This release contains several bug fixes, improvements to code generation (with AMP) and upgrades Spring to version 2.5. Since this is a minor release, we're not using any of Spring 2.5's features, but there's nothing stopping you from using them. The new annotations are particularly exciting.

To learn more about Spring 2.5's features, see InfoQ's What's New in Spring 2.5: Part 1 article.

Please see the Upgrade Guide below or the QuickStart Guide to get started with this release. If you're upgrading from a previous release, you may be interested in the changelog.

Upgrade Guide

If you're currently using AppFuse 2.0, there's a few things you'll need to change to upgrade to 2.0.1. If you're using a version prior to 2.0, you may want to follow previous upgrade instructions first.

The easiest way to make the changes below might be to compare your pom.xml, ApplicationResources.properties, web.xml and web-tests.xml with the ones from a new archetype. Beyond Compare is a fabulous diff tool for Windows users. To do this, create a new project using 2.0.1, then compare the top-level directory of your project with the new one.

The tutorial applications have been upgraded from 2.0 to 2.0.1. Looking at the diffs for these projects may be one of the easiest ways to upgrade.

If you've used mvn war:inplace in your project, make sure you remove your WEB-INF/classes and re-run war:inplace:

rm -r src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/classes

The following are a detailed set of steps you'll need to do if you're manually upgrading your project from a previous 2.x version.

  1. Backup your project on your local file system or (even better) in your source control system.
  2. In your pom.xml, change <appfuse.version> to 2.0.1 and <spring.version> to 2.5.
  3. Maven's war overlay feature is based on timestamps. If you've overridden AppFuse files in your project, you'll need to "touch" them in order to give them a newer timestamp. Here's a sample of what you might run: 
    touch src/main/webapp/*
touch src/main/webapp/scripts/*
touch src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/*
touch src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/pages/*
    Alternatively, you could touch all files in src/main: 
    find src/main -print0 | xargs -r0 touch
    Another, more permanent, solution is to use <dependentWarExcludes> to prevent the files from being overlayed.
  4. Upgrade the maven-jetty-plugin to version 6.1.6.
  5. Change any spring-mock dependencies to spring-test.
  6. If you're using Hibernate, change the <hibernate.dialect> property to MySQL5InnoDBDialect.
  7. Remove any HTML markup from your i18n bundles (ApplicationResources*.properties) since XML is escaped in messages.jsp. [APF-880]
  8. Check your JSPs for any JSTL "${}" expressions inside Struts 2 tags. These will need to be converted to equivalent OGNL expressions. APF-941 has more details and references.

About the AppFuse Maven Plugin

This plugin currently does two things: 1) code generation for CRUD and 2) allows you to convert your project to use AppFuse's source instead of using its binary dependencies.

Generating CRUD with AMP

You can run the following command to generate CRUD screens/classes for a POJO:

mvn appfuse:gen -Dentity=Name

If you don't specify the entity name, you will be prompted for it. Currently, if a @Column has "nullable = false", a "required field" validation rule will be generated as part of the web framework's validation configuration. This command will also install the generated code, unless you specify -DdisableInstallation=true.

If your entity is not defined in hibernate.cfg.xml, it will be added.

In a modular project, these commands must be run in the "core" and "web" modules. The plugin is smart enough to figure out when it should/should not generate stuff based on the packaging type (jar vs. war). If you want to generate specific code in a "war" project, you can use gen-core or gen-web.

You can run mvn appfuse:remove to remove the artifacts installed by appfuse:gen.

There's also a goal that allows you to generate model objects from database tables.

appfuse:gen-model

This goal will install the generated files into your source tree, unless you specify -DdisableInstallation=true. After running this command, you can use appfuse:gen to generate CRUD classes/tests/screens for this object.

Installing AppFuse's source into your project

The good news is creating an "old style" project is now pretty easy. After you've create a new project using 2.x, you can run the following command:

mvn appfuse:full-source

This goal will convert your project to use all of AppFuse's source and remove all dependencies on AppFuse.

What the full-source plugin does:

  1. Exports all sources from Subversion into your project. It reads the dao.framework and web.framework properties to determine what you need.
  2. Removes warpath plugin from pom.xml.
  3. Calculates dependencies by reading pom.xml files form the various AppFuse modules. It replaces your dependencies with these new ones. The order of the dependencies added is alphabetical based on groupId.
  4. Reads properties from the root AppFuse pom.xml and adds the ones that don't exist to your project. The order of the properties added is alphabetical.
  5. Renames packages from org.appfuse to your project's groupId.

If you have issues developing AppFuse in Eclipse or NetBeans because of the WarPath plugin, running appfuse:full-source should fix that problem. It removes the warpath plugin as part of its installation process.

Detailed Changelog