The Tomcat7 plugin for Maven has a number of uses. In a previous post, I’ve looked at using it to deploy a build to an embedded Tomcat server for integration testing with Selenium.
A more simple use case is to simply deploy (or undeploy) a built artifact (war) to a Tomcat installation on a local machine or on a remote server.
The following examples are available to download from the Spanners Demo on GitHub.
Spring Security is a feature rich framework for handling security concerns in a web application. As standard, it has little support for SAML. However, SAML is now supported as an extension project – Spring Security SAML.
The MockMVC class allows tests to be run against a real Spring application context without actually having to run the complete application in a Servlet container
In less than five minutes and just three Maven commands, I was able to create, compile and run a fully working example Spring MVC application.
The Spanners demo project is now available on GitHub: https://github.com/hotblac/spanners. Feel free to fork!
I wanted to migrate the Spanners demo from SVN to Git, partly so I could take advantage of GitHub to host it (yes, I know I could host a SVN project on GitHub but where’s the fun in that?). I also wanted to start using a Distributed Source Control Management (DSCM) system and Git is certainly the most popular of these. Even though I’m (currently) the sole contributor to the Spanners demo project, it’s useful to understand how a DSCM system differs from a ‘traditional’ centralized server based SCM such as SVN and CVS.
I must have seen a hundred blog posts suggesting that the best way to become more productive is to minimise distractions: Switch off IM, disconnect the phone, block out quiet time, get a private office and so on. While I’m sure that these would be of benefit, sometimes distraction is inevitable. I could switch off IM, email and my phone but I happen to work at the desk next to my boss. Convenient as it may be, my boss does not come with an off switch. Also, priorities happen. I may believe that my ‘in the zone’ coding time is golden and must not be interrupted on pain of code diva tantrum. However, if the production server goes down then scheduling a fix next week is just not good enough. Finally, I do on occasion like to stop work for the day and go home. A good night’s sleep is definitely a distraction from work but also I think quite important.
It’s certainly worthwhile arranging your environment and schedule so as to minimise distractions. But it is also important to accept that distraction will happen and to plan for it.
Integration tests are a valuable tool in the development of robust, quality software. Once each individual component has been unit tested, the integration test gives some confidence that the system stack as a whole does what is expected. Like unit tests, a great deal of the value of integration tests comes from the regression suite that they create. After any defect fix or enhancement to software, the unit and integration tests confirm that all existing features do exactly what they did before. If these tests are automated, they cost nothing to run and they’ll stay silent unless a defect is discovered.
I’ve looked at unit testing a few times in the past but this post explains how to integration test the full stack – database, Java application and web server. In this case, I’m running the tests as part of the Maven build lifecycle. As usual, I’m working from the Spanners demo (available for download), mainly working against the spanners-struts web component.
Hibernate can be used to map Java classes to existing database tables. More often, the Java classes come first and the database is created around the mapping. If that’s the case, you’ll want to define your database schema directly from Hibernate mappings rather than hand crafting DDL scripts. Hibernate offers a couple of ways to do this.