Raible Designs

[Ant] Trying to override old definition of task $taskname

I've seen the following message printed out as part of our build process for quite a few months now - and decided to try and fix it today.

compile-common:
Trying to override old definition of task runservertests
Trying to override old definition of task canoo
Trying to override old definition of task dbunit

I found that moving my <taskdef>'s from the root level (right under <project>) to inside my "init" target fixed the problem. Easy fix, no more messages.

RE: Dumbing-down AOP

Merrick Schincariol explains Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) and attempts to dumb-it-down to my level. This is not an easy task, but he does it well. [Blogging Roller]

This is a great article - thanks Merrick. This is what I've always thought it was, but I was never quite sure. If all I need to do (to implement AOP) is add the aspect class to my classpath - this seems super simple. This doesn't make me want to refactor any existing projects to use AOP, but it does make me want to use it on my next project. Then again, appfuse and moblogger have a pretty small codebase at this point - maybe now is the time for refactoring?

The Pragmatic Programmer

I began reading The Pragmatic Programmer this morning. I bought the book after hearing that it was Erik Hatcher's favorite technical book. Since Erik's Java Development with Ant was my favorite technical book - I figured this was a good recommendation. I've read one chapter and I'm loving it. This book will inspire me to be a better programmer - I can already tell.

I don't do nearly enough reading - too much blogging and OS development. So I'm going to try to read more - as David and Andrew recommend - at least one book a month. Actually, I'm going to shoot for two books per month - one technical and one non-technical. I'd compare this book to Rich Dad, Poor Dad, which I think is a great book for motivating good financial health. I read that bad boy last week in 2 hours!

[ANNOUNCE] Struts BSF (Scriptable Actions) 0.3

Boy, Don Brown is a busy man this week. He releases a new version of the Struts Cacoon plugin on Monday, and today he released a new version of Struts BSF.

This project allows Struts Actions to be written in the scripting language of one's choice rather than as Java classes. It uses the Beans Scripting Framework to allow scripts to be written in any language BSF supports like Perl, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, BeanShell, and I believe even VBScript.

Version 0.3 adds the ability to pass parameters from the Struts config file, a pluggable filter system to pre-define custom variables, more documentation, and more. [Learn More]

Looks cool, but I have no need (currently). If you're using the BSF and have experiences to share, please do so. I'm interested, it just hasn't made it past my crap filter yet.

A little excitement in the Open Source Community

From Matt Croydon:

Thanks to Russ and the guys at #mobitopia, here's an Inquirer article on the JBoss fork/coup:

8:00 am -- Seven consultants for The JBoss Group publicly announced the immediate termination of their contracts and the foundation of their new company, Core Developers Network. Their charter "is to provide a commercial infrastructure to enable open source contributors to deliver their professional expertise to the marketplace, independent of their contributions to open source projects".

For some reason, reading the article made my heart beat a little faster. Good? Bad? Who cares! It's engrossing!

Hibernate 2.0 Final this weekend?

From Gavin on the hibernate-devel mailing list:

I plan to release Hibernate 2.0 final this weekend.

It would be nice if, at the same time, we have all the other "bits" built
and available for download:

* a special XDoclet build (I need to clear this with xdoclet team)
* avalon wrapper
* tools package (mainly for the sake of CodeGenerator)
* middlegen plugin (DONE)

The XDoclet team has also been trying to get out a new release - they don't seem to be having much luck though. That's the problem with these open source projects - they take too much time, with little or no ROI for the developer(s). I dream of a day that the company I work for actually pays me to work on Open Source projects. Maybe I just need a new client for Raible Designs, and then I'll just pay myself to work on OS!

Validator Presentation and Struts Cocoon Plugin

Chuck Cavaness, author of O'Reilly's "Programming Jakarta Struts" book, gave a presentation to the Struts Atlanta User Group last week. [Download PDF, 41 pages]. Chuck also announced the availability of the Jakarta Struts Pocket Reference by O'Reilly.

This purpose of this small (144 pages) book is to provide a quick way of looking up often-used information and have it small enough to shove in your back pocket. Information like config files settings, built-in action usage and especially tags is covered. In fact, 100 of the 144 pages are dedicated to how to use the tags, including examples of each. [More Information, Table of Contents, Sample Chapter].

I don't see why you would need this book as the online docs and Google have always provided everything I've needed. Maybe it'd be nice if you lacked an internet connection. In other news, Don Brown (from Struts Training: Week 5), has released a new version of the Struts Cocoon Plugin.

The plugin that allows Struts actions to forward requests to Cocoon has been updated and released as 0.2 This time it is released as a full release rather than a developer prototype, complete with better documentation. Cocoon support has been updated to version 2.1M2 More information can be found at: http://www.twdata.org/struts.

Don has also put together a sample website for the Struts Applications Project at SourceForge.

The site is built using Forrest which is based on Cocoon. Forrest is used to build xml.apache.org, which being in similiar purpose to us, makes a great template for a project site. I took their sources from their CVS and modified them to suite our purposes. One of the big advantages is the site is 100% static HTML so it could be hosted at Sourceforge easily. BTW, anyone wanna throw together a logo? [Discussion Thread]

Reading Ports and Frames in Java

My dad has an issue that maybe y'all can help with. He needs a class or library that can read from ports, addresses, and a "frame" (including the header). I asked him what he meant my all this, and here's what he wrote back.

In Pascal it would be a Procedure that reads a location. The location being an address or a hardware port like an RS-232 port, as opposed to a socket or Port 80 for HTML.

Ethernet transfers data in Packets or Frames and you can limit the size of the frame (fragment for optimal efficency); although, Ethernet (802.3) including 802.11x have a maximum size packet (Frame). The nomenclature changes according to the OSI Model Layer you're reading from.

Any ideas?

Struts Menu now supports tabbed menus!

I uploaded a new demo of the tabbed menu system. This one uses url-matching to determine which menu to activate. If it finds more than one menu item (that matches the current URL), it falls back on a cookie that is set when you click on a link. Seems to work pretty well. Better than the last demo which didn't support clicking the "back" button.

And for you struts-menu users, this menu is soon to be available as a Displayer. I haven't checked it into CVS yet, but here's a working demo. Hope you enjoy! Let me know if you find any bugs.

Update: I checked everything into CVS and also added support for Struts' forwards in menu-config.xml. So now there are three choices when defining a URL for a menu/item:

• location: uses the exact value you specify.
• page: pre-pends the contextPath to the value you specify.
• forward: looks up the path of the forward in struts-config.xml.

You can download the latest struts-menu.war if you want these features right away.

Java Server Faces Resources

James Holmes has put together an impressive list of JSF resources. Very cool - thanks James! Now the question is, when do you start developing your apps in JSF vs. JSP? When do you start developing your apps in JSP 2.0? Obviously, when the J2EE 1.4 spec if finalized and Tomcat 5 comes out - right?! Well then, giddyup - I'm ready!!