Raible Designs

Is there an Instant Messaging API for Java?

I got to thinking on my way into work this morning - is there an Instant Messaging API for Java. I suppose it would help if there was an IM standard, just like there's an e-mail standard (SMTP). I suppose that Jabber is kinda close. Here's why I'm interested. There's a few things I get e-mails on now that are simply "notifications." For instance, Log4j errors, Anthill build notifications and comment notifications from this site. I'd love to be able to program these to call a more configurable messaging system - so I could set it to send me IM's or possibly even SMS messages (the problem with SMS is it costs $$ now). I suppose I could setup a Jabber server and use their API to send messages, but I'm hoping this is already done for me. It'd be slick to parse an e-mail address and based on whether it's @hotmail, @msn, @yahoo or @aol, it'd send it through the appropriate gateway. Anyone know of an API that makes with as easy as sending e-mail with JavaMail?

RE: Where's the $$ in Java

Danno Ferrin asks "Where's the $$ at in Java?" I don't think I have the answer to this, but I can say that the money has certainly declined in the last year. I wanted to comment on this post, because I think I've found myself an interesting niche. There seem to be few Java Developers that know UI Development stuff like CSS, HTML and JavaScript. When I say know, I mean really know it in the sense that they could construct a good looking web page from scratch. On most of the projects I've been on, sure there have been UI Developers, but that's all they knew was CSS, HTML and JavaScript - they didn't know much Java (if any at all). I'm not saying it's impossible for developers to know both Java and UI Technologies, just that it's rare. So if you want to create a niche for yourself as a Java Developer - learn the UI stuff. If you're a UI Developer, learn the Java stuff. It can't hurt can it?

Is it possible to lock files with CVS?

I don't think this is possible, but since a co-worker asked - I'm relaying the question to you, the experts. Using CVS, it is possible to "checkout" a file for editing, and to lock it on the CVS server, so no one else can check it in. If this feature exists, I'd love to use it. Also, if anyone knows how to hookup sending e-mails for commits on a barebones CVS install, enlighten me. SourceForge makes it easy using synchmail, but Google doesn't even know about this tool - must be a SF script.

Update: Anthony has given me some good tips in the comments of this post. I've had some success in getting e-mail notification setup, but I'm still having some issues. To configure it, I checked out CVSROOT, and edited the loginfo file, adding the following line:

^project /usr/bin/mailx -c $USER -s "[cvs-commit] %{sVv}" [email protected]

When I get in a file, I get:

Checking in build.properties;
/export/home/cvsr/project/build.properties,v  <--  build.properties
new revision: 1.7; previous revision: 1.6
done
1.6... User unknown
1.7... User unknown
build.properties... User unknown
/export/home/mattra/dead.letter... Saved message in /export/home/mattra/dead.letter

I do receive the e-mail, but it's addressed to 1.6@cvsserver, 1.7@cvsserver, build.properties@cvsserver and [email protected]. I'm sure it's an easy fix, comments are appreciated.

Update 2: Our SysAdmin solved the e-mail issue with the following lines in loginfo:

^project /usr/bin/mailx -s '[cvs-commit] %{sVv}' [email protected]
^server_config /usr/bin/mailx -r [email protected] -s '[cvs-commit] %{sVv}' [email protected]

I'm no UNIX expert, so that's why I'm posting this here - that way I can use it the next time I need to set this up. Alternative approaches are welcome and encouraged!

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.

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.

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 XDoclet to generate your validation.xml?

Are you using XDoclet to generate the validation.xml file for Struts' Validator Framework? If you're using Struts and you're not using the Validator - you should be IMO. It makes both client-side and server-side validation soooo simple. Using XDoclet to generate the key file (validation.xml) makes implementation a piece of cake. We have Erik to thank for this wonderful addition to XDoclet. Much appreciated sir!

I'm guessing that not many people are using this feature b/c it works kinda funky right now. It disregards the order of your properties in your ValidatorForm and generates entries in alphabetical order. This is great except the client-side (JavaScript) piece of the Validator uses the order to determine which fields to validate first. This has caused a slight headache for me on my project, so I fixed it. Checkout XDoclet's JIRA for the bug and the patch. Hopefully it'll get committed soon, but in the meantime, I'll continue using my patched Apache module that allows me to generate ActionForms from POJOs and orders my validation.xml correctly.

Java-based Forums and Free Software

I've always thought that Jive was a great product, especially when I first found it. It was free then, now it costs $450. It it worth it - yes! But it's tough to recommend this to clients when there are free alternatives. Here's one courtesy of Mathias Bogaert:

Discovered mvnForum, a JSP 1.1/Servlet 2.2 based forum application (GPL), which looks kinda neat...check out their demo.

I have this same problem at work. I told my project manager that I knew of three Bug Tracking systems: Bugzilla, JIRA and Scarab. I currently use Bugzilla for a client and I'm familiar and happy with it. I also use JIRA for Roller and XDoclet, and think it's a great piece of software. Even though I've never used Scarab, I installed it thinking that it was better than Bugzilla, and also b/c the guys from Apache are moving to it. After wrestling with the setup a bit, I got it working. Scarab's main goal seems to be ease of setup - they should take some lessons from Atlassian. Actually, we all should - I had JIRA downloaded/installed/running in under 5 minutes. Anyway, back to the point - I showed Scarab to my project manager and he went off to investigate. An hour later he came back and said he just didn't get it. I didn't have the bandwidth to investigate, and since I've never used it - we're going to use Bugzilla. I prodded and poked and tried to get JIRA; I even downloaded and installed the 30 day trial. No joy, free is what they want.

Speaking of free software, I'm inspired to do some work on Roller - especially with all the stuff that Dave and Lance have done lately. Also, my RSS feed seems to refresh old stories in Radio's aggregator, so I'm due for an upgrade. I hope to add some of the following features over the next week or so (when do we release 0.9.7?):

• Encypted password support - both programmatically and using Tomcat's Realm. The way I've done this in the past is to create a LoginServlet that my form-based authentication maps to. This servlet does the encryption and redirects to j_security_check. I'll also include an option for an SSL-based login. Both password encryption and SSL will be off by default - and changes will be allowed in web.xml.
• Remember Me. You're gonna love this - I sure do.
• Remember Me in Comments. It's definitely needed if you do a lot of commenting. The question is - do you automatically do it - or allow users to say "forget me." Auto is easiest.
• Add support for e-mailing comments and subscribing to comments when posting a comment.
• Dig into XDoclet and make the upgrade to 1.2 Beta 2 - fixing the bug we have with Castor. I hope I'm familiar enough with how XDoclet works to make this happen. I looked through the code today and it should be working from what I can tell.
• Upgrade to Struts 1.1 Beta 3.

Sheez! I just created a whole bunch of work for myself didn't I? Hmmm, now how do I schedule all this and get it done in a week? A late night, an early morning, a weekend? I can't decide... Oooh, here's an idea - Julie and Abbie are leaving for Florida next Thursday (I'm joining them Friday) - I could do it next Thursday night. Hopefully I can get it done sooner, but hopefully a lot of this can wait until then.

Simple Intentions turn into Remember Me Login

I woke up this morning, and had the simple intention of blogging about one of my favorite tools, The Color Schemer. If you're a wanna-be designer like me, it's awesome. It helps you match "like" colors and also allows you to select any color on your screen. It's one of my most invaluable web design tools. Putting a tip about this was my only hope at 4:30 when I sat down at this computer. Now it's 5:39.

Why am I still here? I got caught up in reading the Colorado Bloggers mailing list - which actually got some traffic yesterday. This is one of the first times I've received a message from the list. One of the members pointed me to a another Photo Album for the web. It's called Gallery and she has an example setup. Looks like it runs on PHP. Well that shouldn't have taken me an hour, right?

The activity that's filled my last hour has been wrestling with Erik Hatcher's request for "remember me" functionality in a J2EE app, using container-managed security. The good news is that I did get it working - here's how:

1. First, I added a checkbox called "rememberMe" to my login.jsp. When the user clicks "submit", I do some JavaScript logic. This logic entails saving the username and password as cookies - but only if the rememberMe checkbox is checked. If rememberMe is checked, a cookie is set called "rememberMe" with a value of "true."
   
2. Using Roller's BreadCrumbFiler (maps to /*), I added some logic to check for the existence of the "rememberMe" cookie, and if it exists, to route the user to "j_security_check?j_username="+usernameCookie+"&j_password="+passwordCookie.

This all worked fine and dandy right off the bat - took me about 10 minutes to implement. The problem was that a user couldn't "logout." So I've spent the last hour (now it's been an hour and 1/2) with my own ignorance trying to delete cookies (and doing null checks and such) so users could logout. And I just got it working - fricken sweet! What a way to start the day! The only problem I could see now is if a user tries a username/password and selects "remember me", but then closes their browser. The BreadCrumbFilter will keep trying to authenticate them - yep, I just verified that that's a problem. It's also a problem when they enter an invalid password and select rememberMe.

One way to solve this is to not set the "rememberMe" and "password" cookies until someone has successfully authenticated. Maybe I could use the breadcrumbs in the BreadCrumbFilter to check the last URL accessed, and if it's already j_security_check, don't do the routing. Anyway, here's the code that does the heavy lifting in BreadCrumbFilter:

Cookie rememberMe = RequestUtil.getCookie(request, "rememberMe");
// check to see if the user is logging out, if so, remove the
// rememberMe cookie and password Cookie
if (request.getRequestURL().indexOf("logout") != -1 && 
	(rememberMe != null)) {
    if (log.isDebugEnabled()) {
        log.debug("deleting rememberMe-related cookies");
    }

    response =
        RequestUtil.deleteCookie(response,
                                 RequestUtil.getCookie(request,
                                                       "rememberMe"));
    response =
        RequestUtil.deleteCookie(response,
                                 RequestUtil.getCookie(request,
                                                       "password"));
}

if (request.getRequestURL().indexOf("login") != -1) {
    // container is routing user to login page, check for remember me cookie
    Cookie username = RequestUtil.getCookie(request, "username");
    Cookie password = RequestUtil.getCookie(request, "password");

    if ((rememberMe != null) && (password != null)) {
        // authenticate user without displaying login page
        String route =
            "j_security_check?j_username=" +
            RequestUtils.encodeURL(username.getValue()) +
            "&j_password=" +
            RequestUtils.encodeURL(password.getValue());

        if (log.isDebugEnabled()) {
            log.debug("I remember you '" + username.getValue() +
                      "', authenticating...");
        }

        response.sendRedirect(response.encodeRedirectURL(route));

        return;
    }
}

I can post the code for RequestUtil if you need it. The class RequestUtils (for encoding URLs) is a Struts class.

CVS, SSH and Passwords

Anyone know of a utility that can be used to "remember" my CVS password? I can only access the server using SSH (similar to SourceForge) and it's getting to be a real pain to type my password every time.