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introducing jawarepl

JAWAREPL is a JAva Web Application Read Eval Print Loop. It loads a Spring-based Java .war file into groovysh, and then makes its fully actived Spring beans easy to use.

Here's a quick example. It uses 'petclinic', one of the sample apps included with Spring:

$ groovysh
. /Users/moi/Documents/code/jawarepl/jawarepl.groovy
inst = new JAWAREPL();

Here's how you configure it:

inst.war_path = "/path/to/petclinic/dist/petclinic.war";
inst.context_paths = [ "WEB-INF/applicationContext-hibernate.xml" ];
ctx = inst.context;

After that, the sky's the limit! Start grabbing beans out and call all the methods you want. Put this into groovysh:

clinic = ctx.getBean("clinic");
clinic.vets.each {
   println "vet = ${it.lastName}, ${it.firstName}";
   it.specialties.each {
       println "    $it";
   }
}

And this should come out:

vet = Carter, James
vet = Douglas, Linda
    dentistry
    surgery
vet = Jenkins, Sharon
vet = Leary, Helen
    radiology
vet = Ortega, Rafael
    surgery
vet = Stevens, Henry
    radiology

Just to demonstrate that it's not only for reading data, here is another sample where it adds a visit to the petclinic.

owner = clinic.findOwners("Schroeder")[0];
owner.pets.visits.each { println "$it.date, $it.description" }
[2009-01-24, 2009-01-24], [JAWAREPL test, JAWAREPL test]
visit = new org.springframework.samples.petclinic.Visit();
visit.date = new Date();
visit.pet = pets[0];
visit.description = "JAWAREPL test2";
clinic.storeVisit(visit);
...
Hibernate: insert into visits (visit_date, description, pet_id) values (?, ?, ?)
owner = clinic.findOwners("Schroeder")[0];
owner.pets.visits.each { println "$it.date, $it.description" }
[2009-01-24, 2009-01-24, 2009-01-24], [JAWAREPL test,
JAWAREPL test2, JAWAREPL test]

More detailed instructions are available on bitbucket.

JAWAREPL has been tested on three of the sample Spring apps and a basic Grails app. Those are pretty trivial samples and even so, it was a minor task to make them all work; the Grails war had none of the GORM mojo stitched in so it was really not very useful (patches anyone?) That being said, I would not expect a complex war file to load smoothly. I seem to recall some sort of mock/mini JNDI provider in Spring if that what goes wrong. I will try to look at any bug reports, or much better yet patches.