spring

Eric Miles and I were working on different clients that were both utilizing the Weblogic application and the Spring framework.  Each of needed a way to expose some of the configuration items as JMX beans so that production support folks could change the values of these items at runtime without requiring server re-boots.  Because both of us were using Spring, exposing the beans was fairly straight forward, we just followed the Spring documentation for exporting JMX beans.

Spring Source pushed the first release candidate of Spring 3 a little more than a month ago; it took a little longer than expected, but nonetheless I've been waiting on this release to play around with the new Portlet MVC features.

For portlet developers, the most notable enhancements are in the support for the Portlet 2.0 spec (JSR286), primarily offered through a new set of portlet-specific annotations. There are also various enhancements to Spring Core and Web MVC that will be useful on portal projects and standard java web projects.

I've built an example portlet application to show off some of these new features; it's downloadable below as a deployable WAR (tested on JBoss Portal 2.7.2) and a mavenized eclipse project (zip). 

This article provides a specific example, with code, of using Jersey and JAXB to implement a REST service suitable for consumption by an iPhone application.  It follows an earlier article (http://blogs.captechventures.com/blog/jack-cox/components-enterprise-iphone-restful-applications) in which I surveyed the components that can be used to create an iPhone application that consumes a REST service.

Components

Jersey

Jersey is an open source reference implementation of the JSR-311 (JAX-RS) specification provided by Sun.  In my client work with Jersey, it has proven to be a reliable and lightweight framework for providing REST endpoints and it integrates well with Spring, which will be shown later. 

Jersey is available from Sun at https://jersey.dev.java.net

On my current project, we are using Alfresco and working on an integration with JBoss Portal. In particular, we were creating our own version of Alfresco WebForms editor that is built into their web client.

Do you use Spring Portlet MVC? Have you ever noticed the ImplicitModel request parameter in your URL? It looks something like:

org.springframework.web.portlet.mvc.ImplicitModel=true

Well, it’s a Spring Portlet MVC 2.5 feature and I was scratching my head trying to figure out what it does. It’s set by Spring under the covers, so I dug into their source code to understand it and thought I would share.

Jared Richardson spoke at a Richmond Java Users Group meeting I attended last week; his topic was about investing in yourself and your career - what he called career 2.0. At one point during the presentation, he noted that “if you can’t draw something, you don’t understand it”, which motivated me to finish a blog post I started a while back about Spring Portlet MVC.

JSR250 defines the common annotations for Java. Included in these are the javax.annotation.security.* annotations, including @RolesAllowed, @DenyAll, and @PermitAll; they can be used in EJBs to protect service calls.