what do I know

I finally brought myself to attend a Ruby/Rails conference. I was motivated to do so by my most recent venture into JRuby and Rails at the office. acts_as_conference 2008 is put on by RailsForAll, an active participant in the Orlando Ruby community, as a single track, 2-day event being held out by Universal Studios. I just listened to an interview of Neal Ford on aboutGroovy.com and really enjoyed it. As luck would have it, I just found out that he is speaking at this conference. I’m really interested to see what constitutes advanced topics for Ruby DSLs (hopefully some patterns), especially with my latest venture into a library for using mock objects within ColdFusion (more on this later). Since I’m using JRuby, I expect the highlight of this conference for me to be the Headius. In reading his blog it sounds like we’ll get to see some of the really cool stuff that makes JRuby tick. Dan Benjamin and Obie Fernandez will be closing out each day, respectively, with a keynote that should be interesting since they seem to be recognized Ruby/Rails community members.

I’m enjoying what I’ve done thus far with JRuby/Rails and am grateful to the community for putting this even on in the Orlando area. Continuing with habits from previous conferences, I’ll try to post a summary of each session I attend as well as my pretty useless commentary. Here’s to being misunderstood and taken out of context by an entirely new community.

Marcel Overkijk has taken advantage of the recent open sourcing of Flex to provide a plug-in for the Grails framework to expose AMF endpoints from your Grails application. The AMF end points are created via a service class in Grails. Grails, being built on Groovy, can very easily utilize any Java code, requires little work to configure, and can bundle a WAR for you with a single command. The plug-in looks really promising as does its road map which looks like it will have tools comparable to some of the other remoting packages available for Flex. This plug-in is built for use with BlazeDS, Adobe’s recent open sourcing of a subset of its LiveCycle Data Services product. Although I haven’t tried it yet (and its not recommended for production use), this is a great option to dumping a bunch of JARs into a shared Flex context or trying to setup your own BlazeDS server. Why not let Grails (and this plug-in) do the work for you? Seems like a much easier deployment option, IMO.

I’m also excited to look at Marcel’s code to see if I can learn anything to help in the implementation of an idea I had a while back regarding a Java factory for Flex to create objects from JSR 223 compatible languages using Java’s new script invocation API.

Thanks for the hard work Marcel! I look forward to messing around with the plug-in.

A couple months ago a few of us at work thought it would be worth looking into some of the newer programming languages and frameworks that have been receiving a lot of buzz. We were particularly interested in some of the productivity boosts that have been preached as a result of using these solutions. We decided to focus on the creation of a proof-of-concept (PoC) for one of our major web sites (sort of a stripped down CMS solution). The PoC consisted of two implementations, one using Groovy and Grails, and one using Ruby on Rails. On the Ruby side of things, we decided to look into JRuby, rather than the MRI or Rubinus implementations, since the majority of our development efforts rely on the JVM. Based on the success of this process, we are even open to considering these technologies as a possible replacement for ColdFusion and its assortment of frameworks that we currently use in our web tier.

I decided to move forward with Groovy and Grails in the first implementation. Its syntax seemed to be the most like Java which is what I am most comfortable with. I spent about 4 weeks learning the basics needed for Groovy and the Grails framework. From the little I’ve used it, I really like Groovy as a language. Learning Groovy was a cinch. The availability of closures, the use of builders to simplify configuration, and the emulation of formal properties using Groovy Beans are all great features. After seeing the amount of work being put into Groovy Swing integration, I can’t think why anyone would want to write a Swing UI in straight Java again; the syntax was just as simple as MXML without the markup. I am curious if any classpath conflicts would occur between dependencies in Groovy and our own projects, but I didn’t look into this any.

As far as Grails goes, I am really impressed at the work put into combining the technology stack on which the framework is based. The biggest and most notable feature I like is its tight integration with GORM. The use of GORM as the relational mapper truly makes working with the database effortless. Integration with legacy databases is fairly simple if you want to re-use your Hibernate mapping files, or if you want to do the configuration yourself in your domain classes. Because of GORM, you can approach pretty much any web application focusing solely on your object model; our shop follows this practice already as do most Java shops, so this is a big plus. On the templating side of things, I am pleased to see the work put into GSP. One of the main reasons we went with ColdFusion was because of the simplicity it provided over JSP, so GSP is a welcome attempt at change. Another feature I really like about Grails is the ability to create service classes to hook into, and expose, JEE endpoints with the utmost of ease. I didn’t get a chance to play with these, but from what I’ve seen in the plug-in section, it looks like working with JMS, SOAP, JTA, and a few other standards is ridiculously simple. Yet another feature I really enjoyed was the integration with Spring Web Flow. The scoping in Grails seems so natural; flows are very simple to construct and alleviate a lot of the hacking most developers have to put up with in the session scope. Finally, bundling an application into a WAR is provided out of the box so creating a Grails app and dropping it on your favorite JEE server is fairly effortless. From the little I got to work with the Grails framework, you can tell the team’s focus is clearly to improve Java in the web tier and they are on the right track. I know offering Spring integration is definitely a big draw for me since we use it so heavily in most of our initiatives.

Keeping in mind I worked with Grails 1.0 RC1, I did run into some difficulties with the framework. The first and biggest frustration I encountered was when working with domain classes. When I changed a domain class, while the built-in Jetty server was running, the server would attempt to reload the Spring context but just hang. As a result, I would have to take about 30s or so ever time I changed a domain class to bounce the built-in Jetty server. I’m not sure if this has been fixed since I played with it, but this really deterred me from working with Grails. One thing that I got frustrated with was what seems like a limitation in GSP. I wanted to create a view to edit a domain class which had a one-to-many relationship with another class. A pre-selected multi-select list box seemed like the perfect HTML widget to use. I was unable to find a way to automatically have GSP generate this for me. I searched the user forums, but I only found a post that said an implementation wasn’t available at that time. I didn’t search for a JSP library that may help, but maybe this could have been a viable alternative short of writing the code to render the HTML myself.

So after the Groovy and Grails experience, I dove into JRuby and Rails. Being that I scare easily at the sight of anything new, a colleague recommended Dave Thomas’ Rails book to get started; I also had other colleagues as resources to help in times of need. Since I’ve become more familiar with the Ruby syntax I must say there are some language aspects I do like. Mixins available at the language level are a lot handier than I would have thought, especially in the context of Rails. Properties and module level methods were nice to work with as well. I can definitely see where the “enough rope to hang yourself” analogy comes from however; I encountered a lot of variations on how to syntactically accomplish the same task. From a configuration standpoint, I also had to do some work to setup my environment. In the end, I had to pull down JRuby (1.03) and install the rails (1.2.6), activerecord-jdbc-adapter, and warbler gems as well as update my JDBC driver. Since JRuby is just an implementation of the Ruby language, however, I was able to use any Ruby reference, tutorial, or example I could find and had no issues.

As far as Rails goes, I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to get started. One of the biggest things I like about the framework is the inclusion of data migrations. You are required to interact with the database at a certain granularity but those interactions are abstracted by writing Ruby code. I’m not necessarily a fan of this granularity, but from a maintenance perspective, this is one of the best solutions I’ve encountered for managing an application’s database. I am also glad to see to see the FormOptionsHelper class. When data binding isn’t sufficient, the FormOptionsHelper class provides a lot of convenience methods to help work with select boxes. Tasks such as pre-populating a multi-select list box were extremely simple using options_from_collection_for_select. Lastly, I really liked the work done to integrate the use of REST into the framework. Working with ActiveResource seems fairly straightforward and doesn’t require as much configuration as I expected; that being said I haven’t worked much with this feature yet.

Based on my limited experience with JRuby and Rails, there were a few things of which I am wary. I haven’t looked into this much, but having two language cores available in JRuby freaks me out a bit. Without guidance or standards, I can definitely see a junior developer using Java implementations when Ruby ones are available forming a strange mixture of code. Another point to watch is the current maturity of the tools to migrate a Rails application to the JEE platform. ActiveRecord JDBC and Warbler are still under active development (although close to 1.0 releases) and it did take quite a bit of investigation to get my PoC working with our existing environment. Additionally, I don’t like ERB as a templating language. This is a personal preference, but it reminds me of PHP which I dislike for its heavy use of scriptlets; I really prefer using tag-based markup for templating. Finally, and probably the biggest thing I don’t like, is Rails’ implementation of ActiveRecord. ActiveRecord is cripplingly associated with the relational model rather than your application’s object model. A simple relationship such as belongs_to doesn’t relate to a composition relationship between a parent and child object, it relates to which tables contains the foreign key in your relational model. I designed my PoC with an object model in mind and had quite a bit of frustration, semantically speaking, trying to migrate that model into the mold for ActiveRecord. I felt like my focus was on the database for the most part and that seemed contrary to the goal of the framework.

Ok, so enough for my probably useless feedback, let me tell you what we decided to do. My personal preference lies with Groovy and Grails. The side of me that needs a solution in the immediate however, led to my choose JRuby on Rails. Let me explain. When I worked with Groovy and Grails, my learning curve wasn’t with the language, but with the framework. I found myself having lots of difficulty accomplishing tasks that I had expected to be fairly effortless. I associate a lot of these difficulties with the current state of the Grails framework. This is not meant to come off with a negative connotation, but with the perspective that Grails is the “new kid on the block” and still needs polish. When I worked with JRuby on Rails, the learning curve was with the language, not the framework. Rails met my expectations regarding the work needed to accomplish my goals (short of the ActiveRecord hoopla). Rails has the current advantage over Grails since it’s had the opportunity to be exposed to its community for 2 major iterations now. Getting an environment configured and working is a one time cost; I don’t count this again JRuby on Rails although it was easier to manage with Groovy and Grails. Additionally, running on JRuby provides us with the minimal level of Java integration that we need to re-use our existing architecture. JRuby 1.1’s focus on performance and very eminent release as well as Eclipse tooling support via RADRails are also an added plus.

So that’s the verdict from my PoC, but its not the end of my opinion. Anyone who has read this far and thinks I’m full of shit, ignore this next paragraph unless you want to flame me. I ultimately believe that Groovy and Grails will win out for the majority of users utilizing Java in the web tier. All of the arguments I have made for JRuby on Rails are based around the availability and maturity of its resources. These are arenas in which Groovy and Grails have just recently entered into competition. Groovy is quickly becoming the alternative for those in the Java community who are looking for a syntax with which they are more comfortable that brings a dynamic flare. Although it may have helped, Grails doesn’t seem to have the influence yet to cause the recent spike in popularity that Groovy has received as compared to what Rails did for Ruby. I think Java interop will also become more of an issue as people begin using languages running on the JVM. From the little I’ve seen, I really like Groovy’s approach, it feels familiar. I also think developers, like myself, are looking for re-use from the Java libraries and frameworks that we’ve relied on and with which we have experience. Grails’ tight integration with Spring, Hibernate, and other JEE standards (defacto or not) will make these approaches even simpler. It seems like since Grails explicitly chose to support the enterprise and Rails is choosing to stay out of it. I think Grails over time will have more to offer than Rails for those looking for new solutions on web that are currently using Java. Please keep in mind I’m not saying that Groovy/Grails isn’t currently ready for the enterprise (despite the FUD going around). As I understand it, many have been successful by using these technologies; I’m just saying I’m going to wait a while and see how others have been successful and learn from their examples.

In the end, I definitely think these new languages and frameworks provide a huge amount of productivity compared to how we are currently building applications for the web at the office. Tooling definitely needs some work on the Eclipse side of things, but Netbeans and IntelliJ are providing some great alternatives in the interim. I’m really looking forward to using JRuby and Rails to create our stripped down CMS application, which has recently received the green light. I’m even more excited about continuing to work with Groovy and Grails as their communities grow (and even pushing for its use in the office). Thank you to LaForge, Rocher, Nutter, Bini, and everyone else who has contributed their time and hard work into making Java on the web productive (and fun). I really see potential in the languages being built for the JVM and can’t wait to see what the future holds.

NOTE: Sorry to Jython, Django, Scala, and Lift for not including you in this PoC. For now I’ve spread my wings enough to be dangerous, and by dangerous I mean screw up enough software to retain job security. I hope to find the time later this year to do some more exploring.

Over the last two weeks I’ve been researching CMS solutions in the ColdFusion space. We have a pretty large site with a lot of content so a CMS solution seems like the right fit. I tried out FarCry, one of the popular OSS ColdFusion CMS solutions, and didn’t have too much luck. I spent another week looking at commercial ColdFusion CMS solutions and came up on products in two categories: products with very expensive licensing but fully capable and products with reasonable licensing but limited capability. On top of that the price points were over $25K for 2 server licenses and 5 users, on average. We currently have our app load-balanced across 12 virtualized servers, so licensing for most of these apps would be ridiculous.

I ended up looking at the Savvy CMS from BeSavvy and my initial impressions were that I really liked what I saw. The UI was incredibly simple and easy to use. The constructs of approvals, a built-in authorization system, and templating were available and very easy to prep for a PoC. Installation was so easy, it was sick. Unfortunately, we ran into a large wall when we had to address separating content from its presentation. For example, we wanted to store information about all our Resorts, but we may want to show it on a page as a list of resort names or on a page highlighting a single resort’s details. In the Savvy product, there was no way, short of extending the application itself (which required different licensing or consulting fees for BeSavvy to do the work) to incorporate our content types (i.e. - Resort, Amenity, Destination) and gain the benefits of all the built-in features in the CMS. We did have the ability to make hooks into Savvy that could manage content reuse if we programmed it ourselves. However, I saw this as busting out of the CMS to manage content when that is the CMS’ job to manage content. Why should I have to provide these features? On a side note, licensing for the Savvy CMS was extremely reasonable compared to the other solutions I looked into (licensing per URL, not server, and 5 users was $1350 [see their website for latest pricing]).

So being disappointed that Savvy didn’t have the capabilities we wanted, I went back to Farcry and gave it another shot. I had a few replies on my previous blog post that helped me move a little further with the PoC. I was able to get rid of the unusable library tool from my forms (had to patch the core using fixes from JIRA); with some thought, I also found a compromise between using the site tree and the custom content scaffolding. Unfortunately, we really needed Oracle to be the database for our FarCry installation and my every attempt to do so with the the 4.x beta has failed. I spent quite a bit of time on the google-groups applying patches and fixes as people had found them, but I still had issues (e.g. - adding content types via the COAPI after the installation). Additionally, finding documentation on how to use Rules in FarCry was another struggle I kept running into. The developers wiki for 4.x didn’t have anything I could reference and the 4.x developer’s guide I downloaded covered a very small example of using a rule, but not describe how rules work and the options available for working with rules. As a side note, anyone working with FarCry developer documentation is going to run into a lot of Hungarian Notation; it’s actually part of their suggested coding standards. This was a huge detractor in terms of readability for me, but that’s just my opinion. In any case, I eventually got a rule working, but the process of doing so was pretty tedious. Overall, I felt like I was jumping through quite a few hoops to get the PoC up and running (e.g. - using fixes from JIRA, running edge builds of the software, etc).

To end this story, yesterday I went to lunch with my managers and talked about the last two weeks of effort I had put into exploring CMS products and my work with FarCry and Savvy. In the end, we agreed that the quirky nature of developing in FarCry and the price points of similarly capable, and more usable, commercial CMS solutions warranted more investigation than we could allot in this PoC process. Consequently, we are going to try and kill two birds with one stone. We are evaluating other web-tier languages and frameworks as possible replacements for ColdFusion (I will go into this in another post). Because of the heavy usage of Java in our environment and the great job we’ve done separating our presentation and application tiers, we are considering JRuby/Rails and Groovy/Grails as possible options. We have a PoC going on for JRuby/Rails currently, but none for Groovy/Grails. Our hopes are to use this project as the Groovy/Grails PoC. Even though its a custom solution, we want to see if the new frameworks available “now-a-days” (Grails in this case) will provide enough productivity such that a custom solution is more easily maintainable until we can devote the time to doing a much better evaluation of CMS solutions. Additionally, if we find that this PoC works out well, we may not choose to go down the CMS path, who knows. In the worse case scenario, this custom solution can benefit from the work done in past development efforts and we devote more time to CMS product analysis when we’re ready.

I’ve got mixed feelings about building a custom solution, it really feels like a CMS is a good fit here, but for the sake of being productive and getting this stop-gap done, I think we made a good decision. I’m actually a little excited about finally getting to build a Grails app for the office. My Groovy/Grails skills are pretty lacking, so this will definitely help me get some great exposure. Here’s to diving in.

So today I noticed that my blog got way too many hits from being listed on the Blog section of TheServerSide.com. I even got a comment on the post from the project lead for Grails, which was pretty cool. So needless to say, I had Groovy on the brain on my drive home from work.

I started to think about the use of remote objects in Flex. We use Java to integrate with Flex at the office and I know it’s use with ColdFusion has been a big hit too. This got me to thinking, if Flex can support Java classes, what’s to say that it can’t support Groovy or JRuby or Jython or Rhino or whatever language that falls under the scope of JSR 223? I know Groovy and JRuby can be compiled to Java byte code so why can’t these classes be used as remote objects by Flex? I’m still new to Groovy and JRuby, but I’d assume the only obstacle to integrating the these technologies would be the Java interface exposed by these languages after compilation. Then it clicked in my head, the new javax.script package would normalize this interface to make it easier for developers to integrate. Also, if someone didn’t have Java 6 available, the bean scripting framework (BSF) could just as easily accomplish this goal. Additionally, if remote objects are possible, I have to wonder about how possible it may be to use the RemoteClass metadata to trigger the AMF gateway to play nice.

All of this being said, I’m excited about the possibility of integrating other languages, based on the JVM, into Flex. I know WebOrb has a few options available for .NET, PHP, and RoR apps but my (very limited) understanding is that those integrations are somewhat native to each language. It seems like a very simple layer of abstraction could be written to allow these compiled Java classes to be made available as remote objects in Flex. I can, however, understand why there hasn’t been that much written about the use of classes from scripting languages, based on the JVM, being used as remote objects. Lifecycle Data Services or CF server are required to use remote objects in Flex, from what I understand. I would assume that web services, SOAP and REST-based, are the preferred choice for users of open-source Flex in terms of integration.

Maybe there will be some interest in this topic; maybe Adobe already has adapter built (I didn’t Google that much about the topic as of yet) to address these concerns. Who knows, maybe I’ll get off my tail and actually write some sample code that solves this problem. In any case, out of the box support for any of the scripting languages supported on the JVM would definitely be a cool feature in Flex.

Ok, I’m a ColdFusion/Java programmer. I like ColdFusion for the web-tier, but sometimes I feel its way to verbose. I like Java for the application tier but I’m not a fan of static typing and some of the things that Java brings with it (i.e. - checked exceptions). I’ve been hearing/reading a lot of cool stuff about dynamic types in .NET, all of the cool stuff that Ruby can do, and how Smalltalk has had similar features for years now. With all of the press things like JSR-223 and the DLR have been getting, I figured it was time for me to start learning some new things (I will somehow figure out how this will lead to less responsibility later).

So I looked at JRuby for a little while and got too intimidated to learn a new syntax and new language constructs. This may seem silly, but I’m afraid of everything. So in the spirit of trying to learn too little at once, I started to look into Groovy. Dick Wolf from the Java Posse is always talking about it, so I figured, maybe its an easier transition for my Java syntax mind. After doing a few tutorials and playing with the console that ships with it (cool little Java app), I got pretty comfortable, pretty fast. The syntax is based on Java with, what my Ruby friends (Tan and Dyler) would call, syntactical sugar available to make things like file IO, regular expressions, database connectivity, and collections much simpler. The availability of closures alone just made it that much easier to get into Groovy. Groovy also has the notion of formal properties so that was nice too. Oh, and Groovy is written entirely in Java and supports JSR-223 so bi-directional Java/Groovy integration is really straight forward.

In any case, after a few walkthroughs, I wanted to get some instant gratification, so I tried out Grails. Now one of the first things I noticed about Grails which was a disappointment, but not a big deal, was how slow the generation tools were. Even though you are running them a discrete number of times for an application and its just to get started … slow. Now that being said, wow this is a cool framework. I may later find that’s its not all that great, but what I thought was cool about it was I understood the technologies used to build it! The build tools and generator tools are coordinated from Ant using Ivy for dependency management. The web server that comes bundled with each app is Jetty. The framework uses Spring WebFlow as the foundation for “wire framing” the site’s paths and routing. Spring is available for use with your Java classes (and I think Groovy classes as well). The GORM project is a wrapper around Hibernate 3 that Grails uses for its scaffolding (instead of ActiveRecord as in Rails). I thought it was also pretty cool that Grails uses closures as the foundation for its framework, rather than the extension of a set of base classes. Additionally, there is a notion of services which they advise using to implement business rules, so extending an existing Java SOA would get a cinch.

Some more cool stuff about Groovy and Grails, an Eclipse plugin exists that has some helpful IDE features, the generator tools generate IDE metadata so any Grails project can be imported into Eclipse, IntelliJ, or Netbeans, and Groovy and Grails both have lots of documentation to read through. I was able to get a scaffolded site up and running and start messing with the Spring and Hibernate mapping files (for fun) in under 5 minutes.

Groovy is 1.0 and Grails is at 0.5.6, so I’m not sure if its something we could begin using at work, but it feels much more natural to bridge the Java gap than JRuby, learning curve and all. As I mess with Grails and Groovy some more I’ll try to post some code samples. Now, like a good programmer, I’m going to learn a framework before I have any real clue on how the underlying language works.