Tristan's Blog

Automatic Entity registration with ObjectifyFactory using a Spring FactoryBean

tristan — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 04:52:57 +0000

I’ve been doing a lot of work lately with Google App Engine/Objectify on a Spring project and found it was becoming cumbersome to always create an ObjectifyFactory whenever I need to interact with the datastore.

My first solution was to create a static method that registered the Objectify Translators that I needed and looked something like this:

The downside to this solution was that I still had to manually register all of my Entities on the ObjectifyFactory after it was instantiated.

Since I’m using Spring, I realized that I could take advantage of Spring’s class path scanning to register my Entities automatically. To accomplish this I created a FactoryBean that returns an ObjectifyFactory singleton:

Configuring the bean is simple:

This will scan all classes under the basePackage property and automatically register them with the ObjectifyFactory singleton upon app initialization.

At this point you can use the ObjectifyFactoryFactoryBean (how’s that for a class name!) to inject an ObjectifyFactory wherever you need to use it.

This implementation is for Objectify 4 (still in development), but should be more or less the same for Objectify 3 as long as you change the annotations that are scanned for (you’d probably want to scan for javax.persistence.Entity).

My first open source contribution

tristan — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 05:23:25 +0000

I’ve intended to contribute to an open source project for a quite a while, but had never made the effort to find a project to work on. Recently at work we’ve started using the Scalate templating engine with Spring MVC. Up until my change, the Spring MVC support in Scalate was very rudimentary, however the ScalateViewResolver now supports the order, prefix and suffix properties similarly to the InternalResourceViewResolver.

The updated ScalateViewResolver will be available starting with Scalate 1.4.0 and will be documented here.

A sample Spring configuration that supports both Scalate (jade) and JSP views looks like this:

With this configuration you can now return the view name and view resolver chaining will take care of rendering the correct template. The ScalateViewResolver will be called first and if it can’t find the appropriate jade template, the InternalResourceViewResolver will attempt to render the appropriate JSP template.

Great Customer Service Emails

tristan — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 17:58:10 +0000

A few days ago I ordered a Trackpad Slip from Waterfield Designs for the Magic Trackpad I received for Christmas. The order confirmation I got from them had a nice human touch:

Hi Tristan,

Thanks very much. I just want to let you know that your order (#XXXXXX) will ship fresh from our San Francisco factory on the evening of 27-Dec-2010 via US First Class Mail.

Thanks for tracking us down and giving us a shot. I hope we meet your expectations.

If there’s anything else I can do for you, just let me know.

Best regards,
Gary

PS: By the way, this is what we’re sending you:

1 -Trackpad Socket $12.00

Product Total: $12.00
Sales Tax: $0.00
Shipping: $2.00
Grand Total: $14.00

Even though this is probably automatically generated, it increased the chance that I’ll buy another product form them because it feels like there is a human connection to the purchaser. I wish more companies would send simple confirmation emails like this.