The Spring JDBC framework is used in Java applications instead of traditional JDBC to overcome several JDBC limitations. With the release of Spring 3.1, several classes used in the Spring JDBC framework are deprecated. I updated my Spring JDBC example application to use Spring 3.1 and replaced the deprecated classes with the new versions.
Developing a web application for browsers on hand-held devices requires significant changes to how the view pages are rendered. JQuery Mobile provides very good support for creating web pages and widgets that work well across a number of hand-held platforms. Struts 2, a Java web application framework, works well as the back end system for handling a user's interaction with the view page and for rendering dynamically generated view pages in conjunction with JQuery Mobile.
I'm starting down the long journey of learning how to develop applications for Android devices. Since I've been developing Java applications for several years and am very familiar with Eclipse, Android app development seemed to be the best fit.
I've targeted my learning on Android Ice Cream Sandwich (version 4.0.3) platform. Though almost no handsets and tablets currently (December 2011) use Ice Cream Sandwich, I'm hopeful that by the time I'm ready to put an app on the Android marketplace, it will be more common.
On September 7, 2011, the Struts development team released version 2.2.3.1 for general availability. This version fixes a nasty security vulnerability and "all developers are strongly encouraged to update existing Struts 2 applications to Struts 2.2.3.1." (http://struts.apache.org/) The release notes are here: http://struts.apache.org/2.2.3.1/docs/version-notes-2231.html.
We are now testing our use of Blackboard Learn 9.1 web services in Service Pack 6. Previously, up to Service Pack 5, we were not able to use Blackboard's User web service to update an existing Blackboard user's data. The same tests that were failing for updating an existing Blackboard user using the User web service now pass in Service Pack 6.
It is sometimes useful to use an enum type as a field in a model class or as a field in a Struts 2 ActionSupport class. This article discusses how to use enumerations with the Struts 2 framework and provides a complete example application to demonstrate the use of enumerations in a Struts 2 application.
Blackboard Learn provides extensive web services that external applications may use to get information from and add information to Blackboard. The below links can be used to learn about Blackboard Learn 9.1 web services and to download Java applications that demonstrate how to use the web services.
I wrote these Java example applications, tutorials and documentation based on updated versions of my previous blog articles on Blackboard Learn's web services. Each file includes a link to download an example Java application that can be viewed in any Maven compatible Java IDE. The example applications include a detailed ReadMe.txt file that explains how to build and run the example either in Eclipse or just using Maven.
On March 24, 2011, springsource released milestone 2 of the Spring Data JPA library. Per the Spring Data project website, Spring Data JPA:
Simplifies the development of creating a JPA-based data access layer and provides 'cross-store' persistence functionality for JPA managed entites [sic].
Since I recently started using JPA 2 in my Spring applications, I decided to learn more about Spring Data JPA. To assist my learning, I took an example project that uses Struts 2, Spring 3, JPA 2 (with Hibernate 3.5 as the JPA provider) and modified it to use Spring Data JPA. This blog article is about what I had to modify so the project could use Spring Data JPA and what I could then get rid of.
One of the new features in Spring 3.1 is cache abstraction that allows developers to easily cache method results. This blog article provides a simple Maven Java project that demonstrates how to use the new cache annotations.
As I worked my way through the Contexts and Dependency Injection (CDI) part of the Java EE 6 tutorial I wanted to learn how to use CDI with Tomcat 7 and Maven. The examples that come with the Java EE 6 tutorial provided by Oracle are NetBeans projects and use the GlassFish 3 server (which has built in support for CDI). Since my development environment is Maven and Tomcat, I wanted to translate the CDI examples in the Java EE 6 tutorial to my environment. Just like with my work on converting the JSF 2 example to Maven and Tomcat, converting the CDI example meant a ride on the JSF 2 - Tomcat 7 pain train.
