In this Tech Talk, Matt Raible discusses the reasoning and process behind AppFuse, his writing of Spring Live, and a remarkably balanced view of the factors that have changed his approaches to writing applications in Java.

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Nice interview from a nice guy.
Iam a student and currently learning J2ee. Matt Raible helped me with appFuse a lot in learning good design patterns and using frameworks like Spring, Hibernate the right way.
I really appreciate his work and think he is doing a good job for the whole community.

Nice interview from a nice guy.Iam a student and currently learning J2ee. Matt Raible helped me with appFuse a lot in learning good design patterns and using frameworks like Spring, Hibernate the right way.I really appreciate his work and think he is doing a good job for the whole community.

Haven't seen the interview yet, but I second the 'nice guy' accolade. I've emailed Matt personally for some assistance in the past and he's always been eager to help out.

Mike

Matt,keep up the good work. People can learn a lot from AppFuse......

I must admit that Matt is really a nice guy, and is always accommodating! thank you Matt.

As the CTO of a small french company working specically on J2EE, I always recommend our new employees to spend some time making the AppFuse tutorial and to get used to work with this package. They get the essence of J2EE and understand how to implement the design patterns of a well design architecture.
We also already build a few applications for our client on top of AppFuse, always with success.
So , my comment is that this kind of work is something very valuable for the development and maturity of J2EE. I really think that someone used to work with J2EE can build an application embedding all best practices and rules of design in less time than in any other tool available on the market !
So, Matt, if you read, just receive my humble thanks for your work. Such disinterested initiative with this level of maturity and quality are not so common in the J2EE community.

Bertrand Pinel
CTO
Ippon Technologies

Appfuse seems to be a bit more enlightened about JSF than Matt seems in this interview. When was it done?

JSF support was added to AppFuse in version 1.7. You can read more about the integration on my blog.

Thanks to everyone your accolades - I guess I owe y'all some beers now. ;-)

JSF support was added to AppFuse in version 1.7. You can read more about the integration on my blog.Thanks to everyone your accolades - I guess I owe y'all some beers now. ;-)

Nice work as always :-)

In your comments you said that for JSF to be successful, it would need to dump JSP, I'm working on releasing a very Tapestry-like framework for JSF called Facelets and would welcome any input.

In your comments you said that for JSF to be successful, it would need to dump JSP, I'm working on releasing a very Tapestry-like framework for JSF called Facelets and would welcome any input.

I'll definitely check it out Jacob. For AppFuse 1.9, I hope to dig into JSF and Tapestry and refine them so they're more "pure". For Tapestry in particular, I'd like to upgrade to 4.0 (alpha) and look into using a Tapestry Decorator for SiteMesh. I may make an attempt to create a JSF decorator as well. It'd also be pretty cool to create Tapestry/JSF Struts Menu components.

Can I use Facelets w/o converting the entire app to using it? It'd be interesting to do a Facelets version of this tutorial and show a side-by-side comparison of a JSP page vs. a Facelets page.

Nice work as always :-)In your comments you said that for JSF to be successful, it would need to dump JSP, I'm working on releasing a very Tapestry-like framework for JSF called Facelets and would welcome any input.

Hans Bergsten suggested simply a JSF custom view handler which does what Tapestry does (so far without all "the bells and whistles") some time ago:

http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2004/06/09/jsf.html

Nice work as always :-)In your comments you said that for JSF to be successful, it would need to dump JSP, I'm working on releasing a very Tapestry-like framework for JSF called Facelets and would welcome any input.

Hans Bergsten suggested simply a JSF custom view handler which does what Tapestry does (so far without all "the bells and whistles") some time ago:http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2004/06/09/jsf.html

Hans is also on the EG... now we are in JSF 1.2 (the article was for 1.0) and I would hope that others take the time to revisit JSF at some point.

Guys like Matt have done a great service to the community in getting curious developers over that initial hump in examining new frameworks/possibilities. After reading his blog on Tapestry and JSF, I feel even stronger about the future of Facelets and would welcome any input from other experienced developers.

I jokingly commented to Matt that he is our "Consumer Reports" for web frameworks... maybe that's the new professional position he's hinting at in his blog?

-- Jacob

JSF support was added to AppFuse in version 1.7. You can read more about the integration on my blog.Thanks to everyone your accolades - I guess I owe y'all some beers now. ;-)

By all means, let me buy the beer. Least I can do for tapping off on the knowledge that you have provided. Thank you!

I believe this interview was done November 2004.

Floyd

Why don't you put the date?

I believe this interview was done November 2004.Floyd

Are all tech talks that old?

I would actually prefer to watch a two week old tech talk without text than a half year old one like this. In our business, up-to-speedness i crucial, ye know :)

I wish TheServerSide would show the dates of all the tech talks (past, present and future).

And yes, six months does seem like a long delay.

John Hurst
Wellington, New Zealand

I agree with this.
Journalistic style and standards on the Web are unfortunately very loose, and there is a lot of variety. However, in my opinion, not dating articles and interviews puts TSS in a very low category.

As an experienced journalist and researcher, I have absolutely no objection to the publication of older content, as it usually retains much value, or even provides historical perspective. But the precise date is crucial.

And from the subject's point of view, a delayed and dateless publication is a serious liability in terms of the accuracy of opinions perceived by readers as "current."

I too agree that Matt Raible is the most laid back guy in J2EE, which is a stark contrast to the rate at which he pumps out code and blog entries. I think we can all learn a great deal from Matt in both the J2EE space as well as in life.

There are two points which I believe really stand out in this interview. The first point is that we should simplify and focus on what we really are trying to accomplish by doing web apps. He talks about users wanting to learn how to use a framework rather then how it works. There are, of course, people that need to focus on creating the frameworks, but it shouldn't drag in the whole community. After spending many nights on the Struts mailinglist myself, I got the impression that people where overly concerned with how Struts worked rather than concentrating on the business problem at hand. We need frameworks which can reduce that coupling.

The second point came towards the end of the interview dealing with the UI layer. I swear, if I pick up another J2EE book that uses HTML 4.0 in the examples I am going to chuck it out the window. The web layer is starting to show its age and the fact that Gmail made such a huge stir should tell you something about how much present day web apps suck. While we get all geek out on XMLHttpRequest in Gmail, we must wonder why we torture ourselves so much living without it. XMLHttpRequest is not alone either. The web has always had this nostalgia for holding onto aging technologies, such as Netscape 4.7. Google faces the same cross-browser issues as everyone else. Only, they said, "Forget the old way" and just coded up the application using the latest and greatest and lo and behold, people jumped on for the ride.

In conclusion, let's keep it simple for both the developer and the user. No one is going to get an Emmy for succeeding the hard way with coupling, EJBs and lots of form submissions.

very nice interview.

Regards,
Murugan

There is no doubt that AppFuse is useful but what was also pleasant was to see a nice person behind it.

There is a lot of ego going around in the industry and seeing somebody humble with very down-to-the-earth views about things that (surprise!) are actually usefeul, in practice (as opposed to nice theories that go nowhere), is nice for a change.

Matt, thanks and keep up good work!

cheers

Thank u very much for ur contribution to J2EE comunity. With only university experience on JSP, Servlet and JDBC I could jump on Struts, Spring, Hibernate, Ant, Xdoclet, JUnit, JSTL, etc. in less then a month.

Matt you Rocks!

Cesidio