2009/05/20 - Apache Shale has been retired.

For more information, please explore the Attic.

Shale Framework

Shale is a modern web application framework, fundamentally based on JavaServer Faces. Architecturally, Shale is a set of loosely coupled services that can be combined as needed to meet particular application requirements. Shale provides additional functionality such as application event callbacks, dialogs with conversation-scoped state, a view technology called Clay, annotation-based functionality to reduce configuration requirements and support for remoting. Shale also provides integration links for other frameworks, to ease development when combinations of technologies are required.

Shale Features

The major features of the Shale Framework are described in the following detail sections:

  • View Controller - Convenient mechanism to associate a "backing" Java class with each JavaServer Faces view in an application, with predefined event handers for events significant to an application developer.
  • Dialog Manager - Mechanism to define a "conversation" with a user that requires multiple HTTP requests to implement, modeled as a state diagram.
  • Application Manager - Traditional application wide front controller features that should be applied to every request.
  • Validation - Integration with the Jakarta Commons Validator Framework, supporting both client side and server side validations based on a single set of configured validation rules.
  • Remoting - Server side support for applications that employ AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) style interactions.
  • Spring Integration - Integration with the Spring Framework, allowing the use of Spring's dependency injection framework to create JavaServer Faces managed beans.
  • Clay - An alternative to JSP where you define views in pure HTML, in a fashion similar to Tapestry and Facelets. An innovative sub-framework for supporting the configuration of reusable subtrees of JavaServer Faces components for customizable reuse.
  • Test Framework - Set of mock objects and JUnit test case base classes suitable for testing both the framework classes themselves, as well as application components built on top of the framework.
  • Tiger Extensions - Optional add-on library that adds additional ease-of-use features for Shale applications that run on Java Standard Edition 5 (popularly known by its code name during development, "tiger").

Shale Foundations

Shale is based on (and requires a runtime environment that supports) the following foundation technologies:
  • Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 1.4 or later.
  • Servlet API 2.4 or later.
  • JavaServer Pages 2.0 or later.
  • JavaServer Faces 1.1 or later.
  • JSP Standard Tag Library (JSTL) 1.1 or later.
  • Apache Commons BeanUtils 1.7 or later.
  • Apache Commons Chain 1.1 or later.
  • Apache Commons Digester 1.8 or later.
  • Apache Commons Logging 1.1 or later.
Various optional Shale components have dependencies on the following additional runtime technologies:
  • Apache Commons Validator 1.3.1 or later.
  • Apache Commons SCXML 0.6 or later.
  • Spring Framework 1.2.8 or later.
  • Tiles 2 (the stand-alone version of Tiles, currently in the Struts Sandbox).
  • Cargo
  • jMock
If you wish to work on Shale itself, you will require the following additional resources:
  • Java Development Kit (JDK) 1.4 or later. (JDK 1.5 is required for Shale Tiger.)
  • Apache Maven 2.0.4 or later.

Shale Download

Shale 1.0.3 is available at http://people.apache.org/dist/shale/v1.0.3/. The release notes describe the most recent changes. The code signing key can be verified using the KEYS file at http://www.apache.org/dist/shale/KEYS

The previous build (version 1.0.2) is available here with release notes here.

Nightly builds of Shale are available from http://people.apache.org/builds/shale/nightly/. For convenience, the nightly builds include the following packages:

  • shale-framework-YYYYMMDD.{tar.gz,zip} - The binary and source download of the framework itself, including its dependencies.
  • shale-XXXXXXXX-YYYYMMDD.{tar.gz,zip} - A distribution containing source code and a web application archive for each example application that is available. Currently, the available examples are: shale-blank, shale-clay-usecases, shale-mailreader, shale-sql-browser, and shale-usecases.
Snapshots of Shale are also available in Maven repositories. The group identifier for all Shale artifacts is org.apache.shale, while the artifact identifier varies:
  • shale-application - Shale Application Controller (jar)
  • shale-clay - Shale Clay Plugin (jar)
  • shale-core - Shale Core Library (jar)
  • shale-dialog - Shale Dialog Manager (jar)
  • shale-dialog-basic - Shale Dialog Manager (Basic Implementation) (jar)
  • shale-dialog-scxml - Shale Dialog Manager (SCXML Implementation) (jar)
  • shale-remoting - Shale Remoting (jar)
  • shale-spring - Shale-Spring Integration (jar)
  • shale-test - Shale Test Framework (jar)
  • shale-tiger - Shale Tiger Extensions (jar)
  • shale-tiles - Shale Tiles Integration (jar)
  • shale-validator - Shale Validator Integration (jar)
  • shale-view - Shale View Controller (jar)