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.
From the Struts Developers Mailing List:
My conclusion is OGNL is like Maven 2 - sometimes it really pisses you off, and you probably generally don't like the thing, but you've invested so much into it that it would be too painful to switch, and really, it does 95% of what you want anyways.
And with that, I'm off to Finland and Norway! See you on the other side of the pond.
As far as I can tell, Struts 2 sucks. To be fair, so does Stripes. Why? Because there's no developer feedback for invalid properties or OGNL Expressions. What does this mean? It means if you fat-finger a property name, nothing happens. The OGNL exception is swallowed and you never know you did anything wrong. Furthermore, no one seems to care. The XWork folks will help you build, but not solve the problem. This seems like a major deal-breaker to me, However, I also believe it can be fixed - so maybe there's hope.
To demonstrate the problem, I did an experiment. I used the "user details" page in AppFuse Light to fat-finger a property name for the following frameworks: Struts 1, WebWork, Struts 2, JSF, Spring MVC, Stripes, Tapestry and Wicket. First, I tried changing the "lastName" property to "LastName" to see if the framework's property evaluation was case-sensitive. I found that with WebWork/Struts 2, Stripes and Tapestry, the property is not case-sensitive. I prefer case-sensitivity, but maybe that's because I prefer Unix over Windows.
The 2nd thing I tried was changing "lastName" to "pastName" to see if I'd get an error. An error occurred for all the frameworks mentioned, except for WebWork/Struts 2 and Stripes. This makes me believe these frameworks suck. The both use OGNL, so they could blame it on that, but Tapestry uses OGNL and it presents an error message. After this small experiment, my conclusion is the following frameworks have the best developer feedback:
* Wicket seems like it needs some work as all it presents is "Internal Error" and makes you dig through your log files to find the problem.
Without good developer feedback, how can you have good productivity?
Dear Struts 2 and Stripes Developers,
What do you think about improving your error messages for invalid properties and expressions? Is this a feature you think you could add? We'd love it if you did.
Sincerely,
Your Users
Click here for some screenshots of how a fat-fingered property looks in various frameworks:
Update: Stripes doesn't suck and Wicket has excellent error reporting. See my comment below for more details.
Update 2: I've created a patch to (hopefully) solve this issue in XWork. If you have any feedback on ways to improve this patch, I'd love to hear about it.
The AppFuse Team is pleased to announce the release of AppFuse 2.0 RC1! This release marks a huge step in the march to releasing AppFuse 2.0. This release puts the finishing touches on the AppFuse Maven Plugin (AMP), which offers CRUD generation, as well as the ability to change AppFuse from "embedded mode" to "full source" (like 1.x). In addition, we've addressed over 100 issues in preparation for the final 2.0 release. We hope to fix any bugs related to this release and release 2.0 Final in the next week or two.
The videos still represent how M5 works, but things have been simplified (now you don't need to run appfuse:install after appfuse:gen).
AppFuse 2.0 is available as a Maven archetype. For information on creating a new project using this release, please see the QuickStart Guide or the Hello World video.
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. The Maven Reference Guide has a map of Ant » Maven commands. Maven for Newbies might also be useful if you've never used Maven before. There is some support for Ant in this release.
For more information, please see the 2.0 RC1 Release Notes. The 2.0 series of AppFuse has a minimum requirement of the following specification versions:
We appreciate the time and effort everyone has put toward contributing code and documentation, posting to the mailing lists, and logging issues.
We also 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!
Comments and issues should be posted to the mailing list.
Update: I've uploaded a 247-page PDF version of the RC1 documentation to java.net. This PDF contains the relevant pages from the wiki that help you develop with AppFuse 2.0. Who knew I'd end up writing another book? 
I'll be in Mountain View again this week. Instead of trying to organize another tech meetup, I'm going to be attending Redmonk Evening Services on Thursday. If you're nearby, you should definitely join us - I'm sure the conversations won't disappoint.
After California, I'll be arriving back in Denver around 7 on Friday night. One night at home and then I'm off to Oslo for JavaZone at 10 a.m. on Saturday. I'm pretty pumped for the trip because 1) I really enjoyed Norway on my last trip (May 2005) and 2) my parents are traveling with me.
Hope to see you on the road!
Sidenote: It's ironic that my first "On the road again" post was written last year in September.
It should be interesting going into LinkedIn HQ next week. Personally, I like the Web Developer's Diner. If you had $50 to decorate your cube, what would you do? I'd buy a few cases and host a BOF (after hours of course).
Earlier this year, I had a gig at Checkmate Technologies out in Boston. As part of my work there, they paid me to polish much of AppFuse's code so it passed their Checkstyle coding standards. I'm please to announce that they've donated this work to the AppFuse project. See APF-861 and Changeset 2872 for more details. Thanks guys!
As far as AppFuse 2.0 - we're only 5 issues away from 2.0 RC1! I hope to finish these up in the next few days. With any luck, 2.0 Final will follow shortly after.
The first milestone release of Spring Web Flow 2.0 has been released.
We are pleased to announce that the first milestone of the next generation version of Spring Web Flow is now available. Spring Web Flow 2.0 M1 introduces several major new features, including support for flow-managed persistence contexts, improved support for Java Server Faces, full unified expression language (EL) support, and a more comprehensive sample web application.
I think the most interesting part of this release is Spring Faces:
Spring Web Flow 2.0 M1 introduces the Spring Faces module (spring-faces-2.0-m1.jar), a component shipped with the Web Flow distribution that contains first-class support for organizations developing web applications with Java Server Faces. The pre-existing Web Flow + JSF integration has been factored out to this project, and this project will be the home of all future JSF integration work.
The Spring Faces module provides the Spring community a dedicated project for exploring additional JSF integration opportunities. The initial work in 2.0 M1 on this front introduces integration with Ext, a popular Javascript GUI widget framework.
Of course, I also like how the new sample app looks a lot like one of Seam's demos.
JSF has needed a good client-side validation framework for quite some time. I also like the Ext integration as most JSF date pickers are hideous. Well done gents.
This past weekend marked a big accomplishment for me. I moved into my new place in early August and I've scrambling ever since to make it a home. The biggest thing I've been doing is painting. When I originally decided I wanted to buy the place, it looked really clean inside. However, after the previous owners moved out and took all their pictures down, the walls were pretty nasty looking. I was hoping to do a bit of touch up, but ended up doing a helluva lot more. The first week, I painted the living room and Abbie's room (pink) with the help of many friends. Julie's an expert painter and was able to knock out Abbie's room in only a few hours. The living room (with vaulted ceilings) took severals friends and I quite a few nights. Sure there was a lot of beer involved, but we were still painting the whole time.
The next couple weeks, I spent painting my office and its adjoining bathroom. What a pain in the ass. The office was bright yellow and the bathroom was dark green. Since both have high ceilings, I had to paint those too. For some reason, I chose a mostly white color and went to town. It felt like it took forever, but I finished last Tuesday. It took 4 coats to cover up the yellow and 5 to cover up the green - but it looks sooo much better.
Last weekend was a major deadline for me. I've been working almost every night to get my new place in a condition where I don't feel like I have to work on it - where I'm totally moved in. Sure I still have a lot to do in the garage (and I still need to move my tools to work on the bus), but it finally feels like a home. My deadline was largely motivated by Jack's birthday party here last weekend. I was literally working up until the minute the party started. The worst part was shoveling and hauling 20 tubs of rotten apples out of my backyard.
I have the biggest apple tree I've ever seen and it drops apples like they're going out of style. I counted them in a 24-hour period last weekend and there was 100 new apples! I thought it was cool when I first moved in, but now it seems like a lot of work. However, it's such a good shade tree, it'd be a shame to do anything to it. Below are some pics of the new place.
So what are my 4 other deadlines? I have a project due for my client, AppFuse 2 needs to be released, I need to deliver training materials for a class in October and I have to turn in my Software Summit Presentations. All are due on September 1st (this weekend). Yikes - I'd better get to work!
Today was Abbie and Jack's first day at their new school and boy were they excited. With new lunchboxes and backpacks, what's their not to be excited about? They're both in preschool as Abbie is a bit young for kindergarten (she turns 5 in November). She did take a test for kindergarten and got in, but Julie decided it'd be best to try her in preschool first since her spot disappears as soon as she turns it down. I had a great morning today driving them there (it's about a mile away) and hung out for a while afterwards. Seems like a fun school - made me miss the old days of being a kid.
I went to a K-8 that only had 60 students. You think that's bad - a good friend of mine spent his entire elementary years in a 1-room schoolhouse! There were only 8 kids in his school. The Local School Directory lists that school at 6 students this year. Mine looks quite a bit smaller than 25 years ago - now sitting at 33.
They sure do grow up fast.
Today marks 3 years since Jack was born. He's grown up quite a bit in that time and seems destined to be a train conductor or a hockey player. Too bad he broke his foot a couple weeks ago - he was signed up to start skating lessons next week. Happy Birthday little buddy!
