Raible Designs

RE: CVS, SSH and Passwords

In regards to my post on January 6th, I still haven't been able to get public/private key authentication to work b/w my Cygwin client and the BSD box where our CVS repository lives. Even after following these super simple instructions. For the past few weeks, I've been using the easy hack to remembering passwords with TortoiseCVS.

I'm revisiting this issue because I think public/private key authentication is necessary for Anthill to work. BTW, it was super easy to setup, but now it just hangs when trying to do a checkout from CVS. Damn security - sometimes it seems to hurt more than it helps...

[ANNOUNCE] Hibernate 1.2.3 Released!

Apparently the Hibernate folks don't advertise releases to the mailing lists, cause I never knew about this release (happened yesterday) - until I read Erik's blog today. Anyway, there's nothing new to this release, mostly bugfixes. I'll still be updating my projects that use Hibernate, as it's much easier to upgrade often than to try to migrate b/w releases. I've discovered this the hard way with XDoclet and Roller.

Trying to keep up with all these projects, and my affinity for nightly builds begs for me to implement Maven ASAP. I keep checking in JARS to CVS and removing them a week later!

[SOLVED] Connection Timeout using Oracle with Tomcat

I finally solved the problem I was having where the DBCP Connection Pool in Tomcat kept getting closed. At first, I thought it was happening every 24 hours. After we configured connection logging in Oracle, we discovered it was happening every 2 hours. After posting numerous (likely annoying) messages to tomcat-user and struts-user (with no resolution), I looked up my local Oracle user-group mailing list and fired off a message.

The first (and only) response solved my problem. It said I should check and see if there is a connection timeout on the firewall. Sure 'nuff, 90 minutes. So I wrote a DBPingServlet, coupled with an Ant task to make an HTTP Request to get the servlet, and scheduled it as a cron job. Whalla - the problem is fixed! Thank God - it was annoying to restart Tomcat every 2 hours! Of course, if folks where actually using our application - this would've never been an issue... ;-)

How To: Configure Log4j to notify you of errors

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I was interested in using Log4j's SMTPAppender to e-mail me messages when errors occured in my webapp. I discovered how easy it is a couple of days ago. Here's how to configure it.

1. Add mail to the log4j.rootCategory in log4j.properties: log4j.rootCategory=INFO, stdout, mail
2. Add the following configuration settings to log4j.properties:

# Configuration for receiving e-mails when ERROR messages occur.
log4j.appender.mail=org.apache.log4j.net.SMTPAppender
log4j.appender.mail.To=@ERROR-MAILTO@
log4j.appender.mail.From=@ERROR-MAILFROM@
log4j.appender.mail.SMTPHost=@ERROR-MAILHOST@
log4j.appender.mail.Threshold=ERROR
log4j.appender.mail.BufferSize=1
log4j.appender.mail.Subject=CCT Application Error

log4j.appender.mail.layout=org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout
log4j.appender.mail.layout.ConversionPattern=%p [%t] %C{1}.%M(%L) | %m%n

One question I have is that the ConversionPattern is kinda funky - where the line breaks don't seem to be carried into the e-mail (from exception.printStackTrace()). Any suggestions for a better configuration are appreciated. The To, From, and SMTPHost are all replaced with values from Ant during the build process.

The History of JSP

Erik tipped me off that the JSP 2.0 Proposed Final Draft 2 was released. Too bad they don't show a diff of what changed between Draft 1 and Draft 2, or do they? Let me know if you know of such a feature. I did, however, find a little history on Java Server Pages that might be of interest. This excerpt below is from the PDF.

Historical Note

The following individuals were pioneers who did ground-breaking work on the Java platform areas related to this specification. James Gosling’s work on a Web Server in Java in 1994/1995 became the foundation for servlets. A larger project emerged in 1996 with Pavani Diwanji as lead engineer and with many other key members listed below. From this project came Sun’s Java Web Server product.

Things started to move quickly in 1999. The servlet expert group, with James Davidson as lead, delivered the Servlet 2.1 specification in January and the Servlet 2.2 specification in December, while the JSP group, with Larry Cable and Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart as leads, delivered JSP 1.0 in June and JSP 1.1 in December.

The year 2000 saw a lot of activity, with many implementations of containers, tools, books, and training that target JSP 1.1, Servlet 2.2, and the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition. Tag libraries were an area of intense development, as were varying approaches to organizing all these features together. The adoption of JSP technology has continued in the year 2001, with many talks at the "Web, Services and beyond" track at JavaOne being dedicated to the technology.

The JSP 1.2 specification went final in 2001. JSP 1.2 provided a number of fine-tunings of the spec. It also added the ability for validating JSP pages through the XML views of a JSP page. JSP 1.2 also introduced a normative XML syntax for JSP pages, but its adoption was handicaped by several specification shortcomings.

JSP 2.0 is a major revision of the JSP language. Key new features include a simple Expression Language, tag files, substantial simplifications for writing tag handlers in Java and the notion of JSP fragments. JSP 2.0 also includes a revision of the XML syntax that addresses most of the problems in JSP 1.2. Tracking the industry in a printed document is at best difficult; the industry pages at the web site at http://java.sun.com/products/jsp do a better job.

[ANNOUCEMENT] Commons Betwixt 1.0 Alpha 1 released

I don't use Betwixt now, but Roller does, and I plan to when I create my next webapp Configuration object. So, I'm interested and felt like enlightening you with some possibly useful information. ;-)

The Commons Team is pleased to announce the release of Jakarta Commons Betwixt 1.0 Alpha 1 from the Apache Software Foundation. Betwixt maps beans to XML and back again in a flexible, configurable way using reflection.

This is the first release of betwixt. For more details, see the release notes included in the distributions.

Download: Binary and Source

Enhancing the build process with CruiseControl and Maven

Now that we've passed the first milestone on my project, we're getting into "What's Next." I'm going to propose that we use Maven and CruiseControl to create a tighter continuous integration and testing process. I hope to continue to use our current Ant build.xml, just re-arrange some jars and such for Maven. Think it'll work? I'd love to hear any experiences or helpful hints with either of these tools. I have a start on Maven, and I think I'll be fine getting started with it, but I've never used CruiseControl. Luckily, I have Java Development with Ant on my desk to help me out.

Pictures from Florida

We certainly had a great time this weekend in West Palm Beach (Florida). We saw a bunch of Julie's high school friends, and also had lots of fun hanging out with Grammy. The sign below made me laugh - I hope it has the same effect on you. Click on it for more pictures.

RE: Display Tag Library - donate it!

Shortly after posting my donate plea yesterday, I sent a similar message to the struts-user group and cc'd Ed Hill. Lo and behold, I got the following reply from Ed:

I would gladly support any efforts to continue (restart) development on my taglib. I've reserved some sourceforge space myself, but have not moved things over yet. Alas, it currently does what I need it to do and other priorities have well taken priority.

If someone steps up to volunteer to be the pumpkin keeper (sorry, Perl cultural reference), I will do what I can to help (redirect my web site on my personal machine to the new home, etc...)

I don't subscribe to the struts-user list, so if you would please forward this on to encourage any discussion, I would appreciate it.

Thank you!

Cool, I'll see what the struts-user list says today (I only subscribe to this 150+ message-a-day list at work), and see if I can find a pumpkin keeper.

Display Tag Library - donate it!

If you need a slick JSP Tag Library for sorting and paging data, the display tag library is a great library to use. However, it's got issues - just like any piece of software. I've fixed a couple on my own, but it definitely needs some work - and integration with Struts (i.e. for getting messages, or referencing forwards) would be awesome.

The problem is that Ed Hill doesn't seem to be working on it anymore - and there hasn't been a release since May 2002! Since I do have the source it wouldn't be hard to create a project at SourceForge for it. It would be great to get some input from Ed though. Last year, I think he even did a presenation on JSP Taglibs at Java One! I know there's lots of Struts developers that use the <display> tag - I wonder if they'd be interested. I think I'll send this to the mailing list (and cc Ed) and see what happens.