Welcome to SolamenteNiel!

It's interesting that when you develop open-source software you feel a great sense of relief when the software is ultimately delivered.  In some ways it feels like the end of a voyage because the delivery of software to your end-users (developers in the case of Skyway Builder) is typically one of the final steps in the workplan.  However from an end-user perspective it really is the beginning of the voyage.  Developers can finally get there hands on all the development goodies that you've been working on for them.

Before I get too caught up with working on the next release of Skyway Builder, I wanted to personally share the Skyway Builder 6.3 announcement with my family, friends, colleagues and followers.  I'm very proud of this release.  Whether you are a Spring guru or want to learn Spring, Skyway Builder will save you a lot of time.

Here's a copy of the announcement.

Skyway Software announces the general availability (GA) of Skyway Builder Community Edition (CE) 6.3, an open source, code generator for the Spring Framework. Version 6.3 of Skyway Builder CE is available for immediate download.  This major release of Skyway Builder CE includes:

• Enhanced Spring MVC scaffolding capabilities for generating Spring-based, Java CRUD applications from new or pre-existing domain models.  Watch demo
• Updated Spring DSL for improved package parity between Spring DSL and Spring/Java code
• Enhanced code generation customization for generating Spring MVC and Spring Web Flow solutions that adhere to your own coding standards
• Enhanced graphical Spring Web Flow editor, including usability improvements and better integration with Spring DSL
• Enhanced Spring code generation tags for use with JET templates
• Improved documentation, tutorials and sample projects
• Over 400 bug fixes and enhancements

Skyway Builder Enterprise Edition (EE) 6.3, the commercial edition of Skyway Builder, is also now GA and is available for test drive.  New commercial features in Skyway Builder EE include:

• Integration with IBM Rational Software Architect 7.5.2 to transform UML into working Spring applications. Watch demo
• DWR (JavaScript/JSON) support for accelerating RIA development using Spring services
• Support for project-level customization of code generation templates using JET

I figured I'd also share links to the Skyway Builder 6.3 Feature Preview Series that I did.

• Skyway Builder 6.3 Feature Preview – #1 Enhanced Spring MVC Scaffolding
• Skyway Builder 6.3 Feature Preview – #2 Model Packages
• Skyway Builder 6.3 Feature Preview – #3 Spring DSL Enhancements
• Skyway Builder 6.3 Feature Preview – #4 Configurable Spring Code Generation
• Skyway Builder 6.3 Feature Preview – #5 Custom Spring Templates using JET
• Skyway Builder 6.3 Feature Preview – #6 Spring Services via Javascript/JSON using DWR

In the first four posts of this series I focussed on everything but building the Appcelerator-based RIA.  Part 1 gave an overview of the technologies, and part 2 described how I added Appcelerator support to an Eclipse web project.  Part 3 was related to implementing the domain model and Spring-based services using Skyway Builder, and part 4 described how the Appcelerator service layer was configured to use the Spring services.  Now the time has come to actually implement the front-end using Appcelerator RIA.  You can download the project and see the running application here.

In this post I will make the Skyway Services from (part 3) available as Appcelerator services that can be used by an Appcelerator-based RIA application.  I was hoping I could just use Spring services, but at SpringOne 2008, Kevin Whinery said the recommended approach is to use Appcelerator services and wire in Spring services.  It's an extra step, but it turns out that it gave me a place where I could workaround some issues I had with Appcelerator's automatic JSON serialization logic.  While I could've updated the Spring beans to return JSON to the Appcelerator service, I wanted to avoid tweaking my Spring services to accomodate Appcelerator.

Now that Skyway Software has a twitter account, I was curious to see how I could use Skyway Builder's scaffolding to build a twitter client.  The application may be trivial, but nevertheless it's a neat example of the use of Spring MVC scaffolding.  Using Skyway Builder and Twitter4J I built this Spring MVC twitter application.  The project can be downloaded at the end.

• the weather data comes from a NOAA web service that is accessible using SOAP
  
• the Spring Services are defined and generated from Skyway Builder
  
• the web application is implemented using Appcelerator