SASH 2.0 Migration Guide

Introduction

This guide documents how to upgrade your existing SASH installation or application to version 2.0.

Maven Repositories

The Maven 2 repository that hosts SASH has been updated to host the new artifacts for version 2.0. The new version is at:

http://maven.sourcelabs.com/sash-2.0/repository/

(The JDK 1.4-compatible build of SASH 2.0 has its own repository at:

http://maven.sourcelabs.com/sash-2.0-jdk14/repository/

Please use this instead if you are not using JDK 1.5 or higher.)

SASH dependencies that are not built by SourceLabs now have their own repository at:

http://maven.sourcelabs.com/sash-2.0/nonbuilt/

Both of these repositories should be added to any Ant build script or Maven POM file you are currently using. The old repositories will, of course, still work. However, if you are using more than one component of SASH, it is highly recommended that you do not try to run builds of each from different SASH versions.

SASH Components

This section collects possible upgrade issues for each of the four major SASH components. We highly recommend you read this list before migrating your applications.

Spring

The JARs in Spring have changed for 2.0. The most prominent change is that support for different data layers, including JDBC, Hibernate, and JDO, has been split out into separate JARs, and their contents are no longer provided with Spring 2.0.

The DTD for Spring configuration files has also changed, and a new XSD schema has been provided as well. We recommend updating your existing configuration files with these new schemas to sort out any potential issues; also, we recommend using the XSD schema whenever possible.

The Spring reference documentation lists other potential migration issues here.

We also recommend the following KB articles:

• UrlFilenameViewController is backward incompatible from Spring 2.0 to Spring 1.2.
• When constructing an XmlBeanFactory using an InputStreamResource, configuration that worked in Spring 1.2 fails under Spring 2.0.
• TransactionProxyFactoryBean configuration in 2.0 is not backwards compatible with 1.2.
• After upgrading to Spring 2.0, a document with the attribute ‘default-lazy-init=’true’ no longer works.
• Subclasses of AbstractHandlerMapping that worked with Spring 1.2 no longer work with 2.0.

Axis

SASH 2.0 upgrades Axis from version 1.3 to 1.4. There are no API or functionality changes between these two versions, only bug fixes and performance and stability improvements. Any existing applications should continue to run normally with the new version of Axis without any changes. If any problems do appear, please contact SourceLabs Support.

Struts

The JARs in Struts have changed for 2.0. There is no longer one unified struts.jar; the components, including tiles and taglibs, have been separated into different packages.

As of version 1.3, Struts uses a new default controller. Previous versions used RequestProcessor; the new version is ComposableRequestProcessor. 1.2 applications that did not previously specify a controller are not required to specify one now, and users with specified controllers are also okay. However, several Struts plugins, especially the Spring integration suite, require a Spring-specific RequestProcessor implementation. Applications wishing to integrate Spring and Struts are encouraged to read the documentation carefully.

Applications using Tiles are required to specify a new configuration parameter in the web.xml:

     <init-param>
         <param-name>chainConfig</param-name>
         <param-value>org/apache/struts/tiles/chain-config.xml</param-value>
     </init-param>

Finally, the Struts community has provided a list of upgrade issues from version 1.2 to version 1.3 here.

Hibernate

CGLIBLazyInitializer cannot access a public member if parent class is not public.

Commons Logging

The following property has now been removed from Commons Logging:

org.apache.commons.logging.LogFactory

Instead use the following property with a Logger instead of a LogFactory:

org.apache.commons.logging.Log

Commons Validator

One item to note with Validator is that the JavaScript libraries are shipped inside the JAR file with SASH. They are in the org/apache/commons/validator/javascript/ directory of the jar file and if you want to use them you should unpack them from there.

ehcache

SASH 2.0 provides version 1.2.4 of ehcache, which no longer assumes a default configuration. Since ehcache is the default cache implementation used by Hibernate, this can cause spurious NullPointerExceptions. Hibernate provides a default configuration file in etc/ehcache.xml which you should customize to your needs.

cglib is a set of utility classes that can be used to generate and load Java classes at runtime.

SourceLabs includes CGLib in its Self Support for Linux and Open Source Java offering.

SourceLabs’ public Maven repository for SASH

Velocity is a Java-based template engine.

SourceLabs covers Velocity in its Self-Support Suite for Linux and Open Source Java