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.
You searched this site for "grails". 106 entries found.

You can also try this same search on Google.

Building Rich Applications with Appcelerator

This afternoon, I delivered my Building Rich Applications with Appcelerator talk for the 3rd time at Colorado Software Summit. When I first proposed this topic, I hadn't used Appcelerator and saw this as a good opportunity to learn more about it. I'm glad I did.

IMO, Appcelerator is a lot like Dojo in how it parses pages and turns HTML with special attributes into JavaScript widgets. I can't help but think a pre-compilation step would be nice to speed things up. I like Appcelerator's extensive Widget Library, and I especially like that they re-use many widgets rather than re-creating their own. Finally, I really dig the "SOA in a browser" approach where everything is a message and you can easily publish and subscribe to events - on the client and server. Below is my presentation, please let me know if you have any questions.

Posted in Java at Oct 22 2008, 04:18:42 PM MDT 9 Comments

GWT and REST

I've posted two message to the GWT Google Group in the last couple of days. However, new member messages are moderated and neither has shown up yet. I'm reposting my questions here in hopes of getting some answers.

Is there a way to easily use a REST backend with GWT? I tried GWT-REST. It works, but it seems to be centered towards Rails (I'm using Grails) and it suffers from the SOP issue.

JSONRequest looks promising for cross-domain support, but I can't get it to work either. The provided examples work, but not my simple hello world that returns:

{"response":"Hello World!"}

Also, the example implementation only has GET support, not PUT, DELETE or POST. I can post my REST backend on the public internet if anyone is interested in seeing the issues I'm having.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Posted in Java at Jul 21 2008, 10:31:58 AM MDT 14 Comments

LinkedIn has the Biggest Rails app in the World

From the LinkedIn Engineering Blog:

LinkedIn loves Rails Bumper Sticker started as a small experiment in August, 2007. Facebook had released their development platform while we were hard at work on our own. We were curious to experiment and discover some of the characteristics of an application platform built on a social network and to see what, if any, learning we could apply to our own efforts. After noticing that professional and business-related applications weren't flourishing in the Facebook ecosystem, a few of our Product folks put their heads together while out for a run; one engineer, one week, and a few Joyent accelerators later, Bumper Sticker was born.

We'd be lying if we said that anyone was prepared for the kind of success Bumper Sticker has had since then - though we should have expected it, given the excellent Product team here at LinkedIn. Here's a quick snapshot of Bumper Sticker statistics at this moment: Read More »

The "biggest Rails app in the world" claim comes from this video.

In addition to having a kick-ass RoR team at LinkedIn, we also do a lot with Java and love our Macs. Why wouldn't you want to work here?

If you find a gig you like, or simply have mad programming skills, contact me and I'll see if I can hook you up. And yes, we are hiring at LinkedIn Denver.

Posted in Java at Jun 24 2008, 01:25:16 PM MDT 5 Comments

LinkedIn's Engineering Blog

LinkedIn Blog Have you been curious about LinkedIn's architecture or how they're using Grails and Rails? If so, you might be interested in LinkedIn's Engineering Blog. Over the past couple of weeks, a few Engineers have starting writing about our architecture, OpenSocial, RailsConf, YUI, Grails and OSGi. Below is a complete listing of Engineering posts.

If there are topics you'd like to see us blog about, please let me know. I've somehow landed in the role of Editor for the Engineering Blog, so I should be able to hook you up if I can find an engineer to blog about what you're interested in.

On a related note, Rob Getzschman's entry LinkedIn discovers the truth about Cannes is quite entertaining. Highly recommended.

Posted in Java at Jun 13 2008, 08:30:19 AM MDT 10 Comments

RE: Which is the Hottest Java Web Framework?

The "Break it Down" Blog has a lengthy post on Which is the Hottest Java Web Framework? Or Maybe Not Java? Comparing Java Web Frameworks is hard because so many people are passionate about the framework they know best. Add a couple more like Flex and Ruby on Rails and its downright difficult. Nevertheless, this post is good in that it contains a lot of pretty trend graphs and it looks like the author has done some good research. It's likely the folks that will scream foul are the ones that did poor in the comparison (Tapestry and Stripes, I'm talking about you).

Surprising among the top Java Web Frameworks is the rise of Struts 2:

Google Trends Graph

To quote:

Which is much more interesting I think is how Wicket adoption has stayed almost flat while Struts 2 adoption has spiked. Spring MVC/WebFlow seems to be going no where fast and racing JBoss Seam there.

The popularity of Struts 2 really caught me off guard with it being quite a bit different from Struts 1, I figured it got thrown into the "just another web framework" category, but I guess there is something in a name and it's doing quite well.

Regardless of what you think of the post and trends, you have to appreciate the amount of time the author put into it.

Posted in Java at Jun 10 2008, 10:39:08 PM MDT 14 Comments

What's a good RIA to develop in 20 hours?

OSCON 2008 In less than two months, I'm making my annual trek to Portland, Oregon to speak at OSCON. To prepare for my talk, I'd like to develop the same application with two different combinations: Flex + Rails and GWT + Grails.

As luck would have it, I'm having a hard time coming up with a good application to write. I'd like to time-box it so I only spend 10 hours on the backend (for each) and 10 hours on the front-end, for a total of 40 hours for both applications.

Can you think of any good applications that would warrant a rich front-end and wouldn't take too long to create? I'd like to put both applications in production and generate enough traffic to be faced with scalability issues.

Over the next several weeks, I hope to start creating the applications and blog about what I've learned along the way. At some point, I hope to post an outline and a rough draft. With your help, I believe this can be an excellent presentation. If the presentation and applications are as good as I hope they'll be, it's likely I'll open source them for everyone to use.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Update: Thanks for all the great feedback. I've posted a survey to narrow the choices.

Posted in Java at Jun 09 2008, 09:56:30 PM MDT 21 Comments

Talks for the Colorado Software Summit

I'm looking forward to another great year at the Colorado Software Summer in October. I submitted a couple abstracts back in April and have recently been granted the opportunity to change one.

The reason for the change is Yan Pujante (founder at LinkedIn) is going to do my talk on Building LinkedIn's Next Generation Architecture with OSGi and Spring. Since he's been very integral in writing the existing codebase, as well as the move to OSGi, it seemed more appropriate for him to do this talk. I'd like to keep my talk on Appcelerator, but I'm having a hard time deciding between four other options.

If you're planning on attending CSS this year, let me know which one you'd like to see most.

I could see changing the first option to Spring Web specifically. I could also see adding Rails and Grails to the 3rd choice. The 4th one is a lofty goal as the project has just begun. If we succeed, it could be a great talk.

Posted in Java at May 29 2008, 03:40:13 PM MDT 6 Comments

Should we change AppFuse to be Struts 2-specific?

Dusty recently posted an interesting idea to the AppFuse developers mailing list:

After thinking/coding/reading for a while I think the more interesting task is: Retool AppFuse to be one or more Struts2 plugins based on various higher level app patterns. (AppFuse Facebook, AppFuse Employee DB, AppFuse Blog, AppFuse Basic LDAP, AppFuse Basic Crowd).

This all comes from the fact, that I have been wanting to refactor the AppFuse web layer for Struts. One of the interesting aspects of AppFuse is that it works pretty much the same across all its web frameworks. It does so with some lowest common denominator abstractions that can be ported and look and work the same across frameworks. I have picked my tool(s): Struts 2 and Ruby On Rails when I want to pretend I am young again. I know Spring MVC, JSF, etc. but I have no desire to build significant apps on those platforms. It's not because they suck and Struts2 rules, it is because I know Struts 2 the best, I am most efficient there and it provides everything I need to build great webapps (Let's not devolve to a framework debate). So, I would rather have a more Struts 2-specific web stack, that really leverages conventions born and raised there. The nice thing about the Struts 2 web stack is that it is complemented nicely by AppFuse's data/service layer, since unlike Grails or Rails, Struts 2 has no data or service layer. [Read More »]

Seems like a good idea to me. What do you think?

Someday I'd like to come up with a "compatibility test" that allows others to improve upon the ideas in AppFuse and develop their stacks independently. A suite of Selenium tests that require extensionless URLs might be a good start.

Posted in Java at May 29 2008, 08:29:44 AM MDT 11 Comments

Extensionless URLs with Java Web Frameworks

Last week, I had a go of making a Spring MVC application use extensionless URLs. I did some googling, found some tips on the Spring Forums and believe I arrived at a solid solution. Using the UrlRewriteFilter (version 3), I was able to create a rule that looks for any URLs without an extension. If it finds one, it appends the extension and forwards to the controllers. This rule is as follows (where *.html is my servlet-mapping for DispatcherServlet in web.xml):

  <rule>
    <from>^([^?]*)/([^?/\.]+)(\?.*)?$</from>
    <to last="true">$1/$2.html$3</to>
  </rule>

As long as I hand-write all my URLs without an extension (<a href="home"> vs. <a href="home.html">), this seems to work. To combat developers that use "home.html", one solution is to require all links to be wrapped with <c:url value="url"/> (or some other macro that call response.encodeURL()). If you can convince everyone to do this, you can write an outbound-rule that strips the .html extension from URLs.

  <outbound-rule>
    <from>^(.*)\.html(\?.*)?$</from>
    <to last="false">$1$2</to>
  </outbound-rule>

In an ideal world, it'd be possible to modify the <a> tag at the very core of the view framework you're using to automatically encode the URL of any "href" attributes. I don't think this is possible with JSP, FreeMarker, Facelets or any other Java Web Framework templates (i.e. Tapestry or Wicket). If it is, please let me know.

Below is my final urlrewrite.xml with these rules, as well as my "welcome-file" rule at the top.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCENGINE urlrewrite PUBLIC "-//tuckey.org//DTD UrlRewrite 3.0//EN"
  "http://tuckey.org/res/dtds/urlrewrite3.0.dtd">

<urlrewrite>
  <rule>
    <from>/$</from>
    <to type="forward">home</to>
  </rule>

  <rule>
    <from>^([^?]*)/([^?/\.]+)(\?.*)?$</from>
    <to last="true">$1/$2.html$3</to>
  </rule>

  <outbound-rule>
    <from>^(.*)\.html(\?.*)?$</from>
    <to last="false">$1$2</to>
  </outbound-rule>

</urlrewrite>

If you have other solutions for extensionless URLs with Java web frameworks, I'd love to hear about them. With any luck, 2008 will be the year we drop extensions (and path-mappings) from our URLs. The stat packages might not like it, but I do.

Posted in Java at May 13 2008, 09:50:51 PM MDT 18 Comments

Upgrading to Spring Security 2.0

This evening I spent a few hours and upgraded AppFuse to use Acegi Spring Security 2.0. The upgrade was fairly straightforward:

  • %s/org.acegisecurity/org.springframework.security/g
  • Upgraded dependencies (exclusions are necessary if you're using Spring 2.5.x and don't want 2.0.x dependencies pulled in):
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.security</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-security-core-tiger</artifactId>
        <version>${spring.security.version}</version>
        <exclusions>
            <exclusion>
                <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
                <artifactId>spring-core</artifactId>
            </exclusion>
            <exclusion>
                <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
                <artifactId>spring-support</artifactId>
            </exclusion>
        </exclusions>
    </dependency>
    ...
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.security</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-security-taglibs</artifactId>
        <version>${spring.security.version}</version>
        <exclusions>
            <exclusion>
                <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
                <artifactId>spring-web</artifactId>
            </exclusion>
        </exclusions>
    </dependency>
    
  • Changed taglib prefix from "authz" to "security" and change the associated taglib declaration to:
    <%@ taglib uri="http://www.springframework.org/security/tags" 
        prefix="security" %>
    
  • In web.xml, I changed <filter-class> to org.springframework.web.filter.DelegatingFilterProxy. Since I didn't name my filter springSecurityFilterChain, I also had to add the following <init-param>:
        <init-param>
            <param-name>targetBeanName</param-name>
            <param-value>springSecurityFilterChain</param-value>
        </init-param>
    
  • Lastly, I modified security.xml to use the new syntax. AppFuse's security.xml went from 175 lines to 33 with the new security namespace configuration!

It's hard to believe I first looked at Acegi almost 4 years ago. At that time, I said it contained too much XML for my needs. Ben's reaction:

Seriously, the "whole lotta XML" gives you exponentially more power and flexibility than a method such as this could ever hope to provide you.

It's nice to see that Spring Security 2.0 gives you exponentially more power and flexibility without all the XML. Thanks guys!

P.S. You can also view the full changelog for this upgrade.

Update: If you're using <authz:authentication property="fullName"/> in your JSPs, you'll need to change it to <security:authentication property="principal.fullName"/>.

Posted in Java at Apr 17 2008, 02:45:47 AM MDT 19 Comments