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'm thrilled to see DWR join the Dojo Foundation and Joe Walker join SitePen. This couldn't happen to a nicer guy. I first met Joe at the Ajax Experience in San Francisco 2 years ago. Great guy, awesome open source project. Well done Joe!
The AppFuse Team is pleased to announce the release of AppFuse 2.0.1. This release squashes a number of bugs and includes an upgrade to Spring 2.5. To learn more about Spring 2.5's features, see InfoQ's What's New in Spring 2.5: Part 1 article.
For information on upgrading from 2.0, see the 2.0.1 Release Notes or changelog. AppFuse 2.0.1 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.
What is AppFuse? Click here to find out.
The 2.0 series of AppFuse has a minimum requirement of the following specification versions:
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.
We greatly appreciate 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!
Please post any issues you have with this release to the mailing list.
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?
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.
When I first read The Rise of JAVA - The Retirement of SUNW, I didn't think much of it. I believe I read it on some sort of news website, so I didn't realize folks would be so passionate about it. Reading the comments on Jonathan's blog is quite entertaining and smells somewhat of a TSS thread - except there's no back-and-forth banter. Dave provides a good roundup of reactions in Blogs on Sun's new stock ticker.
For me, one of the most interesting things to fall out of this is James Duncan Davidson's Remembering Java Naming Blunders Past.
Back in 1998 or so, there were a bunch of people in Cupertino?working in a building that used to belong to Apple?working to finish up the largest and most complicated release of the JDK to that date: JDK 1.2. Compared to JDK 1.0 and 1.1, it was enormous. It had slipped schedule a few times. And there were lots of changes and new APIs everywhere. So many that it was the first release where it was almost impossible to know how to use every Java API out there.
The powers that be really wanted to commorate this in a big way. They wanted to make a big splash when they officially launched the new version of Java in December of 98 at the Java Business Expo in New York. So, they decided to rename Java. I found out about this, along with all the other engineers working on Java, at an all-hands meeting in Cupertino.
The name was? wait for it? Java2000.
I met James at a MySQL Conference a few years back and he's full of stories like this. If you ever get a chance to hear one of his stories about the early days of Java at Sun - I highly recommend it.
My last post on choosing a web framework got quite a few comments. Some seemed to like the application categorization technique as a means to narrow the choices. However, others seemed to disagree. So if application categorization is not a good methodology for narrowing the choices, what is?
I think one of the best ways to figure out a good methodology is to find out what people have done to choose their web framework. I'm looking for stories from developers who have evaluated 2-3+ frameworks for a project. I'd like to come up with 3-5 stories as part of my talk to highlight how some teams have chosen their web framework. What were your important criteria? What made you choose the one you did? Was it a tight race between a few of them? Did industry buzz or application categorization play a part in your decision?
Please send any stories you'd like to share to [email protected]. Of course, you can also post your story in the comments - but an e-mail gives it a bit more validity. If you'd like to share your company name, that'd be great, but it's by no means required. I haven't decided if I'm going to prevent all cases as anonymous companies or not. If you do send a story, I'll make sure and ask your permission before I share any of your personal/company information. Thanks!
The last month working at LinkedIn has been an absolute blast. I'm new to the whole "treating developers like royalty" thing, so that's taken a while to get used to. It's definitely nice, especially when the company gives you ownership of the things you're working on. Sure, there's schedules and priorities, but it seems like each and every engineer has control of their own destiny. As a consultant, I've been very impressed with the way I've been embraced and folded into the team like a regular employee. There's lots of team lunches, a tech meetup every now and then, and I even played hoops with a bunch of guys last night. This is probably the coolest company I've ever worked for.
Wanna have fun like I am? LinkedIn is looking to hire quite aggressively over the next several months. There's new faces almost every week and hopefully I can "hook you up" to be a part of the festivities. Below is a position that we're currently hiring for in the UI Engineering team. Working remotely is not an option at this time, you need to live in (or relocate to) the Bay Area.
I don't know if JSF and Facelets experience is still a requirement (now that I'm here 
), but a passion for UI frameworks and web development is. You should know at least two leading Java frameworks and have a lot of experiencing with testing web applications out-of-container. We're not looking for Java Developers turned web developers, we're more looking for Web Developers that know Java.
If this sounds interesting to you, shoot me your resume in an e-mail. Don't forget to include a link to your LinkedIn Profile.
I plan on rewriting my "Comparing Java Web Frameworks" presentation for this year's Colorado Software Summit. Rather than "Comparing Java Web Frameworks", I'm going to make it into more of a "Choosing a JVM Web Framework" presentation. I think this opens it up to more possibilities such as Grails, JRuby on Rails, Flex and GWT.
One of the things I hope to talk about is choosing the right tool for the job. I think there's 3 types of web applications you can develop:
Once you've decided on which of these you're developing, it's much easier to narrow down the choices:
I'm not sure if GWT fits in the RIA category. I'm not sure where Rails or Grails fit either. They more closely resemble category #1 than any other, yet there's a lot of speculation about their scalability. I think if that perception can be changed, they'll fit into the first category quite well. However, I don't think they compete with component-based or RIA because they don't hold state or offer rich-media capabilities.
Sidenote: I find the scalability debate quite interesting. There's a fair amount of propaganda in Javaland that scalability can be achieved with appservers and clustering tools like Terracotta. If this is true, I've yet to read good solid proof of it. Most of the "how to scale" information out there suggests "share nothing" architectures that shard data and applications across several servers. Of course, there's scalability and then there's massive scalability. Can appservers and clustering solve massive scalability like Google and Amazon require?
The 2nd and 3rd categories have someone of a blurry line, so I'm hoping to figure out how to clarify that. There's also a lot of other factors that will go into choosing a web framework. What if you're simply trying to replace a home-grown framework with an open-source one? If you want to keep your backend and all its logic, does it make sense to use something like Seam, Grails, JRuby on Rails or even AppFuse? Probably not - all their wizbang features and CRUD generation doesn't mean much if all you're using is the web framework. Also, if your application requires support for non-JavaScript browsers (for 508 compliance), then GWT and JSF can be easily eliminated. I know that there are many claims that JSF doesn't require JavaScript, but I've yet to see a real-world application developed with JSF that expects JavaScript to be turned off. Progressive enhancement is a requirement by many of my clients these days.
What's your opinion? How can we make it easier for developers and companies to choose a web framework? Is categorizing application types a good technique?
What if you didn't have to choose between a request-based framework and a component-based framework? What if you could use them together and use request-based for some pages and component-based for others? This is the functionality that the Struts 2 JSF Plugin provides.
To be fair, the JSF-Spring project says it does the same thing for Spring MVC + JSF, but there doesn't appear to be any documentation.
I did some prototyping of Struts 2 + JSF and discovered that it does indeed work. I also discovered that there's no documentation on integrating it with Facelets. Luckily, it's pretty easy to do - hence my reason for writing this entry. You might ask why I want to use Facelets when JSF 1.2 supports JSP fairly well? My reason is because JSP 2.1 hijacks #{}, which Struts 2's OGNL uses for some expressions. Because of this, I want to be able to run on a JSP 2.0 container until a workaround comes along. Sun's JSF 1.2 RI can run on a JSP 2.0 container, while MyFaces 2.1 cannot (at least in my experience).
There's two ways to get Struts 2 + JSF + Facelets working:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<faces-config xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee
http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-facesconfig_1_2.xsd"
version="1.2">
<application>
<view-handler>com.sun.facelets.FaceletViewHandler</view-handler>
</application>
</faces-config>
<context-param>
<param-name>org.ajax4jsf.VIEW_HANDLERS</param-name>
<param-value>com.sun.facelets.FaceletViewHandler</param-value>
</context-param>
NOTE: You have to use 2nd method if you want to use Ajax4JSF. It won't read the view-handler from faces-config.xml.
If you're using SiteMesh, you may have to add another <parser> element to your sitemesh.xml to get Facelets pages decorated:
<parser content-type="application/xhtml+xml"
class="com.opensymphony.module.sitemesh.parser.HTMLPageParser"/>
Thanks to Laurie Harper for his assistance figuring this stuff out.
Now you might ask - why would you want to do this? For one, Struts 2 has a better navigation model (IMO) than JSF. Also, if developers want to use JSF and think it's a better way for a certain module - let them go to it!