I feel this release deserves the big 1.0 designation because it is an up-to-date representation of my learnings and my perceived
best practices in building web applications. Of course, as I learn more, I will continue to push out new releases.
In this release, I did a lot of refactoring and enhancements to existing features. The DAO and Manager interfaces are no longer tied
to Struts or Hibernate. Hibernate's Session object is now passed as an argument into Manager and DAO constructors, rather than
method signatures. The DAOFactory was refactored by Bear Giles to use reflection to
instantiate Hibernate DAO's. Now, if you add a new DAO, you don't have to edit DAOFactory and DAOFactoryHibernate. To insantiate a
new DAO, the code is now:
LookupDAO dao = (LookupDAO) DAOFactory.getInstance(conn, LookupDAO.class);
...where conn is a connection object retrieved from ServiceLocator or ActionFilter. When you add new POJOs, you still have to add them to ServiceLocator (for JUnit tests) and hibernate.cfg.xml, which is kindof a pain. I'd like to figure out a way to tell Hibernate to just look in appfuse-ejb.jar.
<tangent>
I still don't have a Factory for Managers, and I don't know that there's a need for one, but it's something I might add in the future. Managers are still creating using: LookupManager mgr = new LookupManagerImpl(ActionFilter.getConnection());. One thing I've been thinking about is the ability to switch webapp frameworks - kindof like you can do with Persistence Frameworks and the DAO Pattern. It'd be cool to add a way to switch (at build time) to use WebWork or Tapestry. Maybe by replacing values for the controller in web.xml. It'd probably be a pain since I'd probably have to create new JSPs for the new frameworks - but it would probably be a great learning experience.
</tangent>
The Remember Me feature has been refactored so the username and password cookies are only available under
the /appfuse/security url-pattern. I also changed the posting to "j_security_check" in LoginServlet from response.sendRedirect to
an HTTP POST, using Jakarta Common's HttpClient. The reason I have a LoginServlet vs. just using action="j_security_check" in my <form> is to encrypt passwords.
I've developed 3 different applications using AppFuse (struts-resume is one of them), and I have found that it's a pain to
upgrade to new versions of AppFuse. Because of this, I don't recommend upgrading unless you really need to. I will be upgrading
struts-resume to AppFuse 1.0, but I doubt I'll upgrade it to any future AppFuse releases - it's just too much work for not much reward.
Here's a couple of tips to help you in your JSP development with JSTL:
Usually I try not to put any HTML in ApplicationResources.properties, but I don't think a minimal amount hurts anything. Of course, you could put all the HTML in your JSP, so mainMenu.link changes to "Click {0} to return to the Main Menu." and your JSP changes to:
<fmt:message key="mainMenu.link">
<fmt:param>
<html:link forward="mainMenu">here</html:link>
</fmt:param>
</fmt:message>
Enjoy!
(~11.5 MB for src, ~3.9 MB for bin)
