Java

This past weekend I put together an example of a Spring Roo-based Jersey application that can run on Google App Engine. All code in this post is derived from the example project at https://github.com/marcisme/jersey-on-gae-example. You should be able to get a project up and running by copy and pasting the snippets in this entry, or you can clone the project and follow along. This example uses Spring Roo 1.1.1, Jersey 1.5 and App Engine SDK 1.4.0. A basic understanding of the involved technologies is assumed.

As of Roo 1.1.0, addons are created with the addon command. This is slightly different than previous versions, where addons were created with a template argument to the project command. If you find documentation referencing this old style, it’s probably out of date.

If you’ve worked with Jersey, you’re likely familiar with the embedded Grizzly server. Though I haven’t seen it mentioned often, Grizzly can indeed serve static content too. The following snippet is all that’s necessary to fire up an embedded web server. These examples were written with Grizzly 1.9.18-m and Jersey 1.4.

Liquibase is a tool that helps you manage database changes. It can can be integrated into your build process to automatically update your database, and it also has a command line interface that operational staff can use to generate SQL scripts for production deployment. One of its nice features is database abstraction. You define your changesets in XML, and Liquibase generates compatible SQL for you. As with any tool that tries to provide this level of abstraction over a large number of vendors, it doesn’t work 100% with all DBMS. Below is a simple changeset.