Your mission-critical projects need complex event processing, realtime management and monitoring. Talend 5.4 (released in December 2013, https://www.talend.com) offers a great new feature: Talend Event Logging. It allows logging, processing and monitoring of all technical events and business data. In this article, I will focus on how to process, filter and monitor business data. You can find more details about monitoring technical events and logs (e.g. OSGi events of the ESB container) in Talend’s documentation (www.help.talend.com). This new feature is very powerful, but also extendable to fit custom requirements. You can solve and monitor much more complex scenarios than the one I describe here. Talend Event Logging with Logstash, ElasticSearch and Kibana First, let’s take a look at the components / projects which are integrated and extended into Talend’s products for implementing this new feature. logstash (http://logstash.net) is a tool for managing events and logs. You can use it to collect different (distributed) logs, parse them, and store them for later use. Speaking of searching, logstash comes with a simple, but fine web interface for searching and drilling into all of your logs. It uses ElasticSearch under the hood. So, you can easily query through all your logs for specific errors or business analytics (e.g. searching for all lines matching an unique order id). Additional to the pure collection of events, the Event Logging feature supports custom processing (e.g. custom filtering, customer data enrichment/reduction), aggregation, signing and also server side custom pre- and post-processing of events - e.g. to send them to an intrusion detection system or to any other kind of potential higher level log processing /management system. Kibana (http://www.elasticsearch.org/overview/kibana) is a browser based analytics and search interface to logstash and other timestamped data sets stored in ElasticSearch. Kibana strives to be easy to get started with, while also being flexible and powerful, just like logstash and ElasticSearch. Main difference to logstash is a much more powerful HTML5 based web interface. You can • use multiple concurrent search inputs • highlight to drill down bar charts • create line charts, stacked, unstacked, filled or unfilled, with or without points • create Pie and donut charts that compare top terms or the results of multiple queries • create custom dashboards with multiple charts • and much more… Therefore, logstash, Elasticsearch and Kibana are a perfect combination. You can use Kibana to analyze and monitor your data as you do with logstash, however, Kibana’s web interface is much more powerful and comfortable than logstash. There is a great book about logstash: “The logstash book” – for just 9.99 USD. I can really recommend this book for getting started: http://www.logstashbook.com/. For Elasticsearch, you can find several books on Amazon. Unfortunately, Kibana has no good and extensive documentation yet. I heard from its developers that this topic is addressed for Q1 2014. Integration of Event Logging and Monitoring into Talend’s Unified Platform Talend 5.4 has integrated logstash and Kibana into its Unified Platform. Talend Administration Center (TAC) is Talend’s central web application for management and monitoring. It got a new logging view: Here, you can use very flexible and powerful realtime search capabilities of Elasticsearch. Some dashboards are available by default. You can also create your own custom dashboards easily within this site thanks to Kibana. Many panel types are available, such as pie, histogram, table, hits or trends. You can analyze every technical event or business data down to the message level: By default, you see fields such as message, source, timestamp, type, and others. Of course, you can also add custom fields suitable for your business case. This way, you have a central monitoring capability which allows analyzing data on distributed clusters easily. Under the hood, this data comes from logstash. Many alternative inputs are available for logstash, such as log4j input or tcp input. For business data, I often use file input (http://logstash.net/docs/1.2.2/inputs/file) to analyze files such as CSV. Adding new inputs is very simple. You just have to add an input to your logstash configuration file of your logstash server. As I mentioned already, all this is integrated into the Talend’s Unified Platform: In this example, there are three log4j inputs and one file input. I use the file input to analyze text files in a specific directory. In this case, output is an embedded Elasticsearch instance. In production, you should use an external Elasticsearch cluster, of course. Processing such as filtering can also be configured in this file. Thus, you can process, analyze and monitor all your different inputs within one central monitoring application thanks to Kibana. Building Talend Integration Jobs, Routes and Web Services As mentioned before, you can analyze almost all data with logstash, Elasticsearch and Kibana. It does not matter if your input is technical events from a container (e.g. OSGi events) or any business data such as CSV files, log4j logs, or something else. Talend implicitly supports technical events which are created by the ESB container, by MDM, etc. However, you can also add your custom business data from your Talend jobs (integration perspective), SOAP / REST Web Services (integration perspective) or Talend routes (mediation perspective), easily: This is just one example (part of Talend’s DI demos which are included in every DI installation). The job generates some random data and stores it to a CSV file. You just have to add the configured file or directory of tFileOutputDelimited to your logstash configuration using file input (with wild cards for more complex scenarios). That’s it. You can now monitor and analyze the business data in realtime. This example showed a Talend DI Job (i.e. ETL job). However, you can also monitor your business data from SOAP / REST Web Services or Talend Routes the same way. Conclusion Your mission-critical projects need management and monitoring. Today, this is not just possible with complex and expensive tools of large vendors, but also with Talend’s Unified Platform products such as Talend ESB or Talend MDM. Under the hood, Talend integrates and extends widely used open source products: logstash, Elasticsearch and Kibana. Have fun with Talend 5.4’s new event logging and monitoring features… Best regards, Kai Wähner (@KaiWaehner) CONTENT FROM MY BLOG: http://www.kai-waehner.de/blog/2013/12/17/realtime-event-logging-complex-event-processing-cep-and-monitoring-with-talends-unified-platform-5-4-di-esb-dq-mdm-bpm-using-elasticsearch-logstash-and-kibana/

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. org.springframework spring-framework-bom ${spring.framework.version} pom import spring-milestones http://repo.spring.io/milestone true Next, I removed all the references to ${spring.framework.version} in dependencies since it'd be controlled by Maven's dependency management feature. org.springframework spring-web - ${spring.framework.version} I also changed to use Maven 3's wildcard syntax to exclude multiple dependencies. com.sun.jersey.contribs jersey-spring org.springframework - spring - - - org.springframework - spring-core - - - org.springframework - spring-web - - - org.springframework - spring-beans - - - org.springframework - spring-context + * I confirmed the upgrade worked by running "mvn dependency:tree | grep spring", followed by "mvn jetty:run" and viewing the app in my browser. Upgrading to Jersey 2 The next item I tackled was upgrading to Jersey 2.4.1. I changed the version number in my pom.xml, then added the Jersey BOM. org.glassfish.jersey jersey-bom ${jersey.version} pom import You might ask "why Jersey?" if we already have Spring MVC and its REST support? You might also ask why not Play or Grails instead of a Java + Spring stack? For this particular project, I recommended technology options, and these were certainly among them. However, the team chose differently and I support their decision. The project is creating an iOS app, as well as a responsive HTML5 mobile/desktop app. We figured we had enough risk with new technologies on the front-end that we should play it a bit safer on the backend. To make the backend work a bit sexier, we've decided to allow Spring 4, Java 8 and possibly some reactive principles. Next, I changed from the old com.sun.jersey dependencies to org.glassfish.jersey and removed jersey-spring. org.glassfish.jersey.containers jersey-container-servlet org.glassfish.jersey.media jersey-media-json-jackson The last thing I needed to do was change the servlet-class and param-name in web.xml: jersey-servlet org.glassfish.jersey.servlet.ServletContainer jersey.config.server.provider.packages com.raibledesigns.boot.service 1 Requiring Java 8 Requiring Java 8 to compile was easy enough. I added the maven-compiler-plugin to enforce a minimum version. maven-compiler-plugin 3.1 1.8 1.8 I downloaded the latest Java 8 SDK and installed it. Then I set my JAVA_HOME to use it. export JAVA_HOME=`/usr/libexec/java_home -v 1.8` Integrating Spring Boot I learned about Spring Boot a few weeks ago at Devoxx. Josh Long gave me a 3-minute demo at the speaker's dinner and showed me enough to peak my interest. To integrate it into my project, I started with the Quick Start. I added the boot-parent, dependencies for web, security and actuator (logging, metrics, etc.) and the Maven plugin. I removed all the Spring and Spring Security dependencies. org.springframework.boot spring-boot-starter-parent 0.5.0.M6 ... spring-milestones http://repo.spring.io/milestone ... org.springframework.boot spring-boot-starter-web org.springframework.boot spring-boot-starter-security org.springframework.boot spring-boot-starter-actuator ... org.springframework.boot spring-boot-maven-plugin Upon restarting my app, I got an error about spring-security.xml using a 3.1 XSD. I fixed it by changing to 3.2. Next, I wanted to eliminate web.xml. First of all, I created an ApplicationInitializer so the WAR could be started from the command line. package com.raibledesigns.boot.config; import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication; import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.EnableAutoConfiguration; import org.springframework.boot.builder.SpringApplicationBuilder; import org.springframework.boot.web.SpringBootServletInitializer; import org.springframework.context.annotation.ComponentScan; import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration; @Configuration @EnableAutoConfiguration @ComponentScan public class ApplicationInitializer extends SpringBootServletInitializer { @Override protected SpringApplicationBuilder configure(SpringApplicationBuilder application) { return application.sources(ApplicationInitializer.class); } public static void main(String[] args) { SpringApplication.run(ApplicationInitializer.class, args); } } However, after adding this, I received the following error on startup: org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException: Error creating bean with name 'org.springframework.boot.context.properties.ConfigurationPropertiesBindingPostProcessor': Invocation of init method failed; nested exception is java.lang.AbstractMethodError: org.hibernate.validator.internal.engine.ConfigurationImpl .getDefaultParameterNameProvider()Ljavax/validation/ParameterNameProvider; Adding hibernate-validator as a dependency solved this problem: org.hibernate hibernate-validator To configure Spring Security without web.xml and spring-security.xml, I created WebSecurityConfig.java: package com.raibledesigns.boot.config; import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration; import org.springframework.core.Ordered; import org.springframework.core.annotation.Order; import org.springframework.security.config.annotation.authentication.builders.AuthenticationManagerBuilder; import org.springframework.security.config.annotation.web.builders.HttpSecurity; import org.springframework.security.config.annotation.web.configuration.EnableWebSecurity; import org.springframework.security.config.annotation.web.configuration.WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter; @Configuration @EnableWebSecurity @Order(Ordered.LOWEST_PRECEDENCE - 6) public class WebSecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter { @Override protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception { http.authorizeRequests() .antMatchers("/", "/home").permitAll() .antMatchers("/v1.0/**").hasRole("USER") .anyRequest().authenticated(); http.httpBasic().realmName("My API"); } @Override protected void configure(AuthenticationManagerBuilder authManagerBuilder) throws Exception { authManagerBuilder.inMemoryAuthentication() .withUser("test").password("test123").roles("USER"); } } To configure Jersey without web.xml, I created a JerseyConfig class: package com.raibledesigns.boot.config; import org.glassfish.jersey.filter.LoggingFilter; import org.glassfish.jersey.jackson.JacksonFeature; import org.glassfish.jersey.server.ResourceConfig; import org.glassfish.jersey.server.ServerProperties; import javax.ws.rs.ApplicationPath; @ApplicationPath("/v1.0") public class JerseyConfig extends ResourceConfig { public JerseyConfig() { packages("com.raibledesigns.boot.service"); property(ServerProperties.BV_SEND_ERROR_IN_RESPONSE, true); property(ServerProperties.JSON_PROCESSING_FEATURE_DISABLE, false); property(ServerProperties.MOXY_JSON_FEATURE_DISABLE, true); property(ServerProperties.WADL_FEATURE_DISABLE, true); register(LoggingFilter.class); register(JacksonFeature.class); } } Finally, I created MvcConfig.java to set the welcome page. package com.raibledesigns.boot.config; import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration; import org.springframework.web.servlet.config.annotation.ViewControllerRegistry; import org.springframework.web.servlet.config.annotation.WebMvcConfigurerAdapter; @Configuration public class MvcConfig extends WebMvcConfigurerAdapter { @Override public void addViewControllers(ViewControllerRegistry registry) { registry.addViewController("/").setViewName("index"); } } To cleanup, I deleted src/main/webapp/WEB-INF and created src/main/resources/logback.xml: Since Boot doesn't support JSP out-of-the-box, I renamed my index.jsp file to index.html and changed the URL in it to point to "/v1.0/hello". I was pleased to see that everything worked nicely. I learned shortly after that I could remove the Spring BOM since Spring Boot uses a property to control its Spring version. The only issue I found is when started the app with "mvn package && java -jar target/app.war", it failed to initialize Jersey. I tried adding a @Bean for the servlet: @Bean public ServletRegistrationBean jerseyServlet() { ServletRegistrationBean registration = new ServletRegistrationBean(new ServletContainer(), "/v1.0/*"); registration.addInitParameter(ServletProperties.JAXRS_APPLICATION_CLASS, JerseyConfig.class.getName()); return registration; } Unfortunately, when running it using "java -jar", I get the following error: org.glassfish.hk2.api.MultiException: A MultiException has 1 exceptions. They are: 1. org.glassfish.jersey.server.internal.scanning.ResourceFinderException: java.io.FileNotFoundException: /.../target/app.war!/WEB-INF/classes (No such file or directory) at org.jvnet.hk2.internal.Utilities.justCreate(Utilities.java:869) at org.jvnet.hk2.internal.ServiceLocatorImpl.create(ServiceLocatorImpl.java:814) at org.jvnet.hk2.internal.ServiceLocatorImpl.createAndInitialize(ServiceLocatorImpl.java:906) at org.jvnet.hk2.internal.ServiceLocatorImpl.createAndInitialize(ServiceLocatorImpl.java:898) at org.glassfish.jersey.server.ApplicationHandler.createApplication(ApplicationHandler.java:300) at org.glassfish.jersey.server.ApplicationHandler.(ApplicationHandler.java:279) at org.glassfish.jersey.servlet.WebComponent.(WebComponent.java:302) This seems strange since there is a WEB-INF/classes in my WAR. Regardless, this is not a Boot problem per se, but more of a Jersey issue. From one of the Boot developers: The whole idea with Boot is that servlets are just a transport - they are a means to an end, and hopefully not the only one - the "container" is Spring, not the servlet container. We probably could add some form of support for SCI but only by hacking the containers since the spec really doesn't allow for much control of their lifecycle. It hasn't been a priority so far. Summary I hope this article is useful to see how you to upgrade your Java webapps to use Spring 4 and Spring Boot. I've created a boot-makeover project on GitHub with all the code mentioned. You can also view the commits for each step.

CMS, or content management systems, are platforms for managing and administering website content. There is no denying that CMSes are important in today's web ecosystem. These content management systems not only provide an easy way to build and maintain websites, but they also lend a helping hand in updating and editing website content without the need to spend hours or days writing and altering codes and scripts. Some of the leading CMSes are PHP-based, Ruby on Rails-based, ASP.NET-based, and Java-based. Among these, due to scalability, modernized architecture and open-source standards of a few, Java-based CMSs are getting quite a lot of attention lately, especially for enterprise websites, because of the scalable, modern, open source technology behind most of them. There are plenty of CMS tools based on Java to help developers create multi-lingual and multi-channel websites. But how do we decide on the best one for our use case? In this article, we’re going to explore the top 24 content management systems based on Java. Let’s have a look at each of them in detail: 1. Alfresco : Alfresco is one of the top open-source content management systems of Java. It comes with enterprise repository and portlet capabilities along with document management, collaboration, records management, knowledge management, web content management, imaging, and a lot more. Alfresco has a modular architecture and enables end users to efficiently manage websites across the cloud, mobile, hybrid and on-premise environments using open source Java technologies, such as Spring, Hibernate, Lucene and JSF. 2. Magnolia : Magnolia is a well-documented, easy to use, enterprise-grade open source CMS based on the Java Content Repository Standard. It is a highly popular CMS due to its out-of-the-box functionality and ease of use under an open source license. Moreover, Magnolia supports unique content delivery capabilities in a search-engine optimized manner and also follows W3C standards. Magnolia CMS has been deployed by enterprises and governments in more than 100 countries across the world. Here's a case study on Magnolia-based website development 3. LogicalDOC : Though less known than other software such as Alfresco, LogicalDOC is emerging as a powerful and more affordable alternative. With primary focus on Document Management, it offers very interesting content management, knowledge management and collaboration features, and all this in a really efficient way. A peculiar aspect of the interface is the use of Google GWT , this makes the user interface very responsive while the data transfer with the server is minimum. Also the availability of Free Apps for Android and Apple devices (iPhone and iPad) is an interesting feature. 4. Asbru: Asbru is another powerful, fully-featured, easy to use content management system with database-driven capabilities. It is built on the Spring framework with integrated community, databases, eCommerce and statistics modules, which helps developers to create, publish and manage rich and user-friendly internet, extranet and intranet websites on the go. Available in various editions, Asbru provides users with a simple, user-friendly platform to manage websites along with a host of other benefits and features such as custom templates and data, password protected content, multi-lingual content, communities, eCommerce and website analytics, a cutting-edge WYSIWYG content editor and a lot more. 5. OpenCMS : OpenCMS is based on Java and XML technology that allows you to build highly customizable and interactive websites and portals. It comes integrated with a WYSIWYG editor and fully-featured Template Engine which is fully compliant with W3C standards. OpenCMS can be deployed both in an open-source environment (Linux, Apache, Tomcat, MySQL) as well as a commercial environment (Windows NT, IIS, BEA Weblogic, Oracle) 6. Walrus: Walrus is yet another Spring-based CMS that provides unique and effective content management capabilities with a smart administrative interface and drag-and-drop facilities. Easy-to-setup and undo/redo features make Walrus a highly preferred and suitable CMS for government and non-profit enterprises. 7. Pulse : Pulse is a Java-based framework and portal solution that offers easy-to-use and extensible patterns for creating rich browser web applications and responsive websites. It brings a bunch of innovative and powerful components including content management, web shops, user management and more. A few of its key features include a WebDAV based virtual file system for digital asset management, mature user and role management, built-in internationalization, and more. 8. MeshCMS: MeshCMS is an easy to use online editing system written in Java. It comes with a host of features that you will find in any ideal content management system however, it uses a conventional approach in managing and editing website content. It is considered one of the fastest CMSes for editing files online, managing files, and building some very common components like menus, breadcrumbs, mail forms and so on. MeshCMS is accompanied by cross-browser capabilities, a WYSIWYG editor, hot-linking prevention, and tag-library that makes content management an interesting affair. 9. Liferay: Liferay is one of the most popular CMSes based on Java, and is recommended by many industry experts. It comes with awesome features that can make your content management tasks simple. Liferay is a very popular for developing personal as well as professional websites with ease. 10. DotCMS: DotCMS is a next-gen enterprise CMS that wears an open-source hat. It is highly popular and widely used CMS due to its open APIs, extensible and scalable architecture that it used to create personalized and engaging websites, intranets, extranets and applications with ease. 11. Jease: Jease highly known as ‘Java with ease’ is another open source content management system that is built on popular Java technologies like db40, Perst, Lucence and ZK. It is an extremely lightweight CMS with excellent Ajax interface. Due to its intuitive and interactive interface, it is highly simple and easy to customize and deploy websites in Jease even for inexperienced Java developers. 12. Hippo: Hippo is again a powerful open-source CMS made in Java that features enterprise level capabilities that helps in delivering personalized websites and channels. Hippo outlines its competitor by delivering outstanding customer experience through innovative solutions. Hippo has come a long way since 1999 serving medium to large organizations by offering a personalized multichannel content distribution platform including website, mobile, tablet, extranets and intranets. Its major version update was in December 2012 and since then it is seeing minor updates every couple of months. 13. Apache Lenya: Apache Lenya is another open-source Java CMS that features revision control , multisite management, scheduling, search, WYSIWYG editors, and workflow which makes website development and management quite interesting and easy for developers. Available in a variety of languages, Apache Lenya is highly preferred CMS among enterprises that desire to develop multi-lingual websites. 14. Contelligent: Conteligent is another smart CMS solution offered under Java technology stack. It is fully compliant with J2EE and offers great solution for creating and managing personalized websites. 15. InfoGlue: InfoGlue again is a Java-based CMS that is known for its advanced, scalable and robust open-source architecture. It is a highly flexible CMS built on JSR-168 and comes with full multi-language support, excellent information reuse and high integration capabilities. 16. OpenEdit: OpenEdit CMS is a dynamic tool for managing website content with online editing capabilities. Built in open-source architecture, OpenEdit provides facilities like user manager, file manager, version control and notification tools for managing media-rich websites. OpenCMS features enterprise grade plugins such as eCommerce, Content Management, Blog, Events Calendar, Social Networking Tools and more. 17. AtLeap: Atleap is a multi-lingual CMS based on Java which offers amazing content delivery assistance with SEO and full text search functionalities. AtLeap, a product of Blandware, is not only a CMS but a highly robust framework for developing website and web applications 18. Weceem: Weceem is yet another open source content management system, unlikely other CMS it is built upon well-known Java framework grails, spring and Java itself. Weceem has garner positive reviews and is an ideal CMS when it comes to grails, but faces tough competition in best Java CMS category. I came across a LinkedIn discussion which was enough for me to put this CMS in the Best Java CMS list. 19. Nuxeo: Nuxeno is a powerful open source CMS built on Java-based architecture. It offers solutions related to document management, case management and digital asset management. It is free from licensing free but do costs you when reach out for support and maintenance help. It has strong groups of customers including Electronic Arts, U.S. Navy and as stated on the company website, it’s been used in over 145 countries across thousands of organizations. 20. XperienCentral: Xperien central is currently the only CMS that offers unique content to a visitor as per his earlier journey, so you can tailor the content to increase the conversion. It offers multi-channel content delivery across website, mobile social media channels and applications. It is built on Java and hence it is extremely scalable and agile. 21 Atex: Atex is a web CMS that uses polopoly technology to deliver content. As per claims, it is the only industry leading CMS with built in paywall. Atex again is one of the premium CMS that offers amazing solutions for managing websites and helps marketers deliver the right content to relevant audiences. It has rich set of clientele. 22 Escenic: Customers of escenic include News of the World, The Sun, The Times, the Independent titles. It’s a closed source Java framework. Both Atex and Escenic are found to be highly popular in Sweden. Some of the biggest sites in Sweden use both these CMS. idg.se uses Atex and Aftonbladet.se uses Escenic 23. Adobe Experience Manager/ CQ5 : Best CMS list cannot be completed without including adobe experience manager. It is an all-round CMS which offers all kinds of agility and flexibility an organization may want. It helps deliver unique customer experience by delivering different content on different channels. Adobe Experience Manager was recently named a leader in web content management by Garnters magic quadrant. Earlier it was known as CQ5 but later was acquire by Adobe in 2010 24. SDL Tridion Again a well known CMS and highly recommended by industry experts. Its simple intuitive UI makes it simple to manage the content and deliver it uniformly across all channels. It recently received top score in overall content management experience according to an independent research firm - Forrester Research, Inc., This completes the list 23 top Java-based content management system. Hope after reading about all the CMS, you have got enough inferences and insight as to which CMS would be best for your website development project.

Jetty 9.1 is finally released, bringing Java WebSockets (JSR-356) to non-EE environments. It's awesome news and today's post will be about using this great new API along with Spring Framework. JSR-356 defines concise, annotation-based model to allow modern Java web applications easily create bidirectional communication channels using WebSockets API. It covers not only server-side, but client-side as well, making this API really simple to use everywhere. Let's get started! Our goal would be to build a WebSockets server which accepts messages from the clients and broadcasts them to all other clients currently connected. To begin with, let's define the message format, which server and client will be exchanging, as this simple Message class. We can limit ourselves to something like a String, but I would like to introduce to you the power of another new API - Java API for JSON Processing (JSR-353). package com.example.services; public class Message { private String username; private String message; public Message() { } public Message( final String username, final String message ) { this.username = username; this.message = message; } public String getMessage() { return message; } public String getUsername() { return username; } public void setMessage( final String message ) { this.message = message; } public void setUsername( final String username ) { this.username = username; } } To separate the declarations related to the server and the client, JSR-356 defines two basic annotations:@ServerEndpoint and @ClientEndpoit respectively. Our client endpoint, let's call itBroadcastClientEndpoint, will simply listen for messages server sends: package com.example.services; import java.io.IOException; import java.util.logging.Logger; import javax.websocket.ClientEndpoint; import javax.websocket.EncodeException; import javax.websocket.OnMessage; import javax.websocket.OnOpen; import javax.websocket.Session; @ClientEndpoint public class BroadcastClientEndpoint { private static final Logger log = Logger.getLogger( BroadcastClientEndpoint.class.getName() ); @OnOpen public void onOpen( final Session session ) throws IOException, EncodeException { session.getBasicRemote().sendObject( new Message( "Client", "Hello!" ) ); } @OnMessage public void onMessage( final Message message ) { log.info( String.format( "Received message '%s' from '%s'", message.getMessage(), message.getUsername() ) ); } } That's literally it! Very clean, self-explanatory piece of code: @OnOpen is being called when client got connected to the server and @OnMessage is being called every time server sends a message to the client. Yes, it's very simple but there is a caveat: JSR-356 implementation can handle any simple objects but not the complex ones like Message is. To manage that, JSR-356 introduces concept of encoders and decoders. We all love JSON, so why don't we define our own JSON encoder and decoder? It's an easy task which Java API for JSON Processing (JSR-353) can handle for us. To create an encoder, you only need to implementEncoder.Text< Message > and basically serialize your object to some string, in our case to JSON string, using JsonObjectBuilder. package com.example.services; import javax.json.Json; import javax.json.JsonReaderFactory; import javax.websocket.EncodeException; import javax.websocket.Encoder; import javax.websocket.EndpointConfig; public class Message { public static class MessageEncoder implements Encoder.Text< Message > { @Override public void init( final EndpointConfig config ) { } @Override public String encode( final Message message ) throws EncodeException { return Json.createObjectBuilder() .add( "username", message.getUsername() ) .add( "message", message.getMessage() ) .build() .toString(); } @Override public void destroy() { } } } For decoder part, everything looks very similar, we have to implement Decoder.Text< Message > and deserialize our object from string, this time using JsonReader. package com.example.services; import javax.json.JsonObject; import javax.json.JsonReader; import javax.json.JsonReaderFactory; import javax.websocket.DecodeException; import javax.websocket.Decoder; public class Message { public static class MessageDecoder implements Decoder.Text< Message > { private JsonReaderFactory factory = Json.createReaderFactory( Collections.< String, Object >emptyMap() ); @Override public void init( final EndpointConfig config ) { } @Override public Message decode( final String str ) throws DecodeException { final Message message = new Message(); try( final JsonReader reader = factory.createReader( new StringReader( str ) ) ) { final JsonObject json = reader.readObject(); message.setUsername( json.getString( "username" ) ); message.setMessage( json.getString( "message" ) ); } return message; } @Override public boolean willDecode( final String str ) { return true; } @Override public void destroy() { } } } And as a final step, we need to tell the client (and the server, they share same decoders and encoders) that we have encoder and decoder for our messages. The easiest thing to do that is just by declaring them as part of @ServerEndpoint and @ClientEndpoit annotations. import com.example.services.Message.MessageDecoder; import com.example.services.Message.MessageEncoder; @ClientEndpoint( encoders = { MessageEncoder.class }, decoders = { MessageDecoder.class } ) public class BroadcastClientEndpoint { } To make client's example complete, we need some way to connect to the server usingBroadcastClientEndpoint and basically exchange messages. The ClientStarter class finalizes the picture: package com.example.ws; import java.net.URI; import java.util.UUID; import javax.websocket.ContainerProvider; import javax.websocket.Session; import javax.websocket.WebSocketContainer; import org.eclipse.jetty.websocket.jsr356.ClientContainer; import com.example.services.BroadcastClientEndpoint; import com.example.services.Message; public class ClientStarter { public static void main( final String[] args ) throws Exception { final String client = UUID.randomUUID().toString().substring( 0, 8 ); final WebSocketContainer container = ContainerProvider.getWebSocketContainer(); final String uri = "ws://localhost:8080/broadcast"; try( Session session = container.connectToServer( BroadcastClientEndpoint.class, URI.create( uri ) ) ) { for( int i = 1; i <= 10; ++i ) { session.getBasicRemote().sendObject( new Message( client, "Message #" + i ) ); Thread.sleep( 1000 ); } } // Application doesn't exit if container's threads are still running ( ( ClientContainer )container ).stop(); } } Just couple of comments what this code does: we are connecting to WebSockets endpoint atws://localhost:8080/broadcast, randomly picking some client name (from UUID) and generating 10 messages, every with 1 second delay (just to be sure we have time to receive them all back). Server part doesn't look very different and at this point could be understood without any additional comments (except may be the fact that server just broadcasts every message it receives to all connected clients). Important to mention here: new instance of the server endpoint is created every time new client connects to it (that's why peers collection is static), it's a default behavior and could be easily changed. package com.example.services; import java.io.IOException; import java.util.Collections; import java.util.HashSet; import java.util.Set; import javax.websocket.EncodeException; import javax.websocket.OnClose; import javax.websocket.OnMessage; import javax.websocket.OnOpen; import javax.websocket.Session; import javax.websocket.server.ServerEndpoint; import com.example.services.Message.MessageDecoder; import com.example.services.Message.MessageEncoder; @ServerEndpoint( value = "/broadcast", encoders = { MessageEncoder.class }, decoders = { MessageDecoder.class } ) public class BroadcastServerEndpoint { private static final Set< Session > sessions = Collections.synchronizedSet( new HashSet< Session >() ); @OnOpen public void onOpen( final Session session ) { sessions.add( session ); } @OnClose public void onClose( final Session session ) { sessions.remove( session ); } @OnMessage public void onMessage( final Message message, final Session client ) throws IOException, EncodeException { for( final Session session: sessions ) { session.getBasicRemote().sendObject( message ); } } } In order this endpoint to be available for connection, we should start the WebSockets container and register this endpoint inside it. As always, Jetty 9.1 is runnable in embedded mode effortlessly: package com.example.ws; import org.eclipse.jetty.server.Server; import org.eclipse.jetty.servlet.DefaultServlet; import org.eclipse.jetty.servlet.ServletContextHandler; import org.eclipse.jetty.servlet.ServletHolder; import org.eclipse.jetty.websocket.jsr356.server.deploy.WebSocketServerContainerInitializer; import org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener; import org.springframework.web.context.support.AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext; import com.example.config.AppConfig; public class ServerStarter { public static void main( String[] args ) throws Exception { Server server = new Server( 8080 ); // Create the 'root' Spring application context final ServletHolder servletHolder = new ServletHolder( new DefaultServlet() ); final ServletContextHandler context = new ServletContextHandler(); context.setContextPath( "/" ); context.addServlet( servletHolder, "/*" ); context.addEventListener( new ContextLoaderListener() ); context.setInitParameter( "contextClass", AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext.class.getName() ); context.setInitParameter( "contextConfigLocation", AppConfig.class.getName() ); server.setHandler( context ); WebSocketServerContainerInitializer.configureContext( context ); server.start(); server.join(); } } The most important part of the snippet above is WebSocketServerContainerInitializer.configureContext: it's actually creates the instance of WebSockets container. Because we haven't added any endpoints yet, the container basically sits here and does nothing. Spring Framework and AppConfig configuration class will do this last wiring for us. package com.example.config; import javax.annotation.PostConstruct; import javax.inject.Inject; import javax.websocket.DeploymentException; import javax.websocket.server.ServerContainer; import javax.websocket.server.ServerEndpoint; import javax.websocket.server.ServerEndpointConfig; import org.eclipse.jetty.websocket.jsr356.server.AnnotatedServerEndpointConfig; import org.springframework.context.annotation.Bean; import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration; import org.springframework.web.context.WebApplicationContext; import com.example.services.BroadcastServerEndpoint; @Configuration public class AppConfig { @Inject private WebApplicationContext context; private ServerContainer container; public class SpringServerEndpointConfigurator extends ServerEndpointConfig.Configurator { @Override public < T > T getEndpointInstance( Class< T > endpointClass ) throws InstantiationException { return context.getAutowireCapableBeanFactory().createBean( endpointClass ); } } @Bean public ServerEndpointConfig.Configurator configurator() { return new SpringServerEndpointConfigurator(); } @PostConstruct public void init() throws DeploymentException { container = ( ServerContainer )context.getServletContext(). getAttribute( javax.websocket.server.ServerContainer.class.getName() ); container.addEndpoint( new AnnotatedServerEndpointConfig( BroadcastServerEndpoint.class, BroadcastServerEndpoint.class.getAnnotation( ServerEndpoint.class ) ) { @Override public Configurator getConfigurator() { return configurator(); } } ); } } As we mentioned earlier, by default container will create new instance of server endpoint every time new client connects, and it does so by calling constructor, in our caseBroadcastServerEndpoint.class.newInstance(). It might be a desired behavior but because we are usingSpring Framework and dependency injection, such new objects are basically unmanaged beans. Thanks to very well-thought (in my opinion) design of JSR-356, it's actually quite easy to provide your own way of creating endpoint instances by implementing ServerEndpointConfig.Configurator. TheSpringServerEndpointConfigurator is an example of such implementation: it's creates new managed bean every time new endpoint instance is being asked (if you want single instance, you can create singleton of the endpoint as a bean in AppConfig and return it all the time). The way we retrieve the WebSockets container is Jetty-specific: from the attribute of the context with name"javax.websocket.server.ServerContainer" (it probably might change in the future). Once container is there, we are just adding new (managed!) endpoint by providing our own ServerEndpointConfig (based onAnnotatedServerEndpointConfig which Jetty kindly provides already). To build and run our server and clients, we need just do that: mvn clean package java -jar target\jetty-web-sockets-jsr356-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT-server.jar // run server java -jar target/jetty-web-sockets-jsr356-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT-client.jar // run yet another client As an example, by running server and couple of clients (I run 4 of them, '392f68ef', '8e3a869d', 'ca3a06d0', '6cb82119') you might see by the output in the console that each client receives all the messages from all other clients (including its own messages): Nov 29, 2013 9:21:29 PM com.example.services.BroadcastClientEndpoint onMessage INFO: Received message 'Hello!' from 'Client' Nov 29, 2013 9:21:29 PM com.example.services.BroadcastClientEndpoint onMessage INFO: Received message 'Message #1' from '392f68ef' Nov 29, 2013 9:21:29 PM com.example.services.BroadcastClientEndpoint onMessage INFO: Received message 'Message #2' from '8e3a869d' Nov 29, 2013 9:21:29 PM com.example.services.BroadcastClientEndpoint onMessage INFO: Received message 'Message #7' from 'ca3a06d0' Nov 29, 2013 9:21:30 PM com.example.services.BroadcastClientEndpoint onMessage INFO: Received message 'Message #4' from '6cb82119' Nov 29, 2013 9:21:30 PM com.example.services.BroadcastClientEndpoint onMessage INFO: Received message 'Message #2' from '392f68ef' Nov 29, 2013 9:21:30 PM com.example.services.BroadcastClientEndpoint onMessage INFO: Received message 'Message #3' from '8e3a869d' Nov 29, 2013 9:21:30 PM com.example.services.BroadcastClientEndpoint onMessage INFO: Received message 'Message #8' from 'ca3a06d0' Nov 29, 2013 9:21:31 PM com.example.services.BroadcastClientEndpoint onMessage INFO: Received message 'Message #5' from '6cb82119' Nov 29, 2013 9:21:31 PM com.example.services.BroadcastClientEndpoint onMessage INFO: Received message 'Message #3' from '392f68ef' Nov 29, 2013 9:21:31 PM com.example.services.BroadcastClientEndpoint onMessage INFO: Received message 'Message #4' from '8e3a869d' Nov 29, 2013 9:21:31 PM com.example.services.BroadcastClientEndpoint onMessage INFO: Received message 'Message #9' from 'ca3a06d0' Nov 29, 2013 9:21:32 PM com.example.services.BroadcastClientEndpoint onMessage INFO: Received message 'Message #6' from '6cb82119' Nov 29, 2013 9:21:32 PM com.example.services.BroadcastClientEndpoint onMessage INFO: Received message 'Message #4' from '392f68ef' Nov 29, 2013 9:21:32 PM com.example.services.BroadcastClientEndpoint onMessage INFO: Received message 'Message #5' from '8e3a869d' Nov 29, 2013 9:21:32 PM com.example.services.BroadcastClientEndpoint onMessage INFO: Received message 'Message #10' from 'ca3a06d0' Nov 29, 2013 9:21:33 PM com.example.services.BroadcastClientEndpoint onMessage INFO: Received message 'Message #7' from '6cb82119' Nov 29, 2013 9:21:33 PM com.example.services.BroadcastClientEndpoint onMessage INFO: Received message 'Message #5' from '392f68ef' Nov 29, 2013 9:21:33 PM com.example.services.BroadcastClientEndpoint onMessage INFO: Received message 'Message #6' from '8e3a869d' Nov 29, 2013 9:21:34 PM com.example.services.BroadcastClientEndpoint onMessage INFO: Received message 'Message #8' from '6cb82119' Nov 29, 2013 9:21:34 PM com.example.services.BroadcastClientEndpoint onMessage INFO: Received message 'Message #6' from '392f68ef' Nov 29, 2013 9:21:34 PM com.example.services.BroadcastClientEndpoint onMessage INFO: Received message 'Message #7' from '8e3a869d' Nov 29, 2013 9:21:35 PM com.example.services.BroadcastClientEndpoint onMessage INFO: Received message 'Message #9' from '6cb82119' Nov 29, 2013 9:21:35 PM com.example.services.BroadcastClientEndpoint onMessage INFO: Received message 'Message #7' from '392f68ef' Nov 29, 2013 9:21:35 PM com.example.services.BroadcastClientEndpoint onMessage INFO: Received message 'Message #8' from '8e3a869d' Nov 29, 2013 9:21:36 PM com.example.services.BroadcastClientEndpoint onMessage INFO: Received message 'Message #10' from '6cb82119' Nov 29, 2013 9:21:36 PM com.example.services.BroadcastClientEndpoint onMessage INFO: Received message 'Message #8' from '392f68ef' Nov 29, 2013 9:21:36 PM com.example.services.BroadcastClientEndpoint onMessage INFO: Received message 'Message #9' from '8e3a869d' Nov 29, 2013 9:21:37 PM com.example.services.BroadcastClientEndpoint onMessage INFO: Received message 'Message #9' from '392f68ef' Nov 29, 2013 9:21:37 PM com.example.services.BroadcastClientEndpoint onMessage INFO: Received message 'Message #10' from '8e3a869d' Nov 29, 2013 9:21:38 PM com.example.services.BroadcastClientEndpoint onMessage INFO: Received message 'Message #10' from '392f68ef' 2013-11-29 21:21:39.260:INFO:oejwc.WebSocketClient:main: Stopped org.eclipse.jetty.websocket.client.WebSocketClient@3af5f6dc Awesome! I hope this introductory blog post shows how easy it became to use modern web communication protocols in Java, thanks to Java WebSockets (JSR-356), Java API for JSON Processing (JSR-353) and great projects such as Jetty 9.1! As always, complete project is available on GitHub.

eclipse is very workspace centric: it only knows and deals with files in the workspace. so it is easy to compare and merge files present in the workspace: i select both files/folders and compare them with each other: compare with each other but what if the files and folders are not in the workspace? hidden option to compare external files as outlined in this post , it needs a special plugin to search for files outside the eclipse workspace. and doing a file or folder compare outside of the workspace requires a trick as shown in this post . thanks to a tip from john there is another (hidden) way in eclipse to compare external files keyboard shortcut the trick is described in this article and requires a keyboard shortcut assigned. select the menu window > preferences > general > keys and assign a shortcut key for ‘ compare with other resource ‘: compare with other resource key binding (i’m using ctrl+shift+home above). comparing to compare, i have first to select a file, folder or project, then i press my shortcut. then the following dialog shows up (with the selection as default): select resource to compare if the dialog does not show up, then i probably have not selected a file or folder in the eclipse project view. now i can select the external files or folders to compare with: selected external files with this, i can now compare and merge my files and folders with the eclipse compare view: compare view in eclipse i can select two files/folders and then press the shortcut, and it will populate the search dialog values. drag & drop that compare dialog has a nice feature: i can drag&drop files and folders too: c:\programdata\processor expert\cwmcu_pe5_00\examples\frdm-kl25z\frdm-kl25z_rnet\sources summary with ‘ compare with other resource ‘ i have a way to compare files/folders, and i’m not limited to the workspace files. the only disadvantage is that i need to assign a shortcut for it first. beside of that: yet another hidden treasure in eclipse . happy comparing

Unfortunately, I have seen it misused several times when a better design would be the solution.

Introduction I had an interesting conversation the other day about custom domain-specific languages and we happened to talk about a feature of Spring that I’ve used before but doesn’t seem to be widely known: the static application context. This post illustrates a basic example I wrote that introduces the static application context and shows how it might be useful. It’s also an interesting topic as it shows some of the well-architected internals of the Spring framework. Most uses of Spring start with XML or annotations and wind up with an application context instance. Behind the scenes, Spring has been working hard to instantiate objects, inject properties, invoke context aware listeners, and so forth. There are a set of classes internal to Spring to help this process along, as Spring needs to hold all of the configuration data about beans before any beans are instantiated. (This is because the beans may be defined in any order, and Spring doesn’t have the exhaustive set of dependencies until all beans are defined.) Spring Static Application Context Spring offers a class called StaticApplicationContext that gives programmatic access from Java to this whole configuration and registration process. This means we can define an entire application context from pure Java code, without using XML or Java annotations or any other tricks. The Javadoc for StaticApplicationContext is here, but an example is coming. Why might we use this? As the Javadoc says, it’s mainly useful for testing. Spring uses it for its own testing, but I’ve found it useful for testing applications that use Spring or other dependency management frameworks. Often, for unit testing, we want to inject different objects into a class from those used in production (e.g. mock objects, or objects that simulate remote invocation, database, or messaging). Of course, we can just keep a separate Spring XML configuration file for testing, but it’s very nice to have our whole configuration right there in the Java unit test class as it makes it easier to maintain. Example I’ve added an example to my intro-to-java repository on GitHub. I created aStaticContext class that provides a very basic Java domain-specific language (DSL) for Spring beans. This is just to make it easier to use from the unit test. The DSL only includes the most basic Spring capabilities: register a bean, set properties, and wire dependencies. package org.anvard.introtojava.spring; import org.springframework.beans.MutablePropertyValues; import org.springframework.beans.factory.config.ConstructorArgumentValues; import org.springframework.beans.factory.config.RuntimeBeanReference; import org.springframework.beans.factory.support.RootBeanDefinition; import org.springframework.context.ApplicationContext; import org.springframework.context.support.StaticApplicationContext; public class StaticContext { public class BeanContext { private String name; private Class beanClass; private ConstructorArgumentValues args; private MutablePropertyValues props; private BeanContext(String name, Class beanClass) { this.name = name; this.beanClass = beanClass; this.args = new ConstructorArgumentValues(); this.props = new MutablePropertyValues(); } public BeanContext arg(Object arg) { args.addGenericArgumentValue(arg); return this; } public BeanContext arg(int index, Object arg) { args.addIndexedArgumentValue(index, arg); return this; } public BeanContext prop(String name, Object value) { props.add(name, value); return this; } public BeanContext ref(String name, String beanRef) { props.add(name, new RuntimeBeanReference(beanRef)); return this; } public void build() { RootBeanDefinition def = new RootBeanDefinition(beanClass, args, props); ctx.registerBeanDefinition(name, def); } } private StaticApplicationContext ctx; private StaticContext() { this.ctx = new StaticApplicationContext(); } public static StaticContext create() { return new StaticContext(); } public ApplicationContext build() { ctx.refresh(); return ctx; } public BeanContext bean(String name, Class beanClass) { return new BeanContext(name, beanClass); } } This class uses several classes that are normally internal to Spring: StaticApplicationContext: Holds bean definitions and provides regular Java methods for registering beans. ConstructorArgumentValues: A smart list for a bean’s constructor arguments. Can hold both wire-by-type and indexed constructor arguments. MutablePropertyValues: A smart list for a bean’s properties. Can hold regular objects and references to other Spring beans. RuntimeBeanReference: A reference by name to a bean in the context. Used for wiring beans together because it allows Spring to delay resolution of a dependency until it’s been instantiated. The StaticContext class uses the builder pattern and provides for method chaining. This makes for cleaner use from our unit test code. Here’s the simplest example: @Test public void basicBean() { StaticContext sc = create(); sc.bean("basic", InnerBean.class).prop("prop1", "abc"). prop("prop2", "def").build(); ApplicationContext ctx = sc.build(); assertNotNull(ctx); InnerBean bean = (InnerBean) ctx.getBean("basic"); assertNotNull(bean); assertEquals("abc", bean.getProp1()); assertEquals("def", bean.getProp2()); } A slightly more realistic example that includes wiring beans together is not much more complicated: @Test public void innerBean() { StaticContext sc = create(); sc.bean("outer", OuterBean.class).prop("prop1", "xyz"). ref("inner", "inner").build(); sc.bean("inner", InnerBean.class).prop("prop1", "ghi"). prop("prop2", "jkl").build(); ApplicationContext ctx = sc.build(); assertNotNull(ctx); InnerBean inner = (InnerBean) ctx.getBean("inner"); assertNotNull(inner); assertEquals("ghi", inner.getProp1()); assertEquals("jkl", inner.getProp2()); OuterBean outer = (OuterBean) ctx.getBean(OuterBean.class); assertNotNull(outer); assertEquals("xyz", outer.getProp1()); assertEquals(inner, outer.getInner()); } Note that once we build the context, we can use it like any other Spring application context, including fetching beans by name or type. Also note that the two contexts we created here are completely separate, which is important for unit testing. Conclusion Much like my post on custom Spring XML, the static application context is a specialty feature that isn’t intended for everyday users of Spring. But I’ve found it convenient when unit testing and it provides an interesting peek into how Spring works.

A quick overview on how to see your heaps in Eclipse.

Android 4.4 has made a big change in the OS’ internals for HTML5 development: it has replaced its original WebKit-based WebView with modern Chromium. The new Android Browser is also powered by Chromium, but it’s not clear yet its future. Besides the good news, not everything looks exciting in these changes: let’s see why. Every web developer that has played with native webapps, PhoneGap and the Android’s WebView knows how terrible it was in terms of performance and HTML5 compatibility. These are the same problems that most web developers suffer right now with the Android Browser, which is reported to be 32% of the mobile web browsing market share, compared with just 5% of the modern Chrome for Android according to Akamai. I’ve been talking about this problem in a recent post this year: Android Browser: the eternal mobile browser. Therefore I’m the first one to celebrate the beginning of the end for this dying web platform and the Chrome team now in charge of Android’s web runtimes. Chroming Android From Android 4.4, Chromium 30 is the web engine for the WebView native widget, including the V8 JavaScript engine. Let’s start with good news: Support for remote debugging Support for new HTML5 features Better performance Now why we should take this change with moderated excitement: We will still deal with the old WebView for a couple of years. It won’t be upgraded without an OS upgrade There might be some compatibility issues Where is My Browser? Everybody at Android and Chrome team is talking about the new WebView but nobody is even mentioning what will happen to the browser. We all want Chrome as the default browser, but it seems it’s not there yet (licenses issues, I guess). I’ve even seen a couple of members of the Chrome team saying that the stock Android Browser didn’t exist in the latest previous versions, which is not true. From Google’s perspective, Android Browser sounds much like IE6 and nobody wants to talk about it. They give us the idea that Chrome has been powering web browsing in Android for a while, but that is only true for some particular Android devices - Nexuses and devices from top manufactures. However, as I’ve mentioned before, the relationship between users browsing with Android Browser and Chrome is still 7 to 1. Besides what some people believe, the previous version of Android, 4.3, included minor upgrades to the Browser, so it is there for sure. The question is: what will happen on 4.4 with the stock browser? We know that the Nexus 5 has Google Chrome by default; the question here is what will happen with other devices having in mind that average users don’t download browsers from the store and use what the devices offers for browsing. Based on the emulator, the Android Browser is still there on the emulator and it’s using the classic browser UI with the Chromium 30 engine (it can coexist with Chrome but they will be radically different) Unfortunately, there is no mention of this on docs and blogs on Android 4.4. I hope we can get a real answer from the Android team soon about the future of the browser itself. The Good News Remote debugging Finally we have the ability to debug remotely Android native webviews, including PhoneGap apps, and the Android Browser works smoothly both from real devices and from the emulator. When we have an Android app opened with a web view or the Android Browser, the Chrome remote debugger tools will recognize it as a “Chrome 30” session and we have the full package of excellent tools for debug, profile and test our webapps. HTML5 new features Compared with the classic web view and the Android Browser until 4.3, we now have support for: Server Sent events Web Sockets Web Workers Advanced form input selectors, such as date and time FileSystem API IndexedDB MediaCapture Stream ??? test Animation Timing API Page Visibility API Canvas Blend modes CSS3 Flexbox (latest version) CSS3 Filters Even matching Chrome 30 for Android, the Web View (and potentially the Android Browser) will not have support (no reasons given) for: WebGL WebRTC WebAudio FullScreen Form validation Compared with the classic Web View, the new one doesn’t have Network Information API Performance difference Having V8 as the JavaScript engine for the new web view, the JavaScript performance if much better, besides general performance on CSS thanks to hardware acceleration. The Not so Good News The Classic Web View is still alive Don’t get so excited. We will deal with the old Web View (known as “classic”) for a couple of years. In fact, some devices such as Galaxy Nexus that are today on 4.3 will not get the update. And remember that still today 30% of Android users are on 2.x after 2 years of being replaced by 4.0, so it’s fair to guess that at the beginning of 2016 we will still have around a third of the users on the “classic” WebView that we hate today. The migration on the market will be slow based on Android’s fragmentation. WebView upgrade The KitKat WebView is based on Chromium 30 and it won’t be updated. That means you are stuck with it unless to get an upgrade in the future of the whole OS to next version. Even Google has announced OS delta updates without vendors’ intervention, but it seems the WebView will not get that deal yet. Therefore and based on Chrome's release cycle, in one year we will have Chrome 40 and the WebView will still be in 30. In a couple of years we might be complaining about an “old and outdated” webview again Compatibility issues Because there are changes between the old WebKit-based rendering engine and the modern Chromium engine, you should test your native webapp on KitKat to make sure it’s still working great. To reduce problems, if our app was packaged before KitKat the WebView will enter a “quirks mode” (any similarity with IE6 is pure coincidence) that will reduce the risk of incompatibilities while still getting the new APIs. In fact, this compatibility mode will get in action if the configuration file of your app has a target SDK lower than 19 (the API number for KitKat). To get more detailed information on migration and compatibility issues you can try the new Guides at Android and Chrome websites: http://developer.android.com/guide/webapps/migrating.html http://developers.google.com/chrome/mobile/docs/webview Looking Forward I’m really looking forward to remove the old WebKit and Android Browser from the market. The Chrome team is doing a great job empowering the mobile web (just remember homescreen webapps from Chrome 31), but sometimes the Android ecosystem is slowing down HTML5 penetration and helping promoting companies to avoid using web technologies. I hope this is the beginning of a change.

This blog post demonstrates how easy it is to use Apache Camel and its new json-path component along with the camel-sqs component to produce and consume messages on Amazon SQS. Amazon Web Services SQS is a message queuing “software as a service” (SaaS) in the cloud. To be able to use it, you need to sign up for AWS. It’s primary access mechanism is XML over HTTP through various AWS SDK clients provided by Amazon. Please check out the SQS documentation for more. And as “luck” would have it, one of the users in the Apache Camel community created a component to be able to integrate with SQS. This makes it trivial to add a producer or consumer to an SQS queue and plugs in nicely with the Camel DSL. SQS, however, is not a “one-size fits all” queueing service; you must be aware of your use case and make sure it fits (current requirements as well as somewhat into the future…). There are limitations that, if not studied and accounted for ahead of time, could come back to sink your project. An example of a viable alternative, and one that more closely fits the profile of a high performance and full featured message queue is Apache ActiveMQ. For example, one limitation to keep in mind is that unlike traditional JMS consumers, you cannot create a subscription to a queue that filters messages based on some predicate (at least not using the AWS-SQS API — you’d have to build that into your solution). Some other things to keep in mind when using SQS: The queue does not preserve FIFO messaging That is, message order is not preserved. They can arrive out of order from when they were sent. Apache Camel can help with its resequencer pattern. Bilgin Ibryam, now a colleague of mine at Red Hat, has written a great blog post about how to restore message order using the resequencer pattern. Message size is limited to 256K This is probably sufficient, but if your message sizes are variable, or contain more data that 256K, you will have to chunk them and send in smaller chunks. No selector or selective consumption If you’re familiar with JMS, you know that you can specify consumers to use a “selector” or a predicate expression that is evaluated on the broker side to determine whether or not a specific message should be dispatched to a specific consumer. For example, Durability constraints Some use cases call for the message broker to store messages until consumers return. SQS allows a limit of up to 14 days. This is most likely sufficient, but something to keep in mind. Binary payloads not allowed SQS only allows text-based messages, e.g., XML, JSON, fixed format text, etc. Binary such as Avro, Protocol Buffers, or Thrift are not allowed. For some of these limitations, you can work around them by building out the functionality yourself. I would always recommend taking a look at how an integration library like Apache Camel can help — which has out-of-the-box support for doing some of these things. Doing JMS-style selectors So the basic problem is we want to subscribe to a SQS queue, but we want to filter which messages we process. For those messages that we do not process, those should be left in the queue. To do this, we will make use of Apache Camel’s Filter EIP as well as the visibility timeouts available on the SQS queue. By default, SQS will dispatch all messages in its queue when it’s queried. We cannot change this, and thus not avoid the message being dispatched to us — we’ll have to do the filtering on our side (this is different than how a full-featured broker like ActiveMQ does it, i.e., filtering is done on the broker side so the consumer doesn’t even see the message it does not want to see). Once SQS dispatches a message, it does not remove it from the queue unless the consumer has acknowledged that it has it and is finished with it. The consumer does this by sending a DeleteMessage command. Until the DeleteMessage command is sent, the message is always in the queue, however visibility comes in to play here. When a message is dispatched to a consumer, there is a period of time which it will not be visible to other consumers. So if you browsed the queue, you would not see it (it should appear in the stats as “in-flight”). However, there is a configurable period of time you can specify for how long this “visibility timeout” should be active. So if you set the visibility to a lower time period (default is 30 seconds), you can more quickly get messages re-dispatched to consumers that would be able to handle the message. Take a look at the following Camel route which does just that: @Override public void configure() throws Exception { // every two seconds, send a message to the "demo" queue in SQS from("timer:kickoff?period=5000") .setBody().method(this, "generateJsonString") .to("aws-sqs://demo?amazonSQSClient=#sqsClient&defaultVisibilityTimeout=2"); } In the above Camel Route, we create a new message every 5 seconds and send it to an SQS queue named demo — note we set the defaultVisibilityTimeout to 2 seconds. This means that after a message gets dispatched to a consumer, SQS will wait about 2 seconds before considering it eligible to be dispatched to another consumer if it has not been deleted. On the consumer side, we take advantage of a couple Apache Camel conveniences Using JSON Path + Filter EIP Camel has an excellent new component named JSON-Path. Claus Ibsen tweeted about it when he hacked it up. This allows you to do Content-Based Routing on a JSON payload very easily by using XPath-style expressions to pick out and evaluate attributes in a JSON encoded object. So in the following example, we can test an attribute named ‘type’ to be equal to ‘LOGIN’ and use Camel’s Filter EIP to allow only those messages that match to go through and continue processing: public class ConsumerRouteBuilder extends RouteBuilder { @Override public void configure() throws Exception { from("aws-sqs://demo?amazonSQSClient=#sqsClient&deleteIfFiltered=false") .setHeader("identity").jsonpath("$['type']") .filter(simple("${header.identity} == 'login'")) .log("We have a message! ${body}") .to("file:target/output?fileName=login-message-${date:now:MMDDyy-HHmmss}.json"); } } To complete the functionality, we have to pay attention to a new configuration option added for the Camel-SQS component: deleteIfFiltered — Whether or not to send the DeleteMessage to the SQS queue if an exchange fails to get through a filter. If ‘false’ and exchange does not make it through a Camel filter upstream in the route, then don’t send DeleteMessage. By default, Camel will send the “DeleteMessage” command to SQS after a route has completed successfully (without an exception). However, in this case, we are specifying to not send the DeleteMessage command if the message had been previously filtered by Camel. This example demonstrates how easy it is to use Apache Camel and its new json-path component along with the camel-sqs component to produce and consume messages on Amazon SQS. Please take a look at the source code on my github repo to play with the live code and try it out yourself.

Introduction Over the weekend, I decided to try and import image metadata using C# and the .NET Framework. Aside from “normal” file attributes such as date modified and size, the Windows Explorer (shell) provides extended file property information which can be quite valuable. The challenge was how to extract this information, given that the .NET Framework has somewhat limited support for this type of extraction? Read on to find out how. Extended File Property Data When you right click on a file in Windows Explorer and select “Properties”, you’ll notice a tab called “Details”. Likewise, if you change the folder view to “Details” view and right click on the column headings, you can select “More…” which allows you to include extended property columns which are available to view. Note that many properties will not be applicable depending on the type of files contained within the folder. Once added, the Explorer view will show you additional property data for each file; this is the kind of data we’ll be querying using the .NET Framework. Image Data In my specific scenario, I want access to extended properties which relate to photos, e.g. ISO Speed, F-stop, Focal Length, Dimensions and so forth. Each property has an identifier which can be used to retrieve the associated property data. You can do this from .NET for some information, as seen here: Image image = new Bitmap(file); PropertyItem propItem = image.GetPropertyItem(36867); string dateTaken = r.Replace(Encoding.UTF8.GetString(propItem.Value), "-", 2); var dateTaken = DateTime.Parse(dateTaken); Therefore you can obtain more information like this by using Win32 interop and invoking shell calls directly from C#/.NET, but this can be time consuming, not to mention laborious as you have to track down the correct Win32 API interfaces and property item IDs to use. Surely there’s an easier way? Introducing the Windows API Code Pack Thankfully, someone has already done the leg work for us, and it has culminated in the extremely usefulWindows API Code Pack, the latest release being available via this link. The Pack itself contains documentation, samples, pre-compiled binaries and the source code for the binaries. Honestly, I found the documentation and samples to be a bit underwhelming, but the core assemblies are absolutely gold – once you figure out how to use them properly. The following is a screenshot of the Explorer Browser which ships as a sample with the Pack: This could be one of the most disturbing things I’ve seen in ages Retrieving Extended Property Data One of the best features of the Pack must be the fact that someone has gone and mapped all the extended property values to strongly typed definitions, which saves us a lot of time and effort. For example, given the fully qualified path and file name of a photo, we could retrieve extended file information (such as Camera Manufacturer and Camera Model) by using the following code: ShellObject picture = ShellObject.FromParsingName(file); var camera = picture.Properties.GetProperty(SystemProperties.System.Photo.CameraModel); newItem.CameraModel = GetValue(camera, String.Empty, String.Empty); var company = picture.Properties.GetProperty(SystemProperties.System.Photo.CameraManufacturer); newItem.CameraMaker = GetValue(company, String.Empty, String.Empty); The SystemProperties class defines an incredibly useful hierarchy of extended property identifiers which can be used in conjunction with shell objects, as demonstrated above. Using the Pack Based on the above, it was easy as pie to extract extended photo property data. I wrote a small utility to demonstrate how straight forward it is to extract the required data. You need to reference two assemblies from the pack – Microsoft.WindowsAPICodePack.dll andMicrosoft.WindowsAPICodePack.Shell.dll. Here’s a complete dump of the code I used: using System; using Microsoft.WindowsAPICodePack.Shell.PropertySystem; using Microsoft.WindowsAPICodePack.Shell; using System.Diagnostics; namespace DataTools.FilePropertyExtract { class Program { private static string GetValue(IShellProperty value) { if (value == null || value.ValueAsObject == null) { return String.Empty; } return value.ValueAsObject.ToString(); } static void Main(string[] args) { if (args.Length != 1) return; string filename = args[0]; if (!System.IO.File.Exists(filename)) return; ShellObject picture = ShellObject.FromParsingName(filename); if (picture != null) { var camera = GetValue(picture.Properties. GetProperty(SystemProperties.System.Photo.CameraManufacturer)); var cameraModel = GetValue(picture.Properties. GetProperty(SystemProperties.System.Photo.CameraModel)); var formattedString = String.Format("File {0} has Manufacturer {1} and Model {2}", filename, camera, cameraModel); Trace.WriteLine(formattedString); } } } } Which results in the following, if you pass a fully qualified path and file name of a photo to extract data from: Note that in this case, the file did not have a Camera Manufacturer so the property was empty (but not null). Summary There’s obviously a lot more to this Pack than an abstraction of the Windows Shell API. I might do some more exploration at a later time, but I felt this article might be handy for those out there who needed an easier solution for extracting extended file property data. Enjoy.

Introduction One of the nice recent features of Spring (2.x era) is support for custom XML. This is the way that Spring itself has added all kinds of new tags such as and . The way this works is pretty elegant, to the point that it makes an interesting alternative for configuring Java using XML, particularly if the application already uses Spring. I’ve written an example application to try to give an easily-copied example of how it’s done. The example uses Spring and a custom XML parser to build dynamic Swing menus. It makes a nice comparison to doing dynamic Swing menus using the Digester version I posted a while back. Of course, this is not a good way to make Java menus in general! In most applications, this would be an example of Soft Coding. This would really only make sense in an application where it was really important to be able to add or remove menus without changing Java code. So treat it as a nice example, but please don’t start making your GUIs this way. Spring Custom XML Custom XML works in a Spring configuration file because Spring can dynamically validate and parse XML. To do this, Spring first has to be able to validate the XML it parses against a schema. It does this by looking for all files on the classpath called META-INF/spring.schemas. These files provide a location on the classpath for the XML schema that goes with a given namespace. For example, the “core” XML for Spring is defined in the beansnamespace. The META-INF/spring.schemas file in the spring-beans JAR has entries like this one: http\://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd=org/springframework/beans/factory/xml/spring-beans-3.0.xsd So when we use the beans schema in our Spring XML, it knows where on the classpath to hunt down the schema so it can validate that XML. Once the schema is validated, Spring needs to find a “handler” that knows how to make Spring beans based on the XML. Spring finds handlers by looking through all the files on the classpath called META-INF/spring.handlers. Thespring.handlers file in the spring-beans JAR has entries like this one: http\://www.springframework.org/schema/p=org.springframework.beans.factory.xml.SimplePropertyNamespaceHandler It’s really the job of the handler to make bean definitions, not the regular Java objects that will live as beans in the Spring application context. This is because Spring still has to manage things like beans depending on other beans, which means Spring has to parse all the XML to figure out the dependency graph before any objects can be instantiated. Example Application Our example application has several parts: The spring.schemas and spring.handlers files in META-INF. An XML schema defining what is valid in our custom namespace. MenuNamespaceHandler, the entry class that allows us to register what XML elements go with what parser classes. MenuDefinitionParser, the actual XML parser for our custom XML namespace. A regular Spring XML configuration file that also includes our custom XML. A main class to get the whole thing kicked off. There’s also a Java class called MenuItem that we use to store the ID, the title, and any children of the menu item. It doesn’t know anything about Spring or XML; it’s just a POJO. Defining the custom XML The spring.schemas file is pretty simple. Note that it’s matching to a file on the classpath; Spring is not going to be looking out on the Internet for your XML schema at runtime. http\://anvard.org/springxml/menu.xsd=org/anvard/springxml/menu.xsd The spring.handlers file is also pretty simple. It just points to the right handler class: http\://anvard.org/springxml/menu=org.anvard.springxml.MenuNamespaceHandler The XML schema is omitted here; it’s an XML schema and not much need be said. Of note is that it allows for arbitrary nesting of elements inside other elements. One more piece of boilerplate; the namespace handler. Since our namespace is really simple and only contains one top-level element (menu), it’s a one-liner: public void init() { registerBeanDefinitionParser("menu", new MenuDefinitionParser()); } The parser is where it gets interesting. The parser will get called while Spring is reading the XML file, whenever it comes across an element that belongs to the matching namespace. However, it will only be called for the top-level element; it’s up to us to handle any nested elements as required. protected AbstractBeanDefinition parseInternal(Element element, ParserContext context) { BeanDefinitionBuilder builder = parseItem(element); List childElements = DomUtils.getChildElementsByTagName( element, "menu"); if (null != childElements && childElements.size() > 0) { ManagedList children = new ManagedList<>( childElements.size()); for (Element child : childElements) { children.add(parseInternal(child, context)); } builder.addPropertyValue("children", children); } return builder.getBeanDefinition(); } private BeanDefinitionBuilder parseItem(Element element) { BeanDefinitionBuilder builder = BeanDefinitionBuilder .rootBeanDefinition(MenuItem.class); String id = element.getAttribute("id"); if (StringUtils.hasText(id)) { builder.addPropertyValue("id", id); } String title = element.getAttribute("title"); if (StringUtils.hasText(title)) { builder.addPropertyValue("title", title); } String listener = element.getAttribute("listener"); if (StringUtils.hasText(listener)) { builder.addPropertyReference("listener", listener); } return builder; } In this case, because we allowed for the idea that a menu could contain child menus, we have to handle that here with some recursion. Note that for every element at whatever level, we are creating a separate Spring bean definition (that’s one purpose of the rootBeanDefinition() static method call). The really important thing to notice is that as we build the bean definition, we are not creating a MenuItem object directly, nor are we setting any properties directly. In fact, in the case of the children property, we are not even building a list of the correct type, as the MenuItem class expects to receive a list of MenuItem children, but we are building a list ofAbstractBeanDefinition. Spring handles all of the necessary wiring when it actually instantiates our MenuList objects, including looking up each of the references in the list and populating a new list with the real objects. One other thing that’s slightly confusing is that a reference to a single other Spring bean uses addPropertyReference(), while a managed list of Spring bean definitions uses addPropertyValue(). Using the custom XML Now that these items are in place, we can use the custom XML just the same as any other XML in a Spring configuration file. For example: Note that we can make our custom XML the default namespace so we don’t have to prefix our XML elements; we can also make the bean namespace the default as is more typical in a Spring XML configuration file. We can mix our custom XML freely with standard Spring XML. Also note that our custom XML can make references back to ordinary Spring beans as long as we do the right thing in our parser to make this work. We use a list called toplevel as a handy way of finding the outermost menu items for our menu bar. Once the XML is parsed, the beans are all loaded into the Spring application context and the structure of the XML no longer really applies. Using this file from our main class looks just the same as any Spring code: ClassPathXmlApplicationContext ctx = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("/menuDefinition.xml"); All of our menu items are available in the Spring application context, so we could do ctx.getBean("menu9") and get back the menu item with the title “Child 5”. Conclusion Even though many Spring users are shifting toward annotation-driven configuration, there are still things that are easier to do in XML, like creating many instances of a class with different properties. A custom XML namespace is a way to make Spring XML configuration more compact and more readable.

Previous posts such as this one have shown using embedded Jetty to REST-enable a standalone Java program. Those posts were lacking an important feature for real applications: packaging into a JAR so the application will run outside of Eclipse and won’t be dependent on Maven and jetty:run. To make this happen, we will use Maven to build an executable JAR that also includes all of the Jetty and Spring dependencies we need. The goal of this work is to get to the point where we can run the example application by: Cloning the Git repository. Running mvn package. Running java -jar target/webmvc-standalone.jar When I started adding the necessary bits to the pom.xml file of my sample application, I expected a relatively straightforward solution. I ended up with a relatively straightforward solution that was completely different from what I expected. So I think it’s worth a detailed discussion of how this solution works and what Maven is doing for us. Our desire to make an executable JAR is complicated by the fact that we want our Maven project to build a WAR as a default package, so that we can use this code in a Java web container if desired. Additionally, we introduce some complexity by making a single JAR with all dependencies, because that causes files in the Spring JARs to collide. I’ll show what I did to address each of these. Build both JAR and WAR The basic idea here is that we want Maven to make both a JAR file and a WAR file during the “package” phase. Our pom.xml file specifies war as the packaging for this project, so the WAR file will be created as expected. We need to add the JAR file without disturbing this. I found a great post here that got me started. The basic idea is to add the following to pom.xml under build/plugins: org.apache.maven.plugins maven-jar-plugin 2.4 package-jar package jar This is the behavior we would get for “free” if we used jar packaging inpom.xml. The execution section ties it to the package phase so that it runs during the default build process. The jar goal tells the plugin what to make. This gets us a basic JAR with the classes in the normal place for a JAR (rather than in WEB-INF/classes as they must be in the WAR file). At the same time, we need to deal with the fact that the Maven resources plugin considers only src/main/resources to be a resources directory, while in our case we have files in src/main/webapp that also need to be included. We want to copy these resources to the target directory so the JAR plugin will pick them up. (This is an important distinction; the typical Maven question, “how do I include extra resources in my JAR?” should really be “how do I get extra resources into target so the JAR plugin will pick them up?”) We add this to the build section of pom.xml: src/main/resources src/main/webapp This causes our new webmvc.jar file to include the HTML, JavaScript, etc. required for our embedded Jetty webapp. JAR with dependencies Next, we make an additional JAR that has the correct Main-Class entry in theMANIFEST.MF file and includes the necessary dependencies so we only have to ship one file. This is done using the Maven assembly plugin. The assembly plugin does repackaging only; that’s why we had to add a JAR artifact above. Without that JAR artifact to work from, the assembly plugin repackages the WAR, and we end up with classes in WEB-INF/classes. This causes Java to complain that it can’t find our main class when we try to run the JAR. The assembly plugin comes with a jar-with-dependencies configuration that can be used simply by adding it as a descriptorRef to the relevant section of pom.xml, as shown in this StackOverflow question. However, this configuration doesn’t work in our particular case, as the Spring dependencies we need have files with overlapping names. As a result, we need to make our own assembly configuration. Fortunately, this is pretty simple. We first add this to the build/plugins section of pom.xml: org.apache.maven.plugins maven-assembly-plugin 2.4 src/assemble/distribution.xml org.anvard.webmvc.server.EmbeddedServer package single As before, we use the executions section to make sure this is run automaticaly during package. We also specify the main class for our application. Finally, we point the plugin to our assembly configuration file, which lives in src/assemble. I present the assembly configuration below, but first we need to talk about the issue with the Spring JARs that made this custom assembly necessary. Spring schemas and handlers With this sample application, we use Spring WebMVC to provide a REST API for ordinary Java classes, as discussed in this post. The Spring code we use is spread across a few different JARs. Recent versions of Spring added a “custom XML namespace” feature that allows the contents of a Spring XML configuration file to be very extensible. Spring WebMVC, and other Spring libraries, use this feature to provide custom XML tags. In order to parse the XML file with these custom tags, Spring needs to be able to match these custom namespaces to handlers. To do this, Spring expects to find files called spring.handlers andspring.schemas in the META-INF directory of any JAR providing a Spring custom namespace. Several of the Spring JARs used by this application include thosespring.handlers and spring.schemas files. Of course, each JAR only includes its own handlers and schemas. When the Maven assembly plugin uses the jar-with-dependencies configuration, only one copy of those files “wins” and makes it into the executable JAR. We really just need a single spring.handlers and spring.schemas that are the concatentation of the respective files. There is probably some Maven magic to accomplish this, but I elected to do it manually as my Bash-fu is much greater than my Maven-fu. I added two files to the src/assemble directory that have the combined contents of the various files in the Spring JARs. Maven assembly configuration The assembly file looks like this: standalone jar true META-INF/spring.handlers META-INF/spring.schemas src/assemble/spring.handlers /META-INF false src/assemble/spring.schemas /META-INF false The id will be used to name this assembly. The baseDirectory tells the assembly plugin that the pieces it assembles should go at the root of the new JAR. (Otherwise they would go into a directory using the project name, in this case “webapp”.) The next two sections are important. We want to exclude thespring.handlers and spring.schemas from the Spring JARs (a.k.a. the dependency set). Instead, we want to explicitly include them from oursrc/assemble directory, and put them into the right place. We also want the assembly plugin to unpack the dependency set JARs so we wind up with Java class files in our new JAR, rather than just JAR-files-inside-JAR-file, which would not run correctly. Notice that there is no directive telling Spring to include all dependencies from the dependency set, including transitive dependencies. This is the default so we don’t need to specify it. It’s also the default to include the unpacked files from our own artifact (webmvc.jar) into the new JAR. Conclusion A real-world application would probably pick either WAR packaging or executable JAR packaging, and be simpler. Additionally, it would be possible to use multiple Maven modules to build a JAR and embed it in the WAR. But it’s interesting to see how to implement a more complex solution that builds everything we need from a single project.

The Windows Explorer (shell) provides extended file property information which can be quite valuable. The challenge was how to extract this information, given that the .NET Framework has somewhat limited support for this type of extraction?

in today’s tutorial, i’m going to show you the process of creating nearly an entire website with a new library – angularjs. however, i would like to introduce to you to angularjs first. angularjs is a magnificent framework by google for creating web applications. this framework lets you extend html’s syntax to express your application’s components clearly and succinctly, and lets you use standard html as your main template language. plus, it automatically synchronizes data from your ui with your js objects through 2-way data binding. if you’ve ever worked with jquery, the first thing to understand about angular is that this is a completely different instrument. jquery is a library, but angularjs is framework. when your code works with the library, it decides when to call a particular function or operator. in the case of the framework, you implement event handlers, and the framework decides at what moment it needs to invoke them. using this framework allows us to clearly distinguish between templates (dom), models, and functionality (in controllers). let’s come back to our template, take a look at our result: live demo download in package description this template is perfect for business sites. it consists of several static pages: projects, privacy, and about pages. each product has its own page. there is also a contact form for communication. that is all that is necessary for any small website. moreover, it is also a responsive template, thus it looks good on any device. i hope you liked the demo, so if you’re ready – let’s start making this application. please prepare a new folder for our project, and then create new folders in this directory: css – for stylesheet files images – for image files js – for javascript files (libraries, models, and controllers) pages – for internal pages stage 1. html the main layout consists of four main sections: a header with navigation, a hidden ‘contact us’ form, a main content section, and a footer. first we have to prepare a proper header: index.html as you can see, it’s an ordinary header. now – the header with the navigation: our projectsprivacy & termsaboutcontact us it's an ordinary logo, and the menu is the usual ul-li menu. the next section is more interesting – the ‘contact us’ form: contact us send message your message has been sent, thank you. finally, the last key element is the main content section: have you noticed the numerous ‘ng-’ directives? all these directives allow us to do various actions directly in the dom, for example: ng-class – the ngclass allows you to set css classes on an html element dynamically by databinding an expression that represents all classes to be added. ng-click – the ngclick allows you to specify custom behavior when element is clicked. ng-hide – the nghide directive shows and hides the given html element conditionally based on the expression provided to the nghide attribute. ng-include – fetches, compiles, and includes an external html fragment. ng-model – is a directive that tells angular to do two-way data binding. ng-show – the ngshow directive shows and hides the given html element conditionally based on the expression provided to the ngshow attribute. ng-submit – enables binding angular expressions to onsubmit events. stage 2. css in this rather large section, you can find all the styles used: css/style.css /* general settings */ html { min-height:100%; overflow-x:hidden; overflow-y:scroll; position:relative; width:100%; } body { background-color:#e6e6e6; color:#fff; font-weight:100; margin:0; min-height:100%; width:100%; } a { text-decoration:none; } a img { border:none; } h1 { font-size:3.5em; font-weight:100; } p { font-size:1.5em; } input,textarea { -webkit-appearance:none; background-color:#f7f7f7; border:none; border-radius:3px; font-size:1em; font-weight:100; } input:focus,textarea:focus { border:none; outline:2px solid #7ed7b9; } .left { float:left; } .right { float:right; } .btn { background-color:#fff; border-radius:24px; color:#595959; display:inline-block; font-size:1.4em; font-weight:400; margin:30px 0; padding:10px 30px; text-decoration:none; } .btn:hover { opacity:0.8; } .wrap { -moz-box-sizing:border-box; -webkit-box-sizing:border-box; box-sizing:border-box; margin:0 auto; max-width:1420px; overflow:hidden; padding:0 50px; position:relative; width:100%; } .wrap:before { content:''; display:inline-block; height:100%; margin-right:-0.25em; vertical-align:middle; } /* header section */ header { height:110px; } header .wrap { height:100%; } header .logo { margin-top:1px; } header nav { float:right; margin-top:17px; } header nav ul { margin:1em 0; padding:0; } header nav ul li { display:block; float:left; margin-right:20px; } header nav ul li a { border-radius:24px; color:#aaa; font-size:1.4em; font-weight:400; padding:10px 27px; text-decoration:none; } header nav ul li a.active { background-color:#c33c3a; color:#fff; } header nav ul li a.active:hover { background-color:#d2413f; color:#fff; } header nav ul li a:hover,header nav ul li a.activesmall { color:#c33c3a; } /* footer section */ footer .copyright { color:#adadad; margin-bottom:50px; margin-top:50px; text-align:center; } /* other objects */ .projectobj { color:#fff; display:block; } .projectobj .name { float:left; font-size:4em; font-weight:100; position:absolute; width:42%; } .projectobj .img { float:right; margin-bottom:5%; margin-top:5%; width:30%; } .paddrow { background-color:#dadada; color:#818181; display:none; padding-bottom:40px; } .paddrow.aboutrow { background-color:#78c2d4; color:#fff !important; display:block; } .paddrow .head { font-size:4em; font-weight:100; margin:40px 0; } .paddrow .close { cursor:pointer; position:absolute; right:50px; top:80px; width:38px; } .about { color:#818181; } .about section { margin:0 0 10%; } .about .head { font-size:4em; font-weight:100; margin:3% 0; } .about .subhead { font-size:2.5em; font-weight:100; margin:0 0 3%; } .about .txt { width:60%; } .about .image { width:26%; } .about .flleft { float:left; } .about .flright { float:right; } .projecthead.product { background-color:#87b822; } .projecthead .picture { margin-bottom:6%; margin-top:6%; } .projecthead .picture.right { margin-right:-3.5%; } .projecthead .text { position:absolute; width:49%; } .projecthead .centertext { margin:0 auto; padding-bottom:24%; padding-top:6%; text-align:center; width:55%; } .image { text-align:center; } .image img { vertical-align:top; width:100%; } .contactform { width:50%; } .input { -moz-box-sizing:border-box; -webkit-box-sizing:border-box; box-sizing:border-box; margin:1% 0; padding:12px 14px; width:47%; } .input.email { float:right; } button { border:none; cursor:pointer; } .textarea { -moz-box-sizing:border-box; -webkit-box-sizing:border-box; box-sizing:border-box; height:200px; margin:1% 0; overflow:auto; padding:12px 14px; resize:none; width:100%; } ::-webkit-input-placeholder { color:#a7a7a7; } :-moz-placeholder { color:#a7a7a7; } ::-moz-placeholder { /* ff18+ */ color:#a7a7a7; } :-ms-input-placeholder { color:#a7a7a7; } .loader { -moz-animation:loader_rot 1.3s linear infinite; -o-animation:loader_rot 1.3s linear infinite; -webkit-animation:loader_rot 1.3s linear infinite; animation:loader_rot 1.3s linear infinite; height:80px; width:80px; } @-moz-keyframes loader_rot { from { -moz-transform:rotate(0deg); } to { -moz-transform:rotate(360deg); } } @-webkit-keyframes loader_rot { from { -webkit-transform:rotate(0deg); } to { -webkit-transform:rotate(360deg); } } @keyframes loader_rot { from { transform:rotate(0deg); } to { transform:rotate(360deg); } } .view-enter,.view-leave { -moz-transition:all .5s; -o-transition:all .5s; -webkit-transition:all .5s; transition:all .5s; } .view-enter { left:20px; opacity:0; position:absolute; top:0; } .view-enter.view-enter-active { left:0; opacity:1; } .view-leave { left:0; opacity:1; position:absolute; top:0; } .view-leave.view-leave-active { left:-20px; opacity:0; } please note that css3 transitions are used, which means that our demonstration will only work modern browsers (ff, chrome, ie10+ etc) stage 3. javascript as i mentioned before, our main controller and the model are separated. the navigation menu can be handled here, and we also can operate with the contact form. js/app.js 'use strict'; // angular.js main app initialization var app = angular.module('example359', []). config(['$routeprovider', function ($routeprovider) { $routeprovider. when('/', { templateurl: 'pages/index.html', activetab: 'projects', controller: homectrl }). when('/project/:projectid', { templateurl: function (params) { return 'pages/' + params.projectid + '.html'; }, controller: projectctrl, activetab: 'projects' }). when('/privacy', { templateurl: 'pages/privacy.html', controller: privacyctrl, activetab: 'privacy' }). when('/about', { templateurl: 'pages/about.html', controller: aboutctrl, activetab: 'about' }). otherwise({ redirectto: '/' }); }]).run(['$rootscope', '$http', '$browser', '$timeout', "$route", function ($scope, $http, $browser, $timeout, $route) { $scope.$on("$routechangesuccess", function (scope, next, current) { $scope.part = $route.current.activetab; }); // onclick event handlers $scope.showform = function () { $('.contactrow').slidetoggle(); }; $scope.closeform = function () { $('.contactrow').slideup(); }; // save the 'contact us' form $scope.save = function () { $scope.loaded = true; $scope.process = true; $http.post('sendemail.php', $scope.message).success(function () { $scope.success = true; $scope.process = false; }); }; }]); app.config(['$locationprovider', function($location) { $location.hashprefix('!'); }]); pay attention here. when we request a page, it loads an appropriate page from the ‘pages’ folder: about.html, privacy.html, index.html. depending on the selected product, it opens one of the product pages: product1.html, product2.html, product3.html or product4.html in the second half, there are functions to slide the contact form and to handle its submit process (to the sendemail.php page). next is the controller file: js/controllers.js 'use strict'; // optional controllers function homectrl($scope, $http) { } function projectctrl($scope, $http) { } function privacyctrl($scope, $http, $timeout) { } function aboutctrl($scope, $http, $timeout) { } it is empty, because we have nothing to use here at the moment. stage 4. additional pages angularjs loads pages asynchronously, thereby increasing the speed. here are templates of all additional pages used in our project: pages/about.html about us script tutorials is one of the largest web development communities. we provide high quality content (articles and tutorials) which covers all the web development technologies including html5, css3, javascript (and jquery), php and so on. our audience are web designers and web developers who work with web technologies. additional information promo 1 lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. nunc et ligula accumsan, pharetra nibh nec, facilisis nulla. in pretium semper venenatis. in adipiscing augue elit, at venenatis enim suscipit a. fusce vitae justo tristique, ultrices mi metus. ..... pages/privacy.html privacy & terms by accessing this web site, you are agreeing to be bound by these web site terms and conditions of use, all applicable laws and regulations, and agree that you are responsible for compliance with any applicable local laws. if you do not agree with any of these terms, you are prohibited from using or accessing this site. the materials contained in this web site are protected by applicable copyright and trade mark law. other information header 1 lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. nunc et ligula accumsan, pharetra nibh nec, facilisis nulla. in pretium semper venenatis. in adipiscing augue elit, at venenatis enim suscipit a. fusce vitae justo tristique, ultrices mi metus. ..... pages/footer.html copyright © 2013 script tutorials pages/index.html product #1 product #2 product #3 product #4 finally, the product pages. all of them are prototypes, so i decided to publish only one of them. pages/index.html product 1 page lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. nunc et ligula accumsan, pharetra nibh nec, facilisis nulla. in pretium semper venenatis. in adipiscing augue elit, at venenatis enim suscipit a. fusce vitae justo tristique, ultrices mi metus. lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. nunc et ligula accumsan, pharetra nibh nec, facilisis nulla. in pretium semper venenatis. in adipiscing augue elit, at venenatis enim suscipit a. fusce vitae justo tristique, ultrices mi metus. download the app finishing touches – responsive styles all of these styles are needed to make our results look equally good on all possible mobile devices and monitors: @media (max-width: 1200px) { body { font-size:90%; } h1 { font-size:4.3em; } p { font-size:1.3em; } header { height:80px; } header .logo { margin-top:12px; width:200px; } header nav { margin-top:11px; } header nav ul li { margin-right:12px; } header nav ul li a { border-radius:23px; font-size: 1.3em; padding:10px 12px; } .wrap { padding:0 30px; } .paddrow .close { right:30px; } } @media (max-width: 900px) { .contactform { width:100%; } } @media (max-width: 768px) { body { font-size:80%; margin:0; } h1 { font-size:4em; } header { height:70px; } header .logo { margin-top:20px; width:70px; } header nav { margin-top:8px; } header nav ul li { margin-right:5px; } header nav ul li a { border-radius:20px; font-size:1.1em; padding:8px; } .wrap { padding:0 15px; } .projectobj .name { font-size:3em; } .paddrow { padding-bottom:30px; } .paddrow .head { font-size:3em; margin:30px 0; } .paddrow .close { right:20px; top:60px; width:30px; } .projecthead .picture { width:67%; } .projecthead .picture.right { margin-right:16.5%; } .projecthead .text { position:static; width:100%; } .projecthead .centertext { width:70%; } .view-enter,.view-leave { -webkit-transform:translate3d(0,0,0); transform:translate3d(0,0,0); } } @media (max-width: 480px) { body { font-size:70%; margin:0; } header { height:50px; } header .logo { display:none; } header nav { margin-top:3px; } header nav ul li { margin-right:3px; } header nav ul li a { border-radius:20px; font-size:1.3em; padding:5px 14px; } #contactbtn { display:none; } .wrap { padding:0 10px; } .paddrow { padding-bottom:20px; } .paddrow .head { margin:20px 0; } .paddrow .close { right:10px; top:45px; width:20px; } .about .image { margin:10% auto; width:60%; } .about .abicon { display:inline; } .projecthead .centertext { width:90%; } .about .txt,.input { width:100%; } .about .flleft,.about .flright,.input.email { float:none; } } live demo download in package conclusion that’s all for today. thanks for your patient attention, and if you really like what we did today, share it with all your friends in your social networks.

for modern web application development, having dozens of unit tests is not enough anymore. the actual code coverage of those tests would reveal if the application is thoroughly stressed or not. for tests written using the famous jasmine test library, an easy way to have the coverage report is via istanbul and karma . for this example, let’s assume that we have a simple library sqrt.js which contains an alternative implementation of math.sqrt . note also how it will throw an exception instead of returning nan for an invalid input. var my = { sqrt: function(x) { if (x < 0) throw new error("sqrt can't work on negative number"); return math.exp(math.log(x)/2); } }; using jasmine placed under test/lib/jasmine-1.3.1 , we can craft a test runner that includes the following spec: describe("sqrt", function() { it("should compute the square root of 4 as 2", function() { expect(my.sqrt(4)).toequal(2); }); }); opening the spec runner in a web browser will give the expected outcome: so far so good. now let's see how the code coverage of our test setup can be measured. the first order of business is to install karma . if you are not familiar with karma, it is basically a test runner which can launch and connect to a specific set of web browsers, run your tests, and then gather the report. using node.js, what we need to do is: npm install karma karma-coverage before launching karma, we need to specify its configuration . it could be as simple as the following my.conf.js (most entries are self-explained). note that the tests are executed using phantomjs for simplicity, it is however quite trivial to add other web browsers such as chrome and firefox. module.exports = function(config) { config.set({ basepath: '', frameworks: ['jasmine'], files: [ '*.js', 'test/spec/*.js' ], browsers: ['phantomjs'], singlerun: true, reporters: ['progress', 'coverage'], preprocessors: { '*.js': ['coverage'] } }); }; running the tests, as well as performing code coverage at the same time, can be triggered via: node_modules/.bin/karma start my.conf.js which will dump the output like: info [karma]: karma v0.10.2 server started at http://localhost:9876/ info [launcher]: starting browser phantomjs info [phantomjs 1.9.2 (linux)]: connected on socket n9ndnhj0np92ntspgx-x phantomjs 1.9.2 (linux): executed 1 of 1 success (0.029 secs / 0.003 secs) as expected (from the previous manual invocation of the spec runner), the test passed just fine. however, the most particular interesting piece here is the code coverage report, it is stored (in the default location) under the subdirectory coverage . open the report in your favorite browser and there you'll find the coverage analysis report. behind the scene, karma is using istanbul , a comprehensive javascript code coverage tool (read also my previous blog post on javascript code coverage with istanbul ). istanbul parses the source file, in this example sqrt.js , using esprima and then adds some extra instrumentation which will be used to gather the execution statistics. the above report that you see is one of the possible outputs, istanbul can also generate lcov report which is suitable for many continuous integration systems (jenkins, teamcity, etc). an extensive analysis of the coverage data should also prevent any future coverage regression, check out my other post hard thresholds on javascript code coverage . one important thing about code coverage is branch coverage . if you pay attention carefully, our test above is still not exercising the situation where the input to my.sqrt is negative. there is a big "i" marking in the third-line of the code, this is istanbul telling us that the if branch is not taken at all (for the else branch, it will be an "e" marker). once this missing branch is noticed, improving the situation is as easy as adding one more test to the spec: it("should throw an exception if given a negative number", function() { expect(function(){ my.sqrt(-1); }). tothrow(new error("sqrt can't work on negative number")); }); once the test is executed again, the code coverage report looks way better and everyone is happy. if you have some difficulties following the above step-by-step instructions, take a look at a git repository i have prepared: github.com/ariya/coverage-jasmine-istanbul-karma . feel free to play with it and customize it to suit your workflow!

I’m going to start by discussing the Spring WebMVC configuration and move on from there in future posts.

In this post we are going to learn how we can use NHibernate in ASP.NET MVC application. What is NHibernate: ORMs(Object Relational Mapper) are quite popular this days. ORM is a mechanism to map database entities to Class entity objects without writing a code for fetching data and write some SQL queries. It automatically generates SQL Query for us and fetch data behalf on us. NHibernate is also a kind of Object Relational Mapper which is a port of popular Java ORM Hibernate. It provides a framework for mapping an domain model classes to a traditional relational databases. Its give us freedom of writing repetitive ADO.NET code as this will be act as our database layer. Let’s get started with NHibernate. How to download: There are two ways you can download this ORM. From nuget package and from the source forge site. Nuget - http://www.nuget.org/packages/NHibernate/ Source Forge-http://sourceforge.net/projects/nhibernate/ Creating a table for CRUD: I am going to use SQL Server 2012 express edition as a database. Following is a table with four fields Id, First Name, Last name, Designation. Creating ASP.NET MVC project for NHibernate: Let’s create a ASP.NET MVC project for NHibernate via click on File-> New Project –> ASP.NET MVC 4 web application. Installing NuGet package for NHibernate: I have installed nuget package from Package Manager console via following Command. It will install like following. NHibertnate configuration file: Nhibernate needs one configuration file for setting database connection and other details. You need to create a file with ‘hibernate.cfg.xml’ in model Nhibernate folder of your application with following details. NHibernate.Connection.DriverConnectionProvider NHibernate.Driver.SqlClientDriver Server=(local);database=LocalDatabase;Integrated Security=SSPI; NHibernate.Dialect.MsSql2012Dialect Here you have got different settings for NHibernate. You need to selected driver class, connection provider as per your database. If you are using other databases like Orcle or MySQL you will have different configuration. ThisNHibernate ORM can work with any databases. Creating a model class for NHibernate: Now it’s time to create model class for our CRUD operations. Following is a code for that. Property name is identical to database table columns. namespace NhibernateMVC.Models { public class Employee { public virtual int Id { get; set; } public virtual string FirstName { get; set; } public virtual string LastName { get; set; } public virtual string Designation { get; set; } } } Creating a mapping file between class and table: Now we need a xml mapping file between class and model with name “Employee.hbm.xml” like following in Nhibernate folder. Creating a class to open session for NHibernate I have created a class in models folder called NHIbernateSession and a static function it to open a session for NHibertnate. using System.Web; using NHibernate; using NHibernate.Cfg; namespace NhibernateMVC.Models { public class NHibertnateSession { public static ISession OpenSession() { var configuration = new Configuration(); var configurationPath = HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath(@"~\Models\Nhibernate\hibernate.cfg.xml"); configuration.Configure(configurationPath); var employeeConfigurationFile = HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath(@"~\Models\Nhibernate\Employee.hbm.xml"); configuration.AddFile(employeeConfigurationFile); ISessionFactory sessionFactory = configuration.BuildSessionFactory(); return sessionFactory.OpenSession(); } } } Listing: Now we have our open session method ready its time to write controller code to fetch data from the database. Following is a code for that. using System; using System.Web.Mvc; using NHibernate; using NHibernate.Linq; using System.Linq; using NhibernateMVC.Models; namespace NhibernateMVC.Controllers { public class EmployeeController : Controller { public ActionResult Index() { using (ISession session = NHibertnateSession.OpenSession()) { var employees = session.Query().ToList(); return View(employees); } } } } Here you can see I have get a session via OpenSession method and then I have queried database for fetching employee database. Let’s create a new for this you can create this via right lick on view on above method.We are going to create a strongly typed view for this. Our listing screen is ready once you run project it will fetch data as following. Create/Add: Now its time to write add employee code. Following is a code I have written for that. Here I have used session.save method to save new employee. First method is for returning a blank view and another method with HttpPost attribute will save the data into the database. public ActionResult Create() { return View(); } [HttpPost] public ActionResult Create(Employee emplolyee) { try { using (ISession session = NHibertnateSession.OpenSession()) { using (ITransaction transaction = session.BeginTransaction()) { session.Save(emplolyee); transaction.Commit(); } } return RedirectToAction("Index"); } catch(Exception exception) { return View(); } } Now let’s create a create view strongly typed view via right clicking on view and add view. Once you run this application and click on create new it will load following screen. Edit/Update: Now let’s create a edit functionality with NHibernate and ASP.NET MVC. For that I have written two action result method once for loading edit view and another for save data. Following is a code for that. public ActionResult Edit(int id) { using (ISession session = NHibertnateSession.OpenSession()) { var employee = session.Get(id); return View(employee); } } [HttpPost] public ActionResult Edit(int id, Employee employee) { try { using (ISession session = NHibertnateSession.OpenSession()) { var employeetoUpdate = session.Get(id); employeetoUpdate.Designation = employee.Designation; employeetoUpdate.FirstName = employee.FirstName; employeetoUpdate.LastName = employee.LastName; using (ITransaction transaction = session.BeginTransaction()) { session.Save(employeetoUpdate); transaction.Commit(); } } return RedirectToAction("Index"); } catch { return View(); } } Here in first action result I have fetched existing employee via get method of NHibernate session and in second I have fetched and changed the current employee with update details. You can create view for this via right click –>add view like below. I have created a strongly typed view for edit. Once you run code it will look like following. Details: Now it’s time to create a detail view where user can see the employee detail. I have written following logic for details view. public ActionResult Details(int id) { using (ISession session = NHibertnateSession.OpenSession()) { var employee = session.Get(id); return View(employee); } } You can add view like following via right click on actionresult view. now once you run this in browser it will look like following. Delete: Now its time to write delete functionality code. Following code I have written for that. public ActionResult Delete(int id) { using (ISession session = NHibertnateSession.OpenSession()) { var employee = session.Get(id); return View(employee); } } [HttpPost] public ActionResult Delete(int id, Employee employee) { try { using (ISession session = NHibertnateSession.OpenSession()) { using (ITransaction transaction = session.BeginTransaction()) { session.Delete(employee); transaction.Commit(); } } return RedirectToAction("Index"); } catch(Exception exception) { return View(); } } Here in the above first action result will have the delete confirmation view and another will perform actual delete operation with session delete method. When you run into the browser it will look like following. That’s it. It’s very easy to have crud operation with NHibernate. Stay tuned for more.

ElasticSearch provides Java API, thus it executes all operations asynchronously by using client object.

Advantages coming from dependency injection can be addictive. It's a lot easier to configure application structure using injections than doing all resolutions manually. It's hard to resign from it when we have some non-managed classes that are instantiated outside of the container - for example being part of other frameworks like Vaadin UI components or JPA entities. The latter are especially important when we're using Domain Driven Design. During DDD training ran by Slawek Sobotka we were talking about options to remove "bad coupling" from aggregate factories. I'm sure you'll admit, that it's better to have generic mechanism able to "energize" objects by dependencies defined by e.g. @Inject annotation than inject all necessary dependencies into particular factory and then pass them into object by constructor, builder or simple setters. Spring framework brings us two different solutions to achieve such requirement. I'll now describe them both of them. Let's start with with simpler one. It's especially powerful when we've case such as generic repository, mentioned earlier aggregate factory, or even any other factory just ensuring that we have only few places in our code where will instantiate objects outside of the container. In this case we can make use of AutowireCapableBeanFactory class. In particular we will be interested in two methods: void autowireBean(Object existingBean) Object initializeBean(Object existingBean, String beanName) The first one just populates our bean without applying specific post processors (e.g. @PostConstruct, etc). The second one additionally applies factory callbacks like setBeanName and setBeanFactory, as well as any other post processors with @PostConstruct of course. In our code it'll look like this: public abstract class GenericFactory { @Autowired private AutowireCapableBeanFactory autowireBeanFactory; public T createBean() { // creation logic autowireBeanFactory.autowireBean(createdBean); return createdBean; } } Simple and powerful - my favorite composition :) But what can we do when we have plenty places in our code where objects get born? That's for example case of building Vaadin layouts in Spring web application. Injecting custom bean configurer objects invoking autowireBean method won't be the peak of productivity. Happily Spring developers brought us @Configurable annotation. This annotation connected with aspects will configure each annotated object even if we will create it outside of the container using new operator. Like with any other aspects we can choose between load-time-waving (LTW) compile-time-waving (CTW). The first one is easier to configure but we become (due to instrumentation) dependent from application server, which can be undesirable in some cases. To use it we need to annotate our @Configuration class by @EnableLoadTimeWeaving (or add tag if you like Flintstones and XML configuration ;)) After completing configuration just annotate class by @Configurable: @Configurable public class MyCustomButton extends Button { @Autowired private MyAwesomeService myAwesomeService; // handlers making use of injected service } The second option is a little bit more complex to setup but after this it will be a lot lighter in runtime. Because now we want to load aspects till compilation we have to integrate aspectj compiler into our build. In Maven you need to add few dependencies: org.aspectj aspectjrt 1.7.3 org.springframework spring-aspects 3.2.4.RELEASE org.springframework spring-tx 3.2.4.RELEASE javax.persistence persistence-api 1.0 provided I hope you are curious why above you can see persistence-api. That was also strange for me, when I saw "can't determine annotations of missing type javax.persistence.Entity" error during aspectj compilation. The answer can be found in SpringFramework JIRA in issue SPR-6819. This happens when you configure spring-aspects as a aspectLibrary in aspectj-maven-plugin. Issue is unresolved for over three year so better get used to it :) The last thing we need to do is to include above-mentioned plugin into our plugins section. org.codehaus.mojo aspectj-maven-plugin 1.5 1.7 1.7 1.7 true org.springframework spring-aspects compile And that's all folks :)