Raible Designs

Bailey's at 9:00 a.m.

I was up until 3:00 a.m. last night as a friend was passing through town and stopped by to say hi. He (and his dad) didn't get to our place until 12:30, so I didn't get to visit long, but it was worth the lack of sleep. I got up at 7:00 and went to work feeling like a zombie - only to find out that there was a Bailey's party at 9:00! That's right - one of the ladies made some home-made Baileys and brought it in for everyone to enjoy. I have to say, it's the first time I've had spiked coffee at work!

We just got home from dinner at a friend's house and I am beat. I do have a couple questions and news items though.

• Is it possible to configure Java to use a proxy server to connect to the Internet. The only way to connect to the Internet at work is to setup your browser to use an Automatic Configuration URL. This means that Struts can't validate to it's DTDs (unless I change to use a System DTD) and I can't use Maven to download jars.
• Can Hibernate generate classes and it's mapping files from an existing database?
• Konstantin Priblouda has published a demo of using Hibernate, XDoclet and JBoss. You will need a current version of XDoclet from CVS to run it.

Snowing like the dickens

It was a 9-inch day at Vail today, and it's snowing all night tonight. Damnit - I've gotten two calls from friends already that are going up tomorrow. Those bastards!

The First Day

The first day at the new job was good. The three developers on the team (myself included) had a 3 hour meeting getting our arms around the project and figuring out how to do everything. It's an interesting approach we're using - where an Excel speadsheet is e-mailed to a mailbox. It's then picked up, processed, and if it meets certain criteria, it's entered into an Oracle database. Then we're going to use a web front-end and Struts to grab the data and render it to the user so they can correct it. I wonder if I can use the Struts Validator on the way out? It'll be interesting to find out.

The only unfortunate part of the day was the machine I found myself in front of. It's a Dell GX110, and has 128MB RAM and a 733MHz processor. Ughhh, try running Ant, Eclipse and Tomcat at the same time on that sucker! I faired better than the other developer though - he got an NT 4 box - at least mine's 2000! They said they'd try to get us better machines, but I hope to just use the ol' Powerbook. The dual 21" monitors is helping to reduce the pain.

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.

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).

Code Readability

There's a debate taking place at FreeRoller about code readability. Isn't this a non-issue with sweet code formatting tools such as jalopy? I don't think I've cared how my code as looked in months, I just use the formatter. For the record, I prefer one space, not all my variables lined up on one side. Why? If you add a new variable with a long name, you have to adjust the spacing for all your variables - what a pain in the ass. However, Jalopy does offer this type of formatting and will plugin to all your favorite IDEs.

Along these same lines, XDoclet uses a beautify ant task that fixes the code everytime you re-compile. While it's nice, it can be annoying that you have to reload your .java file everytime you compile.

Tomcat 4.1.17 Alpha

Apache Tomcat 4.1.17 Alpha has just been released. Significant changes over 4.1.16 Beta include fixing socket binding in Coyote JK 2 (where only the loopback interface would be bound), administration webapp fixes for resource link handling, minor performance tweaks in the TCP endpoint, as well as other minor fixes. View the release notes or download.

Deadlines and Opportunities

I turned in my 1st draft of the Security Chapter on Monday and I'm sending my example app to go along with it as we speak. That means I'm 3 days late on my first deadline - doh! And my second deadline is Sunday - for the Struts Chapter - fat chance of hitting that one. To make matters more convoluted, I have had more calls this week about new opportunities than all year!! As you might now, I don't have a full time gig right now - so opportunities are most important right (especially with a little one and wife to support). So I will be staying up until the wee hours of the morning, acting like a keyboard monkey, until sometime next week. I can't wait to get this over with. The writing part is cool - but I can't concentrate on writing - I get too caught up in the sample app and waste hours trying to tweak stuff. Damn, I can't wait to get rid of this stress.

IDEA vs. Eclipse

I've been switching back and forth between IDEA and Eclipse for the past couple nights. I DO like IDEA, but as I only have 3 days left on my evaluation, I'll sadly have to let it go. My favorite feature is it's ability to recognize that you haven't imported a class, and then allows you to hit Alt+Enter to add the import. Also, it grays out imports that aren't being used, both very slick features. As for generating getters and setters, it does a poor job in my opinion. It puts them above your variable declaration and doesn't add any javadoc comments. Eclipse puts them at the bottom of your class and adds javadoc comments - so Eclipse wins here. Also, Eclipse does a much better job of adding and recognizing javadoc comments. IDEA wins on indentation, it always seems to know where you want to be. If I get a full time gig here soon, I might have to buy IDEA. I think it's best when you can use multiple tools to make your development life easier. I say screw these debates on Eclipse vs. IDEA or Struts vs. Webwork - use them all! (I need to examine Webwork as it gets lots of good comments from it's developers.) Of course, it's easier to use both when you have a dual-monitor setup! I highly recommend this... it's awesome!

Later: The other thing that IDEA wins on is that it can actually run my Ant script without puking. Eclipse doesn't let me run it - maybe it's cause it has Ant 1.4.1. Hmmm, wonder if I can upgrade it to 1.5.1. IDEA has better XML editing, and even seems to detect errors in build.xml.

As I'm editing this post with the Later paragraph, I received the following from Cédric (who seems to work for BEA from his e-mail address).

You didn't say if you already knew this about Eclipse, so I thought I would tell you anyway:

- To fix a missing import, just press Ctrl-1 (Quick Fix) on the class with squiggly lines. Ctrl-1 does a lot of incredible things, like it sometimes reads your mind. I much prefer this approach to having specific actions and shortcuts to remember. Another interesting one is Ctrl-Shift-O (Organize Imports), when you have a lot of imports to fix. Eclipse will analyze your whole source and add them all for you (and possibly prompt your when there are ambiguities).

- The latest builds underline the unused imports with yellow squiggly lines.

-- Cédric http://beust.com/weblog

Sweet! Must be time to download a nightly build!

Postcard from Hawaii

My Mom and Dad are having a rough week - we received the postcard below from them today. My sister, Kalin, and I surprised them with a trip to Hawaii for their 30th wedding anniversary (November 16th). They never had a honeymoon when they originally got married, so we figured they'd enjoy one now! My dad was stationed at Waikiki beach when he was in the Navy - so he's having a lot of fun re-living old memories. I used Kurt's sharpen, resize, sharpen again technique on the scanned postcard below - seems to have worked pretty well. My gung-ho mom writes that she went running at 5:30 in the morning and there were a lot of folks already up and about. Running!? At 5:30 in the morning?! Yeah, she runs marathons too! She hadn't exercised in her life, in the traditional sense - we always got plenty of exercise living at the cabin - until my sister and I moved out. Now she's over 50 and in the best shape of her life! Go Mom - you're awesome.