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.
I've added a Christmas Tree to this site to decorate a little for the holidays. Hope you don't mind. Like all new additions, I had to make room for it and adjust some margins so it didn't hide behind anything. Feel free to steal it if you like. The CSS to make it a background is available with a good ol' Ctrl+U. You should be glad this is all I did - the first one I tried was animated... Happy
Holidaze! 
I feel obliged to report on security in web applications now I've written a chapter on it. DevX has an article on how to Set Up a Certificate Authority for Java-based Systems. Along the same topic of security, Lance sent me this humorous story about a hotshot security manager.
I requested a new feature today for Roller - the ability to receive e-mail notification when comments have been posted. I mentioned this wouldn't be too hard using the mailer tag library. So I got slightly motivated and did it myself. I think to add it to Roller, we should make it a little more configurable, but here's what I added above the form in weblog/comment-form.jspf:
... define mailer and c taglibs of course ...
<c:if test="$\{param.method == 'update'\}">
<mt:mail server="smtp.domain.com">
<mt:setrecipient type="to">[email protected]</mt:setrecipient>
<mt:from><c:out value="${param.email}"/></mt:from>
<mt:subject>Comment: <bean:write name="blogEntry"
property="title" scope="request" /></mt:subject>
<mt:message><c:out value="${param.content}"/>
<c:out value="${param.name}"/>
<c:out value="${param.url}"/>
</mt:message>
<mt:send>
Doh! An error has occurred sending comments notification!<br />
<mt:error id="err">
<jsp:getProperty name="err" property="error"/>
</mt:error>
</mt:send>
</mt:mail>
</c:if>
I had to put those \'s in their in order to get past Velocity. The one pain with the mailer tag library is everything comes through with the spacing as set in the JSP. That's why the name and url variables are squished all the way over to the left.
I heard about Jenerator on the mailing list this morning. Sounds cool.
The Jenerator Version 0.9 is a code generator (Licensed under the Academic Free License version 1.1) and hosted on SourceForge, which takes meta information from different mediums, applies XSL templates and generates code. Unlike other code generators, which use JavaDoc custom tags to define and describe what is to be generated, Jenerator uses XML based Descriptor files.
It's got a heck of a list of features too: supports regeneration, EJBs, VOs, Unit Tests for JUnit and Cactus, Ant's build file, JDO source descriptor, and Servlets. While all this sounds good, I probably won't even download it - I'm just not interested as I really like how XDoclet works right now. I might change my mind in a few weeks, but I've learned too much to give it up now.
I, like Charles, was unsure of what Maven did. James has made it clear and I have seen the light - I think. In my AppFuse project, I have a lib directory that contains all the various third-party jars I'm using in my build process. Among these are XDoclet, Struts, Cactus, JSTL, Hibernate, JUnitDoclet, etc. The problem is that this directory is ~16MB and if I add it to CVS, I've got a monster project. The zipped up version of AppFuse's source is 14MB! That's enough to scare off folks right there.
It sounds to me that Maven can help me out in 2 ways. It can be used to download and install these jars as part of the build process. Slick if it can! Can it get me nightly builds from CVS? The 2nd feature seems to be building a project website for me. That's cool and definitely better than my simple readme file. However, can I make my site look like this (my site) rather than this (Maven site)? The good news I see is that the generated website does use XHTML and a DOCENGINE:
<!DOCENGINE html PUBLIC "-//CollabNet//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.collabnet.com/dtds/collabnet_transitional_10.dtd">
The bad news is that it's not a standard DOCENGINE and even after I override the doctype and charset, it still does not validate. Of coure, this may not be a big deal, but if this were to be more "standard" it would be easier to convince folks like me to jump on the bandwagon. If there's templates I can modify, show me, and I'll dig like a miner that's struck gold.
Konstantin Priblouda has put together a small demo showing hibernate in action:
I found a new site with a list of Eclipse plugins tonight. I was hoping that the Ant View plugin could solve my Ant problems in Eclipse, but I can't seem to figure out what it does. I gave it the ol' 30 seconds of investigation - maybe I should read the documentation. The problem I'm having now is (after swapping Ant 1.4 jars for 1.5.1) is:
Unable to find a javac compiler; com.sun.tools.javac.Main is not on the classpath.
Hmmm, works fine from Cygwin, and Eclipse (2.0.2) has tools.jar and rt.jar in the classpath. Must be time to download a nightly build.
There was a lot of talk today in the java.blogs community about Hibernate. I'm happy to see this as it feels like I just bought a new car and everyone is saying it's the best car on the road. I decided to use Hibernate based on Dave's implementation in Ag. It looked easy enough, so I figured - why not?! It turns out, at the same time, that the XDoclet folks were in the midst of creating a new hibernate module in CVS. In fact, I got the hibernate module from Joel Rosi-Schwartz (I'm assuming a hibernate developer) before it was even in the XDoclet source tree.
I got to be a guinea pig in making hibernate tags work with XDoclet. I have to say that with Dave's working example, I was able to markup a POJO with hibernate/xdoclet tags and generate my persistence layer in a matter of minutes. It just worked. Kinda like Tomcat IMHO. That's how software should be. Check out my security-example if you're interested in using Hibernate with XDoclet. The readme in the source will explain how to run initial generation and tests. Currently, it generates a Struts Validator Form and VO from an Entity bean (located at src/ejb/org/apache/template/User.java). Why? Because Struts Forms can only be generated from Entity Beans. This needs to change IMO. But at the same time, the EJB architecture is already in place, I just need to execute the ejb-related tasks, and I'm in business.
In other news, a couple of Struts related goodies:
I found on the Struts website that the top 2 Java books sold at Amazon.com this month are Ted's Struts in Action and Chuck's Programming Jakarta Struts. You can look at the Bestselling Java Books for proof. Don't you find it strange that #3 is a Perl book though?!
I saw the following on the xdoclet-user mailing list today:
Chapters from Manning's "EJB Cookbook", by Ben Sullins and Mark Whipple will be made available on TheServerSide for public review. A chapter on "Code generation" is now available for download. "Code generation" presents the most common uses of XDoclet, an open source tool, tightly integrated with Ant, that lets you generate source code or other files.
Also, I just received the following e-mail from a fellow Denverite, Mike Clark:
Subject: Nice Blog
Hi Matt!
I've been enjoying reading your blog for a while and meaning to introduce myself since we both live in Denver. I'm speaking at the DJUG in April, so perhaps we can meet each other there.
By the way, my weblog is at: http://www.clarkware.com/cgi/blosxom.
Nice - gotta like e-mails like that!! Apparently, Mike is the Author of BitterEJB and also has some chapters for review at TSS:
If you're into JMS and message-driven beans, my "Bitter Messages" chapter is up for review on TheServerSide. As always, any feedback you might have is greatly appreciated!
I noticed the "hot" links over at java.blogs this afternoon. They show who has the most read topics for a particular day - at least on that website. I had 2 of the top 3 yesterday! If that's not motivation for better writing, I don't know what is. But is this really a popularity contest? Are we trying to boost our Google/Java.Blog rankings? Probably not, but it sure won't hurt when you're out looking for a new job!
That being said, I interviewed for a J2EE developer position this morning. The project sounds pretty cool - using Struts, Servlets, JSPs and such to create a web front end to an Oracle database. The guy who interviewed me seemed very smart and would be great to work for - he's chosen J2EE as an architecture and wants to run the production system on Tomcat. Nice! All the stuff I've been working with for the past year and a half. He's probably reading this right now (I sent him the url to my blog), so hopefully this post helps me out. ;-)
Another reason for writing this post is to let you know that there is another open position on this project. Required Skills: HTML, XHTML programming. Any Java/J2EE, LDAP or Apache/Tomcat skills would be a bonus to complement the team. If you're interested and you live in Denver, let me know, and I'll send you the recruiter's e-mail. I believe the contract is for 3-6 months.