Saw this on Amazon.com today. YOu can get Norton Internet Security for a measly $5 after rebates - now that's a deal! The shipping will probably cost you more. A good gift for your techy friends that use Windows.
Jabber Journal #5 was published yesterday. If you ever have a need to host an IM server, Jabber is the way to go. Pretty damn easy to setup and I'm guessing easy to talk to as well - it's just XML. I bought Programming Jabber a couple months back, but haven't used it yet. Jabber registers users by creating an XML file in it's directory - so it'd be pretty easy to create new jabber users when someone creates a new user in the database, and then you could dole out a jabber id for them as well.
Here's a question for you: Should I be using DBUnit in AppFuse and struts-resume? I've heard of it before, but have never used it. It sounds good:
The Dbunit database testing framework is a JUnit extension which sets up your database in a known state before executing your tests. This framework uses xml datasets (collection of data tables) and performs database operations before and after each test. The Dbunit framework supports both the clean insert and the refresh strategies.
Actually, know that I think of it, of course I should be! Currently, I use an Ant Sql task to create my database, and then Hibernate's SchemaExport
class to create the tables. I have no way to automagically enter data into the database. I suppose I could use another sql task in my build file, but it sounds like this job is more suited for DBUnit. I don't want to give up Hibernate's table generation as it's smart and adds new columns when I add new columns to my VO. Hopefully these two can work together nicely.
I also found this Best Practices guide on using Hibernate. The first line about using fine-grained objects has motivated me to refactor my User class.
Write fine-grained classes and map them using <component> or <component-element>. Use an Address class to encapsulate street, suburb, state, postcode. This encourages code reuse and simplifies refactoring.
As I woke up this morning, I thought "Maven must have a way to checkout development builds from CVS." So I think I can still use it and get all my needed 3rd-party jars. They all have CVS Repositories and most are hosted by Jakarta or Sourceforge. Now I just have to figure out how to do that.