I've always said the best way to learn a new technology is to get paid to do it. Do you live in Newton, MA or San Francisco and wanna learn Macromedia's Flex? If so, you might want to checkout these openings. I've heard stories that it sucks to work for Macromedia - but it's always cool to get paid to learn.
Download · Changelog. Less than two weeks ago, Tomcat 5.0.24 Stable was released. However, it had a small bug where two cookies would be issued instead of just one - so a hotfix was released. Today, I discovered that 5.0.25 Stable is already out with a whole bunch of other fixes. Since there seem to be no announcements about this release - I thought you might like to know in case you have an upgrade planned.
Tomcat tip o' the day: When you install a new version of Tomcat, clean out its webapps directory (rm -r $CATALINA_HOME/webapps/*) and remove the balancer.xml from $CATALINA_HOME/conf/Catalina/localhost/. The webapps directory contains a number of sample apps that do nothing more than slowdown server startup. I also typically delete the "admin" application since I don't use that either:
rm -r $CATALINA_HOME/server/webapps/admin
rm $CATALINA_HOME/conf/Catalina/localhost/admin.xml
Lastly, don't forget to add a user with a "manager" role in $CATALINA_HOME/conf/tomcat-user.xml. This way you can use the slick Manager app (http://localhost:8080/manager/html) to install/start/stop/reload/remove webapps.
Update: After installing this release, I discovered that looking up a Mail Session in JNDI doesn't work. It's possible its a bug in my configuration, but it's worked fine on all previous 4.1.x and 5.0.x releases. Because of this, I recommend sticking with 5.0.19 or 5.0.24.
Update 2: This has been verified as a bug in 5.0.25.
I finally found time to fix a few minor bugs in AppFuse 1.5 Beta and update all the tutorials. Now there's 3 new HowTos for developing a Master/Detail page using Spring's MVC Framework. After writing the tutorials, I found a new appreciation for Spring's MVC. I really like its lifecycle and (if given the opportunity) I think I'll use it for my next project. Without further ado, here's the relevant links:
Enjoy!
BTW, if you live in Colorado and you want to learn more about AppFuse, Spring and AppFuse Light - stop by the Denver JUG on June 9th or the Boulder JUG on June 10th. I'll be talking at both events. As a teaser, here's the bullet points from my slide on AppFuse Light:
- Designed for quick apps with few requirements (i.e. prototypes)
- Uses Sitemesh for skinning
- No build-time dependencies (i.e. XDoclet), no out-of-the-box security
- Web tests do not depend on container
- All code can be easily ported to AppFuse if you need AppFuse features (i.e. security, i18n, gzip compression)
- Simpler, lighter, faster (for building and testing)