Xebia Blog

The purpose of this post is to give a Maven based sample code of Spring with Stripes integration. The source code set is already in Eclipse project format, so you can use eclipse to view files content and structure.
This post will not explain about the techniques of integrating spring with stripes. The spring with stripes integration is very well explained at Stripes framework wiki page - Spring with Stripes. I kindly suggest you to read that documentation first before trying out the sample code given in this post. This post also assume that you are familiar with the basics of Maven, Eclipse, Stripes and Spring.

Few of the other "How to" samples (like Ajax addition, addition, echo, stripes layout reuse) that were documented in Stripes framework wiki page were also included in this sample code.
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Filed under: Ajax, Eclipse, Flex, Java, Maven, Spring, Stripes
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Erwin van der Koogh shows you in this Eclipse tip; how to use templates.

Templates can make your coding life a lot easier, by just typing a short word and pressing ctrl+space, et voila, a complete line of code or even better! Just check it out.

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Filed under: Eclipse, Java, Podcast
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Robert van Loghem shows you how you can declutter your Eclipse workspace by using the Fast View feature.

Head on over to our podcast page here or subscribe to podcast.xebia.com.

Filed under: Eclipse, Podcast
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Erwin van der Koogh shows you 2 settings that will make your Eclipse life a lot easier.

Head on over to our podcast page here or subscribe to podcast.xebia.com.

Filed under: Eclipse, Java, Podcast
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I have used the mylyn plugin before (it was called mylar then), but I never had a project where it could be really useful. But now I that I have, I'm really enthusiastic.

First let me explain what mylyn is. According to their own website it is a: "Task-Focused UI for Eclipse that reduces information overload and makes multi-tasking easy". It does this by integrating with your task repository (issue tracking systems like jira, trac, bugzilla), so that when you need to switch to or from issues it will maintain the context of the issue you were working on, so that when you switch back you will have all the files you had opened and that we’re important then. This will reduce the overhead associated with switching between tasks.

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Filed under: Agile, Eclipse, Java
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The second eclipse quick tip is here where i show you how i use the external tool feature of eclipse to launch the selected shell script. So enjoy our new short video!

Head on over to our podcast page here or download or subscribe to our new podcast.xebia.com.

Filed under: Eclipse, Podcast
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Well we have a new addition to our podcasts! Video! and we start off with Serge giving you an Eclipse tip; Links directory.

Serge shows how to use a "links directory" in Eclipse and how to easily manage plugins across installations.

So head on over to our podcast page here or download or subscribe to our new podcast.xebia.com.

Filed under: Eclipse, Podcast
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For a current project I use maven 1 as build tool. I always generate the eclipse plugin for generating the .project and .classpath file because I do not want to add dependencies both in the project.xml and the eclipse classpath. The eclipse plugin can also link the source files to the dependencies in your project, I find this a handy feature because you always need to debug and step through the code of some dependency.
However since the maven 1 repository is maintained even worse as the maven 2 repository you won't find any sources jars for the newer versions of dependencies (for instance Spring 2.0). Besides this being very annoying the eclipse plugin also takes ages to finish because it gets a lot of time-outs about not being able to download the sources jars from the maven 1 repository. That's why I created a small Jelly script that made it is possible to traverse through the maven 2 repository and grab the sources jars from there. Here's the smelly Jelly that made it all possible:
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Filed under: Eclipse, Maven
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Many applications we built have to provide reporting to allow end users to monitor results, progress, etc. In most cases a simple query and an Excel export is more than sufficient. In cases where more advanced reports are required we often look at projects like JasperReports or if that doesn't suffice maybe even Crystal Reports. As I'll try to explain in this blog, it might be worth your time to take a look at Eclipse BIRT.

The Eclipse “Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools” is one of those Eclipse projects I've been tracking for some time now. Its current release features a report designer based on our favorite IDE (also available as standalone download) which allows non-technical users to create reports with charts, tables, etc. It includes a web based report viewer application. It can of course execute the report designs, but also provides export capabilities (with AJAX column selection) and a range of other features.

For a more thorough overview of the features of BIRT, take a look at their website at http://eclipse.org/birt/phoenix. Features I found interesting:

• Standalone designer (based on the Eclipse IDE)
• Support for various datasources (including XML)
• Different output formats (with similiar layout)
  
  Currently it supports PDF and HTML, but there is also an (experimental) XLS emitter available. Look for "tribix" here: http://qauck.blogspot.com

In most cases we want to include the reporting directly in our applications (to be able to provide security, caching, etc.). Since most of our applications are built using the Spring framework it would be convenient if we could use BIRT by instantiating a few beans. As it turns out we can, but it took me some time reading (sometimes) badly documented source code and googling a lot. The remainder of this blog describes the steps I took to integrate BIRT in a sample Spring web application.

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Filed under: Eclipse, Java, Spring
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