Blog for Java

Ever wish Maven could run a specific command if any files in your project change? Some IDEs have their own features to do X if a file changes, but they usually don't take your full Maven project file into account. Problem finally solved with the Watcher Plugin for Maven. Add to your Maven project file and fire it up in a new shell. Maven will continuously and recursively watch any number of configured directories and then execute a series of goals if a file change is detected. Just like if you typed it on the command-line! We use it at Fizzed across a bunch of projects, but mainly our web projects -- where we want a full compile run any time our Java code, resources, or templates change. Works especially well from a project parent to watch any of your sub modules too.

Ninja is a full stack web framework for Java. Stork is an "after-build" tool for Java. Lately, I run all webapps in a stand-alone process (embed Jetty/Netty/etc) and use a reverse proxy (Nginx) to send requests to it. While Ninja is easy to package as a war file that's ready to run in Tomcat/Jboss/etc, it's not as easy to package it as a stand-alone app that can run as a daemon/service. Ninja + Stork to the rescue! Stork integrates with Ninja in just 2 easy steps.

A free and open source Play Framework Module for Twitter is now available! It supports play framework version 2.x and it will fetch, cache, and display tweets from Twitter. It's resilient against Twitter API downtime/rate-limiting by maintaining a cached copy of the last successful API call. It supports rendering tweets into html for simple display. It's published to maven central for quick and easy installation as a dependency in your play project.

There are a handful of articles on how to build a module for version 2.x of the Play Framework. While those articles are an excellent starting point, they were lacking information on configuration, exposing a plugin, and publishing them to maven central. This post will explain how to build, maintain, publish, and use your Play Framework 2.x module in other projects.

Tapping into your build system to automatically generate source code that includes build information (version, date, dependencies) is not only smart, it should be the standard. For Maven-based Java projects, I've long had a technique I use in every project by defining it in a standard parent pom.xml file used in every project. For Play framework's SBT-based build system, there fortunately is a plugin (sbt-buildinfo) which can accomplish the same result with just a few simple tweaks.