Equinox is a lightweight version of AppFuse.
I was inspired to create it while writing Spring Live and
looking at the struts-blank and webapp-minimal
applications that ship with Struts and Spring, respectively.
These "starter" apps were not robust enough for me, and I wanted
something like AppFuse, only simpler. Much of the documentation for developing
with Equinox can be found in the
Spring QuickStart Chapter in Spring Live. If you have issues downloading this
PDF, you might try saving it to your hard drive before opening it.
The basic Equinox application shows how to do simple
CRUD on a database table.
To see this feature, click on the button below. Click here
to learn more about Equinox.
Introduction to Equinox
Equinox is designed to show webapp developers how to start
a bare-bones webapp using a
Spring-managed middle-tier backend and
Hibernate for persistence. By default, Equinox uses Spring for
its MVC framework, but you can change it to
Struts,
WebWork,
Tapestry
or JSF. Installers are in the "extras" directory.
An in-memory HSQL database is used by default.
The database and its tables are created on-the-fly when tests (or the application)
is run. The one issue of using this method is that records disappear every
time the app is started. The nice side effect is that you never write tests
that depend on existing data. If you have issues with records not showing up or
want to use a different database, see
these instructions. Since there is no container
configuration required, the application should work with any Servlet 2.4
servlet engine.
Assumptions
It's 2004, no one uses Netscape 4 anymore, or at least
no one does by choice. All HTML will be XHTML compliant,
without a space: i.e. <br/> not <br />.
JSP 2.0 is out, so it will be used to simplify syntax.
Simplicity is more important than configurability.
Notes
Equinox ships with project files for both Eclipse
and IDEA. For information on setting up
Equinox to run tests and debug Tomcat, see
the FAQ.