I checked my Google Analytics data this afternoon to get a feel for what my readers are reading... here's a list of the most popular posts on my site -- interestingly, they were some of my favorites too.

• Getting Started with Struts Shale
• How to Create an ATOM Feed
• Securing EJB Applications with Custom JBoss Login Modules
• Apache Rewrite Rules
• Installing Apache2 and SVN using Fink on OS X

Also ranking pretty highly in my popular content is my JBoss tag. Back in the day when I was earning my Master's at Clarkson, I was posting a lot about JBoss configuration and customization.

So, according to Google, that's the best of Tim Fanelli (dot com)

I mentioned in my post on Getting Started with Shale that I'd come back to using it with Maven. Since the project is so new, there's no Shale artifact in the Ibiblio repository. For the time being, you should install Shale into your local repository by hand. This will let you use Shale as a dependency in your applications managed by Maven the way you'd expect too.

The first step is to download the latest nightly build of Shale. You can find the nighly builds in their CVS repository.

Extract the bundle and go into the dist directory. You'll see 6 jar files that we'll install into your repository. In general, for each jar, executing:

mvn install:install-file 
      -DgroupId=<struts-shale> 
      -DartifactId=<jarname>
      -Dversion=<SNAPSHOT>
      -Dfile=<path-to-file>
      -Dpackaging=<jar> 
      -DgeneratePom=true

Will be sufficient, however, shale-core has several dependencies. It would be nice if listing shale-core as a dependency of your project automatically got you it's dependencies as well. To accomplish this, we'll create a simple POM for the shale-core artifact:

shale-core-SNAPSHOT.pom

<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/maven-v4_0_0.xsd">
  <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
  <groupId>struts-shale</groupId>
  <artifactId>shale-core</artifactId>
  <packaging>jar</packaging>
  <version>SNAPSHOT</version>
  <name>Struts Shale</name>
  <url>http://struts.apache.org</url>

  <dependencies>
        <dependency>
                <groupId>commons-beanutils</groupId>
                <artifactId>commons-beanutils</artifactId>
                <version>1.7.0</version>
        </dependency>

        <dependency>
                <groupId>commons-chain</groupId>
                <artifactId>commons-chain</artifactId>
                <version>1.0</version>
        </dependency>

        <dependency>
                <groupId>commons-digester</groupId>
                <artifactId>commons-digester</artifactId>
                <version>1.7</version>
        </dependency>

        <dependency>
                <groupId>commons-logging</groupId>
                <artifactId>commons-logging</artifactId>
                <version>1.0.4</version>
        </dependency>

        <dependency>
                <groupId>commons-validator</groupId>
                <artifactId>commons-validator</artifactId>
                <version>1.2.0</version>
        </dependency>
  </dependencies>
</project>

Then install the jar with it's POM by executing:

mvn install:install-file 
      -DgroupId=<struts-shale> 
      -DartifactId=<jarname>
      -Dversion=<SNAPSHOT>
      -Dfile=<path-to-file>
      -Dpackaging=<jar> 
      -DgeneratePom=true
      -DpomFile=<path-to-pom>

NOTE: If you're using a Maven version before 2.0.1 SNAPSHOT, you'll need to copy the POM into your repository manually:

cp shale-core-SNAPSHOT.pom ~/m2/repository/struts-shale/shale-core/SNAPSHOT/

You can repeat this process every now and then with the latest nightly snapshot to keep current on Shale builds until the Ibiblio repository gets an artifact for it.

Struts Shale is a proposal for a next-generation web development framework. I've spent a couple days scouring the internet trying to find a simple getting started guide to build a new Shale application, but there just doesn't seem to be one yet. Shale's website promises that a future milestone release will include a blank template ready for customization, but in the meantime, we're left to reading JavaDoc to figure out how to get going. This tutorial will walk you through building a very simple Hello / GoodBye world application using Shale and JavaServer Faces technology from scratch.

(read more)