Spincast Framework

HTML Forms & Validation

Sat, 26 Nov 2016 12:00:00 GMT

This release is huge. We have been working on it for more than 3 months now. The last released version of Spincast contained approximately 800 tests, there are now over 1600!

The core of this release is about HTML Forms and Validation. There's a lot more than that, but those are the two big novelties.

Try the new demos

Spincast supports Json and XML out of the box since day one, so developing a Single Page Application or a set of REST services has always been easy. But, even if SPAs are very popular these days, any serious web framework must provide excellent support for traditional websites too, where the server generates the HTML to render.

As long as you integrate a good Templating Engine, providing HTML generation functionalities is not too hard. What's more challenging is to provide a good experience when it's time to deal with forms and their validation... And we think we hit the nail on the head! Spincast now provides an easy way to validate a submitted form and to redisplay it with Validation Messages resulting from the validation, when this is required.

Another big change in this release is about JsonObjects : they are now more powerful than ever and they are used pretty much everywhere in Spincast. We added to them a feature we call JsonPaths : this makes retrieving an element, inside an element, inside an array, inside an element, as simple as :

Date myDate = myJsonObject.getDate("user.books[3].publishingDate").

We also added a small Quick Tutorial section which is a high-level view of the main steps involved when building an application using Spincast. And, finally, we cleaned a lot of code, which now follows more closely Java's standards (no more "I" prefixed interfaces!).

Bootstrapping++

Mon, 02 Jan 2017 12:00:00 GMT

This release is all about bootstrapping a Spincast application. This process has been greatly improved and the creation of the Guice context associated with an application is now easier. A new component, the Bootstrapper, is at the core of this process.

Here's a fully working "Hello World!" Spincast application :

public class App {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        Spincast.init(args);
    }

    @Inject
    protected void init(DefaultRouter router, Server server) {
        router.GET("/").handle(context -> context.response().sendHtml("<h1>Hello World!</h1>"));
        server.start();
    }
}

Speaking of "Hello world!" applications, you can now find three of them in the "Demos / Tutorials" section! :

Finally, we introduced a new section in the documentation dedicated to plugins : what they really are, how to install them, etc.

Video : Spincast Framework application from scratch in under 3 minutes

Sun, 08 Jan 2017 12:00:00 GMT

A tutorial video has been posted on Youtube : Spincast Framework application from scratch in under 3 minutes.

Please watch in 1080p to see the code clearly!

Configuring a Spincast application

Tue, 20 Jun 2017 23:00:00 GMT

A new section on how to configure a Spincast application is now available.

In this section, you will learn how to make the configurations externalizable, so they can have different values depending on the environment the application runs on....

JDBC / SQL utilities

Tue, 26 Dec 2017 02:00:00 GMT

A new plugin, Spincast JDBC plugin is available! Using this plugin, you have access to :

Scopes - automatic connections management and support for transactions.
Statements - allow the creation of SQL queries in a safe and easy manner, with named parameters support.
Result Sets - with goodies and better null support compared to plain JDBC.

A full documentation section "JDBC / SQL" is dedicated to the features this plugin provides.

Internationalization (i18n)

Fri, 10 Aug 2018 15:00:00 GMT

Internationalization of a Spincast application is now very easy.

You can read everything about this topic in the Dictionary section of the documentation.

Not only can you now translate your application, but you can also override the messages provided by Spincast and the various plugins.

Finally, a Pebble function is also provided to get localized messages from your templates (your HTML templates, for example).

Timezone resolver and Date formatter

Mon, 13 Aug 2018 22:00:00 GMT

A Timezone resolver is now part of the spincast-default artifact. This resolver allows you to define a default TimeZone to use, but also provides a Pebble filter: "timeZoneCookie()". This filter gets the user TimeZone using javascript and stores it in a cookie so Spincast has access to it.

Another new plugin, Spincast Date Formatter, allows you to format dates in various ways, both in Java code and in templates (using a provided dateFormat() Pebble function).

4 new plugins

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 23:00:00 GMT

4 new plugins are now available:

Spincast Session: Create and manage sessions associated with your users.
Spincast Scheduled Tasks: Register scheduled tasks ("cron jobs") that are going to be run at specific times or specific intervals.
Spincast Crypto: Utilities related to cryptography, encryption, hashing.
Spincast Forms Protection: Protect your forms from CSRF attacks and double submissions.

Spincast Attempts Limiter plugin

Sun, 02 Sep 2018 23:00:00 GMT

Have you ever wish you could easily limit the number of attempts a visitor can make at something, on your site? For example to limit the number of registrations done using the same IP address, or to limit the number of messages sent by a specific user?

The new Spincast Attempts Limiter plugin does exactly that! It helps you deal with actions performed too much, or even with brute force attacks, by limiting the attempts a visitor/user can make trying to perform a given action.

Hot Swapping

Sun, 09 Sep 2018 20:00:00 GMT

A new plugin, Spincast Hotswap, helps you configure hot swapping (sometimes called "hot reloading") in your application.

The plugin uses HotswapAgent + DCEVM to get the best Java classes redefinitions solution available for free! The modifications you make to your Java source code during development are immediately picked up, without the need to restart the application.

In addition to the automatic classes redefinitions provided by HotswapAgent, you can also register listeners to be called when modifications are made. By using such listeners, you can run custom code to react to modifications (by clearing cache, refreshing routes, refreshing configurations, etc.).

Those new features lead to a very pleasant and fast development experience.

Database migration using Flyway

Sun, 16 Sep 2018 02:00:00 GMT

A new plugin, Spincast Flyway Utils, integrates Flyway into Spincast to provide easy migrations for your SQL database.

By using this plugin, you write your migrations using plain Java code, will full dependency injection support. You are also sure the appropriate connection will be used when running the SQL queries, even when your code makes use of existing components that are not aware of the migration context.

Hotlinking protection and images watermarking

Sat, 02 Mar 2019 16:00:00 GMT

A new feature and a new plugin are now available and they work together very well!

The new feature is Hotlinking Protection. This feature allows you to protect resources from your website that may have been embedded in a foreign website, without your consent. You can then simply stop serving those hotlinked resources (a forbidden status is returned), or you can decide to serve different versions of them...

And this is where the new plugin becomes handy: the Spincast Watermark Plugin. This plugin allows you to watermark files, images in particular. For example, you could use this plugin to create an image identical to a base image but with your logo added at one of its corners.

Hotlinking protection and watermarking go very well together, as you can now easily serve a watermarked version of your images if they are hotlinked without your consent.

Spincast 1.0.0

Sun, 10 Mar 2019 16:00:00 GMT

The very first Git commit of Spincast framework was done April 23, 2016, almost three years ago! Since then, Spincast has always stayed in beta... Why is that? The answer is that we wanted to stabilize the API as much as possible and we wanted Spincast to be used on real projects before calling it ready.

Since then, a lot of new plugins have been developed. A RealWorld.io implementation (here) was also created... RealWorld.io is slowly becoming a mandatory rite of passage for any new framework.

Big Bada Boom comics is an example of a real project entirely based on Spincast. Everything, from authentication to security is based on Spincast framework.

At first, we wanted to migrate Spincast to Java 11 before tagging it 1.0.0, but sadly we feel the Java ecosystem is still not perfect in regard to the new JPMS/Jigsaw module system added in Java 9... We encountered many errors using the popular IDEs trying to migrate. So we decided to stabilize on Java 8 first. Spincast 2.X.X will be based on Java 11 when we feel the tools are mature enough.

Please play with the Quick Start application! Tell us what you think. Feel free to contribute. We know we do not have the financial resources or a community as big as other frameworks such as Spring, but look at the code, experiment a bit, make your own mind.

Spincast Logback Utils plugin

Tue, 12 Mar 2019 23:00:00 GMT

A new plugin, Spincast Logback Utils is now available. This small plugin allows you to easily configure Logback, for logging purposes in your application.

Using plain Java code, you can specify which configuration file Logback should be configured with, for example depending on the environment the application runs on! The plugin also allows you to tweak the content of the configuration file, for example by replacing some placeholders.

OpenAPI support

Sat, 30 Mar 2019 20:00:00 GMT

We are happy to announce that Spincast now has a plugin to generate OpenAPI / Swagger specifications! This allows you to document a REST API developed using Spincast easily.

The plugin, Spincast OpenAPI Bottom Up, uses a bottom-up approach (also called "code first" approach) as it starts from the code of your application to generate the associated OpenAPI specifications as JSON or as YAML.

This plugin reuses a lot of code from the battle-tested and well-maintained official Swagger Core reference implementation. Doing so, the plugin should respect the OpenAPI specifications very well and should also be future-proof.

Spincast Gson plugin

Thu, 04 Apr 2019 17:00:00 GMT

If, for some reasons, your prefer to use Gson rather than Jackson as a way of converting Java Objects into JSON and back, this new plugin is for you.

The Spincast Gson plugin is a complete replacement for the default Spincast Jackson Json plugin that is provided in the default Spincast artifact.

Some custom serializers and deserializers are provided. Also, the GsonBuilder is easy to access so you can add your own configurations to help build the final Gson instance.

Spincast Swagger UI plugin

Tue, 09 Apr 2019 10:00:00 GMT

Now that Spincast has support for OpenAPI documentation, it makes sense to provide plugins for related tools!

This new plugin, Spincast Swagger UI plugin, integrates Swagger UI with Spincast so you can display your REST API specifications in a friendly HTML interface.

Spincast Process Utils plugin + other utilities

Tue, 09 Apr 2019 10:00:00 GMT

The new Spincast Process Utils plugin provides utilities to manipulate processes and external programs.

The main features are:

"Running a goal on an external Maven project" - Allows you to programmatically compile/package/install an external Maven project. The Maven project can be on your classpath: it will first be extracted to the file system before the goal is executed.
"Executing an external program" - Allows you to easily execute an external program and keep control over the created process.

By combining those utilities, it is now possible to test code inside a .jar file! Indeed, running tests from an IDE (or using the command line) doesn't always represent the production environment, where everything is bundled in an executable .jar file.

Finally, two new utility methods are provided by the SpincastUtils component:

copyClasspathFileToFileSystem(...), to copy a single file from the classpath to the file system.
copyClasspathDirToFileSystem(...), to copy a full directory from the classpath to the file system.

What about Spring Framework?

Wed, 10 Apr 2019 10:00:00 GMT

Spring Framework / Spring Boot is by far the most popular Java framework. If you are looking for a framework with a very large community and for which paid support is available, look no further, you will not find anything better! We used Spring a lot before starting Spincast.

The problem we had with Spring, is that we found ourself asking those questions too often:

"How can I modify that default behavior?"
"How do I configure this component?"
"How can this work since I didn't even configure it?"
"What does this annotation actually do? Can I tweak its behavior?"

Our experience with Spring Framework is that it tends to be a little bit too magical, it tends to hide implementation details too much so your application is harder to configure and tweak. In the name of "Defaults that are good enough 80% of the time", Spring sometimes seems to favor simplicity over providing full control.

Any real-world application will be part of that 20% requiring a lot of manual tweaking, so why not base it on a framework that favors flexibility and control from the ground up?

Yes, it is very easy to start a new Spring Boot application using their pretty Initializr! But as long as you have developed at least one real application in your life, you know that this kind of simple bootstrapping is smoke and mirrors: you will have to modify/change/replace components at some points or another. You will have to manually control what is actually happening behind the scene.

Also, Spring relies a lot on annotations: that contributes to the "easy to use" aura. But, as we explain here, we are not big fans of annotations.

In the other hand, the very first goal of Spincast is to make modifying anything a borderline trivial task. If you find something that is not easily modifiable and should be, it will be considered as a bug and will be fixed.

Here is how you tweak almost anything in a Spincast application:

You identify the class containing the code you want to tweak and the interfaces this class is bound to in the Guice context.
You extend this class to override/tweak/add anything you need. There are no private methods so sky is the limit here.
In your application's Guice module, you bind your custom implementation.
Done. No magic. No components hard to extend.

Even Spincast's core components can be modified using those simple steps.

In other words, we would say that the main difference between Spring and Spincast is that Spincast favors long term flexibility and control from the ground up, while Spring seems more preoccupied with providing something that is easy to start with.

(this news is taken from the About section of the site)

HTTP/2 official support

Fri, 12 Apr 2019 23:00:00 GMT

The HTTP/2 protocol is now officially supported by Spincast.

You can read more about this topic in the dedicated HTTP/2 section of the documentation.

Spincast supports HTTP/2 and Server Push in two ways:

If your application is standalone and HTTP/2 connections are managed by the embedded server (Undertow is the default).
If your application is behind a reverse proxy such as Nginx or Apache.

Spincast CSS Autoprefixer plugin + refactoring

Sun, 05 May 2019 12:00:00 GMT

A new plugin, Spincast CSS Autoprefixer, integrates Autoprefixer to easily add vendor prefixes to your CSS.

The plugin allows you to serve CSS that has been tweaked so browsers support is enhanced. For example, you may use this plugin to be able to use CSS Grids with good support for IE11!

Also, some methods of the Spincast Process Utils plugin have been refactored to be more generic. If you are currently using the executeJar(...) method, please upgrade to one of the new executeAsync(...) or executeSync(...) methods! Those are more generic and provide way more control over the executed programs.

Read more about those new methods in the plugin's documentation.

Spincast CSS YUI Compressor plugin

Sun, 05 May 2019 22:00:00 GMT

A new plugin, Spincast CSS YUI Compressor, integrates YUI Compressor so you can easily minify/compress your CSS.

What else can we say? It is simple and it works!

Optimize your Javascript with the new Closure Compiler integration

Thu, 09 May 2019 23:30:00 GMT

A few days ago, we released a plugin to minify your CSS. We now release Spincast JS Closure Compiler, a plugin made to optimize your Javascript!

As its name implies, this new plugin makes use of the well-supported Closure Compiler library, from Google.

All official flags and options are supported and easy to specify.

Easy Javascript and CSS bundling

Wed, 15 May 2019 23:30:00 GMT

Two new Pebble functions are now provided to easily bundle your Javascript files together and your CSS files together, directly from an HTML template.

The jsBundle(...) function allows you to concatenate and optimize multiple .js files. The result can then be served as a single bundle that is quick to download for the client. This Pebble function is provided by the Spincast JS Closure Compiler plugin.

The cssBundle(...) is similar but target your .css files. It is provided by the Spincast CSS YUI Compressor plugin.

Java 17

Sun, 17 Apr 2022 23:30:00 GMT

Unfortunately, Spincast hasn't gained a community, so I won't put as much effort into it as I did in the past. But I still want to keep an updated version for my own projects that use it. This version makes Spincast compatible with Java 17 instead of Java 8, and also contains multiple small fixes and improvements.

Note that the documentation may not have been updated to reflect all the new features. When in doubt, the code is of course the source of Truth.

One of the big changes coming with Java 17 is the requirements for the Spincast Hotswap plugin. The DCEVM library is not available as standard for JDK 17, so the currently suggested method of automatically reloading a Spincast application is to use a JetBrains JDK release, which already contains DCEVM. More information on the plugin page!