Raible Designs

Wednesday February 04, 2004

ActionForms: Struts' bastard child Folks that rag on Struts seem to point to ActionForms as one of its major design flaws. I've been slightly frustrated with ActionForms this week, but overall, I think they're a good thing. It's possible my ActionForm affection is misguided. The major reasons I like them is because I believe they allow me to do stuff that is not possible in other web frameworks. I definitely could be wrong though, so I'm hoping the other framework authors/users will speak up and say "My framework does that!" Specifically, I'm talking to the WebWork, Tapestry, JSF and Spring folks.

I do wish that I could throw my POJOs up to my UI, so I hope the following things are possible with the WTJS frameworks. It would simplify things if I didn't need to transform POJOs -> ActionForms (particularly with Hibernate).

• Validation and re-displaying the user's entered values. I love Struts' Validator. It's great how I can generate the validation.xml file with XDoclet and have a "required" struts.validator tag right next to a hibernate not-null="true" tag. Two questions:
  
  1. Can any of the WTJS frameworks re-display the user's entered values? Specifically, back into the input fields where the user entered them? I think this is important for useability.
  
  2. Do any of them have the ability to generate client and server-side validation, or at least declaratively write it in XML?
  
  I'd love to find a way to hack the Validator to allow you to define validation rules for a POJO and then use an Interceptor to validate it. I don't like how Spring requires you to write YAJC (Yet Another Java Class) to do validation.
• Handling checkboxes. The basic reason for the reset() method in ActionForms is to handle checkboxes. Since unchecked checkboxes don't send a value - there needs to be a way to set a boolean back to null. I'm sure all of the WTJS frameworks support checkbox handling, I just want to make sure - and frankly - I'd like to learn a little more about how each framework handles it.

I guess there's only two reasons I like ActionForms - the major one being the ability to specify (and generate) my client and server-side validation in XML. If I don't find this same slick feature in the other frameworks, I might have to do a bit of hacking to do the Interceptor with Validator thing - but hopefully I won't need to go there. Posted in Java at Feb 04 2004, 08:31:13 PM MST 25 Comments

[ANNOUNCE] Hibernate 2.1.2 Released Hibernate 2.1.2 has been released. Looks like they fixed a whole sh*tload of bugs. Read the Release Notes or Download. All tests pass in AppFuse! Posted in Java at Feb 04 2004, 04:18:51 PM MST 1 Comment

apache.org won't let e-mail through from comcast.net I don't use my comcast.net account, but I do use their SMTP server to send e-mail. I've sent a few messages to the tomcat and ant mailing lists in the past couple of days, and they've never shown up. Today, I realized why. Howard says:

...it appears that there's a disruption which is preventing mail originating at comcast.net's domain from reaching apache.org's. This may have been going on for a week (its probably related to the massive amount of e-mail from the MyDoom virus).

I guess I'll have to resend those suckers from my Yahoo account. Even with this disruption, I still think Comcast's broadband is the best in the business. Who can complain about 2 MB/sec (downloads average 250K/sec)? OK, maybe it's not that today, but usually it's pretty close. Posted in The Web at Feb 04 2004, 01:41:14 PM MST Add a Comment

Running AppFuse on Orion (a.k.a. OracleAs) Mike Lawrence has been beating his head against the wall trying to get AppFuse running on Oracle App Server for the last few days. The good news is he finally got it working and he's written up some documentation. I wiki-fied his contribution and now I present you [How To run AppFuse on Orion|AppFuseOnOrion]. Enjoy! Posted in Java at Feb 04 2004, 10:18:41 AM MST 2 Comments