Raible Designs

RE: How do they do it?

Dominic writes, "How in the world do they (Java bloggers) not lose their mind doing all these non-work related projects/activities such as: writing books, opensource development, consulting, etc." Since I do a lot of non-work related activity, I left a comment on his site, basically saying that I have no time-management skills and that the only way I get stuff done is to stretch the bounds of my relationship with my wife. This is because usually I tell her "I have to work tonight" and I get on the computer around 7 PM and join her in bed around midnight or 1. Then I get up at 4 and head into the office, only to do it again the next night (if necessary). I find this really sucks, particularly if I'm working a 40-hour week in 4 days. Since I have a new deadline looming (edit/return Wrox Chapters by Monday), I'm going to try something a bit different. I'm going to work an hour and a 1/2 at night (5:30-7), and then again in the morning (4-5:30) . I'll work an 8 hour day, getting off at 3, then I'll hit the gym and be home by 5. That's just this week, we'll see how it goes. In reality, I've found that the following things work the best for "getting things done."

• Quit blogging and reading blogs. Same goes for e-mail - this can save 1-3 hours a day for me.
• Plan your day and leave your computer/location when you say you're going to.
• If you're reading a book or writing a paper - take it to the library. Go early and stay all day.
• For me, working on Windows is a good 2-3 times faster than working on my Mac or Linux. Stay with the OS that you're most productive on.
• When something small comes up that you need to do, just do it.

OK, now I'm going to follow a bit of my own advice and close Outlook and Phoenix.

www.struts.ru

Cool - there's a new site for all the Struts documentation in Russian. I actually got a degree in Russian, and I dig Struts, so of course - this interests me. Beautiful country, awesome culture and a very rich history. Too bad I gave up Russian after graduating to learn all this computer stuff instead. Now I can barely understand a full sentence - and I was pretty close to fluent my senior year. One question I have for non-English programmers - do you write Java/JavaScript/CSS/HTML in your native language or in English? I've always wondered...

Whither ActionMappings

Ted Husted made a post last Friday to the struts-user mailing list. It looks like a good post for rookie struts users. I haven't read it, but hopefully by bookmarking it here, I'll read it soon.

Haven't quite decided where to use this, and it didn't seem like the best time to squeeze something new into the docs =:0), so I thought I'd post it here for now, in case it were of interest to some.

WHITHER ACTION MAPPINGS?

We write applications to do things for people. We might say, for example, that we want the appication to create a mail-merge job for us. Some developers call these top-level tasks "client stories". In practice, to do a big job like this, an application will need to take several smaller steps. We'll need to obtain the information from the user about which mail-merge job to create. We'll need to find the items to merge. We'll need to put the items together with a template, and we'll need to present the result back to the user. Some developers call these smaller tasks "use cases". To complete a client story, we usually chain several use cases together. A chain of use cases is sometimes called a workflow.

Before doing any thing for us, most applications wait to be asked. When we ask the application to do something, we usually need to provide a variety of details. If we ask the application to store a name and address, we need to provide the name and address to go along with the request. [read more...]

RE: Tiles 101

Patrick Peak has a weblog that was just started last Wednesday. He wrote a great post today on Tiles that I hope to send to the struts-user mailing list (as soon as I get his permission). Unless someone else has already done it, of course. This is definitely a blog to watch and enjoy.

Java.blogs and Roller in Java Developer's Journal

I received the February issue of Java Developer's Journal today. I thought it pretty cool that java.blogs, Roller and MiniBlog were all mentioned. I barely skimmed the thing, so it's possible that there are more nuggets like this hidden in its pages. Maybe I'll find out tomorrow - Abbie wants me to read her a story tonight.

I received the reviews/comments back from Wrox today on my Security and Struts chapter. I briefly read the e-mails and gasped at the deadline for editing/returning (next Monday). Overall, the e-mails were encouraging and didn't seem to indicate a lot of change, just more code samples and a more consistent flow. Knowing my luck, there's all kinds of work hidden in the marked-up Word docs. Getting these chapters edited and returned could take a while since it gives me an excuse to dive back into struts-resume and add some more features. Maybe that's why they give the short deadline.

One interesting point that was mentioned is that the Struts chapter was so packed full of tools (i.e. XDoclet, Struts, Validator, Ant, Hibernate, Tiles) that they're thinking of renaming it to be something like "Leveraging Struts, Tiles, and other Tools." Sounds cool to me. In my current project, it seems that Struts only plays a small role in the whole webapp, but after teaching it to a co-worker over the last week - I guess it plays a larger role than I thought. The combination of all these tools and learning them can be a bit overwhelming - I guess I had an advantage in learning since I wrote about them and also did a sample app. I tell you what - "doing it" is certainly the best way to learn. Now hopefully I can come up with a better way to explain how to do it. The book is (to my knowledge) still scheduled to be released in March.

JAAS Security in Action

I haven't read it, but this JAAS Security in Action article at DevX.com looks like a good intro to JAAS. Hopefully it'll teach me something as soon as I take the 10 minutes to read it.

Is it possible to lock files with CVS?

I don't think this is possible, but since a co-worker asked - I'm relaying the question to you, the experts. Using CVS, it is possible to "checkout" a file for editing, and to lock it on the CVS server, so no one else can check it in. If this feature exists, I'd love to use it. Also, if anyone knows how to hookup sending e-mails for commits on a barebones CVS install, enlighten me. SourceForge makes it easy using synchmail, but Google doesn't even know about this tool - must be a SF script.

Update: Anthony has given me some good tips in the comments of this post. I've had some success in getting e-mail notification setup, but I'm still having some issues. To configure it, I checked out CVSROOT, and edited the loginfo file, adding the following line:

^project /usr/bin/mailx -c $USER -s "[cvs-commit] %{sVv}" [email protected]

When I get in a file, I get:

Checking in build.properties;
/export/home/cvsr/project/build.properties,v  <--  build.properties
new revision: 1.7; previous revision: 1.6
done
1.6... User unknown
1.7... User unknown
build.properties... User unknown
/export/home/mattra/dead.letter... Saved message in /export/home/mattra/dead.letter

I do receive the e-mail, but it's addressed to 1.6@cvsserver, 1.7@cvsserver, build.properties@cvsserver and [email protected]. I'm sure it's an easy fix, comments are appreciated.

Update 2: Our SysAdmin solved the e-mail issue with the following lines in loginfo:

^project /usr/bin/mailx -s '[cvs-commit] %{sVv}' [email protected]
^server_config /usr/bin/mailx -r [email protected] -s '[cvs-commit] %{sVv}' [email protected]

I'm no UNIX expert, so that's why I'm posting this here - that way I can use it the next time I need to set this up. Alternative approaches are welcome and encouraged!

Deploying to Tomcat using Ant

If you're using Tomcat 4.1.x, did you know you can deploy using an Ant task that ships with Tomcat. You'll need to add $CATALINA_HOME/server/lib/catalina-ant.jar to your classpath, but then you can configure your ant task as follows:

<taskdef name="deploy" classname="org.apache.catalina.ant.DeployTask"/>

<deploy url="${manager.url}"
         username="${manager.username}"
         password="${manager.password}"
         path="/${name}"
         war="file:/${dist.dir}/${name}.war" />

I haven't tried it, but it looks cool. Right now I use a simple copy task that works pretty well for me, so no need to change at this point.

<target name="deploy" depends="package-web" if="tomcat.home"
    description="unwar into the servlet container's deployment directory">
          
    <unwar src="${webapp.dist}/${webapp.war}" 
        dest="${tomcat.home}/webapps/${webapp.name}"/>
    
</target>

If you know of any advantages to using Tomcat's deploy task, or you'd like to share your experience using it - please post a comment.

Anthill, this site crashing and XSL

Anthill rocks. Once I got our CVS server configured to allow pserver authentication from localhost, it took less than 5 minutes to configure automated builds with our build.xml file. Next steps - running tests and deploying. I got deployment pretty much done today and all I have to do is add the tests as parameters to Anthill's build process. The only thing that worries me about Anthill is that they have an open-source version and a pay-for-it version. No company wants to pay for anything these days, and I'm afraid all the good stuff will end up in the pay-for-it version. To be honest, that's fine with me, since all the stuff I need right now is in the open-source version.

In case you haven't noticed, this site has been crashing daily and I only discover it when I actually check it. I'm definitely overdue for a Roller upgrade - especially considering the last one was in the October or November of last year. I want to contribute before I upgrade though, so it might be awhile. The problem I'm experiencing right now is OutOfMemory errors, so Keith wrote a perl script to check catalina.out for this string, and if it's there, it restarts Tomcat. Hopefully this will help me out until I upgrade Roller.

This morning, I did a little XSL for one of my moonlighting projects - and I was disappointed to find that there's no ends-with function in the current XSL spec. There's starts-with and contains, but no ends-with. I used contains in the end to check if a filename contains .avi, and if so, then use HTML for Windows Media Player, rather than QuickTime Player. Seems to work good enough for now.

Which conference would you attend?

I try to go to a conference every year. Last year it was Web Builder in Vegas, and it was a great time - but not enough Java stuff. So this year I'm going to try and attend a conference that is more up my alley. Here's the three I'm trying to decide between:

• Rocky Mountain Software Symposium (May 16-18, Denver)
• TheServerSide Symposium (June 27-29, Boston)
• O'Reilly Open Source Convention (July 7-11, Portland, OR)

In reality, I'd like to go to all. Regardless of the other two, I'm pretty sure I'll attend the one in Denver. I know Jay Zimmerman (the organizer), and I don't mind giving him my money at all. After all, he is a fellow Montanan! I'd really like to attend the one in Boston, but that'd be a spendy trip with hotel and all. As for the O'Reilly Convention in Oregon, my parents live in Salem (40 miles south of Portland), so that one might work out well. However, we usually try to do the 4th of July at the cabin, it might be rough travel to Oregon so quickly after basking in the Montana Summer. I'll probably settle for Denver and maybe hit up another one towards the end of the year.