Maven

Integration of JBake in Maven – Static Websites

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JBake is a “Java based, open source, static site generator” (http://jbake.org/, on github https://github.com/jbake-org/jbake). It is a great choice if you want to create static HTML websites. No slow loading of dynamic content anymore. Additionally, if a site is created on load by JavaScript, issues with indexing and search engine optimization/SEO might occur. This is not a problem with static sites. At the same time different template engines like FreeMarker (http://freemarker.org/) help you modularize the website. You only have to define menu and footer once and they will be inserted automatically.

JBake was perfect for us to create a microsite with 15 different pages and lots of reappearing elements. We integrated JBake into Maven to create a comfortable release process. To do this we used the plug-in jbake-maven-plugin (https://github.com/ingenieux/jbake-maven-plugin). This sample project shows the fundamental integration: https://github.com/ingenieux/jbake-sample.

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Maintainable Rich Web Applications with AngularJS – Part 2

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In the last post we used a demo application to discuss the development of maintainable Rich Web Applications with AngularJS. We introduced the most important concepts: The Model View Controller pattern and its application, the extension of HTML using directives and the routing concept to define the navigation between views.

This post explains how to integrate AngularJS into a build process based on Maven and shows how to develop automated unit tests and end-to-end tests for AngularJS applications.

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Configuration of the EAP6 / JBoss AS7 with CLI scripts

| Heinz Wilming

The JBoss EAP6 and AS7 supports different approaches to mange server configurations. One approach is the command line interface (CLI). It is based on the De-Typed Management API and allows the execution of management operations. The CLI has support for CLI scripts with management and configuration operations that can be executed in a non-interactive mode.

In this post we want to introduce two ways of using CLI scripts to manage server configurations.

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Maven Sites – Reloaded

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In recent times, Maven Sites came close to becoming extinct. Maven Plugins were still using them for the wonderful automatic documentation page (named goals), but regular projects were not using them anymore.

However, Maven Sites have some huge benefits such as keeping the documentation close to the code, and automatically providing reports, information and API docs (Javadoc). Being able to release the documentation at the same time as the code was also a great advantage.

So why was this feature not used? Several reasons:

  • The look and feel was terrible.
  • The apt syntax was terrible.
  • The customization was terrible.

Now, though, it’s possible to create much better Maven Sites using Twitter Bootstrap for the skinning and Markdown for the editing. Even better, if you use GitHub, your site can be automatically updated on your project’s GitHub page.

This blog post explains how to use all these new features.
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Brave new world – Migrating a Java EE Application from JBoss AS 6 to JBoss AS 7

| Robert Magnus

We are migrating an existing Java EE Application from JBoss AS 6 to JBoss AS 7. This blog post introduces our experience we have gained during the migration of the application to the new JBoss AS 7.

Overview of the application

The application is a Java EE application based on EJB, JPA and it contains a web application built with JSF. Furthermore, the application contains a web service to interact with a third-party system and some MBean’s for administration and configuration.

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Jumping into continuous delivery with Jenkins and SSH

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Let’s imagine the following situation. You’re working on an application for a customer. Despite a firm deadline and a roadmap given to your customer, he’d like to check the progress regularly, let’s say weekly or even daily, and actually give you feedback.

So to make everybody happy, you start releasing the application weekly. However, releasing is generally a hard-core process, even for the most automated processes, and requires human actions. As the release date approaches, stress increases. The tension reaches its climax one hour before the deadline when the release process fails, or worse, when the deployment fails. We’ve all been in situations like that, right?

This all-too-common nightmare can be largely avoided. This blog post presents a way to deal with the above situation using Jenkins, Nexus and SSH. The application is deployed continuously and without human intervention on a test environment, which can be checked and tested by the customer. Jenkins, a continuous integration server, is used as the orchestrator of the whole continuous delivery process.

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Provisioning Maven artifacts with Puppet

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Our last blog post introduced how Puppet can be used to achieve Infrastructure-As-Code, and how to deploy Play applications following this practice. However, we didn’t address how the applications are actually copied to the host.

Apache Maven is a widely used build tool adopted by more and more companies to support their build process from compilation to deployment. Deploying, in the  Maven world,  means uploading the artifact to a Maven repository. Such Maven repositories are managed using Sonatype Nexus or JFrog Artifactory. However, this sort of deployment does not address the real provisioning of the application, i.e the deployment on the production servers.

This blog post presents a Puppet module to download Maven artifacts from a Nexus repository. This module closes the gap between the development team deploying their artifacts to a Maven repository, and the administration team responsible for installing and configuring the application.

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Testing maven plugins with the verifier approach

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Maven is a great build tool that has already proven its benefits. But sometimes, you need an extension for a custom task or need. Luckily, Maven is extensible and allows you to write plugins.

Now, when implementing a Maven plugin, you generally want to test it as well. If possible, we want do do that automatically. Those tests then run on your continuous integration server and you’re notified when, unfortunately, you (or someone else) broke something. Automatic Maven Plugin tests can be done with different approaches. This post focuses on a strategy suitable for integration tests.
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