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 received an e-mail this morning that said the following:
Congrats! Your blog has made it into the TOP 50 of The All Night Coder blog community, powered by SocialRank!!!
Then I clicked on the link they supplied and discovered I'm #1! Since I know it won't last, I figured I'd better take a screenshot. 
Did you know that Spring MVC's JstlView has a exposeContextBeansAsAttributes property you can use to expose all your Spring beans to JSTL? I didn't. To configure it, you configure your viewResolver as follows:
<bean id="viewResolver"
class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver">
<property name="viewClass" value="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.JstlView"/>
<property name="exposeContextBeansAsAttributes" value="true"/>
<property name="prefix" value="/"/>
<property name="suffix" value=".jsp"/>
</bean>
After doing this, any Spring bean can get referenced in JSTL with:
${beanId.getterMethodWithoutTheGetPrefix}
If you're using Spring 2.5a annotations and <context:component-scan>, you'll need to specify a "value" attribute on your annotations in order to reference them in JSTL. For example:
@Controller(value = "beanId")
@RequestMapping("/foo.html")
public class MyController extends SimpleFormController
...
@Component(value="testClass")
public class TestClass {
Pretty cool stuff. It'd be a lot more useful if you could call methods with parameters. Hopefully JUEL will solve that problem. JSTL's functions work, but I'd rather write ${foo.method('arg')} rather than ${taglib:callMethod(foo, 'method', 'arg')}.
I found the following when cruising through some options in my Gmail account today. Seems like a decent strategy to me.
The good folks at Atlassian have written a nice tutorial on Integrating Crowd with AppFuse and Acegi. Crowd is a web-based single sign-on (SSO) tool that simplifies application provisioning and identity management. We use Crowd for the AppFuse project to maintain a single user store for JIRA, Confluence, and Bamboo. It's worked awesome for us.
AppFuse Light 1.8.1 is a bug fixes release that includes an upgrade to Spring 2.5 and Wicket 1.3 RC1. See the Release Notes for more information on what's changed since the last release.
What is AppFuse Light? Click here to find out.
AppFuse Light now offers 60 possible combinations for download:
If you have any questions about this release, please subscribe to the AppFuse user mailing list by sending a blank e-mail to [email protected]. You can also post questions in a forum-like fashion using Nabble: http://appfuse.org/forum/user.
If you're a developer of one of the frameworks that AppFuse Light uses - I'd love a code review to make sure I'm "up to snuff" on how to use your framework. I'm also more than willing to give commit rights if you'd like to improve the implementation of your framework.
Live demos are available at:
What's on tap for AppFuse Light 2.0? Here's what I'm hoping to do:
Let me know if you disagree with any of these items or would like to see other enhancements.
The AppFuse Team is pleased to announce the release of AppFuse 2.0.1. This release squashes a number of bugs and includes an upgrade to Spring 2.5. To learn more about Spring 2.5's features, see InfoQ's What's New in Spring 2.5: Part 1 article.
For information on upgrading from 2.0, see the 2.0.1 Release Notes or changelog. AppFuse 2.0.1 is available as a Maven archetype. For information on creating a new project using AppFuse, please see the QuickStart Guide or the demos and videos.
What is AppFuse? Click here to find out.
The 2.0 series of AppFuse has a minimum requirement of the following specification versions:
If you've used AppFuse 1.x, but not 2.x, you'll want to read the FAQ. Join the user mailing list if you have any questions.
Thanks to everyone for their help contributing code, writing documentation, posting to the mailing lists, and logging issues.
We greatly appreciate the help from our sponsors, particularly Atlassian, Contegix, JetBrains, and Java.net. Atlassian and Contegix are especially awesome: Atlassian has donated licenses to all its products and Contegix has donated an entire server to the AppFuse project. Thanks guys - you rock!
Please post any issues you have with this release to the mailing list.
The good folks from JavaZone have published a video of the Comparing Java Web Frameworks presentation I did in Oslo in September. Enjoy!
Update: In this presentation, I say we've chosen Struts 2 at LinkedIn. Even though it solved most of our problems, I'm also now prototyping with Spring MVC. I wish JSP/JSTL had a way to call methods with arguments like Struts' OGNL supports.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Thanks for leaving such good comments on this blog and making the web such an enjoyable place to write stuff. Here's a Thanksgiving smile from Abbie in November 2003. Damn they grow up fast.
I'd also like to thank my parents for making the drive to Colorado from Oregon (via Montana). I've had a lot of fun with them in town this week. I'm looking forward to teaching my Dad how to play pool over the next couple days. 
Related: Past Thanksgiving entries.
Gmail has been giving me the following error page since Friday morning. On one hand it's frustrating that I can't check my e-mail. On the other, it's kinda nice having a couple of days off.
My parents are in town and we've been cleaning gutters and raking leaves all day. It's a beautiful 69°F to make it all the more enjoyable.
Update: It's been almost 4 days and still no resolution. My account is still out of order and most e-mails to me are likely bouncing. My advice: don't depend on Gmail for your main mail account. Luckily I haven't, so [email protected] should still work - [email protected] seems to be gone indefinitely.
Update 2: I finally got access again on Tuesday afternoon - 4.5 days later. With 268 unread messages in my inbox, I think I'd like it turned off again.
After attending Dan's talk on REST, I stayed in the same room and listened to Don Brown talk about Struts 2's support for building RESTful applications. Below are my notes from the event.
What is wrong with today's web applications? You're using a modern web framework and you've cleanly separated your presentation and business logic. The biggest problem in modern web applications is Confusing URLs.
A URL should be a resource indicator - not a method invocation. Often, web applications have little or no caching. People use GET to perform data manipulation and POST may or may not change state (especially with JSF). Another big issue with modern web frameworks is there's too many abstraction layers that hide HTTP headers and it's difficult to manipulate them.
Today's applications are "information silos". There's a lot of information in your applications, but it's all buried in HTML, JavaScript and CSS. There's no way to get this information out of your application unless you explicitly expose it.
The answer to many of these problem is REST. It's the Way of the Web. To solve the information silo problem, you can create a single interface that has multiple representation of the same resource. There's one URI for all types of resources - be it XML, JSON or HTML. How does this work w/o modifying the URL? You modify the URL's extension.
Struts 2 has a couple of plugins that make developing RESTful services easier. The first is the Codebehind plugin and the 2nd is the REST plugin. Don is doing a demo with the REST plugin and shows that there's no Struts configuration files needed (no struts.xml and no struts.properties). The only thing that's necessary is to specify an "actionPackages" init-param on the DispatcherFilter in web.xml. This activates the Codebehind plugin that uses conventions to determine the view template's path.
In Don's demo, he's creating an "OrdersController" that implements ModelDriven. After implementing a setId() method (to set the id from the request parameters), a getModel() method (to return the Order object) and implementing a show() method that returns HttpHeaders, Don starts up his server and shows that http://localhost:8080/order/5 returns an HTML page. Changing the URL to end in /5.json returns JSON, /5.xml returns XML.
public HttpHeaders create() {
service.save(order);
return new DefaultHttpHeaders("success").setLocationId(order.getId());
}
The Poster Plugin for Firefox is great when you're working with REST services. Don used this plugin to show us that it's possible to post to JSON and get back JSON results. His demo was impressive, especially the fact that there was no XML configuration required for Struts. I also like how the DefaultHttpHeaders class allows you to manipulate headers in a type-safe manner.
To use the REST plugin, you'll want to use Struts 2.1. If you're using Maven, all you need to depend on is struts-rest-plugin. The struts-codebehind-plugin (as well as struts-core) will be pulled in by transitive dependencies.
One disadvantage of REST vs. WS-* is you can't generate client code from a WSDL. You'll have to write your client by hand. However, one advantage of REST is there's already lots of clients - your browser, curl, etc.
The Struts REST Plugin hasn't been officially released, but hopefully will be in Struts 2.1.1. You can checkout the code from SVN using the URL below. The documentation is located here.
http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/struts/struts2/trunk/plugins/rest
Great talk Don - and excellent work on the REST plugin for Struts. I can't wait to try it out.