Friday, December 20, 2013
Monday, July 8, 2013
Project Glass Explorer Program Pickup
It all started with a invitation from Google to post on Google+ or on Twitter how you would use Glass if you had the opportunity to get a pair from Google. It was a great way for Google to judge the demand that they had for the wearable device long before it was released and even before many knew anything about it. I had only seen one video and a couple of pictures taken by employees at Google. The video that I saw was this one:
All that was asked what that you post with the hashtag #ifihadglass. I didn't waste anytime at all and quickly thought about things that I would do. The obvious choice for me was something on the DigitalChalk platform. Here is what I responded with:
After that, I really forgot about it until the Twitter account of Project Glass (@projectglass) responded to me a little over a month later letting me know that I was chosen to be a part of the program.
I was certainly excited to see that and then the wait began. I waited for 3 months before hearing from Project Glass again. I started to wonder if maybe they had eliminated me as a participant or even forgot about some. Then, on June 21st I got a direct message from them that invited me to schedule my pickup in New York City. That night I went online, ordered Glass and booked my plane tickets.
This past weekend, I flew to New York to pick them up. We were able to invite one person to go with us to the pickup and I asked my brother-in-law to go since he lives in New York near the city. We met at Starbucks across the street in Chelsea Market and then walked over the Google offices where the pickup for Project Glass was located. We were greeted as soon as we got off of the elevator by two people in reception wearing Glass and they checked us in and gave us guest badges marked with Explorer Edition.
After a very brief wait, we were met by our Glass Guide, Sunil who was awesome. He took us back to his station and then let us try on all of the different colors of Glass. Even though I had specified the color online when I purchased them, he asked if I would like to switch.
I chose to stick with Shale and by the time we got back from the fitting station, someone had brought a new box to the desk with a Shale pair of Glass. After a quick chat, I proceeded with the unboxing and Sunil let me through fitting them to my face and then through the basic setup of connecting them to my phone and to the wireless network. The phone is connected through Bluetooth pairing and connecting to the wireless network was made easy by inputing the connection information in my glass profile online and then scanning a QR code with my Glass to configure them.
Sunil then let me up on to a platform overlooking the New York City skyline, complete with the Freedom Tower in the distance. Here he taught me how to take pictures and video in different ways and how to perform a Google search with Glass.
I can't wait to see what the future holds!
All that was asked what that you post with the hashtag #ifihadglass. I didn't waste anytime at all and quickly thought about things that I would do. The obvious choice for me was something on the DigitalChalk platform. Here is what I responded with:
After that, I really forgot about it until the Twitter account of Project Glass (@projectglass) responded to me a little over a month later letting me know that I was chosen to be a part of the program.
I was certainly excited to see that and then the wait began. I waited for 3 months before hearing from Project Glass again. I started to wonder if maybe they had eliminated me as a participant or even forgot about some. Then, on June 21st I got a direct message from them that invited me to schedule my pickup in New York City. That night I went online, ordered Glass and booked my plane tickets.
This past weekend, I flew to New York to pick them up. We were able to invite one person to go with us to the pickup and I asked my brother-in-law to go since he lives in New York near the city. We met at Starbucks across the street in Chelsea Market and then walked over the Google offices where the pickup for Project Glass was located. We were greeted as soon as we got off of the elevator by two people in reception wearing Glass and they checked us in and gave us guest badges marked with Explorer Edition.
After a very brief wait, we were met by our Glass Guide, Sunil who was awesome. He took us back to his station and then let us try on all of the different colors of Glass. Even though I had specified the color online when I purchased them, he asked if I would like to switch.
I chose to stick with Shale and by the time we got back from the fitting station, someone had brought a new box to the desk with a Shale pair of Glass. After a quick chat, I proceeded with the unboxing and Sunil let me through fitting them to my face and then through the basic setup of connecting them to my phone and to the wireless network. The phone is connected through Bluetooth pairing and connecting to the wireless network was made easy by inputing the connection information in my glass profile online and then scanning a QR code with my Glass to configure them.
Sunil then let me up on to a platform overlooking the New York City skyline, complete with the Freedom Tower in the distance. Here he taught me how to take pictures and video in different ways and how to perform a Google search with Glass.
We then returned to our station and Sunil answered a few more questions and showed me how to make phone calls and share activity from Glass. The entire appointment only lasted about an hour and fifteen minutes but a lot of ground was covered. It was time to return our badges and hit the streets of New York with them on.
It was odd leaving the building with this device on my head, but it quickly became less and less noticeable to me. I have had them for two days now and have worn them to church and to work. One of the great things about wearing them around is letting kids try them out when they ask. The excitement on their faces is so evident. They almost always start laughing and smiling. It is great to watch and be a part of opening up a whole new world to them. I think this will certainly be a part of their future. There are not that many applications right now written for them, but as they become available, the use for Glass will only grow and become more embedded in our lives. I feel fortunate to have the ability to be one of the few able to test these out and write some applications for Glass. If you would like to follow me on Google+, that is where I will most likely be sharing most of the pictures and videos that I take with Glass, you can do so here:
I can't wait to see what the future holds!
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
Tuesday, December 25, 2012
Merry Christmas
POST /broadcast HTTP/1.1
Host: cloudchamp.com
Content-Type: application/json;charset=UTF-8
Content-Length: 176
{
"author": "Troy",
"content": "Merry Christmas! Remember the reason for the season. \u003ca href=\"http://bible.us/116/luk.2.1-20.nlt\"\u003eLuke 2\u003c/a\u003e"
}
Host: cloudchamp.com
Content-Type: application/json;charset=UTF-8
Content-Length: 176
{
"author": "Troy",
"content": "Merry Christmas! Remember the reason for the season. \u003ca href=\"http://bible.us/116/luk.2.1-20.nlt\"\u003eLuke 2\u003c/a\u003e"
}
Tuesday, July 3, 2012
Happy 4th of July
Independence Day is one of my favorite holidays. I can't help but smile and fill with pride when I see the red white and blue of the flag go up in store windows, street corners, and on the front porches of so many homes. It is a feeling of strength, of pride, of gratitude and humility all neatly wrapped into one. It is a feeling that warms the heart and the soul. It is hamburgers and hotdogs, fireworks and swimming pools, parades and homemade apple pie and ice cream. I am so grateful to live in this country and have the freedoms that we enjoy. I have such respect for every man and woman that has served in our armed forces and in the agencies that protect our freedoms. Everything that we enjoy is owed to the brave men and women who have fought and stood with unfailing courage against the enemies of the freedom we so cherish, many giving their own lives to protect the way we get to live. Thank you to my father and uncle for their valiant service in Vietnam and after. Thank you to my brother-in-law for his service in Iraq. A huge thank you to all of you who have served - past and present heros. As I enjoy my traditional 4th of July pancake breakfast and family barbecue with fireworks, I will do so with smiles and laughter mingling in the air, pride in my heart and a lump in my throat - enjoying my family and the celebration and remembering the sacrifices that were made for what is truly special and uniquely American. Happy 4th of July!
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Video Based Learning Now Available on the iPad
Mobile devices and mobile connectivity are such hot topics right now, so it is natural that enabling learning on these devices is a big subject as well. As I started research on what it would take to bring e-learning to mobile devices 2 years ago, the predictions were staggering - even back then. In the short time span from that point until now, the numbers continue to grow rapidly upwards on the number of devices, users, and the amount of bandwidth consumed on mobile platforms. It was certainly evident then that we had to address this demand and deliver DigitalChalk on tablet devices.
As simple as that might sound on the surface, it took a lot of careful thought and planning because we did not want to offer our customers any less of an experience on their iPad or tablet than we did on their laptops. One of the strengths of DigitalChalk is our ability to track the student's activity to a very detailed level. To meet the strictest requirement in the continuing education space, we had to maintain the ability to do that tracking, as well as prevent the student from fast forwarding through the course if the instructor had configured the course in that manner. (Some accrediting bodies require students to meet or exceed a specific amount of time in a course.) Simply enabling an HTML5 based delivery of our video and audio lessons was simply not enough. We started over a year ago converting our encoding and streaming infrastructures and the content our customers were pushing into the system to facilitate this move. Terabytes of video and audio were reprocessed and packaged and hundreds of CPU hours were consumed in preparation for extending full functionality to iPads and tablets.
I am certainly interested in hearing ideas from our customers on what enhancements that would like to see in the future. We are working on a couple of things to be released very soon that I think you will all enjoy and were direct requests from some of our customers.
Monday, December 19, 2011
DigitalChalk Rolls Out Enterprise e-Learning and Discounts
Online training leader DigitalChalk introduces Enterprise features and shopping cart discount options in their latest release.
Asheville, NC (PRWEB) December 19, 2011
Online training software leader, DigitalChalk announced today it's release of the winter 2012 "Newton" edition to it's Cloud-based training software as a service (SaaS) platform. This latest release includes features for both the professional trainers selling courses online as well as the Enterprise accounts. Current Professional and Business account customers have full access to the shopping cart discount features. Enterprise accounts now have an advanced rules engine for course registration.
The discount features introduced for Professional and Business accounts include options for course providers to offer coupon codes, combination course bundles and even advanced user matching options. Matching options only allow discounts to apply if the user meets criteria such as an email domain or geographic location match. Training providers can also create registration codes for bulk sales to business clients.
With the introduction of Enterprise accounts, DigitalChalk now provides advanced course delivery, tracking and reporting features along with full single sign-on capabilities to integrate the Cloud-based training services into corporate networks. This release includes an advanced course registration rules engine that allows training managers to set up rules to assign training courses to audiences based on geography, user rules, user profile data or keyword matching.
"The Enterprise edition released this year has had significant traction for both current clients and new customers who need to rapidly roll out online courses" said Tony McCune, VP Sales. "Clients now routinely sign up, publish courses and deliver training to thousands or more employees in less than a month. With over 2,000 client organizations and nearly 6,000 courses being offered, DigitalChalk has become the clear leader in Cloud-based e-learning," said McCune.
About DigitalChalk
DigitalChalk was founded in 2005 and is headquartered in Asheville, NC. The SaaS training platform is available on a per-delivery fee basis for training professionals selling courses or a per-user basis for Business and Enterprise accounts. DigitalChalk is a full-service e-learning platform with course authoring, delivery and reporting included. DigitalChalk is the first and only online platform to provide HDLearn technology for video streaming capabilities that include tracking, progress control and reporting in a video lesson.
DigitalChalk was founded in 2005 and is headquartered in Asheville, NC. The SaaS training platform is available on a per-delivery fee basis for training professionals selling courses or a per-user basis for Business and Enterprise accounts. DigitalChalk is a full-service e-learning platform with course authoring, delivery and reporting included. DigitalChalk is the first and only online platform to provide HDLearn technology for video streaming capabilities that include tracking, progress control and reporting in a video lesson.
Friday, August 5, 2011
Asheville Cloud Computing Day
On August 10th, I will be speaking at an event in Asheville, North Carolina focused on Cloud Computing technology. If you are interested in learning about how you can use cloud computing in your business or seeing what the City of Asheville is doing with the technology, this event is free and open to the public. It is a very short mini-conference with a good line-up of speakers and we will also be hearing from Asheville's CIO, Jonathan Feldman. I hope to see you there!
City announces speaker lineup for Asheville Cloud Computing Day 2011
City announces speaker lineup for Asheville Cloud Computing Day 2011
ASHEVILLE - The City of Asheville's Information Technology Services Department is sponsoring "Asheville Cloud Computing Day 2011", a mini-conference scheduled for 9 to 11:30 a.m. Aug. 10 in the Municipal Building (100 Court Plaza, 4th floor).
The event seeks to share cutting-edge ideas about cloud computing, a technology that promises to improve city government, as well as other organizations that adopt it.
The agenda and speaker lineup will include:
- “Servers are Software: The Advantages of Cloud Architecture” - Joe Emison, VP, Research & Development, BuildFax.
- “How Citizens Can Use Open Data To Create New City Services” - Trevor Lohrbeer, CEO, Lab Escape.
- “Beyond the server: the rise of cloud-based desktops” - Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, contributing editor, CBS News and ZDNet.
- “The Playground of Today’s Tech Innovators: How Cloud Computing Changes The Game” - Troy Tolle, CTO, Digital Chalk.
RSVPs from members of the community interested in attending the event are appreciated, but not necessary. RSVPs or questions about the event may be directed to @avlcio on Twitter, or jfeldman@ashevillenc.gov.
For information about Asheville's Information Technology Services program, visit http://ashevillenc.gov/its.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Save Time with Custom Search in Chrome & Firefox
I am a fan of anything that can simplify and quickly make my life easier, no matter how small that thing might be. This week one of our talented developers (@devewm) at DigitalChalk showed me something that will save me several minutes every single day. He introduced me to making your own custom searches in Chrome and Firefox. I wanted to share with you how it really simplified my day in hopes that you could apply it as well.
At DigitalChalk, we use Edgewall's Trac to for our development wiki and issue tracking system. Every single day, I will be talking with someone in sales, support, development or operations and will inevitably get asked to go and view a certain ticket by its ticket number. While it is simple to use the search field within Trac itself, it would be nice to just navigate straight to the ticket from the browser. This is where a custom search shined for me. You can take any known url and insert your search text right from the browser bar. I used this to setup a custom DigitalChalk Trac search that would take me straight to the ticket I was looking for saving me a click everytime.
Here is how you can set it up for yourself in Chrome:
At DigitalChalk, we use Edgewall's Trac to for our development wiki and issue tracking system. Every single day, I will be talking with someone in sales, support, development or operations and will inevitably get asked to go and view a certain ticket by its ticket number. While it is simple to use the search field within Trac itself, it would be nice to just navigate straight to the ticket from the browser. This is where a custom search shined for me. You can take any known url and insert your search text right from the browser bar. I used this to setup a custom DigitalChalk Trac search that would take me straight to the ticket I was looking for saving me a click everytime.
Here is how you can set it up for yourself in Chrome:
Open Chrome Preferences
Click on the Manage Button next to the Search drop-down
In the Search Engines dialog, click on the + button in the bottom left hand corner. The important things here are the keyword and the URL. You will notice that I am using a keyword of "!trac". This is what I will type in the browser bar and it will take whatever text I put next and place it in the URL where I have specified "%s". In the case above, the "%s" is at the end of the URL and will correspond to the ticket number I would like to display.
After that, you are ready to use it. Just open up a new tab and type in your keyword.
Chrome will resolve the keyword to your Search and then you can type in your search term. After you press enter, you will be taken directly to the page that you were targeting.
On Firefox, the same feature exist, but it is buried a little differently. You can accomplish what you want to do with Bookmarks.
Under the "Bookmarks" menu item, go to "Show All Bookmarks"
In the Bookmarks dialog, right-click on the "Bookmarks Menu" and choose "New Folder..." (You don't have to do this step, but it is easier to keep track of your custom searches this way). I names my folder "Search Helpers".
Right-click on the folder you just created and choose "New Bookmark..."
You can fill out the form exactly as you did in Chrome
Use it the exact same way. Firefox will not autocomplete the keyword to your Search name, but it functions the same way.
I hope you can put this tip to good use and that it saves you some clicks along the way.
Monday, January 3, 2011
DigitalChalk with HDLearn Technology
Friday, December 3, 2010
Alerts for EC2 through CloudWatch
Monitoring your applications running on Amazon's EC2 platform just got easier. Today, Amazon announced the public availability of CloudWatch for EC2 with Alarms. Instead of having to poll and ask CloudWatch for the current status, you can actually have that information pushed to you instead. This is a much more efficient way to monitor you applications running in the Amazon cloud. Right now the only new alarm that is supported is for Amazon SNS, but this is a huge step forward. Before today, CloudWatch could still trigger an Auto Scaling policy, but with the addition of SNS the doors are really opening up. Using Amazon SNS, you can do almost any type of notification that you would like posting to HTTP/HTTPS, Email, JSON, or directly into SQS. This makes the service very flexible. You are able to monitor CPU Utilization, Average Disk Reads, Average Disk Writes and Network traffic in and out.
Amazon has also enabled a new monitoring tab in the EC2 management console that will allow you to look at the graphs for these elements on each of your EC2 instances. The data only goes back to the 2nd of December since it was just released today, but this will be extremely useful for a quick read on how your instances are performing.
Amazon is certainly hitting things on my wishlist this year. Now if they would only enable CloudWatch and Alarms for metrics on SQS! Hopefully this is just around the corner. You can read more about the new features and the pricing of CloudWatch on EC2 here.
Amazon has also enabled a new monitoring tab in the EC2 management console that will allow you to look at the graphs for these elements on each of your EC2 instances. The data only goes back to the 2nd of December since it was just released today, but this will be extremely useful for a quick read on how your instances are performing.
Amazon is certainly hitting things on my wishlist this year. Now if they would only enable CloudWatch and Alarms for metrics on SQS! Hopefully this is just around the corner. You can read more about the new features and the pricing of CloudWatch on EC2 here.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Downloading EXE files from S3
It is more than a little frustrating that Internet Explorer and Windows cannot do anything to match what the other major browsers and operating systems are doing, or so it seems. Internet Explorer has long been the browser that most developers hate to support. Today, I ran across something that wasn't HTML or CSS related but still caused issues on Windows using Internet Explorer.
As many of you know, I use Amazon Web Services to do much of my work and S3, Simple Storage Service, is a large part of what I work with. Today, I was made aware that someone could not download an EXE file from S3 onto their desktop. I tested it out, and it was fine for me. Classic developer response right? Turns out, it worked for me because I was using Chrome on my Mac. It didn't work quite right in Internet Explorer on Windows. The file would download, but it would not bring down the extension to the file. What I mean, is if the file was stored in S3 as "filename.exe", when it was downloaded to the Windows machine it would only be named "filename". I was encouraged by some people that I know to simply chalk it up to a security concern, and while I do not encourage anyone downloading random .exe files and installing them, I knew that this just couldn't be the case. As it turns out, Internet Explorer must be told the Content-Disposition of the file when it is an EXE or DLL. This is done in the headers when the file is requested. Luckily, S3 allows you to put metadata on a file that is passed down when the file is requested. To allow Internet Explorer to recognize and save the file with the .exe extension you will just need to add the Content-Disposition:attachment; filename=<filename.exe> header.
You can do this as metadata in S3 through the AWS console. Many of the software utilities that work with S3 also allow you to set this metadata programmatically when storing the objects.
I am used to all sorts of JavaScript, HTML, CSS problems when working with IE, but this one really threw me for a loop at first. I hope that this helps you.
Friday, November 19, 2010
DigitalChalk is a Gazelle
I was interviewed by Mark Whitehouse about 2 weeks ago while I was walking down the street in San Francisco, a long ways from our headquarters in Asheville, North Carolina but right in the heart of tech startup country. He told me he was trying to do some research on why it was hard for startups right now to get adequate funding. I was excited to share with him about DigitalChalk and the success that we have been blessed with in some really hard economic times. Our growth this year has been better than it ever has and there is really no end in sight! As I described this to Mark, he told me over and over that we had all the markings of a great story as a Gazelle. I really like that analogy. Gazelles are extremely fast and nimble animals and if you had the opportunity to meet the team at DigitalChalk, I think it describes us completely. I get to work with some of the smartest people with the agility to change and go from 0 to 100 at anytime.
Reading through the article, and seeing some of the accomplishments in print in the Wall Street Journal is both exciting and humbling, but most of all, it makes me thankful for the passion and the dedication to all the people who make up the DigitalChalk team. This is something we can all look back on and be proud of.
Please check out the article: Shortage of Capital Costs Firm
Thursday, October 7, 2010
DigitalChalk takes SCORM to the Amazon Cloud
DigitalChalk, a learning management system serving the continuing education and professional training markets announces SCORM support on the Amazon Cloud.
Infinity Learning Solutions, the parent company of DigitalChalk announced today that they have successfully released the fall 2010 Aristotle 4 version with full SCORM 1.2 support. SCORM 1.2 compliant content is now available in all editions of DigitalChalk including Free, Pro, Business and School. DigitalChalk also added a checkpoint enhancement to the Chalkboard Editor, a browser based multimedia lesson studio that is included in DigitalChalk. The Checkpoint feature lets instructors insert interactive prompts and questions into a multimedia presentation through the browser.
"Hosting a SCORM compliant system in an advanced cloud computing platform such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) poses some unique challenges. SCORM uses communication specifications that were originally designed before the cloud was invented. We took a system with it’s own personality and wove the SCORM specification into it," said Troy Tolle, Chief Technology Officer of ILS. "The team accomplished the task in an innovative and highly scalable fashion. There was no impact to the thousands of organizations currently delivering courses on DigitalChalk today."
The SCORM specification was originally created by the US Department of Defense. Introducing SCORM into DigitalChalk helps address the growing demand from the US federal government for scalable software as a service (SaaS) learning management systems on the Apps.gov cloud infrastructure, which is modeled after the AWS system.
"Not only is DigitalChalk an industry leader in delivery of online training and continuing education, DigitalChalk is the first Learning Management System to build a SCORM compliant system in the cloud using Amazon Web Services that we are aware of," said Wes Hester, CEO of Foxhole Technologies, a VA based federal IT services company.
To learn more about DigitalChalk, visit www.DigitalChalk.com or call toll-free in the US at 877-321-2451. To learn more about Foxhole Technology and DigitalChalk in the Federal Market, please visit http://www.foxholetechnology.com/technology/cloud/digitalchalk.html. GSA Schedule 70: GS-35F-0569V
You can read more about the SCORM specification from Advanced Distributed Learning at www.adlnet.gov.
Monday, August 9, 2010
Creating a Maven Web Project in Eclipse
My development platform of choice has been Eclipse for many years now and, more recently, I have really started to enjoy the library management that Maven provides me in development, testing and production. Although there are very nice plugins available for integrating Maven and Eclipse together, it is not always the most straight forward process to setup a WTP project in Eclipse that can utilize Maven. I have also found that since creating new projects is not something that we do on a daily or even monthly basis, it can easily become a trial and error episode chewing up a couple of hours of precious development time. I hope that walking through it here will help save you some time on your next project.
Let's assume a fresh install of Eclipse. I am using Eclipse 3.6 Helios for Java EE developers which you can download from eclipse.org. You will also need to download and extract Apache Tomcat 6. We will point to this Tomcat directory later when we go to test our project setup.
Our fresh install of Eclipse does not come with the necessary Maven plugins, so we will need to install them first. In Eclipse, navigate to your Help menu and select "Install New Software...".
In the top right hand corner, click on the "Add..." button and a dialog will appear that will allow you to add an new update site for the M2 Eclipse plugin. The Location is: http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org/sites/m2e . You can name the site anything that you like, but you will want it to reflect the name so that you will recognize it later if you come back to scan through your plugins. I have named mine M2Eclipse.
Clicking OK here will take you to a screen so that you can choose the pieces that you want to download. For this site, you only have one choice so it is easy. Check it and click finish and the plugin will start to install.
You will have to navigate and agree to the license. It will also ask you to restart eclipse after the install. You should go ahead and do this and return back to the "Install New Software..." screen after the restart. You will also need to install the M2 Eclipse Extras in the same way. The repository location for the extras is: http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org/sites/m2e-extras
This update site contains more than one item to install. You will not need to check the M2Eclipse Extensions Develop Support or the Project configurators for commonly used maven plugins. I do like to use Mylyn and the integration with CVS is nice to have, but they are not necessary. You can choose the ones that you feel you need for your development environment. The only one that you must pull down is the Maven Integration for WTP.
Clicking Finish here will take you through the license agreement again and then ask you to restart.
After restarting, let's continue by installing the Apache Tomcat runtime environment in Eclipse. Under Eclipse "Preferences..." navigate down to "Server > Runtime Environments". Click on "Add..." and select "Apache Tomcat v6.0" and click Next.
You will need to enter the Tomcat installation directory. This will be the directory where you extracted Tomcat. You can use "Browse..." to locate and populate that location.
We are now ready to create our Web project. Return to the Project Explorer in the Java EE perspective and choose File > New > Dynamic Web Project
Simply name your project and make sure that your Target runtime is set to Apache Tomcat 6.0 and your Dynamic web module version is 2.5
Click Next >
This screen will allow you to configure your folders for building the application. We are going to modify these folders to match the Maven hierarchy. This can be done later as well, but doing it now will avoid some copy and paste as well as some deleting cleanup. You will need to remove the "src" folder that is listed by default and add the following source folders:
Click Next >
We are also going to change the Web Module settings to match the Maven packaging. You will need to change the Content directory on this page from WebContent to "src/main/webapp".
Click Finish.
This completes the setup of the Dynamic Web Project. We now need to make it a Maven project as well. This can be done by right clicking on the project in the Project Explorer and choosing "Maven > Enable Dependency Management"
In this wizard, you will only need to change the Packaging to "war" instead of "jar". and click "Finish"
You should now see the POM editor in Eclipse. We need to add a compiler plugin for 1.6 that will help keep things building cleanly. Click on the Plugins tab at the bottom of the editor and then Click on "Add..." in the Plugins section at the top left. Search for the groupId of "org.apache.maven.plugins" and then choose the "maven-compiler-plugin" artifact from the list.
Click on OK and then navigate to the "pom.xml" tab in the editor. We need to add the configuration for 1.6 which we cannot do through the GUI. All that is needed is the configuration XML that is selected below.
Save and close the POM editor.
When that completes building, you may notice that the Java Runtime is giving you a warning in your "Markers" tab.
This can be remedied by changing your build path. You can right click on the project and select "Properties" and then change the build path JRE System Library to point to the 1.6 Execution Environment. If you do not have your Execution Environments set, you can simply click on the "Environments..." button on this dialog and point them to the JDK installation on your machine.
Clicking Finish here will rebuild the project and you should be error free in your Markers tab.
Now for some simple cleanup of your project. You can expand your project in the Project Explorer and navigate down to Web Resources > WEB-INF and delete the lib directory. We are going to let Maven and WTP work together to manage this.
You will also notice that you have a Classpath Dependency warning in your Markers tab. This is very important and will have to be addressed if you want your Maven managed dependencies to be available to your local test server.
Simply right click on the warning and choose the "Quick Fix" option.
Then you will be prompted with a popup explaining the suggested remedies to your problem. We need the classpath to be available to our server, so we need it to be added as a dependency. Choose that option and then click "Finish".
The setup is now complete. All that is left now is to test our new project and configuration. This is easily done by creating an index JSP in our webapp directory.
After saving the JSP, you can test your application by right clicking on the project and choosing "Run As > Run on Server"
Choose the Tomcat v6.0 Server and then click Finish. This will push your project to deploy on startup of that server and it will start the server.
When the startup is done, a browser window should appear in Eclipse with your index.jsp content displayed.
You are now off to the races on your new web project using Maven. All of the dependencies that you add to the pom file will be included in the classpath each time you start the server.
I hope that you found this useful. Let me know your experience.
Let's assume a fresh install of Eclipse. I am using Eclipse 3.6 Helios for Java EE developers which you can download from eclipse.org. You will also need to download and extract Apache Tomcat 6. We will point to this Tomcat directory later when we go to test our project setup.
Our fresh install of Eclipse does not come with the necessary Maven plugins, so we will need to install them first. In Eclipse, navigate to your Help menu and select "Install New Software...".
In the top right hand corner, click on the "Add..." button and a dialog will appear that will allow you to add an new update site for the M2 Eclipse plugin. The Location is: http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org/sites/m2e . You can name the site anything that you like, but you will want it to reflect the name so that you will recognize it later if you come back to scan through your plugins. I have named mine M2Eclipse.
Clicking OK here will take you to a screen so that you can choose the pieces that you want to download. For this site, you only have one choice so it is easy. Check it and click finish and the plugin will start to install.
You will have to navigate and agree to the license. It will also ask you to restart eclipse after the install. You should go ahead and do this and return back to the "Install New Software..." screen after the restart. You will also need to install the M2 Eclipse Extras in the same way. The repository location for the extras is: http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org/sites/m2e-extras
This update site contains more than one item to install. You will not need to check the M2Eclipse Extensions Develop Support or the Project configurators for commonly used maven plugins. I do like to use Mylyn and the integration with CVS is nice to have, but they are not necessary. You can choose the ones that you feel you need for your development environment. The only one that you must pull down is the Maven Integration for WTP.
Clicking Finish here will take you through the license agreement again and then ask you to restart.
After restarting, let's continue by installing the Apache Tomcat runtime environment in Eclipse. Under Eclipse "Preferences..." navigate down to "Server > Runtime Environments". Click on "Add..." and select "Apache Tomcat v6.0" and click Next.
You will need to enter the Tomcat installation directory. This will be the directory where you extracted Tomcat. You can use "Browse..." to locate and populate that location.
We are now ready to create our Web project. Return to the Project Explorer in the Java EE perspective and choose File > New > Dynamic Web Project
Simply name your project and make sure that your Target runtime is set to Apache Tomcat 6.0 and your Dynamic web module version is 2.5
Click Next >
This screen will allow you to configure your folders for building the application. We are going to modify these folders to match the Maven hierarchy. This can be done later as well, but doing it now will avoid some copy and paste as well as some deleting cleanup. You will need to remove the "src" folder that is listed by default and add the following source folders:
- src/main/java
- src/main/resources
- src/test/java
- src/test/resources
Click Next >
We are also going to change the Web Module settings to match the Maven packaging. You will need to change the Content directory on this page from WebContent to "src/main/webapp".
Click Finish.
This completes the setup of the Dynamic Web Project. We now need to make it a Maven project as well. This can be done by right clicking on the project in the Project Explorer and choosing "Maven > Enable Dependency Management"
In this wizard, you will only need to change the Packaging to "war" instead of "jar". and click "Finish"
You should now see the POM editor in Eclipse. We need to add a compiler plugin for 1.6 that will help keep things building cleanly. Click on the Plugins tab at the bottom of the editor and then Click on "Add..." in the Plugins section at the top left. Search for the groupId of "org.apache.maven.plugins" and then choose the "maven-compiler-plugin" artifact from the list.
Click on OK and then navigate to the "pom.xml" tab in the editor. We need to add the configuration for 1.6 which we cannot do through the GUI. All that is needed is the configuration XML that is selected below.
Save and close the POM editor.
When that completes building, you may notice that the Java Runtime is giving you a warning in your "Markers" tab.
This can be remedied by changing your build path. You can right click on the project and select "Properties" and then change the build path JRE System Library to point to the 1.6 Execution Environment. If you do not have your Execution Environments set, you can simply click on the "Environments..." button on this dialog and point them to the JDK installation on your machine.
Clicking Finish here will rebuild the project and you should be error free in your Markers tab.
Now for some simple cleanup of your project. You can expand your project in the Project Explorer and navigate down to Web Resources > WEB-INF and delete the lib directory. We are going to let Maven and WTP work together to manage this.
You will also notice that you have a Classpath Dependency warning in your Markers tab. This is very important and will have to be addressed if you want your Maven managed dependencies to be available to your local test server.
Simply right click on the warning and choose the "Quick Fix" option.
Then you will be prompted with a popup explaining the suggested remedies to your problem. We need the classpath to be available to our server, so we need it to be added as a dependency. Choose that option and then click "Finish".
The setup is now complete. All that is left now is to test our new project and configuration. This is easily done by creating an index JSP in our webapp directory.
After saving the JSP, you can test your application by right clicking on the project and choosing "Run As > Run on Server"
Choose the Tomcat v6.0 Server and then click Finish. This will push your project to deploy on startup of that server and it will start the server.
When the startup is done, a browser window should appear in Eclipse with your index.jsp content displayed.
You are now off to the races on your new web project using Maven. All of the dependencies that you add to the pom file will be included in the classpath each time you start the server.
I hope that you found this useful. Let me know your experience.
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