Raible Designs

Wednesday September 25, 2002

Jabber Love. I've been installing and playing with Jabber since yesterday afternoon. If you don't know what Jabber is - it's an open, XML-based protocol for instant messaging and presence. So it's basically an open-source instant messaging server. It takes about 10 minutes to setup and get running, and I've installed it successfully on both Red Hat 7.3 and Windows XP. Easy as pie - that's how open source should be!

Posted in General at Sep 25 2002, 11:58:03 PM MDT Add a Comment

Upgrading Rampage. I went on an upgrading rampage yesterday and ended the day with the worst feeling. My Struts 1.1b2 application appeared to work fine on most things, however, I kept getting the following error when I tried to submit a form with indexed input values:

java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException
 	at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
 	at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39)
 	at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25)
 	at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:324)
 	at org.apache.commons.beanutils.PropertyUtils.getIndexedProperty(PropertyUtils.java:475)
 	at org.apache.commons.beanutils.PropertyUtils.getIndexedProperty(PropertyUtils.java:410)
 	at org.apache.commons.beanutils.PropertyUtils.getNestedProperty(PropertyUtils.java:749)
 	at org.apache.commons.beanutils.PropertyUtils.getProperty(PropertyUtils.java:780)
...
Caused by: java.lang.IndexOutOfBoundsException: Index: 0, Size: 0
 	at java.util.ArrayList.RangeCheck(ArrayList.java:508)
 	at java.util.ArrayList.get(ArrayList.java:320)
 	at com.onpoint.webapp.form.QuestionForm.getAnswer(QuestionForm.java:321)

The items I attempted to upgrade were:

• Jikes 1.15 -> 1.16
• J2SE 1.4.0_01 -> 1.4.1
• Tomcat 4.0.4 -> 4.1.12
• Cactus 1.4 -> 1.4.1
• StrutsTestCase 1.8 -> 1.9

After hours of banging my head against the wall for hours and even trying versions of my code from a week ago, I decided to try the "classic" compiler in Ant. Which I soon learned should now be named "modern." Whalla - it fixed the above problem! My advice - DON'T USE JIKES 1.16 to compile your Struts-based web app! I also found that switching to modern from jikes reduced my build process from 1 min 20 seconds to 50 seconds - I'm sold.

I ended up not upgrading to Tomcat 4.1.12 (rather to 4.0.5) because I found that my error-pages were not being recognized. I hope that a client using the application never sees an error page, but if they do - I'd rather them see my pretty page vs. a stacktrace. Posted in Java at Sep 25 2002, 06:12:06 AM MDT Add a Comment

Google News I dig Google's new News feature I found this tasty treat this morning.

Microsoft acknowledges Linux threat
"We got beaten by Linux in the very high-end systems, but we have a whole development team despatched on that now," he is reported as saying in the Financial Times: "Linux isn't going to go away. Our job is to provide a better product in the marketplace." -- Steve Ballmer, September 2002. [ Full Article ]

Posted in The Web at Sep 25 2002, 03:03:27 AM MDT 3 Comments