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.
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Editing Java webapps instead of edit/deploy/reload

For the last few years, I've always done Java webapp development the hard way. Yeah, I'm the guy that makes Dion cringe (although I'm pretty sure he's not referring directly to me). I edit a class/jsp/xml file and run "ant deploy reload". Then I wait a few seconds for my context to reload in Tomcat. Luckily, I do mostly test-first development, so it's rare that I have to open my browser to test stuff. However, with the power of CSS and Ajax, manual testing in a browser is becoming more and more useful (although Selenium may solve that).

I've long resisted the power of the IDE, b/c I've always trusted Ant and felt confortable with the command line. However, I'm ready for a change. I'm ready to start developing Equinox and AppFuse-based applications using the edit/save/auto-reload cycle. So how do I get started? Where's the instructions for setting up my IDEs to work this way?

I prefer to use Eclipse and IDEA for development - so I'll likely try to get this working in both. If I get it working, I'll make sure and provide good documentation so others can do the same. I'm also willing to make any changes in project structure to make this happen; modifying build.xml (or pom.xml) to accomodate shouldn't be too difficult.

Posted in Java at Nov 07 2005, 09:16:03 AM MST 23 Comments

Failed upgrade to Struts 1.2.7

Yesterday I made an attempt to upgrade AppFuse to use Struts 1.2.7 instead of 1.2.4. Everything seemed to go smoothly until I started running my Canoo WebTests with JavaScript enabled. It turns out there's a major bug (IMO) in Struts 1.2.7 where the JavaScript rendered by Commons Validator can't handle the Struts' <form> tag in XHTML mode. I tried a nightly build (20050809), but it's not fixed there either, so I backed out the upgrade.

The interesting thing about Struts 1.2.7 is SpikeSource has certified this release. Are they not testing JavaScript as part of their certification test?

Another thing I attempted to upgrade yesterday was Canoo WebTest from build574 to build976. No dice - mainly because of issues with Prototype (I think). The worst part is everything works fine in a browser. Even worse is I still have a problem with build574, but it doesn't cause the tests to fail. Times like this make me wish Selenium was more polished and ready to use. I talked with some ThoughtWorkers last week and they said the Java driver is ready for a 1.0 release, but one of the committers wanted to make sure all language drivers were ready first (at least that's what I remember).

Posted in Java at Aug 10 2005, 11:17:35 AM MDT 9 Comments

Fun with jWebUnit and Canoo WebTest

For the past few days, I've been messing around with jWebUnit and Canoo WebTest at my "day job". I say messing around because I've mainly been trying to overcome perceived bugs with both projects. I'm used to using Ant and both of these libraries "just work".

The problem I had with jWebUnit is that the setOption(selectName, optionLabel) didn't work for me. This turned out to be some sort of conflict with SiteMesh, and when I commented out the SiteMesh <filter-mapping>, everything worked as expected. This is quite strange since I use SiteMesh+jWebUnit with Equinox. I tried to reproduce the problem with Equinox by adding a <select> with <option> elements, but it all worked fine there. I'd blame it on Maven, but I was running my tests from IDEA. As a workaround, I subclassed SiteMesh's PageFilter and stopped processing when the user-agent.startsWith("httpunit"). This is very similar to the JCIFS and jWebUnit workaround we're using.

Before I figured out the jWebUnit/SiteMesh issue, I decided to try my favorite UI testing tool: WebTest. Since we're using Maven, I figured the Maven Canoo Webtest Plugin would be the way to go. This took me about a day to get working (so much for the ol' 10 minute test). Most of the problems where related to the fact that setting the properties didn't seem to have any effect. I ended up writing my web-tests.xml much like I would with Ant - with taskdefs and importing project.properties for the properties to take effect. Last night, after I couldn't get webtest to click a button, I decided to try the same XML file with Ant. I dropped it into AppFuse, changed a few settings and voila! - it all worked! "WTF?" I thought to myself. Turns out the Maven Plugin is from October 2004 and is based on build 543. I ended up rebuilding the plugin to build 733 and then everything worked fine. Here's the patch.

Now that I got them both working, I'm leaning towards using jWebUnit because I can use Java to get the last inserted id (for fullying CRUDing an object). With Canoo, I'd have to use our query interface, add a feature to sort by id (or somehow get the last record added), then click on it to edit the new record. To make matters worse, the API we're talking to right now let's us add records, but we can't fetch them back - no matter what we query by. We've tried both the web services interface and the EJB one with the same results.

Ahhh, the life of an enterprise developer - trying to make 3 systems talk to each other and all of them have broken (or non-existent APIs). For one system, we're actually going through their web interface with httpclient to do CRUD on records!

Posted in Java at Mar 01 2005, 05:09:59 PM MST 5 Comments