Raible Designs

Tuesday October 14, 2003

Camino now supports Twisty Comments! I've been using Safari as my primary web browser since I bought my new PowerBook. This evening I decided to try a nightly build of Camino and see how things are coming along. I was delighted to find out that my twisty comments now work in Camino (not so in Safari).

Camino's nightly build does have some issues though - both are things that used to work just fine on this site. One is that the search input field has a purple background (matching it's containing <div>). The second quirk is that the textarea box in Roller's Weblog -> Edit page is shifted to the right - seems something is amiss with floats (it's to the right of my "Validate as XML" checkbox). Even with these little quirks, it's still a great browser. Posted in The Web at Oct 14 2003, 08:03:37 PM MDT Add a Comment

Skinning your applications and Apache+Tomcat on RH9 Here are a couple of links I found on mailing lists that might be of use:

• Xkins: Xkins framework uses Velocity to process snippets of HTML, but you can use any other template processor (Xkins comes with it's own default processor). Xkins also comes with Forms Tag Libs, that allows you to create forms using Xkins and comes with four Skins. Xkins Forms integrates with Struts framework. Xkins also fits perfect in JSF world, playing a role as a RenderKit, and can work with other presentation frameworks, (i.e. struts-layout).I'll stick with simple XHTML and CSS. If I need different layouts (HTML), I'll use a different base tile.
• John Turner has published a Tomcat 4.1.27 + Apache 2.0.47 HowTo. This is similar to mine, but looks much cleaner and to the point.

Later: I discovered the beauty of John's HowTo this evening. It allows you to specify one measly line in Apache's httpd.conf file and only a few lines in Tomcat's server.xml file and viola Tomcat configures itself! It sets up aliases and such for each webapp that you have deployed. As an example, here's dynamically created section for AppFuse:

#################### localhost:/appfuse ####################                                       
                                                                                                       
# Static files                                                                                     
Alias /appfuse "/opt/dev/tools/jakarta-tomcat-4.1.27/webapps/appfuse"                              
                                                                                                       
<Directory "/opt/dev/tools/jakarta-tomcat-4.1.27/webapps/appfuse">                         
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks                                                                 
    DirectoryIndex index.jsp                                                                       
</Directory>                                                                                  

# Deny direct access to WEB-INF and META-INF                                                       
#                                                                                                  
<Location "/appfuse/WEB-INF/*">                                                                 
    AllowOverride None                                                                             
    deny from all                                                                                  
</Location>                                                                                 
                                                                                                       
<Location "/appfuse/META-INF/*">                                                              
    AllowOverride None                                                                             
    deny from all                                                                                  
</Location>                                                                                   
                                                                                                       
JkMount /appfuse/j_security_check  ajp13                                                           
JkMount /appfuse/auth/*  ajp13                                                                     
JkMount /appfuse/register/*  ajp13                                                                 
JkMount /appfuse/passwordHint/*  ajp13                                                             
JkMount /appfuse/*.do  ajp13                                                                       
JkMount /appfuse/*.jsp  ajp13                                  

I had all of this working great - I even had Apache upgraded to 2.0.47 on OS X (serving localhost/~user files and everything)! And then I rebooted... Now in catalina.out, I'm getting the following - ugh...

BAD packet 256                                                                                      
In: : [B@c283b5 4/843                                                                               
01 00 03 47 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  | ...G............                                 
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  | ................ 

WTF?!

Solved: I got this solved fairly easily. I had modified /usr/sbin/apachectl so that the HTTPD variable pointed to /usr/local/apache2/bin/httpd rather than /usr/sbin/httpd. I fixed it by removing /usr/bin/apachectl and executing "ln -s /usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl /usr/sbin/apachectl". Now if I could only get the Rendezvous mod working on 2.0.x. Posted in Java at Oct 14 2003, 08:09:07 AM MDT 2 Comments