[pebble-user] Next Pebble/Pebble3

[Joachim R. <ma...@jo...>]

Dear Simon Brown,
Dear James Roper,
Dear Olaf Kock,

Hello everybody,

I'm only writing to you because I found your names in the pebble pom.xml 
;-) No, all jokes aside.

I am a software developer from Germany (meanwhile 53) and working as a 
freelancer now for more than 10 years (+X years before as an 
employee/hobbyist ) in a professional Java/JEE context - here:
https://www.xing.com/profile/Joachim_Roesener/

At the moment I have some time to take care of my own projects and 
therefore I have e.g. maintained or modernized my IT infrastructure.

Since about 2005 I had been running pebble on my server and wanted to 
get this great piece of software up and running again. I found out that 
pebble doesn't have a maintainer anymore (and is no longer developed) - 
which is a pity, but I can understand it, because the code base is from 
a completely different time. Times I still know

I am in the process of developing pebble into pebble3 - because I liked 
the project from the beginning and because so much knowledge has already 
gone into the software that it would be a shame to just "throw pebble 
away".

Status:
- I cloned the current master in my own git/private gitlab, you can see 
my last "official" state here:
https://blog.audiotraining.org/
- I am currently doing some work on the code (more on that in a moment). 
I'll push my changes when I see fit. In this context: I don't want to 
become the new maintainer - I have neither time nor nerves for that
- when I'm done with my changes, I will invite you to the code review

About refactoring/consolidation:
It feels like some parts of pebble are still on the Java 1.3 level
Therefore I have already made the following changes:
- Adaptation of the artifacts in pom.xml to current versions
- Implementation of Java 1.5 generics
- Migration from Spring Security3 to Spring Security4 (bcrypt)
- Implementation of ZonedDateTime vs. Date/Calendar
- Elimination of potential resource leaks/implemetation 
try-catch-with-resource
- Increase of code quality by static code analysis (SonarLint is 
merciless ;-))
- Adaptation of tests

About my motivation:
I want to turn pebble (new working title: "pebble3") into a modern 
Spring Boot application, which can also run "in the cloud"/in a container.
- Persistence: Since "in the cloud" there is no file system available to 
begin with (or the application should be stateless), I at least thought 
about implementing an abstract file access layer (Apache VFS2). On the 
other hand, I don't know yet if it would be so cool to store images in a 
database (as BLOBS) (to dispense with a file system) . Otherwise I'm 
thinking about connecting pebble3 to a DBMS via JPA. Maybe you have some 
suggestions for me here?
- MVC paradigm: I will split pebble3 into a backend and a frontend. The 
backend should still be accessible via XML-RPC (with camel xml-rpc), but 
the frontend should be able to communicate with the backend via a 
"modern" REST-API. This would have the smart advantage that new 
(Java/Typescript) user interfaces could access the backend via AJAX.
- Frontend: I still think JSF is cool, but unfortunately it is a bit 
outdated now (keywords: Responsive Design, UX, mobile devices). As an 
intermediate step or because I don't know much about frontend 
technologies, I could imagine Vaadin, for example, with which even a 
Java backend developer like me could implement appealing UIs (I already 
have experience in this). My main concern is to eleminate JSP - that is 
very ugly in 2021 by now . What do you think?

So, 'nuff said No Spam

I am very curious about your answer

Many greetings from Germany,
Joachim Rösener.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)