Maven release plugin

Published on December 13, 2011

Properly versioning and releasing code can be fiddly if it’s done properly. If you’re not cutting corners, the process involves several steps. If these steps are performed manually the process is error prone and time consuming. I’ve often found it’s easier just to cut a few corners. Why change the version in the Maven pom when you could perform all releases against a single SNAPSHOT version? Why tag the release build when you could probably work out the release version from a Subversion log? Why put release artifacts in a release repo when you can rebuild from a historic version?

I’m not going to argue that you shouldn’t cut corners when creating a release build (all the same, just don’t!). I will argue that the process need not be fiddly. So long as a Maven project is correctly set up, the whole thing can be done with a single command. Wire that single command up to Hudson, Jenkins, CruiseControl or whatever and you can create properly versioned release builds in a single click or (if you’re so inclined) as a scheduled task.

At the heart of this is the powerful – though slightly inflexible – maven release plugin.

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Web service testing with soapUI

Published on March 19, 2011

In my previous post regarding Spring-WS and Security I didn’t mention anything about testing the resulting SOAP service. Particularly when it comes to secure services, it’s vitally important to test. First, we want to make sure that the service is functionally correct – that it returns the correct results. Second, we want to make sure it is secure – that it refuses service to any request that does not meet our security requirements.

With regard to how we test, it’s simplest to use some SOAP editor tool that lets us fiddle with the request and press a button to retest instantly. But ideally we want some programmatic test that can be included in the test phase of our build.

This post describes testing the now legendary Spanners WS demo with the following requirements:

Tests must be functional – they test what the webservice does
Security is tested
Tests can be tweaked and rerun instantly
Tests can be included in build process

The updated source of the Spanners WS demo including the tests described here is available to download.

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Spring-WS and Security

Published on February 19, 2011

Spring Web Services (Spring-WS) are a neat way of declaratively creating SOAP web services using Spring with a minimum of boilerplate code usually associated with web services. I’d recommend it as the best way to create web services for a Spring application. When it comes to WS-Security (message encryption, authentication, signatures and so on) it is absolutely vital. It simplifies the very complicated business of securing messages to a few lines of declarative code.

I found the documentation provided by Spring on writing Spring-WS services and securing Spring-WS services very in depth and thorough but I’ve not yet found a good simple example app. This demo is about the simplest possible web service with the most standard WS-Security features enabled.

Test Coverage

Published on December 12, 2010

I’ve been looking a lot recently at JUnit (and TestNG) tests on a code base I’m not too familiar with. In many cases I was not convinced that the tests were adequate but it took a fair bit of investigation before I could be satisfied that this was the case. I would need to look at the tests, then look at the code it’s meant to exercise, then try to work out in my head if the test covers everything it should. To make this process a bit easier, I’ve started running code coverage analysis using Emma. While this doesn’t tell me if the test is good or not, it does show me at a glance how much code is covered by the test and exactly which lines, methods and classes are missed. This is usually a good first approximation for the quality of the test case.

I’ve found Emma to be a useful tool to run after I think I’ve written my test cases and got them working. Running the test case tells me if the code being tested works. Running Emma tells me if I’ve tested enough of the code. There’s no point in having 100% test case successes if the tests themselves only exercise 50% of the code.

Tapestry Quickstart

Published on October 2, 2010

As preparation for a recent interview, I decided to attempt to download, install and run an example Tapestry web application. I set aside a couple of hours to get this going. I expected to have to download an installation bundle, extract it, run an installer, install some dependencies, install and configure a webserver, start some services, write some code, debug, swear a bit then give up and just read an online tutorial.

As it happens, all you need is Maven 2. Running two goals with no particular config will download Tapestry and all dependencies, build and deploy a sample webapp and then run it in a webserver (which it will install too!).

Spring-WS SAAJ problem in JBoss

Published on August 29, 2010

I recently used Spring-WS in an application that we wanted to deploy under JBoss 4.0.1sp1 / JDK 1.5 and JBoss 5.1.0GA / JDK 1.6. I had a good few problems getting the dependencies just right but the biggest problem was with SAAJ.

If you’re running JBoss 4.0.1sp1 and JDK 1.5, you’ll need to package a SAAJ implementation with your app. Easy enough. However, if you’re running JBoss 5.1.0GA and JDK1.6, you don’t want to include a SAAJ implementation as it’s included in the JDK 1.6 release. Also easy enough? Er no.

Maven 1 to Maven 2

Published on July 22, 2010

I’ve been using Maven 1 for close on to five years now. I’ve been meaning to upgrade to Maven 2 for pretty much all of that time but never quite got round to it. A combination of my starting work on a new project and finding some nasty bugs in Maven 1 has finally nudged me towards Maven 2.

Surprisingly, in my team of around a dozen developers, we’ve had only minimal exposure to Maven 2. Everyone has stuck loyally to the now completely obsolete and unsupported Maven 1. I think everyone hopes someone else will do the hard work first.

As we have dozens of build projects in our repo I can’t migrate them all at once. I’m just doing my project and its immediate dependencies. Unfortunately, this causes problems for the old Maven 1 projects as Maven 2 repos are not compatible with Maven 1. So during the transition period I must ensure that both old style Maven 1 projects and new style Maven 2 projects have access to their dependencies from one or other of the repos.

Tag: maven