My 2cts on software architecture, digital transformation, and other concerns

At this year’s JavaOne I attended a talk by Marius Bogoevici (@mariusbogoevici) and was once again pointed at the JBoss Forge project. Last time I took a look at Forge it was still called Seam Forge which was about a year ago. It seriously matured since then.

JBoss Forge is a shell for rapid-application development at a command-line level. It supports developers setting up Java applications by reducing the need to write boilerplate code. In case you ever have to start a project from scratch you should really take a glance at JBoss Forge as it makes life easier!

Daily usage

As I’m using Forge on a regular basis, I often see myself switching between the IDE and the command line which seems quite inefficient. There is a neat integration for Eclipse but unfortunately there isn’t any integration into IDEs like Netbeans or my favourite IntelliJ IDEA. Nevertheless as Forge operates at command-line level it can easily be integrated into any IDE supporting input via a console window.

In IntelliJ IDEA (I’m using the IntelliJ IDEA 12 EAP) this is done via an “External Tools” configuration. Therefore open IntelliJ’s “Settings” dialog and navigate to “External Tools”. Then click on the “+”-Button to create a new “External Tool” configuration.

Configuration for Mac OS X

On Mac OS X I entered the following:

  • Name: forge
  • group:
  • description: JBoss Forge
  • Program: /bin/bash
  • Parameter: –init-file /Users/USERNAME/.bash_profile -i -c $FORGE_HOME/bin/forge
  • Working Directory: $ProjectFileDir$

Screenshot of "External Tools" configuration for JBoss Forge

My “~/.profile” contains the following lines:

export FORGE_HOME=/Users/ahe/dev/tools/forge-distribution-1.1.1.Final
export PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:$FORGE_HOME/bin:$PATH

Other operating systems

In case you ain’t working on Mac OS X, you will have to adjust the above mentioned paths accordingly. For Windows users I can recommend the bash packaged with Git For Windows.

Tags

  • java
  • macos
  • intellij
  • jboss forge
  • bash
  • open source
  • organisation

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