Raible Designs

Symlinking now works in Tomcat 4.1.16!

The Tomcat developers turned off the ability to create symbolic links (symlinks) in 4.1.x. This really threw a wrench in my ability to upgrade as I use symlinks to point to resources outside my webapp all the time. I don't do it for jars, but for common image or documentation directories. In Tomcat 4.1.12 (the latest release), you were supposed to be able to turn symlinks back on by adding the following to your app's context:

<Resources
  className="org.apache.naming.resources.FileDirContext"
  allowLinking="true" caseSensitive="false" />

The bad news? This didn't work! I'm happy to report that with the lastest 4.1.16 beta, this does work! So, for instance, if you want to turn on symlinks in the ROOT context, add the following to your server.xml:

<Context path="" docBase="ROOT" debug="0">
  <Resources
    className="org.apache.naming.resources.FileDirContext"
    allowLinking="true" caseSensitive="false" />
</Context>

News Nuggets from Today

The skiing was great at Vail today! I might not be able to walk tomorrow, but so goes the first day of the season.

There was all kinds of good info from the java.blogs community, and so I re-emphasize, for the heck of it. My favorites (thanks Erik and Dave):

• Tomcat 4.1.16 beta released. I wonder if they fixed the problem with following symlinks?
• Mozilla 1.2.1 released. Download it before it goes bad like 1.2!
• How loyal is Russ? I want surveys in Roller! Send us the code Erik!
• The hits keep rolling in over at FreeRoller.
• Struts In Action has been reviewed at Slashdot and got an 11 out of 10! I ordered mine a few weeks back, should arrive any day now.

Stomach Flu

Julie and I are sick with the stomach flu - hopefully it's just a 24 hour thing. There's nothing like getting sick to make deadlines even tighter.

Oslo - New Project admin tool

Aslak Hellesøy, of XDoclet fame, has started a new project admin tool called Oslo.

Oslo is an administration tool that will let you set up a development project easily.
...
The main goal of the Oslo project is to provide one single tool that can automatically download, install and configure such tools. Oslo will provide an intuitive web interface where everything can be configured.

Sounds good to me - it's definitely needed! BTW, I found these XDoclet Templates for Eclipse.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I would like to thank my wonderful family and my great friends for making my life a blast to live! I'm also thankful for good health and the micro-breweries of Colorado, Montana and Oregon.

I'd also like to thank the blogging community (particlarly you java.blogs gents) for making the web fun again. Now go get some good eats and tell your family I said Hi!

www.javablogs.com

I woke up around 10 this morning (after being up until 2 last night), fired up NetNewsWire and started reading. The first one of interest was Dave's entry All I can say is WOW! and where can I get the source?. I signed up and was amazed my the smoothness and speed of this webapp. As I told Mike - this is one of the coolest things I've woken up to in a long time. The question is, will I stop using NetNewsWire on OS X, or Phoenix (with a 31 tabbed bookmark) to read the blogs? Probably not, I like the look of a web page, and people are changing their styles so much, that it's nice to see good looks along with great content.

I guess if I really had my shit together, I'd put something like this together for www.javawebapps.com. A place where you can signup and upload your .war files for public consumption. I'm willing to let the java.blogs webapp be the first entry! I'd love to hear more about this webapp - I'm guessing it's written using webwork and it's running on Resin.

Bend, Oregon

Russell says he's heading to Bend, Oregon next weekend. Cool! I went to high school in Salem, Oregon and a bunch of my friends lived in Bend after college. Julie and I have visited Bend a few times, and it's a really nice mountain town. It's kinda like Denver, but a lot smaller (but growing rapidly). They get 300 days of sunshine a year (like Denver) and have a great micro-brewery. Everytime I've been there, I've wanted to move there. It's got great skiing too! But then again, Russ may not like it since he hates the cold and it was 15 degrees (F) this morning!

Services for UNIX

I received a Services for UNIX CD in the mail today from Microsoft. That's funny since I remember receiving an installing SFU 3.0 back in July. I tried to telnet into my XP box, and apparently the 120-Day Evaluation has expired. It's nice that they sent me a new 120-Day Evaluation. I wonder if I'll get another one after 4 months. I'd buy it if I really needed it since it's only $99. However, since the license expired a couple weeks ago, and I didn't even notice, I must not use it. It's very much like Cygwin, except you get everything that UNIX has - including a telnet server, and you can type ls from a DOS prompt.

BTW, did you know you can enable command-completion on any Windows machine? Here's how.

XDoclet and Castor

I found this post on the castor-dev mailing list this afternoon. It seems to indicate that there's a better version of the Castor module for XDoclet.

The "exolab2" module is nearly identical to the original exolab module in that it:

1. generates the mapping.xml file

however, exolab2 differs in that it:

1. works on the fields in a class instead of the methods
-working with field name seems easier and more logical as castor
is for mapping class/db fields, not methods
2. generates the database.xml file
3. generates the create.sql and drop.sql for each class' table
4. doesn't require explicitly declaring the @castor:field-sql type="..." for each class field; it uses a simple look up .xml file to retrieve the appropriate/default sql type for the field's java type
5. doesn't require explicitly declaring the @castor:class table="...";
the class' name will be used as the default table name

so in summary, it generates:

-database.xml
-mapping.xml
-create.sql
-drop.sql

with less "work" than before. basically, these improvements are to help developers quickly and easily generate all the castor-specific and non-castor-specific (sql table defintions) code for new projects.

Too bad this isn't available in XDoclet as of yet. Hmmm, maybe I can use Castor Doclet to generate my DDL.

Writing a Technical Book

Graham Glass offers some great suggestions on how he writes a book (tip of the hat to Matt Croydon). This is extremely valuable information for me, as I will be writing a couple chapters over the next few weeks. If I can follow in his footsteps, I'll be set!

A typical chapter takes me 3 or 4 days to write, including the source code for the examples, which I think is pretty fast. In addition, the high level book structure takes about a day.

The thing I'm struggling with right now is what persistence layer to use on my example Struts application. I'd like to use either Hibernate or Castor, but since I've never implemented either from scratch, I don't want to spend more time learning than implementing. And I'd like to generate the entire persistence layer - which seems possible with both. I'd like to use Middlegen, but then I'll have to use JDO or EJB's for my persistence layer. While JDO might be appropriate, EJBs are probably over-kill for an example app. The nice thing about Middlegen is that it will generate the JSP and Struts classes for me too.