Raible Designs

JHipster Conf 2018: Summer Solstice in Paris

Last week, I journeyed to Paris with my son, Jack. It was his first time in Europe and I brought him along for good reason. I’d been invited to the first ever JHipster Conf, and I was eager to attend. We were both pretty excited when we left Denver last Monday.

My Background with JHipster

I’ve been a part of the JHipster community for a few years now. I joined by accident, really. I was trying to market myself as an independent consultant by spouting my knowledge of Spring Boot and Angular with an InfoQ mini-book. Since JHipster leveraged both to jumpstart app development, it seemed like a perfect fit. I’ve been a long-time fan of app jumpstarts, having developed my own called AppFuse in days long gone.

Through the process of writing the mini-book, finding issues, and submitting pull requests, I eventually found myself to be a member of the JHipster development team. Through my relationship with JHipster, and it’s 3.0 release, I found myself intrigued my microservices and how to develop them with Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, all through the generation expertise of JHipster.

I’ve learned a ton by being part of the project and trying to figure out how all of its options work.

When I found myself with a full-time job at Stormpath, I did my best to create a Stormpath module for JHipster. When Okta acquired Stormpath, I added a similar module to my list of things I wanted to write.

When it came time to implement an Okta module, I discovered JHipster’s OAuth support only worked internally, not with an external OAuth provider, also known as an Identity Provider, or IdP. I mentioned to the JHipster team I thought we could do better and add support for external providers instead. They agreed, and I went to work.

In hindsight, it was a great decision and not terribly difficult to implement thanks to Spring Security, Keycloak, and Docker. We had a ton of help from the community along the way, and as of last October, JHipster added support for single sign-on with OIDC (tested with Keycloak and Okta).

JHipster 5.0: Spring Boot 2.0, Angular 6, and React

It’s been a fabulous adventure on the JHipster train and it’s still going strong. We just released version 5.0 with React and Spring Boot 2.0 support, there’s client generators for Ionic and React Native, and we just hosted a kick-ass conference about JHipster in Paris.

JHipster Conf 2018

The conference featured members of the core team, the well-dressed and fit Joe Kutner from Heroku, as well as Java celebrities like Ray Tsang and Josh Long. You can read about the festivities and presentations from JHipster's founder, Julien Dubois.

The conference was a little over 24 hours long, starting with a speaker’s dinner on Wednesday evening. Before attending, Jack and I spent the day strolling around Versailles. Versailles is a special place in my life since I proposed to my double rainbow there after Devoxx Belgium in 2011.

The conference kicked off with a keynote by the JHipster's co-leads: Julien and Deepu.

During my talk, I had Jack join me on stage for an intro, and tried to give him a taste of public speaking in front of hundreds.

My talk went well, with some successful and some failed demos. Hopefully people got the point that it’s cool to store your users outside of JHipster so you can share them between apps. I also tried to show that OAuth and OIDC are excellent for securing APIs. You can download my presentation from Add JHipster to Your JHipster Apps with OIDC or view it below.

I created a tutorial of the app I showed in my talk and published it to the Okta developer blog: Build a Photo Gallery PWA with React, Spring Boot, and JHipster. If you like React and OAuth, you're gonna love this guide!

Jack and I had a day in Paris after the conference, so we made the most of it. We hit the Eiffel Tower, hiked the stairs, and marveled at the view. After, we waited in a long line for The Catacombs and walked among the dead.

Kudos to the JHipster Community!

What a trip! It’s so much fun to be a part of JHipster’s thriving open source community. It’s not just the project itself; it’s all the projects we build upon, from Java to TypeScript to Spring Boot to Spring Data to Spring Security to Angular to React to webpack to Bootstrap. It’s a conglomeration of all of my favorite tools and open source developers encompassed in several awesome projects!

Life as an open source developer is pretty fun. I encourage you to get involved in open source too! I started way back in the early 2000s with Struts and Ant, and it’s done wonders for my career.

Viva La Open Source!

Speaking Adventures at J-Spring, Devoxx UK, GeeCON, and Spring I/O

As a Developer Advocate at Okta, I'm expected to travel up to 25% per month to speak at conferences and meetups. This May was more like 50%! I had opportunities to contribute to a number of cool conferences in exotic cities that I was eager to accept.

My adventure began on Monday, May 8 when I flew to Amsterdam to speak at the J-Spring conference. It was the first time the NLJUG hosted this conference in several years. I marveled at the venue and especially liked the outdoor area it offered during breaks. The walk from/to the train station was pretty nice too.

I spoke about Microservices for the Masses with Spring Boot, JHipster, and JWT. Feedback I received mentioned it was a bit too fast and I crammed too much into the 50-minute time slot. I do tend to mention everything I know about topics when I speak, so I apologize for trying to cram too much in.

AppFuse 3.5 Released!

The AppFuse Team is pleased to announce the release of AppFuse 3.5. This release contains a number of improvements.

• XML reduced by 8x in projects generated with AppFuse
• CRUD generation support for Wicket, as well as AppFuse Light archetypes (Spring Security, Spring FreeMarker and Stripes)
• Upgraded Tapestry to 5.4
• Integrated Spring IO Platform for dependency management
• Refactored unit tests to use JUnit 4
• Renamed maven-warpath-plugin to warpath-maven-plugin
• Upgraded to jWebUnit 3 for AppFuse Light integration tests
• Updated all AppFuse Light modules to be up-to-date

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.

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 users mailing list. You can also post them to Stack Overflow with the "appfuse" tag.

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.

Converting an Application to JHipster

I've been intrigued by JHipster ever since I first tried it last September. I'd worked with AngularJS and Spring Boot quite a bit, and I liked the idea that someone had combined them, adding some nifty features along the way. When I spoke about AngularJS earlier this month, I included a few slides on JHipster near the end of the presentation.

This week, I received an email from someone who attended that presentation.

Hey Matt,
We met a few weeks back when you presented at DOSUG. You were talking about JHipster which I had been eyeing for a few months and wanted your quick .02 cents.

I have built a pretty heavy application over the last 6 months that is using mostly the same tech as JHipster.

• Java
• Spring
• JPA
• AngularJS
• Compass
• Grunt

It's ridiculously close for most of the tech stack. So, I was debating rolling it over into a JHipster app to make it a more familiar stack for folks. My concern is that it I will spend months trying to shoehorn it in for not much ROI. Any thoughts on going down this path? What are the biggest issues you've seen in using JHipster? It seems pretty straightforward except for the entity generators. I'm concerned they are totally different than what I am using.

The main difference in what I'm doing compared to JHipster is my almost complete use of groovy instead of old school Java in the app. I would have to be forced into going back to regular java beans... Thoughts?

I replied with the following advice:

JHipster is great for starting a project, but I don't know that it buys you much value after the first few months. I would stick with your current setup and consider JHipster for your next project. I've only prototyped with it, I haven't created any client apps or put anything in production. I have with Spring Boot and AngularJS though, so I like that JHipster combines them for me.

JHipster doesn't generate Scala or Groovy code, but you could still use them in a project as long as you had Maven/Gradle configured properly.

You might try generating a new app with JHipster and examine how they're doing this. At the very least, it can be a good learning tool, even if you're not using it directly.

Java Hipsters: Do you agree with this advice? Have you tried migrating an existing app to JHipster? Are any of you using Scala or Groovy in your JHipster projects?

Integrating Node.js, Ruby and Spring with Okta's SAML Support

Security has always piqued my interest, ever since I first developed AppFuse and figured out how to make J2EE security work back in 2004. I hacked AppFuse to have Remember Me functionality, then moved onto Acegi/Spring Security. Spring Security had the features I needed, even if it did require almost 100 lines of XML to configure it. These days, it's much better and its JavaConfig - combined with Spring Boot - is pretty slick.

That was the first part of my security life. The second phase began the night I met Trish, and learned she sold security products. She knew of OWASP and their top 10 rules. It was Trish that inspired me to write my Java Web Application Security presentation. I really enjoyed writing that presentation, comparing Apache Shiro, Spring Security and Java EE's security frameworks. I followed up the first time I presented it with a number of blog posts and screencasts. Hmmmm, maybe I should update the presentation/screencasts to use Java configuration only (#NoXML) and submit it to a couple conferences this year? I digress.

I had to do a security-related spike over the last couple weeks. I was trying to get SAML authentication working with Okta and my client's Active Directory server. Luckily, someone setup the AD integration so all I had to do was try a few different languages/frameworks. I searched and found ThoughtWorks' okta-samples, which includes examples using Node.js and Sinatra (Ruby + JRuby). I also found a Spring SAML example that includes one of my favorite things in JavaLand: Java-based configuration.

I'm happy to report I was able to get all of these applications working with my client's Okta setup. This article will tell you how I did it. For each application, I created a new application on Okta using its "Template SAML 2.0 Application" and added myself in the application's "People" tab. Each section below contains the configuration I used for Okta. The instructions below assume you're similar to me, a developer that has Java 8, Node and Ruby installed, but none of the specific frameworks. As I write this, I have everything working on my Mac with Yosemite, but I wrote the instructions below using one of my old laptops, fresh after a Yosemite upgrade.

AppFuse, Reduced

In November, I had some time off between clients. To occupy my time, I exercised my body and brain a bit. I spent a couple hours a day exercising and a few hours a day working on AppFuse. AppFuse isn't used to start projects nearly as much as it once was. This makes sense since there's been a ton of innovation on the JVM and there's lots of get-started-quickly frameworks now. Among my favorites are Spring Boot, JHipster, Grails and Play.

You can see that AppFuse's community activity has decreased quite a bit over the years by looking at its mailing list traffic.

Even though there's not a lot of users talking on the mailing list, it still seems to get quite a few downloads from Maven Central.

I think the biggest value that AppFuse provides now is a learning tool for those who work on it. Also, it's a good place to show other developers how they can evolve with open source frameworks (e.g. Spring, Hibernate, JSF, Tapestry, Struts) over several years. Showing how we migrated to Spring MVC Test, for example, might be useful. The upcoming move to Spring Data instead of our Generic DAO solution might be interesting as well.

Regardless of whether AppFuse is used a lot or not, it should be easy to maintain. Over the several weeks, I made some opinionated changes and achieved some pretty good progress on simplifying things and making the project easier to maintain. The previous structure has a lot of duplicate versions, properties and plugin configurations between different projects. I was able to leverage Maven's inheritance model to make a number of improvements:

Building a REST API with JAXB, Spring Boot and Spring Data

If someone asked you to develop a REST API on the JVM, which frameworks would you use? I was recently tasked with such a project. My client asked me to implement a REST API to ingest requests from a 3rd party. The project entailed consuming XML requests, storing the data in a database, then exposing the data to internal application with a JSON endpoint. Finally, it would allow taking in a JSON request and turning it into an XML request back to the 3rd party.

With the recent release of Apache Camel 2.14 and my success using it, I started by copying my Apache Camel / CXF / Spring Boot project and trimming it down to the bare essentials. I whipped together a simple Hello World service using Camel and Spring MVC. I also integrated Swagger into both. Both implementations were pretty easy to create (sample code), but I decided to use Spring MVC. My reasons were simple: its REST support was more mature, I knew it well, and Spring MVC Test makes it easy to test APIs.

Camel's Swagger support without web.xml
As part of the aforementioned spike, I learned out how to configure Camel's REST and Swagger support using Spring's JavaConfig and no web.xml. I made this into a sample project and put it on GitHub as camel-rest-swagger.

This article shows how I built a REST API with Java 8, Spring Boot/MVC, JAXB and Spring Data (JPA and REST components). I stumbled a few times while developing this project, but figured out how to get over all the hurdles. I hope this helps the team that's now maintaining this project (my last day was Friday) and those that are trying to do something similar.

Developing Services with Apache Camel - Part II: Creating and Testing Routes

This article is the second in a series on Apache Camel and how I used it to replace IBM Message Broker for a client. The first article, Developing Services with Apache Camel - Part I: The Inspiration, describes why I chose Camel for this project.

To make sure these new services correctly replaced existing services, a 3-step approach was used:

1. Write an integration test pointing to the old service.
2. Write the implementation and a unit test to prove it works.
3. Write an integration test pointing to the new service.

I chose to start by replacing the simplest service first. It was a SOAP Service that talked to a database to retrieve a value based on an input parameter. To learn more about Camel and how it works, I started by looking at the CXF Tomcat Example. I learned that Camel is used to provide routing of requests. Using its CXF component, it can easily produce SOAP web service endpoints. An end point is simply an interface, and Camel takes care of producing the implementation.

AppFuse 3.0 Released!

The AppFuse Team is pleased to announce the release of AppFuse 3.0. This release is AppFuse's first release as a 10-year old and includes a whole slew of improvements.

• Java 7 and Maven 3 are now minimal requirements
• Replaced MyFaces and Tomahawk with PrimeFaces for JSF
  
  • Removed SiteMesh in favor of JSF's built-in layout support
• Added Wicket support
• Migrated from jMock to Mockito for tests
• Integrated wro4j and WebJars
• Migrated to Bootstrap 3 and defaulted to Bootswatch's Spacelab theme

In addition, this release includes upgrades to all dependencies to bring them up-to-date with their latest releases. Most notable are Spring 4, Spring Security 3.2 and Bootstrap 3. 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.

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 users mailing list. You can also post them to Stack Overflow with the "appfuse" tag.

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.

A Webapp Makeover with Spring 4 and Spring Boot

A typical Maven and Spring web application has a fair amount of XML and verbosity to it. Add in Jersey and Spring Security and you can have hundreds of lines of XML before you even start to write your Java code. As part of a recent project, I was tasked with upgrading a webapp like this to use Spring 4 and Spring Boot. I also figured I'd try to minimize the XML.

This is my story on how I upgraded to Spring 4, Jersey 2, Java 8 and Spring Boot 0.5.0 M6.

When I started, the app was using Spring 3.2.5, Spring Security 3.1.4 and Jersey 1.18. The pom.xml had four Jersey dependencies, three Spring dependencies and three Spring Security dependencies, along with a number of exclusions for "jersey-spring".

Upgrading to Spring 4
Upgrading to Spring 4 was easy, I changed the version property to 4.0.0.RC2 and added the new Spring bill of materials to my pom.xml. I also add the Spring milestone repo since Spring 4 won't be released to Maven central until tomorrow.

<dependencyManagement>
    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-framework-bom</artifactId>
            <version>${spring.framework.version}</version>
            <type>pom</type>
            <scope>import</scope>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>
</dependencyManagement>

<repositories>
    <repository>
        <id>spring-milestones</id>
        <url>http://repo.spring.io/milestone</url>
        <snapshots>
            <enabled>true</enabled>
        </snapshots>
    </repository>
</repositories>