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"I've had an opportunity recently to work on a product that needed an RIA web interface, and I chose my recent favorite tool for this, Vaadin. The services for this project needed to be highly scalable, and lent themselves well to functional techniques, so I selected Scala as my language of choice. I build my projects with Maven, for reasons I won't go into right now, and I do much of my JVM-language work in Intellij's excellent IDEA IDE. Given these tools, I found a way to facilitate very rapid development of web UI's, and I thought I'd pass it along. Another technique I use, which I'll expound on later, is creating "dummy" implementations of all of my backing services for my application. The "real" implementations are written as OSGi services, in separate modules from my UI. The UI is packaged as a war, but is also OSGi aware, with a bundle activator. This activator only gets called if the war is deployed into an OSGi container, and not otherwise. This allows the app to select which implementation of the services it uses - the "dummy" ones when it's deployed outside of OSGi, and the "real" ones when they're available. This means I can use the handy Maven jetty plugin to quickly spin up my application and test it on my local workstation, without needing all of the dependencies (like a data store and such) of my real services. That's good, in that I can get my "cycle time" down to a few seconds, where "cycle time" is the time between making a change and actually being able to test it in my browser. We can do better, though. I'm using Scala as my language of choice for building the UI as well, as it works just fine with Vaadin (and with everything else in the JVM ecosystem, for that matter, which is why I didn't choose a non-JVM language - but that's yet another rant). I compile my Scala with the Maven scala plugin - here's where the next handy bit comes into play. Turns out the Scala plugin has a goal cal

"Logback is intended as a successor to the popular log4j project, picking up where log4j leaves off. Logback's basic architecture is sufficiently generic so as to apply under different circumstances. At present time, logback is divided into three modules, logback-core, logback-classic and logback-access. The logback-core module lays the groundwork for the other two modules. The logback-classic module can be assimilated to a significantly improved version of log4j. Moreover, logback-classic natively implements the SLF4J API so that you can readily switch back and forth between logback and other logging frameworks such as log4j or java.util.logging (JUL). The logback-access module integrates with Servlet containers, such as Tomcat and Jetty, to provide HTTP-access log functionality. Note that you could easily build your own module on top of logback-core. "

SymmetricDS is web-enabled, database independent, data synchronization/replication software. It uses web and database technologies to replicate tables between relational databases in near real time. The software was designed to scale for a large number of databases, work across low-bandwidth connections, and withstand periods of network outage. By using database triggers, SymmetricDS guarantees that data changes are captured and atomicity is preserved. Support for database vendors is provided through a Database Dialect layer, with implementations for MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, DB2, Firebird, HSQLDB, H2, and Apache Derby included. Synchronization can be configured to push data (trickle-back) or pull data (trickle-poll) at an interval. SymmetricDS allows for synchronization between two or more tiers of nodes, such as the following: A farm of web server nodes fronting an enterprise-class general office database A handful of regional servers for synchronizing from the general office to remote geographical areas 1000(s) of store server nodes using a departmental class database to sync with a regional node 10(s) of Point of Sale (POS) register nodes using an embedded database to sync with a store server Deployment options include the following: Web application archive (WAR) deployed to an application server such as Tomcat, Jetty, or JBoss Standalone service Embedded in an application SymmetricDS is written in Java and licensed as open source software under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).