6 Dec 2009, 4:01pm
Projects: app engine eclipse google sitebricks sitemesh
by Cliffano Subagio
5 comments
Projects: app engine eclipse google sitebricks sitemesh
by Cliffano Subagio
5 comments
Sitebricks And SiteMesh On Google App Engine
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been trying various web framework stacks to be used with Google App Engine. The ones that I gave a go, and gave a pass for various reasons, were Stapler (the enchilada that powers Hudson), Spring, and RestEasy + htmleasy.
The search continued and I came across Sitebricks, still in its alpha phase but it looks really promising. Simple and straightforward, nothing too magicky, and I got it working with GAE/J in no time.
To guide others who might want to give Sitebricks on Google App Engine a try, here’s what I did: (and please note that this is a miminalist guide, enough to get a simple page up and running)
- Using Google Plugin for Eclipse, create a new Google Web Application Project with Google App Engine enabled and Google Web Toolkit disabled.
- Since Sitebricks didn’t have any official release yet, I had to build the jar from the sitebricks-0.7 tag using
mvn install -Dmaven.test.skip=true
. Unfortunately some of the unit tests on the trunk failed so I just skipped them, hey it’s still in alpha. - The above command downloaded all the dependency jars and generated a Sitebricks SNAPSHOT jar at <M2_REPO>/com/google/sitebricks . Copy the following jars to the Eclipse project’s /war/WEB-INF/lib directory and add them to the build path.
- sitebricks-0.7.jar
- guice-2.0.jar
- guice-servlet-2.0.jar
- google-collections-1.0-rc3.jar
- aopalliance-1.0.jar
- mvel2-2.0.14.jar
- dom4j-1.6.1.jar
- commons-io-1.4.jar
- Create the following files in src/your/package/name.
GuiceInit.javapublic class GuiceInit extends GuiceServletContextListener { @Override public Injector getInjector() { return Guice.createInjector(new SitebricksModule() { @Override protected void configureSitebricks() { scan(FooBar.class.getPackage()); } }); } }FooBar.java
@At("/barkleyzone") public class FooBar { public String getQuote() { return "I have nothing against old people; I want to be one myself one day"; } public String getName() { return "Charles Barkley"; } } -
Create FooBar.html in /war.
<div> ${name} said "${quote}". </div> -
Add GuiceInit servlet context listener and GuiceFilter to /war/WEB-INF/web.xml.
<filter> <filter-name>webFilter</filter-name> <filter-class>com.google.inject.servlet.GuiceFilter</filter-class> </filter> <filter-mapping> <filter-name>webFilter</filter-name> <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern> </filter-mapping> <listener> <listener-class>your.package.name.GuiceInit</listener-class> </listener> - Enable sessions by adding this line in /war/WEB-INF/appengine-web.xml .
<sessions-enabled>true</sessions-enabled>
- Use Eclipse Run -> Run As -> Web Application to start the application and visit http://localhost:8080/barkleyzone and you should see this message:
Charles Barkley said "I have nothing against old people; I want to be one myself one day."
As for a page layout / templating solution, SiteMesh has always been a personal favourite.
- Download sitemesh-2.4.2.jar, place it in /war/WEB-INF/lib directory and add it to the build path.
-
Create /war/templates/main.jsp .
<%@ taglib uri="http://www.opensymphony.com/sitemesh/decorator" prefix="decorator" %> <html> <head> <title>Test</title> </head> <body> <decorator:body/> </body> </html> -
Create /war/WEB-INF/decorators.xml .
<decorators defaultdir="/templates/"> <decorator name="main" page="main.jsp"> <pattern>/*</pattern> </decorator> </decorators> -
Add SiteMeshFilter to /war/WEB-INF/web.xml .
<filter> <filter-name>sitemesh</filter-name> <filter-class>com.opensymphony.sitemesh.webapp.SiteMeshFilter</filter-class> </filter> <filter-mapping> <filter-name>sitemesh</filter-name> <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern> </filter-mapping> - Use Eclipse to stop and start the application, view the HTML source of http://localhost:8080/barkleyzone and you should see the HTML layout wrapping the original div element.