In 2010, I began creating example applications and tutorials for the Apache Struts 2 project. My goal is to provide a series of tutorials and examples that a Java developer new to Struts 2 may use to learn about the Struts 2 framework.
In this tutorial we'll explore using Struts 2 message resource capabilities (also called resource bundles). Message resources provide a simple way to put text in a view page that is the same throughout your application, to create form field labels, and to change text to a specific language based on the user's locale (i18n).
One of the perks of my current job is I work with a pretty smart group of Java developers. Jeff Day, one of the programmers here at KU, showed me how to enable logging when using Struts 2's global exception handling mechanism.
In my Struts 2 web applications, I'm now using Spring to manage class relationships. Creating unit tests for a Struts 2 ActionSupport class in an application that also uses Spring can be difficult. Fortunately, there is a Struts 2 plugin available that makes it easier to write unit tests for ActionSupport class.
I was learning Hibernate as another methodology for storing my Java objects' state in a data repository. I wanted to experiment with integrating Hibernate into a Struts 2 and Spring application so I created an example of using the three technologies together. The combination of these three frameworks enables Java developers to create powerful web applications with a minimum of code.
At a Spring training conference, I learned about a new feature in Spring 3.0 that makes it very easy to create an embedded database to run in your Java application. The Spring 3.0 documentation provides a good summary of why developers may want to use an embedded database:
An embedded database is useful during the development phase of a project because of its lightweight nature. Benefits include ease of configuration, quick startup time, testability, and the ability to rapidly evolve SQL during development. [Reference 1, section 12.8.1]
I had to load properties from two different property files in a Java Spring project. Since I had not done that before and I'm a Spring newbie, I did some research in the Spring documentation. I found out that Spring provides a very easy to use methodology to load properties from multiple property files and then inject the property values into your Spring managed beans. This article will explain what I learned and provide an example Spring Java application you can download.
For a new project I'm working on I'm using Spring JDBC (http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/2.5.x/reference/jdbc.html) to interact with the database.
Spring JDBC provide numerous benefits over using traditional JDBC. Once you learn the methodology of using Spring JDBC, development time is greatly reduced. Spring JDBC has numerous methods that make it simple to store, retrieve, and update your Java objects in the database.
In a previous blog article I described how you can integrate Jersey RESTful web services and the Spring framework. I ended that article with a note that I needed to do further research into how to write unit tests for the web services that depend on the Spring framework for dependency injection.
Fortunately, I ran across an article on Naresh's blog, Jersey Test Framework re-visited, where he explains the new version (1.1.2-ea) of the Jersey test framework. In his article he provides a link to the code for the spring-annotations sample test (provided as part of the Jersey project), which is an example of unit testing a web service that uses Spring. So using Naresh's article and the Spring annotations example code I was able to design a demo application that uses Jersey and Spring and that includes some simple unit tests.
I worked on a project that uses Jersey RESTful web services that depend on other classes to do the actual work. For example a web service that uses a data access object to get information out of a data repository. Since I like to use Spring to manage dependencies between classes, I needed to learn how to integrate Spring and Jersey.
