Next, they went on showing us the Ruby On Rails (ROR) and Grails frameworks and of course demonstrated the fast creation of a simple working web-application (those famous 10 minute demos). If you want to know more about it, just follow the links, read the introduction and watch the screencasts.

Both Grails and Rails (when used with JRuby) allow integration with Java and a Java infrastructure. Charles for example used the rome library in Rails to generate an RSS feed and the next version of the GlassFish application server will offer special support for deployment of Rails applications. So the idea is, why not combine the best of both worlds (Grails & Java or Rails & Java).

As Groovy is a dynamic language written for the JVM and shares a lot of similarities with Java, I think it might be more suitable for Java teams and environments than Ruby. Grails itself is based on solid java components like Spring, hibernate, quartz, sitemesh, embedded jetty and hsqldb (80% of grails is written in Java) and offers various java related plugins (e.g. for DWR, Wicket, xFire,…). The 0.6 release of Grails (available as release candidate) will offer integrated support for Spring Webflow and the 1.0 release is due in October.

All in all it has been an inspiring afternoon and no matter if you favor Ruby, Grooy, Grails or Rails, these are exiting developments and if you can, learn something new and give it a try. I started to learn Ruby & ROR a while ago but never really had a chance to use it practically. With Groovy & Grails I think it might be different as the demand for lean and agile java development is growing.

More photos on Flickr

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Thanks to virtualization you can install Oracle 10g Express on a Linux or Windows VM and use it from the Mac side (your Java application, Eclipse,…).

I used Ubuntu Ultimate 1.4 on VMware Fusion. Before you can install Oracle 10g express, you have to increase the swap size. In my case the installer reported that the Express Edition requires 750 MB of swap space. I followed these instructions and increased the swap space to 800MB. Since I wanted to use the universal release, I used ‘apt-get install oracle-xe-universal’ to install Oracle (Oracle also offers RPM packages). The rest is straight forward. Just follow the instructions. As you can see in the screenshot, I can contact the 10g database from SQL Developer running on Mac OS X on the same machine. The Ubuntu windows shows the web-interface of Oracle.

I ran the same maven build again (clean install with database scripts and full tests) and now the time went down to 2:50 (from 3:30 with a remote database). The Core 2 Duo of my MacBook Pro had to work hard and memory usage went up to 1.5 GB, but there was enough room to continue working.

So, this is great. Now I have a completely independent mobile software development platform.

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Build speed matters as you see and it was one reason for me to buy a new MacBook Pro to replace my 2 year old PowerBook, which just became too slow for software development as well as other common tasks.

So, today I ran a small unscientific competition between my two systems on our current project, which uses Maven 2 to build and a Oracle 10g database. To reduce dependency on the network connection to the database server (via VPN), I installed a local Oracle 10g Express on separate machine. Later I will try to install the same on a VM.

With maven I ran a clean installation including all tests a couple of times, also to make sure all dependencies have been resolved.

The PowerBook (1.67Ghz G4, 1.5MB RAM, 100Mbit connection) needs on average 7 minutes (it took more than 20 minutes with the VPN connection!). The new MacBook Pro (2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo, 2GB, WLAN connection) finishes the same task in 3 1/2 minutes, which is an acceptable speed. Just run your tests when you get a fresh cup of coffee (you should not sit behind the desk without a break anyhow).

It is also nice, that Eclipse 3.x with MyEclipse and some other plug-ins starts 14 seconds faster on the MacBook Pro.

Considering the costs of development hours, esp. if bugs are not caught on time because skipped testing, I think it is foolish to save money on hardware for software developers. Give them the best and fastest you can get. It will not only motivate them (we love good technology) but also improve productivity and probably quality as well.

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For quite a while, I was trying to ignore the increasing buzz about Wicket, convincing myself that I don’t need yet another MVC framework (there are too many of them anyway), but somewhere between the Javalobby articles, the InfoQ article and the O’ReillyNet article – my resolve cracked and I took a closer look. (…)

It looked interesting and so I decided to try and migrate a selected few JSP screens of an existing Spring MVC + Spring WebFlow application to Wicket. This went much better than I expected and two months later (not full time) – I completed migrating the entire app to Wicket and it is now ready for a new release as a 100% JSP free application. (…)

So is Wicket the one true MVC framework that a lot of us have been hunting for? At the moment, I tend to think so. (…)

read the full article

It all sounds so familiar. Spring MVC, Spring WebFlow, XML configuration files, JSP with various tag libraries and custom tags, JSTL, Acegi, an unmaintainable collection of Javascript files and libraries, SiteMesh decorators, Velocity, web-designers who mess up JSP files and so on. Web development like this is error prune and not really suitable for an agile development process.

Wicket sounds very interesting and promising. I should give it a try but I guess I can not convince management to give us some extra weeks to convert the web-application we’ve been working on from Spring MVC to Wicket.

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There were basically three aspects, which made internationalization difficult:

1. All levels of a system and application are effected (e.g. operating system, I/O operations, database, web-tier, web-services). If the settings don’t match at some point, it might results in wrong character conversion. Usually this means we have to look at database encoding, file system encoding and http request/response encoding.
2. A lot of software which is being used (e.g. 3rd party components and libraries) uses a default character encoding, which is usually ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1). Is this western ignorance?
3. You don’t have the time to understand the complicated and often unclear issues surrounding character set encoding. If the world could just decide to switch to one global encoding, our live would be much easier.

The goal is to use only one character encoding within the Java application (in our case UTF-8 seems to be fine for the job), so we only have to handle different character sets at entry and exit points (web, files, …).

Let’s look at places which might need some attention:

Application servers

Start these with the correct JVM arguments.

Default file encoding
The default file encoding is being used by the InputStreamReader and OutputStreamReader. If it is not set, the file encoding of the operating system will be used which can lead to unexpected results if you have a team which works on different systems or if the deployment system differs from the development environment. Set it with -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8

Next check and if necessary configure the default character encoding.

Resin
The default value is ISO-8859-1.
see Specify the default character encoding for the environment.

Tomcat
Default encoding of Tomcat 5 is UTF-8. If not, you can specify it in $CATALINA_BASE/conf/web.xml or in your webapp’s own web.xml.

WebSphere
Default character encoding is UTF-8. For more information see: Developing J2EE Global Applications : Character Encoding

Database

Switch the complete database, individual tables or individual columns to UTF-8. How this can be done differs per database system.

For some JDBC database drivers you have to specify the encoding explicitly, others drivers are smart enough to determine the database encoding automatically.

Oracle 10g
In order to review the current settings enter SELECT * FROM V$NLS_PARAMETERS;
NLS_CHARACTERSET and NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS are interesting for us. Oracle recommends using Unicode character set AL32UTF8 for all new system deployments.
If you don’t want to change the settings for the database, you can use the NCHAR, NVARCHAR2, and NCLOB datatypes instead. Their default encoding is AL16UTF16.

Additional information:
Changing The Character Set In Oracle Applications
Character Semantics and Globalization

Spring Framework

Since Spring handles you requests, it needs some extra configuration:
Add filter to web.xml and spring configuration
In this case the Spring framework does most of the work for you. Without such framework you might have to do some conversion between different character encoding types yourself.

Java Servlet Pages

Use: <%@ page pageEncoding=”UTF-8″ contentType=“text/html; charset=UTF-8″ %>

To set the default page encoding used for all jsp files, use

<jsp-property-group>
(…)
<page-encoding>utf-8</page-encoding>
</jsp-property-group>

Additional information:
Setting Properties for Groups of JSP Pages

It is a good idea to add
<META http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″>
to the html as well.

Templating Engines and layout frameworks

Sitemesh
By default Sitemesh uses ISO-8859-1. All used JSP pages should define UTF-8 as encoding. If you have various decorators and includes, these must all use the same encoding.

Velocity
Also Velocity uses ISO-8859-1 as default. This has been the large pitfall on my first internationalization project. I wasted a lot of time before I knew this.
Velocity allows you to specify the character encoding of your template resources on a template by template basis. The output encoding is an application specific setting and can be set in the runtime configuration with following configuration key: output.encoding (it might be a good idea to set input.encoding as well)
More information: Velocity Developer Guide

Freemarker
You can specify the charset of the template in the template itself and the charset of the output with the
setOutputEncoding(outputCharset) method of a Freemarker processing environment.

Resource bundles

Edit message bundles for non western languages in UTF-8 mode and then convert this file to an ascii format for Java. Call native2ascii encoding, specifying the original file has UTF-8 encoding:
native2ascii -encoding UTF-8 messages_cn.txt messages_cn.properties

Additional information

Java World: Multibyte-character processing in J2EE
An in-depth look at Java’s character type
A tutorial on character code issues

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As our Spring project at Tripolis is moving on fast, we started working on the web tier and needed some more detailed information about Spring MVC. Luckily a new Spring MVC book had just been released.

“Expert Spring MVC and Web Flow (Expert)”
(Seth Ladd, Darren Davison, Steven Devijver, Colin Yates)

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So currently I am reading these books:

Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices by Robert C. Martin
A book I highly recommend both for developers as well as project managers. It is easy and fun to read and still has a lot to say.

Spring in Action by Craig Walls
A good introduction. A 2nd edition would be nice though.

Pro Spring by Rob Harrop
Once you know and understand some of the Spring basics or you have hand-on experience with the Spring framework, this is a good book to take you to the next level.

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