The Angular Mini-Book is a
guide to getting started with Angular. You'll learn how to develop a bare-bones application, test it, and
deploy it. Then you'll move on to adding Bootstrap, Angular Material, continuous integration, and authentication.
Spring Boot is a popular framework for building REST APIs. You'll learn how to integrate Angular with Spring Boot and use security best practices like HTTPS and a content security policy.
For book updates, follow @angular_book on Twitter.
The JHipster Mini-Book is a
guide to getting started with hip technologies today: Angular, Bootstrap, and Spring
Boot. All of these frameworks are wrapped up in an easy-to-use project called JHipster.
This book shows you how to build an app with JHipster, and guides you through the plethora of tools, techniques and options you can use. Furthermore, it explains the UI and API building blocks so you understand the underpinnings of your great application.
For book updates, follow @jhipster-book on Twitter.
The Man in Blue has some nice form layouts using fieldsets, labels and CSS. I think I'll integrate one of these styles for the forms in AppFuse. I've always stuck with tables for layout because it seemed easy, but I really like the look and flexibility that CSS provides.
Apress recently contacted me about updating Pro JSP for JSP 2.1. While the fame of having 3 books published is tempting, I think I'm going to have to pass. The Security chapter I wrote could probably use some updates, but I just wrote a Security Chapter for Spring Live - and I don't really feel like writing another. The other chapter, titled "Using Struts, XDoclet, and Other Tools", would be fun (since it's about AppFuse and Struts Resume), but I'd probably try to squeeze way too much into 50 pages.
Maybe I could just %s/Chapter 11 in Pro JSP/Chapter 12 in Spring Live and %s/Chapter 12 in Pro JSP/Chapter 2 in Spring Live and show folks how to use Struts+Spring+Hibernate. 
Is there any logic to how JBoss puts all WARs, EARs and their accompanying JARs into the same ClassLoader? It seems logical that I should be able to deploy different versions of a JAR in different WARs. This works fine on Tomcat, but doesn't seem to on JBoss. Is there someway to turn this segmentation on?
I got up at the crack of dawn (4:00) this morning. For the first time since the 2nd week in January, I drove to work instead of riding my bike. We have a deadline and the software needs to be ready for production tomorrow. We don't want to stay late tonight, so we figured coming in early would be a good idea. So what happens when I get here? The server that we talk to for all our data is down. Figures - should be a good 3-4 more hours until it's up again. A wasted morning for productivity.
Hmmmm, that's strange. This post's published time shows up as 4:02 a.m. - but it was really 5:02 when I posted it.
JRoller has upgraded to Roller 1.0.1 and Remember Me is finally working! Since I'm the one who added this feature - please let me know if you find any issues with it. The last time we deployed it to JRoller, it ended up being a huge security hole and you could log into other people's accounts. Doh! Sorry about that. Hopefully it won't happen this time.
If you want to know how this feature is implemented, see AppFuse's Remember Me documentation.
I've decided to attend the Microsoft Conference in a few weeks. The good news is I got approval (from Microsoft) to blog the whole thing - even during the event. So you, my dear readers, will know as much as I do after this shindig. Furthmore, they agreed to let me cut out early. My sister's birthday is St. Patty's day (Thursday) and she's going to pick me up so we can head to my parents (in Oregon) for the weekend. A couple days with the folks and then I fly back to Denver on Saturday. Sounds fun.
David Geary on Ruby on Rails:
Interestingly enough, ROR creates
default views for your db tables. Cool. But after I thought about it
for a minute, I came to the conclusion that that feature is certainly
close to useless: It's nice to get you up and running, and great for
seductive demos and articles, but you're going to override at least 100% of the views that ROR generates. And therein lies the rub...
...because views in ROR are a mixture of HTML and Ruby scriplets!
We've been there before, of course, in the early days of JSP with HTML
mixed with Java scriptlets. No thanks, I'll pass on that giant step
backwards.
I've thought about this myself. I think David is right, but only to a certain point. Ruby on Rails (and its scriptlet-ridden views) will work until they get HTML designers in their writing Ruby code. Furthermore, when companies start off-shoring their Ruby development, that's when it gets ugly. JSP scriplets were a disaster because you had HTML developers writing Java code, and using if statements that exceeded the 64K block and such. JSP scriplets are hard to maintain when they're used and abused. I've seen a lot of code (especially the off-shored stuff) that has very ugly and unmaintanable scriplet code. However, using scriptlets in JSPs isn't a bad thing - it's only bad if you're coding business logic and/or, using lots of Java code in them, or having JSPs that are scriplet-only pages.
However, I believe Rails is a bit different. Not only does it enforce MVC from the get-go, but you can't use the views stand-alone (can you?). With JSPs and Servlets, you have the opportunity to use JSPs only - which encourages scriptlets. I do wish that Rails' templates used the ${...} syntax that JSP, Velocity and FreeMarker enjoy - the <% %> syntax brings bad bad thoughts of 1000+ line JSPs.
Oh, and one last thing - for David and Rick (the JSF-is-the-best-thing-since-sliced-bread-duo). At least Rails allows HTML in its view templates. JSF developers don't even get to see HTML anymore - poor guys.
This weekend was another action-packed one. On Saturday, we went to the NBA All Star Jam at the Convention Center in downtown Denver. I expected some sort of practice session with the All Stars, but it was just a carnival-like event for grade-school age basketball fans and players. We went with "Uncle Justin" and had a great time riding the light rail down and playing with basketballs at the event. Saturday night, we went to the DU Hockey game and got to witness our first loss of the season. It was a bad game, but I think the Pioneers needed it to get their heads straight for the playoffs in two weeks.
Today, Abbie and I headed up to Copper to do some tubing. The drive up was great - no traffic and Abbie slept the whole way. We rode up the lift together and hopped on the tube for our first ride down. It was wicked fast, and I thought we were in over our heads for a minute. Abbie got scared and cold and that first run was our last. I put on her hat and gloves (she didn't want them before we started the run) and we marched back to the car. The drive back was traffic-less and Abbie kept me entertained with all her mountain-driving observations. I'm going to try to get back in the habit of taking pictures when we do this fun stuff. Click on any image below to see pictures from this weekend.
I was up until 4:30 this morning working on Spring Live. There's nothing like sleeping 3 hours and then riding your bike to work. Must... find... coffee.
My newest reply for why AppFuse doesn't use Maven is going to be this link. Ant rocks. I still need to update AppFuse's build.xml to use all the Ant 1.6 stuff - that's scheduled for next week's late nights.
