In my previous post I introduced Spring Test MVC HtmlUnit and explained the motivation behind the project. In this post I will describe how to use Spring MVC Test with HtmlUnit.

Updating Dependencies

Before you use the project, you must ensure to update your dependencies. Instructions for both Maven and Gradle can be found on the site documentation.

Using HtmlUnit

Now that we have the correct dependencies, we can use HtmlUnit in our unit tests. Our example assumes you already have JUnit as a dependency. If you have not added it, please update your classpath accordingly. The complete code sample for using HtmlUnit and Spring MVC Test can be found in MockMvcHtmlUnitCreateMessageTest…

Recorded at SpringOne2GX 2013 in Santa Clara, CA

Speaker: Jeremy Grelle

As the complexity of web and mobile apps increases, so does the importance of ensuring that your client-side resources load and execute in an optimal and efficient manner. Differences in resource loading techniques can have a dramatic impact on how fast an application feels to your users, and can be the catalyst for whether they have a joyful or frustrating experience. This talk will discuss performance techniques aimed at keeping your users on the joyful end of this user experience spectrum. We'll take a look at:

• Pragmatic tools for measuring client-side performance
• Techniques for optimizing resources and their resulting impact
• Approaches to maximizing dev-time happiness and production performance
• Easy incorporation of these techniques into your everyday tool-chain

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Recorded at SpringOne2GX 2013 in Santa Clara, CA.

Speaker: Brian Cavalier

Loose coupling. Your web front-end has that, right? Your JavaScript is using pubsub, event emitters, and message buses! Guess again, you can do better. Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) is a technique for augmenting the behavior of objects, methods, and functions non-invasively. AOP adds new behaviors and modifies existing behaviors "from the outside". Using AOP, it's possible to create connections between components without either having any knowledge of the other and without any extra library dependencies in your code. While you may be familiar with AOP in Spring, you may not yet have applied it in JavaScript. In this talk, we'll do just that. We'll introduce simple techniques for applying AOP in pure JavaScript using no additional libraries, and then look at meld.js (https://github.com/cujojs/meld), the AOP library that powers Cujo.js (http://cujojs.com). We'll work from simple examples of making connections between components to more sophisticated examples that integrate pubsub, message buses, etc. in a truly loosely coupled way.

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Spring Boot 1.0.0.RC5 has been released and is available in the repo.spring.io repository. This is mainly a bug fix release, although a couple of new features have been added:

• A new @IntegrationTest annotation has been added to help when writing integration tests for Spring Boot.
• The CRaSH shell now exposes an endpoint command that can be used to obtain actuator information.

We now also have a fairly comprehensive reference manual.

This is the last planned release candidate, so please give it a try and report any bugs. We plan to release GA very soon.

With the GA release of Java 8 finally having arrived this week, let's all rejoice and celebrate - and then wake up and wonder how to introduce this to our everyday work environments...

This is easy enough to do for prototyping purposes: grab a JDK 8 download, IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse's recently completed Java 8 support, and off you go. The challenging part comes a step later: You need to figure out how to deploy your app to a Java 8 enabled environment.

Of course, in practice, that consideration probably comes much earlier: Before you're willing or allowed to try Java 8, you need to have a…

Java developers have heard a lot about functional-style programming - particularly with Java 8's addition of lambda expressions.

"First-class functions in Java 8" is a 12 minute video tutorial from Java 8 in Action: Lambdas, Streams, and functional-style programming by Raoul-Gabriel Urma, Mario Fusco and Alan Mycroft.

This video introduces method references and lambda expressions, the mechanisms Java 8 provides to pass a behavior as an argument to a method.

To save 38% on this or any other Manning books, just enter vturma01 in the Promotional Code box when you check out at manning.com.

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While the term "lambda expression" may sound abstract and academic, Java 8 Lambdas can have a big impact on how you program every day. In simplest terms, a lambda expression is a function—a bit of code—that you can pass to another method as an argument. Thus, you can cope with changing requirements by using a behavior, represented by a lambda, as a parameter. Java 8's functional programming features, like lambdas and the new Stream API that enables a cleaner way to iterate through collections, can help you write concise, maintainable code that scales easily and performs well on multicore architectures. Java 8 in Action is a clearly-written guide to Java 8 lambdas and functional programming in Java. It begins with a practical introduction to the structure and benefits of lambda expressions in real-world Java code. The book then introduces the Stream API and shows how it can make collections-related code radically easier to understand and maintain. Along the way, you'll discover new FP-oriented design patterns with Java 8 for code reuse, code readability, exception handling, data manipulation, and concurrency. For developers also exploring other functional languages on the JVM, the book concludes with a quick survey of useful functional features in Scala and Clojure.

On Monday I announced the release of the first milestone of Spring Test MVC HtmlUnit with the promise of a blog series that would introduce it. This is the first of a four part blog series introducing Spring Test MVC HtmlUnit. The series outline can be seen below:

• In this first post we will explore the motivation behind Spring Test MVC HtmlUnit.
• The second post will demonstrate how we can integrate Spring MVC Test and HtmlUnit.
• Our third post will demonstrate how we can integrate Spring MVC Test with WebDriver.
• Finally, we will demonstrate how we can integrate Spring MVC Test with Geb.

Why…

Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring!

Today, Oracle released Java 8 and all its many wonderful features at EclipseCon. Java 8 is finally here! Be sure to grab your JDK today.

There are lots of fine features - like lambas - that enhance Spring application development. To learn more, be sure to check out Spring project lead Juergen Hoeller's webinar on the 25th of March on the subject of Spring 4 and Java 8. I'll be there!

As usual, we've got a lot to cover so let's get to it.

1. InfoQ has posted a very nice article introducing Spring Boot today by Dan Woods. Dan does a very good job, I'd recommend it.
…

Recorded at SpringOne2GX 2013 in Santa Clara, CA

Speaker: Josh Long (Pivotal) and Kevin Nilson (Google)

It'd be nice to assume everything remains the same from one environment to another, but the realities of today's deployment targets (clouds, app servers, etc.) make this difficult. An application may target one in-memory database in development and target a traditional database in production. A/B testing is a common practice that lets you incrementally expose potentially high risk features. Feature switches can be invaluable; should something go wrong, you can revert to a known state. All of these use cases, and more, can be handled using the Spring framework. Join JavaOne Rock Star and Java Champion Kevin Nilson and Spring Developer Advocate Josh Long for a look at how you can run your application in differing environments using the Spring Framework.

Learn more about Spring at http://www.spring.io

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