Tag Archives: Maven

dropwizard-jobs – My First Open Source Contribution

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I am very exited today.
Today I did an actual contribution to the open source community.
I helped publishing Java libraries to maven central.

The library we published is a plugin for dropwizard that uses quartz:
https://github.com/spinscale/dropwizard-jobs

You can check it out. The README explains how to use it.
In this post I will not explain the plugin, but I will share my contribution experience to an open source project.

Why Even Contribute

There are so many reasons. Google is full of them.
I did it because I really wanted to help the community (In this case, the originators of the code).
It improves my skill-sets. I know now more than I knew before.
Exposed to technologies and processes which I usually don’t use.
Part of my digital signature and branding.

Why This Project

I know about dropwizard for more than a year.
I didn’t have the chance to use it at work.
I did some experiments with dropwizard to get the filling of it.

In one of my POCs, I wanted to create a scheduling mechanism in the micro-service I created.
By searching Google, I found this project.
First of all, I liked what it does and how.
I also liked the explanation (how to use it). It’s clear and I could work with it immediately.
I think the developers did a good job.

How It (my contribution) All Started

But one thing was missing. It wasn’t in maven repository (central or any other public repository).
So I asked whether the developers plan to publish it.

Issue #10 in the repository shows my question and the beginning of the conversation.
Issue 10, question from 2015/02/24

Basically the problem was the time to spend in order to comply requirements. The code itself was working.

My Contribution

I took upon myself to publish it to public maven repository.
I have never done something like that, so I wasn’t sure what to do.
I thought of using bintray by JFrog.
Eventually I decided to use sonatype. It felt more comfortable. So I started reading about OSSRH (Open Source Project Repository Hosting).
There’s an explanation for that below.

I forked the code to my GitHub account and used pull requests in order to merge the code I pushed.
I mostly modified the pom files so comply Sonatype requirements as explained in the tutorials.

Once we were all set, I did the actual publishing.
And now it’s there. Everyone can use it.

At first I was extra careful with any change. After all, “it’s not my code”…
Over time, I felt more comfortable modifying and pull requesting.

How To Upload to Sonatype

I used the tutorials, which explain clearly what to do.
http://central.sonatype.org/pages/ossrh-guide.html

  1. Create a user at OSSRH
  2. Open an issue with links to GitHub. Group ID and artifact ID
  3. Follow instructions (In our case, I had to modify the maven’s groups ID)
  4. Add the correct plugins to the pom file
    maven
    pgp – read it carefully
  5. Deploy

Contributors

Linkedin Twitter facebook github

Spring and Maven Configuration

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This is the first post of a series of posts demonstrating how we to use Spring in an application.
In the series I will show some howtos of technical aspects (context file, properties, etc.).
And I will also show some design aspects and test approach.

In this post I will simply show how to integrate Spring using Maven.

The basic dependency would be the context. Using Maven dependencies, spring-core will be in the project as well.

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
  <artifactId>spring-context</artifactId>
  <version>${spring.version}</version>
</dependency>

If we want to use annotation such as @Inject which comes from Java JSR, we’ll add the following dependency:

<dependency>
  <groupId>javax.inject</groupId>
  <artifactId>javax.inject</artifactId>
  <version>1</version>
</dependency>

And in order to be able to test using Spring, here’s what we’ll need (in here, the scope is test):

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
  <artifactId>spring-test</artifactId>
  <version>${spring.version}</version>
  <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>

You can see that I didn’t add spring-core as it comes with the context / test dependencies.

You can find the code at: https://github.com/eyalgo/request-validation

Some notes about the code.

I added the Spring code, context and the Spring’s Maven dependencies to the test environment.
This is on purpose.
I want to emphasize the separation of the validation-filter framework to the usage and wiring of an application.

In real life, you might have an external library that you’ll want to use it in a Spring injected application.
So the test environment in the code simulates the application and the src is the “external library”.