Raible Designs

Using JasperReports with AppFuse and Spring MVC

It's been over a year since Gilberto wrote a message to the mailing list about how to use JasperReports with AppFuse's Spring MVC flavor. Now he's created a tutorial for how to use JasperReports in AppFuse. Thanks Gilberto!

I've seen a fair amount of howtos for Spring MVC + JasperReports. I've even written one myself as part of Chapter 6.5 in Spring Live. However, I haven't seen many articles detailing how to integrate JasperReports with other Java web frameworks. Are they out there and I'm just not seeing them? It'd be great if we could show how to integrate JasperReports with all the web frameworks that AppFuse supports.

[ANN] Equinox 1.6 Released

For a good story of how Equinox helps, see Wayland Chan's Equinox to the rescue blog post.

This release's major new features are Tapestry 4.0 and WebWork 2.2.1 upgrades. In addition, I changed to use Maven's Standard Directory Layout. It makes IDE and using Maven plugins much easier, so it's a natural progression.

This release does not contain Maven support for running the integration tests with Cargo. This is because Cargo still seems a lot more complicated with Maven than with Ant. Hopefully I'll be able to figure out an easy way to get test-all functionality with Maven and Cargo in the next release.

All of the frameworks used in Equinox, as well as its build/test system is explained in Spring Live. A summary of the changes are below (detailed release notes can be found in JIRA):

• Added custom exception page for Tapestry, as well as tapestry-flash.
• Changed birthday date input to use WebWork's DatePicker component.
• Added support for pre-compiling JSPs when building with Maven (on by default).
• Added createDatabaseIfNotExist=true to jdbc.properties.mysql to auto-create the database when using MySQL.
• Changed classes that extend *SpringContextTests to use AUTOWIRE_BY_NAME so more than one instance of an interface is supported.
• Dependent packages upgraded:
  • Cargo 0.7
  • DisplayTag 1.1
  • Hibernate 3.1.2
  • Scriptaculous 1.5.2
  • Tapestry 4.0
  • WebTest build 1168
  • WebWork 2.2.1

Download. For more information about installing the various options, see the README.txt file.

Demos:

• Spring
• JSF
• Struts
• Tapestry
• WebWork

Known Issues: The Tapestry-Flash JAR was built with JDK 1.5 - so you'll need JDK 5 to run the Tapestry version. Howard Lewis Ship said he'd fix this tonight or tomorrow. Also, if you're on Unix, you'll need to run "ant fixcrlf" before you install anything. Finally, downloading dependencies might not work the first time. Running the "ant" or "mvn" command multiple times usually solves the problem.

See the roadmap for what's coming in the next release.

DisplayTag 1.1 Released!

Read the release notes, change log, migration instructions and download. Don't forget to check out the live demo too. If you're using Maven 2, you simply need to add a new repository:

  <repositories>
    <repository>
      <id>displaytag</id>
      <url>http://displaytag.sourceforge.net/m2repo</url>
    </repository>
  </repositories>
  ...
    <dependency>
      <groupId>displaytag</groupId>
      <artifactId>displaytag</artifactId>
      <version>1.1</version>
      <scope>runtime</scope>
    </dependency>

This release is pretty huge IMO. You can now do external sorting and paging, which should eliminate any performance concerns with using this library. Another nice feature is portlet support. Nice work Fabrizio!

Update: This release is now at ibiblio, so you don't need to add the custom repository to your pom.xml anymore.

Improving the Maven Repository

Brett Porter provides a few steps on how you can help improve the Maven repository. My advice? Convert your project to use Maven 2 as an experiment. That's what I did with Equinox 1.5. In the process I found 28 issues with POMs at ibiblio. If you're using Ant, you can use Maven 2's Ant Tasks to download your dependencies w/o going "whole hog" and converting everything to M2.

Yes, this is a somewhat twisted attempt to convince you to endure the same pain I went through. The best and worst part of Maven 2 is its transitive dependencies. If they can all be updated to be accurate by the project owner's - the problem will be solved. But how do you convince project owner's to do that? I wonder how good Ivy's metadata is?

Why is this whole debate important to you? Because Ant 1.7 is (supposedly) going to have a dependency download mechanism. It's likely you'll use it because it is a nice convenience. Steve Loughran is one of Ant's primary developers and he has this to say:

I do find the m2 tasks and repository hard to work with, and am debating a quick investigation of Ivy. Maybe focusing on one thing -library management- has let them do a better job than trying to be all of a next generation build tool.

The "best dependency downloading tool" debate is heating up. I wonder which one will win Ant Developers over? If it's M2, I can see the Apache folks smiling. However, if it's Ivy - at least we'll know it's not a political decision. It's because it simply does a better job. May the best tool win.

NOTE: I've yet to try Ivy, and don't know if I will. Especially now that I've fixed all the POMs I use at ibiblio.

Maven 2's Transitive Dependencies

I spent a few hours this week integrating Maven 2's Ant tasks into Equinox. Here's a things I discovered in the process.

• The JAR you need to include to use the Maven Tasks is quite large, weighing in at a hefty 833K. Regardless, it's easier to include a ~1MB JAR in CVS than it is 10MB of JARs. Equinox (w/o the extras directory) weighs in at 10.2MB before, 1.3MB after.
• The transitive dependencies feature needs to be cleaned up a fair bit. There are a *lot* of unnecessary dependencies downloaded for many libraries. For example, Hibernate downloads a bunch of JBoss JARs and the Display Tag downloads all the various web framework JARs. I found myself excluding almost as many dependencies as I added.
• Using in-line dependencies (where you specify each one in your build.xml) is cleaner and requires less XML (b/c of attributes vs. elements). I went this route at first and it worked well, but to allow greater flexibility (for those who might want to use Maven 2), I ended up creating a pom.xml. 48 lines in build.xml turned into 195 lines in pom.xml.
• The Maven Developer team provides fantastic support - both on the mailing list and IRC. Thanks Brett!
• Maven 2.0 RC was released today.
• I need to figure out a way to "install" the persistence/web framework options in Equinox. The easiest way from a maintenance perspective is to parse pom.xml to add new dependencies. Entity includes might make the project more extensible though - and easier to upgrade.
• Once you have pom.xml in place, it's pretty easy to make the build/test/package process M2 friendly.
• Maven 2 is faster than Ant.

Overall, it was a pretty frustrating experience, with lots of trail-and-error. In the end, I got it all figured out and the only "hack" I had to do was delete servlet-api-2.4.jar after copying dependencies into my WAR. This is b/c Ant is not smart enough to know that dependencies with a "provided" scope shouldn't be copied. I could probably have a 4th dependencies path to solve this, but deleting sounded easier at the time.

I'm not going to check anything in yet b/c I still have to modify all the installers to specify their dependencies. The main advantage I can see in using a download-dependencies feature is easier upgrading of dependencies. It'll also make a lot more sense in AppFuse b/c certain parts of project (i.e. appfuse-dao.jar) can be published as re-usable modules.

In the meantime, if you'd like to try out Equinox with this feature (works with both Maven 2 or Ant), you can integrate it into a CVS version with the following steps:

• In the equinox directory, create a lib directory and download maven-artifact-ant-2.0-dep.jar into it.
• Replace your build.xml with this build.xml (view diff against current).
• Download pom.xml and put it in the equinox directory.
• Delete web/WEB-INF/lib.

That's it! I'm sure some things can be improved - please let me know if you find any issues.

Using Ivy in AppFuse

I'll admit, the thought of not checking in JARs to AppFuse's CVS is intriguing. With Ivy, I think I could pull off the current setup, plus a dynamic-downloading system. By current setup, I mean that the JARs are distributed in your "lib" directory and you can build your app w/o downloading any dependencies. I like this because I can develop AppFuse and not worry about my internet connection.

Dion doesn't get my love for checking in JARs. The main reason I do it is because it takes me a less time to download a new release and check it into CVS than it takes me to find that same release in Maven's Repo. Case in point: Hibernate 3.

I love the idea of Ivy, and mockhaug makes it sounds great, but I don't want to have to create a bunch of metadata whenever I want to use something like Hibernate 3. Then again, if Ivy is ever going to catch on, someone has to do it.

In conclusion, I'm still not convinced I should integrate Ivy into AppFuse - sounds like maintaining and uploading dependencies would be a lot more work than just checking in JARs. If there was a person responsible for creating Ivy metadata every time a new release came out, I might think different.

Maven's ibiblio repository: nicely out of date

I have a feeling that Maven and I will never quite get along. I live on the bleeding edge, because you have to if you want to keep up with open source. I'm using Hibernate, Spring and JSTL in my Maven sample app. Hibernate is pretty up to date - ibiblio has 2.1.3 and 2.1.4 is the latest. Spring's JARs aren't too bad - 1.0.1 vs. 1.0.2 being the latest release. So much for getting spring-mock.jar quick and easy - since it's part of 1.0.2. JSTL is one version behind too.

Lesson learned: if you want to stay on the bleeding edge, don't use Maven. I suppose another option is to become the guy who uploads these new versions. That job looks rather complicated though. I'm guessing that most folks are simply maintaining their own repositories (or staying away from the bleeding edge).

Maven Questions: Webapp best practices and local repositories

I can't seem to subscribe to the Maven User Mailing List for the life of me, so I'll ask my questions here, and hopefully get some answers. The first question is regarding local repositories. Ideally, I'd like to put this on a network drive, so all developers can get to it by mapping a drive or something. When I try to use a network drive, I get the following error (WinXP, Maven CVS pull from yesterday):

Artifact '\\server\share\repository\velocity\jars\velocity-1.4-dev.jar' 
    not found to add to classpath 
java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: velocity 
        at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:199) 

The reason I'd like to use a network share (over an FTP server or HTTP server) is because then we can easily add the .jar files to the classpath in Eclipse or JBuilder. If Maven downloads the files to each user's local hard driver - then we can use an FTP server. Another option is to use the default (~/.maven/repository), but then each developer has to copy javamail and our custom jars onto their hard drive.

My second question is regarding webapp best practices with Maven. The Maven Tomcat Plugin seems nice, but it mangles my server.xml file. I'd like a solution similar to the way I've done it with Ant. I use a context.xml file and place this in $CATALINA_HOME/webapps and then I "deploy" the expanded war into Tomcat. Tomcat detects when any files change under WEB-INF/ and reloads the app. Works great. A better solution would be to point the docBase to target/webappName. So I guess what I'm saying is - should I just create a context.xml file and make my own custom "setup-tomcat" task (which does an ant:copy)? Then use war:webapp to refresh the app's files from source? How are you experts doing it?