The Kickstart SourceForge page

Kickstart Documentation

What is Kickstart?

While Web-Development with Java is supported by a variety of great frameworks it is still not easy (even tedious) to, firstly, choose the right ones for a given problem and, secondly, make them work together.

Kickstart strives to provide a selection of integration-patterns with well defined domains of application. Each pattern comes with a complete template application getting you kickstarted with your application in minutes.

For the time being, Kickstart is based on Tapestry, Hivemind and Hibernate. Also, Kickstart is in an early state. While it works, there's only one application pattern and template supported right now. But nevertheless, please try it and tell me whether it works for you.

What do you get?

A pattern

Due to lack of time, there's only one pattern currently supported by Kickstart. It has proven suitable for low to medium load (some 100 concurrent users) web-apps typically found on corporate extranets. It's characteristics are

• Hibernate-sessions are held in a request-spanning context called a conversation (see the Hibernate session-per-conversation pattern). That means persistent domain objects kept in the conversation-context have exactly the same lifetime as the Hibernate session. The conversation context, in turn, is kept in the http session. That does not mean of course that a conversation should last as long as the whole user-session. There are certain points in most applications where it is natural to discard persistent objects along with the Hibernate session in which they were loaded. By adding a new property-persistence-strategy, called "conversation" to Tapestry, KickStart makes it very easy to do just that.
• DB-Transaction per request: Each http-request runs in one database transaction

A more thorough discussion comes soon

An implementation

Kickstart currently consists of 3 Eclipse projects (or directories).

• KickstartLib provides the glue-code to integrate Hibernate with Tapestry. There's also a build-script to generate projects for you own apps. These will consist of two projects/directories which are instances of the following two template projects:
• KickstartTemplateCore contains the domain logic and the persistence services
• KickstartTemplateWeb contains the presentation layer (web-templates plus controller).

Getting Kickstarted

Prerequisites

The Kickstart-Download comprises all libraries upon which it depends to compile (to be found in KickstartLib/lib). Besides that, you'll need

• Java 5.0 or later
• Eclipse 3.1 or later as the development environment,
• Your favorite Servlet-Container plus its Eclipse plugin, if available. I like Jetty and the Jetty-Launcher

Installation and getting started

• Unzip the distributable into your Eclipse workspace.
• Start up Eclipse and create the 3 projects KickstartLib, KickstartTemplateCore and KickstartTemplateWeb.
• Run the build.xml in KickstartLib. And create the Eclipse projects YourNameCore and YourNameWeb
.
• Create an Eclipse Run-Config for HSQLDB - as shown here and here and start it
• Create a run config for Jetty, like that and start it.
• Point your browser to http://localhost:8080/ and play with the foos and bars.
• You might also want to have look at the unit tests in the testsrc directory of the Core-project.
• Review and adapt the configuration in the META-INF/hivemodule.xml file of the Core project.
• Note: Build-scripts to deploy the app will come soon.