Raible Designs

Why I like Tomcat 5.5.12 better than Tomcat 5.5.15

Here's what happens with Tomcat 5.5.15:

alotta:~/dev/appfuse mraible$ export CATALINA_HOME=$TOOLS_HOME/apache-tomcat-5.5.15
alotta:~/dev/appfuse mraible$ ant deploy;tstart
Buildfile: build.xml

...

deploy:
    [unwar] Expanding: /Users/mraible/Work/appfuse/dist/webapps/appfuse.war into
 /opt/dev/tools/apache-tomcat-5.5.15/webapps/appfuse

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 3 seconds
Using CATALINA_BASE:   /opt/dev/tools/apache-tomcat-5.5.15
Using CATALINA_HOME:   /opt/dev/tools/apache-tomcat-5.5.15
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: /opt/dev/tools/apache-tomcat-5.5.15/temp
Using JRE_HOME:       /Library/Java/Home
alotta:~/dev/appfuse mraible$ ant reload
Buildfile: build.xml

reload:
   [reload] FAIL - Encountered exception java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: 
org/apache/log4j/spi/VectorWriter

BUILD FAILED
/Users/mraible/Work/appfuse/build.xml:1063: FAIL - Encountered exception 
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/log4j/spi/VectorWriter

Total time: 1 second
alotta:~/dev/appfuse mraible$ 

Here's what happens with Tomcat 5.5.12:

alotta:~/dev/appfuse mraible$ export CATALINA_HOME=$TOOLS_HOME/apache-tomcat-5.5.12
alotta:~/dev/appfuse mraible$ ant deploy;tstart

...

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 4 seconds
Using CATALINA_BASE:   /opt/dev/tools/apache-tomcat-5.5.12
Using CATALINA_HOME:   /opt/dev/tools/apache-tomcat-5.5.12
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: /opt/dev/tools/apache-tomcat-5.5.12/temp
Using JRE_HOME:       /Library/Java/Home
alotta:~/dev/appfuse mraible$ ant reload
Buildfile: build.xml

reload:
   [reload] OK - Reloaded application at context path /appfuse

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 3 seconds
alotta:~/dev/appfuse mraible$ 

Looks like I'll be sticking with 5.5.12 for the foreseeable future.

Canoo WebTest Firefox Plugin

Canoo WebTest now has a Firefox plugin, similar to Selenium IDE. I gave it a 2-minute test using Deer Park (a.k.a. Firefox) on my MacBook Pro. Thumbs down, not intuitive enough. Of course, if it had a video like Selenium's video, it might be easier to figure out.

Nice Weather

Yesterday was 70°F, today is going to be even nicer. You couldn't ask for nicer weather for the ol' bike commute.

Roller on Geronimo

Jeff has posted a nice tutorial showing how to run Roller on Geronimo. Note that he's using a HEAD build of Geronimo, so you might have to build Geronimo yourself or wait for the next release. I've heard rumors the next release will ship with a Web-only version (i.e. Tomcat and JMS), so that might be a good fit for Roller. As for pre-compiling JSPs, that's on my to do list.

There's been a few "how to run Roller (or AppFuse)" on X server lately. IMO, the best howto is no howto - it just works. I recently tried AppFuse 1.9 on JOnAS and it ran w/o any changes. Since it uses a Spring-managed connection pool and doesn't require any server configuration, this is how things should work. I've had similar results with AppFuse on Jetty and JBoss (and Tomcat of course).

MacBook Pro and Wireless

The only major issue I've had so far with my MacBook Pro is wireless connectivity. It works fine at my office, works great at Starbucks, but not at home. My router is a Netgear WGT624.

The Netgear works flawlessly with my Windows XP Desktop (HP Pavilion 1250n) and PowerBook G4. It works with no password, 40-bit WEP and 128-bit WEP. But not with the MacBook Pro. Is there something special I have to set on my router for it to work with the MacBook Pro?

I posted this question on the Apple Discussion forums yesterday (which appear to be powered by Jive Forums). The response? Crickets. Oh well, I think I'll just leave my MacBook at the office and ignore this issue for now.

Update: Looks like Apple is aware of many issues with the MacBook Pro. Hat tip to Jeff for the article.

OpenLaszlo Tutorial and AppFuse with DWR

A few web development nuggets:

• Web clients fatten up with OpenLaszlo - good article about using OpenLaszlo on developerWorks.
• AJAX using DWR in AppFuse - a tutorial showing how to use DWR in AppFuse, written by Josip Mihelko. Please try it out and let us know how we can improve it.

I also noticed a recently updated howto on the AppFuse wiki: Spring Rich Client with AppFuse by Radim Burget. The amount of documentation being produced by the AppFuse community is truly awesome. Thanks everyone!

Update: XFire is crazy fast. If you like, you can see for yourself in AppFuse using OpenLaszlo as a client. Hopefully we can include XFire in a coming release, along with Maven 2 integration.

Smashed Fingers

Today we took the kids to Dave & Buster's for lunch. They're not quite old enough, but they do good. Abbie and I race cars and she can't even touch the gas. After a few seconds of waiting, her car takes off and she's driving - hooting and hollering the whole time. Jack isn't quite tall enough - he can peer over the edge and see a bunch of coins in the machine - but has no idea what it does. He does know that the machine takes coins - and loves putting them in. When he won 100+ tickets today, he was ecstatic - pulling the tickets out and giggling to himself the whole time.

I carried both kids to the car on the way out. We have a Honda Odyssey mini-van (they might be cheesy, but they make awesome cars - spoken like a true dad, eh?). Holly opened the door with the remote. It stopped after opening a few inches - and I reached to open it manually. As soon as I got my fingers around the door, it shut. Youch! I screamed like a little girl. After a few seconds, Holly was smart enough to open the front door and I pulled them out. No dropped kids, which was pretty impressive. It's been a couple hours since then. It was only two fingers, but one is still numb. The good news is I'm still able to type - but they're still throbbing.

Denver Tech Meetup on March 9th

Stephen O'Grady:

Ok, I know I dragged this out far too long - mostly due to travel concerns - but let's just pick a date and run with it. So the date for the next Denver Tech Meetup is now officially March 9th.
...
Venue will be - barring unforeseen circumstances - the same as last time, the Wazee Supper Club. It's easy to get to, close to some of the downtown offices, and most importantly, is my favorite.

If you don't know what the Tech Meetup is all about, I like to describe it as a User Group meeting without the User Group; there's no common affiliation other than we're all in tech (and even that rule can be bent , and no technical meetings - just the after-meeting beers/cocktails (and maybe food).

This meeting was a lot of fun last time. Matt Filios and I enjoyed talking to guys doing PHP, Rails and even some developers from the OpenSolaris project. I highly recommend attending.

MacBook Pro: Kicking ass and taking names

I received my MacBook Pro this morning, and I've spent the day setting it up, doing some development and running some performance comparisons. The setup was easy: I just booted my PowerBook into Firewire mode and copied over all the files I needed. Everything works for the most part. I did have some issues with IDEA and Eclipse, but got both working after doing a few try and try-again shenanigans. Eclipse was crashing when I'd browse to set my workspace; typing it in manually fixed the problem. IDEA hung the first time I opened it; killing it and restarting fixed the problem.

As far as performance, this thing fricken' rocks! Safari launches in under a second and you're browsing before the dock icons hits the top of its first bounce. Firefox is a different story (likely b/c it hasn't been compiled for x86) - it takes 10 seconds to launch. The good news is once it's up, there doesn't seem to be any performance issues. Safari is amazing though - the speed does wonders for GMail and it actually feels like a desktop application.

When I mentioned yesterday that I was going to compare the MacBook to my desktop, Rob Williams said it wasn't a fair comparison. I agree - but I really wanted this machine to be the best machine I could possibly buy. With my (very unofficial) performance tests, it appears like it is. It's faster than my dual-core AMD 64 desktop machine that has 3 GB of RAM. Now, I have had the desktop for a couple months, so it's possible I'm suffering from OS Rot, but still - it's impressive it keeps up. Here are the numbers from my Performance Comparisons page:

For the tests below, I used Java version "1.5.0_06" and had the following variables set: JAVA_OPTS=Xms256M -Xmx384M, $ANT_OPTS=-Xmx256m. I used the CVS version of AppFuse (1.9.1-dev).

A couple of interesting things to note:

• When I first got my desktop, it's numbers were 00:14 for "ant clean package-web" and 01:29 for "ant setup test-all". The MacBook Pro? 00:12 and 01:28. The Windows box had 1 GB of RAM when I ran those tests, but no matter how I tweaked the memory settings once I put 3 GB of RAM in, I've never gotten better numbers.
• My PowerBook has been dog slow for several months now. When looking up the OS X version on it - I noticed it lists the memory as 512 MB. WTF?! I've had 1 GB in it every since I first bought it! What happened? Did half my RAM go bad or did someone steal half of it during a repair? Oh well, at least I now know the reason it was so damn slow.

Conclusion: The MacBook Pro is one of the best machines you can buy (laptop or desktop) for Java development. As for the battery life? I'm still doing the "calibration", so I'm not quite sure. Nor do I care - I plan on having this thing hooked up to my 20" cinema display that Virtuas was kind enough to get for me. The display combined with a mouse, keyboard and iCurve is a very nice setup.

Update: I pulled out the memory from my PowerBook and put it back in. Upon reboot, it resulted in the correct (1 GB) memory setting. The numbers above appear to be accurate regardless. I ran some tests again and times were actually slower (maybe because I'm on battery power).

Dear Elena

James Duncan Davidson:

Daniel Steinberg has bravely started writing about his daughter, Elena, after she died of bacterial meningitis.

I've known Daniel for a couple of years now, through conferences and his writings at java.net. Reading his opening entry "Dear Elena" is a very emotional experience. As a parent, I can't imagine what I would do in the same situation.