Shaun Abram
Technology and Leadership Blog
Subscribe to RSS FeedHow to add a project to GitHub
Although the GitHub docs contains good info on how to add an existing GitHub project to your local machine, how to add an existing (unversioned) project from your local machine to GitHub was a little less clear to me. Here are the steps I use.
Tags: git, github, intellij, vcs, versioncontrol
Invaluable Mac tools
After setting up a couple of macbooks recently, there are a few tools that I just need to install before I can feel at home (although not all are Mac specific).
Tags: mac, macbook, productivity, shortcuts, tools
Dynamically set Jenkins node
This post explains how to dynamically/programmatically set the node a Jenkins/Hudson job will run on. This is relatively easy to do statically, using the NodeLabel Parameter Plugin, but trickier to do programmatically.
Tags: ci, continuousdeployment, continuousintegration, devops, hudson, jenkins
ThoughtWorks Technology Radar
ThoughtWorks Technology Radar is out and definitely worth a read. Although I follow many of the ThoughtWorks folks, like Martin Fowler, Neal Ford and Jez Humble, this is the first time I have read their tech radar, but it won’t be the last.
Tags: radar, techradar, thoughtworks, thoughtworkstechradar
Cloudbees
I’ve been using CloudBees a lot recently for deploying to ‘the cloud’.
There are a couple of things that attract me to CloudBees…
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Tags: cloud, cloudbees, continuousdeployment, continuousintegration, jenkins, Maven
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.
Tags: excel, handsontable, JavaScript, jQuery, jsp, spreadsheet, 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
(Previously I had the code deployed on a CloudBees instance at http://springmvc.shaunabram.cloudbees.net, but CloudBees have since unfortunately shut down their free tier).
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
GitHub SSH key audit
Got this error recently when trying to do a fetch from github in Intellij:
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly
ERROR: Hi sabram, it’s GitHub. We’re doing an SSH key audit.
Vague error but finally figured out that it is related to Github’s recent security compromise and that I needed to verify my SSH keys.
Couldn’t find much about the error on Google, so maybe this post will help someone else!
Tags: github
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
JavaOne: Comparing Java Web Frameworks
The first talk I attended at this year’s JavaOne was “Choosing Your Java Web Framework” by Richard Pack from salesforce.com
Overall, I found this a really interesting talk. It was lacking in any sales pitch, nor did it have the unquestioning devotion to one particular framework that I felt some of the Java FX talks had. Instead it seemed like an unbiased look at web frameworks in general and a handful of frameworks in more detail, based on Richard’s extensive and hands on experience and SalesForce and Hyperic.
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Tags: grails, gwt, javaone, javaone2011, jsf, tapestry, webframework, wicket
Spring MVC Hello World
There is a good Getting Started with Spring MVC blog post over on the Spring team blog.
I have created several Spring MVC projects for both work and play, and am attaching my own simple version of the HelloWorld example here, based on the Spring blog example.
Find my maven ready source here.
Like my previous JSP/Servlet example, I find these templates useful for getting prototypes up and running.
Tags: helloworld, jsp, servlet, spring, springmvc, webapp, webframework
Spring Enterprise Recipes
I recently found out that this book has just been published:
“Spring Enterprise Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach”
It is written by Josh Long and Gary Mak. I have heard Josh speak at several conferences, followed his articles on TheServerSide (as well as on his blog) and recently got to hang out with him at the SoCal Code Camp. He is very knowledgeable about Spring and enterprise integration and since Gary is already an author of one of the leading Spring books (Spring recipes), this should be a great book. I have just ordered my copy and will try to post a review when I am done with it.