Matt RaibleMatt Raible is a writer with a passion for software. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

The Angular Mini-Book The Angular Mini-Book is a guide to getting started with Angular. You'll learn how to develop a bare-bones application, test it, and deploy it. Then you'll move on to adding Bootstrap, Angular Material, continuous integration, and authentication.

Spring Boot is a popular framework for building REST APIs. You'll learn how to integrate Angular with Spring Boot and use security best practices like HTTPS and a content security policy.

For book updates, follow @angular_book on Twitter.

The JHipster Mini-Book The JHipster Mini-Book is a guide to getting started with hip technologies today: Angular, Bootstrap, and Spring Boot. All of these frameworks are wrapped up in an easy-to-use project called JHipster.

This book shows you how to build an app with JHipster, and guides you through the plethora of tools, techniques and options you can use. Furthermore, it explains the UI and API building blocks so you understand the underpinnings of your great application.

For book updates, follow @jhipster-book on Twitter.

10+ YEARS


Over 10 years ago, I wrote my first blog post. Since then, I've authored books, had kids, traveled the world, found Trish and blogged about it all.

How To: Configure Log4j to notify you of errors

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I was interested in using Log4j's SMTPAppender to e-mail me messages when errors occured in my webapp. I discovered how easy it is a couple of days ago. Here's how to configure it.

1. Add mail to the log4j.rootCategory in log4j.properties: log4j.rootCategory=INFO, stdout, mail
2. Add the following configuration settings to log4j.properties:

# Configuration for receiving e-mails when ERROR messages occur.
log4j.appender.mail=org.apache.log4j.net.SMTPAppender
log4j.appender.mail.To=@ERROR-MAILTO@
log4j.appender.mail.From=@ERROR-MAILFROM@
log4j.appender.mail.SMTPHost=@ERROR-MAILHOST@
log4j.appender.mail.Threshold=ERROR
log4j.appender.mail.BufferSize=1
log4j.appender.mail.Subject=CCT Application Error

log4j.appender.mail.layout=org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout
log4j.appender.mail.layout.ConversionPattern=%p [%t] %C{1}.%M(%L) | %m%n

One question I have is that the ConversionPattern is kinda funky - where the line breaks don't seem to be carried into the e-mail (from exception.printStackTrace()). Any suggestions for a better configuration are appreciated. The To, From, and SMTPHost are all replaced with values from Ant during the build process.

Posted in Java at Jan 30 2003, 06:25:43 AM MST 5 Comments

Cool Log Analyzer: AWStats

Both Jeff and Anthony provide us with a tip to look at AWStats.

AWStats is a short for Advanced Web Statistics. It's a free tool that generates advanced web (but also ftp or mail) server access statistics graphically. This log analyzer works as a CGI or from command line and shows you all possible information your log contains, in few graphical web pages.

This package looks very cool - and it's free, Free, FREE! I wonder if I can get my ISP to replace my existing stats software with this one.

Posted in Roller at Jan 29 2003, 10:31:12 PM MST 1 Comment

The History of JSP

Erik tipped me off that the JSP 2.0 Proposed Final Draft 2 was released. Too bad they don't show a diff of what changed between Draft 1 and Draft 2, or do they? Let me know if you know of such a feature. I did, however, find a little history on Java Server Pages that might be of interest. This excerpt below is from the PDF.

Historical Note

The following individuals were pioneers who did ground-breaking work on the Java platform areas related to this specification. James Gosling’s work on a Web Server in Java in 1994/1995 became the foundation for servlets. A larger project emerged in 1996 with Pavani Diwanji as lead engineer and with many other key members listed below. From this project came Sun’s Java Web Server product.

Things started to move quickly in 1999. The servlet expert group, with James Davidson as lead, delivered the Servlet 2.1 specification in January and the Servlet 2.2 specification in December, while the JSP group, with Larry Cable and Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart as leads, delivered JSP 1.0 in June and JSP 1.1 in December.

The year 2000 saw a lot of activity, with many implementations of containers, tools, books, and training that target JSP 1.1, Servlet 2.2, and the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition. Tag libraries were an area of intense development, as were varying approaches to organizing all these features together. The adoption of JSP technology has continued in the year 2001, with many talks at the "Web, Services and beyond" track at JavaOne being dedicated to the technology.

The JSP 1.2 specification went final in 2001. JSP 1.2 provided a number of fine-tunings of the spec. It also added the ability for validating JSP pages through the XML views of a JSP page. JSP 1.2 also introduced a normative XML syntax for JSP pages, but its adoption was handicaped by several specification shortcomings.

JSP 2.0 is a major revision of the JSP language. Key new features include a simple Expression Language, tag files, substantial simplifications for writing tag handlers in Java and the notion of JSP fragments. JSP 2.0 also includes a revision of the XML syntax that addresses most of the problems in JSP 1.2. Tracking the industry in a printed document is at best difficult; the industry pages at the web site at http://java.sun.com/products/jsp do a better job.

Posted in Java at Jan 29 2003, 10:21:18 PM MST Add a Comment

Good Prices Galore: T68i and Apples 23" Cinema Display

T68i I found a tip from Gizmodo today that the T68i from Sony Ericsson (I have this phone and love it) is now FREE (with service activation) at Amazon.com.

I also did a bit of surfing and discovered that Apple's 23-inch Cinema Display is now only $1999! Still a little rich for my blood, I'll wait until it hits $1200 this fall.

Posted in General at Jan 28 2003, 08:53:59 PM MST Add a Comment

[ANNOUNCE] Opera 7 Released!

It appears that Opera 7 Final was quitely released today. There's only a Windows version at this point and I can't seem to download it. I wonder if this is b/c everyone is rushing to download it (never to use it again), or if the Internet is once again amiss thanks to SQL Server and lazy Admins. For once, I'm proud to be upgrade happy.

Posted in The Web at Jan 28 2003, 08:44:55 PM MST Add a Comment

[ANNOUCEMENT] Commons Betwixt 1.0 Alpha 1 released

I don't use Betwixt now, but Roller does, and I plan to when I create my next webapp Configuration object. So, I'm interested and felt like enlightening you with some possibly useful information. ;-)

The Commons Team is pleased to announce the release of Jakarta Commons Betwixt 1.0 Alpha 1 from the Apache Software Foundation. Betwixt maps beans to XML and back again in a flexible, configurable way using reflection.

This is the first release of betwixt. For more details, see the release notes included in the distributions.

Download: Binary and Source

Posted in Java at Jan 28 2003, 04:34:55 PM MST Add a Comment

Enhancing the build process with CruiseControl and Maven

Now that we've passed the first milestone on my project, we're getting into "What's Next." I'm going to propose that we use Maven and CruiseControl to create a tighter continuous integration and testing process. I hope to continue to use our current Ant build.xml, just re-arrange some jars and such for Maven. Think it'll work? I'd love to hear any experiences or helpful hints with either of these tools. I have a start on Maven, and I think I'll be fine getting started with it, but I've never used CruiseControl. Luckily, I have Java Development with Ant on my desk to help me out.

Posted in Java at Jan 28 2003, 08:57:54 AM MST 3 Comments

Pictures from Florida

We certainly had a great time this weekend in West Palm Beach (Florida). We saw a bunch of Julie's high school friends, and also had lots of fun hanging out with Grammy. The sign below made me laugh - I hope it has the same effect on you. Click on it for more pictures.

Funny Sign

Posted in Java at Jan 27 2003, 10:58:04 PM MST Add a Comment

Back From Florida

We all survived the Florida trip and we arrived home safely a couple of hours ago. Abbie was awesome on the plane(s) and only cried when she was hungry. I'll post pictures soon. Also, it was cool to find that there was FREE wireless Internet access at the Fort Lauderdale airport. That's where I discovered this site was down, and Keith fixed it over the course of the day. It turned out to be related to the Tomcat/MySQL Connection - which was preventing the AJP Apache/Tomcat connector from starting. Restarting MySQL fixed the problem.

BTW, if you're flying Delta on your next trip - didja know you can check-in online 6 hours before your flight? You just print out your boarding pass and show it at the gate. Very cool in my book.

Posted in General at Jan 27 2003, 08:00:40 PM MST Add a Comment

Blogging from the Airport

I'm at the Dallas/Forth Worth airport right now, coming to you live courtesy of Wayport ($6.95/day) and Mini-Me. I haven't been to the airport in 6 months and I can tell - some cool things have happened.

  • Delta allowed me to check-in in under a minute using the e-Ticket checkin with my credit card. It was the easiest airport checkin I've ever had, which was very cool.
  • Everyone at DIA discovered the security shortcut through Terminal A. It now has a line longer than the regular security gates.
  • WI-FI at the airports. They had it last time I tried at DIA (March 2002), but you couldn't connect. You just got a logon screen with no way to pay-for-access. In Denver, it was $10/24 hours - in Dallas it's $3 cheaper.

So this post cost me $7 - hope you enjoy!

Posted in General at Jan 24 2003, 11:34:34 AM MST Add a Comment