Raible Designs

RE: Mock Shmocks!

After I finished reading Open Source Programming and all the of the feedback from my Mock Shmocks post, I've realized that I need to learn more about Mocks. I need to learn how to streamline my TDD process. It's just taking too long right now. So where do I go from here? AppFuse currently contains, from what I can tell, only integration tests. All the tests depend on the database or the container to run. It works great, and all of AppFuse's tests complete under 3 minutes, but obviously this time increases as the project grows. So should I remove some integration tests and replace them with unit (mock) tests? If so, which ones? Should UserDAOTest talk to the database, but LookupDAOTest only use a Mock? How do you decide which tests should be real (integration) and which tests don't need to be (mocks)?

If the answer is "create a unit tests to sit next to each one of your integration tests" - then that seems like a waste of time. Am I supposed to have 2 *Test.java classes for each real class? I need a book that'll explain all of this and make me the TDD guru I long to be.

Even if I figured out all the answers to the above questions - which package should I use? There's a whole slew of them: Mockrunner, MockObjects, EasyMock and jMock. How do you decide? It's easy when testing Java classes - you use JUnit. When you want to test servlets, you use Cactus. Why all the choices for Mock testing?

I've been bitten

I woke up in the middle of the night last night with a pounding headache and a clogged noggin'. I felt like shit, plain and simple. I killed my 4:00 a.m. alarm and slept until 9:00. I IM'ed in sick to work and I've been on the couch all morning. I still have a headache, and have lost all motivation to do anything computer-related. It's actually a nice feeling - I feel free, even with the headache.

Exposé for Windows

I love Panther's Exposé application. It's by far my favorite OS X application - I even find myself longing for it when using Windows. Could the wait be over? I stumbled upon WinPLOSION today, which looks (to me) to be Exposé for Windows. Anyone tried this thing. At $10, it's probably worth finding out if it works - but I'd thought I'd ask y'all first.

[Review] Java Open Source Programming

Today I finished reading Java Open Source Programming. It took me one week to read - and I only read about an hour a day. This book is nice to read - you can breeze through 20 pages in no time. I appreciate a quick-read technical book. I enjoyed the simplicity of this book, especially since I'm such a rookie at WebWork, SiteMesh and Mock Objects. I knew most of the Hibernate and XDoclet stuff, but I did manage to pick up a few tricks, and since it's the only book on Hibernate (that I know of), I'll refer to it when I need to do components or proxies. Overall, this book made WebWork and SiteMesh look like great technologies and I'm excited to start using them.

The sample app, PetSoar, continues the "call your persistence layer from your action class" that I've seen in all WebWork sample apps. I still don't know if this is a good idea, but since Actions aren't tied to the web, maybe it is. This means you put your business logic in your controllers (a.k.a. actions). Kinda breaks the whole controllers should only be controllers mantra, but whatever floats your boat. To be honest, in AppFuse, all the Managers (a.k.a. business layer) do is transfer POJOs to ActionForms, and then back again. The Managers are were my business logic should go, but I often find it easier to put it in my actions. I sense a paradigm shift - will the WebWork version of AppFuse only contain a "dao" layer and a "web" layer? Who knows - only time will tell.

One interesting thing I picked up is the different way that Dependency Injection (a.k.a. Inversion of Control) is handled in WebWork compared to how its handled in Spring. In Spring, all you need to do is add a setter (and local variable) to prepare a class for IoC. When using WebWork, you have to create an Interface that has the setter defined, and then your Action must implement that interface. If Spring can do it without an interface, why can't WebWork?

All in all, I enjoyed this book - though it didn't peak my interest as much as J2EE Design and Development. I think that's probably because Spring solves some issues I've had with AppFuse (binding interfaces and implementations), whereas this book doesn't really solve anything for me. As a WebWork newbie though, I do feel this is a good read. I also found myself saying "Wow, that's cool" a fair amount of times (re: SiteMesh and WebWork).

I was disappointed that i18n was not covered at all. I tend to always prepare my Struts apps for i18n (extracting text into a .properties file). However, in most cases, a 2nd translation has never been put in place. So, I bitch about the lack of i18n coverage, and I write my apps with i18n in mind, but it's never been used in any of the apps I've written. Maybe I should just quit doing i18n in my apps - it'd probably save an hour a week of development time.

So it comes down to this - if you don't know anything about WebWork, this book is a worthwhile read. If you know WebWork - I'm sure you'll be disappointed because it is written for newbies.

Next up, upgrading my programmer certification to 1.4 with the Sun Certified Programmer & Developer for Java 2 Study Guide.

A few thoughts on AppFuse

I've been thinking about how to structure AppFuse for the upcoming Spring and iBatis enhancements. These enhancements shouldn't require any directory structure changes. However, I've received some suggestions to change the common, ejb and web directory structure to be a little more inline with the tiers. So it would become something more like database, business and web (or dao, service and web). After thinking about this for the last couple of days, it seems to make sense. I picked up the notion of common from Erik Hatcher's JavaDevWithAnt, which I borrowed heavily from when creating AppFuse. Erik used common because this represented classes that would be included in both the web tier and the EJB tier. But since I (currently) don't plan on every adding EJBs to AppFuse, does it make sense? Even if I did, I'd probably only use SessionBeans, and those could easily fit into the service layer. The nice thing about moving the business layer (currently in web/**/services) to it's own directory is that it will get it's own JAR (with hardly any modifications to build.xml) and can be used outside of the webapp.

The nice thing about isolating the web directory to web-only classes is I can use Ant to replace any Struts-specific classes with WebWork or Tapestry. To prevent AppFuse from being cluttered with too many options, it'll ship with Struts out-of-the-box. If users want WebWork for their framework, they can download a WebWork version of the web-tier and run an Ant target that will replace all the Struts stuff with WebWorks stuff. It seems like the cleanest way to do web framework switching.

Another thing that might happen to AppFuse, caused by my enthusiasm to try out everything, is that it will contain too much stuff for a basic web application. It currently has security and user management built in, which is what most webapps need. I recently added in OSCache and Clickstream. OSCache is not enabled, but most webapps can probably use it somewhere. Clickstream is a different story. For most of the webapps I've built, this is not needed at all. Most of the apps are no more than 20 screens, and it's unlikely the client will care where people go the most. Another option that deserves ripping out is the idea of Struts' submodules. I tend to rip this out as the first thing when starting a new project. File Upload is something I've used rarely, so I should probably lose that feature too.

There are also other technologies that I've thought of adding to AppFuse, namely Quartz and Lucene. However, I've only used Quartz on 1 of my last 5 projects and Lucene on 2 - so obviously these might be considered bloat for a basic webapp. I think the best thing would be to implement these in AppFuse, on my own, and then document how I did it on the wiki (for an example, see diagramming build.xml with Vizant). If folks need to use it they can add it on their own. Documentation is always good, and if I can just document how to add stuff, I can certainly reduce the bloat.

Whaddya think - is it better to include options out-of-the-box or simply document them? Should I restructure the directories to match the tiers more?

Coldtags - I dig the product and the support

I noticed from reading JavaLobby's Weekly News that Coldtags has a new version:

Coldbeans Software announced the major new release of Coldtags suite. This suite provides 160+ custom JSP tags for common programming tasks faced by JSP developers. And now this suite includes custom tags similar to web controls in .NET framework.

Find out more here: http://www.servletsuite.com/jsp.htm

I currently use the Country tag and the State tag and they're awesome (simple, but still something I needed). One feature I'd like to see is XHTML compliance for these tags, so I send them an e-mail.

Any chance of making this (and statetag) XHTML compliant? It would basically involve allow assigning an "id" attribute ("style" would be great too) and changing SELECTED to selected="selected".

Lo and behold, I got a quick reply less than an hour later:

Hello Matt,

it will be done.

Best regards,
Coldbeans support

P.S. I would like to note that the wish list for any component is open. So, feel free to suggest new features/options etc. you or your clients need and we will add them to upcoming release. Your suggestions for new components are more than welcome also.

Sweet! Note the P.S. - send your suggestions if you have any.

One Hour Later: Both tags have been updated with new attributes, and it's now XHTML-compliant. ;-D

How blogging has helped me this morning

My early-morning blog reading comes through once again. First off, Charles explains how I should implement Remember Me. If understand him correctly, I basically need to create a new table (i.e. user_cookie) that has two columns: username and cookie_id - where cookie_id is a random 128 bit number. The key to his strategy is replacing the number with a new one everytime the user logs in. Why didn't I think of that? Thanks Charles!

Secondly, this Tweaking MySQL Primer (via Erik) has some good tips on MySQL. I'd prefer a more generic "tweak your database" howto that covered many databases, but this will have to do for now. I'm going to try a little OPTIMIZE tablename on this site in a few - it's it's down all morning, now you know why...

Lastly, what the hell are Erik and Rick Ross cooking up?

I spent five hours on the phone with Rick Ross (of Javalobby) on Saturday afternoon. I think we effectively fixed everything that is wrong in the world. Stay tunned. ;-)

WTF? 5 hours on the phone? I don't think I've spent 5 hours on the phone with anyone in my entire life. It must be good - or they're not very good communicators... ;-)

Alternative web frameworks for AppFuse

I've was thinking about the AppFuse Roadmap for a bit today - and it hit me. The hardest part of supporting frameworks like WebWork and Tapestry is going to be replacing the Struts features I'm confortable with. For WebWork, it should be fairly easy to replace Tiles with SiteMesh, but for Tapestry - does a templating framework even exist? Other things that might be hard to implement in Tapestry are the DisplayTag (although Erik Hatcher did mention it's easy to implement in Tapestry) and Struts Menu. I imagine doing something like implementing a menu with CSS/JavaScript isn't too hard in Tapesty - but can it be configured from an XML file and a Velocity template? Implementing these components into WebWork should be easy since it supports JSP, but Tapesty is a whole different animal. I've also heard that JSF already has a grid component - and the struts-faces library should allow me to use Struts Menu easily with JSF.

I guess the good news in all of this is that I will discover if this stuff is possible or not - instead of just wondering. If you do happen to know the answers off the top of your head - please let me know. The real question is - after all of this - which framework will I choose as my favorite. Stick around and read about my journey into these other frameworks from the perspective of a hardcore Struts developer and enthusiast. I don't plan on trying to prove that Struts is better - I just want to find the beauty of these other frameworks and report if it's all hype or actually true.

Win2VNC is very cool

I got the tip from Crazy Bob and decided to try it tonight. Win2VNC basically allows you to connect to a server (via VNC) and you can simply move your mouse onto that VNC-ed machine and voila - your mouse and keyboard are on that monitor. It's almost too cool to describe. The only issues I found where that it doesn't work well with multiple monitors. I have two monitors plugged into my XP desktop, and if I choose "West" as my direction (to switch to my PowerBooks monitor), then that works, but I can't get it onto my primary monitor - it only shows up on the 2nd monitor. The issue is better described on the user forums. The easy workaround is to go "North" to switch monitors. The other annoying bugs are no mouse wheel support and no Alt+Esc support. This thread has a few patches for this. The first patch I tried seems to work the best, with both Alt+Esc and wheel support. This other one has an installer, but Alt+Esc didn't work for me.

If you have a laptop sitting next to a desktop - you've got to try this software - it's what you've always wanted.

A Wiki to Watch

If you're a Java Blogger, you know about Erik's weblog. If you don't, you're living under a rock. Today, Erik introduced his wiki, which is likely to be a hotbed of good Tips and Tricks. I subscribed to his wiki RSS feed. I've seen issues with my wiki's RSS feed (it says there's updates when there really isn't), so I hope his works better. I didn't realize my Redman Skin got published, but oh well - the download is only 12KB. The name is probably a bad one since it's easy to change the color scheme from Red to other colors (just change the link colors). At my current client, I changed everything to green, and I have to say - it looks a bit better than the red. One thing I've been meaning to do to this wiki template is support for a tabbed menu, I just haven't gotten around to it.