Raible Designs

Good Humor from the struts-user mailing list

This made me laugh out loud, so I thought I'd share:

Hi, all -- I'm new to struts and I have a few questions. Since you are
the experts I'm sure you will be able to help me.

My boss wants to know how many people are using struts and how long it
will take to build our application using struts as opposed to our current
development process. We currently have a thousand monkeys sitting at a
thousand emacs editors. The application isn't completely designed yet,
and of course I can't release confidential information about our 
application but if you could give me an estimate of monkey-hours saved, 
that would be great.

I was able to download the struts-blank.war file but I am having trouble
setting it up. The first stumbling block was that it is misnamed. It
should be called 'struts-blank.zip' because it is in zip format. I had 
to open the file in hexedit to figure that one out. Hopefully the next 
version will have the right name???

The other problem I have is that I can't get my application to behave
properly. If the user types in their email address I want to be able to
check that it is a correct one and show the field red while they are
typing if it is not. I have a javascript that checks for the '@' sign but 
many people are typing in 'a@a'. Since I don't think so many people would
have the same email address we are losing valuable data. How can struts 
help me with this? Will it take many monkey-hours to implement?

Once I unzipped the file I could not find any README or INSTALL file. I
tried the usual 'make; make install' but that did not work. I went out
on the net to find some install instructions and I read one place that 
said I just had to stick the zip file inside my tom cat. I do have a cat, 
but she's female. Will that make a difference, or does struts only run on
male cats? Does it matter if they are neutered? Does each client need to 
have a male cat or just the server?

Denver JUG Review

Last night's meeting was great. The first presentation on TINI was very cool and showed how you could telnet/ftp into this SIM (RAM-style) device and run Java on it. Granted, it only supports JDK 1.1 and lacks some cool stuff, but it can run a servlet engine and even serve up web pages through a servlet. This was all designed to demonstrate how Java can run on embedded devices. The speaker thought that embedded devices would be the next big thing for Java. IMO, he has to - especially since he seems to have dedicated a lot of work to learning about it. In reality, I hope it is the next big thing, Java (and our job market) could use a real boost.

The second preso was by our good friend Erik Hatcher. It was the first time I've met Erik in person, so that was definitely the highlight of the night. He's a very down-to-earth fellow and gave a great presentation. If I didn't learn so much about XDoclet in the past couple of months, I would've been wowed. I did learn that I should replace my // TODO: comments with @todo in the JavaDoc so I can use XDoclet to generate a JavaDoc-like website of my todo list. I'm definitely looking forward to the next time he speaks at the NoFluff Symposium.

Moblogging went fairly well as you can tell from the pictures. These photos look pretty awful on the camera, but turned out decent on this site. I'm heading off on a trip to Chelan, Washington this weekend and will hopefully snap some more pics (pending connectivity).

JSP Plugin for Eclipse?

Does anyone know of a good JSP Plugin for Eclipse? I've found that the available XML and JSP Editors are not very good, and I resort to HomeSite (which I love) for most of my regular text editing. I'd love to find a tool that does code completion for JSPs. I suppose I could use Dreamweaver, but they don't have a copy here in the office. BTW, I found the Lomboz plugin, but it doesn't appear to be latest-eclipse-release compliant.

RE: GC settings to improve Eclipse performance

I changed my shorcut icon (Win2K) to have the following as it's target:

eclipse.exe -vmargs -Xverify:none -XX:+UseParallelGC -XX:PermSize=20M  
 -XX:MaxNewSize=32M -XX:NewSize=32M -Xmx256m -Xms256m

Eclipse now starts in a mere 6 seconds (2 GHz Dell, 512 MB RAM). Without these extra settings, it takes 11 seconds to start. That's what I call a performance increase!

Struts from Scratch

More goodness from the struts-user list this afternoon. In reality, I don't know why I'm posting these as I'm not planning on reading them - maybe in hopes that some of you will find it interesting. Could be that I worked until 3:30 last night and got up again at 7. Red Bull at lunch and I feel like I got a full night's sleep!

Struts from Scratch covers a Struts install from ground zero.

It provides detailed install and configuration steps for a beginning Struts application. It comes with a basic sample application and basic Ant build script (available for download from http://www.strutskickstart.com).

[ANNOUNCE] Struttin' With Struts beta

Rick Reumann has put together a nice website with tutorials for learning Struts. From the struts-user mailing list:

I created a web site that walks new Struts users step by step through the development of three VERY simple web applications in three lessons. Each lesson adds a few more features so that they build upon each other yet each stands alone such that if you follow the steps in any lesson you'll have built a very basic application regardless of which lesson you start with.

I created these because there seemed to be lacking some more recent "walk through" Struts tutorials geared toward the very new Struts developer. I think real newbies will find them especially useful, but then again I could be way wrong:)

I'm considering the site a "beta" because I'm sure there will be some mistakes. If anyone sees something I'm doing in a lesson that is way off (or a very bad practice) please let me know. Some of the stuff I know could be done in a more "best practice" way, but for the sake of trying to also keep the lessons small and simple some ideas weren't included (ie- I didn't use a constants interface for my forward definitions).

If anyone wants to contribute, reword, or add anything please let me know. The site is there to help others. I got really lazy in a lot of places and didn't say much about certain things that I would have liked to. Hopefully over time the site will improve.

Struttin' with Struts:

http://www.reumann.net/do/struts/main

-- Rick

Thanks Rick - looks very cool! I like the design too - nice work!

[ANNOUNCE] JDK 1.4.1 for OS X has been Released! (finally)

Don't give me the credit, Matthew Porter hooked me up with the news:

Yes, it is true. Java 1.4.1 for Mac OS X is finally out. Run System Update to get it! Also, check out Apple's Java page.

Downloading now...

Servlet 2.4 Specification

Damn, according to The Server-Side, the new XSD syntax for a web application's deployment descriptor (web.xml) has been removed. Or at least that's how I first read it. That would suck, only because it's one of the things I noted as a difference between 2.3 and 2.4. Where did I note it - in the chapters I wrote for Wrox. Doh - get those chapters back from the printing presses!

Hibernate Enhancements

For you Hibernate users/lovers, here's some good news for you (THANKS GAVIN!):

1. [Hibernate Forum] For XDoclet users its well-worth grabbing a CVS update now, I have fixed a bunch of issues and made improvements including Hibernate2 support (thanks to Matt Raible) and joined-subclass support.

2. [Hibernate Dev List]

 After a bit of research and thinking, I have settled on an approach to
 query by Criteria that hopefully is flexible enough for 80-90% of use
 cases, but still simple enough to fit in sufficiently few lines of code.
 
 The proposed new API is based loosely upon the Cayenne API. Queries may be
 expressed as follows:
 
 
 List cats = session.createCriteria(Cat.class)
     .add( Expression.like("name", "Izi%" ) )
     .add( Expression.between("weight", minWeight, maxWeight) )
     .add( Expression.eq( "mate", mate ) )
     .addOrder( Order.asc("age") )
     .setMaxResults(20)
     .list();
 
 
 Which is approximately equivalent to:
 
 from Cat cat
 where cat.name like 'Izi%'
 and cat.weight between :minWeight and :maxWeight
 and cat.mate = :mate
 order by cat.age
 
 
 This API is marked "experimental", but I would like to stabilize it fairly
 soon, so early feedback is very welcome. This is all in CVS.

Exceptions and Amazon.com

The March issue of Java Developers Journal has a great article on anti-patterns concerning exceptions (not published online yet). After reading it, I can see I need to improve my exception handling, as I'm tossing a DAOException in my database layer, and a plain ol' Exception in my services layer. Since all my services layer does is convert object types -> strings (and executing business rules), I should probably change it to throw a generic BusinessException and a ConversionException. Too bad there's no link, hopefully soon.

In other news, we stopped by Barnes and Nobles for a Starbucks today. While there, I noticed a book my sister gave me for Christmas and I said to Julie, "I should read that sucker while you're gone next week." She sheepishly admitted that she'd sold it on Amazon a few weeks ago! Since it was a gift (from my sister), and I really do want to read it, I decided to buy it. The line was long and slow, so rather than buying it there, I used my phone and bought it online from Amazon. I searched, selected, logged in and I was done. They had a great message after logging in:

Yes, it really was that easy. Your order will be shipped to your one-click address.

Fricken sweet! The Internet Rocks and it's only gonna get better...