Raible Designs

Wednesday August 10, 2005

First Magazine Article: Challenges in the J2EE Web Tier It's official - I've written (and published) my first article in a magazine. If you received the July issue of Java Developer's Journal, you'll see my article titled Challenges in the J2EE Web Tier.

Over the course of its life, the J2EE Web Tier has faced many challenges in easing Web application development. While it's a scalable, enterprise-ready platform, it isn't exactly developer-friendly. Particular challenges to Web developers include the need for a standard Web framework, compatible expression languages, and availability of components. Several Web frameworks have been developed to resolve these issues, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. This article discusses the unique challenges of the J2EE Web Tier and how various technologies have attempted resolve them. By learning from and competing with each other, these Web technologies play an important role in pushing the limits of excellence to produce ever-higher standards of Web application development.

Enjoy! Posted in Java at Aug 10 2005, 04:30:22 PM MDT 11 Comments

Failed upgrade to Struts 1.2.7 Yesterday I made an attempt to upgrade AppFuse to use Struts 1.2.7 instead of 1.2.4. Everything seemed to go smoothly until I started running my Canoo WebTests with JavaScript enabled. It turns out there's a major bug (IMO) in Struts 1.2.7 where the JavaScript rendered by Commons Validator can't handle the Struts' <form> tag in XHTML mode. I tried a nightly build (20050809), but it's not fixed there either, so I backed out the upgrade.

The interesting thing about Struts 1.2.7 is SpikeSource has certified this release. Are they not testing JavaScript as part of their certification test?

Another thing I attempted to upgrade yesterday was Canoo WebTest from build574 to build976. No dice - mainly because of issues with Prototype (I think). The worst part is everything works fine in a browser. Even worse is I still have a problem with build574, but it doesn't cause the tests to fail. Times like this make me wish Selenium was more polished and ready to use. I talked with some ThoughtWorkers last week and they said the Java driver is ready for a 1.0 release, but one of the committers wanted to make sure all language drivers were ready first (at least that's what I remember). Posted in Java at Aug 10 2005, 11:17:35 AM MDT 9 Comments