Raible Designs

Open Source Testing

We all know how much open source Java tools have helped us - how about open source testing tools? Opensourcetesting.org looks to be a great site for saving some cizash for your QA department (or for you when you're wearing that hat).

Opensourcetesting.org aims to boost the profile of open-source testing tools within the testing industry and give you easy access to open source testing tools from one central location. As you'll see from the tools on offer, there are some very usable, sophisticated and stable open source testing tools out there.

Help re-name XDoclet

The XDoclet Team is looking for a new name for XDoclet 2. This is to eliminate confusion b/w version 1 and version 2. Checkout the current suggestions and add your own if you like. If you don't know what XDoclet is, or haven't used it, you're wasting precious development hours IMO.

Java Treats

Here are a number of Java-related treats I found this morning that will likely serve as good personal bookmarks in the future.

• Ryan is looking for an XML-based properties class and one of his commenters (Dmitry) points to this article about the J2SE 1.4 Preferences API. Good stuff.
• From JavaWorld (via Erik): Java Tip 138: Still parsing to generate your JavaBeans' XML representation?
• Dave Hyatt makes XBL look wicked cool! If we could only get Microsoft to support it, it might actually be useful.
• After reading this article I wonder if I should replace my Powerbook (w/in the next year) with another Powerbook, or an Intel based laptop. I do most of my development on Windows because I'm more productive and as an American, I get a buzz from being productive. So why buy another Mac? Intel-based PCs are faster - if I really want a Unix core, I can just run Linux. With VMWare for XP, I find it hard to justify buying another Mac. Besides, I already own one and the desire is out of my system. And furthermore, I dig how Dell will come to your house and fix your PC, whereas Apple makes you send it in for two weeks - what's up with that?!

RE: Abstract Classes vs. Interfaces

Yakuu provides a good comparison of abstract classes versus interfaces. This is an interested read for me, since I've only started using both of these in the last year - and only because I've seen/copied/extended other programmer's code. After using them for that long, I have to say that there's still doesn't seem to be much of a point. Of course, I'm rarely using mutliple inheritence and none of my projects have gone through a major refactoring. I'm willing to bet that Dave is happy he decided to use interfaces in Roller. The Castor -> Hibernate conversion probably would've sucked without them - or did they create more work?!

[ANNOUNCE] Roller 0.9.7.2 Released!

Dave has released Roller 0.9.7.2. Get it while its hot! This site has been rockin' (IMO) since I moved to the new server. In fact, I haven't had to restart Tomcat once since I started it on Wednesday. That's a huge improvement considering it used to restart itself due to OutOfMemory errors 3+ times per day. Just goes to show that software is not always the one to blame - damn hardware - I'm just glad that I decided to try a new box before moving to a new provider.

I've added this to my Java channel for all you java.blogs readers. ;-)

[ANNOUNCE] New Hibernate Versions (1.2.5 and 2.0 RC2)

Hibernate has released new versions of it's awesome persistence framework. I'm biased because I use it and it makes my life/job a lot easier (not to mention this site a lot faster). Not to mention that it's a finalist of JavaWorld Editor's choice awards.

• Download 2.0 RC2 [Release Notes]
• Download 1.2.5 [Release Notes]

How to control access with Jabber?

So know that I've got a password-embedding scheme worked out for e-mail and moblogger, I have to figure out a way to do something similar with Jabber. Currently, in what I have working, there is no password verification, but it is needed. It's necessary to prevent just any-old-Joe from posting to your weblog. Of course, they'd have to know the username for your blog IM user (this listens for new posts), but it probably wouldn't be hard to figure out. My first thought is to have the password as the first part of the message, and then the message after that. For instance:

mypassword / Here is the rest of my post

I'd suggest doing this in the subject, but the problem with this is that you can send an IM without a subject, and I still want posts to succeed even if there's no subject (a.k.a. title). So whaddya think - would you be willing to type "password / rest of your IM" everytime to wanted to post to your weblog via IM?

BTW, the new server seems to be holding up quite nicely, eh?

Where to put the password in moblogger-enabled e-mails?

In my Bloggar API and Titles post earlier today, Russ and I were discussing where to put a user's password (in an e-mail) when moblogging. After thinking about it for a couple of hours tonight, it suddenly came to me. The best place for the password is in the "to" field. Meaning that you give your blog's e-mail address a nickname, or type in with your password prefixed to the address, followed by a space. Basically, the "to" field will look like this: 'mypassword' [email protected]. Then you can use InternetAddress.getPersonal() to get the prefix ('mypassword'), strip off the single quotes, and use that as the password! I tried it and it works like a charm. This way, you can create a contact with your password as the name and easily blog from your mobile phone or other e-mail client.

I also added support to Roller's Blogger API implementation so if your post contains <title>, then that is used for the title. Then I made the E-Mail and IM Processors of moblogger support passing subjects as titles.

Host your blog for free?

One of the folks that contacted me about hosting is Jason Rimmer of Irth Networks. The sweet thing about Jason's company is that they host blogs (movable type, bojsom, and roller), websites, email, etc. for not-for-profit activities and organizations. Free hosting!? What the hell?! It's true:

The operators of RhumbaNet, being completely self-taught and wanting to give something back to the community that enabled and supported their education recognized the perfect opportunity to do so. Hence, the commercial venture was shutdown and transformed into Irth Networks. [more...]

Of course this is a screaming deal - so why didn't I jump at it? For one, I feel that I should pay for hosting this site, as well as my family's site. And now that the new server seems to be humming along nicely, there's no reason to find a new provider (probably just jinxed myself there). However, I might ask Jason to host a few of the demos I have running. We'll see how this server holds up for the next few days.

Moblogger and Jabber - it works!

I did some tinkering with Moblogger and Jabber this evening, and I'm stoked to report that I successfully posted to Roller! I grabbed some code from blojsim and had it running fairly quickly. The biggest problem I ran into? Finding a Jabber client that would actually post a message (rather than a chat). The Jabber clients I have on my machine don't seem to post messages, so finally I downloaded skabber and everything worked right away! Too bad I spent the last hour trying to figure out what I was doing wrong (nothing). This could present a major problem for users. Most will probably be like me and assume they can use any Jabber client, when in reality, it has to be one that can send messages. For all I know, they all do, and I was just too tired to figure it out.

There's a heckuva lot more work to do, but the proof of concept is complete. One thing is that Moblogger uses the Blogger API - which doesn't seem to support titles. Bummer - we can probably fake it though (add bold, and a couple of <br />'s). I suppose I should apply for that project space now from SourceForge and get the code checked in.