AppFuse First Impression (An Introduction to MVC Design Pattern)

Now, we have learned about Tapestry, Hibernate, and Spring. So, let me introduce a MVC architecture. An architecture such as MVC is a design pattern that describes a recurring problem and its solution that used 3 main components. MVC, They are Model (business logic goes here), View (presentation logic goes here), and Controller (application logic goes here). One of MVC framework is Brick/ AppFuse Framework. By default, AppFuse use Hibernate framework as Model (object persisting framework), Tapestry framework as View (web presentation), and Spring framework as Controller. So, here it is...

All that we need are AppFuse framework, Apache Ant, MySQL as database, Apache Tomcat as application server, Eclipse as IDE and JUnit as testing tools. Extract Apache Ant in a specific location, as example in /home/ndung/Java/ant/apache-ant-1.7.0. Configure our environment variables.
~$ sudo gedit /etc/bash.bashrc

Add these lines in that file:
export ANT_HOME=/home/ndung/Java/ant/apache-ant-1.7.0
export PATH=$PATH:$ANT_HOME/bin

To configure Apache Tomcat and Eclipse read this. Extract Junit in specific folder and copy junit-x.x.jar into Apache Ant libraries (apache-ant-1.7.0/lib). Extract AppFuse in our eclipse workspace as example /home/ndung/workspace/appfuse. Open properties.xml and edit tomcat properties (line 37-40) based on our tomcat configuration mainly in user name and password. Also edit our database properties (line 43-59) based on our MySQL or our other database configuration mainly in user name and password. Open terminal and run:
~$ ant new


After that enter our project workspace folder. Run setup and test-all.
~$ cd /home/ndung/workspace/AppfuseExample
~$ ant setup test-all

Finish! Now start our tomcat. We will start it manually by using terminal. Enter Tomcat installation bin folder.
~$ cd /opt/apache-tomcat-5.5.26/bin

Add the execute permission to all of the .sh files in the $CATALINA_HOME/bin directory.
~$ sudo chmod u+x startup.sh
~$ sudo chmod u+x catalina.sh
~$ sudo chmod u+x setclasspath.sh
~$ sudo chmod u+x shutdown.sh

Start our engine (tomcat) by using this command:
~$ ./startup.sh

Now, point our browser into http://localhost:8080/AppfuseExample. Use our tomcat user name and password to log in as user, as example in my tomcat configuration, user name: tomcat; password: tomcat. To log in as administrator use mraible as user name and tomcat as password.
Here is some screen shot:


Don't forget to shut down our engine:
~$ ./shutdown.sh

Now, how to edit this project by using IDE. Open our Eclipse. Click File -> Import. Select Existing Projects into workspace under General item as an import source. Click next. Select our eclipse workspace (example:/home/ndung/workspace) as root directory. Check AppfuseExample in Projects then click Finish. Now, we can easily to add whatever in our project. In the next posts we will add other feature in this our project.