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.
My task for this week is to figure out how to customize Eclipse on-the-fly? By this, I mean that we're going to install Eclipse and then programmatically add plugins and configure them. Is this possible? We'd also like to add projects to the workbench and have them be there when the user first opens Eclipse. My current technique is to do diffs on directories after I've configured/added stuff, but that's probably not a good long-term solution.
I ran FindBugs on AppFuse last night and found/fixed a number of issues as a result. I'm now down to only a handful left - most of them being "Class is Serializable, but doesn't define serialVersionUID". I tried to generate one using serialver, but I couldn't it to work after numerous attempts. My issues seemed to be classpath related: it wanted the servlet api in my classpath, and once I'd add that, it could find my class. I'll have to try the SerialVer Ant Tasks. Fixing this issue would be nice, but I doubt it's really affecting appfuse-based applications. The other bug is "Inconsistent synchronization" in UserCounterListener.contextInitialized() method. Any tips on solving this one are appreciated.
I've haven't been developing applications with AppFuse since May. Instead, I've been using Equinox. One of the main things in Equinox I've grown to love is SiteMesh. It's worked in all the webapps I've written, which utilize frameworks like Struts, Spring MVC, WebWork, Tapestry and JSF. Tiles will only work in 3 of those.
I think it's time to make an executive decision on AppFuse and ditch Tiles in place of SiteMesh. It's faster and easier to develop with, and it doesn't get in your way. In fact, I didn't have to change a single line of SiteMesh-related code to support any of the aforementioned frameworks. Furthermore, using SiteMesh would also greatly reduce the duplicate between frameworks. I've thought about keeping Tiles around, but it's a pain in the ass to maintain parallel sets of documentation.
Whaddya think - any reason you can think of to keep Tiles? I can't. In fact, I think I'd cringe if I had to start my next AppFuse-based project w/o SiteMesh.
I agree with Dion that PostgreSQL is a good database. Thanks to his post, I found the new Windows installer for 8.0. Using it, I was able to quickly setup a database for AppFuse, change my database settings in build.properties and run "ant test-all" successfully. Total time? 5 minutes. That's the way a database installation should be.
I've setup PostgreSQL on OS X before using this package, but now when I try to run it, I get an error "could not read shared memory segment". Time to start digging into config files.
5 minutes later: Using these update instructions, I got everything working again on OS X. To ensure good PostgreSQL support, I'm going to run AppFuse against PostgreSQL (on OS X) from now on.
Of all the MVC Frameworks I've developed with in the last few weeks (Struts, Spring MVC, WebWork and Tapestry) - JSF was by far the worst. And it's not the implementations that are the problem, it's the spec itself (as far as I can tell). Plain and simple, it does not simplify web development.
I spent 3 days developing a simple JSF app - most of it which I had done in the first day. The last 2 days have been spent migrating to MyFaces and trying to find clean ways to do things. My perspective on JSF after this experience? Run away. Run far, far away. All of the above mentioned frameworks are MUCH superior to this technology. Let's get on with the things I learned.
Like Tapestry, I felt like I was banging my head against the wall a fair amount. However, with Tapestry (and all the other frameworks), I was able to get exactly the behavior I wanted w/o too much work. I could produce clean and user-friendly error messages - (Tapestry already had clean required messages built in). I was able to write a jUnitWebTest to test all CRUD activities. With JSF, I was able to test one thing - adding a new record. I couldn't edit it b/c the JavaScript support (which I tend to not use) puked every time it encountered a JSF-generated JavaScript function.
My opinion after all of this? If you know Struts, Spring MVC and WebWork are fairly easy to learn. WebWork is simpler and elegant, but Spring MVC supports more view options out-of-the-box. Tapestry is cool, but you'll have to invest a lot of time into learning it and you'll probably get caught up in its cult and forever be claiming "Tapestry Rocks!" which can get annoying to your fellow developers. 
Finally, I can confirm that SiteMesh rocks - it worked for all the frameworks I used and I never had to change a single line of code.
Whatever you do, don't use JSF. Not yet anyway.
This evening, I met up with Dion, Christian and Bruce at the Rock Bottom Brewery. Topics discussed: OSCON, JavaOne, WebSphere, AOP, JBoss, Geronimo, Spring, Struts, SourceBeat, OpenLogic, TSS, ThoughtWorks, Ant, Maven, Digital Globe (of course), staying up late, getting up early and writing. Good stuff - thanks gents.
Warner has a post about why he likes Maven. He might not know it, but he's actually ripping on AppFuse, its directory structure, and build file. I like getting ripped on, so that doesn't bother me. What bother's me is that Warner has comments turned off so no one can get him back.
The main reason that AppFuse uses Ant over Maven is speed. Maven runs much slower than Ant. Period. Also, with an open source project like AppFuse - I try to appeal to the larger audience, who likely has Ant installed. Other OS projects I work on (displaytag and struts-menu) both use Maven and people have a lot harder time trying to build from source b/c of Maven issues. Lastly, I like having a complete download - rather than download-dependencies-after-you-download-the-project like Maven does. I realize if I did use Maven I could package the dependencies in the app - which is likely what I'd do anyway since the main repositories seem to be constantly out-of-date.
Recently, I had a similar experience to Warner. As part of my current contract, I was tasked to write a couple of Maven sample apps. Warner came to my rescue and helped me out a lot, but I felt like I was jumping through a lot of hoops to do simple stuff that was already done in the Ant version of my app. I guess I'm just not a Maven guy. A project that's done right, regardless of if it's done with Ant or Maven, should build by typing "ant" or "maven" - or at least provide you help on what you need to type. Some projects, like Spring and Struts, actually allow you to use either one out-of-the-box. That's a pretty cool idea and likely keeps everyone happy.
It sounds like Warner has re-worked AppFuse to work with Maven. Care to donate your couple hours of work? I wouldn't use it personally, but there has been interest in a Maven version. Some folks seem to like slow build tools.
I finally got around to updating my Eclipse Plugins package for Eclipse 3.0 → Download or read the Release Notes. Below is a list of plugins included in this download. I dropped Lomboz and JSEditor b/c they didn't work at all with 3.0 on Windows - which I expect is the largest user base. Additions include CSS Editor and Doclipse.
Colorer and Jalopy don't work on OS X, so I wouldn't even bother installing them. Colorer has issues on Linux too. For OS X, I'd recommend buying a subscription to My Eclipse. It's only $30 and if you can afford a Mac, what's another $30? For a source code formatter on OS X, I recommend buying IDEA - it's only $200 - same cost principle applies. I tend to use IDEA a lot more on the Mac simply b/c it's faster and you don't need to install all these plugins. However, I've been stuck a lot in Eclipse-land lately because of it's multiple-project-in-one-pane support - as well as it copies and pastes code nicely into Word.
In addition to these plugins, I recommend installing the Spring IDE Plugin if you're using Spring [HowTo] - and Spindle if you're using Tapestry. Hopefully, distributions like this will become unnecessary with the introduction of the Web Tools project.
For those of you looking for an AppFuse Light, I have good news for you. I've actually been sitting on it for several months now, but now I'm prepared to release it. It's name is Equinox and it's much, much simpler than AppFuse. Equinox has only one build-time dependency (CATALINA_HOME being set for the servlet-api.jar). There's no code generation and no features - not even security. However, it supports building, testing and deploying from Ant, and even has support for managing Tomcat out-of-the-box.
To get started with Equinox, you can download the QuickStart Chapter from Spring Live. This chapter shows you how to develop a simple webapp using Struts, Spring and Hibernate - which talks to an HSQL database. Struts and Spring are integrated using the ContextLoaderPlugin and all tests are designed to be run out-of-container using JUnit and StrutsTestCase. Equinox ships with project files for both Eclipse and IDEA so you can develop and run the tests in either of these top-notch IDEs. There's also a demo available. Thanks to Boér Attila for the kick-ass CSS.
If you like what you see in the QuickStart Chapter, there's much more in the other ERP chapters of Spring Live - now available for download. Too see what's in the other chapters, checkout the Chapter Summaries.
This is a nice milestone - feels good to have made it this far. Have a good weekend!
Way back in January, Rick Hightower sent me instructions on how to run AppFuse on JBoss. I finally got around to digging through my inbox and putting them on the wiki. Here's how to run AppFuse on JBoss. If anyone is using JBoss, please feel free to edit these instructions.
Also, I noticed that Lee Grey has started an AppFuse Line-by-Line Category on this his blog. Very cool! Lee has a perspective that I never thought of:
AppFuse makes it possible for you to be productive, to take advantage of some of the most powerful and widely used open source development tools, before you really understand what you're doing. As a beautiful side-effect of this, you become familiar with Ant, Hibernate, Spring, Struts, Tiles, XDoclet, JUnit, Cactus, Canoo, DBUnit, and on and on -- all in the process of developing your application!
Good stuff Lee - keep it up! While this is a good perspective - I dread to think of supporting all those folks that don't "really understand what they're doing." 
