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.
Ted Husted gives a nice review of what's happening at Apache with Struts and Roller. Pretty cool to see him offering Struts Training as well. I wonder if most Struts 1.x users will upgrade to Struts Action 2.0 (a.k.a. WebWork)?
I've said in the past that Podcasts are boring. I still think this is true for the most part, but that's largely because most of them aren't appealing to me. However, this week I've found a couple of good ones. Tapestry 4.0 and WebWork 2.2 have recently been released, and now you can listen to interviews with both project's primary developers: Patrick Lightbody of WebWork and Howard Lewis Ship of Tapestry/Hivemind. The easiest way I've found to subscribe and listen to podcasts is to download iTunes. You also may want to checkout The Java Podcasters article on ONJava.com.
I hope to upgrade both Equinox and AppFuse to these releases in the near future, I just need to find the time. I also hope to change the default web framework in AppFuse to Struts Action 2 as part of AppFuse 2.0. This will allow us to ditch Struts and WebWork and only support 4 web frameworks (SA2, Spring MVC, Tapestry and JSF).
We arrived back in Denver after an awesome week in Cancun. There's no real good stories to tell, just lots of fun, laughter and relaxation with family. Below are some pictures from our trip, as well as many others on Flickr.
Right before I left last Saturday, I released AppFuse 1.9, then went to watch the Broncos vs. Patriots at Invesco Field. Today, it's the Steelers. It's pretty cool to come home to a town this excited. Go Broncos!!
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.
2005 was quite a year for me. I found my dream job, after contemplating what's next in my career only a few months earlier. I attended TheServerSide Symposium in March and created some great memories with James Goodwill. There's nothing like losing all your money and then winning it all back at 6 in the mornin'.
Other March highlights include:
April was a fun month, and started off with a me heading to work for Microsoft. The joke worked so well it was picked up by news.com. DU repeated as NCAA Champions (again). The MySQL Conference and wine-tasting with Julie (for our 5th anniversary) rounded out the month.
May was a whirlwind month, where I headed to Norway after barely renewing my expired passport on time. My PowerBook died on the way over, but I still had a great time. I was featured on TheServerSide and started planning AppFuse 2.0.
The summer flew by: I got biled by Hani, toured with the "Bomb Squad" at JavaOne, drove through Yellowstone, bought a new bike, learned more about Ruby and Rails at OSCON (and learned how much fun a smackdown can be), and watched Jack turn 1.
Then things got busy: I had a great time at Java in Action, started The Bus Project, and enjoyed the beauty of Keystone with Bender and Snyder at the Colorado Software Summit.
To round out the year, I traveled and attended conferences like I was possessed (New Jersey, NFJS, San Francisco and Florida). Abbie turned 3, Roller 2.0 was released and the WebWork joined Struts after a multi-year rivalry.
Phew, it's been quite a year folks. Here's to 2006 being even better! My goals for the year? Happiness, health and more car bombs with family and friends. 
This release's major new feature is dependency downloading using Maven 2's Ant tasks. The main reason I used Maven 2 over Ivy is
because I've heard rumors that Ant 1.7 will include dependency downloading - and they're planning on integrating the work that
Maven has already done.
One of the nice things about using Maven 2's Ant Tasks, is you
can download Maven 2 and generate your Eclipse or IDEA (possibly even Netbeans)
project files using "mvn eclipse:eclipse" or "mvn idea:idea". You can also use Maven 2 to build and test things if you like.
The only thing that doesn't currently when using Maven to test Equinox is the web tests with Cargo. I can try to get those working
if there's enough demand. For now, you'll have to use Ant if you want to test the UI.
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):
Download. For more information about installing the various options, see the README.txt file.
Demos:
The basic Equinox download contains all the various web and persistence framework options in the "extras" folder. If you have issues replacing the web framework or persistence engine, please enter an issue in JIRA and I'll build and upload a customized version for you.
The Ajax Experience looks like it's going to be an excellent show.
We will have the website for the conference launched just after christmas, but here is a taste of the quality speakers that we have confirmed for the event:
This is a show I'd love to attend. However, it ends the day before Mother's Day - WTF is up with that?! For those of us who happen to be family men and are planning on attending JavaOne, this sucks. If I want to attend The Ajax Experience, I'd have to fly back on Sunday and then fly back to San Fran on Monday for JavaOne. Booo hisss. Looks like I'll be missing this show.
I read the news initially on the AMIS Technology blog, which points to the original news-breaker on the IT-eye Weblog. This is huge for the JSF community IMO. The main compelling feature behind component-based frameworks is components. Without components, there's not much point in them.
By christmas a website and mailing list will be available for the incubator project. You will also be able to download the source code. By New Year a subversion repository should be available with the source code. And the intention is to move out of incubator by JavaOne 2006, which I think is in May.
So why is Oracle doing this? Well it's obvious that Java needs to have a good component based framework to compete with .NET. And Oracle believes that JSF can be this Framework, but a good implementation is needed, which is what ADF Faces provides.
What does ADF Faces, or better Apache Faces Cherokee contain? More than 100 components, an Html AJAX renderkit (but it doesn't use HttpXmlRequest, but iframes), a dialog framework, personalization, skinning, and a lot more.
I wonder if Oracle has a solution for the "everything is a post" problem?
JSF is cool, and easy to be productive in, but so is Tapestry, WebWork and Spring MVC. I find it somewhat ironic that the Struts committers turned down Shale as Struts 2.0, but they voted in WebWork.
I think component-based frameworks might be the way of the future. However, after playing with OpenLaszlo for the past few weeks - I can't help but think that this is what component-based frameworks should be. Many components, easy to use, and the output is a rich-client out-of-the-box. In addition to the Flash output they have now, I've heard rumblings that OpenLaszlo may support other outputs in the future (i.e. XHTML/Ajax).
It's pretty cool to see continued excitement and innovation in Java. Competition is good, and will only make each of these frameworks stronger and easier to use.
Last week, I traveled to beautiful South Florida to attend The Spring Experience conference. This show was put on by Interface21 and No Fluff Just Stuff. Keith Donald (from I21) and Jay Zimmerman (from NFJS) were the organizers and both did an excellent job. This was one of the best conferences I've attended this year, and I've been to many.
Well done gentleman, can't wait for the next one. To read my posts from the event, please see the links below:
This week, most of the Virtuas Practice Leaders are at ApacheCon. Let's hope they blog a little about the event.
A few weeks ago, I realized I was developing webapps the hard way, by re-deploying everytime I made a change. It's important to have a build process that can create a WAR and deploy, but it's also important to have a system where you can edit/save/view changes w/o ever deploying.
I spent some time this weekend working with Jetty Launcher, Eclipse 3.1 and the latest version of Equinox. Below are instructions on how to make the two work together. Once you've completed the steps below, you should be able to launch Jetty and edit/save Java files or JSP files in Equinox - and the changes will show up immediately in your webapp. No deployment or Ant/Maven interaction necessary.
I've tested this setup on Eclipse 3.1, using both OS X and Windows XP.
Step 1: Install Jetty and Launcher
Download and install Jetty. I tested 5.1.4 and 5.1.6 and both seem to work (6.0.0 Beta does not). In Eclipse, go to Help » Software Updates » Find and Install. Select Search for new features to install and click Next. Click on the New Remote Site button and enter "Jetty Launcher" for the name and "http://jettylauncher.sourceforge.net/updates" for the URL. Click OK, continue to download and restart your workspace.
Step 2: Install Equinox and create Eclipse project files
Download Equinox 1.5 beta 1 and extract to your workspace (I generally use c:\Source on Windows and /Users/${username}/dev on OS X). Download Maven 2.0, install it, and add $M2_HOME/bin to your $PATH. From the command line, cd into the equinox directory and type "mvn eclipse:eclipse". Get a cup of coffee or soda while you wait for Maven to download all the dependencies.
Once the project files have been created, open Eclipse and go to File » New » Project » Java Project. Click Next and type "equinox" in the Project name box. Click Finish to begin importing the project. You'll probably get an error like the following. Click OK to continue.
Click Next to continue (I had to click it a few times before it took me to the next screen). On the next screen (Define the Java build settings), select the web directory and click Configure inclusion and exclusion filters. Click the Add button for Exclusion patterns and enter "WEB-INF/classes/" (the trailing slash is important).
You're not done yet, now you need to define the M2_REPO variable that points to all the downloaded dependencies. Click the Libraries tab and then the "Add Variable" button as seen below.
Click the Configure Variables button and add a new one with a name of M2_REPO and Path of to your local Maven repository (/Users/${username}/.m2/repository on OS X and C:\Documents and Settings\${username}\.m2\repository on Windows). Click OK, Cancel and then Finish.
Step 3: Configure Jetty Launcher for Equinox
In Eclipse, go to Run » Debug and select Jetty Web in the Configurations panel. Click the New button. In the "Use Options" section, use "web" for the webapp root and (optionally) "/equinox" for the context name.
Jetty has issues running applications that use commons-logging, so you'll need to turn off all the INFO logging from the projects that Equinox uses. To do this, click on the Arguments tab and add the following to the list of VM arguments:
-DDEBUG -DDEBUG_PATTERNS=org.appfuse -DDEBUG_VERBOSE=-1
This can be placed on the line below the -Djetty.home argument. For more information on logging in Jetty, see the Jetty logging and debugging tutorial.
Step 4: Start Jetty in debug mode and modify to your hearts content
Click Apply and then Debug, and watch Jetty startup. If you go to http://localhost:8080/equinox/users.html in your browser, you should see a log message like the following:
11:44:25.855 DEBUG [SocketListener0-1] org.appfuse.web.UserController.handleRequest (UserController.java:24) >29> entering 'handleRequest' method...
You should be able to click on "UserController.java:24" to navigate to the UserController.java class. In this class, modify the log.debug(...) message, save the file and hit refresh on your browser. The console should spit out your updated log message. If it didn't, go to Window » Preferences » Workspace and make sure Build automatically is checked.
As far as I can tell, edit/save/refresh will work for .java and .jsp files, but not for .xml files. For that, the Jetty Launcher adds a Stop/Restart Jetty icon to your Eclipse toolbar. This setup seems to work great, except for the fact that you can't see when Jetty is done starting up in the console.
NOTE: I tried to get a similar setup working with the Tomcat Eclipse Plugin (v3.1 beta) and the Eclipse Web Tools Project (v0.7.1). Neither worked as smoothly, and the WTP wouldn't even deploy to Tomcat.
