Matt RaibleMatt Raible is a Web Developer and Java Champion. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

The Angular Mini-Book 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 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.

10+ YEARS


Over 10 years ago, I wrote my first blog post. Since then, I've authored books, had kids, traveled the world, found Trish and blogged about it all.

AppFuse Light 2.2.1 Released!

In December, the AppFuse Team released 2.2.1. Right before that release, I decided to wait on enhancing its "light" modules, a.k.a. AppFuse Light. I'm glad I did, because it took some effort to get jQuery and Bootstrap integrated, as well as to make it more secure.

The good news is AppFuse Light 2.2.1 is released and it's sitting out on the Central Repository. This release is a refactoring of all archetypes to be up-to-date with the AppFuse 2.2.1 release. This means Java 7 compatibility, Servlet 3, Bootstrap/jQuery integration, Tapestry 5.3.6 upgrade and security improvements. I integrated Bootstrap and jQuery using WebJars Servlet 3 support since it was simple and straightforward.

You can create projects using AppFuse's light archetypes using a command such as the following:

mvn archetype:generate -B -DarchetypeGroupId=org.appfuse.archetypes 
  -DarchetypeArtifactId=appfuse-light-spring-freemarker-archetype -DarchetypeVersion=2.2.1 
  -DgroupId=com.mycompany -DartifactId=myproject 

The list of archetypes is as follows:

  • appfuse-light-jsf-archetype
  • appfuse-light-spring-archetype
  • appfuse-light-spring-freemarker-archetype
  • appfuse-light-spring-security-archetype
  • appfuse-light-stripes-archetype
  • appfuse-light-struts-archetype
  • appfuse-light-tapestry-archetype
  • appfuse-light-wicket-archetype

The QuickStart Guide will help you get setup and demos are available at the following links:

If you have questions about AppFuse, we invite you to ask them on the users mailing list or tweet using #appfuse.

For those enjoying Bootstrap in your apps, I encourage you to check out {wrap}bootstrap and Bootswatch.

Posted in Java at Jan 24 2013, 07:43:20 PM MST Add a Comment

AppFuse 2.2.1 Released!

The AppFuse Team is pleased to announce the release of AppFuse 2.2.1. This release includes upgrades to all dependencies to bring them up-to-date with their latest releases. Most notable are Hibernate 4, Struts 2.3.7, Apache CXF 2.7.0 and Spring Security 3.1.3. In addition, we've integrated HTML5, Twitter Bootstrap, jQuery and replaced Compass with Hibernate Search. Last but not least, we've added full support for Java 7 and integrated many security improvements. For more details on specific changes see the release notes.

What is AppFuse?
AppFuse is a full-stack framework for building web applications on the JVM. It was originally developed to eliminate the ramp-up time when building new web applications. Over the years, it has matured into a very testable and secure system for creating Java-based webapps.

Demos for this release can be viewed at http://demo.appfuse.org. Please see the QuickStart Guide to get started with this release.

A number of blog posts were written about features that went into this release while it was being developed:

If you have questions about AppFuse, please read the FAQ or join the mailing list. If you find any issues, please report them on the users mailing list.

Thanks to everyone for their help contributing patches, writing documentation and participating on the mailing lists.

We greatly appreciate the help from our sponsors, particularly Atlassian, Contegix and JetBrains. We highly recommend using the new IntelliJ IDEA 12 for developing web applications.

Posted in Java at Dec 11 2012, 03:21:44 PM MST 5 Comments

My What's New in Spring 3.1 Presentation

My first business trip of the year was to Dublin, CA this past week. Trish joined me because she wanted to take some pictures of San Francisco. She got some awesome shots as you can see below.

Lombard Ave in SF with Bay view Kissing Sea lions Pier 38 San Fran San Francisco Bay Bridge at Night Bay Bridge San Francisco at Night

Balclutha Maritime Museum San Fran

On Tuesday night, I attended Twitter's Open Source Summit with a co-worker and had a great time.

On Wednesday, I talked about What's New in Spring 3.1 at the Silicon Valley Spring User Group. I discussed the support for Java 7, Servlet 3, Hibernate 4 (and JPA 2 with Spring Data) and the new Cache Abstraction. I mentioned how spring-data-jpa-examples is a great sample project and showed a bunch of code from my Spring Kickstart project. I was surprised to find that no one in the audience (all Spring users) was using Java Config. Below are the slides from my presentation and you can also download the PDF.

Posted in Java at Feb 04 2012, 05:47:14 PM MST 2 Comments

AppFuse 2.1 Released!

The AppFuse Team is pleased to announce the release of AppFuse 2.1. This release includes upgrades to all dependencies to bring them up-to-date with their latest releases. Most notable are JPA 2, JSF 2, Tapestry 5 and Spring 3. In addition, we've migrated from XFire to CXF and enabled REST for web services. There's even a new appfuse-ws archetype that leverages Enunciate to generate web service endpoints, documentation and downloadable clients. This release fixes many issues with archetypes, improving startup time and allowing jetty:run to be used for quick turnaround while developing. For more details on specific changes see the release notes.

What is AppFuse?
AppFuse is an open source project and application that uses open source frameworks to help you develop Web applications with Java quickly and efficiently. It was originally developed to eliminate the ramp-up time when building new web applications. At its core, AppFuse is a project skeleton, similar to the one that's created by your IDE when you click through a wizard to create a new web project. If you use JRebel with IntelliJ, you can achieve zero-turnaround in your project and develop features without restarting the server.

Release Details
Archetypes now include all the source for the web modules so using jetty:run and your IDE will work much smoother now. The backend is still embedded in JARs, enabling you to choose with persistence framework (Hibernate, iBATIS or JPA) you'd like to use. If you want to modify the source for that, add the core classes to your project or run "appfuse:full-source".

AppFuse comes in a number of different flavors. It offers "light", "basic" and "modular" and archetypes. Light archetypes use an embedded H2 database and contain a simple CRUD example. Light archetypes allow code generation and full-source features, but do not currently support Stripes or Wicket. Basic archetypes have web services using CXF, authentication from Spring Security and features including signup, login, file upload and CSS theming. Modular archetypes are similar to basic archetypes, except they have multiple modules which allows you to separate your services from your web project.

AppFuse provides archetypes for JSF, Spring MVC, Struts 2 and Tapestry 5. The light archetypes are available for these frameworks, as well as for Spring MVC + FreeMarker, Stripes and Wicket. You can see demos of these archetypes at http://demo.appfuse.org.

For information on creating a new project, please see the QuickStart Guide.

If you have questions about AppFuse, please read the FAQ or join the user mailing list. If you find any issues, please report them on the mailing list or create an issue in JIRA.

Thanks to everyone for their help contributing patches, writing documentation and participating on the mailing lists.

We greatly appreciate the help from our sponsors, particularly Atlassian, Contegix and JetBrains. 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.

Posted in Java at Apr 04 2011, 09:38:05 AM MDT 5 Comments

AppFuse 2.1 Milestone 2 Released

I'm pleased to announce the 2nd milestone release of AppFuse 2.1. This release includes upgrades to all dependencies to bring them up-to-date with their latest releases. Most notable are Spring 3 and Struts 2.1. This release fixes many issues with archetypes and contains many improvements to support Maven 3. For more details on specific changes see the 2.1.0 M2 release notes.

What is AppFuse?
AppFuse is an open source project and application that uses open source frameworks to help you develop Web applications quickly and efficiently. It was originally developed to eliminate the ramp-up time when building new web applications. At its core, AppFuse is a project skeleton, similar to the one that's created by your IDE when you click through a wizard to create a new web project. If you use JRebel with AppFuse, you can achieve zero-turnaround in your project and develop features without restarting the server.

Release Details
Archetypes now include all the source for the web modules so using jetty:run and your IDE will work much smoother now. The backend is still embedded in JARs, enabling you to choose with persistence framework (Hibernate, iBATIS or JPA) you'd like to use. If you want to modify the source for that, add the core classes to your project or run "appfuse:full-source".

AppFuse comes in a number of different flavors. It offers "light", "basic" and "modular" and archetypes. Light archetypes use an embedded H2 database and contain a simple CRUD example. In the final 2.1.0 release, the light archetypes will allow code generation like the basic and modular archetypes. Basic archetypes have web services using CXF, authentication from Spring Security and features including signup, login, file upload and CSS theming. Modular archetypes are similar to basic archetypes, except they have multiple modules which allows you to separate your services from your web project.

AppFuse provides archetypes for JSF, Spring MVC, Struts 2 and Tapestry 5. The light archetypes are available for these frameworks, as well as for Spring MVC + FreeMarker, Stripes and Wicket.

Please note that this release does not contain updates to the documentation. Code generation will work, but it's likely that some content in the tutorials won't match. For example, you can use annotations (vs. XML) for Spring MVC and Tapestry is a whole new framework. I'll be working on documentation over the next several weeks in preparation for the 2.1 final release.

For information on creating a new project, please see the QuickStart Guide.

If you have questions about AppFuse, please read the FAQ or join the user mailing list. If you find bugs, please create an issue in JIRA.

Thanks to everyone for their help contributing patches, writing documentation and participating on the mailing lists.

Posted in Java at Nov 15 2010, 03:28:57 PM MST 2 Comments

AppFuse 2.1 Milestone 1 Released

The AppFuse Team is pleased to announce the first milestone release of AppFuse 2.1. This release includes upgrades to all dependencies to bring them up-to-date with their latest releases. Most notable are Hibernate, Spring and Tapestry 5.

What is AppFuse?
AppFuse is an open source project and application that uses open source tools built on the Java platform to help you develop Web applications quickly and efficiently. It was originally developed to eliminate the ramp-up time found when building new web applications for customers. At its core, AppFuse is a project skeleton, similar to the one that's created by your IDE when you click through a wizard to create a new web project.

Release Details
Archetypes now include all the source for the web modules so using jetty:run and your IDE will work much smoother now. The backend is still embedded in JARs, enabling you to choose which persistence framework (Hibernate, iBATIS or JPA) you'd like to use. If you want to modify the source for that, add the core classes to your project or run appfuse:full-source.

In addition, AppFuse Light has been converted to Maven and has archetypes available. AppFuse provides archetypes for JSF, Spring MVC, Struts 2 and Tapestry 5. The light archetypes are available for these frameworks, as well as for Spring MVC + FreeMarker, Stripes and Wicket.

Other notable improvements:

Please note that this release does not contain updates to the documentation. Code generation will work, but it's likely that some content in the tutorials won't match. For example, you can use annotations (vs. XML) for dependency injection and Tapestry is a whole new framework. I'll be working on documentation over the next several weeks in preparation for Milestone 2.

AppFuse is available as several Maven archetypes. For information on creating a new project, please see the QuickStart Guide.

To learn more about AppFuse, please read Ryan Withers' Igniting your applications with AppFuse.

The 2.x series of AppFuse has a minimum requirement of the following specification versions:

  • Java Servlet 2.4 and JSP 2.0 (2.1 for JSF)
  • Java 5+

If you have questions about AppFuse, please read the FAQ or join the user mailing list. If you find bugs, please create an issue in JIRA.

Thanks to everyone for their help contributing code, writing documentation, posting to the mailing lists, and logging issues.

Posted in Java at Nov 19 2009, 07:16:36 AM MST 8 Comments

Upgrading Hibernate to 3.4.0 and AppFuse for Tapestry 5

Last night I spent an hour upgrading AppFuse to Hibernate 3.4.0.GA. I tried the same thing a week ago, but failed miserably. When Hibernate Core Modules (3.3) (a Maven dependency howto) showed up on the Hibernate blog, I was re-inspired. I discovered some interesting things along the way (at least in my setup).

You need to use JBoss's Maven Repository
The latest Hibernate releases aren't in the central Maven repo yet. If they're not in there two weeks after the release, I doubt they'll be there anytime soon. Best to plan on adding http://repository.jboss.com/maven2 as a permanent repository. As a bonus, you can remove http://download.java.net/maven/2 since JTA is in JBoss's repo.

Javassist is not an optional dependency
If I remove the Javassist dependency, here's the error I get:

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: javassist/util/proxy/MethodFilter

Seems reasonable right? What if I add in the dependency on Hibernate's cglib instead?

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: javassist/util/proxy/MethodFilter

OK, so apparently you can't switch between Javassist and hibernate-cglib-repack as stated in Hibernate's Maven dependency howto. Of course, I do believe their instructions are correct, they just don't work in my setup. Versions I'm using: hibernate-core-3.3.1.GA and hibernate-annotations-3.4.0.GA.

Not including SLF4J is a bad idea
If you don't include a dependency on SLF4J (and you're using Spring), you get a nice cryptic error message.

Caused by: org.springframework.beans.BeanInstantiationException: Could not instantiate bean class 
[org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.annotation.AnnotationSessionFactoryBean]: 
Constructor threw exception; nested exception is java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError
        at org.springframework.beans.BeanUtils.instantiateClass(BeanUtils.java:115)
        at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.SimpleInstantiationStrategy.instantiate(SimpleInstantiationStrategy.java:61)
        at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.instantiateBean(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:877)
        ... 48 more
Caused by: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError
        at java.lang.Class.forName0(Native Method)
        at java.lang.Class.forName(Class.java:164)
        at org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.LocalSessionFactoryBean.class$(LocalSessionFactoryBean.java:174)
        at org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.LocalSessionFactoryBean.(LocalSessionFactoryBean.java:174)
        at org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.annotation.AnnotationSessionFactoryBean.(AnnotationSessionFactoryBean.java:64)
        at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance0(Native Method)
        at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.java:39)
        at sun.reflect.DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.java:27)
        at java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstance(Constructor.java:494)
        at org.springframework.beans.BeanUtils.instantiateClass(BeanUtils.java:100)

Hibernate's JPA now uses PersistenceException instead of EntityExistsException
In previous releases, Hibernate's ConstraintViolationException was wrapped in a javax.persistence.EntityExistsException. In Hibernate's EntityManager 3.4.0.GA, it's wrapped in a javax.persistence.PersistenceException.

Of course, these errors could be caused by Spring or Maven, but my hunch is they're more related to Hibernate and it's new more modular dependencies. You can view the full changeset for upgrading Hibernate 3.2.6.ga to 3.3.1.GA via FishEye.

Tapestry 5 version of AppFuse
In other AppFuse-related news, Serge Eby has created a Tapestry 5 version of AppFuse. You can see his alpha-level work in Google Code's tapestry5-appfuse project. I haven't had a chance to take a look at Serge's work yet, but I'm eager to do so. Hopefully we can get it back into the main project sooner than later. As far as Wicket and Stripes support, I haven't forgot about those - just having trouble finding the time and motivation to do the work.

Posted in Java at Sep 17 2008, 09:35:45 AM MDT 12 Comments

AppFuse 2.0.2 Released

The AppFuse Team is pleased to announce the release of AppFuse 2.0.2. This release includes upgrades to Spring Security 2.0, jMock 2.4, the ability to customize code generation templates and many bug fixes.

For information on upgrading from 2.0.1, see the Release Notes or changelog. AppFuse 2.0.2 is available as a Maven archetype. For information on creating a new project using AppFuse, please see the QuickStart Guide or the demos and videos.

To learn more about AppFuse, please read Ryan Withers' Igniting your applications with AppFuse.

The 2.0 series of AppFuse has a minimum requirement of the following specification versions:

  • Java Servlet 2.4 and JSP 2.0 (2.1 for JSF)
  • Java 5+

If you've used AppFuse 1.x, but not 2.x, you'll want to read the FAQ. Join the user mailing list if you have any questions.

Thanks to everyone for their help contributing code, writing documentation, posting to the mailing lists, and logging issues.

Please post any issues you have with this release to the mailing list.

Posted in Java at May 11 2008, 11:25:40 PM MDT 4 Comments

AppFuse Light 1.8.2 Released

AppFuse Light 1.8.2 is a bug fixes release that includes upgrades for Spring, Spring Security, Hibernate, Wicket, Tapestry and many others. In addition, Spring bean definitions were replaced with annotations (@Repository, @Service and @Controller). See the Release Notes for more information on what's changed since the last release.

AppFuse Light now offers 60 possible combinations for download:

  • Web Frameworks: JSF (MyFaces), Spring MVC (with Ajax, Acegi Security, JSP, FreeMarker or Velocity), Stripes, Struts 1.x, Struts 2.x, Tapestry, WebWork, Wicket
  • Persistence Frameworks: Hibernate, iBATIS, JDO (JPOX), OJB, Spring JDBC

AppFuse Light Screenshot - click on the box at the bottom right of AL to activate StyleSheet Switcher

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.

Posted in Java at May 11 2008, 10:16:17 PM MDT Add a Comment

AppFuse Light 1.8.1 Released: includes upgrades to Spring 2.5 and Wicket 1.3

AppFuse Light 1.8.1 is a bug fixes release that includes an upgrade to Spring 2.5 and Wicket 1.3 RC1. See the Release Notes for more information on what's changed since the last release.

What is AppFuse Light? Click here to find out.

AppFuse Light now offers 60 possible combinations for download:

  • Web Frameworks: JSF (MyFaces), Spring MVC (with Ajax, Acegi Security, JSP, FreeMarker or Velocity), Stripes, Struts 1.x, Struts 2.x, Tapestry, WebWork, Wicket
  • Persistence Frameworks: Hibernate, iBATIS, JDO (JPOX), OJB, Spring JDBC

AppFuse Light Screenshot - click on the box at the bottom right of AL to activate StyleSheet Switcher

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:

What's on tap for AppFuse Light 2.0? Here's what I'm hoping to do:

  1. Drop the seldom-used persistence frameworks: JDBC, JDO and OJB.
  2. Drop Struts 1.x and WebWork as web frameworks (replaced by Struts 2).
  3. Support the same persistence frameworks as AppFuse: Hibernate, iBATIS and JPA.
  4. Re-use appfuse-service, appfuse-hibernate, appfuse-ibatis and appfuse-jpa in AppFuse Light. I'll likely include the core classes (User, Role) since AppFuse Light is more "raw" than AppFuse.
  5. Require Java 5.

Let me know if you disagree with any of these items or would like to see other enhancements.

Posted in Java at Nov 29 2007, 09:28:06 AM MST 3 Comments