RubyGems in a JAR

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 ....

JRuby Rake and Ivy

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....

Zero-downtime deployments

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....

S3DropBox is now on GitHub

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....

JRuby Rake Vs Ant

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....

Conversations with Spring

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....

Apache Ivy and Spring EBR

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....

Jsoup - BeautifulSoup for Java

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 views for Spring

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....

Manipulating collections with lambdaj

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”....