Matt RaibleMatt Raible is a Web Developer and Java Champion. 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.

Fixing your java.net project's homepage

If you're hosting your open source project at java.net, you might be annoyed by the fact that you can't disable the forums or issue tracker. The forums pretty much suck, mainly because there's no "remember me" on the site and it's a pain to click 3 times just to answer someone's question. They also don't have the ability to quote a previous message. In addition to the less-than-adequate forums, the issue tracker doesn't hold a candle to JIRA.

For the longest time, I've been wanting to remove both the "Discussion forums" and "Project issues" links from the AppFuse homepage. I asked the java.net folks, and they didn't have a solution. Finally, I thought of one on my own.

In case you didn't know - you can create a project_tools.html file in your project's www directory - which allows you to append items to the menu on the left site. Add a little JavaScript action and you can manipulate or remove items as well. Here's what I'm using to remove the link for the Discussion forums, as well as change the Project issues to point to JIRA. If you find any issues with this script, please let me know.

<script type="text/javascript">

function replaceLinks() {
    try {
        var tools = document.getElementById("projecttools");
        var links = tools.getElementsByTagName("a");
        for (i=0; i < links.length; i++) {
            if (links[i].getAttribute("href").indexOf("ProjectIssues") > -1) {
                links[i].setAttribute("href", "http://issues.appfuse.org/browse/APF");
                links[i].innerHTML="JIRA Issue Tracker";
            }

            if (links[i].getAttribute("href").indexOf("ProjectForumView") > -1) {
                links[i].parentNode.style.display = "none";
            }
        }
    } catch (e) {}
}

window.onload=replaceLinks;
</script>

Related: AppFuse and Equinox get some FishEye lovin'.

Posted in Java at Jul 29 2005, 02:39:36 PM MDT Add a Comment

Site Status

Last weekend's crash made me change a few things on this site - all for the better. Instead of having a single server for hosting the AppFuse Wiki, there's now a read-only mirror at http://appfuse.org/wiki. Keith (of KGB Internet) has been kind enough to setup an rsynch cron that synchronizes from raibledesigns.com daily.

As part of the "fixing", I upgraded Roller and JSPWiki. Roller's search is still broken for the most part, but it seems to be due to some orphaned records, which I can hopefully fix soon. When upgrading JSPWiki, I broke the print as HTML feature, which I hope to fix today.

Last, but not least, I've enabled Roller's Planet feature. If you have a blog where you talk about AppFuse or it's related technologies, let me know and I'll add you. As far as contributing to Roller, I'm ashamed to admit that I haven't committed any code in months (maybe even a year). Integrating Acegi Security has been on my todo list for a couple of months now - and I hope to find some time soon. Unfortunately, life, AppFuse and Spring Live keep getting in the way. ;-)

5 minutes later: Print as HTML is fixed.

Posted in Roller at Jul 29 2005, 10:29:02 AM MDT 1 Comment

OSCON: Next week in Portland

I'm starting to get pretty pumped about OSCON next week in Portland. Unlike the rest of the conferences I attend, this one is close to home. My parents live in Salem, Oregon - which is a mere 40 miles south of Portland. I spent my last two years of high school in Salem, so I still have a few friends in the area too. To get the most out of the trip, I'm flying into Portland on Sunday and commuting from Salem to Portland for the first couple days.

On Monday, I'm going to do a Ruby-immersion day and spend it listening to Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson. I hope to come out of these sessions with enough knowledge to write a webapp in Rails. Since I'm aspiring to be an open source web frameworks expert, instead of Just Java - this seems like a good fit. In the next few months, I plan on learning more about Rails, as well as other open source web frameworks in general (any and all suggestions welcome).

Tuesday, I'm giving an AppFuse Tutorial and Wednesday I'll be duking it out with Matthew Porter. Other tutorials and sessions I hope to attend are Kathy Sierra's Creating Passionate Users, Joe Walnes' SiteMesh talk and I could probably stand to learn a bit more about Beehive.

Another reason this conference will be a lot of fun is because many of the SourceBeat Authors are attending. It's always a good time when you rendezvous with a bunch of smart developers. Last, but not least, if you're attending OSCON, you might want to check the New Sessions entry on O'Reilly's blog.

Posted in Java at Jul 28 2005, 11:53:56 AM MDT 12 Comments

Taming JSF 1.1

A couple weeks ago, I received an e-mail from Ray Davis of University of California, Berkeley. In the e-mail, he provided me a link to his team's Confluence Wiki - where he describes their experience and frustrations with JSF 1.1. I really like how Ray explains the problems they experienced, as well as how they fixed them. The "request thread" scope they created sounds similar to what Spring Web Flow does.

Our experience left us very happy with Spring, moderately happy with Hibernate, and not at all happy with JSF. We did manage to deliver a Pilot Gradebook that told us what we needed to know, but sacrificed reliability, consistency, and scalability to do so.

In January 2005, when we moved to full-time work on the official Sakai 2.0 Gradebook, JSF was our biggest concern.

It's a good read for those looking to jump into JSF. I think JSF 1.2 will solve a lot of problems, but who knows how long it will take to get a RI and MyFaces version of that.

Posted in Java at Jul 27 2005, 02:51:40 PM MDT 9 Comments

Tapestry 4.0 and AppFuse

It looks like someone might integrate Tapestry 4.0 into AppFuse before I get a chance. Now that Tapestry 4 has reached Beta 3, this seems like an excellent idea to me. My only request is to not make the initial Tapestry 4 integration depend on JDK 5. I plan to start working on AppFuse 2.0 in September and it would be nice to have Tapestry 4 in AppFuse 1.9 as well as 2.0. I'd love to start this next month, but I'm attending OSCON and working on Spring Live for most of the month.

P.S. The main reason I'm writing this post is to send a trackback to the developer who wants to do this work. I was unable to leave a comment on their site, nor find a contact e-mail address. ;-)

Posted in Java at Jul 26 2005, 05:33:08 PM MDT 1 Comment

What happens at my house when you're gone for a week

I was out of town last week and Julie architected and started building a deck while I was gone! We still have quite a bit more work to do - but she did the hard part. Her mom was in town all week, so apparently she was staying up until midnight working on it everyday. Of course I knew this before today, but didn't have any pictures to impress you with. ;-)

New Deck

Posted in General at Jul 25 2005, 10:20:33 AM MDT 1 Comment

Down all weekend - what happened?

Some of you might have noticed that this site was down all weekend. I didn't notice it until Saturday morning, at which point I was so beat from traveling last week that I didn't care. I tried to fix it for 5 minutes, then gave up figuring Keith (at KGB Internet) would be able to fix it. I sent him an e-mail asking for help - hoping he could kill a stray process or something. I didn't do any more investigating until Sunday - when it was still down. This site has been extremely stable for the last few months, so the fact that it all just stopped working really had (and still has) me puzzled.

I spent about an hour trying to get things to startup again, to no avail. The problem seemed to be related to the fact that the first time I'd try to hit Roller - it would peg the CPU and the number of database connections would start to skyrocket. Within seconds, the connection pool would become exhausted and Hibernate stack traces would begin to litter my logs. I spent hours doing this dance. At one point, I suspected a DOS attack - why else would the connections skyrocket for no reason?

While I was doing the site-fix dance, I created a read-only copy of the AppFuse Wiki at http://appfuse.org/wiki. When I tried to restart Tomcat on appfuse.org, I got stack traces from the JSPs. Upgrading to the latest stable release of JSPWiki (2.2.28) fixed the problem. However, when I'd start the "wiki" app, it would hang when I tried to request pages. Guessing that this was related to the data volume of pages (11.5 MB gzipped), I cleared out the wiki pages directory and started the wiki context with no data. That worked. I was then able to copy the pages back in and get everything back to normal.

Back to this site. I tried several things last night, including upgrading Roller to 1.2, upgrading Tomcat to 5.5.9 and upgrading the JDK to 5.0. Nothing worked, so I gave up and went to bed. This morning, I decided to try JDK 5 with Roller 1.2 and the instance of Tomcat (5.0.28) that's been working so well for the past few months. Still no dice. But I did manage to get the wiki to spit out the errors it did on appfuse.org. Remembering that this was caused by JDK 5, I went ahead and upgraded JSPWiki to 2.2.28 and did the empty directory dance to get the wiki started. Voila! - everything was fixed!

So that's my story. I still don't know the root cause, but I think the JDK 5 + JSPWiki 2.2.28 combination fixed the problem. I also suspect that something is different today than yesterday b/c the number of database connections didn't immediately spike like it did yesterday. I turned the search feature off as part of my site-fixing dance, so that's still off. I've been afraid to touch anything since I got it all working again. I'll try to turn it back on tonight. In the meantime, I need to figure out how to fix the startup problem with JSPWiki.

Update: I think I figured out the problem - particularly with JSPWiki. I was using JSPWiki's PageViewCountPlugin to track page hits. This file had grown to be just over 59 MB! Deleting the file allowed JSPWiki to start problem-free.

Posted in Roller at Jul 25 2005, 10:05:03 AM MDT 1 Comment

On the downhill slope

Now that I've completed 4 out of the 5 days of training out here, I'm really starting to enjoy San Francisco. Of course, I miss my family and friends back home - but the students I'm training have been very hospitable and enjoyable to work with. They even invited me to join them at Zebulon last night for a "going away" party for one of the team members. I was happy to go, but got scared and left after the car bombs started flowin'. It was weird being at Zebulon and not seeing any Tangosol or Solarmetric monkeys (case in point).

Last night, I had the pleasure of dining with Crazy Bob and his woman at a very cool restaurant down by the bay. It was fun talking about how WebWork sucks and Google is a horrible place to work. Bob's work life seems to be pretty horrendous, but the new baby in a few weeks should turn things around. ;-) Good luck you two - I wish you the best.

The weather here is awesome. It seems to hover between 60 and 75, which is perfect IMO. Denver weather sounds awful right now. A good quote from Jason: "It's like I went to sleep Tuesday night and woke up in Phoenix."

One of the fun parts of class today was sharing IDEA tips. The good ones I learned were 1) use the pin icon on the panels to auto-close them when you're not using them (Command+1 to re-open the Project pane) and 2) install the Rearranger Plugin to control where your getters and setters are generated. The only tips I had to offer were Command+N, Command+Shift+N and Command+E - which most IDEA users already know. A lot of folks didn't know about Command+E (recent files), so that was likely my only contribution. Another good one I learned was Command+Shift+Alt+N (variable search). With all of the shortcuts I'm learning for IDEA, it's going to become harder and harder to keep using Eclipse. Got another useful shortcut? I'd love to hear about it!

Posted in Java at Jul 21 2005, 07:18:43 PM MDT 11 Comments

San Francisco Giants

This evening, Matt Filios and I headed down the street to Giants Stadium to watch the Giants play the Braves. The park was very cool, the Guinness was good - and the Giants won in the bottom of the ninth. It was an awesome game and our 20th row seats behind home plate were pretty nice too. ;-)

Posted in General at Jul 19 2005, 11:26:47 PM MDT 6 Comments

The DOM Scripting Task Force

It's nice to see that someone is going to help make JavaScript code more standardized.

"The skillset of a front end programmer is a three-legged stool: structure (XHTML) is the first leg, presentation (CSS) the second, and behavior (DOM Scripting) the third," said Peter-Paul Koch, a prominent scripting expert and one of the founders of the task force. "These three legs should be equal, but at the moment the behavior leg is the shortest, least-valued and least-understood of the three, even though the DOM has been a W3C specification for seven years and enjoys relatively solid browser support."

The Web Standards Project did a good job of helping evangelize and promote standards in HTML and CSS - let's hope they can do the same for scripting the DOM.

Posted in The Web at Jul 18 2005, 06:47:28 PM MDT Add a Comment