Maven archetypes to create your project folder structure

Although gradle is my preferred build tool these days, the maven archetypes are still useful for creating a folder structure to start with.
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Tags: devops, gradle, Maven, mvn

Handsontable ‘Spreadsheet’ talking to SpringMVC

Handsontable is an Excel-like data grid utilizing JQuery. For example, it provides the ability to copy and paste directly to & from Excel. Handsontable itself if very easy to setup. The part I struggled with was passing the data to SpringMVC. So, this post shows how to send data from a Handsontable data grid on the client to a SpringMVC server.

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Tags: excel, handsontable, JavaScript, jQuery, jsp, spreadsheet, spring, springmvc

MyMoney – A simple SpringMVC app

I created a small, open source web app called MyMoney for entering and tracking spending details. It allows you to create accounts (for example Cash or Checking) and enter transactions associated with those accounts.

The app is running at http://mymoney.shaunabram.cloudbees.net and the sourecode is available via GitHub.
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Tags: Hibernate, spring, springmvc

Spring MVC Hello World with Continuous Deployment

Oh dear, yet another ‘Hello World!’. But although the functionality is trivial, this little SpringMVC project is complete enough for me to use as a template to bootstrap more complex projects. It consists of:

• HTML/JSP client
• SpringMVC server using a Controller/Service/DAO design
• Maven for build and dependency management

This is an updated version of an older project I created, with the following enhancements:

• Added a full suite of automated tests (unit, integration and browser based)
• Added placeholders for JavaScript and images (both can be a little tricky to put in the correct place with SpringMVC)
• Incorporated into a continuous deployment environment

More details below, but you can find the full source code on this GitHub repository and the deployed app at http://springmvc.shaunabram.cloudbees.net.
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Tags: cloud, cloudbees, continuousdeployment, continuousintegration, easymock, fest, helloworld, jenkins, spring, springmvc, Testing, unittesting

Running Jenkins jobs sequentially

I am a huge fan of the Jenkins continuous integration tool, using it not just for continuous integration, but also continuous delivery, server monitoring and performance testing.

Although using Jenkins is normally a breeze, I recently had a need to run several Jenkins jobs sequentially and it proved a little trickier than expected, so I thought worth posting about.

Basically, I wanted to call a database backup job before calling the deploy build job, which obviously shouldn’t be done in parallel. After a bit of research, I found a number of ways to have Jenkins run jobs sequentially.
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Tags: agile, ci, continuousintegration, devops, hudson, jenkins

First experiment with Cloud Foundry

I’m at a Cloud Foundry conference today. Cloud Foundry is an open source “cloud” platform as a service (PaaS).

I decided to dive in and try to deploy the server we developed at GiveCamp last week for the ‘Big Brothers and Big Sisters’ charity project. I started by mavenizing the project, so I had a war to deploy.

Then, I created a free Cloud Foundry account, installed their ‘vmc’ command line tool and ran the ‘vmc push’ command to deploy my way to the cloud. And it worked straight off! Don’t you just love it when tools just work?

Our webservice is now running on a remote server that can be accessed by the iPhone and Android apps the team is developing. We still have some database work to complete, but this feels like a nice step forward.

In the mean time, I am now officially a Cloud Foundry fan…

Tags: charity, cloud, cloudfoundry, givecamp

Central California GiveCamp Review

Had a great weekend at the Central California GiveCamp in Fresno this weekend. I joined the Big Brothers and Big Sisters team, working on a mobile app (Android & iPhone). I helped out on the server & database side where we created a Java WebService talking JSON, with a MySQL database. Most of the team were from Fresno State. Still some work do to deploying the solution to the cloud, but we made good progress.

It was a really enjoyable weekend, and all for a good cause. Thanks to Walt Read and Iran Rodrigues for setting up and running it all so smoothly, and Dr Alex Liu from Fresno State for organizing the team…

Tags: charity, givecamp

Going to Central California GiveCamp

Heading to Central California GiveCamp tomorrow for a weekend of coding for charitable causes. Should be fun!

Swing, Webstart and Maven – An Example

Following my introductory rant on the subject, this post is a working example of using Swing and Webstart with a multi-module maven project.

Complete source can be downloaded from here.
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Tags: helloworld, jnlp, Maven, mvn, swing, webstart

Swing, Webstart, Maven – a difficult combination

I have spent the last few weeks struggling with a Swing app that I wanted to deploy via Webstart and build using Maven, via the the Webstart Maven Plugin. It has been a hugely painful process. I found the plugin documentation difficult to follow, struggled to understand the subtle config differences in jnlp, took longer than I expected to get jar signing working, had problems with webstart caching and suffered through a plethora of vague error messages. I found this posting where the author vowed to never use Webstart again, and I can empathize. Postings of people asking for help with Webstart problems certainly aren’t difficult to find. Using maven to build the jnlp provides some conveniences, but introduces new problems too. Overall, I’d prefer to avoid using a Swing/Webstart/Maven solution again.
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Tags: helloworld, jnlp, Maven, mvn, swing, webstart