Blog

Here is my highly anticipated review of Andy Hoffman’s AppFuse presentation at the Dallas Java Developers SIG meeting this past Wednesday, 1/26/05.

First, let me say I think Andy did a good job. I think he geared his presentation to an audience that knew nothing about AppFuse, and that was the crowd he had. He asked who had heard of AppFuse and surprisingly only a couple two or three people had (including me).

Andy started by talking about AppFuse’s creator, Matt Raible, and the history of AppFuse. He briefly explained each of the open-source projects that are a part of AppFuse and the part they play in AppFuse. Then he spent the rest of the session demo’ing AppFuse. Covering AppFuse from installation to working through the first of four tutorials Matt Raible created for learning AppFuse. The tutorial we worked through Creating New DAOs and Objects in AppFuse was helpful.

Some of what Andy proved was that installing, configuring, and running AppFuse is fairly painless. And if you’re comfortable with Tomcat, Ant, and Hibernate you will gain a lot by using AppFuse to get your next webapp project started. He also made it obvious that if you aren’t familiar with Hibernate you will have some learning-curve problems to get past before you can use AppFuse.