Raible Designs

Friday May 30, 2003

Hotels.com powered by Struts! This is kind of a cool announcement - giving more credibility to Struts. Personally, I think all the leading web application frameworks are great - and can probably be learned in a week or two (or a few days/hours!) - so it's not about which one you're using, it's about if you're using one or not. If you are - you're on the right path. If not, you're probably wasting a lot of time developing your own.

I am proud to announce the successful launch of a major vacation packaging site whose presentation tier has been built entirely with Struts:

http://packaging.hotels.com/packaging/index.do

We have made extensive use of the Struts MVC framework, custom tags, and I18N components, with some custom modifications. It has proven itself to be a stable and robust platform, able to amply handle the needs of both our users and management.

I would like to applaud everyone who has worked on the Struts project; it has been shown yet again to be an excellent framework for a commerical web application.

James Childers hotels.com Packaging Team

Posted in Java at May 30 2003, 10:59:40 AM MDT 1 Comment

nforms.net - Cross-browser XForms engine

nForms.net is a javascript implementation of an Xforms engine. Xforms is the next generation mark-up language for generating web-based forms. nForms is a zero-deployment solution that adds browser support for xforms elements into your current html applications.

Looks cool - unfortunately it doesn't seem that it will be released as open source. Posted in The Web at May 30 2003, 09:27:02 AM MDT 1 Comment

Anthill and Maven I did a little more research this morning - this time trying to find out if Anthill could play nicely with Maven. Here is the answer I received from the anthill mailing list:

We've recently implemented a Maven builder for Anthill Pro -- it's not 
released yet but will be part of version 2.1.

We will probably implement a Maven builder for Anthill OS sometime soon 
as well.

In the meantime, check out how some people have gotten Maven builds to 
work with Anthill in the past -- 

http://lists.urbancode.com/pipermail/anthill/2002-December/000543.html

Cool! Thanks Maciej! Posted in Java at May 30 2003, 07:48:48 AM MDT 1 Comment

Can I Mavenize my release process? I sent the following e-mail to the maven-user mailing list this morning:

Since the deployment of my project's site was so easy using  "maven
site:deploy", I suspect that's there's an easy way to  "package" my app and
upload it to SourceForge.

For packaging, here's what I had in mind.

1. Creates a "dist" directory.
2. Copies the following directories/files into dist:
   bin/*
   conf/*
   target/lib -> dist/lib
3. zips and gzips contents of dist for distribution.
4. Uploads zip and gzip to upload.sf.net
5. (Optionally) Creates a branch in CVS for this release.

In the midst of writing this post, I actually got an answer! Using "maven dist", I created distributions in target/distributions. This directory contains moblogger-*.jar, LICENSE.txt and a docs folder. A little more work and I'm sure I can get a "lib" directory with all the required .jar's for running moblogger, as well as the bin and conf directories. If any of you have examples of dist-ing your project to SourceForge using Maven, please let me know.

Here's a good question for you: Is it possible to create entries in moblogger.jar/META-INF/MANIFEST.MF that point to the other .jar files required to run moblogger? I'd love to simply be able to run:

java -jar moblogger.jar conf/agentsettings.xml

Rather than how it is now (java -cp [each jar listed here] net.sf.moblogger.agent.MoblogAgent conf/agentsettings.xml). The MANIFEST.MF file generated by Maven gives me the impression that this is possible. Consider the following entry in this file:

Extension-List: jaf,mail,commons-lang,commons-logging,ftp,jdom,log4j,q
 uartz,smack,xerces,xmlrpc,junit
jaf-Extension-Name: jaf
jaf-Implementation-Version:
jaf-Implementation-URL: http://www.ibiblio.org/maven/jaf/jars/activati
 on.jar

When I try this now, I get:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/quartz/SchedulerFactory

I'm assuming that it might be possible to change the Implentation-URL to something to point to the local file in the same directory. If not, is it possible to add these JARs into my moblogger.jar? Or will this violate some JARs licenses? Posted in Java at May 30 2003, 06:27:12 AM MDT Add a Comment