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 found an interesting blog post today about a contest (English translation) a French company (Xebia) had with some Java web frameworks.
4 teams have developed the same web application, each with a framework (very) different. The frameworks used were:
Overall, I think it's a good summary of the strengths and weaknesses of the various frameworks.
According to Scott, today's Java-based web frameworks are partial solutions at best. They're only solving one piece of the puzzle - you still need to manage persistence, deployment, etc. all by yourself.
We're moving into a new era of web frameworks. The expectation now is a full-stack solution. Grails is a fully integrated modern Java web application in a box. It contains Spring, Hibernate, Quartz, Log4J, Jetty, HSQL, JUnit and Ant. You're not limited to using Jetty, you can type "grails war" and create a WAR that you can deploy to any application server. In a single zip/tar, you get the whole thing - including the database and servlet container. You get a lot of good default for free, but you're not limited to those defaults.
What does "modern" in a framework mean? It means it uses Convention over Configuration - Grails autowires components together based on naming conventions. Struts 1.x uses Configuration over Configuration - the more XML the better.
The Wisdom of Crowds - why are the many smarter than the few? What is the wisdom of crowds when it comes to web frameworks. Struts is the wisdom of crowds when it comes to web frameworks. It's based on sound principles (MVC) and was written by Craig McClanahan. He was the architect of "Catalina" Tomcat 4 and wrote Struts shortly thereafter. David Geary was contributor #2 to Struts. It has a proven track record and has a 60%-70% market share. Struts must be the perfect framework - especially since it has such a great pedigree.
So what's wrong with Struts?
The Recipe for a Tipping Point: Contagiousness / viral, tiny "tweaks" to a proven model can yield big, disproportionate effects, the rise is not "slow and steady" - the effect is dramatic and immediate.
Ruby on Rails won the hype award. It's largely worth the hype, but it's not revolutionary - it's evolutionary. It has tiny tweaks to the proven MVC-driven approach: Convention over Configuration, Scaffolding and Unified Technology Stack.
The one thing that Rails is lacking is Java support. Grails, on the other hand, offers the same experience using known, proven Java solutions.
Scott drank the Rails Kool-Aid for a while and enjoyed it, but found it difficult to switch from Ruby in the morning to Java in the afternoon. With Grails, he doesn't have to do as much context switching, as well as all the Java libraries are available - the ones you know and love.
You can drop groovy.jar into your classpath and write Groovy code. One nice thing about Groovy is you can rename your existing .java files to .groovy and they'll work just fine. Included Ajax support: Script.aculo.us and Protoype as well as YUI. YUI is battle-tested since it's used by Yahoo and very well documented. You can use "grails install-dojo" to install the Dojo toolkit. Grails has a wealth of plugins available at http://grails.org/plugins.
Now we're going to crack our nuckles and build some code - slides are over.
grails create-app conference cd conference grails create-domain-class Speaker (add some fields) grails generate-all Speaker grails run-app
The impressive things about this set of commands is I was able to 1) download Grails and 2) run all these commands at the same time that Scott did. I was definitely impressed (I knew I would be). Auto-scaffolding - you can get the same thing as "generate-all", but it generates controllers and views at runtime in-memory. All you need to do is create a domain object (i.e. Talk) and then create a TalkController that has the following line in it:
def scaffold = Talk
As a test, I tried this at the same time that Scott did and got the following error. It looks like Grails/Jetty isn't smart enough to pick up new classes as they're added.
[263102] commons.DefaultGrailsApplication Class not found attempting to load class Talk
java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: Talk
at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:200)
Grails comes with a number of environments. Dev (the default) auto-reloads changes to Controllers, Views and even the Model (this is helpful for rapid development). Prod loads all items statically for maximum performance. To change the environments - you can change DataSource.groovy.
For some reason, adding/removing some properties on my Talk object and my application hasn't been the same since. Now when I try to access my TalkController, I see the following stack trace:
org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.HibernateQueryException: could not resolve property: difficulty of: Talk; nested exception is org.hibernate.QueryException: could not resolve property: difficulty of: Talk at org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.SessionFactoryUtils.convertHibernateAccessException(SessionFactoryUtils.java:640) at org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.HibernateAccessor.convertHibernateAccessException(HibernateAccessor.java:412) at org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.HibernateTemplate.execute(HibernateTemplate.java:378) at org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.HibernateTemplate.executeFind(HibernateTemplate.java:342) at org.codehaus.groovy.grails.scaffolding.DefaultScaffoldDomain.list(DefaultScaffoldDomain.java:112)
I asked Scott about this error and he proved that removing properties from domain objects should work. I told him restarting Jetty didn't fix the problem and he suggested dropping the "Talk" table and letting Grails re-create it. Unfortunately, I have no idea where this database is, so that's difficult to do. Doh - now I realize what was causing the problem. Before I dropped the "difficulty" property, I had clicked on the column and that property was still referenced in the URL. When I'd refresh the browser, the stack trace occurred. I don't know if I'd consider this a bug or not.
dbCreate = hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto is used. When in development create-drop is used. In production and test environments, it uses update and saves the data between restarts.
You can turn off Hibernate's automatic schema alteration by commenting out "dbCreate" line in DataSource.groovy.
To run your application in Tomcat instead of Jetty, you can run "grails war" and copy the WAR to Tomcat. The WAR is created with the production environment by default, so you may need to pass in arguments or set environment variables if you want the WAR created in dev mode.
At this point, my battery died. Scott continued to cover how to order form elements (when using scaffolding) with "static constraints" and how to add validation rules. It was an excellent presentation and Grails definitely looks like a really cool web framework. The best part is I learned most of what you need to know to use it - in an hour!
I might have to try Grails soon - I love the concept of Life above the Service Tier and Grails would work nicely for serving up REST. I think YUI, GWT-Ext and Flex are probably the best frameworks for developing a SOFEA client. The question is - when using YUI, how do you download all pages in the application at once?
This morning I delivered my Choosing a JVM Web Framework presentation at the Colorado Software Summit. One of my goals for the talk was to get more audience participation and stories of how folks thought it best to choose a web framework. The room was packed and the crowd was interested, so we barely even used the slides I prepared. One of the most interesting things about the audience was that over 60% (of 50-60 people) were using Struts 1. Most of them came to learn about frameworks they might think about migrating too. Unfortunately, I didn't talk a whole lot about the frameworks and their features, but a few members had advice concerning frameworks *not* to use based on their experiences. Overall, it was a lot of fun to interact so much with the audience and hear their thoughts on web development for the Java Platform.
You can download a PDF version of my presentation from my presentations page. Thanks to all the folks who responded to my Stories Wanted post - I used many of these comments as part of the "Case Studies" in the presentation.
Are you coming to the Colorado Software Summit this year? I'm excited to go because I wrote new presentations and I think they'll be a lot of fun to deliver. Also, as I've said before, I really enjoy this conference because it's so relaxing. It's a full-week long, which is a tough commitment, but I like to think of it as a vacation. You do have to deliver your talks 3 times each, so you still have to work every day, but there's also a great opportunity to learn from other speakers. And you don't feel rushed since each talk is given 3 times. This means you can treat some days like real vacation days where you only work a couple hours and others you can pack it in and get a brain full of stuff.
Here's my Choosing a JVM Web Framework abstract?
One of the most difficult things to do (in Java web development) today is to pick which web framework to use when developing an application. A few years ago, there were over 50 Java web frameworks available, most of them open source. Since then, the number hasn't gone down, but the quality of choices has certainly improved. Should you use the standard JSF, or something like Tapestry or Wicket? What about Struts' successor ? is Struts 2 better than Spring MVC or Stripes? And what about the slick-looking applications that Flex and OpenLaszlo can create? Should you use Rails on GlassFish or Grails with Groovy? Is ZK really the next best thing? Where does RIFE fit into all of this? The choice hasn't gotten easier over the years.
This session is a discussion about choosing the best tool for the job. Not only will various frameworks and their features be discussed, but so will important factors for choosing a web framework. Is ease of development more important, or future maintenance? Is the project community an important factor? All of these questions will be discussed and answers will be provided. If you are about to choose a web framework, or if you have an opinion about a web framework, this session is for you.
I think it's important to note that this talk is going to be a discussion. I don't plan on offering my opinions as much as I plan on extracting them from others. This talk probably wouldn't work with the Norway crowd (they don't like to participate much), but I think it'll work with the Colorado folks.
If you're attending ApacheCon this year, which talk would you rather attend - Comparing or Choosing? Or maybe "choosing" would fit in better as a BOF?
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.
AppFuse Light 1.8 adds CSS Framework integration, as well as support for Stripes (1.4.2) and Wicket (1.2.6). It also has significant upgrades for JSF and Tapestry; to versions 1.2 and 4.1.3 respectively. See the Release Notes for more information on what's changed since the the beta release of 1.8.
What is AppFuse Light? Click here to find out.
AppFuse Light now offers 60 possible combinations for download:
If you have any questions about this release, please subscribe to the AppFuse user mailing list by sending a blank e-mail to [email protected]. You can also post questions in a forum-like fashion using Nabble: http://appfuse.org/forum/user.
If you're a developer of one of the frameworks that AppFuse Light uses - I'd love a code review to make sure I'm "up to snuff" on how to use your framework. I'm also more than willing to give commit rights if you'd like to improve the implementation of your framework.
Live demos are available at:
Yes, I realize that 60 combinations is ridiculous. I didn't create the frameworks, I'm just integrating them so you don't have to. 
Unfortunately, it's a real pain to create Maven archetypes or they'd all be as easy as mvn archetype:create. Rumor is that the archetype plugin will allow you to create-from-project in the future. When that happens, I'll make sure all the combinations are available as archetypes.
I've recently been offered the opportunity to become a committer on one of the open source web frameworks I often talk about. From a professional and career standpoint, I'd be a fool to turn it down. My clients would benefit and it would look good on my resume. However, I'm wondering if it would hurt how folks perceive me when I talk about web frameworks?
Personally, I don't think it would change my views. Instead, it would probably eliminate my complaining about said framework because its developers would say "If you have a problem with that - fix it!" What do you think - if I were to become a committer on one of Java Web Framework projects, would you still think I'm agnostic when I talk about Java (or other open source) web frameworks? Of course, it's possible you don't think I'm agnostic now, so maybe I'm worried for no reason.
From the Struts Developers Mailing List:
My conclusion is OGNL is like Maven 2 - sometimes it really pisses you off, and you probably generally don't like the thing, but you've invested so much into it that it would be too painful to switch, and really, it does 95% of what you want anyways.
And with that, I'm off to Finland and Norway! See you on the other side of the pond.
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.
