Raible Designs

Struts Resume @ Sourceforge.net

I'm in the midst of checking in my struts-resume app to the struts-apps project at sourceforge.net. I hate to admit it, but I'm doing it the ugly way. I have a ~12MB lib directory that contains all the 3rd party jars used in this application. Ugh, I wish I was using Maven now. I figure you gotta start somewhere though - so I might as well get it all in there and clean it all up later.

Apple's New Safari Browser

It's cool because its fast, and it's got the slick aqua-class buttons like Chimera. But Steve - where's my tabbed browsing!? You forgot the best part of the modern browser phenomenon. I bet M$ has it in IE 7 - or at least they should. I did download Safari and I do like it's bookmarks and nice icon - but it's not doing it for me w/o tabs. Good effort though - too bad it doesn't implement the CSS border-style: dotted correctly. Check out freeroller.net using Mozilla, and then look at in in IE 6. Safari renders dashes just like IE. The other thing that sucks is that the text in this blog is super small. I mean it's small as it is - but it's tiny in Safari. Normally, it actually is larger on OS X than on Windows. If it's too small for you right now - use your browser to make it bigger.

I am looking forward to new iTunes and iPhoto - I love those apps!

Sweet New Powerbooks

Nice friggen feature if you ask me! One of the things I hate about laptops (small screens) has just been eliminated. Give me 2GHz and you've got yourself a deal!!

CVS through an HTTP Proxy?

Anyone know how to access a CVS server (i.e. SourceForge) though an HTTP Proxy? I need to get the latest CVS version of XDoclet at work and I can only get out via a proxy. Thanks in advance.

Tomcat 4.1.18 + Apache 2.0.43 + SSL

I'm going to test out my articles on Tomcat+Apache and Apache+SSL this morning - and will update my findings here. I already have Tomcat 4.1.18 installed and working great. I will NOT be setting up clustered instances of tomcat (i.e. tomcat 1, tomcat2) but I will set up my environment to allow for a clustered environment. I am doing this on a Windows 2000 SP3 machine, which Cygwin installed. Cygwin has all the required modules already installed - SSH, OpenSSL, etc. Below are the errors I've found - hopefully someday I'll use this post to update the articles.

• The link to download the latest Linux version is bad. Update your bookmarks for the latest 2.0.43 release.
• Since I want SSL, I downloaded 2.0.43 with mod_ssl and OpenSSL 0.9.6 from http://hunter.campbus.com/.
• I unzipped the download to c:\Tools\apache and chose to "user folder names."
• I downloaded mod_jk-2.0.42.dll and put it in $APACHE_HOME\modules ($APACHE_HOME = c:\Tools\apache).
• Added the following to $APACHE_HOME\conf\http.conf after the last LoadModule:
  #
# Load mod_jk
#
LoadModule jk_module modules/mod_jk-2.0.42.dll

#
# Configure mod_jk
#
JkWorkersFile conf/workers.properties
JkLogFile logs/mod_jk.log
JkLogLevel info

• Below DocumentRoot in httpd.conf, I added:
  
  JkMount /* tomcat1
  
  ... because I want everything to go to Tomcat.
• Then I continued with Steps 2.3+, only configuring Tomcat1 though.
• NOTE: Checkout Step 6 for setting up multiple instances of Tomcat that can be used to host separate applications. For instance, this is great for setting up myapp1.raibledesigns.com, myapp2.raibledesigns.com. This is what I've always used Apache+Tomcat for, rather than for load balancing.
• Next I searched for @@ in http.conf and changed appropriately (all I change was the ServerAdmin. I also had to change line 57 from c:/apache to c:/tools/apache, and DocumentRoot from c:/apache/htdocs to c:/tools/apache/htdocs. 25 lines below DocumentRoot, change Directory to be the same as DocumentRoot.
• Navigate to $APACHE_HOME\bin and type "Apache -k install".
• Type "Apache -k start" and goto http://localhost. Hey it worked - first try!! There's an ApacheMonitor.exe file in $APACHE_HOME\bin that will allow to to start/stop/restart Apache from the SystemTray. Now onto configuring SSL.
• From step 3, creating a certificate, I literally copied and pasted all the command into Cygwin and everything worked without a hitch.
• I then uncommented the following line in httpd.conf: LoadModule ssl_module modules/mod_ssl.so
• I had to change all references from "c:/apache" to "c:/tools/apache" in the already installed ssl.conf file in the same directory as httpd.conf. I did this in httpd.conf just for kicks too - 11 replacements on top of those I already made.
• Then I commented out the <IfDefine SSL> tags at the beginning and the end of ssl.conf, since I want SSL to always be running.
• I then got the following error:
  Syntax error on line 114 of C:/Tools/apache/conf/ssl.conf:
SSLCertificateFile: file 'C:/Tools/apache/conf/ssl.crt/server.crt' does not exist or is empty
  
  So I changed SSLCertificateFile c:/tools/apache/conf/ssl.crt/server.crt in ssl.conf to be (same as beginning of above)/conf/ssl/server.crt, and SSLCertificateKeyFile c:/tools/apache/conf/ssl.key/server.key to remove .key so it's just .../conf/ssl/server.key. Then I stopped and restarted Apache.
• Whalla!! - https://localhost/index.jsp worked like a charm.

Hope this helps make your next Tomcat/Apache installation easier.