Spring Tool Suite

I have spent quite some time banging my head trying to get the first sample project worked out using STS (I was using 2.7.1.RELEASE).

While I was trying to create a Spring Template Project, I kept getting "Failed to read artifact descriptor for org.springframework:spring-context:jar:3.0.5.RELEASE". The solution was to delete the ".m2" in "C:\Documents and Settings\xyz\" to start with a clean slate for Maven repo. The reason is that a Spring Template Project is closely tied with Maven 2. Any un-resolved dependency will cause the project to fail.

Now think of it, what happened was that I started when was in my office and I needed to go through proxy server to get all dependencies downloaded. In my first attempt, I did not have proxy set up right. Somehow, partial dependencies were downloaded. Then after I got the proxy set up right, for some reason, the Spring Template Project thought all dependencies were already there and didn't bother to download the missing ones. No other error was given but the above nasty line. After tried a clean installation of the STS and created a Template Project successfully at my home PC, I did a comparison with my machine at work and resolved the mystery.

Groovy and Grails

In the past three month or so, I have been working very intensively and extensively on a project using Grails. The project looked small however full of exciting features of Grails. I have to say Grails is a great framework for web application development. We have been talking about picking framework for years and none of them is really met my standard of a "framework" until I started to know Grails. This is it! I was amazed by the simplicity and productivity of it. In the coming posts, I will start sharing some of the implementation in various areas...