Java Thinking

Sometimes its useful to expose the version of your web application - I find it useful so vsConsole can display the version of the deployed application for each environment on the dashboard. If you build your app with Maven, you can use this code to get the version, and simply wire up a controller/rest endpoint to return it as text/plain. To expose the version of your maven built spring web application, you can use a REST controller like that shown below. Note, you won't see a valid version while running in the IDE - it'll only work when running the Maven built WAR. If you want to add the Jersey dependencies to your spring application try using the following dependency declaration.

I've seen projects where the application code base contains database connection information - passwords and all, or, WAR files are rebuilt for each environment with properties substituted appropriately for the target environment. Rather than putting database information in the application code, it makes more sense to use a JDNI data source provided by the container. This way the exact same application code is deployed to all environments, and we don't encounter any exposed passwords - since the owner of the container (in production environments the infrastructure/support team) define the data source themselves. Database access via JNDI data source in Tomcat In your application server you want to define a data source which points to the database server and schema of your choice. Here, I'm using the H2 database , and assuming this is the DEV Tomcat server, I point it to the DEV schema - define this resource in the Tomcat context.xml :  <Resource name=" jdbc/

It's sometimes nice to be able to update a development Tomcat 7 server from Maven - this makes it simple to hook automatic deployment into a CI server or just update the dev server as a developer. First, the Tomcat manager application needs to be installed (check Tomcat's webapps directory for the manager application) and configured with the appropriate user credentials: Now, I needed to define the server admin credentials in my maven settings (~/.m2/settings.xml): Then, I updated the POM to configure the maven tomcat plugin : Now, using 'mvn tomcat7:redeploy' lets me update the dev server. Note however, on Windows you may have some problems with undeploying the application - after an undeploy command, some jars may be left over in the webapps/appname directory. When you try to redeploy your app you'll see an error containing " cannot invoke tomcat manager fail - unable to delete... ". To work around this, you can change the TOMCAT_HOME/