Raible Designs

Panther coming in 14 days

I don't mind paying $129 bucks to speed up my Mac - but this image is too good to pass up.

IDEA seems dumb

I'm going to rant about my issues with IDEA here because it always gets to so much praise in blogs. I like the fact that it opens quickly on OS X. However, every other time I open it, after it spends 10-20 seconds "loading project files," then synchronized local VCS and then the dialog hangs and I can't get rid of "storing local CVS." Closing IDEA fixes the problem usually. Secondly - and this is a new one - I just created/opened a new project (Canoo's WebTest) and it can't find import java.util.Map; What the? You can't find "java" files even though I told you my JDK was in "/usr" (which it should've detected anyway). It's highly likely that I'm the dumb one, but at this very moment it seems that IDEA gets to wear the dunce cap.

An enjoyable workday

Yesterday I had a one-day contract to teach a JSP class at a company in Boulder. I got up early and drove to Boulder, where the company is located. I left early because our Internet Access has been down (no MapQuest) and I needed to figure out where the heck the company was. The strange thing was that I really, really enjoyed my drive to work. Today I enjoyed my drive as well, but not nearly as much. What I noticed was that yesterday I was more alert of my surroundings. Granted, the Flatirons are pretty spectacular (as illustrated by my mophotos). However, the difference was that I was not contemplating my day. Today, I noticed I was planning my whole day on the drive. I gotta get those WebTests written (including reading all my apps links from my menu-config.xml file) ... I need to write more tests for the JSPs and all our actions ... damn, I'm only going to get in 9 hours today - how am I gonna get 40 in by tomorrow night ... etc. Yesterday, it was just - cool, I'm going to teach a class, should be fun.

What am I trying to get at with this rambling? I'm trying to say that some jobs are more finite, and therefore more enjoyable. When I did construction work in college, it was awesome because we'd always start cleaning up a 1/2 hour before 5 o'clock. With programming, I start to say "Oh shit, I gotta get going" at 4:55, and I don't leave until 5:30. With teaching, it was an 8:30 - 4:30 gig - a nice finite day. I found this to be incredibly enjoyable - just the thought of being done with no worries at 4:30. Today, if I don't get everything done by the time I leave, I'll think about it all the way home.

Is it just me, or does being a passionate programmer kinda suck? I know there's programmers out there that are much better about this - 5:00 means 5:00 and they don't think about anything after they leave the office. I need to find a balance, a way to shut it off when I leave, and to not think about it until I get here. By the way, the courseware for the class never showed up yesterday, so it was cancelled before it started - but I had that no-anxiety feeling for most of the day. Wierd.

What's the best way to test Tag Libraries?

I know of two tag libraries that are in dire need of unit tests - the displaytag and struts-menu. Both have no tests. I've looked briefly at TagUnit, but aren't you just writing JSPs (with custom tags) to test JSPs? I'd rather have an Ant/JUnit driven solution. Also, are there HTML versions of the user guides for TagUnit (Simon ;-)? I hate PDFs.

So my question is - how do you test your tag libraries?

Monitor Connections in SQL Server

Does anyone know how to monitor the number of Connections in SQL Server? In MySQL, I use "mysqladmin processlist", but there doesn't seem to be such a utility for SQL Server. I need to make sure that my connections are getting closed properly.

Java Infested Week

This week looks to be highly Java infested for me. This is a good thing and I hope to learn a lot. Tomorrow, I'm teaching a JSP class at a local company, so I'll probably learn some tips and tricks with JSPs from the students in the class. Wednesday, the Denver Java Users Group has a presentation on JavaServer Faces. Thursday, James is coming to the Boulder JUG to talk about Effective Object Orientation. I'll be attending both. Finally, on Friday, I'm joining Julie, Abbie and rest of her family in Evansville, Indiana for Julie's Grandpa's (a.k.a. "Paw") Birthday. I'm on a late Friday night flight, and it's long, so I plan on knocking out JSP 2.0. Then again, airplanes tend to put me to sleep. Combine that with a book on technology and I may just end up getting some good rest for the party on Saturday.

It's a good time to be a Java Developer in Silicon Mountain.

Dynamic Queries with Hibernate

I have a client that wants the ability to search on all columns in all tables in their database. So far, I've been able to get all the columns, and their friendly labels by getting all the *Form.* keys in my ApplicationResources.properties file. I still need to sort them alphabetically, but that's another issue. Now I have the following UI pretty much done:

I'm happy with the UI, but I'm struggling with getting Hibernate to return my desired results. I'm able to dynamically select the table/column to search on because of values in my "tables/columns" drop-down. However, many of these tables have Id fields - for status fields, type fields, etc. (basically drop-downs). When searching, this is a pain because users are likely to search on "Active" rather than "1". Because of this, my first issue is how do I make the status field's friendly name a part of my POJO (with Hibernate)?

My 2nd issue is regarding Hibernate's Expression API. I want to be able to pass in the criteria (=, contains, <, >), propertyName and value and get my results. However, it seems that the second half of the comparison must be the same datatype as the field. This means if you're searching on "contract amount", and its a Double, I need to do a Double.valueOf(searchTerm). Basically, I'm looking for an easy way to do this:

  Criteria filter = ses.createCriteria(clazz); 
  
  // determine type of expression - I'd love to figure 
  // out a cleaner way to do this but there's only 
  // 5 possible types, so I don't mind typing the 5
  // if statements
  if (expression.equals("=")) { 
    // How do I convert these to the fields' type at run-time?
    // Sure I could do a bunch of if statements again, but it seems ugly.
    filter.add(Expression.eq(field, Double.valueOf(value))); 
  }
 
  List results = filter.list();

Any advice is appreciated - especially considering I estimated this task to take 4-5 hours and I'm going on 8.

Pictures from the Great American Beer Festival

Last weekend, I volunteered to serve up 1 oz. beers at the Great American Beer Festival. It was a great time, and I highly recommend it. I was fortunate enough to be serving beers from the Brooklyn Brewery, which won both a gold and a silver medal. Here are some pics from the event.

My Trip to Nebraska on September 20th-21st

On the Golf Course

Cletus's new house (and future wife?).

Interesting shortcut keys in Safari

I discovered these by accident tonight. By holding down the "Apple" key (or whatever the hell its called) and pressing a number in Safari - it'll open that respective bookmark. So I have vi Reference as my first bookmark, and Apple is second. Apple+1 open vi reference, Apple+2 opens apple.com. Doubt I'll use it much, but interesting to know.