Raible Designs

A glorious weekend in Steamboat

After 6 feet of snow in 7 days, we couldn't help ourselves and rushed off to spend a few days in Steamboat last weekend. I bought new skis on Thursday and worked all night so I could take Friday off. I knew the skis were for me when I heard their name - Atomic "Sweet Daddies". Friday morning there was 11" of fresh powder, so I tried to convince Julie we should leave right away. She said "No" because I hadn't slept yet and said I should get some rest. 4 hours later, I woke up and Julie was packed and ready to go. We headed out for the 3-hour drive right around noon.

Saturday morning, we woke up to 4 inches of pow pow and left the condo by 8:15. I was skiing with a buddy (Steve) and we were meeting his friend (Jason) at the Gondola for first tracks. Jason showed up 20 minutes late, but that didn't stop us from finding the powder. We headed up Storm Peak, hiked a bit to the good stuff and enjoyed knee-deep powder to start the day. That run alone took almost an hour and I was definitely feeling the Fat Tire I drank the night before. We had a couple more powder runs, a couple fast groomers and it was time for beer thirty at the top of the gondola. Skiing with Jason (a Steamboat local) was exhausting - especially since he'd already skied 6 days in a row! After lunch, I hit the hot tub, took a nap with Jack and then went tubing with the kids. We ended the night with several bottles of wine and Talladega Nights.

Sunday we woke up to no new snow, but the weather was beautiful. It was something like 40°F and the perfect Spring skiing day. Julie and I took the kids over to the "magic carpet" run and had a blast. Abbie needs no help these days, she can do "pizza" and french fries w/o even trying. She does circles (down the hill, up the moving sidewalk) the whole time.

Jack was a whole different story.

He kept yelling at me "Go down" when we'd get to the top. As I'd ski to the bottom, I'd glance over at him and see a grin from ear-to-ear. When I'd get to the bottom, he'd take off. No turning, no pizza - just balls-to-the-wall with a shit-eating grin and lots of giggling. By the time he'd get to me, he'd be going pretty fast. Luckily, I caught him every time - amidst gasps from the Texans who were learning how to ski on the same hill. After 6 or 7 runs, he'd had enough and we headed back for "nap time".

I spent the rest of Sunday afternoon skiing on popcorn snow that was warmed by the Sun all day. It was beautiful skiing weather and I was ready for the ride home at 4:00. Another trip to the hot tub, a couple Sunshine Wheat beers and we drove home to a beautiful orange and pink sunset. What a glorious weekend.

Artifactory - a new Maven 2 Repository Manager for Enterprises

From the Maven 2 user list:

We would like to announce the immediate availability of Artifactory, a Maven 2 enterprise proxy.

Artifactory offers advanced proxying, caching and security facilities to answer the needs of a robust, reproducible and independent build environment using Maven 2. It uses a JSR-170 Java Content Repository (JCR) for storage, which makes it extremely easy to manage searchable metadata, and provide extended features such as security, transacted operations, auditing, locking, etc.

Artifactory is distributed under APLv2 at http://artifactory.sourceforge.net. It is currently available as a downloadable archive, that can be run out of the box (with default settings). An install script to run it as a Linux service is also provided. A (limited) guest live demo is available at http://www.jfrog.org/artifactory (username/password is guest/guest).

You are welcome to give it a go!

Cheers,

Yoav Landman,
The Artifactory Team

So how does this compare to Archiva, Proximity and Maven Proxy? One user writes (formatted for better reading):

It's interesting to see that Artifactory's UI is powered by Wicket and Dojo. The demo seems kind of sluggish, but I don't believe this application is meant to handle more than 10 users at a time. For more information on Artifactory's features, see its introduction page.

It's great to see a (seemingly) good tool come out for internal repository management.

I spent a couple days last week analyzing the best open source continuous integration server for Maven 2 projects. Hudson turned out to be the clear winner with the best UI and easiest setup. It also actually worked, which is a lot more than I can say for Continuum. While I did get Continuum to work, it required turning on anonymous SVN (no, putting the username/password in the URL did not work). CruiseControl worked as well, but required config.xml knowledge, which sometimes scares admins. Pulse and Bamboo continue to be the best commercial Maven 2 testers, while TeamCity failed my 10-minute test (twice!). One of the features I was looking for was Trac integration and that only exists for CruiseControl and Continuum.

It's amazing to see projects like Continuum and Archiva. If they're any reflection of the Maven team's ability to develop software, that's frightening. My advice: discontinue both of these projects as they're a waste of anyone's time to even research them.

Update October 2009: Fast forward a couple years and I take back what I said about the Maven's team ability to develop good software. Nexus is a kick-ass Repository Manager.

Upgrading to Tomcat 6

Erik did it, so I tried it as well. This site is now running Tomcat 6.0.10 and it has to be the least painful major Tomcat upgrade I've ever done. By major, I mean upgrading from one version number (5.5.17) to the next. Apparently, no XML files changed (like they did from 4.1.x -> 5.0.x -> 5.5.x) because I was able to copy over conf/server.xml and conf/Catalina/** without any issues. The only change I had to make was to copy commons-logging.jar from Roller's WEB-INF/lib to JSPWiki's.

I have seen a couple of the following errors in my log files since I upgraded, so if you see any strange behavior, please let me know.

2-Mar-2007 12:36:10 AM org.apache.tomcat.util.http.Parameters processParameters
WARNING: Parameters: Character decoding failed. Parameter skipped.
java.io.CharConversionException: EOF
        at org.apache.tomcat.util.buf.UDecoder.convert(UDecoder.java:83)
        at org.apache.tomcat.util.buf.UDecoder.convert(UDecoder.java:49)
        at org.apache.tomcat.util.http.Parameters.urlDecode(Parameters.java:410)
        at org.apache.tomcat.util.http.Parameters.processParameters(Parameters.java:392)
        at org.apache.tomcat.util.http.Parameters.processParameters(Parameters.java:508)
        at org.apache.tomcat.util.http.Parameters.handleQueryParameters(Parameters.java:266)
        at org.apache.catalina.connector.Request.parseParameters(Request.java:2404)
        at org.apache.catalina.connector.Request.getParameterValues(Request.java:1089)
        at org.apache.catalina.connector.RequestFacade.getParameterValues(RequestFacade.java:396)
        at javax.servlet.ServletRequestWrapper.getParameterValues(ServletRequestWrapper.java:189)
        at org.acegisecurity.wrapper.SavedRequestAwareWrapper.getParameter(SavedRequestAwareWrapper.java:325)
        at org.apache.roller.ui.rendering.velocity.deprecated.OldPageRequest.(OldPageRequest.java:164)
        at org.apache.roller.ui.rendering.velocity.deprecated.RedirectServlet.figurePageRedirect(RedirectServlet.java:285)
        at org.apache.roller.ui.rendering.velocity.deprecated.RedirectServlet.doGet(RedirectServlet.java:131)

I tested AppFuse 2.0 on Tomcat 6.0.10 earlier today and impressed that 1) Cargo worked perfectly and 2) most of the web frameworks worked. Which one didn't? You guessed it - good ol' JSF. That's OK though, the JSF version of AppFuse (MyFaces 1.1.5 with Facelets 1.1.11) doesn't work with Jetty 6.1.1 either. The good news is I found a workaround - removing the el-api dependency from my pom.xml makes it work on both.

    <dependency>
        <groupId>javax.el</groupId>
        <artifactId>el-api</artifactId>
        <version>1.2</version>
    </dependency>

If I remove this dependency, everything works fine on Tomcat 6.0.10 and Jetty 6.1.1. Unfortunately, it seems this dependency is needed for Tomcat 5.x. Hopefully some fancy stuff with Maven profiles can fix this incompatibility.