Raible Designs

Tomcat Service Manager for Windows

If you run Tomcat as a service (on Windows), you might be interested in the Tomcat Service Manager. I don't, so I'm not - I prefer "tstart" and "tstop" in cygwin (or bash), which are defined in my .bashrc file as:

alias tstart=$CATALINA_HOME/bin/startup.bat
alias tstop=$CATALINA_HOME/bin/shutdown.bat

NOTE: If you are unfortunate enough to have $CATALINA_HOME defined as a directory with spaces in it, you'll need to wrap $CATALINA_HOME in double quotes.

RE: IDEA vs Eclipse

I love Eclipse and always have. However, it kinda sucks on OS X. It is slow like Marcus says. Actually, it's a LOT snappier on my new PowerBook, but it's still much slower than it is on Windows. On Windows, it runs lickedy split and is by far my favorite IDE - because it *looks* like Windows more than anything. Inspired by Marcus's post, I'm willing to give IDEA another try on my OS X - I probably won't get enough time in the 30 day trial to appreciate it (or switch to it), but I'll make an attempt. BTW, I've actually heard that many of the "IDEA Rules" advocates actually got it for free - at least some OS projects' committers got a free copy. I'm sure if there was a 6 month trial version, and folks actually got addicted to it (like I am with Eclipse), they'd sell more copies. I'd pay for Eclipse right now if it weren't free.

Later: I already have one pet peeve - why can't I install IDEA in an "idea" folder rather than in "IntelliJ-IDEA-3.0.5". I install all my "tools" in /opt/dev/tools (i.e. /opt/dev/tools/eclipse) and this makes it very easy to tar xzf any new versions over old ones - and it just looks better. I hate when installers make you install their apps to a particular directory.

New Powerbooks ~ I agree with James

I agree with James about the new PowerBooks. My 17" simply rocks. I do have to disagree on one point though - it's actually not that hot. It seems to run much cooler than my 15" 667MHz.

Know of any good Calendar Tag Libraries?

Anyone know of a good Calendar Tag Library - that renders calendars like the ones you see on blogs? I found this one from Coldbeans, but it's $50 - whereas free is always better. We just need it to render a calendar on a page and gray out certain days (with CSS) to say that day is not available.

Tiles Tips o' the Day

Here's a couple of things I learned today that might be useful to you Struts developers out there. When using Tiles, you'll normally import all the attributes into your baseLayout.jsp, and then your attributes are exposes as beans/scripting variables (you can actually grab them with JSTL tags). Rather than using:

<tiles:importAttribute/>

Use:

<tiles:importAttribute scope="request"/>

And then all your inserted pages can access these attributes. Pretty slick when you got a little JSTL love in the mix. The second tip is how to implement definition path switching. Let's look at the following baseLayout definition as an example:

  <definition name=".baseLayout" path="/layouts/baseLayout.jsp">
    <put name="titleKey"/>
    <put name="header" value="/common/header.jsp"/>
    <put name="sidebar" value=".sidebar"/>
    <put name="footer" value="/common/footer.jsp"/>
  </definition>

You currently cannot change the "path" attribute with a Controller, so you have to do it as the Tiles author recommends - by changing your path to refer to an action. So I changed the path on this particular definition to be:

<definition name=".baseLayout" path="/do/switchLayout">

Where my action-mapping is defined as follows:

 <action path="/switchLayout" 
   type="org.appfuse.webapp.action.SwitchLayoutAction">
   <forward name="printLayout" path="/layouts/printLayout.jsp" />
   <forward name="baseLayout" path="/layouts/baseLayout.jsp" />
 </action>

Then in SwitchLayoutAction.java, I have the following code:

boolean print =
    Boolean.valueOf(request.getParameter("print")).booleanValue();

// see if a print parameter is passed in the request
if (print) {
    log.debug("switching base layout to printing...");

    return mapping.findForward("printLayout");
} else {
    return mapping.findForward("baseLayout");
}

Pretty slick IMO! It's easy to make the printLayout.jsp only contain some simple wrapper stuff and only do <tile:insert attribute="content"/>. Of course, in this particular example, you could just use a print stylesheet (media="print"), but that doesn't work so well on 4.x browsers (man I hate those beotches).

Refactoring Struts Menu

I made a bunch of changes to Struts Menu (a.k.a. Navigator) for use in my current project. Highlights include dynamic parameters (configured in menu-config.xml) and the ability to create menu templates using Velocity. The full story can be see on my wiki.

And yes, I did really post this at 2:30 in the morning - ugh, I'm off to bed!

Backed out of Roller 0.9.8

I have too much other stuff pounding my brain to support this website right now (it crashed again today), so I reverted back to Roller 0.9.8-dev. I'm sure the release is fine (at least on FreeRoller), just something about my not-so-clean Roller environment that doesn't allow the upgrade (or at least kills MySQL every so often). If it dies again, well then, oh well...

Sun to Present Chip-Design Breakthrough

This seems huge to me - whaddya think?

Network computer maker Sun Microsystems Inc. researchers will report on Tuesday that they have devised a way to dramatically increase the speed at which semiconductors can talk to each other.

By placing the chips edge to edge, directly touching, so data can flow freely, Sun has taken out the need for the tiny wires, pads and solder points that now connect chips on printed circuit boards that help make up computer systems, Sun said. [Yahoo News]

[ANNOUNCE] Display Tag 1.0 beta 1 Released!

The Display Tag Library has a new release! Fabrizio Giustina has been a busy guy as well as John York in refactoring the entire tag library. We had a run off between the two refactorings and Fabrizio won. This release is pretty stellar - checkout the full list of changes.

Temporary: I've uploaded a demo war that will self destruct as soon as displaytag.org is updated. This message will also disappear at that time.

CVS Spam has a new release

CVSspam, a very cool tool, has a new release out. Release Notes and Download.