The latest version of the Knappsack Maven Archetypes now supports creating Java EE 6 applications for servlet containers. These projects includes configuration for core Java EE 6 technologies such as JSF, CDI, JPA and Bean Validation and can be run from the command line using the embedded Jetty and Tomcat servlet containers.

Also with this latest release, all the archetypes are available in the Central Maven Repository which means you can dive straight in and create a new Maven project using these archetypes :
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In part 1, we looked at the basic structure and configuration of the project that is common in all the archetypes. This time we’ll look at the minimal archetype that contains some more functionality and a number of different classes used to implement that functionality. (more…)

I have finally got around to putting the Mavan Java EE 6 Archetypes into the Maven Central Repository. This means you no longer have to manually download and install the Archetypes, they should be available for you to use out of the box. In some cases, depending on how you are creating your projects, you may need to refresh or update your Repository indexes in the IDE before they are visible.

In Eclipse (with m2Eclipse installed), you open the Maven Repositories view, locate the Central Repository in the global repositories, and right click and select update index to make the archetypes available.

To create a new project from the command line, you can copy the following command into a script or batch file and edit it to setup your own group and archetype values.

mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeGroupId=org.fluttercode.knappsack -DarchetypeArtifactId=jee6-sandbox-demo-archetype -DinteractiveMode=false -DarchetypeVersion=1.0.4 -DgroupId=org.application -DartifactId=sandboxdemo -Dpackage=org.application

The new version includes the archetypes for creating Java EE 6 applications in servlet containers which lets you play around with CDI, JSF, JPA, validation and other JEE 6 technologies using an embedded servlet container from the command line.

In this tutorial, we will create a new project using the Knappsack Archetypes and compile and deploy it. For this example, we will use the jee6-basic-archetype. Before you begin, you will need to have installed Maven, but you no longer need to manually install the Knappsack Archetypes as they are in the Central Maven Repository now, so you just need to make sure your index is up to date. These instructions will work for any Maven Archetype you have installed and creating new maven projects in general.
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This is a brief guide to downloading and installing the Knappsack Maven Archetypes for Java EE 6. (more…)

This article describes how to install artifacts into Maven from the source code. To start with you should have installed Maven and downloaded the source code you want to install. This same mechanism can be used for library jar files to archetypes that you want to install. (more…)

This tutorial will show you how to install DataValve into your local Maven repository. You should already have Maven installed locally on your machine into which we will be installing the DataValve libraries.
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I’ve just released a new project called Knappsack which is a set of Maven archetypes for Java EE 6. In addition to the usual starter projects, these archetypes provide complete example applications so you can see the features of JEE 6 and play around with it without having to butcher existing demo applications.
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Note : Spigot has been renamed to DataValve.

(Edit : I renamed this post so it doesn’t seem like Spigot is just for Seam, Spigot can be used with different frameworks or without any at all. However, I wrote this post since Spigot is so familiar to the Seam EntityQuery that it should be easy for Seam users to get the idea)

Seam developers should become familiar with Spigot concepts fairly quickly since they are very similar to those found in the Seam EntityQuery which was one of the main inspirations for the framework. If you imagine taking the entity query class and splitting it in two, one part to keep hold of state and the other to actually fetch the data. The stateful part is the Paginator that keeps track of what the current ordering of the data is, what is the current page and how big the pages are. The stateless part takes the Ejbql and the pagination information and returns a subset of the data. Now imaging that the data provider has the JPA pieces taken out and replaced with an abstract fetchResults method. This method is implemented in subclasses for specific data providers for text files, sql queries, jpa queries, native jpa queries, xml files, comma delimited or just an in memory dataset.
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Note : Spigot has been renamed to DataValve and is hosted over on FlutterCode.com.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything new as I’ve been busy with a new Open Source software project called Spigot. It’s a java library that sits between your application code and your data sources (Hibernate, JPA, JDBC or any arbitrary source of data) and helps with things like pagination and sorting using a common interface so you can switch out data providers and use alternatives.

For query language data providers, Spigot also facilitates excluding restrictions from WHERE clauses when parameters are resolved to null. Parameters are handled using parameter resolvers so there is more than one way to parameterize the query including EL expressions, reflection or a value map on the data provider.

Spigot also provides a few other add-ins like converting any dataset into an in-memory dataset that can itself be paginated and sorted and shared across an application (such as commonly used data in a web application). The IndexedDataProviderCache can give you random access into a dataset with caching and look ahead loading. This lets you hook a dataset with thousands of rows up to a Swing JTable with an instant response and a very small memory footprint since it doesn’t need to load all the objects at once as the provider will load the records as needed and cache the results. This is demonstrated in the Swing Demo in the download. There are also demos for Wicket and CDI with JSF.

You can ready about why I created Spigot in the documentation

Spigot is currently hosted on Project Kenai, where you can download the release, view documentation online or read about 10 ways Spigot helps developers.