/c I won't use them. Unfortunately, it's not that easy for others to do this b/c they don't know what they'll break if they remove a bunch of stuff. I'd like to move to a more modular, plug-in type architecture - but I have a feeling that that's the path to over-engineering. Even so, it would be pretty cool if it was possible to turn on/off features (even the use of a particular web framework) by changing a properties file.

WebWork Books

What is it about WebWork that makes it so hard to write books about? I remember talking to Kris Thompson (a.k.a. the guy that quit blogging) last summer about WebWork in Action. At that time, it was "almost done". Over a year later and it's still "due out next month" (or is it done?). Almost as bad is Matthew Porter's WebWork Live, which was started late last year. I remember Matthew saying he expected to finish the initial version in March - and there's still not an ERP almost 10 months later.

Here's my guess: the Manning book has been done for months, but the publishing process takes months. As for Porter, my guess is he's too busy providing outstanding support at Contegix to work on the book. Any good conspiracy theories out there? Maybe WebWork has too many patterns that need to be documented?

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.

[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.

Wicket is the most widely used Java Web Framework

According to this post, Wicket is the most widely used Java web framework. While I believe his statements are true, IMO it's only true in the context of this guy's post. My guess is that most of the folks that read his post were Wicket users, or somehow the Wicket Team got wind of this and told users to e-mail this guy. The main reason I don't believe that Wicket is the most popular is because it's so new. I do think it's an up and coming framework that may become the most popular, but I don't think it's there yet.

So, to answer this question, I believe that claiming Wicket to be the most widely is Just Good Guerilla PR. To put some numbers behind that, here's some graphs showing mailing list traffic for the various Java web frameworks.

Granted, these are just indicators of the number of users - but I believe they are a good indicator. One interesting note about these stats is that Wicket's mailing list traffic has increased significantly in the past few months. Ironically, here's what one of the Wicket developers had to say about this statistic about a month ago:

... who says having a lists that has a lot of traffic is a good thing? It might just as well be an indication of a too-hard-to-understand framework having insufficient documention.

In the past couple of months, I've spoke in front of 25+ Java developers on 4 different occasions to talk about web frameworks. I've asked those developers which frameworks they've used, or plan on using. Struts is still the most widely used, with WebWork and Tapestry the least used. Surprisingly, JSF seemed to be getting no traction among the the audiences I spoke to. Even more surprising (to me at least) was that the most popular web framework continues to be the in-house framework. The overwhelming majority of the developers I've talked to aren't even using open-source web frameworks.

Equinox on Resin 3.0.14

Yesterday I moved demo.raibledesigns.com from Kattare to Contegix. The main reason I moved is because Contegix is much more responsive when I have issues, as well as Kattare's server was incredibly slow to startup Tomcat. The move went pretty smoothly, but I did run into a couple issues - caused by moving from Tomcat 5.0.28 to Resin 3.0.14. The issues were only in one application - the MyFaces version of Equinox.

The first issue was that the corejsf-validator.jar that I'm using (for client-side validation) contained an invalid TLD file. It was easy enough to fix as it was missing a <short-name> element. This is the 2nd issue I've found with this library - obtained from David Geary's Core JSF book. The first issue is that Spring's Ant-style patch matching doesn't work when this JAR is in the classpath. Anyone out there using a better (less buggy) library for client-side validation in JSF?

The 2nd issue was that MyFaces depends on commons-el.jar, which is shipped with Tomcat. Not so with Resin. Adding this JAR to my WEB-INF/lib directory solved the problem. I've committed both changes to CVS.

Below is a full listing of the sample apps I have installed on this server. The one app that I didn't move is Struts Resume. I'll be moving that one to appfuse.org today.

• Data Grid Tag
• Equinox (Spring+Hibernate)
• Equinox (MyFaces + Hibernate)
• Equinox (Struts + Hibernate)
• Equinox (Tapestry + Hibernate)
• Equinox (WebWork + Hibernate)
• MyUsers
• Struts Menu
• Tapestry's Workbench
• WW2 Tutorial

I'm open to adding more, so let me know if you have one you'd like hosted. Of course, I reserve the right to refuse suggestions based on my interest in the functionality they're demonstrating.

Struts Ti

I heard about Struts Ti at OSCON, and after googling a bit today, I've discovered a bit more. Here's a bit about the project from Don Brown's proposal on the Struts Developers Mailing List.

Struts Ti is a simplified Model 2 framework for developing webapps which allows the developer better access to the underlying servlet/portlet environment. It serves a niche of web applications that don't want the additional complexity of server-side components and verbose configuration, yet want the structure and controller features of a modern web framework. Struts Ti builds on the directions of Struts 1.x, yet re-implements the framework to provide a clean slate for the next generation of Struts Ti. It aims to combine the simplicity of Ruby on Rails and NanoWeb, the refinement of WebWork 2, the tool-friendly authoring and Page Flow of Beehive, and the lessons learned from Struts 1.x.

The key word for Struts Ti is simplicity. Ideally, Struts Ti should approach Ruby on Rails levels of easy of use, yet scale up to large applications providing a smooth transition to JSF/Shale if desired.

More information can be found at https://www.twdata.org/projects/struts-ti.

[OSCON] Spring MVC vs. WebWork Smackdown

Matthew Porter and I's Spring MVC vs. WebWork Smackdown presentation was a lot of fun this morning. We had a boxing bell (that I got off eBay) and had a good time ragging on the two frameworks. The only surprise was that Matthew actually ran some metrics on the Spring MVC vs. WebWork code in AppFuse and pointed out that the WebWork version required 25% less code than the Spring version. Oh well. The hard part about this presentation for me was trying to defend Spring MVC and saying it's better than WebWork. Matthew obviously felt strongly that WebWork was the better framework, whereas I like them both.

On the downhill slope

Now that I've completed 4 out of the 5 days of training out here, I'm really starting to enjoy San Francisco. Of course, I miss my family and friends back home - but the students I'm training have been very hospitable and enjoyable to work with. They even invited me to join them at Zebulon last night for a "going away" party for one of the team members. I was happy to go, but got scared and left after the car bombs started flowin'. It was weird being at Zebulon and not seeing any Tangosol or Solarmetric monkeys (case in point).

Last night, I had the pleasure of dining with Crazy Bob and his woman at a very cool restaurant down by the bay. It was fun talking about how WebWork sucks and Google is a horrible place to work. Bob's work life seems to be pretty horrendous, but the new baby in a few weeks should turn things around. Good luck you two - I wish you the best.

The weather here is awesome. It seems to hover between 60 and 75, which is perfect IMO. Denver weather sounds awful right now. A good quote from Jason: "It's like I went to sleep Tuesday night and woke up in Phoenix."

One of the fun parts of class today was sharing IDEA tips. The good ones I learned were 1) use the pin icon on the panels to auto-close them when you're not using them (Command+1 to re-open the Project pane) and 2) install the Rearranger Plugin to control where your getters and setters are generated. The only tips I had to offer were Command+N, Command+Shift+N and Command+E - which most IDEA users already know. A lot of folks didn't know about Command+E (recent files), so that was likely my only contribution. Another good one I learned was Command+Shift+Alt+N (variable search). With all of the shortcuts I'm learning for IDEA, it's going to become harder and harder to keep using Eclipse. Got another useful shortcut? I'd love to hear about it!

Scaling with Rails

Whenever I talk to developers in the Java community about Rails, the first question out of their mouth is usually "But can it scale?" Today, David has written a nice post titled It's boring to scale with Ruby on Rails.

The one thing that I see time and time again is that Java developers don't seem to realize that some of the highest traffic sites on the net are using LAMP stacks similar to what Rails advocates. IMHO, I don't think "Rails can't scale" is a valid argument. In fact, I don't know if there's any argument or way to put down Rails anymore.

As a developer, my guess is the rates for programming in Ruby developer are less than for programming in Java (unless you're a Ruby Superstar of course), so that's one reason not to program in it. However, since Rails is one of those new bright and shiny things, chances are you might be able to get high rates for it. As far as Enterprise Adoption of Rails, unfortunately I think that's still pretty far on the horizon. I think the hardest part is convincing management that they'll be able to find developers to support it. Mind you, I didn't say good developers, just developers. Period. This is information I've gathered from talking to my Java developer friends.

Try convincing a Fortune 500 company to program in Rails vs. Struts and they'll probably choose Struts because there are thousands of Struts Developers. Is this a good decision on their part? I don't think so. I think it's more important to hire smart people that can learn a technology, rather than hiring those that know a technology. Of course, if someone knows a technology really well, there's probably no harm in hiring them.

I think Rails can become a real contender in the Enterprise if managers can be convinced that it'll be easy to maintain Rails application. Remember that most of software cost is maintenance. Because of this, the whole "it's super productive to develop with" doesn't matter so much - does it? Are Rails applications easy to maintain? My guess is yes, but how do you convince CTOs and CIOs? Another thing I think Rails needs for Enterprise Adoption is good tool support. Drag and Drop type of stuff. Why? Because management loves that stuff (because then they can develop apps) and it's a great sales tool. ASP.NET has been successful because of Visual Studio, not because of its ease-of-use and simple syntax.

Will I learn Rails and use it to develop applications? I certainly hope to, but it's hard enough convincing companies to use something other than Struts - so I don't know if I'll have much luck in selling Rails. The one cool thing about my new job at Virtuas is its an open source company, not just a Java open source company. This opens the doors for me to learn about Rails (and others) and compare them to Java Web Frameworks.

Update: Aaron Rustad has written an interesting article for DeveloperWorks that compares Rails to Struts+Hibernate: Ruby on Rails and J2EE: Is there room for both?