The Stripes Book Blog

How do you convince the Suits to use Stripes?

This is a tutorial to set up JPA with Hibernate, using Maven 2. There are probably other/better tutorials out there, but I couldn't find one that explained everything that I needed to know, all in one place. This may be due to lack of Googling skills. Nevertheless, I'm writing this in case others find it useful. There isn't anything particularly difficult here, but I'm probably going to need to refer back to this, so I may as well post it.

By default, Stripes uses StripesResources.properties as a resource bundle, and you can of course use StripesResources_xx.properties for different languages. For various reasons, you might like to use a database to store your localized messages. Using a database-backed resource bundle with Stripes is not difficult. Here are some tips to get you started.

A few people asked about whether or not the Stripes book is available in India. You can get it directly from The Pragmatic Programmers; now, also see this page which is specifically aimed at customers in India.

Enjoy!

Ruby is born!

The Stripes book is now available as an e-book for the iPhone, Kindle, Sony, and so on, DRM-free. Bravo, Pragmatic Programmers!

Stripes has a good balance of convention over configuration, not going overboard and doing too much "black magic". One best practice consists of having a default event handler in each action bean that redirects to a view template (JSP or FreeMarker template, typically). This event handler is the target of the initial request to the action bean, so that you never target a view template directly.

Stripes is an easy-to-use and powerful Web Framework. The Stripes book includes many tips and tricks to help you get the most out of it. Here is one that concerns the way that Stripes obtains values to populate form input fields.

I showed this little script to work colleagues here and there, and posted it on StackOverflow; thought I'd post it here as well for those who might find it useful.

"It's my job to be repetitive. My job. My Job. Repetitiveness is my job." Manning, why do you feel that repetitiveness is necessary in your books?

Aurangzeb Agha spotted a bug in the Stripes book's sample code's final iteration (email_36) that prevents messages from being deleted. The two previous examples have the same problem. It turns out that this was a bug in Stripes itself (see this JIRA issue). You can either use the latest Stripes build from SVN to get the bug fix, or get a workaround for the Stripes book code here. Thanks for reporting the problem, Aurangzeb!

As mentioned in this review of Jersey, picking a name for a framework should nowadays involve considering the Google presence. I love Stripes, and I do like the name because it's simple and unpretentious, just like the framework. However, the disadvantage is that it's such a generic word that it's somewhat difficult to find information when searching on Google (or any other search engine for that matter).

Struts also suffers here because it's difficult to find information concerning Struts 1 versus Struts 2.

New frameworks should strongly consider picking a name that is unique so that it's easy to find information. I don't need to tell you what unrelated results you might get when Googling for LaTeX!

I've been trying out SimpleORM as an ORM solution for Stripes. So far, I like what I see.

Stripes-Quickstart is an Ant script that speeds up the process of creating a new Stripes project. Here is a summary of its features:

• Creates the project directory structure
• Downloads and copies the appropriate JAR files
• Generates a basic web.xml file
• Generates an action bean, a layout, and a simple page as a starting point
• Supports JSP/JSTL and FreeMarker
• Creates an Ant build.xml file for compiling and packaging the web application
• Creates a run target to run the web application in Jetty
• Creates an xml file that you can use to run the web application in Tomcat
• Creates ready-to-import Eclipse and NetBeans projects

Groovy is a dynamic language for the JVM. This article shows how to use Groovy with Stripes.