DDevelopment & Design

xquery4j in action

In my previous article, I introduced a wrapper library for Saxon, xquery4j http://github.com/rafalrusin/xquery4j.
Here, I will explain how to use it to create an article generator in Java and XQuery for XHTML, called Article. You can download it here: http://github.com/rafalrusin/Article. It’s a simple DSL for article generation.

I think it is something worth noticing, because the whole project took me just a while to implement and has interesting features. Those are:

  • embedded code syntax highlighting for a lot of programming languages (using external program highlight),
  • creating href entries for links, so you don’t need to type URL twice
  • it integrates natively with XHTML constructs

This is an example of an input it takes:

 xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml' xmlns:a="urn:article">
Some text
 lang="xml">
]]>

It generates XHTML output for it, using command

./run <input.xml >output.xhtml

The interesting thing is that XQuery expression for this transformation is very simple to do in Saxon. This is the complete code of it:

declare namespace a="urn:article";
declare default element namespace "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml";

declare function a:processLine($l) {
for $i in $l/node()
return
typeswitch ($i)
case element(a:link, xs:untyped) return href=“{$i/text()}”>{$i/text()}
default return $i
};

declare function a:articleItem($i) {
typeswitch ($i)
case element(a:l, xs:untyped) return (a:processLine($i),
)

case element(a:code, xs:untyped) return
( a:highlight($i/text(), $i/@lang)/body/* ,
)

default return “error;”
};

xmlns=“http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>

<br /> a.xml


rel=“stylesheet” type=“text/css” href=“highlight.css”/>


{
for $i in a:article/*
return
a:articleItem($i)
}

Inside this expression, there is bound a:highlight Java function, which takes two strings on input (a code and a language) and returns DOM Node containing XHTML output from highlight command.
Since there is not much trouble with manipulating DOM using xquery4j, we can get as simple solution as this for a:highlight function:

public static class Mod {
        public static Node highlight(final String code, String lang) throws Exception {
            Validate.notNull(lang);
            final Process p = new ProcessBuilder("highlight", "-X", "--syntax", lang).start();
            Thread t = new Thread(new Runnable() {

public void run() {
try {
OutputStream out = p.getOutputStream();
IOUtils.write(code, out);
out.flush();
out.close();
} catch (IOException e) {
throw new RuntimeException(e);
}
}
});
t.start();
String result = IOUtils.toString(p.getInputStream());
t.join();
return DOMUtils.parse(result).getDocumentElement();
}
}

Please note that creating a separate thread for feeding input into highlight command is required, since Thread’s output queue is limited and potentially might lead to dead lock. So we need to concurrently collect output from spawned Process.
However at the end, when we need to convert a String to DOM and we use xquery4j’s DOMUtils.parse(result), so it’s a very simple construct.

— Previous article

Embedding XQuery in Java

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Git, Beginner to Advanced Survey

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DDevelopment & Design

Spock, Java and Maven

Few months ago I've came across Groovy - powerful language for JVM platform which combines the power of Java with abilities typical for scripting languages (dynamic typing, metaprogramming).

Together with Groovy I've discovered spock framework (https://code.google.com/p/spock/) - specification framework for Groovy (of course you can test Java classes too!). But spock is not only test/specification framework - it also contains powerful mocking tools.

Even though spock is dedicated for Groovy there is no problem with using it for Java classes tests. In this post I'm going to describe how to configure Maven project to build and run spock specifications together with traditional JUnit tests.


Firstly, we need to prepare pom.xml and add necessary dependencies and plugins.

Two obligatory libraries are:
<dependency>
    <groupid>org.spockframework</groupId>
    <artifactid>spock-core</artifactId>
    <version>0.7-groovy-2.0</version>
    <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupid>org.codehaus.groovy</groupId>
    <artifactid>groovy-all</artifactId>
    <version>${groovy.version}</version>
    <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
Where groovy.version is property defined in pom.xml for more convenient use and easy version change, just like this: 
<properties>
    <gmaven-plugin.version>1.4</gmaven-plugin.version>
    <groovy.version>2.1.5</groovy.version>
</properties>

I've added property for gmaven-plugin version for the same reason ;)

Besides these two dependencies, we can use few additional ones providing extra functionality:
  • cglib - for class mocking
  • objenesis - enables mocking classes without default constructor
To add them to the project put these lines in <dependencies> section of pom.xml:
<dependency>
    <groupid>cglib</groupId>
    <artifactid>cglib-nodep</artifactId>
    <version>3.0</version>
    <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupid>org.objenesis</groupId>
    <artifactid>objenesis</artifactId>
    <version>1.3</version>
    <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>

And that's all for dependencies section. Now we will focus on plugins necessary to compile Groovy classes. We need to add gmaven-plugin with gmaven-runtime-2.0 dependency in plugins section:
<plugin>
    <groupid>org.codehaus.gmaven</groupId>
    <artifactid>gmaven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>${gmaven-plugin.version}</version>
    <configuration>
        <providerselection>2.0</providerSelection>
    </configuration>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <goals>
                <goal>compile</goal>
                <goal>testCompile</goal>
            </goals>
        </execution>
    </executions>
    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupid>org.codehaus.gmaven.runtime</groupId>
            <artifactid>gmaven-runtime-2.0</artifactId>
            <version>${gmaven-plugin.version}</version>
            <exclusions>
                <exclusion>
                    <groupid>org.codehaus.groovy</groupId>
                    <artifactid>groovy-all</artifactId>
                </exclusion>
            </exclusions>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupid>org.codehaus.groovy</groupId>
            <artifactid>groovy-all</artifactId>
            <version>${groovy.version}</version>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>
</plugin>

With these configuration we can use spock and write our first specifications. But there is one issue: default settings for maven-surefire plugin demand that test classes must end with "..Test" postfix, which is ok when we want to use such naming scheme for our spock tests. But if we want to name them like CommentSpec.groovy or whatever with "..Spec" ending (what in my opinion is much more readable) we need to make little change in surefire plugin configuration:
<plugin>
    <groupid>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactid>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.15</version>
    <configuration>
        <includes>
            <include>**/*Test.java</include>
            <include>**/*Spec.java</include>
        </includes>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

As you can see there is a little trick ;) We add include directive for standard Java JUnit test ending with "..Test" postfix, but there is also an entry for spock test ending with "..Spec". And there is a trick: we must write "**/*Spec.java", not "**/*Spec.groovy", otherwise Maven will not run spock tests (which is strange and I've spent some time to figure out why Maven can't run my specs).

Little update: instead of "*.java" postfix for both types of tests we can write "*.class" what is in my opinion more readable and clean:
<include>**/*Test.class</include>
<include>**/*Spec.class</include>
(thanks to Tomek Pęksa for pointing this out!)

With such configuration, we can write either traditional JUnit test and put them in src/test/java directory or groovy spock specifications and place them in src/test/groovy. And both will work together just fine :) In one of my next posts I'll write something about using spock and its mocking abilities in practice, so stay in tune.

DDevelopment & Design

Rapid js + css development

BackgroundLast time I had some work to do in OSGi web module written in Spring MVC. If we have application splitted to well-designed modules, back-end development in this framework run in OSGi environment is quite fast because after some modification w...