News

• 2009-02-22: Fixed a bug in the generated build.xml file when using an existing Jetty installation.
• 2009-02-15: Fixed a bug in the generated Eclipse project classpath when using Freemarker for templating.
• 2009-01-24: Changed comments to indicate that the core project path can be a relative path. Thanks to Allen Halsey for pointing that out.
• 2009-01-18: It's now optional to use the Stripes dynamic tag library declaration (stripes-dynattr.tld).
• 2008-11-27: Added support for Spring. Thanks to Gregg Bolinger for the contribution.
• 2008-11-25: Added more robust support for the URL binding of the initial action.
• 2008-11-25: Fixed a bug with the generated web.xml file when using the Dynamic Mapping Filter.
• 2008-11-18: Added the opt.stripes-reload property for having the option of including Stripes-Reload. With this option, your action beans, type converters, formatters, and resource bundles will be reloaded without having to restart the server.
• 2008-11-17: Added the opt.jetty property for having the option of including Jetty in the project structure. With this option, ant run will run the web application without requiring to manually download and installing Jetty.

Download

Stripes-Quickstart is available with or without dependencies:

• stripes-quickstart-with-dependencies.zip : this file already includes the JAR files, so they won't need to be downloaded when you run the script.
• stripes-quickstart.zip : this file does not include the JAR files, so is much smaller. The appropriate JAR files will be downloaded when you run the script.

Running Stripes-Quickstart

Stripes-Quickstart is an Ant script with two main targets: create-project and clean.

To create a project, first edit the stripes-quickstart.properties and, at the very least, set the core.project.path property to the absolute path where you want to create the project. Make sure to use forward slashes (/) in all paths. Then, run the command:

  ant create-project

That's it! The rest is details on tweaking the configuration settings to your liking. To start over from scratch, run ant clean create-project.

Configuration

Stripes-Quickstart uses a single .properties file for configuring things like the path where you want the project to be created, the paths where you want your Java, resource, and template files, the packages where you want action beans and extensions, the prefix you want to use for the Stripes tag library, and so on.

By default, the stripes-quickstart.properties file is used. You can specify a different file using -Dconfig=<filename>, as in:

  ant -Dconfig=my-stripes-project.properties create-project

This enables you to save different configuration settings in different .properties files and reuse them.

FreeMarker support

As an alternative to the standard JSP/JSTL, you can use FreeMarker with Stripes. Stripes-Quickstart supports this by giving you the option of generating a Stripes project for use with FreeMarker, along with these conveniences:

• A custom Freemarker servlet that exposes public fields so that you can refer to them in your markup, and also makes the context path available using ${contextPath}
• A tweaked stripes-freemarker.tld file that changes all Stripes tag names that have a hyphen (-) to the same name but with underscores (_). With that, instead of

    [@s["options-collection"]]
  

  You can use:

    [@s.options_collection"]]
  

  This also gives you the option of closing the tag with either [/@s.options_collection] or [/@], instead of forcing you to use [/@].

Also note that with FreeMarker, it's not necessary to use stripes-dynattr.tld because FreeMarker's custom tag library support allows you to use dynamic attributes out-of-the-box.

See the stripes-quickstart-freemarker.properties file for a sample FreeMarker configuration.

Running your Stripes application

A build.xml file is generated for your project. This Ant script includes a build target which creates a WAR file that you can deploy to your servlet container. The context path of the application will match the name of your project. You can also run the application directly from the project directory in Jetty and Tomcat, as explained below.

Jetty support

The generated Ant script also includes a run target which runs the web application in Jetty. For this to work, you must either:

• set the opt.jetty property (and that's all),
  OR

• have Jetty installed,
• set the JETTY_HOME environment variable to the installation directory, and
• have the Ant-Jetty plugin. For your convenience, you can just copy this JAR file to the lib subdirectory of Jetty. This JAR has been tested with Jetty 6.1.10. It may work with other versions as well.

Tomcat support

You can also run your web application in Tomcat. All you need to do is take the .xml file named after your project, which you will find in the root directory of your project, and copy it to the conf/Catalina/localhost subdirectory of Tomcat. Create those subdirectories if they do not already exist. Then, start Tomcat.

Feedback

Please send your feedback as comments on this post or email me at fdaoud %at% proinbox #dot# com.