There’s one particular thing Groovy is really good for and that is working with XML. When I started playing around with the REST support in the latest version of Spring MVC I wanted to try using Spring for the controller infrastructure and delegate to Groovy for producing XML responses. It turned out this wasn’t as [...]

Spring Security is one of the basic building blocks I use pretty much every time I’m constructing a web application. It’s a very mature and incredibly powerful security framework, one of its main benefits being its versatility. There are hooks and plugs everywhere, allowing you to extend and combine basically any way you want. Now, [...]

Since I’ve started doing some stuff in Grails lately I’ve virtually been forced to start looking for an alternative IDE. I’ve been an Eclipse guy for the last five years or so; ever since I got out of the JBuilder swamp. Unfortunately, the only IDE with decent support for Grails seems to be Idea (yes [...]

Great news everyone: just recently an all-new version of Apache HttpClient was released. HttpClient is now part of the new initiative Apache HttpComponents, which seems to aim for a complete approach to Http programming in Java; server side as well as client side. I’ve used Commons HttpClient in older versions on several occasions in the [...]

It’s with great pleasure that we can now finally announce the final 1.3.0 version of Spring LDAP. It’s been a while since we’ve made a major release, but there’s quite a bit in this one to make up for it. Among the highlights of this release are the improvements in the authentication area, which is [...]

Ever since I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10 on my laptop (Dell Precision M90) I’ve been having problems with getting the sound to work properly. I could get some applications working if I would change the sound default from ALSA to OSS, but it wouldn’t work in Firefox (e.g. youtube etc.) Seems this is not an [...]

We recently released Spring LDAP 1.3.0.RC1. This long awaited release contains a number of new features and bug fixes. In this post I’ll highlight some of the changes, pointing out some of my favorite Spring LDAP features. Simple Authentication Mechanism By far the most requested feature for inclusion in Spring LDAP has been the ability [...]

In a recent post I wrote about the particular problems we’ve been having with integration testing the Spring LDAP project and the use we’ve made of Amazon EC2 for solving these problems. In this post I’ll present the implementation details. Prerequisites In order to keep this reasonably brief I’ll have to refer to the getting [...]

One of my favorite features of the Spring Framework is the Spring Remoting part, which enables you to expose any bean in a Spring Application Context as a remote service over HTTP. It’s fast, it’s easy, and it’s really, really simple. Basic Spring Remoting Configuration In the general situation all you need to do is [...]

One of the major challenges we’ve been facing in the Spring LDAP project is to make certain that the library works together with different LDAP servers. Different servers behave differently in certain situations; some functionality might only be supported on select servers, etc. In the ideal situation we would run our automated test suite against [...]

The Java Naming and Directory Interface (JNDI) is for LDAP programming what Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) is for SQL programming. There are several similarities between JDBC and JNDI/LDAP (Java LDAP). Despite being two completely different APIs with different pros and cons, they share a number of less flattering characteristics: They require extensive plumbing code, even [...]