On a few projects now I’ve used jruby with rake. I know that I can use rvm and just fetch the gems per project, but for developers stuck on windows that way is a little more than difficult. So here’s how I package up rubygems in a JAR. mkdir gemjar java -jar jruby-complete-1.6.3.jar -S gem install -i ./gemjar haml --version 3.1.2 --no-rdoc --no-ri java -jar jruby-complete-1.6.3.jar -S gem install -i ....
Here’s a neat way of using ivy with jruby, rake & ant. task :ivy_retrieve do ant.taskdef :resource => "org/apache/ivy/ant/antlib.xml" do classpath :location => "ivy/ivy-2.2.0.jar" end ant.configure :file => "ivy/ivysettings.xml" ant.resolve :file => "ivy/ivy.xml" ant.retrieve :pattern => "lib/[conf]/[type]/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]", :sync => "true" puts end Still using ant, still angle bracket free (except for ivy, sigh). Read my previous post if you want to know more about jruby, rake and ant....
For some time now I’ve been thinking about all the different approaches that I have seen and heard with the goal of zero-downtime deployment for a horizontally-scaled application that relies on a database or some form of persistent storage. On most of the projects that I have worked on this was not a requirement, although a speedy and automated deployment was preferred. However, other projects were for websites and applications that formed the backbone of a 24/7 company and as such the idea of even a couple of minutes downtime was unacceptable....
I've released a new version of my S3DropBox on GitHub. I've moved the project to GitHub so that I can have all my current active projects in one place. Check it out in its new home at https://github.com/tomcz/s3dropbox. This release uses the AWS java libraries. They are finally good enough for me to stop creating my own wheels and vulcanising my own rubber. As a bonus the S3DropBox creates URLs in virtual hosted format (eg....
For the longest time I’ve been writing Java build files in XML and I’ve always felt a little dirty. Not too long ago I was re-introduced to rake by a colleague (thanks Fabio) and how nicely it integrates with ant. This means that you can now turn this: <project name="spring-conversations" default="build" basedir="."> <property name="src.dir" location="src/main" /> <property name="test.dir" location="src/test" /> <property name="build.dir" location="build" /> <property name="dist.dir" location="${build.dir}/dist" /> <property name="report.dir" location="${build....
Not that long ago I gave a ThoughtWorks geek night presentation on Post-Redirect-Get and how to mess with the Spring Framework to make it happen. I've put up the presentation and the code that I used for it on GitHub. Feedback is always welcome....
Here is how I set up the Apache Ivy dependency manager so that it can fetch springframework JARs from the SpringSource Enterprise Bundle Repository. Listing: ivysettings-custom.xml <ivysettings> <resolvers> <url name="com.springsource.repository.bundles.release"> <ivy pattern="http://repository.springsource.com/ivy/bundles/release/[organisation]/[module]/[revision]/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]" /> <artifact pattern="http://repository.springsource.com/ivy/bundles/release/[organisation]/[module]/[revision]/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]" /> </url> <url name="com.springsource.repository.bundles.external"> <ivy pattern="http://repository.springsource.com/ivy/bundles/external/[organisation]/[module]/[revision]/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]" /> <artifact pattern="http://repository.springsource.com/ivy/bundles/external/[organisation]/[module]/[revision]/[artifact]-[revision].[ext]" /> </url> <chain name="spring"> <resolver ref="com.springsource.repository.bundles.release"/> <resolver ref="com.springsource.repository.bundles.external"/> </chain> <ibiblio name="jboss" root="http://repository.jboss.org/maven2/" m2compatible="true"/> <chain name="main" dual="true"> <resolver ref="shared" /> <resolver ref="public" /> <resolver ref="spring" /> <resolver ref="jboss" /> </chain> <chain name="default" returnFirst="true"> <resolver ref="local" /> <resolver ref="main" /> </chain> </resolvers> </ivysettings> Listing: ivysettings....
HTML is notoriously difficult to parse and it has usually been a pain to do this in Java. Yes I know that there are parsers (like jtidy and nekohtml) that try to create a proper DOM but I’ve been waiting for something more lightweight. Enter Jsoup. It feels like a mix of JQuery and Beautiful Soup (for Python). String html = response.getContentAsString(); Document document = Jsoup.parse(html); Elements elements = document.select("#errorRef"); assertThat(elements....
StringTemplate is a great templating engine. It's powerful, simple and quite opinionated. I've come really appreciate its simple purpose: render data. No assignment, no arbitrary method invocation. It is not Turing-complete and it would make a lousy rules engine. SiteMesh is a web-page layout and decoration framework that is my current "golden hammer" when I need to provide a consistent layout across a java web-application. It seems to fit with the way that I think about web pages a whole lot more than something like Tiles - I really prefer decoration over composition as a means of layout control....
My day-to-day work often consists of writing web applications that aggregate data from a number of sources. Corporate constraints frequently dictate that I cannot use languages that make crunching of collections easier so I am forced into an old-fashioned for-loop frenzy. Ugh. On a recent java project my pairing buddy (Jules - thank you) suggested that we look at lambdaj. From the lamdbaj site: “lambdaj is a library that makes easier to address this issue by allowing to manipulate collections in a pseudo-functional and statically typed way”....