Matt RaibleMatt Raible is a writer with a passion for software. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

The Angular Mini-Book 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 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.

10+ YEARS


Over 10 years ago, I wrote my first blog post. Since then, I've authored books, had kids, traveled the world, found Trish and blogged about it all.

The First Day at the New Gig

I can already tell this is going to be a wicked place to work. It has the feel of a .com company - shorts are allowed, people are smart, technology is bleeding edge. They're using JBuilder 9 and Visual Source Safe, so there's some new tools to learn. My machine isn't nearly as fast as I'd hoped (1.6 GHz, 768 MB), but it'll certainly do. I did get dual monitors, which I have a hard time living without - so I can't complain at all. There were four of us that are starting this week or next - 2 graphics designers and 2 Java developers. We are tasked with building 42 custom websites in the next 6 months. Sweet - I love a good challenge!

Posted in General at Aug 18 2003, 10:06:03 PM MDT 4 Comments

[ANNOUNCE] Struts Menu 1.3 Released!

Maybe I need to pay better attention. I didn't realize that Scott released the next version of Struts Menu 1.3. Feel free to check out my demo and then proceed to download it. I used the Tabbed Menu in my last project and the CoolMenu in the project at Comcast - both have been super easy to use and configure.

Posted in Java at Aug 18 2003, 09:38:32 PM MDT Add a Comment

Pulled an all-nighter last night

In an effort to get my short project done before my new job starts tomorrow - I pulled an all-nighter last night. I started coding like a mad-man at 10:00 at didn't stop until 7:30 this morning. 5 hours of sleep, and I'm back at it again. Ugh, I'm a zombie - but very close to finishing the first release. I've written so much code this week that my fingers actually hurt and they're getting raw!

The good news is that I'll only be working a week at my new job - and then we're off on Vacation! We're planning on flying to San Diego (California) and road-trip up the coast to Oregon, where my parents live. Should be fun - we're looking forward to Napa Valley and the Redwoods. Anyone have any advice on what to see or what to do in CA, please let me know. We're currently planning 5-6 days to go from San Diego to Salem, OR.

Posted in General at Aug 17 2003, 02:58:26 PM MDT 5 Comments

Display Tag: Static Headers

One of the requests we get over on the display tag project is a way to have static headers. Basically, this means that a user could scroll down through all the records on a page and the header would stay in place. The next generation of the tag library has a <thead> and <tbody> that makes this fairly easy to do. For instance, just by adding style="height: 400px; overflow: auto" to the <tbody> tag - you get the desired effect. Cool stuff - only seems to work in Mozilla though. Any IE/CSS experts out there that can explain why it doesn't work in IE?

See Also: Display Tag: Static Headers - Revisited

Posted in Java at Aug 16 2003, 03:16:06 PM MDT 19 Comments

Cool RSS Readers for Windows

FR VS FD

I've recently come to accept the fact that I need an RSS Reader for Windows. I use NetNewsWire for the Mac and it's one of the best things since sliced bread. For Windows, I'm currently evaluating FeedReader and FeedDemon. FeedDemon is written by Nick Bradbury, the creator of TopStyle and HomeSite - my two favorite Windows apps. I tell you what - if Nick would create OS X versions of these TopStyle and HomeSite - I'd buy a G5 and get rid of Windows. I doubt that'll ever happen though. FeedReader is great with the tray icon and update notifications. FeedDemon has a "synchronize with OPML" that looks awesome, unfortunately, it doesn't work with my blogroll.

My favorite features of an RSS Reader? I've listed them below and if my readers support them. NNW = NetNewsWire, FD = FeedDemon, FR = FeedReader.

  • Drag-n-drop URLs from a browser window to the reader (NNW)
  • Ability to import my Blogroll from Blogroll.com (none)
  • Weblog posting/editing (NNW)
  • Retrieval of full post rather than description (NNW, FD)

If you can think of more cool reader features - let me know! There might be some I don't even know about.

Posted in Roller at Aug 16 2003, 11:57:24 AM MDT 4 Comments

Loving Java all over again

This past week has been hectic. I'be been pumping out what seemed to be a relatively small and simple application for a client. What was a simple 3-table 3-page application is now 14 tables and even more pages. But it's going awesome. It's the most productive I've ever been on a project - thanks to AppFuse, which is further backed up by the powerful Ant, XDoclet, JUnit, Struts and Hibernate.

The reason I've fell in love with Java all over again is I've re-discovered the power of reflection and inheritance. 8 of the 14 tables are child tables of a main "project table." As I noticed I was doing a lot of copy/paste in my DAOs, Services and Actions - I decided to reflection for all these child tables and now I have 3 methods on my DAOs (get/save/deleteProjectChild). Same goes for my Services and my Actions all share the same delete/edit/save methods in a BaseAction.

The only reason I even have child Actions is for URL beauty and to xdoclet-generate the action-mappings. Backed up by tons of JUnit, StrutsTestCase and WebTest test cases - it's been a breeze to refactor and enhance. I'm in love all over again.

Posted in Java at Aug 16 2003, 11:23:04 AM MDT 1 Comment

Forest Fires Hit Home

I'm the only person in my family that isn't a professional Forest Fire Fighter. Kalin (my sister) fought fires in Montana and Washington for a number of years before she opened Chelan Cider Company. My mom and dad have over 20 years worth of experience. However, this year, they decided to take a break. But that break will be short lived. A fricken fire is threatening the cabin! Well, not yet - but it's getting pretty fucking close!!

Residents in Kraft Creek, Glacier Creek and along Guest Ranch Road have been under an evacuation warning since Sunday, when Crazy Horse first blew up and ran across national forest and Plum Creek Timber Co. lands. It jumped Kraft Creek Road on Tuesday, heading toward homes a short two miles distant.

I used to catch the school bus at the end of Guest Ranch Road.

"It's disconcerting," said Christian Wohlfeil, owner of Holland Lake Lodge. "But we are not in panic mode yet - the fire hasn't crossed the highway."

We are (luckily) on the side of the highway that it hasn't crossed. I can tell my parents are professionals - they knew this was coming. They booked flights to the cabin a couple of weeks ago - but they're scheduled to arrive next Friday. My dad is ready to hammer their Subaru 11 hours to Montana at a moments notice - so stories like these might be the trigger.

I know they'll stop the fires if they get that close - but I might have to join them. It's like a loved one's life being threatened - you'll do anything to stop the attacker.

Posted in General at Aug 15 2003, 05:46:25 PM MDT 1 Comment

JavaScript Exception Handling

Did you know you can use try/catch blocks in JavaScript? It's pretty slick and makes it easy to hide those ugly JavaScript errors. There is an article over at Dev Shed that explains how you can use the new Error object and the "try-catch" constructs to trap and resolve errors. Good stuff!

Posted in The Web at Aug 14 2003, 03:17:58 PM MDT 4 Comments

AppFuse 0.9.1 Released

AppFuse 0.9.1 is a small bug-fixing release. I introduced some errors in the upload module by using <fmt:message> in my baseLayout.jsp, rather than <bean:message>. Not a big deal if you're not using sub-modules. I've never used them in the real-world, only in my example projects.

Posted in Java at Aug 14 2003, 01:49:35 PM MDT 2 Comments

My Blunder of the Day

I woke up early this morning and put in a days work before noon. This afternoon, a friend and I drove to Cheyenne, Wyoming (1.5 hours north) to meet a friend from Nebraska for an afternoon of golf. Golf was great and we had a fun time. When my buddy dropped me off at my car (in Denver), I realized I left my keys in the golf cart. The problem? We only have one set of keys for the car I was driving.

Damn, I missed the DJUG tonight. Tomorrow should be a fun day driving to Cheyenne and back...

Posted in General at Aug 13 2003, 09:18:13 PM MDT 2 Comments