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.
The Man in Blue has some nice form layouts using fieldsets, labels and CSS. I think I'll integrate one of these styles for the forms in AppFuse. I've always stuck with tables for layout because it seemed easy, but I really like the look and flexibility that CSS provides.
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:
Anthony has a good post on using this minmax script to fix a CSS bug in IE. If you're using the Sunsets theme (like I am) with Roller - you might want to add this to your page templates. I've patched this site - thanks Anthony!
To patch your theme, create a page with name "_minmax.js" and link "minmax.js", populate it with the script contents and then add the following in your theme's <head>:
<script type="text/javascript" src="$ctxPath/page/$userName/minmax.js"></script>
You can also create CSS pages for your site using a similar technique. While we're talking about IE bugs, you might want to know that <script/> doesn't work in IE, that's why you always have to add the closing </script> element.
I've started a small revolution among my friends and family. I'm on a mission to take back the web. If they own a computer and they don't have Firefox installed, it will be soon. I'm recommending it to everyone, b/c people often ask me for advice for their computer's problems. Here's how our conversation usually goes:
Them: I'm having an issue with viruses, spyware, AOL, etc.
Me: You should use Firefox.
Them: Oh really, what's that?
Me: An internet browser. It's a lot better than Internet Explorer.
Them: OK, how much does it cost?
Me: It's free, download it from firefox.com.
Them: Cool, thanks for the tip.
This happens if their computer isn't nearby. If it is, I'll download and install it for them. I did this on Holly's machine last night. After showing her the tabbed browsing and she was pumped. Of course, hooking her up to a wireless network for the first time probably had something to do with her enthusiasm.
Even if IE adds tabbed browsing, I don't think there's any hope for it now. The web feel so much more solid when using Firefox. When I use IE, it feels brittle and ready to break. Have you started taking back the web with your family and friends?
In preparation for my talk on comparing web frameworks, I've made a bunch of enhancements to Equinox
.
I changed the default web framework to be Spring and added a very
simple "CRUD users" feature. While it's basic, it shows how to do
validation, success messages, and a sortable list with the following
frameworks: Spring, JSF, Struts, WebWork and Tapestry. I even added a
"birthday" field to demonstrate date-handling. I dig the built-in popup
calendars that ship with JSF and Tapestry.
Oh yeah, I also added a hack (from James Violette) to make the Display Tag work with JSF. Code says it best. I plan on writing a detailed how-to as part of the Display Tag's documentation. Suggestions for a cleaner hack are welcome.
In other display tag news, here's another way to do static headers.
I've been thinking about Rails ever since I wrote a post about it on Monday. The main reason is because of Dion's comment:
Matt - You should follow the lead and do a video of setting up a simple app using AppFuse.
This might sounds like a good idea, but if I did it right now in AppFuse's current state, it'd be a disaster. The reason? Because you have to manually create a whole bunch of classes to do CRUD on a database table. Here's a list of new classes needed for adding a new "person" table.
The last two JSPs can be generated, but that's still a buttload of classes (9) just to CRUD (and test!) a database table. Not too mention all the files you need to edit for Spring and i18n.
Result: to CRUD a database table using AppFuse you have to create 11 new files and modify 5 existing files. 16 files. What a beotch, huh? If I made a video of this - it'd be 20 minutes long! While this might make AppFuse look silly, it's really more of a symptom of the patterns we have in J2EE and how we're supposed to architect our apps. 3 tiers, test-driven, loosely-coupled and internationalized. Of course, if I was focused on fast and efficient, I could do this all with 1 JSP and JSTL's SQL tags. Everyone would slap my hand for not following patterns, but I'm willing to bet it'd work just as well and be just as fast. But I digress.
There have been a fair amount of requests (and some patches submitted) to generate and modify all of the files listed above. For the most part, I've frowned upon adding such a feature because I think if folks can run "ant generate -Dmodel=Person" - they'll end up with a whole bunch of code that they know nothing about. Sure there's the tutorials, but folks will quit reading those. Instead, they'll create a whole slew of POJOs (maybe even using Middlegen) and run "ant generate" on all 50 of them. Poof - now they've got 550 new files to maintain. Talk about a maintenance nightmare. Even worse - a support nightmare for me.
Nevertheless, if I wanted to create a cool video for AppFuse, I'd spend a few days writing this code-generation engine. Then I could show how you could create the data, service and web layer (including UI) in a matter of seconds. It'd be cool and folks would dig it. I'm still considering it, but I'm also leary of the resulting support fiasco. Maybe I could just say "use at your own risk". 
A while back, I saw Erik Hatcher suggest a better solution than code-generation. I can't remember what he called it, but it was something like "meta-data dynamic rendering". The idea is that your application reads the metadata of a table (or POJO) and renders the appropriate UI for it. I loved the idea as soon as I heard it. I've always wanted a way to dynamically render the UI rather than writing HTML. Of course, I still want the ability to edit the templates and HTML since I fancy that sort of stuff. I don't like writing HTML for each row in a form, but I do like tweaking the HTML and CSS to look good.
Earlier this week, I saw the concept in action with Rails and its demo. IMO, something like Rails would never fly in Java because it appears to be tightly coupled to the database and only MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite are supported. The Java community always seems to pride itself on database abstraction, partly due to JDBC and its ability to connect to anything that has a JDBC Driver. Ruby will probably catch up someday, but right now it appears to be looking for something like JDBC.
Then along comes Trails, which made me smile earlier today when I first read about it on the tapestry-dev mailing list.
I've been working on a project called Trails that uses Tapestry quite heavily and I thought it time to start soliciting feedback. Trails is a domain driven development framework that uses Tapestry, Spring, and Hibernate. Trails is very much in it's infancy, but the current version is functional and should give people a rough idea where I am heading. It's my first real forray into Tapesty and I have really found Tapestry a joy to work with.
Trails is very much like Rails, except that it doesn't talk directly to a database table. Instead, it talks to your domain objects that you mark up with XDoclet/Hibernate tags. To test it out, I dropped a User.java file into the org.trails.demo package, marked it up with XDoclet and deployed. It didn't work at first because the .hbm.xml files are explicitly listed in Spring's applicationContext.xml. I changed the "sessionFactory" bean to use the following and wammo - success! I could list and CRUD the table that my User object was mapped to.
<property name="mappingDirectoryLocations">
<list>
<value>classpath:</value>
</list>
</property>
Trails is very cool, and I'd love to incorporate it into AppFuse or Equinox. Does an LGPL license allow me to do this? The one problem I can see with adding it is that it's specific to Tapestry and Hibernate, which doesn't always suite folks. I think developers might be willing to change because this solution will vastly improve their development productivity, but who knows. I think the best solution would be to offer this option in AppFuse/Equinox, but also offer the current manual and code-generation options. The holy grail would be the ability to plug in iBATIS or JDO instead of Hibernate. In addition, using Struts, Spring, WebWork or JSF instead of Tapestry would have folks clammering to use this stuff.
Mad props to David Heinemeier Hansson and Chris Nelson - you guys are developing awesome software.
My session at ApacheCon is titled Comparing Web Frameworks: Struts, Spring MVC, WebWork, Tapestry & JSF. I have to turn in my presentation by Friday. The purpose of this post is to get your feedback and see what you'd like to see in such a talk. Here's the abstract:
This session is designed to explore the popular Java web frameworks. It will briefly explain how each one works and the strengths and weaknesses of each. Tips, tricks and gotcha's will be plentiful. A simple web application will be dissected and the different options will be compared. Lastly, it will provide attendees with a sample app they can download that has options to use any of the frameworks described.
The simple webapp is MyUsers from Spring Live. As part of my gig with Open Logic this summer, I wrote a number of sample apps using Equinox. Among these where 1) a Mavenized version, 2) a Tapestry version, 3) a JSF version, and 4) WebWork version. The Struts and Spring MVC versions were already done as part of the book. They agreed to let me use the code and knowledge from that experience. This is all to say it shouldn't be too hard to create the sample app for this talk.
The hard part is going to be talking about things that developers care about. In my post on JSF a while back, I noted the things I typically want in my webapps. The following topics might make good points of discussion.
I could do a number of slides and show how each framework handles the above situations. Other topics that would be worthwhile would be:
Whaddya think - what is so special about your framework that'll make it look better in my talk? What are the things that suck that I can bash on? If you're a committer on one of these frameworks - are you going to be at ApacheCon? I'd love to have some folks defend their projects after I'm done ripping on them. If I don't rip on yours, then you can bask in all its glory.
If you live in Denver, I'll be delivering this presentation at DJUG's Architecture SIG on November 3rd.
From the Aspect Log (which is mighty nice BTW), I found CSS Beauty. Very cool - CSS is the bomb. Subscribed.
Wayne Parrott, the VP of Product Management at Genuitec (makers of MyEclipse) has started a blog.
For the past 3 years I have been involved with a great team at Genuitec (www.genuitec.com) of which I am a founder. While my title at Genuitec is VP, Product Management, I think of myself more as an Eclipse technologist and product delivery specialist. These days I spend most of my professional time working on Genuitec's MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench product. A quick fly by of my resume looks something like this: several startup failures, numerous consulting engagements, and some really cool work on the Human Genome Project and NASA's AI Section that dates back to the '80s.
Very cool! I love it when companies get closer to their customers via weblogs. Now we just need to get Wayne to start blogging some tips and tricks.
I spent a few hours last night replacing Tiles with SiteMesh in AppFuse. I had the Struts version done in 2 hours, and most of the Spring version done in an additional hour. Then I spent another 3 hours today twiddling with things and getting it just right. During this process, I discovered a few things I thought I'd share. Keep in mind that I'm pretty much a SiteMesh rookie. Hopefully, implementing and using it in AppFuse will help me to fully understand its power.
<c:import> in my login.jsp for the login menu, importing nothing for signup, and using <c:if> statements in my decorator to see if the user was logged in. If they were, then I import the site menu and its necessary scripts and styles. In the end, this worked fine and it's probably easier for new AppFuse users to understand - so that's a good thing.
<title><fmt:message key="mainMenu.title"/></title>
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tiles-config.xml and then grabbed/used it with the following JSTL code:
<c:set var="bodyId" scope="request">
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<body id="name">. In fact, you don't even need to wrap your content with it, you can simpley do <body id="name"/>. I'm grabbing and using this in my decorator with the following code. This works, but it would be cool if I could check for the existence of the attribute first - so I could eliminate id="" when no body id is set.
<body id="<decorator:getProperty property='body.id'/>">
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<dispatcher>ERROR</dispatcher> to the filter-mapping). A workaround is to use wrap the error page with a <page:applyDecorator> tag. This works, but if you specify elements in <head>, they will end up in the body of page, rather than in the decorator's header.So there you have it. AppFuse now uses SiteMesh instead of Tiles! I'm sure the implementation will get cleaner and more refined as more folks use it. I'm looking forward to deleting some chunks out of AppFuse's tutorials because SiteMesh makes page development so much easier. The hardest part of SiteMesh is setting up the infrastructure. Once you're got that done, you hardly ever touch it again.
Next task: WebWork integration.