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.
What happen's when you're a Java Developer and your wife is a kick-ass designer? You end up with a rockin' Roller theme. Tom McQueeney is DJUG's President and his wife, Renee, is an awesome designer. Not only that, she's a Sun Certified Enterprise Architect. Tom and Renee, this site looks incredible - I especially like how the "blog" part of it is just another page and it looks so seemless. Tom's personal site looks a lot better than many corporate sites I've seen.
It's plagued me before, and now it's back again. When I go to sleep at night, this site crashes. I've been up until 4 lately and it still seems to wait until I fall asleep. In fact, my 500 page is my top referrer this month. That's not good. The problem is probably not Roller - since JRoller seems to stay up and humming. Although it does die, I do have somewhere around 30 open database connections.
The truth is I need to run a profiler and figure out what's wrong. Unfortunately, I don't have the time and it doesn't really bother me that much. I just end up with a whole bunch of "your site is down" e-mails every morning when I wake up. Hopefully I can fix it soon. I've been telling people I'll have more time when the baby comes. They think I'm kidding - but I think it's true. My job will be handling Abbie while Julie nurtures the new baby. Abbie sleeps 12 hours at night, and 2-3 hours in the afternoon. I sleep 4-5 hours a night. That's a lot of time to get stuff done. 
I agree with Dion that PostgreSQL is a good database. Thanks to his post, I found the new Windows installer for 8.0. Using it, I was able to quickly setup a database for AppFuse, change my database settings in build.properties and run "ant test-all" successfully. Total time? 5 minutes. That's the way a database installation should be.
I've setup PostgreSQL on OS X before using this package, but now when I try to run it, I get an error "could not read shared memory segment". Time to start digging into config files.
5 minutes later: Using these update instructions, I got everything working again on OS X. To ensure good PostgreSQL support, I'm going to run AppFuse against PostgreSQL (on OS X) from now on.
I just opened up Microsoft Word for the first time on XP with the 23". It showes two pages side-by-side. Page size? 100% Now that's cool! This didn't happen on OS X. This will definitely make writing and reviewing a lot easier.
I can tell I've been getting a little burned out the last few days. I think it had a lot to do with our builder's death last week. I came to realize that working my ass off just doesn't have that many rewards. For most of the weekends this summer, I've been getting up at 4 and working for a few hours until Julie and Abbie get up. Then I do it again on Monday morning. This weekend I didn't get up before 9. And today I slept until 8 - even though I had planned to get up at 4. To make matters worse, rather than putting in hours for my client today, I spent the entire day wrestling with Linux.
I really wanted to get my new Cinema Display working with Suse and Fedora. I'm almost to the conclusion that it "ain't gonna happen". This sucks b/c now I have to leave one of my huge-n-heavy CRT monitors on my desk. Days like today, where I banged my head against the wall all day, are quite discouraging. My office is in turmoil - with open boxes all over the floor, monitors strewn about and video cards piling up on my desk. Some days are better than others. Hopefully my frustrations from today will turn into some type of writing zone later this week.
Update: I finally gave up and hooked my two Linux boxes up to my old KVM switch and a crappy ol' keyboard/mouse that I had lying around. Then I was planning on hooking my PowerBook and XP box up to my new DVI KVM switch. Wouldn't you know it - it doesn't fricken work. The connector on the cinema display is too fat to even plug into the KVM switch. My guess is that no one is using these displays with a KVM or maybe there's a special switch I have to get. Oh well, I guess I can manually switch the monitor b/w OS X and XP if I really need to.
I wonder if this David Geary is the JSF Geary. I hope so, it'd be great if he started blogging. I've seen David speak before and he's definitely good. Regardless of my recent experience with JSF, it's a technology that's likely to succeed. David is a JSF expert - so hopefully he'll have some tips and tricks for us.
Of all the MVC Frameworks I've developed with in the last few weeks (Struts, Spring MVC, WebWork and Tapestry) - JSF was by far the worst. And it's not the implementations that are the problem, it's the spec itself (as far as I can tell). Plain and simple, it does not simplify web development.
I spent 3 days developing a simple JSF app - most of it which I had done in the first day. The last 2 days have been spent migrating to MyFaces and trying to find clean ways to do things. My perspective on JSF after this experience? Run away. Run far, far away. All of the above mentioned frameworks are MUCH superior to this technology. Let's get on with the things I learned.
Like Tapestry, I felt like I was banging my head against the wall a fair amount. However, with Tapestry (and all the other frameworks), I was able to get exactly the behavior I wanted w/o too much work. I could produce clean and user-friendly error messages - (Tapestry already had clean required messages built in). I was able to write a jUnitWebTest to test all CRUD activities. With JSF, I was able to test one thing - adding a new record. I couldn't edit it b/c the JavaScript support (which I tend to not use) puked every time it encountered a JSF-generated JavaScript function.
My opinion after all of this? If you know Struts, Spring MVC and WebWork are fairly easy to learn. WebWork is simpler and elegant, but Spring MVC supports more view options out-of-the-box. Tapestry is cool, but you'll have to invest a lot of time into learning it and you'll probably get caught up in its cult and forever be claiming "Tapestry Rocks!" which can get annoying to your fellow developers. Finally, I can confirm that SiteMesh rocks - it worked for all the frameworks I used and I never had to change a single line of code.
Whatever you do, don't use JSF. Not yet anyway.
I plan to write up a "My JSF Experience" post later today, but first, I'm forced to rant on the state of JSF implementations. First of all, I must say that JSF isn't so bad. It's cool how you can map buttons to "actions" defined in a navigation entry, as well as to call a method in a managed bean. The problem that I'm experiencing is that the JSF implementations, both from Sun and MyFaces - are errrrr, not so good.
I actually managed to almost finish my simple JSF sample app in one day, but then decided to shoot off some questions to see if I could resolve some remaining issues. Then based on feedback I received, I decided to switch from Sun's RI to MyFaces - not only for the "sortable" grid (I still don't know if it exists), but also Spring supports it w/o using an add-on library.
Ever since I switched, things just haven't gone right. First of all, MyFaces, requires your implement a <listener> in web.xml - who knows why, but you get an error indicating you need it if you don't have it. Standard JSF doesn't require this - why does MyFaces?
OK, I can deal with adding the listener. Everything works as with Sun's RI - and even better since the "layout" attribute of <h:messages> actually works. BTW, why isn't "div" a choice instead of "table" - whoever designed these choices obviously still uses Netscape 4 and table-based layouts. I'm happy now. MyFaces seems to solve the duplicate post issue so if you refresh after adding a record, it just shows a blank form. Cool, I can live with that.
One problem I found, that likely exists in both implementations, is that it's a true pain-in-the-ass to get a declared ResourceBundle in a managed-bean. Here's the method I'm currently using to add a success message:
public void addMessage(String key, String arg) {
ApplicationFactory factory = (ApplicationFactory)
FactoryFinder.getFactory(FactoryFinder.APPLICATION_FACTORY);
String bundleName = factory.getApplication().getMessageBundle();
ResourceBundle messages = ResourceBundle.getBundle(bundleName);
MessageFormat form = new MessageFormat(messages.getString(key));
String msg = form.format(new Object[]{arg});
FacesContext.getCurrentInstance().addMessage(null,
new FacesMessage(FacesMessage.SEVERITY_INFO, msg, msg));
}
There has to be an easier way! Please tell me there is. I admit that I'm a JSF rookie - having just started using it two days ago, but it seems ridiculous that all the "success message" examples out there don't even consider i18n.
So now I have my success messages working, but I discover that there's no way to escape HTML (using <h:messages>) from my ResourceBundle (to put bold around a part of the message). ALL of the other MVC frameworks I've been dealing with allow this - why doesn't JSF?! Again, I'm hoping someone tells me I'm ignorant and there is a way to do this.
Lastly, I tried to upgrade to the latest MyFaces snapshot from CVS to solve this bug and now I can't even get my fricken app to start up because of this issue.
Are these the hoops that developers have to go through to get started with JSF? Thump, thump, thump. My head is starting to hurt.
Update: I'm an idiot about the "can't get my app to start thing" - I didn't copy all the new myfaces*.jar files into WEB-INF/lib. Heh. 
BTW, MyFaces requires a whole slew of JAR files just like Struts. Here's my current inventory:
commons-codec-1.2.jar commons-collections-3.0.jar commons-digester-1.5.jar commons-validator.jar commons-oro.jar commons-logging.jar jstl.jar myfaces.jar myfaces-components.jar myfaces-jsf-api.jar
This evening, I met up with Dion, Christian and Bruce at the Rock Bottom Brewery. Topics discussed: OSCON, JavaOne, WebSphere, AOP, JBoss, Geronimo, Spring, Struts, SourceBeat, OpenLogic, TSS, ThoughtWorks, Ant, Maven, Digital Globe (of course), staying up late, getting up early and writing. Good stuff - thanks gents.
Warner has a post about why he likes Maven. He might not know it, but he's actually ripping on AppFuse, its directory structure, and build file. I like getting ripped on, so that doesn't bother me. What bother's me is that Warner has comments turned off so no one can get him back.
The main reason that AppFuse uses Ant over Maven is speed. Maven runs much slower than Ant. Period. Also, with an open source project like AppFuse - I try to appeal to the larger audience, who likely has Ant installed. Other OS projects I work on (displaytag and struts-menu) both use Maven and people have a lot harder time trying to build from source b/c of Maven issues. Lastly, I like having a complete download - rather than download-dependencies-after-you-download-the-project like Maven does. I realize if I did use Maven I could package the dependencies in the app - which is likely what I'd do anyway since the main repositories seem to be constantly out-of-date.
Recently, I had a similar experience to Warner. As part of my current contract, I was tasked to write a couple of Maven sample apps. Warner came to my rescue and helped me out a lot, but I felt like I was jumping through a lot of hoops to do simple stuff that was already done in the Ant version of my app. I guess I'm just not a Maven guy. A project that's done right, regardless of if it's done with Ant or Maven, should build by typing "ant" or "maven" - or at least provide you help on what you need to type. Some projects, like Spring and Struts, actually allow you to use either one out-of-the-box. That's a pretty cool idea and likely keeps everyone happy.
It sounds like Warner has re-worked AppFuse to work with Maven. Care to donate your couple hours of work? I wouldn't use it personally, but there has been interest in a Maven version. Some folks seem to like slow build tools.