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.
I love how easy it is to start new projects these days. It was very difficult when I started creating AppFuse way back in 2002. We've come a long way baby!
Here's a couple of easy ways to get started with Flex and Grails:
I hope to develop with Flex, Grails, GWT or YUI + Struts 2 in the next 6 months. These seem like the most exciting technologies for Java web development in 2008.
By now, you've seen many stories about upgrading to Leopard. Here's mine.
In the past, I would've slapped the DVD in, selected upgrade and prayed for the best. Now I'm older and (apparently) wiser. First, I cloned my hard drive with SuperDuper!. Then I attempted to upgrade. I started the process on Saturday morning and didn't check it until Saturday afternoon. At that point, I was greeted with the lovely blue screen of death. I didn't even bother to look up the problem - instead opting for the clean install.
The next time I checked (Sunday evening), the installation was completed. I registered, clicked through some stuff and started copying files from my backup drive. On Sunday night, I closed the lid on my laptop and haven't used it since. I guess new operating systems don't excite me as much as they used to. Then again, I do have two MacBooks, so I don't really need the Leoparded one.
As far as the lack of Java 6, that doesn't surprise or disappoint me. I'm sure it'll be out in a few weeks. By the time it's released, I doubt any of my clients will have made the leap from Java 5 -> Java 6.It could be that I'm burned out on technology - or it could be the Rockies and Broncos performance this past weekend has got me bummed. Who knows - the good news is there's lot of trick-or-treating to be done in the next couple of days and I'm sure to cheer up with the kids around.
In Switched, Dave says:
Now that Glassfish V2 is out I'm switching from Tomcat to Glassfish for all of my development. It's more than fast enough. With Glassfish on my MacBook Pro, Roller restart time is about 8 seconds compared to 16 with Tomcat. And the quality is high; the admin console, the asadmin command-line utility and the docs are all excellent. The dog food is surprisingly tasty ;-)
I did some brief and very non-scientific performance comparisons myself:
Startup Time with no applications deployed:
Startup Time with AppFuse 2.0 (Struts + Hibernate version) as a WAR
Environment:
Since this was a very non-scientific experiment, it's possible the last two are actually the same. It's strange that Dave is seeing Roller startup twice as fast on GlassFish. Maybe they've done some Roller deployment optimization?
I realize startup times aren't that important. However, as Dave mentions, they (and context reloading) can be extremely important when developing.
Update: I got to thinking that Dave is probably referring to context reloading. Here's a comparison of how long it takes for both servers to pick up a new WAR (and start the application) when it's dropped into their autodeploy directories.
The strange thing about Tomcat is it takes 6-8 seconds to recognize a new WAR has been deployed. Does Tomcat have a polling increment that can be increased during development?
Regardless, it's impressive that the GlassFish guys have made things that much faster for developers. Nice work folks!
These days, I try to use mvn jetty:run on projects. Then I don't have to worry about deploying, just save and wait for the reload. Time to wait for AppFuse 2.0 to reload using the Maven Jetty Plugin (version 6.1.5)? 7 seconds. Of course, it'd be nice if I could somehow get this down to 1 or 2 seconds.
Maybe Dave should use the Maven integration for Roller to decrease his reload times. ;-)
I'm extremely happy to announce we've finally finished developing AppFuse 2.0. The road to AppFuse 2.0 has been a long journey through Mavenland, annotations and generics. Thanks to all the developers, contributors and users for helping test, polish and prove that AppFuse 2 is an excellent solution for developing Java-based applications. Your time, patience and usage of AppFuse has made it the strong foundation it is today. Last but certainly not least, thanks to all the great Java developers who wrote the frameworks that AppFuse uses - we're truly standing on the shoulders of giants.
What is AppFuse? Click here to find out.
AppFuse 2.0 is available as a Maven archetype. For information on creating a new project using this release, please see the QuickStart Guide or the demos and videos.
If you've used AppFuse 1.x, but not 2.x, you'll might want to read our Frequently Asked Questions. If you have any questions or issues, please post them to the user mailing list. The Maven Reference Guide has a map of Ant » Maven commands. Maven for Newbies might also be useful if you've never used Maven before. There is some support for Ant in this release.
AppFuse 2.0 contains over 200 pages of documentation, downloadable as a PDF (3 MB). You can also download all its dependencies and install them in your local repository if you want to work offline.
For more information, please see the 2.0 Release Notes. The 2.0 series of AppFuse has a minimum requirement of the following specification versions:
New features in AppFuse 2.0 include:
We appreciate the time and effort everyone has put toward contributing code and documentation, posting to the mailing lists, and logging issues.
We're also grateful for the help from our sponsors, particularly Atlassian, Contegix, JetBrains, and Java.net. Atlassian and Contegix are especially awesome: Atlassian has donated licenses to all its products and Contegix has donated an entire server to the AppFuse project. Thanks guys - you rock!
Comments and issues should be posted to the mailing list.
As far as I can tell, Struts 2 sucks. To be fair, so does Stripes. Why? Because there's no developer feedback for invalid properties or OGNL Expressions. What does this mean? It means if you fat-finger a property name, nothing happens. The OGNL exception is swallowed and you never know you did anything wrong. Furthermore, no one seems to care. The XWork folks will help you build, but not solve the problem. This seems like a major deal-breaker to me, However, I also believe it can be fixed - so maybe there's hope.
To demonstrate the problem, I did an experiment. I used the "user details" page in AppFuse Light to fat-finger a property name for the following frameworks: Struts 1, WebWork, Struts 2, JSF, Spring MVC, Stripes, Tapestry and Wicket. First, I tried changing the "lastName" property to "LastName" to see if the framework's property evaluation was case-sensitive. I found that with WebWork/Struts 2, Stripes and Tapestry, the property is not case-sensitive. I prefer case-sensitivity, but maybe that's because I prefer Unix over Windows.
The 2nd thing I tried was changing "lastName" to "pastName" to see if I'd get an error. An error occurred for all the frameworks mentioned, except for WebWork/Struts 2 and Stripes. This makes me believe these frameworks suck. The both use OGNL, so they could blame it on that, but Tapestry uses OGNL and it presents an error message. After this small experiment, my conclusion is the following frameworks have the best developer feedback:
* Wicket seems like it needs some work as all it presents is "Internal Error" and makes you dig through your log files to find the problem.
Without good developer feedback, how can you have good productivity?
Dear Struts 2 and Stripes Developers,
What do you think about improving your error messages for invalid properties and expressions? Is this a feature you think you could add? We'd love it if you did.
Sincerely,
Your Users
Click here for some screenshots of how a fat-fingered property looks in various frameworks:
Update: Stripes doesn't suck and Wicket has excellent error reporting. See my comment below for more details.
Update 2: I've created a patch to (hopefully) solve this issue in XWork. If you have any feedback on ways to improve this patch, I'd love to hear about it.
My last post on choosing a web framework got quite a few comments. Some seemed to like the application categorization technique as a means to narrow the choices. However, others seemed to disagree. So if application categorization is not a good methodology for narrowing the choices, what is?
I think one of the best ways to figure out a good methodology is to find out what people have done to choose their web framework. I'm looking for stories from developers who have evaluated 2-3+ frameworks for a project. I'd like to come up with 3-5 stories as part of my talk to highlight how some teams have chosen their web framework. What were your important criteria? What made you choose the one you did? Was it a tight race between a few of them? Did industry buzz or application categorization play a part in your decision?
Please send any stories you'd like to share to [email protected]. Of course, you can also post your story in the comments - but an e-mail gives it a bit more validity. If you'd like to share your company name, that'd be great, but it's by no means required. I haven't decided if I'm going to prevent all cases as anonymous companies or not. If you do send a story, I'll make sure and ask your permission before I share any of your personal/company information. Thanks!
As part of Julie and I's divorce settlement, I let her keep my 23" Cinema Display along with its attached Windows PC. Since I like having a Windows PC available, I managed to buy the same machine on eBay for $250. However, now I'm in the market for a new monitor.
So what should I get? One 30" cinema display or two 23" displays?
I'm leaning towards two 23 inchers. Matrox's DualHead2Go seems to provide exactly what I'd need to hook two 23s to a MacBook Pro. Furthermore, I could hook it up to my DVI KVM switch and have dual monitors on both my Mac and my PC. No matter how big the screen is, I always seem to enjoy dual monitors more.
What do you think? Is anyone out there using Matrox's DualHead2Go Digital Edition?
In the comments of my Choosing a JVM Web Framework, Graeme Rocher writes:
no offense Matt, but I fear you are a grossly inappropriate person to be writing such a study given your past history of claiming frameworks like Grails are competitors to AppFuse. Any such study will come laced with doubts over its honesty and I'm sure this doesn't just apply to Grails.
In the post Graeme linked to, I said:
I think Grails and AppFuse are more likely competitors rather than compatible. Grails uses Spring, Spring MVC and Hibernate under-the-covers, whereas AppFuse uses the raw frameworks. Of course, it would be cool to allow different classes w/in AppFuse to be written in Groovy or JRuby. At this point, I think it's probably better for users to choose one or the other.
Since writing that post a year ago, I've changed my opinion about AppFuse being competitors with Grails or Rails. Why? Because they're different languages. I don't think you should choose a web development stack first. I think you should choose your language first. For those that choose raw Java, I think AppFuse provides a good solution. To be more explicit, here's a private conversation that David Whitehurst (author of The AppFuse Primer) and I exchanged.
David: Have you been looking at Ruby on Rails any? And, if so, I'm sure you're as impressed by those who command the language as I am. But, I think the J2EE web application is not dead yet. Do you think any comparison of the complexity of AppFuse vs. Rails should be mentioned in the book?
Matt: I'm highly aware of Rails, have attended talks and tutorials on it,
even bought books about it - but I've never written an app, done a
tutorial or used it in the real-world. I'm afraid of it. I'm almost
certain I'd like it, and I'd likely like Grails as well. However, the
reason I stick with pure Java is because that's where my clients' demand is and hence the consulting
dollars for me.
It's probably also possible to create AppFuse for both Rails and
Grails. I believe Rails' Streamlined in much like AppFuse. I like to
think of AppFuse as language agnostic - it's always been designed to
eliminate ramp up time. While Rails and Grails simplify the
programming API and make it possible to develop code with less lines
of code, it'd be nice to have user management, file upload and other
things like AppFuse has. When I start using these frameworks, it's
likely I'll develop some sort of features like AppFuse has and use
them on projects. Of course, if they already have all the features of AppFuse via plugins, I wouldn't reinvent the wheel - I'm simply use what's already there and be happy about it.
I don't know if it's relevant to mention Rails, but it probably
doesn't hurt. There's no reason to ignore the competition if they're
indeed competition. I don't see them as competition, and I almost
don't see Grails as competition either. AppFuse (in its current state)
is for developers that've chosen to use the language and frameworks
that AppFuse supports. It's not trying to solve everyone's problems -
it's merely trying to simplify things for those using the frameworks
it supports.
There's nothing saying that AppFuse can't have a Rails or Grails
version in the future. For me, it'll happen if I start developing
applications using these frameworks and see the integration needs like
I saw with the Java frameworks. The good news is most of these
frameworks have done the integration work, so it's really just a
matter of creating features or using plugins.
David: I keep getting these "dream-squasher" friends of mine showing me Rails, Grails, and how wonderful Ruby is. It's impressive, but I'm not convinced that big business is ready to adopt it any time soon.
Matt:
As a Java programmer, I think you'd be a fool to ignore Rails or
Grails and not at least be familiar with them. There's no reason to
discount technology until you've used it on a real-world project - at
least 6 months or longer - IMO.
Just because you're productive in Ruby and like it - that doesn't make
you a bad Java programmer.
I hope this clears up any confusion on how I feel towards Rails or Grails. I would welcome the opportunity to use them on a project. If I was starting a products-based company, I certainly would give them a shot in the prototyping phase. However, I'm a consultant that makes money from clients hiring me to explain/do what I know best. At the current time, that happens to be open source Java frameworks.
I do plan on learning a plethora of other frameworks, in other languages, I just haven't had the time yet. When I do, I hope that I can somehow become proficient enough to help companies adopt them as well. However, to build up that experience and expertise will likely take years. I think this is how lots of companies feel. Can you blame them for not "jumping ship" on their current skills and knowledge?
Of course, then you have the Relevance guys who seem to be doing exactly what I hope to be doing in several years from now. Not only do they specialize in Java and its frameworks, but they also do consulting and training around Rails, Grails and Ajax. I can't help but admire them tremendously.
Since my last post on trimming whitespace in JSPs seems to be a popular topic, I figured it appropriate to note that JSP 2.1 supports a new trimWhitespace directive.
<%@ page trimDirectiveWhitespaces="true" %>
If you're using a Servlet 2.5 XSD, you can also do this in your web.xml:
<jsp-config>
<jsp-property-group>
<url-pattern>*.jsp</url-pattern>
<trim-directive-whitespaces>true</trim-directive-whitespaces>
</jsp-property-group>
</jsp-config>
A Servlet 2.5 XSD seems to be the following:
<web-app
xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd"
metadata-complete="false"
version="2.5">
To learn more about this feature, view Summary of New Features in JSP 2.1 Technology and search for "TrimWhiteSpace". It'd be nice if there was anchors in this article for a direct link, but I couldn't find any.
Now I just wish JSP's EL had an xmlEscape="true" flag to escape XML in printed variables. Freemarker supports this.
Hat tip to Kerem and Krishna's Unified Expression Language for JSP and JSF article.
What if you didn't have to choose between a request-based framework and a component-based framework? What if you could use them together and use request-based for some pages and component-based for others? This is the functionality that the Struts 2 JSF Plugin provides.
To be fair, the JSF-Spring project says it does the same thing for Spring MVC + JSF, but there doesn't appear to be any documentation.
I did some prototyping of Struts 2 + JSF and discovered that it does indeed work. I also discovered that there's no documentation on integrating it with Facelets. Luckily, it's pretty easy to do - hence my reason for writing this entry. You might ask why I want to use Facelets when JSF 1.2 supports JSP fairly well? My reason is because JSP 2.1 hijacks #{}, which Struts 2's OGNL uses for some expressions. Because of this, I want to be able to run on a JSP 2.0 container until a workaround comes along. Sun's JSF 1.2 RI can run on a JSP 2.0 container, while MyFaces 2.1 cannot (at least in my experience).
There's two ways to get Struts 2 + JSF + Facelets working:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<faces-config xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee
http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-facesconfig_1_2.xsd"
version="1.2">
<application>
<view-handler>com.sun.facelets.FaceletViewHandler</view-handler>
</application>
</faces-config>
<context-param>
<param-name>org.ajax4jsf.VIEW_HANDLERS</param-name>
<param-value>com.sun.facelets.FaceletViewHandler</param-value>
</context-param>
NOTE: You have to use 2nd method if you want to use Ajax4JSF. It won't read the view-handler from faces-config.xml.
If you're using SiteMesh, you may have to add another <parser> element to your sitemesh.xml to get Facelets pages decorated:
<parser content-type="application/xhtml+xml"
class="com.opensymphony.module.sitemesh.parser.HTMLPageParser"/>
Thanks to Laurie Harper for his assistance figuring this stuff out.
Now you might ask - why would you want to do this? For one, Struts 2 has a better navigation model (IMO) than JSF. Also, if developers want to use JSF and think it's a better way for a certain module - let them go to it!