The folks at FeatherCast have just interviewed me about my training at the upcoming ApacheCon Europe. FeatherCast is the "unofficial podcast from the world of the Apache Software Foundation". Thanks are due to them for taking the time to interview the trainers who will be at ApacheCon Europe. I think this gives potential attendees an effective way of evaluating the training sessions and instructors.
My training session? In Amsterdam, I'll be doing a one day training on creating Ajax applications with Struts 2. Rather than go into all the gory details here, I suggest you pop over to FeatherCast and listen to the interview. It's about five minutes long, and it should give you a pretty good idea about whether the training is right for you.
Showing posts with label struts 2. Show all posts
Showing posts with label struts 2. Show all posts
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Struts 2 Ajax Training at ApacheCon Europe
I'm happy to announce that I'll be at the European ApacheCon conducting a one day training on doing Ajax with Struts 2. This short course will demonstrate how the Struts 2 framework makes Ajax development a natural, and easy, thing to do. The framework is no longer against you!
The training will be a hands-on, everybody codes affair. On route to learning how to do Ajax on Struts 2, we'll also see some best practice strategies that cover things like convention over configuration and Maven.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Struts 2 in Action, Book News
Struts 2 in Action, from Manning Publications, is now available in Spanish and German language editions. As one of the authors of this fine book, I am happy to see its increasing availability. It's also available on the Safari Bookshelf, if you are lucky enough to have an account on that fine resource.
Though I am unable to read Spanish or German, I can say that these editions hold to the same standard of quality as the original product. The German edition, in fact, is one of the best produced books that I've seen in recent years. It has a super durable cover and one of those integrated bookmarks sewn into the binding. Very classy.
Though I am unable to read Spanish or German, I can say that these editions hold to the same standard of quality as the original product. The German edition, in fact, is one of the best produced books that I've seen in recent years. It has a super durable cover and one of those integrated bookmarks sewn into the binding. Very classy.
Saturday, November 8, 2008
Struts 2 Tutorial Series
As the author of Struts 2 in Action, I'll be compiling information towards a second edition of Struts 2 in Action. One of the main focuses of this process will be a series of Struts 2 tutorials which I will publish on this blog.
Some of the topics that I am considering include:
Right now, I'm just announcing this upcoming series and asking for some reader input about what tutorials you'd like to see. Feel free to suggest tutorials that I have not included in the above list.
Some of the topics that I am considering include:
- zero configuration
- tools
- customizing the UI Component tags
- Ajax on Struts 2
Right now, I'm just announcing this upcoming series and asking for some reader input about what tutorials you'd like to see. Feel free to suggest tutorials that I have not included in the above list.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Fresh Sample Application for Struts 2 in Action
I've just sent the new version of the sample application over to Manning. I'm not sure how long it will take them to post it to the book page. But it shouldn't take long, day or two at the most I imagine. This new version features:
- Separate HelloWorld.war
- Cleaner source code
- Better comments
- Revised README
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Podcast of Battle of the Web Application Frameworks
Just a quick note to let you know that the podcast of the battle of the frameworks has been posted by the folks at Chariot Solutions; they're the ones that put on the Emerging Technologies conference in Philadelphia that I wrote about a while back. This panel discussion features luminaries from Rails, Seam, JQuery, Open Laszlo, Flex, and more. Entertaining as well as informative. Let me know what you think.
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Struts 2 Book -- Struts 2 in Action
I'm pleased to announce the publication of Struts 2 in Action, by Manning Publications, Inc. As one of the co-authors of this fine book, I'd like to recommend it to everyone. If you feel compelled, you can conveniently purchase the book via the link on the sidebar of this blog.
I'd summarize the book as follows. This is a complete introduction to Struts 2 that spares no details. If you read this book you will be able to go from zero to full speed. Most importantly, full speed will include an indepth understanding of how the framework works. We made sure to include full descriptions and analysis of all key components of the framework. Reading this book will give you the confidence and know-how to not only accomplish your daily development tasks but to take on such advanced tasks as customizing core componentry and building your own plug-ins.
Additionally, we threw in some popular topics like Spring and Hibernate integration, which are great. But, ultimately, I think the hallmark of this book is an indepth introduction that goes all the way on the details. If you read the book, please give us some feedback either in the Manning forums or as a comment on this blog. Enjoy!
I'd summarize the book as follows. This is a complete introduction to Struts 2 that spares no details. If you read this book you will be able to go from zero to full speed. Most importantly, full speed will include an indepth understanding of how the framework works. We made sure to include full descriptions and analysis of all key components of the framework. Reading this book will give you the confidence and know-how to not only accomplish your daily development tasks but to take on such advanced tasks as customizing core componentry and building your own plug-ins.
Additionally, we threw in some popular topics like Spring and Hibernate integration, which are great. But, ultimately, I think the hallmark of this book is an indepth introduction that goes all the way on the details. If you read the book, please give us some feedback either in the Manning forums or as a comment on this blog. Enjoy!
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Battle of the Web Application Frameworks
I recently spoke at the Emerging Technologies conference in Philadelphia. It's a great and growing conference that boasts low registration costs and high-value. I'd say perhaps 75% of the sessions are very informative. Most of the attendees I spoke with were psyched about the content of the sessions. If you get the chance, I highly recommend attending next year's event.
On the topic of my own session, I am glad to say that I "spoke", rather than shouted, screamed or threw chairs. While I am, of course, being slightly tongue in cheek, my speaking was a part of a panel that billed itself as a "main event" of sorts. People definitely came looking for blood. No blood was spilt, but the tenor was clearly up tempo, and the language sprinkled with color ( i.e. F-bombs ). I won't name names, but, apparently, the conference is going to publish a video or audio on their website.
After particpating in this panel, and, more importantly, spending a couple of days chatting with my fellow panelists about their various frameworks ( Seam, RoR, Struts 2, Open Laszlo, JQuery, Flex, etc. ), I realized a couple of obvious things about this whole "battle of the frameworks" concept. First of all, as far as the web application frameworks go ( we'll leave the rich client frameworks for another day ), while there are clearly differences between the frameworks, I'm convinced that, in a nutshell, they are pretty much all good choices.
I'm not saying that your choice doesn't matter, it does. But not in the way that people seem to expect. It would be nice to just say that one of them is the best and be done with it, but, unfortunately, it's not that simple. Let's take the Convention over Configuration issue as an example. Ruby on Rails has certainly made CoC popular. When I talk to developers on the street, rapid development time is what they always rave about. They want to talk about how fast they can build a web application. And that's about all they want talk about. I won't even go into the old school complaints about any sort of code generation ( a.k.a. scaffolding ), but I will skip on to the easier point that, in reality, all new frameworks, taking the lead of projects like RoR and Maven, will all boast high levels of CoC.
Struts 2, for instance, now sports a zero configuration mechanism which is basically the Struts 2 version of CoC. Combining that with the Struts 2 Spring and Hibernate integration provides you with high levels of CoC and a full stack. In other words, you can build an application, providing it follows the straight and narrow, in a very small amount of hours. Whoo hoo! This is in some ways very exciting and lots of people want to know about it. I'm planning to do a tutorial on Struts 2's zero configuration stuff in the near future. Keep your eyes out for that.
I don't want to go into more details about CoC, and only raise it to make the point that any recently minted framework, that has an active community of smart developers, will have absorbed the latest and greatest ideas of the domain. After the success of RoR, you're not going to find any new frameworks that don't support high levels of CoC. I'm afraid that this means that choosing a framework is just plain hard work. You'll probably have to investigate your options to the point of doing a bit of actual development on them.
But lot's of people liked the Battle of the Frameworks and said it was very helpful. I'll relate what I think was the most interesting sound byte. For me, I was just interested to here how the insiders themselves express the differences. Most of the heat was about RoR, not surprisingly, and they claim to have the best framework for *smart* developers. They believe that this is the halmark of their framework. Kind of like the "Ruby allows smart people to better express their smartness" argument. This is probably true ( though, not being all that smart or Ruby-fied, I can neither confirm nor deny it), but it certainly has a bit of the meta-physical cast to it.
Ultimately, I was just flat interested in the Ruby community's choice of this aspect, rather than the high speed dev time, as the best feature of their framework. They don't really boast about the rapid development time. There was even some suggestion that they don't like the way this particular aspect of the framework draws in the *wrong* crowd. This is very interesting actually. I'll have another post, as soon as I can do the research, on the "Rails Ghetto". A very interesting concept.
Those against RoR make accusations about performance. Search the web for Twitter and performance issues, you'll see what they are talking about. To me, this seems a rather foregone conclusion. The newer framework will always be vulnerable to performance issues. RoR has rolled their own persistence layer and web server, afterall. How could they not have an issue or two? Nonetheless, I would suspect that as long as the RoR community stays as active as it is, and filled with bright folks, these issues will go away.
Struts 2 gets accuses of being old. Well, what did you expect them to say? This is, however, patently untrue. As I've indicated, Struts 2 is a brand new framework that was recently born so it incorporates all the new stuff -- CoC, annotations and the like. Struts 2, speaking for itself, makes claims to being a better engineered piece of software. I personally think this is accurate ( I'm not a Struts committer and I wrote a book on Struts 2; this gives me both objectivity and insight, I would hope ). When pimping Struts 2, I always say that I think it's hallmark is the elgance and flexibility of its architecture. If something like the next Ajax comes along, which it will, and makes new demands of frameworks, I'm confident that Struts 2 will be able to respond with speed and grace. This is what you get from software engineering. Admittedly, this is not as sexy as CoC, but there's that too, if you like ;)
On the topic of my own session, I am glad to say that I "spoke", rather than shouted, screamed or threw chairs. While I am, of course, being slightly tongue in cheek, my speaking was a part of a panel that billed itself as a "main event" of sorts. People definitely came looking for blood. No blood was spilt, but the tenor was clearly up tempo, and the language sprinkled with color ( i.e. F-bombs ). I won't name names, but, apparently, the conference is going to publish a video or audio on their website.
After particpating in this panel, and, more importantly, spending a couple of days chatting with my fellow panelists about their various frameworks ( Seam, RoR, Struts 2, Open Laszlo, JQuery, Flex, etc. ), I realized a couple of obvious things about this whole "battle of the frameworks" concept. First of all, as far as the web application frameworks go ( we'll leave the rich client frameworks for another day ), while there are clearly differences between the frameworks, I'm convinced that, in a nutshell, they are pretty much all good choices.
I'm not saying that your choice doesn't matter, it does. But not in the way that people seem to expect. It would be nice to just say that one of them is the best and be done with it, but, unfortunately, it's not that simple. Let's take the Convention over Configuration issue as an example. Ruby on Rails has certainly made CoC popular. When I talk to developers on the street, rapid development time is what they always rave about. They want to talk about how fast they can build a web application. And that's about all they want talk about. I won't even go into the old school complaints about any sort of code generation ( a.k.a. scaffolding ), but I will skip on to the easier point that, in reality, all new frameworks, taking the lead of projects like RoR and Maven, will all boast high levels of CoC.
Struts 2, for instance, now sports a zero configuration mechanism which is basically the Struts 2 version of CoC. Combining that with the Struts 2 Spring and Hibernate integration provides you with high levels of CoC and a full stack. In other words, you can build an application, providing it follows the straight and narrow, in a very small amount of hours. Whoo hoo! This is in some ways very exciting and lots of people want to know about it. I'm planning to do a tutorial on Struts 2's zero configuration stuff in the near future. Keep your eyes out for that.
I don't want to go into more details about CoC, and only raise it to make the point that any recently minted framework, that has an active community of smart developers, will have absorbed the latest and greatest ideas of the domain. After the success of RoR, you're not going to find any new frameworks that don't support high levels of CoC. I'm afraid that this means that choosing a framework is just plain hard work. You'll probably have to investigate your options to the point of doing a bit of actual development on them.
But lot's of people liked the Battle of the Frameworks and said it was very helpful. I'll relate what I think was the most interesting sound byte. For me, I was just interested to here how the insiders themselves express the differences. Most of the heat was about RoR, not surprisingly, and they claim to have the best framework for *smart* developers. They believe that this is the halmark of their framework. Kind of like the "Ruby allows smart people to better express their smartness" argument. This is probably true ( though, not being all that smart or Ruby-fied, I can neither confirm nor deny it), but it certainly has a bit of the meta-physical cast to it.
Ultimately, I was just flat interested in the Ruby community's choice of this aspect, rather than the high speed dev time, as the best feature of their framework. They don't really boast about the rapid development time. There was even some suggestion that they don't like the way this particular aspect of the framework draws in the *wrong* crowd. This is very interesting actually. I'll have another post, as soon as I can do the research, on the "Rails Ghetto". A very interesting concept.
Those against RoR make accusations about performance. Search the web for Twitter and performance issues, you'll see what they are talking about. To me, this seems a rather foregone conclusion. The newer framework will always be vulnerable to performance issues. RoR has rolled their own persistence layer and web server, afterall. How could they not have an issue or two? Nonetheless, I would suspect that as long as the RoR community stays as active as it is, and filled with bright folks, these issues will go away.
Struts 2 gets accuses of being old. Well, what did you expect them to say? This is, however, patently untrue. As I've indicated, Struts 2 is a brand new framework that was recently born so it incorporates all the new stuff -- CoC, annotations and the like. Struts 2, speaking for itself, makes claims to being a better engineered piece of software. I personally think this is accurate ( I'm not a Struts committer and I wrote a book on Struts 2; this gives me both objectivity and insight, I would hope ). When pimping Struts 2, I always say that I think it's hallmark is the elgance and flexibility of its architecture. If something like the next Ajax comes along, which it will, and makes new demands of frameworks, I'm confident that Struts 2 will be able to respond with speed and grace. This is what you get from software engineering. Admittedly, this is not as sexy as CoC, but there's that too, if you like ;)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
