Raible Designs

AppFuse Videos updated for 1.9.3

I've created new AppFuse demo videos that are up-to-date with version 1.9.3. The setup video is around 3 minutes, and the AppGen one is around 3:30.

New Project and Feature Tour


Code Generation with AppGen

If you have any suggestions on making the above movies more effective, please let me know. I used SnapZ Pro X to shoot them and QuickTime Pro to compress.

In other AppFuse news, a couple of new tutorials have been written:

• Integrating Compass with Spring MVC by Chris Barham
• Integrating Compass with JSF by Matt Stine
• Integrating AppFuse and AjaxTags autocomplete by Luciano Fiandesio

Props go out to Chris, Matt and Luciano for taking the time to write these detailed tutorials. Well done gents!

Driving to OSCON: Day 2

This morning, Jim and I slept in a bit and hit the road around 11. The time zone changed on us after an hour and all of a sudden, we were destined for Portland in good time. It was an enjoyable drive through the Columbia Gorge with some beautiful scenery.

We arrived in Portland around 4:15 p.m. and checked into our hotel across the street from the Oregon Convention Center. It didn't take us long to realize the wireless sucked (b/c it's trying to suck off the free wireless next door).

We hopped on "the Max" and headed into downtown Portland. We found the local Rock Bottom Brewery, found out they didn't have wireless, and ended up at Jax Bar. They have free wireless and cold Guinness. You couldn't ask for much more.

Driving to OSCON: Day 1

Today, Jim and I began our road trip to OSCON. We got up early and were able to get out of Denver around 5 a.m. We stopped at 5 p.m. in Boise, Idaho. We drove around town, found some swanky hotel, and settled in for the night. We've been enjoying free wireless and Deschutes Mirror Pond Ale in our hotel bar for the last couple of hours.

Wyoming was definitely lacking scenery, as was Utah and most of Idaho. We made the Wyoming border by 11 and Idaho by 2. It's been a great trip so far. It looks like we have 7 hours left until we arrive in Portland. Below is a nice picture of Boise I found on Flickr.

Glacier Park

James Duncan Davidson recently took a road trip through Montana. In particular, he journeyed through Glacier, Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks. It's a similar trip to the one I'm about to embark upon. Pictures from his trip are available on Flickr.

I especially like his photos of Glacier Park. It's been far too long since I've visited this incredible place. Since it's a mere 2 hours from the cabin, I hope to add it to our list of "fun things we did in Montana."

Article on Equinox in Das Java Magazin

In AppFuse's IRC, I learned of a German article on Equinox. It sure looks cool - too bad I can't read it.

OSCON: A beautiful time of year in Portland

It's that time of year again for the excellent OSCON conference. Last year's show was great, but I spent far too much time in the conference, and not enough time enjoying summertime in Portland. I have a fondness for Oregon in the summer. I spent my last two years of high school in Salem (40 miles south of Portland) and remember loving life in August. This was likely due to the fact that it rained most of the rest of the year.

This year, I'm determined to enjoy Oregon more, and attend the conference less. I have a pass, and I'm doing a short 20-minute talk on "7 Simple Reasons to use AppFuse" (2:00 Wednesday in the Expo Hall). But that's about it. The rest of the week, I hope to enjoy myself and not be pummeled with any new technology or buzzwords. I might end up getting sucked into a session or two, but I'm hoping I don't. With any luck, I hope to visit both Edgefield and the Oregon Brewers Festival. Edgefield on Wednesday, Brewers Festival on Friday.

On Thursday, we're throwing another party at the Red Lion along with a host of other companies. Last year, we had a SourceBeat/Virtuas party at the Red Lion on the patio. The views of Portland were spectacular and it was definitely a good time. This year, it's a Geronimo Live! party. To register, please click on the image below.

Thanks to the many sponsors of this event - we appreciate your support.

Raible Road Trip #10 begins this Sunday. With any luck, I'll be able to snap some pics along the way and blog about our trip as we go.

Julie's House

For the last 3 months, Julie has been doing the "flip this house" thing. Today, it went on the market. Click on the image below to see the listing and pictures. She thinks the pictures look best in the 2D mode.

Nice work darlin!

Update: Believe it or not, it's now under contract. Sold in under 8 hours!

Validation Framework Consolidation

Looks like Jason Carreira has stepped up to the plate to try and consolidate the validation frameworks we have in Java. I'm sure it was a joint effort among many, but Jason's name is the only one I see on the JSR. I applaud this effort - it's definitely needed.

I've used Commons Validator, the XWork Validation Framework as well as Hibernate's Validator. While Commons and XWork work, the ability to annotate a class and validate it anywhere/anyhow is pretty cool. I reviewed an article a couple months ago that hooked Hibernate Validator into Spring MVC and Prototype for client-side validation. There's a lot of good stuff in this space - let's hope this JSR creates something even better. More than anything, let's hope it doesn't brush off client-side validation like JSF did.

In an ideal world, the RIFE, Spring MVC, Stripes, Struts, Tapestry and Wicket developers will all participate and allow JSR-303's result to be used as their framework's validation engine. I think it's a given that this will be usable with JSF.

DC Tech Meetup

Anyone out there still interested in a DC-Area tech meetup tomorrow night? If so, are there any good places near Tyson's Corner? We'd love to return to Brickskeller, but it'd be nice to avoid the 1.5 hour commute to get there. It's not that far, but traffic is something else around here.

Update: Vienna Inn (map) is the location - we'll be there around 8:00.

AppFuse 1.9.3 Released

This release is primarily a bug fix release, but also contains upgrades to several dependent libraries, including Acegi Security 1.0.1.

To install and configure AppFuse for development, see the QuickStart Guide. Thanks to all the sponsors who have contributed products and free hosting to the project.

• Download
• Release Notes
• Learn more about AppFuse

To see how AppFuse works, please see the following demos (username: mraible, password: tomcat):

• 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 JIRA.

Note: If you're building AppFuse on Linux, you should be aware of some non-English encoding issues. The solution is to add the following to your ~/.bashrc file.

export LC_CENGINE=en_US
export LANG=en_US
export LANGUAGE=en_US