Matt RaibleMatt Raible is a writer with a passion for software. 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.

[ANN] AppFuse 1.9.1 Released

This release includes improvements and upgrades to Tapestry 4.0.1, WebWork 2.2.2, as well as support for using AppGen to reverse engineer database tables (using Middlegen). iBATIS is now supported by AppGen and a Create DAO tutorial has been put together for iBATIS. iBATIS and Middlegen support were provided by Bobby Diaz - thanks Bobby! Also, a big thanks goes to Mika Göckel for writing an XFire Tutorial and installer. To install and configure AppFuse for development, see the QuickStart Guide. Thanks to all the sponsors who have contributed products and free hosting to the AppFuse project.

To see how AppFuse works, please see the following demos (username: mraible, password: tomcat):

Comments and issues can be sent to the mailing list or posted to JIRA.

Posted in Java at Apr 07 2006, 02:26:57 AM MDT 14 Comments

What happened to Middlegen?

In AppGen (AppFuse's code generator), I recently integrated support for generating CRUD code (and tests!) from database tables thanks to APF-95 from Bobby Diaz. Previously, it was only possible to generate code from POJOs, but now both are supported. The "mapping files from tables" is done using Middlegen.

Unfortunately, Middlegen seems to be a dead project, especially since its main web site is missing (fixed!). I'd love to use another project that generates XDoclet tags in hbm.xml files, but I don't believe there is one. AFAIK, the Hibernate Tools project does not support XDoclet with its tools. Anyone know where the Middlegen documentation is located? All the documentation used to be on their site.

The good news is the solution I have works, and it works well. However, I definitely look forward to re-writing AppGen. XDoclet as a templating language sucks, and reading XDoclet tags to determine how to generate the UI seems pretty hackish. Hopefully we can use APT and FreeMarker (or Velocity) to process annotations and spit out code in a future release.

Update: The Middlegen website was lost, due some heavy server upgrades. The problem has been fixed and it's back up and running. Now I don't feel so bad about using Middlegen since the project appears to be alive and well. ;-)

Posted in Java at Apr 06 2006, 05:19:15 PM MDT 13 Comments

gotAPI.com - an API Lookup Service

A friend just IM'ed me a link to gotAPI.com. This is a very cool site that allows you to lookup API information on practically everything I use: HTML, CSS, Java, Spring, Ant. Definitely a good bookmark to have.

Posted in Java at Apr 06 2006, 03:17:25 PM MDT 5 Comments

Run Windows XP on your Mac Book Pro

I have to admit, it's pretty cool to see Apple's BootCamp. This software allows you to install/boot Windows XP on a MacBook Pro. I'm intrigued by the thought of doing this. I'd love to use WAPT, Beyond Compare, TopStyle and HomeSite on my laptop.

However, I realize that the process of installing BootCamp would probably take up the whole day - and after 2 days, I'd never use boot into Windows again. It's just easier to use my Windows box when I need Windows stuff. The thing I am interested in is running Windows XP on my Mac using VMWare. Then I don't have to reboot the whole machine just to do some CSS tweaking with TopStyle.

Posted in Mac OS X at Apr 05 2006, 01:19:09 PM MDT 7 Comments

What happened to the design?

To know more about why styles are disabled on this website visit the Annual CSS Naked Day website for more information. Good idea - let's watch the web get ugly. ;)

Posted in The Web at Apr 05 2006, 12:19:02 AM MDT 1 Comment

Busy Weekend

I was planning on taking this weekend off to let my left arm heal a bit. Furthermore, Julie and Holly headed up to Steamboat for some skiing and it was "Daddy Weekend". While the kids and I had a lot of fun, I was unable to overcome my addiction to work.

Saturday night I finally managed to get AppFuse running under CruiseControl. Previously, I'd always run into OOM exceptions before the 10-12 minute process of testing a particular flavor. This seems to be due to Ant and the copying of 700 files 3-4 times makes it run out of memory. For each web framework, the basic install is tested, then tested again with AppGen, and finally iBATIS is installed and tested. While the tests all run and report pass/failed correctly, the memory is so close to being maxed that e-mail cannot be sent, and half the time the webapp isn't viewable. Nevertheless, the process keeps on humming. To see the build status for each different AppFuse flavor, see http://home.raibledesigns.com:8080. Having you all click on this link should crash CruiseControl for sure. ;-)

Last night, I got caught up with working on the appfuse.org website. Rather than having a splash page, I changed it to use frames to wrap the java.net homepage, as well as other AppFuse sites. The top navigation should allow you to navigate to java.net, the wiki, demos and JIRA w/o having to type in new URLs. The fun part of this exercise was using CSS to hide images and compress the standard java.net header. If you'd like to do this for your java.net project, add the following to your www/project_tools.html page:

<style type="text/css">
    .topline, .topbar { border: 0 }
    #banner { height: 0px }
    #banner img { display: none; }
</style>

This week should be a pretty good one. I'm working full-time on finishing up AppFuse 1.9.1, and I hope to have it released before this weekend. My parents are coming into town on Thursday night, so that's my deadline. If I don't have everything done by then, I'll probably release anyway. For the full plan of attack for 1.9.1, please see The road to 1.9.1.

If I can finish the AppFuse release this week, I can work on Spring Live next week. After that, I'm booked up with client work for quite some time. So wish me luck, I'll be burning the midnight oil most of this week.

Finally, it was nice to see that many of you bought into my April Fools joke. While it wasn't as good as last year, I still had fun writing it. As some noted, it's not that unbelievable. However, the part about me dropping something for another is out of character. I changed my major 3 times in college, but never dropped the previous ones. For the record, I like Rails and I've been promoting it at Virtuas and SourceBeat. We've talked about starting a Rails practice, but (to be honest) haven't seen a whole lot of demand from clients. Hopefully that will change in the future and virtuas.com/rails will get filled in.

Posted in Java at Apr 03 2006, 04:09:19 PM MDT 1 Comment

Done with AppFuse, moving to Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails For the last few weeks, I've been building an application with Ruby on Rails. While I enjoy its simplicity and the ability to get things done quickly, the thing I really like is there's a whole team of developers supporting this framework. If I develop an application with AppFuse, chances are I'll find a bug or two, and then I'll have to spend additional time that night fixing it. Furthermore, I'm beginning to loath the compile/deploy cycle that AppFuse requires you to do.

As a result of my experience with Rails, and my decision to use it for all future web development, it makes no sense for me to keep maintaining AppFuse. Virtuas has decided to start a Rails Practice and I'm going to be the Practice Leader for it. In addition, I'll be writing a "Rails Live" book for SourceBeat. Hopefully we'll have an ERP out for that by the end of this summer.

If you live near Denver, have a lot of experience with Spring, and are interested in becoming the Spring Practice Leader for Virtuas, please let me know.

Posted in Java at Apr 01 2006, 09:56:12 AM MST 14 Comments