Raible Designs

Struts Resume on Tomcat 4.1.18 LE

I discovered some issues with struts-resume 0.6. Thanks to Thomas Fabbricante for the tip. The first bug I found is that you need to change the following line in your database.properties file:

hibernate.connection.url = jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/struts-resume?autoReconnect=true   

to:

hibernate.connection.url = jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/resume?autoReconnect=true

As for running struts-resume on Tomcat LE, you'll first need to put mail.jar and activation.jar in $CATALINA_HOME/common/lib - or you can comment out the mail-related stuff. These files include metadata/web/struts-resume.xml (JNDI Mail Session) and web/WEB-INF/classes/log4j.properties (SMTPAppender configuration). Then it all seems to work great! Sweet - that was a lot easier than I thought it'd be. I'll release a 0.6.1 in order to update the database.properties.sample to have a valid db url.

Update: I've uploaded the files for 0.6.1, you can download them here. Alos, here's a demo and a project link for your clicking pleasure.

Java Blogs RSS Feed

I don't know if there was an upgrade or something, but it took me until today to notice that java.blogs has an rss feed for recent entries. Very cool. I'm going to be using NetNewsWire for a while to read sites - it's just faster. Another effort to improve my time management skills.

Struts Training: Week 1

I was invited to attend Basebean's Struts Training today. Vic Cekvenich was nice enough to give me a password to attend, and I agreed that I would blog about it. I also agreed to help out on the MVC Programmers mailing list. I don't know that I'll do the labs, but I am interested in doing them - especially since the examples run on Resin 3.0. So I'm sitting in right now and they're doing some introductions. More to come soon. It's about a 1 and 1/2 hour class this morning - should be fun.

The first 20 minutes have been mostly about open source and it's benefits. I'm thinking - most of the students already know this don't they? Maybe not. I guess my perspective is skewed since I've been involved in open source for so long. Before I started using it, I guess I kinda scoffed at it - so I suppose the intro is good.

The second 20 minutes has been about "why projects fail" and the importantance of requirements. I can definitely understand this - as I've been on a couple projects with a bad requirements-gathering process. So far, this class has been a little disappointing as I haven't learned anything yet. The students seem very interested in the first two topics though - so I guess it's satisfying them. I'm sure I'd be more satisfied if I'd already done the labs (the students have).

Now onto Project Management and CMM. Didja know you can get certified as a Project Manager from PMI.org. IMO, a Project Manager can single handedly make or break a project. I agree with Vic that "the best person to have certified on a project" is the PM. The PM on my current project rocks, and it's made the project soooo much easier. You can track your project's ROI at softwarereality.com.

Don't these student's have mute on their phones? I've heard kids crying and dogs barking so far ;-) No one's heard me sneeze yet - and I've done it 3 times!

Vic recommends the following:

• When starting a project, create the entire application as an HTML mockup. I agree with this - it's awesome for getting requirements solidified.
• Mockup the outputs - i.e. Reports in Excel. For reports, he recommends using iReport. After a quick review - it looks like a report designer that creates an XML file that can be fed to Jasper Reports.

NetLedger.com is a recommended UI for complicated forms. Rumored to have a free login.

Tip: When you have bad requirements, surf the web. Programming on your project will just frustrate you. My advice: contribute to an open source project - then you'll keep your skills up to par. Or, read blogs - you'll learn something there too.

Now we're learning how to setup an IDE (Eclipse) and deploy/test and example app. Looks like the sample app (webPIM) uses JSTL's Fmt tag. Cool, I've never used it, I should probably do the labs. Teaching students how to use an IDE for Struts Development is definitely the easiest way to go, but using Ant is the real-world way - right?

The next lab covers configuring Tiles and developing a sample layout. I noticed it was a big confusing for the students that the tiles definitions file is named layout.xml and the base Tiles template is named layout.jsp. I usually name my tiles definition file tiles-config.xml.

RE: A Better Way to Validate

Hmmm, Patrick seems to be doing the same thing I am - generating ActionForms from POJOs with XDoclet. I wonder if he's using my patch or if he's found another way?

Also, he asks if there's a better way to validate:

My ideal way to validate would be to add xdoclet tags right to my domain model to handle validation.

I guess I'm here to brighten your day then - this is exactly what I'm doing with struts-resume. Check it out: User.java contains @struts.validator tags that are pushed into the generated ValidatorForm via a custom struts_form.xdt (xdoclet) template. Enjoy!

No Fluff, Just Stuff - I'm In!

If I play my cards right, I'll be either (1) flying back from Florida for this conference, or (2) moving to Florida shortly afterwards.

------------------------------------------------------
Confirmation number: 338104
Name: Matt Raible

------------------------------------------------------
Rocky Mountain Software Symposium 2003: Spring Edition

Date: Friday, May 16, 2003 - Sunday, May 18, 2003

Sheraton Denver West
360 Union Blvd
Lakewood, CO  80228

Struts-Resume 0.6 Released!

After spending the last two nights burning the midnight oil, I have finished struts-resume 0.6. Not much new and exciting, but it definitely a more solid application now. Hopefully, I'll have a demo running in short order. [Project Homepage]

Ant Rocks (but you already knew that)

I have a few different side projects I'm working on right now. The first two, struts-resume and security-example are for the Wrox chapters and the third, AppFuse is the kindling I'm using to build these projects. Basically, I'm using AppFuse as a starting point for developing webapps. I think I've got most of what I want done for a baseline, so I'll be removing some struts-resume specific code from appfuse and calling it 1.0. For security-example, I'll be removing even more code.

The slick thing, and the reason for this post, is that I've been doing all my development on one project - appfuse. When I want to update struts-resume or security-example, I simply execute an ant command, and it updates whatever files have changed since I last updated. Ant figures out automagically which files have changed. I love it. I did a few updates and I'll be uploading the struts-resume 0.6 release tonight. Here's what I did to update the app from appfuse.

$ant new -Dapp.name=struts-resume -Ddb.name=resume
Buildfile: build.xml

clean:
     [echo] Cleaning build and distribution directories
   [delete] Deleting directory D:\source\appfuse\build
   [delete] Deleting directory D:\source\appfuse\dist

new:
     [echo] Creating new application named 'struts-resume'...
     [copy] Copying 17 files to D:\source\struts-resume
     [copy] Copied 1 empty directory to D:\source\struts-resume
     [copy] Copying 1 file to D:\source\struts-resume

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 27 seconds

Now all I have to do is commit it to CVS (BTW, you can get struts-resume from SourceForge CVS) and execute and dist. I could FTP to SF using Ant too I suppose (I have Erik's book sitting right here), but I'll just hope someone sends this task (or page number) to me. ;-)

Blogroll Cleanup

It's time to update my blogroll with the sites I'm actually reading now. I still click on the links on my blogroll every-so-often, but there are some that are hardly ever updated. See ya, it was fun reading when you provided regular content. ;-)

Taglibs Standard 1.0.3 Released

I've just noticed that a new version (1.0.3) of the JSTL reference implementation has been released containing some minor bug fixes. [Simon Brown]

Hmmm, no release notes eh? Makes you wonder if it's worth the upgrade/headache. I'll be in for it for quite some time with my struts-resume project. I'm using 17 different OSS packages - it'll be a maintenance nightmare to keep up. That is, until I break down and do some Maven integration.

Tivo and OS X

I think we're going to have to upgrade our Tivo. This OS X - Tivo integration looks like a good enough reason for me. Not to mention controller the shows you want to record from a web browser.