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 "young russian teenboy model pre teen". 788 entries found.

You can also try this same search on Google.

Comparing IDEs and Issue Trackers

A couple of good comparison articles came out today:

Issue Tracking Systems Conclusion
These products reviewed are among the most widely used in the Java community. Bugzilla, with an uninspiring user interface, is rich in features, but undeniably cumbersome to install and to maintain. Trac is a good, lightweight solution that should be seriously considered by any development team using Subversion. JIRA is a solid, powerful solution, providing almost all of the features of Bugzilla, and more, in an eminently more usable (and more productive) form ? but at a cost.

I agree with John's conclusion - Bugzilla was cool 5 years ago, but there's much better systems now. If you're running an open source project, it's a no-brainer to use JIRA. If you're working at a company and want to use an open-source solution, Trac works well.

IDE Wars Conclusion
For enterprise development, I'd say IDEA wins out with its rich support for both J2EE and Java EE 5, followed closely by NetBeans (which also does an impressive job here), and last is Eclipse/MyEclipse (mostly due to their current lack of support for Java EE 5).

I agree with Jacek as well. I've been using IDEA almost exclusively for the last 6 months - ever since I started to convert AppFuse to use Maven 2. Eclipse's support for sub-projects has been pretty pitiful and IDEA has *much* better support for web development - particularly JavaScript and CSS.

Lately, I've found myself advocating IDEA and JIRA to clients more and more. A few years ago it was Bugzilla and Eclipse. However, these IDEA and JIRA (as well as Confluence and FishEye) are so cheap in the relative scheme of things - I think they actually pay for themselves these days.

Disclaimer: I use IDEA, Confluence and JIRA on a daily basis. I use Trac and Eclipse on a weekly basis. I paid for my original IDEA license out of my own pocket, but I received my most recent license for speaking at Denver's JUG. Confluence and JIRA are provided free of charge by Atlassian for AppFuse.

Posted in Java at Mar 15 2007, 05:56:02 PM MDT 5 Comments

A New 17" Powerhouse

Yummy On my current project, we're using SQL Server as the backend database. To make this work on my MacBook Pro, I have to run Parallels in the background. While this setup works, it does have issues. The main problem is things slow down a fair amount when running two operating systems. Last week (or was it two weeks ago?), Parallels came out with their latest release, which includes a Coherence mode. If you're a Mac user, I highly recommend this software. It basically lets you run Windows and OS X at the same time, all integrated into the same screen, which the same dock and everything. It's really slick the first time you see it in action.

After working in this mode for a few days, I knew it was the perfect programming platform for me. I tend to use Windows and OS X each 50% of the time, so having them both running side-by-side rocks. But as I worked, I thought to myself, "I need more RAM and more real estate". It seems liked a no-brainer: it was time to upgrade to the 17" MacBook Pro - with all the performance goodies I could get. Against Ben's advice, I bought a new 17" MacBook Pro last week. 3 GB RAM and the fastest disk they had (100 GB 7200 RPM version). Sure, it'd be great to have more disk space, but I'm not going to give up speed for space. If this bad boy really is 40% faster than my current MBP, life is going to be very good.

Of course, my real reason for getting a new laptop was because Julie dropped her PowerBook a couple months ago. I was going to spend $1000 to get it fixed, but it didn't seem like a worthwhile investment. Julie's renovating a new house, so with me working from home, it can get contentious for her trying to get some computer time. So she needed a new laptop. She mentioned she wanted to buy a PC laptop. I shrieked when I heard this and knew I had to buck up and get a new one so she could have my MBP that runs Windows. Did this reasoning work with her? No, not at all. However, when she gets a new computer later this evening, I'm willing to bet she'll be pretty pumped. ;-)

I'll try to post some performance comparisons this evening after I get it all setup.

Update: It's gonna be a while before I can post any performance comparisons. I got the box setup thanks to Apple's "import from another box" feature. However, I'm wwaaaayyyy behind on a lot of commitments, so I'm scrambling to catch up. With any luck, I'll post something this weekend.

Posted in Mac OS X at Mar 13 2007, 10:20:35 AM MDT 11 Comments

Integrating Selenium with Maven 2

I spent some time this past week integrating Selenium with Maven 2. This post is designed to show you how to do this in your Maven 2 projects.

First of all, there were two types of testing scenarios I wanted to make possible. The first was to allow HTML-based tests that web designers could create and run with Selenium IDE. As far as I know, Selenium IDE is capable of recording and exporting Java-based tests (powered by TestNG or JUnit), but I don't believe it's capable of playing them back. So for Java Developers, I wanted to allow them to write their tests in Java.

To get Maven to run HTML-based tests, the easiest way seems to be using the <selenese> Ant task. I tried Mavenium as well, but it 1) doesn't use the latest version of Selenium RC and 2) reports success when tests fail. Below is a Maven profile that I'm using in an AppFuse-based project to run HTML tests.

<profiles>
    <profile>
        <id>integration-test</id>
        <activation>
            <property>
                <name>!maven.test.skip</name>
            </property>
        </activation>
        <build>
            <plugins>
                <plugin>
                    <groupId>org.codehaus.cargo</groupId>
                    <artifactId>cargo-maven2-plugin</artifactId>
                    <version>0.3-SNAPSHOT</version>
                    <configuration>
                        <wait>${cargo.wait}</wait>
                        <container>
                            <containerId>${cargo.container}</containerId>
                            <!--home>${cargo.container.home}</home-->
                            <zipUrlInstaller>
                                <url>${cargo.container.url}</url>
                                <installDir>${installDir}</installDir>
                            </zipUrlInstaller>
                        </container>
                        <configuration>
                            <home>${project.build.directory}/${cargo.container}/container</home>
                            <properties>
                                <cargo.hostname>${cargo.host}</cargo.hostname>
                                <cargo.servlet.port>${cargo.port}</cargo.servlet.port>
                            </properties>
                        </configuration>
                    </configuration>
                    <executions>
                        <execution>
                            <id>start-container</id>
                            <phase>pre-integration-test</phase>
                            <goals>
                                <goal>start</goal>
                            </goals>
                        </execution>
                        <execution>
                            <id>stop-container</id>
                            <phase>post-integration-test</phase>
                            <goals>
                                <goal>stop</goal>
                            </goals>
                        </execution>
                    </executions>
                </plugin>
                <plugin>
                    <artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>
                    <executions>
                        <execution>
                            <id>launch-selenium</id>
                            <phase>integration-test</phase>
                            <configuration>
                                <tasks>
                                    <taskdef resource="selenium-ant.properties">
                                        <classpath refid="maven.plugin.classpath"/>
                                    </taskdef>
                                    <selenese suite="src/test/resources/selenium/TestSuite.html"
                                              browser="*firefox" timeoutInSeconds="180" port="5555"
                                              results="${project.build.directory}/selenium-firefox-results.html"
                                              startURL="http://${cargo.host}:${cargo.port}/${project.build.finalName}/"/>
                                </tasks>
                            </configuration>
                            <goals>
                                <goal>run</goal>
                            </goals>
                        </execution>
                    </executions>
                    <dependencies>
                        <dependency>
                            <groupId>ant</groupId>
                            <artifactId>ant-nodeps</artifactId>
                            <version>1.6.5</version>
                        </dependency>
                        <dependency>
                            <groupId>org.openqa.selenium.server</groupId>
                            <artifactId>selenium-server</artifactId>
                            <version>0.9.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
                        </dependency>
                    </dependencies>
                </plugin>
            </plugins>
        </build>
    </profile>
    <profile>
        <id>selenium-ie</id>
        <activation>
            <os>
                <family>windows</family>
            </os>
        </activation>
        <build>
            <plugins>
                <plugin>
                    <artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>
                    <executions>
                        <execution>
                            <id>launch-selenium</id>
                            <phase>integration-test</phase>
                            <configuration>
                                <tasks>
                                    <taskdef resource="selenium-ant.properties">
                                        <classpath refid="maven.plugin.classpath"/>
                                    </taskdef>
                                    <selenese suite="src/test/resources/selenium/TestSuite.html"
                                              browser="*firefox" timeoutInSeconds="180" port="5555"
                                              results="${project.build.directory}/selenium-firefox-results.html"
                                              startURL="http://${cargo.host}:${cargo.port}/${project.build.finalName}/"/>
                                    <selenese suite="src/test/resources/selenium/TestSuite.html"
                                              browser="*iexplore" timeoutInSeconds="180" port="5555"
                                              results="${project.build.directory}/selenium-ie-results.html"
                                              startURL="http://${cargo.host}:${cargo.port}/${project.build.finalName}/"/>
                                </tasks>
                            </configuration>
                            <goals>
                                <goal>run</goal>
                            </goals>
                        </execution>
                    </executions>
                </plugin>
            </plugins>
        </build>
    </profile>
</profiles>

The above setup will allow you to run Selenium tests in Firefox, and in IE as well when you're on Windows. I tried to get Safari to work on the Mac, but it just opens Safari and hangs.

HTML tests are great for non-programmers, but what about developers that prefer Java and want test reports to be included in the surefire-plugin's reports? That's easy enough. First of all, put your tests in a particular package so they can be excluded from the normal testing cycle. I used a webapp.selenium package. I configured the surefire-plugin to exclude these tests:

<plugin>
    <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
    <configuration>
        <excludes>
            <exclude>**/selenium/*Test.java</exclude>
        </excludes>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

Then I added the newly released selenium-maven-plugin to my "integration-test" profile and configured surefire to run the Selenium Java tests.

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
    <artifactId>selenium-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>1.0-beta-1</version>  
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <id>start-selenium</id>
            <phase>pre-integration-test</phase>
            <goals>
                <goal>start-server</goal>
            </goals>
            <configuration>
                <background>true</background>
            </configuration>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>
<plugin>
    <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <id>surefire-it</id>
            <phase>integration-test</phase>
            <goals>
                <goal>test</goal>
            </goals>
            <configuration>
                <excludes>
                    <exclude>none</exclude>
                </excludes>
                <includes>
                    <include>**/selenium/*Test.java</include>
                </includes>
            </configuration>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>

Yeah, Maven can be quite verbose when configuring profiles. I contacted the Maven list to see if it's possible to simplify all this XML, but so far haven't found a solution.

If you'd like to see a pom.xml with the Selenium bits and a profile that runs both HTML and Java-based tests, click here (JavaScript needs to be enabled for this to work).

NOTE: I used 0.9.1-SNAPSHOT of Selenium Server because it solves issues with the latest version of Firefox.

This brings up a related question I asked on the AppFuse mailing list a couple of days ago:

Do you use the Canoo WebTests? If not, how do you do UI testing? If so, would you prefer Selenium?

If you've tried AppFuse 2.x and have an opinion, please add a comment. Personally, I like Selenium, but I like how Canoo WebTest can be somewhat friendly to designers and allow i18n testing with Ant's property file support. With Selenium, you have to use parse/replace or Java tests to do i18n testing. Then again, if you need to test a lot of Ajax functionality, it's likely that Selenium will work much better for you.

Posted in Java at Mar 09 2007, 10:35:04 AM MST 17 Comments

RE: Jetty Ant Plugin

It looks like Jetty has a new Plugin for Ant. If you've used the Jetty Maven Plugin, you know this is a slick way to quickly deploy your application. For those of you wondering about Tomcat, there's a similar Tomcat Maven Plugin that supports tomcat:run and tomcat:run-war. However, it's still in Mojo's sandbox.

I'm pumped to see this Jetty task for Ant because I've been thinking a lot about creating an exploded, full-source archetype for AppFuse 2.0. Of course, it's probably possible to start Jetty and monitor your project for changes w/o this task - but it does seem to make things a fair amount easier. If we do a full-source archetype, it makes sense to support Ant as well - especially since we can probably re-use the build.xml from AppFuse Light.

This brings up a related questions I asked on the AppFuse mailing list yesterday:

A couple of questions for folks using (or planning to use) 2.x:

1. As far as archetypes go, are you using basic or modular?

2. If there was a 3rd type of archetype that included the full source (like AppFuse 1.x), would you use it over the existing basic or modular archetypes? If yes, I'm assuming upgrading is not that big of an issue for you?

If you've tried AppFuse 2.x and would like to answer these questions, please add a comment.

There's another questions about Selenium vs. Canoo WebTest in that post, but that's reserved for another entry where I'll talk about Selenium options in Maven 2.

Posted in Java at Mar 08 2007, 08:13:08 AM MST 3 Comments

Zero Configuration in Struts 2

Struts 2 has a nifty zero configuration feature. However, it's only useful for registering actions, not for automatically registering results. In other words, you still have to use an @Result annotation to tell your action what page to dispatch to. To use default view names instead of requiring @Result, you can use the Codebehind Plugin. Also, did you know Struts 2 will autowire your Spring dependencies? It's pretty slick.

What does this all mean? It means you can write your Struts 2 application without writing any XML. Of course, you can still use XML to tweak behavior, but with these plugins enabled, you won't have to.

IMO, these plugins should be combined into a single zero configuration feature.

Here's how you can enable Struts 2's Zero Configuration feature in AppFuse 2.0:

  1. Add a packageNames parameter to the "struts" filter in your web.xml:
    <filter>
        <filter-name>struts</filter-name>
        <filter-class>org.apache.struts2.dispatcher.FilterDispatcher</filter-class>
        <init-param>
            <param-name>actionPackages</param-name>
            <param-value>com.company.newapp.webapp.action</param-value>
        </init-param>
    </filter>
    
  2. Add the Codebehind Plugin as a dependency in your pom.xml:
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.apache.struts</groupId>
        <artifactId>struts2-codebehind-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>2.0.6</version>
    </dependency>
    
  3. Add a struts.codebehind.pathPrefix constant in struts.xml for your default pages directory:
    <constant name="struts.codebehind.pathPrefix" value="/WEB-INF/pages/"/>
    

That's it - now you can code away without configuring anything!

How does this compare to other web frameworks in AppFuse? Tapestry has a similar feature, but Spring MVC and JSF don't. Spring MVC still requires you create a bean definition for Controllers and JSF requires you write a chunk of XML for each managed bean. Of course, if you know how to do something similar with Spring MVC or JSF, please let me know.

Posted in Java at Mar 07 2007, 05:19:18 PM MST 9 Comments

Upgrading to Tomcat 6

Erik did it, so I tried it as well. This site is now running Tomcat 6.0.10 and it has to be the least painful major Tomcat upgrade I've ever done. By major, I mean upgrading from one version number (5.5.17) to the next. Apparently, no XML files changed (like they did from 4.1.x -> 5.0.x -> 5.5.x) because I was able to copy over conf/server.xml and conf/Catalina/** without any issues. The only change I had to make was to copy commons-logging.jar from Roller's WEB-INF/lib to JSPWiki's.

I have seen a couple of the following errors in my log files since I upgraded, so if you see any strange behavior, please let me know.

2-Mar-2007 12:36:10 AM org.apache.tomcat.util.http.Parameters processParameters
WARNING: Parameters: Character decoding failed. Parameter skipped.
java.io.CharConversionException: EOF
        at org.apache.tomcat.util.buf.UDecoder.convert(UDecoder.java:83)
        at org.apache.tomcat.util.buf.UDecoder.convert(UDecoder.java:49)
        at org.apache.tomcat.util.http.Parameters.urlDecode(Parameters.java:410)
        at org.apache.tomcat.util.http.Parameters.processParameters(Parameters.java:392)
        at org.apache.tomcat.util.http.Parameters.processParameters(Parameters.java:508)
        at org.apache.tomcat.util.http.Parameters.handleQueryParameters(Parameters.java:266)
        at org.apache.catalina.connector.Request.parseParameters(Request.java:2404)
        at org.apache.catalina.connector.Request.getParameterValues(Request.java:1089)
        at org.apache.catalina.connector.RequestFacade.getParameterValues(RequestFacade.java:396)
        at javax.servlet.ServletRequestWrapper.getParameterValues(ServletRequestWrapper.java:189)
        at org.acegisecurity.wrapper.SavedRequestAwareWrapper.getParameter(SavedRequestAwareWrapper.java:325)
        at org.apache.roller.ui.rendering.velocity.deprecated.OldPageRequest.(OldPageRequest.java:164)
        at org.apache.roller.ui.rendering.velocity.deprecated.RedirectServlet.figurePageRedirect(RedirectServlet.java:285)
        at org.apache.roller.ui.rendering.velocity.deprecated.RedirectServlet.doGet(RedirectServlet.java:131)

I tested AppFuse 2.0 on Tomcat 6.0.10 earlier today and impressed that 1) Cargo worked perfectly and 2) most of the web frameworks worked. Which one didn't? You guessed it - good ol' JSF. That's OK though, the JSF version of AppFuse (MyFaces 1.1.5 with Facelets 1.1.11) doesn't work with Jetty 6.1.1 either. The good news is I found a workaround - removing the el-api dependency from my pom.xml makes it work on both.

    <dependency>
        <groupId>javax.el</groupId>
        <artifactId>el-api</artifactId>
        <version>1.2</version>
    </dependency>

If I remove this dependency, everything works fine on Tomcat 6.0.10 and Jetty 6.1.1. Unfortunately, it seems this dependency is needed for Tomcat 5.x. Hopefully some fancy stuff with Maven profiles can fix this incompatibility.

Posted in Java at Mar 02 2007, 12:44:46 AM MST 10 Comments

Airport Extreme

Airport Extreme Even though I managed to get my home network speedy again after my bandwidth speed issues, I bought a new Airport Extreme last week. My main reason for buying it was its USB device sharing feature. I have a Suse 10 box that runs Samba, DHCP, DNS right now, but for some reason, my MacBook Pro doesn't work for printing to CUPS over Samba. In my experience, printing is one of the major issues with Macs - it just never seems to work when you want to print over a network. I have gotten it to work in the past, but it's often been a wretched weekend's adventures where I end up sacrificing a goat to the CUPS gods to get everything working.

So by buying an Airport Extreme, I figured I'd have an Apple product at the center of my network and all my problems would be solved. I was wrong.

First of all, why can't there be a web interface on this sucker? Why does it require that I have a client installed to configure it? With most routers I've worked with in the past (NetGear and Linksys), the web interface might've been clunky, but it didn't require I install a CD. I initially tried installing the software on Windows XP, but for some reason it wasn't able to communicate. So I installed it on my Mac and was able to configure everything. While the setup process worked, and I was able to access the internet afterwards, this device doesn't seem to work well with my network. After plugging my printer in (an HP OfficeJet G85), I was able to add it on both XP and OS X using Bonjour. However, no matter what I sent to the printer, it'd never print. Further gripes: it might have an integrated firewall, but there doesn't seem to be a way to configure it. I couldn't find any way to do port forwarding. This stuff is so simple to do on my Netgear router.

At this point, it seems logical to return my Airport Extreme as it simply doesn't work as expected. Of course, my frustration could be from my lack of knowledge, but that's the point - I shouldn't have to read the documentation or contact Apple Support - it should all just work.

Posted in Mac OS X at Feb 28 2007, 09:23:29 AM MST 35 Comments

Upgrading to MyFaces 1.1.5 and Spring 2.x + Resin 3.x + Cargo

This week, I encountered a few issues with some open source software that I hadn't seen before. Furthermore, it was difficult to find the problems' solutions via Google, so I figured I'd blog about them and make life less painful for the next person.

Upgrading MyFaces to 1.1.5
The first issue I experienced was when I tried to upgrade from MyFaces 1.1.4 to 1.1.5. After upgrading, my Canoo WebTests failed on some pages because the page kept redirecting to itself instead of submitting a form and properly processing the result. The solution was found with a simple e-mail to the project's mailing list. If you have a view template that auto-submits to a backing bean, you need to change "_link_hidden_" to "_idcl". Apparently, this change was made to be more similar to the JSF RI. Of course, this hack wouldn't be necessary if JSF would simply allow you to call a method from a URL without going to a view page first.

Spring 2.0's RequestContextListener has issues on Resin and WebSphere
Spring 2.0.2 has a bug where its RequestContextListener throws a NPE on WebSphere 6.0 and Resin 3.x. This is fixed in Spring 2.0.3.

Making Resin 3.x XSD-aware when using Cargo
By default, Resin 3.x doesn't ship with an XSD-aware parser turned on. This means that if you're using Spring 2.0 XSDs, you will need to set some configuration options on Resin. I don't know why Resin doesn't ship with these on by default, but it doesn't. This presents a problem if you're using Cargo to download and install Resin. The good news is you can configure Cargo to set system properties and turn Resin's XSD parser on. Adding the following to the <container> element in the Cargo plugin's configuration to solve the problem.

<!-- Make Resin aware of Spring 2.0 XSDs -->
<systemProperties>
    <javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory>
        org.apache.xerces.jaxp.DocumentBuilderFactoryImpl
    </javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory>
    <javax.xml.parsers.SAXParserFactory>
        org.apache.xerces.jaxp.SAXParserFactoryImpl
     </javax.xml.parsers.SAXParserFactory>
</systemProperties>

Resin and Cargo
Finally, Cargo 0.2 throws a NoClassDefFoundError when shutting down Resin 3.0.23 and doesn't work at all with Resin 3.1.0. What does this mean? It means Cargo works great with Tomcat and JBoss, but not so good with Resin 3.x, Jetty 6.x or Geronimo 1.1.

It's too bad, Cargo really is a great project idea. Maybe the container developers should get involved to help it support all the latest versions?

Posted in Java at Feb 24 2007, 04:33:20 PM MST 1 Comment

Message Driven POJOs by Mark Fisher

Last night, I attended the New England Java Users Group to see Mark Fisher talk about Message Driven POJOs. This was the first JUG I've been to (outside of Denver's) where I was an attendee instead of a speaker. It was interesting to see how they do things. They have one main speaker who speaks for two hours. After the first hour, they have a break, offer pizza and do a raffle. Then the speaker continues. They require you to "register" at least 48 hours before the meeting starts. This is because the meeting is held at Sun and they (apparently) need to do it for security purposes. They actually checked my ID and made sure I was registered at the door. After I passed their verification test, I received a name tag. While I like Denver's Basic Concepts followed by Main Speaker setup, I liked that this JUG meeting was over at 8:15. Below are my notes from the event.

Topics in this Session: Overview of JMS, Spring's JmsTemplate and implementing a Message Driven POJO.

Goals of JMS: provide a vendor-neutral abstraction for accessing Message Oriented Middleware from Java. It provides for enterprise messaging systems what JDBC provides for relational databases. See Wikipedia's definition of JMS for more information.

The API is what insulates your code from the JMS implementation you're using. The JMS implementation will use a message broker to communicate between servers. Tonight, Mark will be using ActiveMQ in his examples. He plans on doing most of his presentation in Eclipse because he's been spending 14 hours per day in PowerPoint revamping Interface21's training courses (I don't miss that at all).

The JMS Message is the central object to JMS. There's various types of messages, TextMessage, ObjectMessage (I missed the rest). Two types of JMS Destinations are available: Queues and Topics. A JMS Session is used to create messages as well as producers and consumers. Examples calls:

  • session.createTextMessage(String)
  • session.createConsumer(dest)
  • session.createProducter(dest)

A JMS Connection is obtained from a JMS ConnectionFactory. The ConnectionFactory is typically accessed by a JNDI Lookup.

JMS is most commonly used for internal application communications (not public facing).

Templates are common in the Spring Framework and are used to simply API usage. Their main goal is to reduce boilerplate code (resource management, try/catch, etc.). Examples include JdbcTemplate, JpaTemplate, JndiTemplate, TransactionTemplate and (you guessed it) JmsTemplate. Spring also translates exceptions to consistent runtime hierarchies. In addition to one-line methods, Spring's templates supply callbacks that alleviate try/catch blocks - but give you full power of the API.

JmsTemplate has a couple of capabilities: it handles acquisition and release of resources and translates checked JMS Exceptions to a parallel hierarchy of RuntimeExceptions. It's also capable of converting a payload to the corresponding JMS message type with a MessageConverter strategy. Lastly, it provides convenience methods to allow sending asynchronous messages.

Now Mark is showing us how you configure a ConnectionFactory, Queue and JmsTemplate in a Spring context file. The first couple of beans only take 3 lines of code to configure, the 3rd one takes 4 because it has a dependency on the first two. Pretty easy configuration if you ask me. After composing bean definitions, Mark created a JUnit test and called jmsTemplate.convertAndSend() to send a message in 2 lines of Java code.

To receive messages with JmsTemplate (pre Spring 2.0), you could use synchronous receive calls: receive(), receive(Destination) and receive(String). There are also receiveAndConvert() methods.

In Spring 2.0, they added the ability to do MessageListener containers to enable asynchronous reception in a non application server environment. Implementations include SimpleMessageListenerContainer, DefaultMessageListenerContainer and ServerSessionMessageListenerContainer. The DMLC adds transactional behavior, and the SSMLC hooks into the server's SPI. Spring's MessageListenerAdapter enables the delegation to a POJO for handling the payload.

For the next 1/2 hour or so, Mark wrote a bunch of Java and XML to create a simple Trader application. About the same time, I got managed to get an internet connection from somewhere and started browsing the net and answering e-mail. Every once in a while I looked up to see Mark's code - it all looks very simple and straight forward. In Spring 2.1, a <jms:*> namespace will be added to simplify the XML configuration.

For those of you out there using Spring's JMS support - are there any issues you've run into? Are you using it in production? It's always pimped as "awesome", so I'm looking for pain points that folks might encounter when using it.

Related: Spring's JMS Documentation and ActiveMQ's JmsTemplate Gotchas.

Posted in Java at Feb 23 2007, 11:25:59 AM MST 6 Comments

Database Profiles in AppFuse 2.0

Last night, I added several database profiles to AppFuse 2.0 and its archetypes. What does this mean? It means AppFuse should work out-of-the-box with several databases, including:

  • H2
  • HSQLDB
  • MySQL
  • PostgreSQL
  • SQL Server

For example, here's how to test a new AppFuse project works with H2:

mvn archetype:create -DarchetypeGroupId=org.appfuse -DarchetypeArtifactId=appfuse-basic-struts -DremoteRepositories=http://static.appfuse.org/repository -DarchetypeVersion=1.0-m4-SNAPSHOT -DgroupId=com.mycompany -DartifactId=myproject
Yeah, I wish there was a way to shorten this command (or prompt for choices) too.

After doing this, you can cd into the "myproject" directory and run mvn integration-test -Ph2. AppFuse 2.0 projects are configured for MySQL by default, so if you want to permanently activate one of these profiles, you can add the following between the <id> and <properties> section of the profile.

    <activation>
        <activeByDefault>true</activeByDefault>
    </activation>

In addition to the profiles listed above, I tried to get Oracle Express and embedded Derby working. No dice on either one. I took a brief look at DB2 Express as well, but with a 400 MB download and 3 JARs required for its JDBC Driver - it seemed like a lot more trouble than it was worth.

Maven 2's build profiles are a powerful feature that we hope to make easy to use. For example, to test your new project with H2 and JBoss, you can simply run mvn integration-test -Ph2,jboss. Thanks to the power of Cargo, this will download JBoss 4.0.5, install it, and run all the Canoo WebTests within it. Of course, this will take a while the first time - especially since JBoss is a 77MB download. Fortunately, we allow you to change one small setting in your pom.xml and use an existing install instead.

Maven 2 is a kick-ass build/deploy/test tool once you figure it out. With AppFuse 2.0, we're doing all the "figuring out" for you. ;-)

NOTE: I would add more server profiles, but Cargo's Maven Plugin (version 0.2) has issues with Geronimo 1.1, Jetty 6.x and Resin 3.x. Strangely enough, Jetty's Maven Plugin version 6.0.0 works great, but 6.1.0 throws stack traces.

Update: Support for Oracle and Derby (in networked mode) has been added. We'll consider adding support for DB2 if IBM can figure out how to package their JDBC Driver into a single JAR.

Posted in Java at Feb 14 2007, 05:41:37 PM MST 27 Comments