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.
Joe Walnes has an interesting post on Flexible JUnit assertions with assertThat(). In this post, he shows the power of using some of jMock's features. Since jMock is included in AppFuse (sample test), using Joe's assertThat() is certainly a possibility. Let me know if adding this is something you'd like to see. The nice thing is adding it won't take any features away - it'll only add new ones.
A week from today, I'm heading to Norway to do some training on Spring. It's going to be a good trip and I have my work cut out for me. I'll be talking about Spring, Hibernate, AppFuse, Acegi Security as well as Ajax and Spring Web Flow. I'll also be presenting at the two JUGs in Norway:
I'll try to post outlines for my presentations in the next week or so.
An AppFuse user known as "thogau" has taken the time to create a very nice looking tutorial titled Handling dates with AppFuse and Struts. Great stuff thogau!
There's nothing like trying to get a bunch of hours in on a short week. I thought I would be able to get in a full week, by working 13-hour days. We leave on Thursday for West Palm Beach (Julie's birthday present) - so I'm trying to avoid the opportunity cost of missing 2 days this week. I managed to get in 13 yesterday by riding to work at 4:30 and starting the day early. Today, my luck hasn't been so good. It's 1:20 p.m. and I still haven't made it into the office. Julie had Jury Duty this morning and she's still downtown getting interviewed. Oh well, the kids and I had fun this morning: a stroller ride to the bagel store, riding the swings at Wash Park and a picnic in the park for lunch. Now they're both sleeping and as frustrated as I am that I'm not getting my hours in - I realize that this is probably as good as a day gets. I might as well have a beer during their naps!
I'm pleased to announce that I'll be speaking at the Colorado Software Summit in October. I'll be doing a presentation on Spring and one on Comparing Web Frameworks. The abstracts are on my very own speaker page. I've never been to this conference, so I'm definitely looking forward to it - especially since it's only an hour away from my house. The only downside to the conference (for speakers) is you have to deliver each presentation 3 times. Of course, this is great if you're an attendee. Now I just need to figure out a way to get SourceBeat to sponsor my condo for the week. 
I originally did my Web Frameworks Comparison (PDF) last year at ApacheCon. I'm looking to revamp it this year - so please let me know if have any suggestions for improvements.
Now that the OSCON 2005 site is up, I might as well advertise the two things I'm doing: an AppFuse Tutorial and a session titled WebWork vs. Spring MVC Smackdown with Matthew Porter. I wasn't planning on doing the AppFuse Tutorial, but I was asked to do it - so what the heck. The title has "Struts" in it, but I'm willing to do whichever one (JSF, Struts, Spring MVC, Tapestry or WebWork) the audience chooses. If we're good, maybe we'll have an Eclipse Plugin done by this conference to simplify the new project and code generation process.
I know I said I'd never do an AppFuse video, but after having many requests - I decided to go ahead and make a couple. The first one is a demo of creating a new project and then installing and browsing that project in your browser - to see all the out-of-the-box features.
The 2nd one basically all the stuff that's done in the tutorials - using Spring MVC for the web framework. I create a Person.java object and then use AppGen to generate all the code for it. In this one, I make a number of mistakes (but solve them all). I thought about going fully happy-path, but then decided it was important to show some gotchas that might occur.
I used the trial version of Camtasia Studio to create these videos. Thanks to Keith at KGB Internet for hosting the
demo site for AppFuse. If you need Tomcat hosting, Keith offers an
excellent service at a very good price.
Update: You can also download these videos for off-line use.
Update 2: I updated these videos for AppFuse 1.9.3.
We're getting ready to put the app I developed into production and we're facing an interesting issue. This app is designed to be a simple interface for mapping an "attribute value" from one system to another system. Currently, we do this with SQL in our dev database, and then copy these tables' data to production when we deploy.
However, with this application, we now have the ability to push out the "mapping responsibility" to our users. The problem is that if our users enter the data in production, we have to figure out a way to synch between dev and prod. We constantly need to enter our own mappings in while we're developing - so there's always going to be data entered in both dev and prod databases.
Is it possible to share the same sequence tables b/w Oracle instances and use triggers to do a second insert into dev when someone does something in prod (or vise versa)? I suppose a manual solution is possible - where we make sure and enter values into prod when we enter them into dev, but that's just ugly.
Update: TheServerSide has additional coverage of this topic.
I bought the appfuse.org domain name sometime last year. I haven't done anything with it for the most part and I've just pointed it to this site. It's amazing how many people actually use it - it's my 4th largest referrer! The demo site I have at Kattare (demo.raibledesigns.com) has a whole slew of demos installed on it, so I contacted Keith (at kgbinternet.com) to set me up a new domain for AppFuse-only demos. These can now be found at http://demo.appfuse.org or by clicking on of the URLs below. The site is currently running AppFuse 1.8 with JDK 5 and Tomcat 5.5.7.
The "Issues" link on this site won't work yet - I'm in the process of setting up JIRA at http://issues.appfuse.org. Hopefully we'll have it done sometime this week. Contegix has been gracious enough to offer free hosting of AppFuse's JIRA instance.
Update: AppFuse's JIRA is now up. Thanks again to Atlassian for a great product and to Contegix for hosting it. The quick installation and support from Contegix has been outstanding.
I think I've hit a point where I don't care about the latest and great techo-gadget anymore. Maybe it's just a phase, but nothing out there really excites me right now. I've never been into video games - they're too much of a productivity black hole and I know I'd be the type that'd stay up until 4 a.m. playing the latest XBox game. Therefore, I don't go there. PSP, XBox, etc. don't excite me b/c I'm fully aware of their addictiveness.
The other gadget I've often loved in the past is having a fancy bluetooth phone. Sure it's cool when combined with a PowerBook for synching and browsing the internet, but I've come to the conclusion that I don't need one. Maybe it's because I lost it in California last week and haven't missed it one bit. Cell phones - blaahhh - who needs them?
Lastly, there's the new OS X. I'm fully aware that someday I'll be enthusiastic about it, but right now I just don't care. I think it's because I've given up using my slow-ass PowerBook for the most part. I used it for 3 months at my current project and have since switched to a much faster Windows desktop. I've come to realize a couple of things about my PowerBook: 1) the slow problem is more a personal issue than a computer issue - I develop faster on Windows and 2) I enjoy a desktop much more than a laptop - where there's a real keyboard and mouse. If Apple will get off their ass and make a fast PowerBook, I'll get off mine and pony up for a keyboard and mouse. If there's not a dual core G4 or a PowerBook G5 this summer, I just might have to get a PowerMac G5.
Hmmm, I just went to the Apple Store to link to the G5 and there's a "We'll be back soon" sign. This implies a major announcement today. It is Tuesday...
