A Java geek

Sep 15, 2012 jax-ws spring web services

Web Services: JAX-WS vs Spring

In my endless search for the best way to develop applications, I’ve recently been interested in web services in general and contract-first in particular. Web services are coined contract-first when the WSDL is designed in the first place and classes are generated from it. They are acknowledged to be the most interoperable of web services, since the WSDL is agnostic from the underlying technology. In the past, I’ve been using Axis2 and then CXF but now, JavaEE provides us with the po

Sep 9, 2012 jbpm spring

Lessons learned from integrating jBPM 4 with Spring

When I was tasked with integrating a process engine into one of my projects, I quickly decided in favor of Activiti. Activiti is the next version of jBPM 4, is compatible with BPMN 2.0, is well documented and has an out-of-the-box module to integrate with Spring. Unfortunately, in a cruel stroke of fate, I was overruled by my hierarchy (because of some petty reason I dare not write here) and I had to use jBPM. This articles tries to list all lessons I learned in this rather epic journey. Lesson

Sep 2, 2012 validation xml

XML validation with imported/included schemas

Recently, I tried to help a teammate design a WSDL file. I gently drove him toward separating the interface itself in the WSDL file and domain objects in a XML Schema file. One thing leading to another, I also made him split this XSD into two separate files, one including another for design purposes. Alas, tests were already present, and they failed miserably after my refactoring, complaining about a type in the included file not being found. The situation was extremely unpleasant, not only becau

Aug 25, 2012 maven test

Re-use your test classes across different projects

Sometimes, you need to reuse your test classes across different projects. These are two use-cases that I know of: Utility classes that create relevant domain objects used in different modulesDatabase test classes (ans resources) that need to be run in the persistence project as well as the integration test project Since I’ve seen more than my share of misuses, this article aim to provide an elegant solution once and for all. Creating the test artifact First, we have to use Maven: I kn

Aug 20, 2012 envers spring data spring security

Spring Data, Spring Security and Envers integration

Spring Data JPA, Spring Security and Envers are libraries that I personally enjoy working with (and I tend to think they are considered best-of-breed in their respective category). Anyway, I wanted to implement what I consider a simple use-case: entities have to be Envers-audited but the revision has to contain the identity of the user that initiated the action. Although it seem simple, I had some challenges to overcome to achieve this. This article lists them and provide a possible solution. S

Jul 29, 2012 inversion of control method injection

Method injection with Spring

Spring core comes out-of-the-box with two scopes: singletons and prototypes. Singletons implement the Singleton pattern, meaning there’s only a single instance at runtime (in a JVM). Spring instantiate them during context creation, caches them in the context, and serves them from the cache when needed (or something like that). Prototypes are instantiated each time you access the context to get the bean. Problems arise when you need to inject a prototype-scoped bean in a singleton-scoped b

Jul 22, 2012 ejb3 spring transaction

Transaction management: EJB3 vs Spring

Transaction management is a subject that is generally left to the tender care of a senior developer (or architect). Given the messages coming from soem actors of the JavaEE community that with newer versions of JavaEE you don’t need Spring anymore, I was interested in some fact-checking on how transaction management was handled in both technologies. Note: these messages were already sent one year and a half ago and prompted me to write this article. Transaction demarcation Note that a

Jul 8, 2012 css maven

Empower your CSS in your Maven build

People who know me also know I’ve interest in the GUI: that means I’ve sometimes to get my hands dirty and dig deep into stylesheets (even though I’ve no graphical skill whatsoever). When it happens, I’ve always questions regarding how to best factorize styles. In this regard, the different CSS versions are lacking, because they were not meant to be managed by engineers. A recent trend is to generate CSS from a source, which brings some interesting properties such as nesti

Jul 1, 2012 jpa persistence spring data

Easier JPA with Spring Data JPA

Database access in Java went through some steps: pure Java DataBase Connectivity, proprietary frameworks, standards such as EJB Entities and Java Data Objects, OpenSource frameworks such as Hibernate and EclipseLink (known as TopLink at the time).

Jun 24, 2012 envers hibernate persistence

How to test code that uses Envers

Envers is a Hibernate module that can be configured to automatically audit changes made to your entities. Each audited entity are thus associated with a list of revisions, each revision capturing the state of the entity when a change occurs. There is however an obstacle I came across while I was 'unit testing' my DAO, and that’s what I want to share to avoid others to fall in the same pit. First, let’s have an overview of the couple of steps needed to use Envers: Annotate your enti