Dependency Injection + ESB = SwitchYard (Coolest New Thing This Year)

Switchyard takes Web Services to the next level. Whereas JAXB2 and JAX-WS (and JAX-RS) have brought the development and deployment of Web Services to the necessary level of maturity for clean, easy and practical development, Switchyard let’s us take things to the next step: it makes Web Service Composition similarly clean and easy. And with Web Service Composition comes the entire arsenal of SOA Design Patterns.

I’m sure everyone right now thinks the biggest advances in the computer industry today are Social Media and the iPad. Or maybe they were last year’s big news and there’s something I don’t know (or yet care) about that just appeared in SXSW this year. Well, as much as I’m still chomping at the bit to do a little iOS development (I still watch the Stanford  class lectures from iTunes U on my iPhone while I run the elliptical at the gym at 5:30am every morning!) I’m actually really the most excited about something else. And when I mean excited, I mean that first thing every morning I’ve been checking the JIRA “open tickets” report to see how the countdown is going. I’m talking “kid counting the days to Christmas” sort of behavior.

The countdown to what? Well, I’m glad you asked. I’ve been waiting since about November for the countdown to the release of the 0.4 version of JBoss Switchyard. Continue reading “Dependency Injection + ESB = SwitchYard (Coolest New Thing This Year)”

Running JSTL 1.2 on Tomcat 7 using Maven

I finally decided to bite the bullet and try using cleaner JSP methods, including JSTL tags for some looping constructs. I thought I could slam out a quick “hello world” on my Tomcat 7 instance, but what I found instead was a world of hurt! I wrote this blog article so that anyone facing a similar road can avoid the speed-bumps.

Okay, I know I haven’t posted anything on my blog in over a year, but this falls under the OMG-Why-Couldn’t-I-find-a-straightforward-answer category. Whomever suffers the same headache I suffered will hopefully get led here by Google…

The Problem: Running the most basic JSP Example

Up until now, the few times I’ve needed to cobble together a JSP file for some sort of front-end functionality, I’ve used raw, low-level JSP Scriptlets. Which means typing things like

<% if (something) { %> <some-html> <% } else { %> <some-html> <% } %>

all over the place. And if I wanted to do any looping, well forget about it! It’s a nightmare. So I’ve got these few books and articles that talk about the better ways to solve these problems using cleaner xml-y solutions, and most all of them dive into using JSTL (JSP Standard Tag Library) which is a damned standard and yet isn’t included with Tomcat. It’s one of those things that each vendor is supposed to implement independently, and yet the only implementation out there appears to be Oracle’s Glassfish implementation! (There’s an Apache JSTL project, and they say on their web page that a version 1.2 implementation (which is the stated version for the Java 6 EE standard collection, alongside Servlet 3.0 and JSP 2.2) but that webpage hasn’t been updated since October 2009!!

So apparently JSTL is so basic and simple that it’s included in the elementary pages of any JSP books, but like some bastard stepchild that nobody wants, it’s support is freakishly missing. Okay, enough bellyaching about how FUBAR that is… what about just getting the thing to run? Continue reading “Running JSTL 1.2 on Tomcat 7 using Maven”