All posts by tristan.tarrant

Canyon: more JSR-223 and the SimpleBindings

In order to make the widgets available as object during script execution, I have extended javax.script.SimpleBindings so that I lookup keys in the widget hierarchy before handing it down to the backing map by overriding the get() method. This was how I did it when using the Groovy implementation directly. I have discovered that javax.script requires that I override containsKey() as well as get(), otherwise it doesn’t even attempt to invoke get(). Now that is fixed in SVN and I am nearing the first public release of Canyon.

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Canyon: JSR-223

Canyon is my implementation of the concepts behind various kinds of XML-based application interface tools (XAML, Flash MXML, ZK, etc).
Canyon started off as a way to describe Echo2 (http://echo.nextapp.com) applications using XML bound together with Groovy (http://groovy.codehaus.org) scripts.
Recently I’ve been working on refactoring Canyon to support multiple widget libraries (Echo2, Cooee, Echo3, Swing, SWT, etc) and JSR-223 (aka javax.script) instead of just Groovy. Currently canyon and its bits are available on Sourceforge SVN (http://sourceforge.net/projects/canyon).

I promise I will hopefully get a half-way decent site for all these projects of mine and create some sort of community going.

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WARShield: progress

The WARShield stuff progresses nicely: it now implements most of the feature-set I had in mind.

I have also implemented an event/listener method so that other ContextListeners / Servlets /Filters can get notified when the configuration is readily available, changes, etc.

Currently the configuration is stored in a single properties file, but I am adding a “multi-resource” method so that applications supply a set of template files which get populated with the configuration data (similar to the maven resource filtering by using the ${} notation).

I plan on adding hooks for containers such as Spring, so that they look for their data in the appropriate place and wait until the configuration is ready before reading it.

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WARShield: Java webapp setup wizard framework

Well, the title is a mouthful, but it says it all.
I am working on a small generic framework for implementing setup wizards in Java WAR applications.

My requirements/features are as follows:

  • store configuration information in a sensible, environment-dependent location (e.g. ~/.java under Unix/Linux, Application Data under Windows, ~/Library, etc
  • XML-based wizard descriptor
  • allow any kind of Java view technology (JSP, Velocity, etc)
  • validation for each step in the wizard both via a user-supplied class or via a javax.script-supported script
  • no external dependencies apart from slf4j
  • obviously available via Maven

Currently the code is embedded in another side-project of mine (a Time Tracker application), but I plan to extrapolate it and make it available under an MIT license as soon as it”s robust enough and not so rough as it is now… 🙂

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