Playing around with Appfuse again

Posted on March 27th, 2008 by arnljot.
Categories: appfuse.

After a long time away from Appuse I recently had to download it again to make a POC.

It’s really coming along real nicely, I love the ready to go DAO layer, and I was quickly able to produce the POC. My only snag was the bug with full source. It doesn’t work currently. I’ve posted it to the userlist, but hasn’t been able to follow up with more debugging details.

Will have to do that soon.

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Appfuse tuning

Posted on January 4th, 2007 by arnljot.
Categories: appfuse, java.

This was a really interessting post regarding how to tune Appfuse.

Seems like it’s worth to keep in mind when building webapps on any framework stack, regardless of form size.

The post can be found here.

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Hibernate and XDoclet - hassle with one-to-one

Posted on September 6th, 2006 by arnljot.
Categories: appfuse, java.

I’m using appfuse 1.9.3, and it seems that the bundled XDoclet 1.3-SNAPSHOT has a bug in it’s one-to-one mapping generation, I think it’s an old X-Doclet bug?

Seems like I need to find a way around this, frustrating since these are the things that are supposed to be simple. Trying to surf XDoclet websites could suggest that the projects (XDoclet1 and 2) have been ‘hibernating’ for quite some time now…

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myRiga and JMock

Posted on September 5th, 2006 by arnljot.
Categories: appfuse, java.

I’ve been studying up on JMock, the reason is that today I’ll be holding a presentation at Avenir on using mock objects.

I’ll post my short powerpoint later on this site. It’s mostly my [limited] experiences with JMock, and leads to good articles on JMock and testing using mock objects.

The case I’ll be using is “myRiga”, an application I’ve been asked to make for a company trip we’ll do later in October.

myRiga is an appfuse based application.

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Tapestry 4 and forms

Posted on September 5th, 2006 by arnljot.
Categories: appfuse, java.

I rarely need to make “static” forms, like “edit userprofile” in Appfuse.

Most of the time I do not know what the instance of the form will look like, because it’s determined by user selections and what’s in the database.

This is a pain… But not impossible, so far I’ve cheated by passing an id to the state of my dynamically built form to the rewind cycle of my page so that I don’t get a “stale link exception”. But I feel like it’s cheating.

In the Tapestry 4 API it says I should inject an application state object instead of using a visit object, is it available in “pageBeginRender” and how is it done?

I need to find out, the way I’m doing it now is surely not “best practice”.

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Tapestry 3.0.4 upgrade to version 4

Posted on June 26th, 2006 by arnljot.
Categories: appfuse, java.

I started upgrading my application “Servibase” today. That was a nightmare… Tapestry really doesn’t care much for backward compatibility. I had to fix the cookie implementations (to the better in T4). And just about all element tags in component and page descriptions had to be exchanged for new tags with new attribute names.

Also the implementation of page and component classes had to be updated, as Tapestry 4 for some reason didn’t call my properties the same way. I suddenly had a forest of “NullPointerExceptions” giving runtime “BindExceptions”. But that was due to sloppy programming in the first place I guess.

Also T4 uses “hivemind” and the enhanced classes don’t belong to the same package as the abstract class. So I had to tweak the logging strategy as well so that I had some debug. Got to look into the “hivemind” way to do it, so my code become nicer :)

I really like T4, but it worries me that they have so little respect for backward compatibility. I think this is the only upgrade I will ever do in my application, at least when Tapestry is concerned.

Also several articles on the net spoke of the “Tapestry way” to do things in terms of business logic, that it’s better to delegate it to services rather than having listener methods deal with it in the pages like my Tapestry/Spring/Hibernate 3.0.4 application did. I’ll have a sideways glance at it. But I don’t expect that I’ll put in the effort to do that also, after having worked till 4am each morning to do the upgrade.

Maybe I shouldn’t have put in such long hours this weekend, I found my self spending 3 hours looking for a bug to why T4 didn’t find my component “ProductInfo” in the namespace, only to realise that of course; it’s called “ProjectInfo”! One litre of coffee didn’t seem to help the bug hunt. ;-P

Too bad I’m not using java 1.5 yet. I’d really love to use annotations, seems like a real tiger of a feature… :-P

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