We are pleased to announce that Skyway Software is a sponsor of SpringOne 2GX, SpringSource’s fifth annual developer conference for the global Spring community.  This year’s conference is being held at the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans from October 19-22, 2009.  Read the press release here.

Joining us in the Skyway booth will be Todd Dunnevant, the Lead of IBM’s Architecture Management Community of Practice.  Todd and the members of the Skyway team will be demoing Skyway Builder’s integration with IBM Rational Software Architect, including:

• Spring profile for IBM Rational Software Architect
• UML support for Spring stereotypes
• UML <-> Spring DSL transformations
• Template-driven generation of Spring MVC applications

And, of course, we’ll also be highlighting some of the new features in Skyway Builder 6.3, including:

• Enhanced Spring MVC CRUD scaffolding
• Service, DWR, Web Flow and Web Service support for RIA development
• Spring development accelerators
• 100% configurable and customizable code generation

Stop by the Skyway Software table to meet the Skyway/IBM team and register for a chance to win a free iPhone.

See you New Orleans!

The documentation for Skyway Builder 6.3 has been published, and it’s available in HTML and PDF format.

Skyway Builder 6.3 CE / EE

• Recipes ( HTML / PDF)
• Reference Guide ( HTML / PDF)
• Step Guide ( HTML / PDF)
• Web Control Guide (  HTML / PDF)
• Spring MVC – Detailed Tutorial ( HTML / PDF
• Spring Web Flow – Detailed Tutorial ( HTML / PDF)
• UML Stereotypes for Spring Reference ( Eclipse / HTML / PDF)
• Spring Sandbox Setup – Tomcat and MySQL ( HTML / PDF)
• How To – CRUD App Scaffolding ( HTML / PDF)
• How To – Web Services ( HTML / PDF)
• How To – Pagination and Sorting ( HTML / PDF)
• Spring Code Generation Tags for JET ( JAVADOC)

Today we published an updated series of tutorial videos for Skyway Builder 6.3.  These videos will walk you through the implementation of a Spring MVC project using the Spring DSL.  It covers project bootstrapping, skeletal code generation and model-driven development of a full Spring application.  This tutorial is also available in Eclipse Help (in Skyway Builder), HTML and PDF formats.

1. Skyway Builder 6.3 – Spring MVC Tutorial Part 1 – Overview and Project shell creation
2. Skyway Builder 6.3 – Spring MVC Tutorial Part 2 – Data layer
3. Skyway Builder 6.3 – Spring MVC Tutorial Part 3 – Service layer
4. Skyway Builder 6.3 – Spring MVC Tutorial Part 4 – Web layer

Update 7/9/2010 – MyEclipse for Spring 8.6 now generates full ready-to-run GWT applications based on MVP and UI Binder in minutes. Just point the scaffolding wizard at your database tables, Java beans, or JPA Entities. You can learn more about it from the Generating Enterprise Class GWT applications for Spring post that I wrote on Genuitec blog. Or, you can keep reading my original post…

In part one we installed the Skyway Builder plugins and the Google Plugins for Eclipse, and we created the GWT project (dynamic web project) and the Spring DSL project.  In part two we implemented the back-end of the GWT application using Spring and Direct Web Remoting (DWR).  In part three we started to create the  GWT front-end.  In this post I’ll wrap up the implementation of the front-end, including the integration between GWT and DWR using GWT JavaScript Native Interface (JSNI).

Read the rest of this entry »

Update 7/9/2010 – MyEclipse for Spring 8.6 now generates full ready-to-run GWT applications based on MVP and UI Binder in minutes. Just point the scaffolding wizard at your database tables, Java beans, or JPA Entities. You can learn more about it from the Generating Enterprise Class GWT applications for Spring post that I wrote on Genuitec blog. Or, you can keep reading my original post…

In part one we installed the Skyway Builder plugins and the Google Plugins for Eclipse, and we created the GWT project (dynamic web project) and the Spring DSL project.  In part two we implemented the back-end of the GWT application using Spring and Direct Web Remoting (DWR).  Now we will build the GWT front-end.

Before we get started lets me make it clear that I will  describe the steps for creating the GWT front-end, but I won’t be explaining GWT development concepts in much detail.  I’m assuming that you already understand GWT.  You definitely don’t want me, a self-professed GWT novice, teaching you GWT.  If you aren’t familiar with GWT, then I recommend you start with the GWT tutorial.  As I stated in earlier blog posts, the purpose of this series of blog posts is to share with you one approach to integrating a GWT front-end with Spring-based back-end services.  This is a topic that I think I have a pretty good grasp of, but I certainly welcome feedback.  I am describing the steps for creating the GWT front-end only for the sake of completeness of the integration example.

Read the rest of this entry »

Update 7/9/2010 – MyEclipse for Spring 8.6 now generates full ready-to-run GWT applications based on MVP and UI Binder in minutes. Just point the scaffolding wizard at your database tables, Java beans, or JPA Entities. You can learn more about it from the Generating Enterprise Class GWT applications for Spring post that I wrote on Genuitec blog. Or, you can keep reading my original post…

In part one we installed the Skyway Builder plugins and the Google Plugins for Eclipse, and we created the GWT project (dynamic web project) and the Spring DSL project.  In part two we are going to implement the back-end of the GWT application using Spring and Direct Web Remoting (DWR).

Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this summer, our “Spring Roo, Skyway Builder and Code Generation” blog post caught a lot of attention and created a great dialog between Skyway CTO and Founder, Jared Rodriguez, and Spring Roo Project Lead, Ben Alex.  As a follow-on to that post, we were contacted by InfoQ writer, Srini Penchikala, to continue that discussion in his article “The Role of Code Generation in Java Application Development“.  For additional perspectives from both Ben and the Skyway team on the impact that code generation has had on Java application development, checkout Srini’s article here.

And, not all of our responses made it into the article — the full set of questions and answers is below.

Read the rest of this entry »

Update 7/9/2010 – MyEclipse for Spring 8.6 now generates full ready-to-run GWT applications based on MVP and UI Binder in minutes. Just point the scaffolding wizard at your database tables, Java beans, or JPA Entities. You can learn more about it from the Generating Enterprise Class GWT applications for Spring post that I wrote on Genuitec blog. Or, you can keep reading my original post…

Over the last month (when time permitted) I have been experimenting with Google Web Toolkit (GWT) for RIA development.  I have benefited a lot from the efforts of other developers that have blogged regarding GWT development, and it’s definitely expedited the GWT learning curve for me.  In the spirit of community I figured I’d share my experiments with the Spring, Skyway Builder, and GWT development community.  Hopefully others will find the information here helpful.

My specific goal was to use Skyway Builder 6.3 to generate the Spring back-end of a GWT application and use basic GWT development techniques for the front-end.  There are many ways for a GWT application to integrate with server-side logic, and the specific approach that I took was to use the DWR functionality in Skyway Builder EE.  In the future (if someone else hasn’t beat me to it) I’ll will explore and share other ways to leverage Skyway Builder for integrating GWT and Spring development.

Rather than just tell you that my experiment was successful, I wanted to describe the steps that I took in detail.  As a result, this series of blog posts will resemble a Skyway Recipe, and I hope to provide sufficient details so that you can recreate this project on your own.  This series will consist of five parts:

• Part 1 – Setup of development environment; Setup of the GWT project
• Part 2 – Scaffold Spring back-end for GWT application
• Part 3 – Create GWT Front-end Skeleton
• Part 4 – GWT and Spring Integration
• Part 5 – Deploy and Test GWT application on Tomcat

Read the rest of this entry »

In a previous preview post (Skyway Builder 6.3 Feature Preview – #5 Custom Spring Templates using JET), I introduced the enhanced template customization feature in Skyway Builder EE.  While it’s not the only way to customize the templates that are used for code generation, it’s certainly the easiest way to customize the templates .  In this post I’m going to demonstrate the use of this feature to change the logging implementation of a scaffolded Spring MVC application.  Specifically, I will replace SLF4J with just LOG4J.

The first step is to scaffold the Spring MVC application, which is covered in detail in the Skyway Builder Recipes.  Here are the steps at a high level:

1. Create Skyway Project: Contacts
2. Create Model Package: org.skyway.contacts.domain
3. Create Domain Object: Contact – add any fields you want  (i.e. id, name, address)
4. Scaffold Domain Object (Right-click –> Scaffolding –> Generate CRUD)
5. Configure your DB with DAO

Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve probably seen all the cool new features with 6.3, and I’m sure you can’t wait to dive into what it can do.  Having the privilege of using it for the past couple months while its been in development, I been able to discover interesting and easier ways to do things during my development based on specific requirements in my projects.  Here is a list of these items, and I hope you find them useful:

• JSF / Spring Faces: JSF Integration just got a TON easier now with 6.3 and the ability to use Lists.  Check out the Spring faces wiki article and the sample TPS project.
• Web Flow Validation: There’s nothing in 6.3 that changes this technique, but now it’s formally documented in our wiki under Validating WebFlow Models.
• Quartz Integration: Ever need to schedule a job?  May the Quartz be with you! Okay, yes – again, I’ll stick with my day job.
• Pagination AND Sorting: Pagination is easy (with EE).  Sorting is easy.  But put them together, and there’s several approaches that you can take.  Here’s one reusable approach as a tutorial and sample To Do List project.

Hope these help!  Let us know what you think!

Dave