Introduction

Spring Data is an ambitious project designed to make data access even simpler.  Spring Data consists of several sub-projects such as Spring Data JPA, which makes it easier for coding an application that uses JPA.  I had previously written about Spring Data JPA and found it significantly reduced the amount of code I had to write.

A relatively new addition to the Spring Data family of projects is Spring Data REST, which simplifies exposing JPA-based repositories as RESTful endpoints.  After reading Vijay Rawat's excellent blog article on how to use Spring Data REST I decided to modify the Struts 2 – Spring Data JPA example application I used in my Spring Data JPA blog article to include Spring Data REST.

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Introduction

I've been using Eclipse for Java development for over 5 years. I'm currently using Eclipse 3.7. Recently NetBeans 7.2 beta was released and I decided to give it a try. I'm working on refactoring/improving a large Java project that was written over 4 years ago. I'm adding Spring, Maven, unit tests and improving the projects flexibility and maintainability. I spent a day using NetBeans 7.2 beta instead of Eclipse to see how well I liked using NetBeans.

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Introduction

As a long-time Java programmer who uses Eclipse as my IDE, Maven as my build tool, and Spring libraries I've been looking for a comfortable way to learn Java EE 6. Most of the Oracle tutorials and book examples use NetBeans and GlassFish and really just show you how to use the NetBeans wizards. I happened to run across a post about how to migrate from Spring to Java EE 6. In the comments for that post I learned about some very good Java EE 6 examples that use Maven and can be easily imported and run from within Eclipse.

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Introduction

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.

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Introduction

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.

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Introduction

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.

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In January 2012, the Struts development team released version 2.3.1.2 for general availability. This version fixes a nasty security vulnerability and "all developers are strongly encouraged to update existing Struts 2 applications to Struts 2.3.1.2." (http://struts.apache.org/) The release notes are here: http://struts.apache.org/2.3.1.2/docs/version-notes-2312.html.

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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.

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Introduction

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.

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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.

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