Raible Designs

Gone Skiing

I'm outta here - for your viewing pleasure, here's a picture of Abbie to make you smile throughout the weekend.

JAAS Security in Action

I haven't read it, but this JAAS Security in Action article at DevX.com looks like a good intro to JAAS. Hopefully it'll teach me something as soon as I take the 10 minutes to read it.

Is it possible to lock files with CVS?

I don't think this is possible, but since a co-worker asked - I'm relaying the question to you, the experts. Using CVS, it is possible to "checkout" a file for editing, and to lock it on the CVS server, so no one else can check it in. If this feature exists, I'd love to use it. Also, if anyone knows how to hookup sending e-mails for commits on a barebones CVS install, enlighten me. SourceForge makes it easy using synchmail, but Google doesn't even know about this tool - must be a SF script.

Update: Anthony has given me some good tips in the comments of this post. I've had some success in getting e-mail notification setup, but I'm still having some issues. To configure it, I checked out CVSROOT, and edited the loginfo file, adding the following line:

^project /usr/bin/mailx -c $USER -s "[cvs-commit] %{sVv}" [email protected]

When I get in a file, I get:

Checking in build.properties;
/export/home/cvsr/project/build.properties,v  <--  build.properties
new revision: 1.7; previous revision: 1.6
done
1.6... User unknown
1.7... User unknown
build.properties... User unknown
/export/home/mattra/dead.letter... Saved message in /export/home/mattra/dead.letter

I do receive the e-mail, but it's addressed to 1.6@cvsserver, 1.7@cvsserver, build.properties@cvsserver and [email protected]. I'm sure it's an easy fix, comments are appreciated.

Update 2: Our SysAdmin solved the e-mail issue with the following lines in loginfo:

^project /usr/bin/mailx -s '[cvs-commit] %{sVv}' [email protected]
^server_config /usr/bin/mailx -r [email protected] -s '[cvs-commit] %{sVv}' [email protected]

I'm no UNIX expert, so that's why I'm posting this here - that way I can use it the next time I need to set this up. Alternative approaches are welcome and encouraged!

Deploying to Tomcat using Ant

If you're using Tomcat 4.1.x, did you know you can deploy using an Ant task that ships with Tomcat. You'll need to add $CATALINA_HOME/server/lib/catalina-ant.jar to your classpath, but then you can configure your ant task as follows:

<taskdef name="deploy" classname="org.apache.catalina.ant.DeployTask"/>

<deploy url="${manager.url}"
         username="${manager.username}"
         password="${manager.password}"
         path="/${name}"
         war="file:/${dist.dir}/${name}.war" />

I haven't tried it, but it looks cool. Right now I use a simple copy task that works pretty well for me, so no need to change at this point.

<target name="deploy" depends="package-web" if="tomcat.home"
    description="unwar into the servlet container's deployment directory">
          
    <unwar src="${webapp.dist}/${webapp.war}" 
        dest="${tomcat.home}/webapps/${webapp.name}"/>
    
</target>

If you know of any advantages to using Tomcat's deploy task, or you'd like to share your experience using it - please post a comment.

Anthill, this site crashing and XSL

Anthill rocks. Once I got our CVS server configured to allow pserver authentication from localhost, it took less than 5 minutes to configure automated builds with our build.xml file. Next steps - running tests and deploying. I got deployment pretty much done today and all I have to do is add the tests as parameters to Anthill's build process. The only thing that worries me about Anthill is that they have an open-source version and a pay-for-it version. No company wants to pay for anything these days, and I'm afraid all the good stuff will end up in the pay-for-it version. To be honest, that's fine with me, since all the stuff I need right now is in the open-source version.

In case you haven't noticed, this site has been crashing daily and I only discover it when I actually check it. I'm definitely overdue for a Roller upgrade - especially considering the last one was in the October or November of last year. I want to contribute before I upgrade though, so it might be awhile. The problem I'm experiencing right now is OutOfMemory errors, so Keith wrote a perl script to check catalina.out for this string, and if it's there, it restarts Tomcat. Hopefully this will help me out until I upgrade Roller.

This morning, I did a little XSL for one of my moonlighting projects - and I was disappointed to find that there's no ends-with function in the current XSL spec. There's starts-with and contains, but no ends-with. I used contains in the end to check if a filename contains .avi, and if so, then use HTML for Windows Media Player, rather than QuickTime Player. Seems to work good enough for now.

Which conference would you attend?

I try to go to a conference every year. Last year it was Web Builder in Vegas, and it was a great time - but not enough Java stuff. So this year I'm going to try and attend a conference that is more up my alley. Here's the three I'm trying to decide between:

• Rocky Mountain Software Symposium (May 16-18, Denver)
• TheServerSide Symposium (June 27-29, Boston)
• O'Reilly Open Source Convention (July 7-11, Portland, OR)

In reality, I'd like to go to all. Regardless of the other two, I'm pretty sure I'll attend the one in Denver. I know Jay Zimmerman (the organizer), and I don't mind giving him my money at all. After all, he is a fellow Montanan! I'd really like to attend the one in Boston, but that'd be a spendy trip with hotel and all. As for the O'Reilly Convention in Oregon, my parents live in Salem (40 miles south of Portland), so that one might work out well. However, we usually try to do the 4th of July at the cabin, it might be rough travel to Oregon so quickly after basking in the Montana Summer. I'll probably settle for Denver and maybe hit up another one towards the end of the year.

MySQL Control Center

If you're using MySQL, you should checkout MySQL Control Center. It's the MySQL Administration client you've been looking for. It says it's cross-platform, but also notes that it doesn't support OS X at this point. I downloaded and installed it on Windows and it seems to work pretty well. Installed and worked in about 10 seconds, which is always a determining factor. You can also checkout these screenshots.

Workflow Redux

Thanks to all who commented on my request for Java-based workflow engines. I especially liked Anthony's comment, and his list of possible frameworks.

This leads me to believe that if we are going to use a framwork, we should probably use Open Business Engine or Open for Business' workflow component - simply because I like standards. The question is - how easy are these to implement in a webapp? Any examples? I haven't researched either tool at all, just hoping someone else has.

[code sample] Using RowSetDynaClass from BeanUtils

On the struts-user list, they're discussing O/R Mapping tools. There seems to be lots of support for OJB and Torque, and I seem to be the only one that piped up for Hibernate. Meanwhile, Craig McClanahan (lead Struts Developer) sent an interesting code sample of using the new RowSetDynaClass to create a collection of DynaBeans from a ResultSet.

How to keep your job

Dave Thomas has published an interesting talk titled "How to Keep Your Job". I read the first few pages, and it definitely looks good. I'll read the rest later, right now I have to brave the rush hour traffic with 2" of fresh snow on the ground. Why o' why can't I just go skiing instead!