Raible Designs

Loving Java all over again

This past week has been hectic. I'be been pumping out what seemed to be a relatively small and simple application for a client. What was a simple 3-table 3-page application is now 14 tables and even more pages. But it's going awesome. It's the most productive I've ever been on a project - thanks to AppFuse, which is further backed up by the powerful Ant, XDoclet, JUnit, Struts and Hibernate.

The reason I've fell in love with Java all over again is I've re-discovered the power of reflection and inheritance. 8 of the 14 tables are child tables of a main "project table." As I noticed I was doing a lot of copy/paste in my DAOs, Services and Actions - I decided to reflection for all these child tables and now I have 3 methods on my DAOs (get/save/deleteProjectChild). Same goes for my Services and my Actions all share the same delete/edit/save methods in a BaseAction.

The only reason I even have child Actions is for URL beauty and to xdoclet-generate the action-mappings. Backed up by tons of JUnit, StrutsTestCase and WebTest test cases - it's been a breeze to refactor and enhance. I'm in love all over again.

AppFuse 0.9.1 Released

AppFuse 0.9.1 is a small bug-fixing release. I introduced some errors in the upload module by using <fmt:message> in my baseLayout.jsp, rather than <bean:message>. Not a big deal if you're not using sub-modules. I've never used them in the real-world, only in my example projects.

• Download

Cool JSP Tag: State Tag

I found a cool State Tag this morning that I'm using in my project this week. It works very nice and just like I'd expect. Here's how I'm using it:

<%@ taglib uri="http://www.servletsuite.com/servlets/statetag" 
    prefix="state" %>
...
<bean:define id="state" name="userFormEx" 
    property="state" type="java.lang.String" />
<state:state name="state" default="<%=state%>" />

Tomcat 5.0.7 Alpha

Since java.blogs has already seen an announcement for Tomcat 5.0.7, there's no reason for me to do it as well. But, there is a very cool enhancement added to this release. From the changelog:

~ Allow putting a /META-INF/context.xml inside any WAR file

This allows much easier deployment IMO. Now you only need to deploy/upload one file, instead of the WAR file and a config (context.xml) file. However, this isn't part of the J2EE 1.4 spec, and other appservers have their own means of configuring - so this is not a portable solution. It would be very cool if there was a common way of doing this for Resin, Orion and Tomcat. I don't know how it would work, but maybe something like META-INF/tomcat-config.xml, META-INF/orion-config.xml, etc.

AppFuse 0.9 Released!

This release contains all kinds of goodies - including a new password hint feature, a compression filter, and a JSP 2.0-syntax option (when deploying). It also fixes a bug in persisting roles and includes many upgrades of dependent packages (Hibernate, PMD, Checkstyle, DBUnit and WebTest).

• Download (~10.7 MB for src, ~3.4 MB for bin)
• Release Notes
• API Documentation and Source
• Mailing List

Enjoy!

It figures - SourceForge still sucks!

I finally find some time to release the next version of [AppFuse] and SourceForge fucks me once again.

We're Sorry.
The SourceForge.net Website is currently down for maintenance.
We will be back shortly

RE: Professional JSP, 3rd Edition

Simon has the inside scoop on (what was) Professional JSP 2.0. He must have some good connections to get this info. I dig that Amazon is listing it and especially that I got mentioned as an Author! Hopefully they fix this little mishap and do an et. al. or something. I'd better do a screenshot so I can have proof that my name was listed at one point.

Tomcat 4.1.27 + Apache 2.0.47 on Red Hat 9

I decided to upgrade my Apache and Tomcat installations on my Red Hat 9 box this morning. In doing so, I found that no binary jk connectors existed for Apache 2.0.47 on Linux. So I built one, and updated my Apache 2.x + Tomcat 4.1.x Article for the latest and greatest versions. Also, when building Apache with SSL, I found that there were a bunch of symlinks I had to create for RH 9. So I updated my Apache + SSL Article as well. If I had the time/motivation, I'd port these to the wiki and the community could keep them up-to-date. Maybe when I'm really bored.

Tomcat 4.1.27 Hotfix

FYI - there's a patch for Tomcat 4.1.27 to fix the webapp reload bug. To install, download into your $CATALINA_HOME directory and execute:

tar xzf 4.1.27-hotfix-22096.tar.gz

Eclipse in Action at Denver JUG next week

Next week, David Gallardo (an Author of Eclipse in Action) will be doing a presentation at the Denver Java User Group. I'll be there for the JDOM presentation in the Basic Concepts group as well. There's a short review of Eclipse in Action vs. Java Developer's Guide To Eclipse over at JavaRanch.

... after reading both books in the past week, I come to the conclusion that the two books serve very different purposes. I would like to have them both on my desk.