As part of learning how to develop Building Blocks (B2) for Blackboard Learn 9.1 I've put together several example projects. I've posted these examples on my GitHub repository. Hopefully other new Building Block developers will find them helpful.

Blackboard Building Blocks are Java web applications that run in the Blackboard Learn platform. Building Blocks allow schools to extend what Blackboard Learn can do or customize what it currently does. Blackboard provides an extensive API and also a JSP tag library. The downside is that as of October 2012 July 2013 (!) there is little documentation on how to develop Building Blocks for the Blackboard Learn 9.0 and 9.1 platforms. Much of the documentation available is too old.

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Introduction

Beginning with Blackboard Learn 9.1 Service Pack 1, Blackboard enabled a Building Block (B2) to create database tables in the Blackboard Learn schema and insert records into those tables when the Building Block is deployed to the Blackboard Learn application server (ref. 1). This makes it simpler for B2 applications that need to store data in database tables, especially if those tables should contain foreign keys to other Blackboard tables.

The documentation available on how to setup a Building Block so it creates the tables and inserts records into the tables is very limited (at least what I could find) and confusing. After I learned how to do this I thought a tutorial and example on how to have a B2 create tables and insert records that are part of the Blackboard Learn database schema would be useful for other B2 developers.

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Introduction

The university I develop Java applications for needs to create some Building Block (B2) applications for Blackboard Learn release 9.1 service pack 9. I'm somewhat familiar with Blackboard's Building Block technology but needed to update my knowledge for Building Blocks that will work with Blackboard Learn release 9.1 service pack 9. This article lists some resources I found helpful in getting me started and updating my B2 knowledge. Hopefully you will avoid the frustrations I experienced in trying to find up-to-date references.

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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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