Auditing a Spring MVC Webapp with AspectJ. Part 1

If you’re like me, then you’ll have those kinds of programming days where everything seems to go incredibly well. You write the code and the tests and it just works. And then and there are those other kinds of days, the really bad ones, where you know that everything you’ve written is as right as it can be and the code refuses to work: something is obviously wrong, but you’ve no idea what. I had one of these kinds of days when writing the code for this blog. The idea was to demonstrate how to use Spring and Aspectj to audit a user’s visits to a screen.

How Do You Organise Maven Sub-Modules?

Being an itinerant programmer one of the things I've noticed over the years is that every project you come across seems to have a slightly different way of organising its Maven modules. There seems to be no conventional way of characterising the contents of a project's sub-modules and not that much discussion on it either. This is strange, as defining the responsibilities of your Maven modules seems to me to be as critical as good class design and coding technique to a project's success. So, in light of this dearth of wisdom, here's my two penneth worth...

Super Quick Tomcat App Deployment Using a PULL Script

If you managed to read my last blog you'll remember that I demonstrated a simple script for creating a new tomcat installation on a server by splitting the tomcat binaries from the conf files, storing the binaries on a FTP server and the conf files in version control, with a script recombining the two parts.

The next and most obvious improvement to this idea is to create a system for automatically deploying an application once it has compiled and passed its unit tests. There are many ways of doing this,

Super Fast Tomcat Installation using FTP and Version Control

When talking about Continuous Delivery one of the tests that both Martin Fowler and Jez Humble often mention is their "flame thrower" test. It goes something like this: Jez will say "How long would it take you to get up and running if Martin and I went into your machine rooms armed with flame throwers and axes and started attacking your servers"?

Securing your Tomcat app with SSL and Spring Security

If you've seen my last blog, you'll know that I listed ten things that you can do with Spring Security. However, before you start using Spring Security in earnest one of the first things you really must do is to ensure that your web app uses the right transport protocol, which in this case is HTTPS - after all there's no point in having a secure web site if you're going to broadcast your user's passwords all over the internet in plain text. To setup SSL there are three basic steps...

Ten Things You Can Do With Spring Security

One

You can specify the authorisation provider of your choice in your Spring XML config file. You do this by configuring an authentication-manager as defined in Spring’s http://www.springframework.org/schema/security/spring-security-3.1.xsd schema. The simplified authentication-manager element definition looks something like this:

<xs:element name="authentication-manager">
 <xs:complexType>
  <xs:choice minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded">
   <xs:element name="authentication-provider">
    <xs:complexType>
     <xs:choice minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded">
      <xs:element ref="security:any-user-service"/>
      <xs:element name="password-encoder">...</xs:element>
     </xs:choice>
     <xs:attributeGroup ref="security:ap.attlist"/>
    </xs:complexType>
   </xs:element>
   <!-- This is BIG -->
   <xs:element name="ldap-authentication-provider">...</xs:element>
  </xs:choice>
  <xs:attributeGroup ref="security:authman.attlist"/>
 </xs:complexType>
</xs:element>

This means that, for example, you can use any number of authentication providers including basic authentication and JDBC authentication as shown in the snippet below:

Spring 3.1: Caching and EhCache

If you look around the web for examples of using Spring 3.1’s built in caching then you’ll usually bump into Spring’s SimpleCacheManager, which the Guys at Spring say is “Useful for testing or simple caching declarations”. I actually prefer to think of SimpleCacheManager as lightweight rather than simple; useful in those situations where you want a small in memory cache on a per JVM basis. If the Guys at Spring were running a supermarket then SimpleCacheManagerwould be in their own brand ‘basics’ product range.

If, on the other hand, you need a heavy duty cache, one that’s scalable, persistent and distributed, then Spring also comes with a built in ehCache wrapper.

Spring 3.1 Caching and Config

I’ve recently being blogging about Spring 3.1 and its new caching annotations @Cacheable and @CacheEvict. As with all Spring features you need to do a certain amount of setup and, as usual, this is done with Spring’s XML configuration file. In the case of caching, turning on @Cacheable and @CacheEvict couldn’t be simpler as all you need to do is to add the following to your Spring config file:

   <cache:annotation-driven />