For everything I long to do, No matter when or where or who, Has one thing in common too, It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a sin (It's a Sin - Pet Shop Boys)-

Usually when you start a new project, it will contain several subprojects, for example one with core funcionalities, another one with user interface, or acceptance tests could be another one.

In next screen-cast post I am going to show you how to create a multimodule Maven project using M2 Eclipse plugin.

This is the first video I have done, I wish you find it really useful, and I will try to switch between blog posts and video posts.

Music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkwgMMNXjTc&ob=av3n

If there ain't all that much to lug around, Better run like hell when you hit the ground. When the morning comes. (This Too Shall Pass - Ok Go)

Javascript has become much more important to interactive website development than five years ago. With the advent of HTML 5 and new Javascript libraries like jQuery and all libraries that depends on it, more and more functionalities are being implemented using Javascript on client side, not only for validating input forms, but as UI creator or Restful interface to server side.

With the growing use of Javascript, new testing frameworks have appeared too. We could cite a lot of them but in this post I am going to talk only about one called Jasmine. 

Jasmine is a BDD framework for testing Javascript code. It does not depend on any other JavaScript framework, and uses a really clean syntax, similar to xUnit framework. See next example:

To run Jasmine, you should simply point your browser to SpecRunner.html file which will contain  references to scripts under test and spec scripts. An example of SpecRunner is shown here:

From my point of view, Javascript has become so popular thanks to jQuery, which has greatly simplified the way we wrote Javascript code. And you can also test jQuery applications with Jasmine using Jasmine-jQuery module, which provides two extensions for testing:

• set of matchers for jQuery framework like toBeChecked(), toBeVisible(), toHaveClass(), ...
• an API for handling HTML fixtures which enable you to load HTML code to be used by tests. 

So with Jasmine you can test your Javascript applications; but we still have a small big problem. We should launch manually all tests by opening SpecRunner page into browser. But don't worry, exists jasmine-maven-plugin. This plugin is a Maven plugin that runs Jasmine spec files during test phase automatically, without needing to write SpecRunner boilerplate file.


So I suppose you want to start coding. We are going to create a simple jQuery plugin in standard Maven war layout, where Javascript files go to src/webapp/js, css at src/webapp/css and Javascript tests at src/test/javascript. Of course this directory structure is fully configurable, for example if your project was a Javascript project, src/main/javascript would be better place. Next image shows you directory layout.

Let's start. First of all we are going to create a css file which will define a red class. Not complicated code:

Next step, create a js file containing jQuery plugin code. It is a simple plugin that adds red class to affected element.

And finally html code that uses previous functionality. Not much secret, a div element modified by our jQuery plugin.

Now it is time for testing. Yes I know write tests first, and then business code, but I thought it will be more appropriate to show first the code to test.

So let's write Jasmine test file.

First thing to do is add a description (behaviour) of what we are going to test with describe function. Then with beforeEach, we are defining what function we want to execute before each test execution (like @Before JUnit annotation). In this case we are setting our fixture to test plugin code, you can set an html file as template or you can define html inline as done here.

And finally the test, written inside it function. Our test should validate that div element with id content, defined in fixture, should contain class attribute with value red after running redColor function. See how we are using jasmine-query toHaveClass matcher.

Now we have got our Javascript test written and it is time to run it, but instead of using SpecRunner file, we are going to make Jasmine tests being executed by Maven during test phase.

Let's see how to configure jasmine-maven plugin.

First thing to do is register plugin into pom.

And then configure plugin with required parameters. In two first parameters (jsSrcDir and jsTestSrcDir) we are setting Javascript locations for production code and testing code.  Since we are writing tests for jQuery plugin in Jasmine, both jquery and jasmine-jquery libraries should be imported into generated SpecRunner, and this is accomplished by using preloadSources tag.

All these parameters will change depending on your project but in case you are creating a Maven war project, this layout is enough.

And now you can run Maven by typing:

mvn clean test

And next console output should be printed:

I think we have integrated Javascript tests into Maven in an easy and clean way; and now our continuous integration server (Jenkins or Hudson) will run Javascript tests too. If you are planning to mount a continuous delivery system with your next project, and this project will contain Javascript file, take in consideration using Jasmine as BDD tool because it suits perfectly with Maven.

I wish you have found this post useful.

Download code

Music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=qybUFnY7Y8w#!

Party rock is in the house tonight, Everybody just have a good time, And we gon' make you loose your mind, Everybody just have a good good good time. (Party Rock Anthem - LMFAO)

Redmine is a free and open source, flexible web-based project management and bug-tracking tool,  written using the Ruby on Rails framework.

Redmine supports multiple projects, with its own wiki, forum, time tracker and issues management.

Moreover Redmine implements a plugin platform so can be customized depending on your requirements. Exists plugins to work with Kanban, Scrum, notification plugins or reports.

What I really like about Redmine is that although does not fix the way you must work, it contains enough options to work in any kind of project management approach.

Redmine can be installed in different ways:

• Using webrick (not recommended in production environments).
• Run with mongrel and fastcgi.
• Using Passenger.
• Or package Redmine into war and deploy into  Java container like Tomcat or Glassfish.

In this post I am going to show you how to package Redmine 1.3 into a war file so could be executed into Tomcat7 and Linux. In theory should be work with Glassfish, JBoss, or any other OS.

First of all download JRuby 1.6.6, so open a terminal

wget http://jruby.org.s3.amazonaws.com/downloads/1.6.6/jruby-bin-1.6.6.tar.gz

And decompress downloaded file and move to /usr/share directory.

tar xvzf jruby-bin-1.6.6.tar.gz

sudo mv jruby-1.6.6/ /usr/share/jruby-1.6.6

Then update environment variables with JRuby installation directory.

sudo gedit /etc/environment

Finally try to execute jruby to see that has been installed correctly:

jruby -v

And JRuby version information should be printed on console.

Next step is to install required gems:

Redmine installation

Download Redmine 1.3 and install them on /usr/share directory:

Redmine requires a database to work. In this case I had already installed mySQL5, but postgeSQL is supported too. So let's configure mySQL into Redmine.

cd /usr/share/redmine-1.3.0/config/

Installation comes with a database template configuration file, we are going to rename it and modify to suit our environment. Moreover Redmine contains different start up modes (production, development, test). In our case because we are configuring a production environment, only production section will be touched.

After this modification, it is time to create Redmine user and database into mySQL.

mysql -u root -p

Now it is time to initialize Redmine

Next step is required because we are installing Redmine 1.3, in next versions of Redmine 1.4 and beyond will not be necessary. Open config/environment.rb and comment next like:

config.gem 'rubytree', :lib => 'tree'

And then create database schema and fill them with default data with next scripts.

Now we are going to test that Redmine is correctly configured. For this purpose we are going to use webrick.


and open a browser at http://localhost:3000 to start checking installation.

Redmine web page will be shown, you can login with username and password admin/admin

At this point we have Redmine correctly installed.

Configuring Email

An issue tracker should be able to send mail to affected users when a new issue is created or modified by  change.

If your mail server requires tls security protocol you should install action_mailer_optional_tls plugin.

This plugin requires git, if you don’t have installed yet, type:

sudo apt-get install git

and then run next command on Redmine directory:

jruby script/plugin install git://github.com/collectiveidea/action_mailer_optional_tls.git

Let’s configure email delivery:

Inside configuration file you will find common email settings. Depending on your email server these attributes can vary widely, so at this point I am going to show you a simple smtp server configuration using plain authentication at production environment. Go to last line of configuration.yml file and append next lines into production section.

All attributes are self-explanatory.

And before creating war file, let’s check that email is correctly configured. Again we use webrick.

Then open browser at http://localhost:3000 and log in with admin account.

Adjust admin email by clicking on My Account link, and at Email section, set administrator email.

After that we are going to test email configuration, from main menu, go to Administration -> Settings -> Email Notifications, add emission email and click on test email. After a few time, a test message will be sent to administrator email account.

We have succeeded in Redmine installation, now it is time to package it to be deployed into Tomcat.

Packaging Redmine

Before starting, because of incompatibility with installed jruby-rack gem, we should run next commands to install 1.0.10 version of jruby-rack.

Warble command requires a configuration file. This file is created using next command:

Edit Warble::Config section and configure config.dirs, config.gems and config.webxml.rails.env sections as:

And finally run:

warble

And Redmine war has been created and is ready to be deployed into Tomcat.

Although we have got a war file, I recommend not deleting Redmine installation directory because could be used in future to install new plugins, or modify any configuration. After a modification, calling warble command, a new war with that change would be created.

I wish you have found useful.

Music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQ6zr6kCPj8&ob=av3e