Raible Designs

Wednesday January 15, 2003

Snip Snap I'd like to use SnipSnap to host/edit my downloads section. Write now I'm editing a plain old HTML file. I suppose I could use Roller, hmmm. I doesn't look like I can use SnipSnap on this site since it appears to only run as a standalone server, running on Jetty. I could try to run it on some crazy port or have two servers running on this site, but I prefer one.

Why do I want to use SnipSnap over Roller? For it's Wiki feature. Why don't I use a different wiki app (esp. since I did the research on them)? SnipSnap looks good - and I'm a sucker for eye candy. The rest of the wikis I reviewed are very plain. Sure I can customize them and do my own stylesheets and all that, I just don't feel like it. Who knows, maybe I will another day. Posted in Java at Jan 15 2003, 10:12:50 PM MST 1 Comment

Java-based Forums and Free Software I've always thought that Jive was a great product, especially when I first found it. It was free then, now it costs $450. It it worth it - yes! But it's tough to recommend this to clients when there are free alternatives. Here's one courtesy of Mathias Bogaert:

Discovered mvnForum, a JSP 1.1/Servlet 2.2 based forum application (GPL), which looks kinda neat...check out their demo.

I have this same problem at work. I told my project manager that I knew of three Bug Tracking systems: Bugzilla, JIRA and Scarab. I currently use Bugzilla for a client and I'm familiar and happy with it. I also use JIRA for Roller and XDoclet, and think it's a great piece of software. Even though I've never used Scarab, I installed it thinking that it was better than Bugzilla, and also b/c the guys from Apache are moving to it. After wrestling with the setup a bit, I got it working. Scarab's main goal seems to be ease of setup - they should take some lessons from Atlassian. Actually, we all should - I had JIRA downloaded/installed/running in under 5 minutes. Anyway, back to the point - I showed Scarab to my project manager and he went off to investigate. An hour later he came back and said he just didn't get it. I didn't have the bandwidth to investigate, and since I've never used it - we're going to use Bugzilla. I prodded and poked and tried to get JIRA; I even downloaded and installed the 30 day trial. No joy, free is what they want.

Speaking of free software, I'm inspired to do some work on Roller - especially with all the stuff that Dave and Lance have done lately. Also, my RSS feed seems to refresh old stories in Radio's aggregator, so I'm due for an upgrade. I hope to add some of the following features over the next week or so (when do we release 0.9.7?):

• Encypted password support - both programmatically and using Tomcat's Realm. The way I've done this in the past is to create a LoginServlet that my form-based authentication maps to. This servlet does the encryption and redirects to j_security_check. I'll also include an option for an SSL-based login. Both password encryption and SSL will be off by default - and changes will be allowed in web.xml.
• Remember Me. You're gonna love this - I sure do.
• Remember Me in Comments. It's definitely needed if you do a lot of commenting. The question is - do you automatically do it - or allow users to say "forget me." Auto is easiest.
• Add support for e-mailing comments and subscribing to comments when posting a comment.
• Dig into XDoclet and make the upgrade to 1.2 Beta 2 - fixing the bug we have with Castor. I hope I'm familiar enough with how XDoclet works to make this happen. I looked through the code today and it should be working from what I can tell.
• Upgrade to Struts 1.1 Beta 3.

Sheez! I just created a whole bunch of work for myself didn't I? Hmmm, now how do I schedule all this and get it done in a week? A late night, an early morning, a weekend? I can't decide... Oooh, here's an idea - Julie and Abbie are leaving for Florida next Thursday (I'm joining them Friday) - I could do it next Thursday night. Hopefully I can get it done sooner, but hopefully a lot of this can wait until then. Posted in Java at Jan 15 2003, 09:47:48 PM MST 1 Comment

Conditional Task Execution with Ant I'm trying to conditionally include my test jar files based on an Ant property. My problem is that the "if" attribute of the <task> element only accounts for the property being present or not. I'd love to be able to specify:

ant -Denable.cactus=false

But Ant seemingly executes my task if a property is present - so even though the value is false, it still executes. Any ideas? Here's my task:

<target name="copy-test-jars" depends="init" if="enable.cactus"
    description="Copy test-related JAR files to WEB-INF/lib">
    <echo>Copying Cactus, StrutsTestCase and JUnit JARs</echo>

    <mkdir dir="${webapp.target}/WEB-INF/lib"/>
    <!-- Copy jars -->
    <copy todir="${webapp.target}/WEB-INF/lib">
        <fileset dir="${strutstestcase.dir}" includes="*.jar"/>
        <fileset dir="${cactus.dir}">
            <include name="*.jar"/>
            <exclude name="commons-logging.jar"/>
            <exclude name="log4j-*.jar"/>
            <exclude name="servlet.jar"/>
        </fileset>
        <fileset dir="${env.ANT_HOME}/lib" includes="junit.jar"/>
        <fileset dir="${env.ANT_HOME}" includes="junit-noframes.xsl"/>
    </copy>
</target>

BTW, this XML was made web-savvy by the E2 Source Code Formatter - a must-have bookmark. I got this tip from The FuzzyBlog!. Posted in Java at Jan 15 2003, 11:19:10 AM MST 6 Comments