Matt Raible's blog

In Boise, heading to Florida on Thursday

Matt Raible — Tue, 5 Dec 2006 17:45:21 -0600

This week, I'm in Boise, Idaho teaching a Spring Fundamentals course. It's cold here, just like it is in Denver this week.

I'm heading out early Thursday morning (Bryan Noll is teaching a Hibernate class that day) for The Spring Experience in Florida.

I'll be staying in West Palm Beach, so hopefully the commute to the show won't be too bad. My AppFuse session is on Saturday night, but I'm expecting a light showing after Terracotta's recent announcement. Jonas Bonér is doing a session at the same time as mine.

ICEfaces goes open source (MPL License)

Matt Raible — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 14:22:59 -0600

As far as JSF Ajax frameworks are concerned, there seems to be two major players: Ajax4jsf and ICEfaces. I don't know that either one is a true open source project (where developers are from multiple companies), but Spring isn't either, so I don't know that it actually matters. I think it interesting that both products don't seem to care about capitalization, but I digress.

Today, ICEsoft announced they've open-sourced ICEfaces. Was this inspired by Java going GPL?1 I doubt it, these things take time and it's likely that ICEsoft had this one in the cooker for quite a while. I do think it's interesting that the major JSF component vendors (Oracle, Exadel and now ICEsoft) have all open-sourced their products. Must be a tough market out there.
Apparently, ICEfaces works with Facelets, so it should work with AppFuse and Equinox. Looking through ICEfaces documentation and sample apps, they seem to be missing a straight-forward "here's how to integrate it into your existing application" guide. They do show how to modify your web.xml, but there doesn't seem to be a short, concise guide to what configuration settings you need to add to your faces-config.xml. I was somewhat motivated to write such a guide this morning, but lost motivation quickly as I realized it might be quite the effort. If someone wants to create the Maven bundles for ICEfaces, I'll try to carve out some time later this week to write up instructions for integrating ICEfaces into Equinox and AppFuse.

Unfortunately, integrating ICEfaces into your project is only the beginning. The hard part is choosing which is a better Ajax toolkit: ADF Faces/Trinidad, Ajax4jsf or ICEfaces? Trinidad and ICEfaces seem to be more about components, whereas Ajax4jsf is more about Ajaxifying regular ol' JSF components. So I think Ajax4jsf still remains, and ICEfaces looks like a better out-of-the-box component library than Trinidad. I guess time will tell.

Update: I forgot to mention Infragistics NetAdvantage as a JSF Ajax framework. OpenLogic decided to use Infragistics in the project I started for them. I was able to get it working in AppFuse fairly easily, but it's kinda ugly from a setup standpoint. They require you to copy a bunch of static files (images, stylesheets and scripts) into your project. Yech.

[1] Stephen O'Grady has an excellent writeup on this: And Sun Said, Set My Java Free: The Open Source Q&A.

The Colorado Software Summit 2006

Matt Raible — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 10:59:34 -0500

Bill Dudney and I are both speaking at the Colorado Software Summit this week. Bill is speaking about Cayenne and Ajax+JSF, while I'm speaking on AppFuse and Migrating from Struts 1 to Struts 2.

When we arrived, we had great weather up here and last night it got even better.

I attended a fair amount of sessions at this show, you can search my blog for "css 2006" to see my posts from the show.

Spring Forward 2006

Matt Raible — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 15:42:38 -0500

This week, I'm on the road speaking at the Spring Forward 2006 Conference. I've posted a number of blog entries on raibledesigns.com with my presentations, as well as notes from attending other sessions.

Spring 2.0 is definitely hot right now. I've updated our courses for it, as well as AppFuse and Equinox. Both applications have their updates in source control, not in current releases.

Spring 2.0 is scheduled for release today.

Seven simple reasons to use AppFuse

Matt Raible — Tue, 8 Aug 2006 18:41:53 -0500

IBM developerWorks published my "Seven simple reasons to use AppFuse" article today. Here's a summary:

Getting started with open source tools for the Java™ platform such as Spring, Hibernate, or MySQL can be difficult. Throw in Ant or Maven, a little Ajax with DWR, and a Web framework -- say, JSF -- and you're up to your eyeballs just trying to configure your application. AppFuse removes the pain of integrating open source projects. It also makes testing a first-class citizen, allows you to generate your entire UI from database tables, and supports Web services with XFire. Furthermore, AppFuse's community is healthy and happy -- and one of the few places where users of different Web frameworks actually get along.

While you're there, you might be interested in reading the "Introduction to Spring 2 and JPA" tutorial. I don't know if we'll get JPA support into AppFuse 2.0, but it's certainly a possibility.

As far as AppFuse 2.0, here's the current structure I've started on for Maven 2:

appfuse
    - data
        - hibernate
        - ibatis
    - service
        - pom.xml
        - src
    - web
        - jsf
        - spring
        - struts
        - tapestry

After code is moved into the directory structure above (or completely re-written), I'd like to move to working on creating single module archetypes and multi-project archetypes (data, service, web) with Maven 2.

After getting the Maven 2 structure checked in, hopefully we can start looking at replacing AppGen. Scott Ryan has done a fair amount of work on this so far with his AppFuse Maven Plugin.

I plan on documenting the plan of attack and milestone features for 2.0 sometime this week.

If you'd like to comment on this entry, please do so on my other blog.

OSCON: A beautiful time of year in Portland

Matt Raible — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 10:59:48 -0500

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.

RE: What Web Application framework should you use?

Matt Raible — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 09:41:38 -0500

Tim O'Brien has an interesting post titled What Web Application framework should you use?. The first thing I noticed about this post is the permalink. It looks like he started with "Isn't Rails supposed to change...", which makes me wonder what the rest of the title was. In this post, he rags on Java Web Frameworks and the lack of a clear path for choosing one. He ends up predicting that many will stick with Struts 1.x (poor bastards) and those that aren't tied to Java should move to Rails. I don't have a problem with folks moving to Rails, but I would like to comment on the Java Web Framework space and Tim's comments. Read More »

Seam 1.0

Matt Raible — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 17:35:17 -0500

It's great to see the release of Seam 1.0. Seam is similar to many full-stack frameworks like Rails, Rife and AppFuse in that it gives you all the pieces you'll need to build a kick-ass web application.

I've blogged my thoughts on Seam before, so there's no need to do that again. I like the idea, especially the lack of interfaces and the 3-files-for-each page idea. However, I don't know that this concept will fly with Java developers. I agree there's a need to simplify, but many of us are mesmerized by the de-coupling that Spring gives us. So now we're programming to interfaces, and every-so-often swapping implementations. I don't know that we can switch to this simpler model. And then there's the "EJB" thing. I think there will be a fair amount of developers that don't use EJB3 simply because it has the "EJB" name. The best thing the EJB Expert Group could have done for EJB3 would be to give it a new name.

The other thing I worry about with Seam is that it wasn't developed from an existing application. AFAIK, it didn't get extracted from a real-world application that had all the problems that Seam solves. I know that Gavin is a smart guy, and he's probably seen these problems in the real world, but there's nothing like developing a real-world application with a technology - and then extracting the framework from that.

In reality, I'm probably jealous. Seam has some really cool features, JBoss has done a great job of marketing it, and it seems to be a really cool way to develop applications. If I'm going to make AppFuse a direct competitor to Seam, it's gonna be quite the uphill battle.

AppFuse 1.9.2 Released

Matt Raible — Tue, 6 Jun 2006 16:46:38 -0500

This release includes CSS Framework integration, EMMA code-coverage support and AppGen sub-package support.Thanks to the CSS Framework Design Contest Winners, Doug Hays and Mika Göckel for their help with this release. Read More »

Studio7Designs

Matt Raible — Wed, 3 May 2006 07:06:01 -0500

Andreas Viklund is the original designer of this site's layout. Last night he pointed out a cool new site that showcases another set of open source web design templates.

Aran and Pat, also known as open source template designers Nautica and snop, have launched a new and extremely pretty website: Studio7Designs.com. The site is announced as a "network of professional designers", and it will show off both open source website templates and stock photography. Pat is one of the designers whose work I truly admire (see the Lazy Days template to understand why) and Aran's Nautica-templates are great examples of the simple design style that I like, so the site is well worth a visit.

Like Andreas, I think their Lazy Days template is truly awesome. I wonder how hard it would be to port it to the CSS Framework?