If you’ve seen my posts or my site before, you’ll no doubt be aware that I have written at great length about Java EE 6, JSF, CDI , EJB and so on. What I haven’t written about is the many frustrations I’ve come up against in dealing with these frameworks on their own and especially when combined, or how their usefulness is often constrained to the application server container.

Java EE in some ways is an archipelago of frameworks that lacks the cohesiveness and all in one wide screen vision that software developers need. Java EE is about the enterprise, in reality its about the web, or even more specifically about Java EE containers. There’s a whole slew of uses for a good type safe and flexible dependency injection and AOP framework and such as CDI outside of Java EE containers but there is very little information and code to make it actually work.

Our goal is to make CDI useful and usable on its own without Java EE 6, and to give developers the tools and information to do so. To let them write vendor neutral and portable code, and apply agile and best practices. Developers know how to write good software and don’t want to sacrifice that for the sake of using a framework to make things easier. To that end we aim to provide code and information that will help facilitate those practices.

There will be some learning for ourselves along the way and we will have to change some of our previously held concepts. I know over the last few weeks having been getting CDI working and useful outside of the web container it has really altered my perspective on how I think about the dependencies and structure in CDI applications. My perspective has changed even more than when I wrote A Little Less Conversation.

As much as I hate to say it, we did come up with a mission statement, although we found it fairly easy and enjoyable to clearly defined the goals and attitudes of the project.

Our mission is to :

• Promote and facilitate the use of the Java Context and Dependency Injection (CDI) framework in relation to as many aspects of application development as possible.
• Enable developers to take advantage of CDI independently of Java EE.
• Provide lightweight, lean and agile access to the underlying CDI container as a core principle in our efforts.
• Make testing easy without requiring a complex set of tools or complex deployment scenarios.
• Enhance both Java EE development as well as the use of CDI in non Java EE application where possible.
• Promote and enable the use of CDI in a vendor neutral environment and maximize the portability of application code across CDI implementations.
• Not reject the ideas of Java EE but expand the usability of CDI outside the borders of Java EE application servers with frameworks that are not a part of the specification.
• Not reject other CDI efforts but to provide another venue to promote those efforts. This is an addition. This is another voice in support of CDI.

We are pretty excited that so far we have been able to live up to the intent of our mission statement with everything we’ve done so far. Over the next few days and weeks you will see articles and tutorials come out of Rick, Rob and I as we write about the CDISource project and we start to showcase some of the code we have written and start giving you an idea of where we are heading.

Right now we have vendor neutral support for starting up CDI outside of the web container and also for testing CDI beans with minimal configuration and intrusion on your test cases. We also have a few other pieces that are nearly ready, as well as dozens of ideas to get started on.

You can start by looking at Ricks brand new introduction of CDI over on JavaLobby.

I’ve renamed Spigot to DataValve, and moved it to the new site FlutterCode.com which will also host my other project called Knappsack which is a set of Maven archetypes for Java EE 6.

The new site will be home to most of my tutorials, articles and other writings, as well as possibly some screencasts and even podcasts. It will in essence be a pure java development site. This blog will go a bit quieter and contain less development stuff, although most opinion will get put out here instead of over there. I’ll also be copying some of my tutorials over there from this blog.

I’m aiming to create a fairly cohesive tutorial site, aided in part by the Maven Archetypes which will give me a firm base onto which I can build tutorials without having to start from scratch, but one archetype is a sandbox Java EE 6 app with project configuration, a demo model and some test data. The sandbox app will let developers create a new skeleton java EE 6 application they can play with. Building on that, there is a sandbox-demo application which as an archetype that creates a full working demo CRUD application using Java EE 6 so developers can see how all the different pieces of Java EE 6 go together. It includes features such as conversations, JPA CRUD, page parameters, CDI injection and events.

Again, I have to say it, but Open Source is Hard. In the past couple of months, I have been working on a whole new site, getting 2 projects ready to roll with documentation and site content to boot as well as working a job, and having some kind of life.

Now it’s out, I can start to focus a little more on getting some more Java EE 6 tutorials and articles out.

(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.

I also abstracted the concepts of parameterization and parameter resolution so you can have parameters on data providers that are no t query based and your parameters can be resolved using different mechanisms such as EL, reflection, a map, or using custom parameter resolution.
So really, for Seam developers, its like a Seam EntityQuery that doesn’t just use JPA, but uses any kind of data source you want but still returns just a list of objects.

Spigot works nicely with CDI and there is even a demo of it in the distribution that uses JSF and was generated using the Weld maven archetypes. Also, there is a Seam Jpa Dataset Adapter that you can use as a direct replacement for the EntityQuery which will adapt the entity query calls to the underlying data provider calls so you can have a seam-less transition if you want to switch over. This is still a little in-progress, but works. The one area that isn’t implemented is the sorting, which may not be possible, but I still need to add in the methods to the adapter even if they don’t do anything. The other issue is of course the configuration of the query from components.xml using the Seam Framework tags. However, you can define the query using regular component xml tags to define the Ejbql, restrictions and page sizes.

Two things to note if you start using Spigot in place of the entity query. All rows are returned by default, and you need to specify both a select statement and a count statement. I separated those two out so you can put join fetch phrases in the select statement without it breaking the count statement. There is an init method that you can use to set both of these statements for a class type.

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.

Granted, source control and build management should have been done early on but this is a small project where I already make regular informal backups and the IDE handles building the single jar so I didn’t bother. Also, I wasn’t planning on making it open source originally but since I did, I wanted to get everything tidied away.

On top of that, I’ve had to produce documentation, more so than if I was just using the library myself, and produce wiki pages, provide uploads, test the downloads to make sure they work, check that the download will work when installed to a maven repository, and provide instruction on how to use it from a maven repository etc. It’s a lot of work all for the sake of sharing a project with the world. I wouldn’t have to do most of that if I were keeping it to myself!

However, it has taught me two things. One is to appreciate all the extra work that goes into managing an open source project above and beyond just putting a jar file on a web page for download. The other is a reminder to always start out with good practices (build processes and source control) from scratch if you even think the project might go public. This is a no-brainer if you know the project will be open source in advance, but probably should be followed just in case you decide to open source it later on.