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.
Not much has changed on my bus since the last time I visited it in the shop. However, this time it is out of the corner and the guy (Mike Lopez of Twins Auto Body) is actively working on it. He's in the midst of replacing the floor pan and doing all of the welding it needs before prepping for paint. I doubt it'll be done this summer, but I'm still hopeful. We snapped a few pics to record its progress.
I discovered something somewhat disturbing last week. As part of AppFuse 2.0 M5, we added "xfire-all" as a dependency so web services could be supported out-of-the-box. What I didn't know is that xfire-all has transitive dependencies to 40 other libraries, which total 13.4 MB in size. Yikes!
Does XFire take the cake for the most bloated library you can use or are we just including too much (xfire-all vs. fine-grained dependencies)? I tried changing to the recommended Maven configuration and there's still 28 JARs added by XFire.
The WEB-INF/lib directory of a basic Struts 2 + Spring + Hibernate AppFuse application is already 19.2 MB to start. Adding XFire for web services increases the size to 29.2 MB. While disk space may be cheap, some users have noticed "mvn jetty:run" is much slower with XFire (presumably from the JAR processing that happens at startup). Is there an uber XFire JAR we can use instead?
Remember when JBoss use to "buy" open source projects by hiring their lead developers and paying them to work on open source? Remember when Marc Fleury said something about owning open source projects?
Have things changed at Red Hat? When are they going to buy Facelets? From the Facelets mailing list:
JBoss Seam progress is heavily dependent on facelets so might be JBoss could to something to remedy the situation with lack of evolution in current facelets.
Facelets is a very good project which now suffers due to lack of evolution which it needs.
Please, keep it going...
Jacob - are you willing to be bought? According to the Facelets user community, this project could really use some help.
From a message I sent earlier to the AppFuse user mailing list:
After getting Dojo's DropdownDatePicker working with both Struts and Spring MVC, I've run into a snag:
You can no longer use Canoo WebTest to enter dates in a form.
It doesn't find the form element because HtmlUnit (the underlying browser implementation for Canoo) doesn't understand/render Dojo's components.
For users, workarounds include:
1. Don't write tests for entering data on forms that have required dates.
2. Don't make dates required.
Either way, it seems logical to move to Selenium for UI testing.
What do you think? Are Dojo-based components the future of Ajax support in Java web frameworks? If so, I wish Dojo allowed more "progressive enhancement" features instead of the invalid HTML feature it seems to rely on now. I'm more than willing to support Dojo if that's what AppFuse users want. However, in my experience
with Struts 2's datetimepicker, it seems pretty slow. Of course, if I could render my own input element and then add a datepicker next to it, I'd be much happier. AFAICT, the Struts' datetimepicker doesn't allow you to do this, but I could be wrong.
Of course, if Dojo 0.9 lives up to the hype and is much faster - maybe I should quit caring about Hijax and just start writing those Selenium tests?
For users of those "next-gen" Java frameworks (like Seam, Grails and Wicket), what do you use for UI testing? Does Canoo WebTest work for you when you have a lot of Ajax functionality? If not, do you use Selenium or leave UI testing up to the QA folks?
Update: I ended up using jscalendar for both Spring MVC and Struts 2's datepickers. It's simply the best tool for the job. Dojo is too bloated IMO (240K for a datepicker!) for such a small feature. This allows us to worry about getting AppFuse 2.0 out the door without migrating to Selenium first. We will eventually migrate to Selenium (it's a better tool for the job IMO), but probably not until 2.1. The only question is what's the best way to distribute Selenium tests?
Last week I had an interesting 4-day consulting gig for a client in Boulder. I was supposed to fly out to Connecticut to deliver a training course, but it got rescheduled due to the 45-day Vendor Approval Process I need to go through. The client in Boulder wanted me to come out and do an architectural assessment and provide recommendations. Topics they were interested in: web tier (specifically Spring MVC), Security, Ajax integration, build process, web services and localization. I've done this kind of before with Virtuas, but this time was different. With Virtuas, I'd do 5-days worth of presentations on just about anything the customer wanted. For example, checkout this agenda for a client in NY last year.
With the company in Boulder, I delivered zero presentations. Instead, everything we talked about and coded was hands-on. On Tuesday, we started out by discussing their application and some issues they were having. They'd done a lot of customization to Spring MVC and had managed to eliminate all the XML needed when adding new controllers and views. I spent 3-4 hours that day with 2 of their engineers finalizing and implementing their convention-over-configuration rules. On Wednesday, I helped them implement Acegi Security into their application. This was interesting because they didn't have any security mechanism and we had to implement Acegi from scratch and then tie it into their backend (using a custom AuthenticationProvider). We also integrated i18n so all messages were retrieved from their database.
On Thursday, we configured Ant to run their tests and wrote some tests for their controllers. As part of this process, I showed them how to use jMock and EasyMock and tried to explain the benefits of using Spring IoC (which they still aren't sold on). On Friday, we integrated Selenium into their build process and wrote a few tests using Selenium's Java support. In the afternoon, I showed them how they might use Scriptaculous and Prototype to Ajax-enable some features in their application.
Doing all the "live coding" on someone else's machine (with 5 developer's watching) was a bit nerve wracking. However, thanks to Cenqua's FishEye tool, I was able to search AppFuse and AppFuse Light's SVN repositories for code snippets and examples. While I knew how to do much of the stuff we covered, FishEye and Google bailed me out when I didn't. About halfway through, I realized that I don't keep a lot of my knowledge in my head. Instead, it's on this blog, or spread out on the web. I don't remember URLs anymore, all I remember are keywords. If I've read a blog post or article on the web, chances are I can find it again pretty easily with Google. Even though I store a lot of bookmarks in del.icio.us, I didn't use it all week. Remembering keywords is the new bookmark for me.
The whole week was an interesting exercise in "live coding." The whole team (6 or so) sat in a conference room all week and VNC'ed into the architect's box to do the work. We worked in Eclipse and used WTP to deploy/test things on Tomcat. The keyboard was passed around between developers at random and everyone got a chance to implement new features. I think the reason that everything worked so well was because the team was full of Senior Java Developers. Everyone learned from each other as they saw new shortcuts, keystrokes and ways or writing code. I don't know if this kind of thing will work in all development teams, but I'd encourage you to try it. It's a great way to share knowledge and educate the entire team on how a new module works.
Over the weekend, I received the following e-mail from one of the developers on the team:
Very nice to meet you this past week and get a chance to see firsthand the breadth and depth of your experience in web app frameworks and such. I believe due to your visit, we will be cranking happily along here very shortly. Everyone was quite happy with the results at the end of the day yesterday.
On a related note, if you're looking to hire an enthusiastic Web + Java Developer, please take a look at my resume or send me an e-mail. My current contract ends this month and I'm hoping to find something new to get me through the summer.
Spotted on the Acegi Security mailing list several weeks ago:
A few weeks ago, I started an open source project (Security Annotation Framework) which addresses annotation-based, instance-level access control for Spring applications. It is also based on Spring 2.0's extensible XML authoring features. You can find more info at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/safr and http://safr.sourceforge.net
The framework was created during a project in 2006 and is now available under the Apache 2.0 license. It's a generic framework focused on processing security annotations on Spring beans as well as domain objects (which typically aren't managed by a Spring application context) and can be used to enforce access decisions for domain object instances. It can be used with any authorization provider and is not specific to Acegi. However, I plan to include an example how to use the SAF with Acegi authorization soon. Furthermore, it supports inheritance of annotations from base classes and interfaces.
What do you think about SAF? Are annotations a better way of implementing ACLs on domain objects?
Here's a couple of good blog entries I've enjoyed reading over the past few days - in case you missed them:
Warner is spot on when it comes to Tapestry's biggest problem. Let's hope Tapestry 5 is the end-all-be-all that Howard thinks it will be. As for Gavin's post, I like it because it's mostly true and the f-bomb makes it enjoyable to read. ;-)
The AppFuse Team is pleased to announce the release of AppFuse 2.0 M5!
This release marks a milestone in the features of AppFuse 2.x. This release adds CRUD code generation, full source support (just like 1.x) and XFire integration. In addition, we've fixed all the issues related to switching persistence frameworks, and you should now be able to easily switch from using Hibernate to to iBATIS or JPA. The videos have been updated for M5. The Easy CRUD with Struts 2 video shows how code generation currently works.
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 and 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 M5 Release Notes. If you'd like to use AppFuse offline (or download everything at once), you may want to grab the dependencies and extract them into your ~/.m2/repository directory.
The 2.0 series of AppFuse has a minumum requirement of the following specification versions:
Comments and issues should be posted to the mailing list.
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, Cenqua, Contegix, JetBrains, Java.net and KGBInternet. Without them, working on this project wouldn't be nearly as much fun.
Update: The videos are much lower quality than the ones I originally recorded (13 MB vs. 70 MB). If you want to view the high quality videos (they're much clearer), you can download them from java.net. If someone has a better way to compress these (I just used QuickTime's Export feature), please let me know.
Also, this release contains the first release of the AppFuse Maven Plugin. This plugin is largely based on Hibernate Tools. We modified many of the FreeMarker templates from Hibernate Tools to default to certain annotations, as well as clean up the formatting. These templates are currently available in AppFuse's SVN. Hopefully making them available is enough to satisfy Hibernate's LGPL license.
There's been a couple of significant events in Abbie's (and our) lives in the last couple of weeks. First of all, Julie and the kids spent two weeks down in Florida at the beginning of May. Julie's mom has a pool, so the kids enjoyed swimming in it almost every day. They've both been taking swimming lessons, but they certainly couldn't swim by themselves. Julie taught Abbie to do an underwater breaststroke rather than doggie paddling after the first few days. By the time I arrived (a week after their arrival), Abbie could swim all by herself, underwater. By the end of the week, she could swim from one end of the pool to the other. Pretty impressive I must say.
The 2nd event I learned about on Friday night. Sometime last week, Julie decided to start giving Abbie money to do chores around the house. She can only earn a maximum of $1 per day, but she's super pumped about it and is always asking if she can do stuff. Her room is usually spotless now. With her new found wealth, she needed something to store it in - so Julie bought them piggy banks over the weekend. Who knows how long their enthusiasm will last, but I think it's important to teach them how much things cost and how they can save money to get things they want. When I was a kid, I had a lot of chores and earned something like $5/week. While I didn't like the chores, I loved the allowance. It's good to see inflation hasn't influenced allowances too much. 
From Erik's Weblog:
After 7 years, It's time to put my linkblog to rest.
I've been struggling in the last few months to find good content... what used to take 30 minutes, now takes hours. Moreover, places like DZone are doing a better job than I ever could.
I took a few weeks off last summer hoping it would help with my frustrations, but it didn't. In a way it made things worse. It is no longer fun and I can't shake the feeling that I could do something more productive with my time.
Thanks to all my regular (and not so regular) readers. It has been fun.
Thanks for the memories.
I'm definitely bummed to see Erik's Linkblog go, but I understand time commitments and priorities. Erik's Linkblog was one of the first Java blogs I started reading and I've enjoyed it thoroughly all these years. Thanks for all the hard work you've put in over the years Erik. Your linkblog will be missed.
