Raible Designs

Anthill, this site crashing and XSL

Anthill rocks. Once I got our CVS server configured to allow pserver authentication from localhost, it took less than 5 minutes to configure automated builds with our build.xml file. Next steps - running tests and deploying. I got deployment pretty much done today and all I have to do is add the tests as parameters to Anthill's build process. The only thing that worries me about Anthill is that they have an open-source version and a pay-for-it version. No company wants to pay for anything these days, and I'm afraid all the good stuff will end up in the pay-for-it version. To be honest, that's fine with me, since all the stuff I need right now is in the open-source version.

In case you haven't noticed, this site has been crashing daily and I only discover it when I actually check it. I'm definitely overdue for a Roller upgrade - especially considering the last one was in the October or November of last year. I want to contribute before I upgrade though, so it might be awhile. The problem I'm experiencing right now is OutOfMemory errors, so Keith wrote a perl script to check catalina.out for this string, and if it's there, it restarts Tomcat. Hopefully this will help me out until I upgrade Roller.

This morning, I did a little XSL for one of my moonlighting projects - and I was disappointed to find that there's no ends-with function in the current XSL spec. There's starts-with and contains, but no ends-with. I used contains in the end to check if a filename contains .avi, and if so, then use HTML for Windows Media Player, rather than QuickTime Player. Seems to work good enough for now.

Which conference would you attend?

I try to go to a conference every year. Last year it was Web Builder in Vegas, and it was a great time - but not enough Java stuff. So this year I'm going to try and attend a conference that is more up my alley. Here's the three I'm trying to decide between:

• Rocky Mountain Software Symposium (May 16-18, Denver)
• TheServerSide Symposium (June 27-29, Boston)
• O'Reilly Open Source Convention (July 7-11, Portland, OR)

In reality, I'd like to go to all. Regardless of the other two, I'm pretty sure I'll attend the one in Denver. I know Jay Zimmerman (the organizer), and I don't mind giving him my money at all. After all, he is a fellow Montanan! I'd really like to attend the one in Boston, but that'd be a spendy trip with hotel and all. As for the O'Reilly Convention in Oregon, my parents live in Salem (40 miles south of Portland), so that one might work out well. However, we usually try to do the 4th of July at the cabin, it might be rough travel to Oregon so quickly after basking in the Montana Summer. I'll probably settle for Denver and maybe hit up another one towards the end of the year.

Workflow Redux

Thanks to all who commented on my request for Java-based workflow engines. I especially liked Anthony's comment, and his list of possible frameworks.

This leads me to believe that if we are going to use a framwork, we should probably use Open Business Engine or Open for Business' workflow component - simply because I like standards. The question is - how easy are these to implement in a webapp? Any examples? I haven't researched either tool at all, just hoping someone else has.

[code sample] Using RowSetDynaClass from BeanUtils

On the struts-user list, they're discussing O/R Mapping tools. There seems to be lots of support for OJB and Torque, and I seem to be the only one that piped up for Hibernate. Meanwhile, Craig McClanahan (lead Struts Developer) sent an interesting code sample of using the new RowSetDynaClass to create a collection of DynaBeans from a ResultSet.

How to keep your job

Dave Thomas has published an interesting talk titled "How to Keep Your Job". I read the first few pages, and it definitely looks good. I'll read the rest later, right now I have to brave the rush hour traffic with 2" of fresh snow on the ground. Why o' why can't I just go skiing instead!

Know of a Java-based Workflow Engine?

Is there a Java API out there for workflow, or some package that will allow me to configure workflow for my app. At my day job, we're starting to get into some significant document workflow. For our next release, we'll probably just be keying off a status field - but I'm interest if there's an easy-to-implement workflow package that we can implement now (before we hard-code too much business logic). Thanks for any suggestions!

Using JMeter to test your webapps

I looked at JMeter last week, but gave up after attempting to use it for an hour. My primary reason for abandoning my quest to learn was that it's usage has not been budgeted into our development schedule. If I manage to convince the schedulers that it's a good idea to use, I'll be definitely reading/doing this tutorial on JMeter. The section describing recording a test case looks very promising and will make the entire process very easy (I hope). Tip o' the hat to Erik for this tip.

A bit of Tomcat History - the names

I got this nugget of information off the tomcat-user list this morning.

I talked to the original Tomcat author, James Duncan Davidson, about the 
name choice. He gave me a surprising answer. Here's a bit of history...

Tomcat was born in response to the need for an independant servlet 
specification implementation. James wrote it hoping that it would 
eventually be open sourced. He figured that since most open source 
projects had O'reilly books about them that he should name it after an 
animal. Essentially he was thinking of an animal that would go on the 
cover of an O'reilly book. He came up with "Tomcat" since the animal 
represented something that could take care of itself and fend for 
itself. That's how he came up with the name.

And Craig McClanahan tells us why he named the Catalina Engine so:

Using "Catalina" was my idea, because I
wrote most of the original code that became it.  The reasons are mundane,
but here they are for the record:

* Even though I don't live in Southern CA, I've always liked
  what I've read and seen of Catalina Island.

* One of the towns on the island is Avalon, and we were (at the
  beginning) considering using the Avalon Framework
  (http://jakarta.apache.org/avalon/) for the internal architecture.
  It would have been a cute tie-in, but alas it didn't happen
  that way.

* When I'm coding, I regularly have one or more cats wandering
  around my lap and adding to the whitespace when they don't
  think I put enough (you don't need fingers to press the space bar :-).

Another "code name" you'll hear in the Tomcat world is Jasper -- that's
the name of the JSP page compiler part of Tomcat.  That name was carried
over from even before my time, but I'm sure it probabbly came from the
alliteration (JaSPer).

Hibernate Doco Goodies

The Hibernate Developers have added some new documentation to their site. If you've worked with Hibernate at all, or you're hoping to, these are a must read. I still haven't figured out the parent child stuff with composite-ids, and I'm hoping these two links will help show me the light. I'll make sure and put an example into struts-resume if/when I figure it out. To quote:

Everyone should read these newly added pages: Parent / Child Relationship and Understanding Collection Performance.

Thanks to whomever contributed this documentation. FYI, I sent a e-mail to the xdoclet-devel mailing list re: Hibernate 2.0 DTD support, but haven't heard anything yet. I'd probably have better luck if I just contributed a patch. This week looks like a bad week for open source moonlighting - I've got a 4 days to get 40 hours in, and my part-time client wants me to pump out a new feature before I head to Steamboat for the weekend. Life is good as a person/father, but poor right now as an OSS Developer. I feel like a slacker, but I'm happy so that's good - it's all about priorities right?! ;-)

Display Tag Library Project setup at SourceForge

I have successfully setup a project at SourceForge for continued development of the Display Tag Library. If you have made enhancements to this library, please let me know and I'll make you a developer on the project. Also, I'm looking for a Admin with SF project admin experience to manage the sucker. Mailing lists should be setup in the next 6-24 hours.

Your project registration for SourceForge.net has been approved.

Project Descriptive Name: Display Tag Library
Project Unix Name: displaytag
CVS Server: cvs.displaytag.sourceforge.net
Shell/Web Server: displaytag.sourceforge.net

Your DNS will take up to a day to become active on our site. While waiting for your DNS to resolve, you may try shelling into shell.sourceforge.net and pointing CVS to cvs.sourceforge.net.