Raible Designs

Maven Console and setting properties

I've been using Maven at my new gig and the Maven Console in order to avoid its painfully slow startup times. Using a slow-ass PowerBook in conjunction with Maven makes my face turn read and my ears smoke sometimes, but I'm getting used to it, much to my dismay. While the console has made things tolerable, Maven itself keeps getting in the way. I hate how it *requires* me to run my tests everytime I build or deploy. So I've turned that off by creating a build.properties file with "maven.test.skip=true". The problem with the Maven Console is it doesn't let me turn tests back on, so I'm stuck with running "maven test -Dmaven.test.skip=false" when I want to run my tests.

There's two ways I can think of to solve this problem:

• If "maven idea:multiproject" allows me to setup my project so that Tomcat/Resin/whatever can point to my source directory and I don't have to deploy. I'm a web developer, and I typically have to run "maven deploy" to test simple UI changes. That's why I turn the tests off - because I want a 1-2 second turnaround to see my changes. BTW, it's too bad there's no "eclipse:multiproject" goal.
• Enhance the console so it's possible to set properties. For example, typing "-Dmaven.test.skip=false" would set the property so the next time I run "maven war", my tests would be run. That, or allow me to run "maven war -Dmaven.test.skip=false". Allowing this would also make it possible to run a single test from the command line, instead of all (the only current option).

JCIFS and jWebUnit

On my current project, we're using JCIFS to integrate our application authentication process with NT Domain logins. While I found it quite easy to integrate, the one issue I found is I couldn't replicate the login process in a jWebUnit test. I tried setting the WWW-Authentication header to NTLM, but couldn't get it to work. The solution I ended up using is to subclass the NtlmHttpFilter and disable authentication when the User-Agent is "httpunit".

Hopefully this is useful for others. If you've managed to get regular jWebUnit authentication working with NTLM, I'm all ears.

Using JasperReports with AppFuse and Spring

In Spring 1.1.3, support was added for using JasperReports with Spring MVC. Today, Gregory Beumer posted a nice overview of JasperReports. This inspired me to dig up Gilberto's post on How to integrate JasperReports with AppFuse. If you're looking for a reporting solution in your AppFuse-based application, and you're using Spring MVC ... enjoy! I plan on adding this to the wiki in the future, along with howtos for integrating JasperReports with Struts, WebWork, JSF and Tapestry. If you happen to know of tutorials for integrating JasperReports with these other frameworks, please let me know.

AppFuse distributed with Gentoo Linux?

According to the Gentoo Java Roadmap, AppFuse is on the list of apps to integrate. Nice! I'm going to rebuild my Windows 2000 Server as a Suse 9.2 box in the next couple of weeks, but I might have to reconsider and go with Gentoo. I was going to buy a gig o' RAM for the box, but it looks pretty spendy.

Today I added another item for AppFuse 1.8 in the roadmap: create an installer using MyJavaPack that can install Ant, AppFuse, MySQL and Tomcat. Basically, give developer's a way to install and start developing with AppFuse in under 5 minutes. Let me know if you're interested in helping out with this.

Running Cargo from Maven

Yesterday, I integrated Cargo into our application so we could start/stop Tomcat before running our jWebUnit tests. I use Cargo in AppFuse and Equinox - which are both Ant-based. Since we're using Maven on our project, I had to do a bit of futzing to get Cargo integrated into Maven. I prefer to use the Ant tasks from Cargo than the programmatic API because it's nice to run your tests when you start Tomcat manually. If you use the programmatic API, and start/stop Tomcat in setUp()/tearDown() methods - your test will fail if Tomcat is already running.

Below is what I added to maven.xml. With this, we can run "maven test-web" to test our UI with Tomcat running or "maven test-tomcat" to start/stop Tomcat before running our tests. Now I just need to figure out the best way to configure the proper port in my jWebUnit test. I'll probably put it into project.properties and the read the value as part of my test. I've also included a "deploy" goal in this example to demonstrate an easy way to deploy to Tomcat.

    <property environment="env"/>
    <property name="maven.tomcat.home" value="${env.CATALINA_HOME}"/>

    <!-- deploy the directory created by war:webapp to tomcat/webapps -->
    <goal name="deploy" prereqs="war:webapp">
        <copy todir="${maven.tomcat.home}/webapps">
            <fileset dir="${maven.build.dir}">
                <include name="${pom.artifactId}/**"/>
            </fileset>
        </copy>
    </goal>

    <goal name="test-tomcat" prereqs="war:war"
        description="Starts Tomcat, runs jWebUnit tests, stops Tomcat">

        <taskdef resource="cargo.tasks" classpathref="maven.dependency.classpath"/>

        <cargo-tomcat5x homeDir="${maven.tomcat.home}"
            output="${maven.test.dest}/cargo.log" action="start" >
            <war warFile="${maven.war.build.dir}/${maven.war.final.name}"/>
            <configuration dir="${maven.test.dest}/tomcat5x">
                <property name="cargo.logging" value="high"/>
                <property name="cargo.servlet.port" value="8280"/>
            </configuration> 
        </cargo-tomcat5x>
        
        <attainGoal name="test-web"/>
        
        <cargo-tomcat5x homeDir="${maven.tomcat.home}" action="stop"/>
    </goal>

    <goal name="test-web" prereqs="test:compile" description="Runs JUnit tests">

      <taskdef name="junit"
        classname="org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.optional.junit.JUnitTask"/>
      
        <mkdir dir="${maven.test.reportsDirectory}"/>
        <junit printsummary="no" errorProperty="test.failed" 
            failureProperty="test.failed">
            <classpath>
                <pathelement location="${maven.test.dest}"/>
                <pathelement location="${maven.build.dest}"/>
                <path refid="maven.dependency.classpath"/>
                <path location="web"/>
            </classpath>
            <formatter type="xml"/>
            <formatter type="brief" usefile="false"/>
            <batchtest todir="${maven.test.reportsDirectory}" if="testcase">
                <fileset dir="${maven.test.dest}">
                    <include name="**/*${testcase}*"/>
                    <exclude name="**/*TestCase.class"/>
                    <exclude name="**/*$*.class"/>
                </fileset>
            </batchtest>
            <batchtest todir="${maven.test.reportsDirectory}" unless="testcase">
                <fileset dir="${maven.test.dest}">
                    <include name="**/*WebTest.class"/>
                </fileset>
            </batchtest>
        </junit>

        <fail if="test.failed">
          Unit tests failed. For error messages, check the log files in
          ${maven.test.reportsDirectory}.</fail>
    </goal>

Installing Jetspeed 2 and deploying Struts/JSF Portlets

One of things we're moving to on my current project is portlet development. The client has a bunch of apps they want developed and it makes a lot of sense to develop them as portlets and deploy them in a portlet container. Because of this, we spent some time this week mucking around with Jetspeed-2. Bruce and I figured out how to install it, and then I did a bit of work with Equinox to deploy the Struts and JSF versions as portlets.

I didn't get equinox-struts or equinox-jsf fully functioning in Jetspeed, but I did get them to deploy and bring up the first page. I expect to do some more work in the next month to get these apps fully functional. In the meantime, I've put together the following tutorials.

• How to Install Jetspeed
• Convert Equinox to a Struts Portlet
• Convert Equinox to a JSF Portlet

If you have any tips on getting JSF or Struts WARs working in Jetspeed, please let me know.

[DJUG] Testing and Handling Exceptions in the Web Tier

I'm attending Denver's JUG tonight, where Scott Davis is talking about Unit Testing the Web Tier. His opening slide says he's going to cover HttpUnit, Canoo WebTest and JMeter. I'm most interested in the JMeter stuff as I've been meaning to integrate it into AppFuse. I've used HttpUnit and it's a little verbose for me. I prefer using Canoo WebTest or jWebUnit over HttpUnit. On my current project, we're considering using jWebUnit or HttpUnit to act as a browser when interacting with a 3rd-party system.

All of these tools run functional tests - which are much different from unit tests. Unit tests usually tests the bricks, whereas functional tests test the building. For unit and functional tests to be truly effective, they must be:

• Scriptable
• Repeatable
• Automated
• Darn close to 100% coverage

The tools Scott is talking about tonight have passed his basic tests:

• Can I learn it in 10 minutes?
• Does it play nicely with my existing test environment?
• Does it play nicely with my existing production environment?

I didn't take any notes about HttpUnit or Canoo WebTest because I didn't really learn anything new. Scott did do a nice job in his HttpUnit examples - he made it look a lot simpler than I've previously seen. I've used it HttpUnit before and it seems a bit verbose. I've always used jWebUnit, which simplifies HttpUnit's API.

JMeter allows you to do the same thing as HttpUnit and Canoo WebTest. It's a standalone GUI, for the complete non-programmer. It does not plug into Ant/JUnit and is mostly used for load testing. I thought it was exclusively used for load testing - and I think it has an Ant task. I could be wrong.

<sidenote>Scott uses Smultron for XML editing on his Mac.</sidenote>

The basic building block of JMeter is a "Thread Group". The Thread Group allows you to control the number of users/threads that run a particular test. You can test gets, posts, change the protocol and even upload files. For load testing, make sure and check "Retrieve all Embedded objects in HTML files". You have to view the "result windows" to view that your tests actually ran - there's no "green bar" feature.

I think JMeter has improved a lot since I last looked at it. Scott's overview and demonstration make it look very straight forward and easy to use. One guy asked if it's possible to see a a global view of all tests run. Scott thinks it's possible by adding a Listener to the Thread Group and creating a graph (one of the options). Scott is now showing a lot of the options in JMeter - there's a ton! It's almost overwhelming.

Next up is "Exceptional" Web Apps by Stephen A. Stelting, a senior Instructor and Author from Sun. His latest book is "Robust Java". Stephen has spent the last year and 1/2 figuring out how to make Java fail.

Objectives:

• Describe the types of errors that occur in the web
• Explain how exceptions and errors can be handled
• Describe the web container response to exceptions
• Present best practices to address web tier exceptions
• Show how web frameworks handle exceptions

Payoff: As a result of this talk, you'll have a better understanding of how to use exceptions in Servlets and JSPs, improving the robustness of your webapps.

I'm a little skeptical at this point. I think most folks don't do exception handling in their webapps. I hope Stephen has some good tips and tricks for those of us who are familiar with handling exceptions. I wonder how he feels about Spring and its runtime exceptions?

There are two types of exceptions in the web tier: HTTP Errors and Java Exceptions. Standard HTTP Errors are handled by the web server. You can also send your own HTTP errors by calling HttpServletResponse.sendError(). If you're using response.sendError(), make sure and call it before you commit the output. The web.xml file allows you to specify errors and exceptions with the <error-page> element.

Servlets and Filters have similar exception behavior. Both declare exceptions in both of their lifecycle methods: init and service (doFilter for Filters). Developers throw exceptions in lifecycle methods to "tell" the container about problems.

• javax.servlet.ServletException
• javax.servlet.UnavailableException
• java.io.IOException

Stephen is now describing the init() method and the exceptions it can throw. Yawn. I think most Java web developers use frameworks these days. Because of this, most developers probably don't use these methods because they don't write plain ol' servlets. One thing I didn't know is that UnavailableException takes a time parameter - if you throw an UnavailableException with this parameter, the container will retry after the specified amount of time.

Result of Exceptions in init(): The destroy() method is never called, since the initialization did not complete. Client calls during component unavailability render a 500 error.

I stopped taking notes at this point because my laptop battery was dying. I didn't really learn much in the rest of the presentation. While I can appreciate Stephen's enthusiasm, it was obvious that he was an instructor and not an in-the-trenches developer. He explained a lot of what and didn't have any code to show how to do stuff. There wasn't a single demo in the entire presentation.

Most of the exception handling stuff Stephen talked about for the rest of the session was common sense (IMO). It also centered around the Servlet and JSP API, which most folks probably don't mess with. The Struts and JSF coverage at the end was cool. If nothing else, it was to nice to hear a Sun employee confirm that JSF is quite deficient in its hooks to allow easy framework-configurable exception handling.

Now that I'm working at home, and working/interacting with friends all day - it seems that the DJUG meetings aren't as exciting. They used to be fun because I could get out of the house and have a few beers with friends. Maybe it was the lack of learning anything new tonight.

CruiseControl and Maven

At work today, I put together a config.xml for CruiseControl to run continuous integration builds for our project. We're using Maven, so I used the CruiseControl Plugin to generate a cruisecontrol.xml file to get started. Then I moved this file up a few directories, renamed it to config.xml and changed all the log paths to be outside of the project.

There's quite a difference between running CruiseControl with Ant vs. Maven. With Ant - you tend to delete the whole project, check it out from CVS and build/test it from scratch. With Maven, the recommendation seems to be a bit different. What I found on the mailing lists and such was that you should manually checkout your project into your "checkout" directory and then call "scm:update-project|clean test" from config.xml. With Maven, it seems there's no CruiseControl-specific maven.xml file for your project.

I tend to like the delete/checkout/test approach you get with Ant over the update/test approach with Maven. For those of you that are using CruiseControl with Maven - is it possible to do delete/checkout/test - or am I stuck with the update/test approach?

Using Acegi Security with AppFuse

Want to use Acegi Security in your AppFuse project? Here's how. Acegi Security will replace Container-Managed Authentication in the next release of AppFuse (1.8). All the code for this was added to CVS today.

Java and Booze next Monday in Denver

Fellow Roller developer Lance is coming into Denver for a brief business trip next week. We're going to hook up for some dinner and drinks at CB Potts on Monday night at 6. If you want to talk about Roller, Java or authoring books - please join us. The more the merrier!