Raible Designs

RE: Reading Blogs

Well said Chris. I enjoy the personal side of blogs more than the technical side to be honest. I view the java.blogs community like a group of co-workers. I'd much rather hear about a co-workers weekend over their use of an I or Impl to name their interfaces ;-)

Give us the good stuff - talk about your families, the parties, the birthdays - we're listening... eagerly. I'm looking forward to Christmas morning with Mimosas (Orange Juice and Champagne) - a family tradition of Julie's. Her mom and sister, Stephanie and Holly, are in town for the week and festivities. Abbie's first Christmas - I'll post pictures by the end of the week. I'm heading out to do some last-minute Christmas shopping (typical guy right?) and then we're going to see the Twin Towers later this afternoon.

I guess you could say I won't get the chapter/sample app done today - maybe later this week. I've got all the writing done - 38 pages, but need a good app to go with it IMO. A good friend told me yesterday to just "get it out" - he mentioned that the last technical book he read had code that didn't even compile! It should be nice not worrying about writing this afternoon and tomorrow - first time in weeks. I feel like I've somewhat missed out on Christmas with writing and the new job. I can't wait until I get to do 50 hour weeks again!

[XDoclet] Generating StrutsForms from a POJO

I was successfully able to complete my mission last night and this morning. I guess you could say that it took me more than 2 hours as I just finished it about an hour ago. I was up until 3 and worked on it a couple of hours this morning too. It's definitely a hack as it still depends on running the <strutsform> task inside the <ejbdoclet> task. But, it doesn't require EJBs anymore, which I think is a good thing. I'll be using it in my chapter's sample app, as well as on my current project - so I think it was time well spent. Now I just have a POJO marked up with Hibernate and StrutsForm/Validator Tags, and walla - life is good. I've opened an enhancement request in XDoclet's JIRA, so you can check out what changed if you're that interested. If you want to use it, you can download the patched xdoclet-apache (43K) module.

How I fixed Ant running in Eclipse

I was able to fix my Ant problem this week. In the latest release of Eclipse (2.1 - M4), it allows you to specify an ANT_HOME, rather than the internal one. So I did that and it still didn't work. I ended up having to add tools.jar as a external jar and now everything works [screenshot]. Cool!

New Blog to Watch - Jon Lipsky

I don't really know Jon, only that he sent me an e-mail about Hibernate's Reverse Engineering Tool. Anyway, he's now blogging and better yet - he's using Roller! Don't forget - I'm biased b/c I think Roller is the best thing to come along since sliced bread. Speaking of the RET, from the documentation, it doesn't even look like it exists - there's no instructions on how to run it??

Man, I wish someone would alter Middlegen to generate Hibernate-tagged classes. Erik Hatcher's been bugging me to do it - any volunteers?

iTerm, StrutsForm Generation and the Work Life

I found iTerm via a quick scan of posts on java.blogs. Very cool - I'll have to download it tonight.

I'm still working like a banshee as you might be able to tell from my lack of posting. I was up until 4 in the morning on Sunday trying to complete my struts-resume app for my Wrox Chapter (still not done). I've backed off from my attempts at generating Struts Forms and Hibernate classes from the same POJO. It just doesn't seem likes it's worth the effort. I'd still like to generate the initial stubs for these classes form a database, but I've come to realize that it's not practical to have these classes generated each time. It's just too much of a nightmare to mix and match what goes to Struts and what goes to a Hibernate class. I am going to give it one last college try though. I hope to use a POJO with XDoclet tags, and then modify the XDoclet code for StrutsForms so they can be produced from a POJO. Of course, if I were smart, I'd just finish the damn application the hard way and be done by tonight. Wrox would be much happier I'm sure. I'll try for 2 hours and if I can't get it, I'm done. I think that I'll end up generating the initial struts form and then stuffing it into the source tree for later manipulation. I've found that it's nice to add getter/setters to the form (that never make it to the backend), so this is probably the best way.

Things at the office are going well. I spent most of the day installing Tomcat, MySQL, VeryQuickWiki and Scarab on a Sun box. It was fun doing the ol' command line thing all day and OS X makes it a real pleasure to interact with Unix systems. Transmit2 makes it super easy to transfer files and even allows you to edit with BBEdit. It's worth the purchase for sure at $25.

I've decided (once again) that OS X is not the development environment for me. Eclipse is too flaky (I'm running 2.1 M4) and takes forever to do anything. Ant runs slow as hell, and Tomcat does too. I'm also addicted to Windows Exploder and OS X's Finder does nothing for me. So I told my boss that they were losing money if I didn't get a faster box, and Windows would probably be best. They said it didn't look good, so I volunteered to bring in my own machine (Dell 8100 P1.5, 768 MB RAM) if they could get me a new hard drive. By getting a hard drive, I don't have to blow out my Red Hat 8.0 installation and I can transfer the hard drive to the new machine when they finally get me one. So they found a 20 Gig hard drive and I'm building the machine as I hammer out struts-resume.

w.blogger 3.0 has titles!

I just downloaded the 3.0 version of w.bloggar - and it's got title support now! Very cool, maybe I can start posting to this site again without every looking at it. Let's hope this works!

After posting and adding title - I guess that doesn't work as nicely as I'd hoped. There is a title box and even a category drop-down, but I guess they don't work with Roller. Not yet anyway ;-)

Ant's jspc task - doesn't work on Tomcat 4.1.18

I'm trying to use Ant's JSPC task to pre-compile my JSPs. I've used Erik Hatcher's example from Java Development with Ant. It works great when using a 4.0.x version of Tomcat, and the following jasper.classpath:

<path id="jasper.classpath">
    <fileset dir="${tomcat.home}/lib">
        <include name="jasper-*.jar"/>
    </fileset>
    <fileset dir="${tomcat.home}/common/lib">
        <include name="servlet.jar"/>
    </fileset>
</path>

However, it doesn't work on Tomcat 4.1.17. I had to change the jasper.classpath to find the appropriate jars (they're in different directories now), plus I had to include ant.jar or I got java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/tools/ant/AntClassLoader. Where everything works on the older Tomcat version, now it fails - what gives?

compile-jsp:
     [jspc] Compiling 8 source filesD:\source\appfuse\build\jspc\java
  [jasperc] 2002-12-21 11:15:51 - uriRoot implicitly set to 
            "D:\Tools\tomcat-4.1.17\webapps\appfuse"
  [jasperc] error:/common/footer.jsp(0,0) null
  [jasperc] 2002-12-21 11:15:53 - ERROR-the file '\common\footer.jsp' 
            generated the following general exception: org.apache.jasper.JasperException: 
            /common/footer.jsp(0,0) null

JavaBlogs Outage

It's no fun to work all day on a Saturday. It's even less fun when java.blogs is out of commission. I did a little research and while atlassian.com is still up, most of the JIRA instances for open source projects (i.e. Roller, XDoclet) is down. It appears (via ping-analysis) that the OSS JIRA instances are hosted on the same server as java.blogs. Since I'm getting a ping reply from this server, I'm assuming the servlet container is down and everyone in AUS is partying it up all weekend. I hope it's fixed when they get back to the office on Monday. That's Sunday for us right?

Connecting a Mac to M$ Exchange

I have both Entourage and Mail on my machine. Has anyone connected successfully to an Exchange server with either of these products? I can connect successfully using Entourage and treating it as an IMAP server, but it wants an SMTP server to send mail, and they don't have one of these at work. Any ideas?

Chimera 0.6 - Nighly Build download Recommended

Not recommended by me (as I haven't done it yet), but by the project itself. It doesn't look like they've fixed the most needed feature for me. The "view selected text" feature that Mozilla has. My default browser has changed from Chimera to Mozilla on the Mac because of this feature. Of course, this feature is only needed when I'm blogging a lot and since that has been sporadic lately, I might switch back to Chimera.

I found out at work yesterday that there's a fat chance of getting a better desktop. So my Powerbook has now become my in-the-office development environment. I don't mind, I just wish BBEdit had a Homesite-like Explorer window. Of course, since there is no Explorer and Finder sucks, this might be wishful thinking. Also, I'd love for a CVS app like TortoiseCVS for the Mac - sure makes things easier. I'm a GUI-guy, can you tell ;)

In an effort to satisfy my Windows-app-cravings, I just downloaded the Virtual PC 6 upgrade [screenshot]. Version 5 sucked as it was soooo slow. And I really had no need for it, as I could use Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection client to connect to my Windows machine. Now that I'm in the office, this is no longer an option. I hope this is faster than the 700Mhz/128MB machine at work!