Getting Started

The purpose of this document is to define simple documentation on getting started with Turbine. For information about the overall structure of Turbine, please refer to the Functional Specification Document (FSD) as well as the other documentation that is available.

Code Organization

Turbine can be used in two different ways depending on what you need. You can choose to only use one way or choose to use both. It is up to you.

  • As a servlet framework with Turbine as the controller.
  • As a framework of useful code in your application.

In all cases, it means that you simply link against the API and code provided in the turbine.jar file. All you need to do is tell Turbine where its configuration file is, add turbine.jar to your classpath and then add the appropriate Turbine Java code into your application.

Turbine is now a fairly large codebase. This can be daunting to people who are just starting out with Turbine. However, the code is fairly well organized and as you learn about each part of the code, the entire architecture starts to make sense and is really quite easy to master. All of our code is well javadoc'd so we encourage you to review not only the actual source code, but also the documentation. :-) The different parts of Turbine are:

  • org.apache.turbine.modules - This is where the code for the Modules system is stored. The different Modules are described in more detail in the funtional specification document.
  • org.apache.turbine.om - OM stands for Object Model. This is where the code that represents Turbine's Security Object Model lives.
  • org.apache.turbine.services - This is where the Services Framework lives. The Services framework is a core aspect of Turbine. Essentially it is a framework for creating Singleton objects which may also have an init() and destroy() lifecycle. There are Services for many different things.
  • org.apache.turbine.util - The Util package is just that. A package of utility code that is used within Turbine. There is code that will allow you to easily send template based email using Velocity as well as many other commonly used web application tools.

Standalone Usage

Turbine can be easily used on its own. In order to do so, all you need to do is something like this before you attempt to make a call to Turbine based code: 

TurbineConfig tc = new TurbineConfig("/path","TurbineResources.properties");
tc.init();

What that does is it tells Turbine the path to its configuration file based on the relative path from "/path" (insert your own path). This is held as a static in memory and therefore you only need to do it once. You do not even have to worry about hanging on to the TurbineConfig object. For more information, please see the javadoc for the TurbineConfig object.

Further Questions and Comments

If you have further questions or comments, please send them to the Turbine Mailing lists.