Uncommented Bytes

Spring regex-backed Date converter

2012-01-19T12:22:00.002-06:00

I've written a small OPI blog post describing a Regex backed Spring Date Formatter/Converter annotation.

Cookie Craziness with IE and Javascript

2011-07-19T22:53:00.005-05:00

This is a helpful post for my future self (and others) on the peculiarities of http cookies and accessing them from javascript vs server side. Since it took me numerous google searches to find all of the answers I'm putting the useful details here in one place for reference. I assume a basic understanding of browser cookies exists in your head already.The properties of cookies that matter are key

Format groovy StreamingMarkupBuilder XML

2008-09-30T13:22:00.000-05:00

Playing with groovy this week, and specifically the MarkupBuilder and StreamingMarkupBuilder classes to create XML documents. MarkupBuilder is simple but doesn't handle namespaces in a DSL friendly way. StreamingMarkupBuilder handles namespaces nicely but doesn't pretty-print format the xml in the output. And finding information on how to pretty print xml from StreamingMarkupBuilder is rather

Fix Twitter RSS in Google Reader

2008-08-17T22:19:00.000-05:00

Here's an awesome fix to read a Twitter RSS feed with Google Reader. I just had to share because it took too long for me to find a work around to twitter's authenticated RSS feed that Google Reader couldn't show.

Use Plugin Classpath with Openfire Plugin

2008-07-31T10:56:00.001-05:00

When creating an Openfire plugin, some classes cannot be found by the default classpath. This is a result of the way that Openfire loads plugins and their jars into the classpath. For me, specifically, I got a ClassNotFoundException when trying to create an IntialContext with WLIntialContextFactory, even though the weblogic.jar was in my plugin lib folder. One solution is to move everything

Enum Serialization with Weblogic EJB Client

2008-07-30T15:28:00.000-05:00

I was trying to setup an ejb client to connect to an ejb running on a Weblogic 9 app server. I could connect fine, but kept getting a Mismatched serialization uids error on a Java 5 Enum class. After some digging I found a fix on JavaRanch. For whatever reason using the wlclient.jar will not work when serializing enums, but using the full blown weblogic.jar is fine. I'm going to ignore the

Custom servlet in Openfire plugin

2008-07-22T13:16:00.001-05:00

I've been working on creating a plugin for our Openfire server, which is currently on version 3.3.3. The Plugin developer guide is a little help, and so are the message boards, but there is still some detail missing.Situation: I want to have a custom servlet that is available on the same url:port as our admin server. I don't want to have to login to the admin server to reach this url, and the

Custom sort key with Ext JS Grids

2008-02-28T21:37:00.004-06:00

I've begun using Ext JS in the last few days. I'm very impressed by the professionalism and api documentation, but there is still a lot to be desired as far as installation and initial setup docs.Anyway... I spent a couple hours trying to track down a way to sort a column in my GridPanel by a value other than its text. That is, I want the column to sort on a keyed index that is different than

Using Eclipse for C++ with GLUT on Windows

2008-01-27T06:34:00.000-06:00

For my latest grad school class at UNO, cs8626 Computer Graphics (yeah, its an easy elective for this semester), I need to develop some code using OpenGL. In my 10 years as a Java web app developer I haven't had any need for OpenGL before now, so my knowledge of it is around "beginner" to "sounds like something cool to learn". I can get by with C/C++/Make and the like, but until now I've either

Reality of Large Corp Coding

2007-07-17T19:17:00.001-05:00

I really enjoyed the article "Corporate Web Standards" today, not only for the primary thoughts, but also the secondary discussion of corporate smells. [http://www.digital-web.com/articles/corporate_web_standards/] (thanks for the link from Elsewhere on the Net [http://www.quirksmode.org/elsewhere/archives/2007/07/index.html#entry1348])The author describes a journey to implement web standards,

Trying out Eclipse 3.3 Europa

2007-07-13T15:13:00.000-05:00

I took the plunge this week of moving from Eclipse 3.2.1 to Eclipse 3.3 Europa. Technically, I went from the previous WTP release to the latest one. This WTP bundles some J2EE and DB features with the standard Eclipse. I don't really use it, but others on my team do.I think this is the first time I have migrated from a prior Eclipse version successfully with 0 problems. I launched the old

Blog Reload

2007-07-12T21:59:00.000-05:00

Okay, so I almost made it a full year without a post. It was some well needed time away from blogging, but I want to try and get it back together on a weekly basis.So what's going on? I took a new job at Lockheed Martin, working on some very interesting high profile contracts. It is very enjoyable and rewarding work so far. Actually, my lack of blogging coincides with my start date at LM last

Rails notes as I start looking at Ruby

2006-09-05T08:16:00.000-05:00

I've started working on a Ruby on Rails side project, though I haven't had as much time for it as originally hoped. Really, I was up and running and writing code to production on an existing Rails app in a # of hours!First, ActiveRecord is very nice. From a DAO oriented Java background (with a sprinkling of Hibernate), ActiveRecord is simply amazing. I love the Model based finds and the

Major Enterprise Ruby on Rails Issues?

2006-07-26T09:08:00.000-05:00

Greg Luck has written a Report from OSCON2006: The Ruby Conspiracy where he proceeds to smash Ruby on Rails.First, I'm just starting to get past the Rails tutorials so I have NO (zero) knowledge of Rails at an Enterprise level. And I've had similar thoughts to Greg's that Rails was being pushed for the betterment of the speakers before.So really I'm asking a question here... Are the points that

Groovy OJUG Talk last night

2006-07-19T15:32:00.000-05:00

Last night at OJUG (Omaha Java Users Group), Scott Hickey gave an awesome talk over Groovy. I wish I had a link to his website, but I didn't see one. He is the lead on the groovy Eclipse plug-in, and is currently finishing an article for the IBM DeveloperWorks Practically Groovy series covering groovy and spring. He's been writing production groovy code for a few years on a mission critical

Firefox AJAX Bug - Plus Workaround

2006-06-13T13:20:00.000-05:00

Today we stumbled across a fairly significant firefox bug with popup windows and making XHR requests. Here is the scenario:We have a calendar selection popup window for our users to select a date (typical of any reservation website). User clicks calendar icon, calendar select popup appears, user selects date, popup window closes & fills text field with date.Today we wanted to add an AJAX call

My Scriptaculous Local.InPlaceEditor extension

2006-05-30T08:30:00.000-05:00

I really like the script.aculo.us Ajax.InPlaceEditor, but it's missing two things that I need.One, it only edits a single field at a time. It would be much nicer IMHO to edit an entire form at once.Two, it requires Ajax to submit the form and display the result. Nice and all, but sometimes I want to submit the form old-school style with a POST or GET and have the server generate the result. I

Eclipse Mac OS X CVS Update Bug?

2006-05-25T09:15:00.000-05:00

So I go into Eclipse (3.1.2) on my OS X (10.3.9) box and do a Team Update from CVS. Anytime that a file has been deleted from cvs by someone else's commit I get this error:Problems encountered while deleting resources.I get this error for EACH file that was deleted. Then I have to open the properties on each file and unselect Read Only. After this I can Team | Override And Update to remove the

IE Left Margin Missing Bug

2006-05-22T12:01:00.000-05:00

This one has been bugging me for a long time before finding the answer today...In IE I couldn't get absolute positioned elements in our left-hand Search pane to appear correctly. The would get pushed onto our right-hand content pane. After thinking about it overnight (well, over multiple nights) I realized that IE was not noticing our negative left or right margins (One True Layout stuff).A

Apple finally coming to town!

2006-03-01T15:52:00.000-06:00

While I don't really like the title (Middle America? come on, we're the Heartland or something, but not Middle America!), we're finally getting an Apple Store!Although I wish it was downtown or closer to midtown instead of out in the suburban "lifestyle center", I'm more than thrilled that we're finally getting one! Good thing I have some tax refund left over :-)

Displaytag new features awesome (in theory)

2006-03-01T10:06:00.000-06:00

I was pumped to upgrade displaytag yesterday from 1.0 to 1.1. We needed the new feature to include the caption and footer in an export, along with some of the other new features that are included in 1.1.First step was to download and install the displaytag.jar. I also installed the displaytag-export-poi.jar so I could use the new Excel POI support.Then I had to upgrade our commons-lang,

Where are the open source car computer readers?

2006-02-06T14:29:00.000-06:00

After having some car troubles this weekend I began wondering... Why do I have to take my car into a service shop and pay them to hook it into a computer for 5 minutes? Why do they charge to hook up to a computer for 5 minutes again? And if the computer in my hood knows something, and LCD readouts are dirt cheap, why can't the car companies put a small readout under the hood to tell me what is

Vegas Conference? I'm there!

2006-01-16T15:58:00.000-06:00

I've just registered for TheServerSide.com Symposium at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas! I wish I could say that every month :-)The weather near the end of march should be near perfect, even if I'll spend 80% of my time indoors...March: 68 F / 43 FApril: 77 F / 50 FCompared to my usual Omaha, this will be awesome (with the low in Vegas > the high in Omaha)!March 38.6April 51.9Better than the

Converting Arrays to Lists in Java 5

2005-12-13T14:15:00.000-06:00

I'm trying to write some Java 5 (or 1.5, whatever) code for the first time. This is how I used to convert an array to a List in 1.4:List list = Arrays.asList(intArray);However, Java 5 gives me an error as Arrays.asList(intArray) actually returns a List. That's right, a list of int arrays with a size of 1 instead of a List, List of ints with size intArray.length.So is this

Trying new Code Review Tool

2005-12-09T11:19:00.000-06:00

I've been wanting to better organize a structured code review on our project. So today I'm looking at the CSDL Jupiter Code Review Tool. It looks promising, in that no external DB is required. It stores all review info in xml documents that are shared through our normal CVS project. It's an Eclipse plugin, which will make it easy to install and get our developers up to speed. And they have a

Eclipse.org redesign... Very Nice!

2005-12-01T12:10:00.000-06:00

After complaining in the past about the Eclipse website, I'm really impressed with their site redesign. I especially like how easy it is to download the Eclipse SDK now from their new downloads area! Finally, a person unfamiliar with the umbrella Eclipse organization can simply download the Eclipse SDK IDE without stumbling through the maze of projects.Nicely done! It's much more elegant and

Tomcat Remote Debug with Windows Service?

2005-11-30T14:50:00.000-06:00

Does anybody know how to start tomcat for remote debugging when using the windows service that comes with tomcat? I can do it in unix and non-service windows, but can't figure out how to work in with the NT service running on XP. Any ideas? Please help!

Re: Why I Hate PayPal

2005-11-28T13:44:00.000-06:00

A post on Marginalia describes his position on Why I Hate PayPal.My position is much simpler. Paypal has a large inbound phone center here in Omaha, and their local 402 area code phone number is one off from my work number. So I answer around 5 calls a week from people complaining about their Paypal account. I even had someone leave their credit card number on my voicemail once.So that's my

Bloglines New Keyboard Shortcuts

2005-10-13T13:54:00.000-05:00

As a follow up to Google Reader (and possibly pressured by them), Bloglines has added Keyboard Shortcuts! This is nicely done, and it is the one feature from Google Reader that I had really wanted. I really like the j/k/s navigation. One little nitpick though is to allow j or s to start the browsing, so I don't have to click on a link to start the browsing.

Google Reader - First Impressions

2005-10-10T09:38:00.000-05:00

Here's my thoughts (pros/cons) on the new Google Reader, as I use my past few years with Bloglines as comparison. First, I love the clean Web 2.0 look! This is a big improvement of the frames of Bloglines. It was easy to export my feeds from Bloglines and import them into Google Reader, although Google seemed to hang on the import. I just returned later to find all of my feeds running. I

Fixed Weblogic Apache Bridge CSS Mimetype

2005-09-12T09:17:00.000-05:00

After switching our jsp pages to render in w3c transitional mode (by adding the doctype to our pages), the css files stopped working in firefox. I found that the css files were being served with an incorrect mime-type of text/html instead of the required text/css from the firefox page info. (IE apparently guesses the mimetype for you, which is against the w3c spec but get's your pages to show

No Fluff Iowa - Day 3 (Selenium Rocks!!!)

2005-07-18T20:45:00.000-05:00

Day 3 at No Fluff Just Stuff at the Central Iowa Symposium in Des Moines was a great way to end (even though I didn't win the Sony PSP). I started off the morning by attending "Give the DB a Break! Peformance & Scalability" from Dion Almaer. Dion had some awesome content in this session, and I was most interested in the caching architectures for taking load off of our db. I'm very interested

No Fluff Iowa - Day 2 (Ruby--)

2005-07-16T16:11:00.000-05:00

This is the second post in attempting to cover my time here at the No Fluff Just Stuff Central Iowa Symposium in Des Moines.If day one was about testing, and death to java - long live ruby, then day 2 is about "Now that you know about Ruby, why don't we give you the Java info that you came here to see." Or, "Here's the reasons that Java can be seen as Ruby--".To start the day, I saw another

No Fluff Iowa - Day 1 (Java's Dead, Ruby Lives)

2005-07-16T00:53:00.000-05:00

I'm at the No Fluff Just Stuff Central Iowa Symposium in Des Moines this weekend, and Day 1 was a great start. First I saw a great Test First session hosted by Venkat Subramaniam. He quickly covered the top points of Test First development by creating a TicTacToe app on the fly. He's a great presenter, and even mentioned JUnitPerf for performance testing that I wasn't aware of. He also showed

There is no spoon

2005-06-17T23:01:00.000-05:00

So.... It's been more than a month since my last post? I really can't believe it, which is why I'm writing this now!!!The main thing happening in my last few months is my change of employer from Raytheon to West Corp. Still in Omaha, and still doing J2EE, but I received a large promotion so I can detail more in design and decisions than merely implementation. Don't get me wrong, I'm still

nullpointer on weblogic fixed

2005-05-19T15:32:00.000-05:00

I have fixed the problem from my last post, and put the answer here:dev2dev OnlineIt seems that weblogic was not noticing the changes so it was not redeploying. This is because we are exploding our ear in development. I changed our ant script to always overwrite the META-INF directory containing the application.xml file. This is forcing weblogic to refresh the application correctly (like it

Deploy error after recompiling with struts on weblogic

2005-05-18T16:12:00.000-05:00

I have posted the same question at BEA's dev2dev OnlineWe are getting the following stacktrace when hitting the application for the first time after a redeploy. We are running on Weblogic, and the problem goes away after restarting the app or redeploying throught the console. Has anyone seen this before?java.lang.NullPointerException at

Fix for JAAS Auth in Jetspeed

2005-04-15T16:16:00.000-05:00

I've finally found a fix for our Jetspeed JAAS Authentication issue with Weblogic (thanks to help from a BEA consultant).The problem occurs when using the JAASSessionValidator in Jetspeed to authenticate through the Weblogic app server, along with using the struts bridge from the apache portals project. After logging in as the same user in more than one session (by first logging in, and then

Using Struts multibox and radio tags

2005-04-08T13:27:00.000-05:00

I've found a great way to use both the Struts multibox and radio tags, and just want to document it here for my future use.The multibox is a tag to output multiple linked checkboxes, so the user can select multiple items at once. The radio is the same idea, but for a single select.My jsp piece looks like this, and it generates a table with a radio button as the first field:

Multiple Firefox Session

2005-01-14T08:36:00.000-06:00

I found some posts about creating multiple firefox sessions. But they all require you to set MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1 in your environment before starting a window. This forces each window to use a different profile. All I want is each window to use separate session cookies, or even allow this in separate tabs (could be very hard to get right).

Legit Tivo web server

2005-01-09T21:41:00.000-06:00

Wow, it is great to here that Version 7.1 of the TiVo service update installs and enables a web server! Now I just have more pressure on myself ot get that wireless adapter for my Tivo. Apparently you can download video straight from the box, without having to use Tivo Desktop software. Sweet.

Using c:param doesn't work in portlets

2004-12-22T10:51:00.000-06:00

For some reason I cannot get a or to work inside of a portlet. The page includes okay, but the param is not passed to the request parameters successfully. The odd thing is that the param does get into the

Windows Console F7 Menu, Very Cool!

2004-12-15T12:30:00.000-06:00

Did you know that from a windows console you can press F7 to open a small menu of your previous commands? Very cool for running ant scripts and the like! I can't believe that I didn't know this! Here's a list of other Windows 2K/XP Command Console Shortcuts

Google Search with Word Complete

2004-12-10T10:36:00.000-06:00

Simply genious! Google Search with Web Complete - Beta I hope they turn this on in the main site soon! I'll be linking to this until they do...

CruiseControl Wiki Down Again!

2004-12-08T21:48:00.000-06:00

Is it just me, or is the CruiseControl Wiki down an awful lot? Many times it has seemed very slow or out of commission over the past month that I have really been using it. It's rather frustrating that the main source of documentation is often inaccessible! I still love the product, but just wish the wiki would be more stable and reliable.

Jetspeed 2.0 M1 released!

2004-12-05T12:11:00.000-06:00

Wow, this is a long time coming. Congrats to the Apache Portals team! Apache News Blog Online: 05 December 2004 - Apache Portals Jetspeed 2.0 Milestone release 1 Now Available

Firefox FoxyTunes Plugin

2004-12-02T20:49:00.000-06:00

I have my second must-have firefox plugin, now that I've been shown the FoxyTunes Plugin. It allows you to control most any music program from the firefox status bar. Very cool! Of course, it still ranks second to the web-developer plugin!

I agree, Eclipse website SUX

2004-11-19T08:09:00.000-06:00

I have to completely agree with Anthony, that the Eclipse website SUX! Make 90% of your use cases simple, and this means put the Eclipse IDE download and help screens on your front page! Realize what your breadwinner is and sell it, don't bury it to make it appear on the same level as your other not-so-popular projects! As a first time visitor, weeding through the the projects is mind-boggling

Jetspeed Fusion, Struts, and Weblogic

2004-11-17T11:45:00.000-06:00

I've finally fixed Jetspeed 1.6 Fusion (JSR-168 enabled Jetspeed) to work with struts on Weblogic. This required a code change in Jetspeed to get around a Weblogic bug, but it works! The details are in this thread on the apache jetspeed mailing list.

Jetspeed 2 on Weblogic - update again

2004-11-11T11:48:00.000-06:00

Now I'm attempting to run jetspeed.war alongside my other wars and ears, while not running it in the same ear as everything else. This saves me from having to explode my ear, if I can get it to work. So far I've seen that the sample apps can be deployed along side the war, with the small addition that all of these wars MUST have this in the web.xml file:

Jetspeed 2 on Weblogic - Finally

2004-11-10T16:44:00.000-06:00

Wow, it works! To get past the issue in my last post, I had to add each of the demo wars into my application.xml. This is a side effect of creating the ear to put my wars into. Also, I found this page that answered my next error, by telling me to put the 5 jetspeed jars into a shared lib, and add this shared lib to my CLASSPATH in the startWebLogic script. I now have most of the portlets

Jetspeed 2 on Weblogic - part 2

2004-11-10T14:47:00.000-06:00

Well I have gotten a little farther since my last post. First I found this thread explaining how to get past the "cannot find OJB.properties" issue. Then I started getting this: java.lang.RuntimeException: Failed to initialize prefs api. java.lang.InternalError: Can't instantiate Preferences factory java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.apache.jetspeed.prefs.impl.PreferencesFactoryImpl and

Problem Deploying Jetspeed 2 on Weblogic

2004-11-10T12:50:00.000-06:00

Here's a quick fix for deploying Jetspeed 2 on Weblogic. First I had to fix a java.net.MalformedURLException. Here's the post on the BEA dev2dev Forums. I just needed to add this to the JAVA_OPTIONS of my startWebLogic script:-Djava.naming.provider.url=t3://localhost:nnnnwhere nnnn is the port configured for this particular WL server.Next I made a jetspeed.ear folder under applications and

Issue: Precompiling with Struts-EL for Weblogic

2004-11-05T13:29:00.000-06:00

Edit 10/13/2005: Apparently BEA has a workaround, and it is fixed in Service Pack 4! For some reason the wlappc task of weblogic blows up when trying to precompile an war that uses the Struts-EL jar. This works fine with only the struts.jar so something is up with the struts-el.jar. Has anyone else seen this problem?I've found a post about this in the BEA dev2dev Forums. As well as a post on

Refactoring with Appfuse

2004-11-04T22:16:00.000-06:00

Appfuse is starting a small revolution on the projects that I work with. Through Appfuse [article] I have been able to easily brief co-developers and architect types on the latest open source ideas in J2EE. You see, the projects I have worked on are "big enterprise" J2EE - Weblogic types, and it is hard to sell these people on new ideas. So, slowly we can implement Agile ideas and methods into

Java Coding Standards

2004-11-04T08:23:00.000-06:00

... on one page? I like it!

Get gmail-lite for gmail PDA access!

2004-10-03T17:04:00.000-05:00

I was frustrated with gmail for lacking a pure html version that can be used by PDA browsers. It was one of my complaints with gmail (along with not allowing html tags when composing). After some searching, I found gmail-lite! This is a php module that acts as a pure html proxy to gmail, meaning I can run it on my internal web server and check gmail from our pda at home! I still wish google

Solution to Slashdot Effect? Mirrordot!

2004-10-01T08:34:00.000-05:00

This article on Wired describes a new website called Mirrordot that will automatically mirror any site posted on slashdot. A very cool idea indeed! As it states in the article, though, I wonder how this will affect the ad revenue of some of the slashdotted sites. On one hand, they won't receive revenue from mirrordot, on the other hand mirrordot will keep their site alive!

Want to be a Googler? Take the Google Aptitude Test!

2004-09-30T22:46:00.000-05:00

Google has released the Google Aptitude Test Take the GLAT for fun, or even apply for a job at google!

Cygwin and Windows Clipboard Usage

2004-09-20T12:59:00.000-05:00

An option that I always forget about when installing cygwin is how to enable usage of the windows clipboard. For some reason it seems hard to google for (probably my laziness), so I'm documenting it here. To enable usage of the windows clipboard from within cygwin, use the -clipboard option from the xwin.exe command. Previously you needed to use xwinclip (or similar), but it is now integrated

Eclipse Saves The Day (Again!)

2004-09-09T08:44:00.000-05:00

I found a new "must use" feature in Eclipse, which comes standard but is turned off by default. Of course, I found it because I was trying to fix a bug in our code. The bug ended up being similar to this: if (something != null); { i++; } Notice that extra semi-colon at the end of the if statement? That burned us. (Don't mention the odd "brace on the next line" coding standard that is

gmail invites?

2004-09-07T15:39:00.000-05:00

Must have been a slow weekend, or everyone already has an account, because I didn't receive one comment from someone needing a gmail account? Does anyone else need one, because I have 6 more!

g-g-g-g-g-g-gmail

2004-09-03T23:02:00.000-05:00

Invites for everyone! Just let me know if you need one, because the first 6 people to leave their addresses will receive an invite!

Driven by Tests... hopefully

2004-09-02T09:04:00.000-05:00

A little late to the test driven side, I am, but I have played with JUnit for a while now. What I'm looking for is best practices to continue this implementation a little further. After some brief research, I have settled on the following setup for our tests: Unit Testing JUnit - obviously for unit testing POJO's -> Cactus - for server side unit testing of ejb's -> Strutstestcase

gmail For Everyone!

2004-08-31T22:44:00.000-05:00

Who wants a gmail invite? Put your address in my comments, and one will be sent your way. Since I received mine this way a few days ago, I feel obliged to release 6 invites in the wild on my own!

Gmail Thoughts (4 Pros, 1 Con)

2004-08-29T22:02:00.000-05:00

I just have to give a big thanks to Ryan Daigle for hooking me up with a gmail account. Now for my main thoughts... So far gmail seems to be a great improvement over my old Yahoo! Mail. I really like the "discussion" style of tracking replies. This is very suitable for reading email. I also like the labels that can be applied to messages so they are stored in multiple "folders". The

Weblogic EJB Compiler Options

2004-08-11T11:23:00.000-05:00

We fixed a problem today by setting options for the Weblogic EJB compiler that is used to compile EJBs on the server at deploy time. Of course we should be using WL appc, but even then we'll probably need to use the same options. Now I need a nice wiki to document these myself, but without one I'll simply post it here. The Problem When deploying many large EJBs to Weblogic, without

Roller Now Simpler to Setup

2004-07-28T15:46:00.000-05:00

Where was I when this Roller announcement was made? Roller Now Simpler to Setup After finding out today that there is a version of Roller with an embedded HSQLDB database, I went and set it up right away. I did a couple of tricks with it, because I already have a Tomcat server running on port 8080. But after a couple of small script changes, I was up and running in less than 20 minutes total!

java.net: Using RSS in JSP pages

2004-07-23T16:05:00.000-05:00

This is what I've been looking for. A nice example of using a Java API for RSS. Although I wonder if informa is the latest and greatest library to use? java.net: Using RSS in JSP pages

WebLogic Server Administration Best Practices

2004-07-22T09:49:00.000-05:00

Great tips and tricks straight from the mouth of BEA (thanks for pointing it out Vinny!): WebLogic Server Administration Best Practices

Yahoo! Mail is making me want GMail more

2004-07-15T10:11:00.000-05:00

I used to be happy with Yahoo! Mail, but they have taken away my favorite feature. A few weeks ago when they "upgraded" the interface to compete with GMail, they dropped the "include HTML tags" option when sending an email. It used to be nice that I could write HTML into my email so that my family could see nice pictures without ever needing to attach huge files. I just used a simple img tag

I agree. IoC appears to replace factories.

2004-07-14T17:15:00.000-05:00

Groboclown hits the nail on the head with his discussion about IoC. Groboclown's Weblog This is precisely how I view IoC also! I'm just surprised to see someone else explain it in this way. I only wish I was allowed to use IoC in my environment, because each time I do a MyInterface object = new MyInterfaceImpl() I think that using IoC would be so much cleaner.

Is Jess The Best Rules Engine Fit For J2EE?

2004-07-08T08:20:00.000-05:00

I'm a little disappointed that no real straight answers came from my last entry: Uncommented Bytes: Jess Architecture in a J2EE Environment So now I'm lead to believe that Jess may truly be difficult to integrate into our highly scalable, distributed, enterprise architecture. Wrapping Jess in a custom RMI server doesn't seem very elegant to me, but as of now it looks like the only solution. As

Jess Architecture in a J2EE Environment

2004-07-07T16:57:00.000-05:00

We need to implement the Jess rules engine into a clusterable distributed environment. The question lies in how Jess is deployed. It would appear that it cannot be deployed inside of an App Server because Jess does it's own threading. After some research into JSR 94 (Rules engine API/SPI) it is still unclear how Jess would actually run in our environment. I seem to remember that Clipse ran as

Eclipse Rises

2004-07-07T09:44:00.000-05:00

As I mentioned previously, I was having trouble with the 3.0 release of Eclipse. I thought it was time for an update, as my opinion has improved dramatically. As a quick background, I have been using Eclipse since early 2003 when I fell in love with it. Eclipse made my life so much easier. I had been longing for an IDE that could refactor, even though I didn't know what to call it. I

Open Source Portals and Apache Jetspeed Update

2004-07-06T22:58:00.000-05:00

A couple of updates from my Commentary on Jetspeed. First, I was thrilled to see Benjamin of the eXo team respond to my remarks, and also receive great feedback from Stéphane regarding Jahia. Second, my eyes bugged out reviewing my hit counts at bstats (for Blogger users) and seeing that I had been on the front page of TheServerSide.com (sincere thanks to Dion)! Benjamin mentioned in my

Proxy Breaks Weblogic Web Service Testing

2004-07-01T11:06:00.000-05:00

A peculiar error came up while trying to test my weblogic web service. BEA provides a test page for web services that you can use in development. So I went to the page to test my ProofOfConceptService (brilliant name, huh?). I received this error: weblogic.webservice.tools.wsdlp.WSDLParseException: Failed to retrieve WSDL from http://localhost:80/jetspeed/ProofOfConceptService?WSDL. Please

Which Portal? Apache Jetspeed, of course!

2004-07-01T09:22:00.000-05:00

Punit asked Which Open Source Portal Server?, and here is my answer:He lists the top contenders in the open source portal market as:eXoGridsphereuPortalApache Jakarta Jetspeed 2LiferayI would mod it to change Jetspeed to version 1 and add Jahia.About 5 months ago I did a fairly extensive evaluation of the portal market. I chose Apache Jetspeed 1. We are running 1.4 now, but are migrating to 1.5

Giving Eclipse a Chance

2004-06-30T08:18:00.000-05:00

Well I'm still not giving up on Eclipse. I'm going to try a tip that someone left me in the comments of my last entry. That is to basically delete the eclipse settings from my project (imported from 2.1) and create a new project in 3.0. It's worth a shot, especially considering all of the good comments that were left in favor of Eclipse. I really want everything to run smoothly since I have

What happened to Eclipse?

2004-06-29T16:55:00.000-05:00

I've been using the latest 3.0 release of Eclipse for a full day now, and I have to cry out "What happened?". I've been using 2.1.x for many many months now, without so much as a hiccup. However 3.0 has been causing me problems all day. I love the new look, and I love many of the new features (Ant finally works for me!). But it's so slow, even on my beefed up dev box, and it has locked up

Ant Junit Task mishandles Suites

2004-06-29T12:15:00.000-05:00

Maybe I'm missing something, but the Ant Junit task doesn't seem to handle Suites well. What I mean is that the formatters supplied with the base Junit task, when outputting information about a suite, don't spit out details about the class that a test was in. So can't even display this information in the html. For instance if I had two tests, one in TestClass1 and another in TestClass2 named

J2SE Tig5r

2004-06-28T15:52:00.000-05:00

As reported by David Flanagan and all over the blogosphere, the latest J2SE has been renamed from 1.5 "Tiger" to just 5.0. Maybe next year I can get my company to send me to JavaONE? Yeah right...

Eclipse 3.0 Download

2004-06-28T14:57:00.000-05:00

Okay, now that I'm all excited about Eclipse 3.0, and I just can't wait to check it out, I can't get a download speed over 12 KB/s. That's after trying most of the mirrors from our office in Omaha, which normally has blazing connection speeds. I'm not complaining, I'm just anxious to try it out. Especially since I'm giving a brownbag presentation over Eclipse to my fellow workers in less than

Firefox slays Eclipse?

2004-05-25T15:15:00.000-05:00

It's come to the point that I love Firefox for my browser of choice. If it wasn't for two very major problems. (I understand its only in a 0.8 stage of release so I'm more venting than complaining at this point.) 1) Firefox periodically kills Eclipse. I'm not sure what I click on or do, but its possibly when popping open a new window through javascript. When I switch back to my code,

Spam Advertisement Apology

2004-05-18T15:13:00.000-05:00

I feel the need to apologize to the javablogs.com community. You see, I was a user of 2rss.com. They provided (yes, thats past tense) a free atom to rss converter. With Blogger not supporting rss, I have been using 2rss.com to supply javablogs.com with updates. Today I noticed that someone/something was posting spam to javablogs in my name! Imagine my shock! The links went to some other

Weather XML, the new frontier?

2004-05-18T14:21:00.000-05:00

Today my quest has been to find some standards for disseminating weather data over the web. My initial reaction is, of course, that RSS would be a perfect fit! Technically we'd need to extend RSS to handle the weather data in XML format, but the basis is there. We just need to receive the weather anytime a sensor changes and display it to the user. The National Weather Service along with NOAA

Atom to RSS converter

2004-05-13T10:00:00.000-05:00

I noticed this morning that java.blogs was not picking up my entries. Naturally I assumed it was caused by my switch from jRoller to Blogger yesterday. I checked my configuration and it dawned on me that Blogger uses Atom while java.blogs is looking for RSS. If the differences are new to you, then do a quick google to find numerous information on the political differences. Anyway, to fix my

Moving in from jRoller

2004-05-12T16:51:00.000-05:00

Finally fed up with jRoller, I have now migrated all of my blogs to Blogger. I just couldn't take the downtime any longer. And how could I pass up the new templates and comments on Blogger?!?! My old blog is here if you're interested in seeing it. No looking back now.