Raible Designs

Now Running Tomcat 4.1.17

I upgraded this site to use Tomcat 4.1.17 in about 10 minute tonight. All I had to do was change my server.xml to use the proper ports for my ISP, and copy the MySQL JDBC driver to $CATALINA_HOME/common/lib. Nice and easy - short and sweet. My kinda software - "it just works."

Later: Tomcat seems to be running just fine, but I'm getting the following error in catalina.out. It doesn't seem to affect anything, so I'm not too worried. When running on Tomcat 4.0.6, I kept getting a ClassNotFound error for an hsql jdbc driver, and everything ran fine. I never even used or refered to the hsql driver was the wierd part. The error has been there since my very first post on August 1st.

17-Dec-2002 10:14:40 PM org.apache.jk.common.ChannelSocket processConnection
INFO: server has been restarted or reset this connection
17-Dec-2002 10:14:51 PM org.apache.jk.server.JkCoyoteHandler action
INFO: RESET

Jakarta's POI

I went to the kick-off party for my project tonight - too bad no one I'll be working with showed up! Oh well, everyone else that was there was very cool. Margaritas and nachos is always fun. I finally met the recruiter I've been working on the phone - and she's even cooler than she sounded on the phone. Apparently, there was a requirements meeting for the project on Monday. Doh! That would've probably been a good meeting to attend.

I heard that the hardest requirement will be parsing/reading Excel files, on a Unix box. I think the ol' POI project can come to the rescue for us.

The POI project consists of APIs for manipulating various file formats based upon Microsoft's OLE 2 Compound Document format using pure Java.

OLE 2 Compound Document Format based files include most Microsoft Office files such as XLS and DOC.

You just gotta love open source!

Why do you blog?

I received the e-mail below from Andy Katz (no need to broadcast his e-mail) this afternoon. Messages like this make blogging worthwhile and the world a better place in general.

Date: Tue Dec 17, 2002  12:10:11 PM America/Denver
Subject: thanks for the great site ...

hello matt,

i just wanted to drop you a quick note to let you know how much 
valuable and interesting information i find on your website 
every day!

thanks so much for taking the time to put it all together.  as 
you know, it's often difficult trying to stay on top of all the 
latest software and tools.  you make it that much easier as well 
as providing unbaised feedback and commentary on all of the above.

i look forward to visiting your site every morning.

AWESOME! I'm glad I could help and I'm even more pumped that you took the time to send me this e-mail. Thanks Andy, much appreciated. I feel the same way about reading Dave and Russell's sites - good stuff.

Tomcat Clustering with JavaGroups

Need clustering for Tomcat? Check out the tomcat-javagroups project at SourceForge.

This project consists of a custom Tomcat 4 Manager class which enables session replication across Tomcat 4 instances using JavaGroups as the communication mechanism.

Eclipse Plug-ins for Struts and DAO Generation

I ran across STRECL.COM today via the struts-user mailing list.

Just in time to get some coverage in my Struts chapter - that is, if it's any good ;-)

[ANNOUNCE] Tomcat 4.1.17 Released!

As predicted... (man are they quick!).

The Tomcat Team announces the immediate availability of Apache Tomcat 4.1.17 Stable. Tomcat 4.1.17 includes many bugfixes and performance tweaks over Tomcat 4.1.12. Please see the release notes for a complete list of the changes. [Download]

Important note: When upgrading from another Tomcat 4.x release, the Tomcat work directory must be cleared.

Watching TV and Blogging

I have the opposite problem that Jeff has. He says he can't watch TV and blog as he never gets any blogging done. I can't watch TV and blog as I never get any TV watching done. Then again, I have Tivo so I can always rewind. But it is a pain the butt when I settle down to watch some football and I miss the whole game!

But I grew up without TV, so I actually don't like the stuff and I'm one of those parents who fear for their kids TV-watching habits. Julie, on the other hand, is a TV addict and loves the stuff. Should be an interesting compromise to raise Abbie (+1 in a year or two) with our opposite views on the boob tube.

Tomcat 4.1.17 Stable

From watching the tomcat-dev mailing list, I'd expect a Tomcat 4.1.17 release either today or tomorrow. The website files have been updated in CVS to indicate this.

JK 1.2.2 Released

Since I 've modified a couple of articles to detail installing Apache and Tomcat, and I seem to get a lot of hits on this site from it - I'd better tell you about the latest release of the Apache/Tomcat connector. From my Inbox this morning:

JK 1.2.2 maintenance release is available. Changes with JK 1.2.2:

• tomcat_trend.pl updated script to support changed logging of aborted requests
• jk set correctly the content-type in Apache 2.0, making it ready to works with mod_deflate and AddOutputFilterByType
• jk will check result of get_endpoint and handle a failure. This call can fail if the allocation for the endpoint fails because of low memory conditions causing a dereference of NULL when we try and access the endpoint

Sources, Linux (flat/rpms) and iSeries binaries are already available, Windows, Solaris, MacOS X binaries will be released soon.

iSeries Note: Previous JK binaries for iSeries (AS/400) were built without TERASPACE support nor multi-threading support code and should be considered incorrect. Production sites should upgrade to this version.

Binaries Providers: We're looking for binaries contributors for AIX and FreeBSD (Apache 1.3 (w/wo SSL) and Apache 2.0.42 or higher).

Bloody Noses and Struts Chapter Progress

I've gotten three bloody noses in the last 36 hours - and I don't seem to recall ever having them before in my life! Yikes - is the stress getting to me?! Oh well, I'm sure I'll be fine. I read on a website today that bloody noses are way over-emphasized and they aren't a big deal at all.

I'm at 22 pages on the Struts chapter now, doing Exceptions and how Struts lets you declare exceptions in your struts-config.xml -- pretty cool stuff. The bad part is that I've never used them before, so it's kinda tough to write about them - at least in the context of Struts. I tried to use Strut's ApplicationException (now renamed ModuleException) last summer on a client's project - and it was too buggy to use. Now it seems to to work as I originally expected it to, and it's pretty sweet. I do feel like I'm building an application to show functionality though, rather than developing an application to fulfill some requirements, which is unfortunate. I'd rather build an application that employs KISS, and shows the easy way to do things. It's like using design patterns because your manager thinks they're a good idea, but you could get the project done in half the time without them. Sure, your app might not be extendable in the future, but if it doesn't live past 3 months, what's the point?! Of course, I think using the Validator and Tiles is easy, and many developers think that's the complicated part. If my learning curve was up to snuff, Exception and Modules (a.k.a sub-applications) would be easy. Soon they will be, though I still may never use them.

Tomorrow is my last day (for a while) as a full-time employee of Raible Designs. I've certainly enjoyed the last year, but I've missed the office comradery and face-to-face interaction. It'll be good to get back into an office, but I'm sure I'll miss coding in my living room within a week, and wish I was back here.

I'm going to get my mugshot tomorrow for the Wrox book - I've convinced Abbie and Julie to go with me so we can get some good family photos - should be fun. After that, I'm going to fill out the paperwork - W2's - for the new gig, and then off to a project kick-off party! Sounds like my kind of project already!! It's got a good name too - Project Fiji. One of the things I'm looking forward to is implementing Struts and Hibernate (if they'll let me) using XDoclet. I've done it in my sample project and AppFuse (expect a new release in a week), but it'll be awesome to cut our development time in half right away! Especially when the first deliverable is due January 15th!

If I'm good (and I can figure it out), I hope to use Maven on the project as well. It should be interesting to be the primary Java Developer on the project, along with a Web Developer and Oracle DBA. I've always been the web developer - but I've learned so much in the past year and a half (since I met Struts), that I feel more than comfortable being the Java guy. You know what the best part is - I feel like I've learned more from the java.blogs community than I have from studying for certifications, or from any conferences I've been to. Keep it up - learning is awesome!

You know what the better part is? Julie just said to me - "thanks for making all my dreams come true." Enough said, life is awesome - even with toilet paper stuffed up my nose and a chapter that seems like it'll never get done.