Raible Designs

Struts 1.1 Final ~ might be released on Sunday

According to the struts-user mailing list, the Struts Dev Team is going to try and release 1.1 Final this weekend! Sweet!

From: Ted Husted
Subject: Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] Struts 1.1 Release Candidate 2 released
Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2003 03:30:47 -0700 
-------------------------------------

Just a note on the RC2 status.

Martin posted the release vote for FileUpload on Monday, and there
are already 3 binding +1s. <yeah!/>

We've one outstanding Bugzilla ticket against RC2, which we should 
be able to either resolve or postpone. Given the imminent release 
of FU 1.0, I plan to post the Struts 1.1 Final Release vote 
tomorrow, so that we can roll it out on June 29. <double-yeah!/>

-Ted.

This doesn't mean much to me since the current RC2 release works fine for me (if I didn't, I'd use a nightly). However, it's cool that this is finally being released. It's too bad it took so long - such is the nature of open source - I probably won't release struts-resume 1.0 until 2004. And who knows when Roller 1.0 will be released...

Tomcat's Ant Tasks - why they don't work for me

I've written up a howto for implementing [Tomcat's Ant Tasks|TomcatAntTasks] and why they don't work for me. I've been requested by a few users to use them vs. my current <copy> method, but I don't see why I should. Please read the wiki page and help me out if you can.

Free hibernate.org!

The Hibernate team is looking for $1888 to buy hibernate.org from a commercial domain hoster.

The goal of this action is not to get us rich (and others poor ;), but only to buy the domain. To give you an impression on how much money is needed: Hibernate is downloaded 500 times every day. The Hibernate website has more than 15.000 pageviews and 1.500 visits each day. If we estimate that every 10th person downloading Hibernate donates a dollar, we can free this domain in a little more than one month!

I'll probably donate. While we're at it, is anyone willing to help us Roller developers buy roller.com for $15,000? ;-) This is down from $20,000 when I originally inquired. No word on how much for roller.org.

What is gzip compression?

I did a bit of research today and have some links for you concerning gzip-compression and why you should be using it on your server. First of all, DevArticles has some good resources on compressing web output for Apache 1.3.x (using mod_gzip) and Apache 2.0.x (using mod_deflate).

In a WebRef article, HTTP Compression Speeds up the Web, I found that any browser that supports HTTP 1.1 also supports web compression.

Is Compression Built into the Browser?

Yes. Most newer browsers since 1998/1999 have been equipped to support the HTTP 1.1 standard known as "content-encoding." (although content encoding was included in the HTTP 1.0 spec: RFC 1945). Essentially the browser indicates to the server that it can accept "content encoding" and if the server is capable it will then compress the data and transmit it. The browser decompresses it and then renders the page.

Good stuff to know.

Roller and GZIP Compression

Roller has a couple of gzip compression filters built into its codebase thanks to Lance. I haven't been using them because, according to Dave, they didn't work on Tomcat. I'm not one to doubt Dave, so I'm guessing he was running on an old version of Tomcat when this happened - because I was able to get them running lickedly split today! All I had to do was uncomment the filter mappings for the PageGzipFilter and the RssGzipFilter and voila - you're getting gzipped content (if your browser supports it). I've verified it's working using Firebird's Live HTTP Headers extension (thanks for the tip Lance). Cool beans - now help me name this new theme before I commit it. Here's some ideas I've come up with:

• Minimal
• Sunsets
• LowB (for Low Bandwidth)
• Simplicity

All suggestions are welcome.

New Apple Stuff

The new G5's are cool - and I'm almost inspired to buy one. However, I read the following comment and I think it's better to wait:

IBM is working on next generation "that will knock your socks off" [vowe dot net]

iChat AV looks very cool - especially if I can use any DV camera (esp. since I already have one). Of course, I can already see the problem with this software - you'll have to have a Mac on the other end - right?! That sucks, there's no way my PC-loving family is going to buy a super-spendy Mac (and I don't blame them).

Getting back on the road to XHMTL compliance

This site has failed to validate for many moons now. I think ever since I added the twisty comments. So did some work today to make the twisty comments XHTML-compliant. I almost got there. The only problem I experienced was with the <iframe> that's used to submit the comment. Basically, if I want to be XHTML 1.0 Strict, I need to create the iframe on the fly (with JavaScript), as well as set the form's target to this frame. It all works fine and dandy in Mozilla, but I can't get IE to let me set an "onload" property for the iframe. It just doesn't work. So I've reverted to XHTML 1.0 Transitional and I've stuck the iframe in the page, allowing me to set the onload property manually. Other changes I made to facilitate better compliance (this is mainly so I can fix it in Roller later).

• Replaced "insertionid" attributes in weblog.vm with "id" attributes and adjusted JavaScript in comments.js accordingly.
• Various small fixes to themes/x2/styles/comments.css.
• Edited my "_day" template to end the </p> before the #showCommentsDiv.
• Moved <a> tags inside of the <h1> tags.

So my remaining problems are the onload on the iframe and the fact that the left arrow doesn't show up in IE next to the comments div. Oh well, I can live with one measly validation error.

RE: Using Struts' Declared Exceptions

I modified the ActionExceptionHandler I reported on earlier. Now it uses the already built-in functionality of the Struts' ExceptionHandler and also only reports messages that are distinct. That is, it checks the next exception's message to see if the current message is a duplicate. Probably best to let the code speak for itself.

I'm not expecting anyone to care - I just want to make sure the code I'm using is accurately reflected here (rather than the initial, untested prototype).

[ANNOUNCE] Tomcat 5.0.3 Alpha released

From the tomcat-user mailing list:

Tomcat 5.0.3 Alpha is now available for testing.

Please refer to the changelog included in the release for the list of changes. [Download]

I've found that this release is not worth your time. It's even worse than 5.0.2. For details, check out my Tomcat 5 upgrade page.

RE: WWDC Keynote

Keep an eye on the WWDC Quicktime Keynote Stream page later this afternoon. [Matt Croydon]

Let's hope they announce 2 GHz G5s. I was thinking that if they gave them to us cheap, I might be willing to combine my 2 1.5 GHz Dells into dual-processing Linux beast - and just go for a dual processor G5 as my new desktop machine...