A ‘LegUp’ for new Java projects
Nowadays, even a simple Java web system is going to require a web framework, some sort of persistence layer and probably some sort of dependency injection. But how long would it take you to create such a project from scratch? 1 day? 1 hour maybe if you knew all of the technologies involved. With LegUp you can be up and running in 15 seconds*.
LegUp is a collection of free, open source (Apache 2 licensed) Maven 2 archetypes, and a web based configuration tool provided by jWeekend. It allows you to choose from different combinations of popular Java technologies (Apache Wicket, Spring, Google Guice, JPA, Hibernate, Warp Persist) to allow you to get up and running quickly and easily. Up and running means that will have a simple application running within a minute of starting.
Currently the following archetypes are available:
- Spring 2.5 with a JDBC database layer
- Spring 2.5 with a JPA 1.0 database layer
- Apache Wicket 1.4 and Google Guice 1.0
- Apache Wicket 1.4, Google Guice 1.0, Warp Persist 1.0 and Hibernate 3
- Apache Wicket 1.4, Google Guice 1.0, Warp Persist 1.0 and JPA 1.0
- Apache Wicket 1.4, Spring 2.5 and JPA 1.0
Example for a project with Wicket, Spring and JPA
- Make sure you have Java 5+ and Maven 2 installed and working. You can search on the internet for how to do this if you are not sure.
- Go to the LegUp configuration page in your web browser of choice.
- Select the Wicket, Spring, JPA archetype from the drop down list.
- Optionally customize the Group Id, Archetype Id, Version and Package fields. These are standard Maven properties. I will leave the defaults for this example.
- Click the ‘Generate Maven Command’ button. This will populate the text area under the button.
- Open a terminal window (Mac, Linux) or command prompt window (Win) and cd to a suitable directory.
- Copy the command line (starts with mvn archetype:generate) and paste it into your open terminal.
- Hit enter and wait for maven to finish processing the command. The time this will take depends on the speed of your internet connection and how populated your local maven repository is. It could take a few minutes if this is the first time you have used maven.
- Cd into the directory which has been produced, this will be named the same as the Archetype Id you entered earlier. In my case this directory is called ‘myproject’.
cd myproject
- Build the application and run the provided tests using this maven command:
mvn compile test
- Run the wicket application on jetty with this maven command.
mvn jetty:run
- Thats it, you now have a running Wicket Application with Spring Dependency injection and JPA using hibernate under the covers, all running with a HSQL database.
Added bonus feature
If you type the following maven command, it will generate you an eclipse project which you can import into eclipse to start editing the code straight away
mvn eclipse:eclipse
Gotchas
- Warp Persist will need installing into your local repository manually. Download it from the Warp Persist website and follow the instructions that maven gives you.
