Hi all,
The beta version of Jspresso 3.0 is ready to be test-drived. Among many bug fixes and improvements, the most exciting feature of this new release is the native Flex support for all Jspresso based applications. And you will benefit from it without a single line of ActionScript nor MXML since the Jspresso Flex GUI channel is based on a generic client engine that seamlessly communicates with the Jspresso backend through a brand new networking layer that relies on Adobe's BlazeDS. Everything keeps running on the server (your entities, your business rules, your actions, ...) while efficiently notifying the client side whenever needed through generic commands.
If you want to see now what it looks like, lauch the flex version (login demo/demo)of the HR sample application.
Moreover, the Jspresso application development cycle has been greatly simplified by integrating everything in Maven instead of relying on an external ant script for the following steps :
- generation of the domain model
- generation of the Hibernate mapping
- compilation of the Jasper reports
- generation of the DB schema scripts
Building the webapp is now as simple as "mvn package" with all the previous steps included. And of course, the flex compilation and html/swf generation is also part of the game thanks to the excellent flex-mojos maven plugins).
Neither the site nor the reference documentation have been updated yet to reflect these changes but this will be done before the general availability of the final release.
For those of you who are interested in giving it a try, please first read the release notes as well as the change log. They contain important informations about some major changes that directly impact existing Jspresso applications.
Before migrating an existing Jspresso application, the best approach is certainly to leverage the 3.0 archetype and import the HR sample application sources in it to get a clear idea of the project structure.
Here are the main steps involved (tested with maven 2.0.10):
- as Pierre commented below, you must increase the java heap space allocated to Maven :
on windows :
set MAVEN_OPTS=-Xmx512m (or set it as a user env variable)
on linux :
export MAVEN_OPTS=-Xmx512m (or set it as a user env variable)
- generate the HR sample application skeleton using the Jspresso 3.0 archetype :
mvn archetype:generate
-DarchetypeCatalog=http://repository.jspresso.org/maven2-snapshots/
-DgroupId=org.jspresso.hrsample
-DartifactId=hrsample - download the HR sample application sources here.
- unzip (and merge) hrsample-3.0-SNAPSHOT/hrsample-core/main into hrsample/core/src. This will bring the HR sample spring descriptors into your codebase by replacing the default archetype ones.
- mvn package
You should obtain your ready-to-deploy war in the hrsample/webapp/target directory.
Deploy it in tomcat (don't forget the -Djava.security.auth.login.config=/path/to/hrsample/conf/jaas.config) and you can play with the HR sample application :
- http://localhost:8080/hrsample-webapp/flex/ for the Flex version (requires the flash plugin 9+)
- http://localhost:8080/hrsample-webapp/wings/ for the WingS version
Of course, the project is ready to be imported in Eclipse for further testings. Note that every modification made to the domain model structure will require a "mvn package" and a refresh of the Eclipse project (F5) for getting updated entities.
Whenever you face any problem while testing this release, please post back in this thread.
I hope you will enjoy it !
Regards,
Vincent
