Raible Designs

[ANNOUNCE] StrutsTestCase v2.0 Released!

StrutsTestCase v2.0 improves support for Struts 1.1 (including better support for testing Tiles and sub-applications), provides several requested enhancements, and fixes many reported defects.

The project home page can be found here:

    http://strutstestcase.sf.net

Notes for this release can be found here:

    http://sf.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=157811

Questions and comments are always welcome!

Deryl Seale -

I just replaced the 1.9.5 JAR with the new 2.0 JAR and all my Action tests ran lickedy-split! Now I just have to get off my duff and write some Action tests for Roller.

WebWork and XWork Mavenized

I currently monitor the WebWork mailing list because I'm interested in the framework, and it's good to know what's going on over there. This morning I was impressed to see that one of the developers (seemingly overnight) Mavenized both WebWork and XWork. Very cool IMO. I especially like the Project Reports. If I do promote Moblogger to SourceForge, I think I'll mavenize it first thing. It's a small project at this point, so it'd probably be fairly easy to do. And we all know that some of the most successful open source projects are built on top of good documentation. So the real question is - wiki vs. maven?

Cannot load JDBC driver class 'null'

I'm going to post my newly-found solution to an often-seen error in hopes that it will help someone. In the struts-resume demo application that runs on this server, I've been getting the following error message everytime I startup the context.

java.sql.SQLException: Cannot load JDBC driver class 'null'
        at org.apache.commons.dbcp.BasicDataSource.createDataSource(BasicDataSource.java:529)
        at org.apache.commons.dbcp.BasicDataSource.getConnection(BasicDataSource.java:312)

In the past, this problem has been caused by not having the JDBC driver in my $CATALINA_HOME/common/lib directory, having an invalid username/password, or having another JNDI setting incorrect in server.xml. The strange thing about the problem this time was that everything was correct, and the app ran fine, save for the error (in the log file) on startup. Tonight I figured out the solution - I needed to grant permissions for the user with the specific hostname of the machine. I've been using the following SQL to grant permissions to the app's db user. This is the syntax for MySQL, it is probably different for other databases.

grant all privileges on resume.* to username@"%" identified by "password";

While this has worked on my WinXP machine, it failed on my RH9 box tonight. The solution turned out to be specifying the specific HOSTNAME (i.e. drevil.raibledesign.home), rather than "%".

grant all privileges on resume.* to username@HOSTNAME identified by "password";

Here Google, come and get it!

JSPs compiled by Jikes

I configured Tomcat to compile JSPs using Jikes, and everything seems to work just fine. So good in fact, that I don't know that the change has taken effect. Anyone know how to verify that jikes is truly compiling my JSPs?

I'm willing to bet...

... that this site crashes more than any other website I know of. It sucks. It was down most of the day due to a max of 20 database connections per MySQL user. When the automated process of restarting Tomcat for OutOfMemory errors took place, the database connections where not released for some reason. Damn. It was down a lot on Sunday and Monday because there was MySQL connection problems. NOTE: All of these issues are NOT related to Roller. Keith is going to try to setup a new box for me tonight to test on, and possibly move this site to. If that doesn't resolve these issues, I'm outta here and onto a new provider.

Running a process from a servlet

Note to self: This may help you in running moblogger from a servlet:

Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("/bin/chmod 700 /path/to/myfile");

I found this nugget on the tomcat-user mailing list - and I'm assuming it can be used to run any command-line process.

Hibernate's Query by Criteria (What I'd like to see)

After trying to work with Hibernate's new Query by Criteria feature in version 2.0, I've come up with a page detailing what I'd like to see. Basically, this page results from the API not working for my needs - and since it's still in its infancy, hopefully this document will help shape it future. I'll add a comments link on the document (to this post) for any feedback or comments.

DHCP and Dynamic DNS on Red Hat

I found a great howto today for setting up DHCP and Dynamic DNS server on Red Hat 8.0. It literally took me about 5 minutes to get it installed and running. 5 minutes later, I had all my machines (WinXP, Win2K, OS X, Linksys Print Server) connected and working. Very slick!

Even better is I did it with Red Hat 9, which I downloaded last weekend and installed lazily over a few days. The upgrade from 8.0 was like butter. I like Void Main's Red Hat Tips so much, I'm tempted to mirror them in hopes this URL won't go away. But for now, I'll have faith and hope it's a true permalink. Hope you don't mind that I've stuffed this under my Java category - just doesn't seem fit for General.

[Request] Moblogger on Sourceforge

Hey Russ, what do you think about putting Moblogger on SourceForge? If you have something against SourceForge, that's fine, how about putting it on a publicly accessible CVS server so folks can contribute?

I have a few reasons for wanting this:

• I want to see title support - maybe signified by a space in the subject after the password.
• I'd like to see the ability to specify multiple blogs/e-mail boxes in the config file (agentsettings.xml).
• A sample web interface would be awesome. For instance, the ability to edit the config file via a JSP and start/stop the agent through this same interface. Maybe even use Betwixt for writing/reading the config file.
• Use Velocity or XSL for templates - rather than hardcoding it in the Java code.
• This seems like a great project to integrate Jabber-blogging into.

If you give the OK, I can request the project be setup - but I thought you'd like to be the admin on it.

Jabber and Roller

This would be a much better post if I'd already developed the software, and this was an announcement. But I don't want to develop the software per se, I just want to use it. So I'm putting this idea out there in hopes that someone has already developed the software. My e-mail to the jabber-dev mailing list pretty much sums it all up.

Hello,

My name is Matt Raible and I am a contributor on the Roller Weblogger
project (http://rollerweblogger.org).  I'm looking to add support for 
Jabber as a blogging client.  Currently, we support the BloggerApi and 
MetaWeblogApi.  What I'd like to know is if there is a project already 
that converts Jabber's XML files to XML-RPC calls - or if I could simply 
use an XSL stylesheet to transform and resend to my blog.

Thanks,

Matt

I'd love to add a Jabber Powered logo to my About page. I did some work with Jabber last year, basically just installing and configuring it - both very simple. The project I was on was also planning on adding support for creating new jabber accounts on-the-fly when a new user was created in our database. It's all XML, so it's probably all pretty easy. Anyway, I bought a Programming Jabber book and it's been collecting dust ever since. The cool thing about Jabber is if we setup a Jabber server (i.e. jabber.freeroller.net), then I think it'd be possible to blog via your favorite IM client. Please leave your thoughts and comments - and any links to anything that might already exists.