Raible Designs

Bear Creek Trail

Awesome trail, saw an Elk.

An XForms Tutorial

On the xul-announce mailing list, I found Mike Dubinko's XForms Tutorial presentation (from the O'Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON) 2003 in Portland). Mike is author of the upcoming O'Reilly XForms Essentials book (August 2003) and W3C XForms spec co-author.

Good stuff - I definitely enjoyed viewing the slides and can't wait for the browsers to support XForms.

HowTo: Upgrade your app to JSP 2.0

I did some more playing with Tomcat 5.0.4 today - and converted appfuse to a JSP 2.0 application. After accomplishing this task, I created a "jsp-2" task that can (optionally) be run at build time, and whalla, you've got a Servlet 2.4/JSP 2.0 application. I learned a number of things in the process.

1. The expression language in JSP 2.0 replaces in JSTL is <c:out>, that's it. I was under the impression that I could use <c:if> or <c:forEach> tags without declaring the tag library URI, etc. I was wrong, if you want to use JSTL tags, you must import the declare the taglibs, just like you do now in Tomcat 4.x.

2. The EL is turned off by default if you have a 2.3 DTD for your web.xml. If you have a 2.4 XSD in web.xml, the EL is turned on by default. This means that you can write ${param.foo} and it will be analyzed when the EL is on (when off, it's not analyzed).

3. You can replace <html:rewrite page=""/> with <c:url value=""/> and get the same effect. The only difference is that html:rewrite is context and module-sensitive, whereas c:url is only context-sensitive.

4. I had to replace the URI's for JSTL core and fmt with their run-time URIs - http://java.sun.com/jstl/core_rt vs. http://java.sun.com/jstl/core. Otherwise, I would get something similar to the the following error.

According to TLD or attribute directive in tag file, 
  attribute test does not accept any expressions

I figure upgrading to JSTL 1.1 might solve this issue, but since it hasn't been released, why bother? So to convert appfuse to be a JSP 2.0 webapp, here's what my Ant task does:

• Replaces URIs with their run-time equivalent.
• Removes <c:out> tags, leaving the value of the "value" attribute intact.
• Replaces 2.3 DTD in web.xml with 2.4 XSD.

I did some (rough) benchmarking of running my JSP tests, here are the results on a Pentium IV (2 GHz, 512 MB RAM).

start Tomcat, run tests, stop Tomcat:
 Tomcat 4.1.24: 1 minute, 17 seconds
 Tomcat 5.0.4: 1 minute, 7 seconds
 Tomcat 5.0.4/JSP 2.0: 1 minute, 3 seconds

run tests, Tomcat already started:
 Tomcat 4.1.24: 33 seconds
 Tomcat 5.0.4: 22 seconds
 Tomcat 5.0.4/JSP 2.0: 22 seconds

According to these numbers, Tomcat 5 is quite a bit faster than 4.1.x.

Our new Internet Service from Comcast

Yesterday, Comcast showed up to install their cable internet service at our new house. Long story short: We bought a new house by DU, but haven't sold ours in Morrison yet. Hopefully it'll sell soon, or we'll be stuck paying two mortgages. I have to give a glowing review to Comcast and how everything was executed in setting up our service. One week ago, I signed up for (and scheduled) an appointment online to have Comcast High-Speed Internet installed. They called me to confirm my appointment two days before, and then gave me a 2 hour window that I had to be at the house. The guy showed up 5 minutes early, and was done 15 minute early. Sweet! We have nothing else in the new place (we haven't moved yet), but we have internet access - yeah baby, yeah.

I'm very impressed - it only took one week to get high-speed internet. Remember the days when it would takes months from the time you ordered DSL until it got installed? I'm pumped too because it's cable, which is the fastest IMO. I have friends in town with DSL and friends with cable; cable is much, much faster (~ 2MB down). You might think I'm biased because I currently work at Comcast. At Comcast, not for Comcast - I'm just a contractor, no benefits for me. The lucky bastards I work with get cable and high-speed internet for free - not to mention a TV in their office/cube (if they want).