Why we use IntelliJ IDEA – a quick review

The nice guys at JetBrains have been providing us for [fleXive] a free open source development license for quite some years and we are very grateful for this support!

Lets take a look back at the far and distant past and see why we made the switch to IntelliJ IDEA:

Previously we used Eclipse (and to be honest we even tried Netbeans which was back then a real pain to work with) and we spent a lot of time navigating through the source, doing manual refactorings, switching back and forth through various IDE views/modes and got used to the thing they called ‘debugger’. We were actually happy with how things worked, not knowing about alternatives. Then a friend from university approached me and showed me a product called ‘IntelliJ IDEA’. A bit sceptical at first a team member switched to IntelliJ IDEA and the rest followed immediatly 🙂

Since [fleXive] was using JSF from the start a big need for us was to have a firm (x)html support – and IntelliJ IDEA delivered just that: code completion (that actually worked!), switching between code and views using simple clicks and not to mention refactorings. Did I mention refactorings? It saved (and still does!) a tremendous amount of time – from simple renamings to introducing new arguments to methods or simply finding code duplicates.

Another thing that really got us hooked was support for multiple (JVM) languages: [fleXive] relies heavily on Groovy code – from dynamic events (upload a Groovy code snippet and execute its e.g. when a content is saved or changes), to start-up scripts. Groovy is a first class citizen in [fleXive] and using IntelliJ IDEA we are able to code in Groovy like we were used to in Java. Now that IntelliJ IDEA does support even more JVM languages we are very tempted to bring Scala support to [fleXive].

Last but not least lets mention the debugger: If you come from Eclipse you know the pain I speaking of – just try for example to evaluate or even change expressions/properties at ‘debug-time’. The latest iteration of IntelliJ IDEA (v14) even shows variable values within the code, which helps us a lot – making things even more productive.

Thanks to the plugin-support of IntelliJ IDEA we are able to run even more useful tools within IntelliJ IDEA: we’re running JRebel for hot-redeployments and the YourKit Profiler to optimize [fleXive]’s performance – a big thanks to these companies here for providing open source/social licenses for us here as well!

Bottom line is: if you are coding in a JVM language and have not tried IntelliJ IDEA yet – give it shot, I doubt you’ll regret it!

Podcast on JSF Central

JSF Central just published a podcast about [fleXive] recorded at last year’s JSFdays. It’s basically an introduction to [fleXive], and Kito was of course a very competent and knowledgeable interviewer, so the interview covers quite a few interesting points I wouldn’t have thought of before.

Continue to the podcast…

[fleXive] 3.1.4 released, adds Web Profile support

A new update release containing important bugfixes has been released. Head over to our homepage for release notes and download links.

The major new feature of this release is support for the JavaEE 6 Web Profile, a slimmed-down version of JavaEE 6. It provides all the good stuff of JavaEE that [fleXive] already uses (managed beans, container managed transactions, connection pooling, JSF), but removes a lot of the baggage from the J2EE era. Actually the only feature we are using that is not part of the web profile is remote interfaces. To see this in action just download flexive-admin.war, get Glassfish 3 Web, and drop the WAR file into the glassfish/domains/domain1/autodeploy folder. It should just work, without further configuration. The default data source is defined with the new DataSourceDefinition annotation (but can of course be overridden with a custom datasource).

To use [fleXive] in a WAR project, either create the project using our Maven archetype or include the [fleXive] EJBs in your (Maven) application:

        <dependency>
            <groupId>com.flexive</groupId>
            <artifactId>flexive-ejb</artifactId>
            <type>ejb</type>
            <version>3.1.4</version>
            <exclusions>
                <!-- Exclude remote interfaces to enable web profile deployment -->
                <exclusion>
                    <groupId>com.flexive</groupId>
                    <artifactId>flexive-ejb-interfaces-all</artifactId>
                </exclusion>
            </exclusions>
        </dependency>

        <!-- Add only local EJB interfaces for flexive -->
        <dependency>
            <groupId>com.flexive</groupId>
            <artifactId>flexive-ejb-interfaces-local</artifactId>
            <version>3.1.4</version>
        </dependency>

        <dependency>
            <groupId>com.flexive</groupId>
            <artifactId>flexive-plugin-jsf2-core</artifactId>
            <version>3.1.4</version>
        </dependency>

JSF2 support in [fleXive]

I added a page regarding JSF2 support in [fleXive] to our wiki:

• [fleXive] 3.1.0+ should run on any JSF implementation
• Work on trunk has started for native JSF2 support (i.e. supporting the new view description language and features like f:ajax).

There is also a (very small) test project for the JSF2 components, check it out with:
svn co http://svn.flexive.org/repository/flexive/trunk/src/examples/jsf2-test

[fleXive] 3.1 released, EAR archetype updated

Just a quick note that the next major release of [fleXive] is available. Read the accouncement on our homepage (finally also powered by fleXive).

In the course of the release the EAR archetype has also received a minor update, bumping the [fleXive] version to 3.1.0 (no other changes). Use this command to create a new project:

mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeGroupId=com.flexive -DarchetypeArtifactId=flexive-archetype-ear -DarchetypeVersion=0.7.1 -DarchetypeRepository=http://repo.flexive.org/maven2/

More information on working with Maven projects can be found in the reference documentation.

Maven archetype updated, Beta 3 released

The Maven EAR archetype has been updated after the release of [fleXive] 3.1 Beta 3. It is of course based on beta 3, and includes a few minor changes and bugfixes that justified a new version.

The flexive backend is now always reached under the /flexive context (both from the embedded Jetty instance and from EAR deployments), the application itself always under /war. To get started:

1. mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeGroupId=com.flexive -DarchetypeArtifactId=flexive-archetype-ear -DarchetypeVersion=0.7 -DarchetypeRepository=http://repo.flexive.org/maven2/
2. Enter the project name and group, e.g. test/test
3. cd test
4. mvn install
5. cd war
6. mvn jetty:run
7. Open http://localhost:8080/flexive/ in your browser and complete the installation by logging in with supervisor/supervisor.

For more information on the Maven support, please refer to the reference documentation.

[fleXive] 3.1 Beta 2 available

The second beta version for the upcoming release of [fleXive] 3.1 is available. It includes many bugfixes since the first beta release, PostgreSQL support and (experimental) division export and import.

Continue reading on flexive.org for further information and download links.

CMIS and WebDAV connector source released

Yesterday I added the sources of our CMIS and WebDAV adapters to our main repository on svn.flexive.org. They are still under development, so no binary releases yet, but especially the WebDAV adapter is already quite useable. If you want to build them now, please follow these steps…

Get and build Chemistry

Chemistry is an incubating project at Apache and provides a generic implementation of a server-side CMIS connector. The idea is that the content repository only has to implement a modest set of backend methods, and Chemistry will provide the rest (like AtomPub and WebService bindings). Currently there are no releases of Chemistry yet, so we need to build it on our own (all instructions are for Unix, please adopt slightly when using Windows):

Update 2010-01-08: Flexive tracks the Chemistry trunk version again, so please checkout http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/chemistry/trunk instead.

mkdir build
cd build
svn checkout http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/chemistry/branches/0.62 chemistry-reactor
cd chemistry-reactor
mvn install
cd chemistry
mvn install

Get the CMIS/WebDAV modules

The CMIS and WebDAV modules of [fleXive] are also built with Maven 2. To build them, we don’t need the entire [fleXive] source tree, as the [fleXive] artifacts will be resolved from our Maven repository.

cd ../..
svn checkout http://svn.flexive.org/repository/flexive/trunk/modules/chemistry flexive-chemistry
cd flexive-chemistry
mvn install

The “mvn install” step will also run some tests with an embedded [fleXive] container, if you want to skip them pass “-DskipTests” on the command line.

Installation

The interesting artifacts produced by the build are two web applications:

• flexive-webdav-webapp/target/flexive-webdav.war contains the WebDAV adapter
• flexive-atompub-webapp/target/flexive-atompub.war is the CMIS AtomPub connector

To use them, add the WAR files to your flexive.ear (when using Maven, add a dependency to the WAR artifact, when using the flexive distribution, add them to the flexive-dist/applications directory, when building [fleXive] from source put them in the drop/ directory). Note that both adapters are under active development, and are not yet in a stable state. The CMIS adapter used to work against the CMIS Spaces and CMIS Explorer clients, but the clients have moved to newer versions of the standard since then. The WebDAV adapter is based on Milton and works quite well, although it’s also not recommended for production use. I tested it with KDE’s Dolphin, Gnome Nautilus (only works when it is bound to the root web context), cadaver (Linux command line client), and Windows XP. It also passes quite a few tests of the litmus WebDAV test suite, which of course is entirely to be attributed to the excellent Milton WebDAV library.

[fleXive] 3.1 Beta 1 available

The first beta release of [fleXive] 3.1 is available. This release includes a ton of new features and improvements, as well as a Java-based installer that takes you to the [fleXive] login prompt in less than a minute.

Try out the installer or continue to read the rest of the announcement on www.flexive.org

Maven EAR applications: new H2 version required

The 0.6 version of our EAR archetype includes a hardcoded version number for the H2 database engine artifact. Recent changes in the [fleXive] trunk (i.e. 3.1-SNAPSHOT) require a newer version of H2, otherwise the initialization of the database will fail with a “Syntax error in SQL statement”.

The fix for existing projects is to fix the version number in your main module’s pom.xml: increase the h2.version property from 1.1.106 to 1.1.117.

To avoid this issue in the future, I moved the H2 dependency to the flexive-h2 artifact. The current snapshot version of the archetype (1.0-SNAPSHOT) therefore no longer includes a dependency on com.h2database.h2, and potential changes in the required H2 version number (always a possibility since H2 development is very active) won’t affect existing projects.