Raible Designs

[ANNOUNCE] Struts BSF (Scriptable Actions) 0.3

Boy, Don Brown is a busy man this week. He releases a new version of the Struts Cacoon plugin on Monday, and today he released a new version of Struts BSF.

This project allows Struts Actions to be written in the scripting language of one's choice rather than as Java classes. It uses the Beans Scripting Framework to allow scripts to be written in any language BSF supports like Perl, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, BeanShell, and I believe even VBScript.

Version 0.3 adds the ability to pass parameters from the Struts config file, a pluggable filter system to pre-define custom variables, more documentation, and more. [Learn More]

Looks cool, but I have no need (currently). If you're using the BSF and have experiences to share, please do so. I'm interested, it just hasn't made it past my crap filter yet.

A little excitement in the Open Source Community

From Matt Croydon:

Thanks to Russ and the guys at #mobitopia, here's an Inquirer article on the JBoss fork/coup:

8:00 am -- Seven consultants for The JBoss Group publicly announced the immediate termination of their contracts and the foundation of their new company, Core Developers Network. Their charter "is to provide a commercial infrastructure to enable open source contributors to deliver their professional expertise to the marketplace, independent of their contributions to open source projects".

For some reason, reading the article made my heart beat a little faster. Good? Bad? Who cares! It's engrossing!

Draggable IFRAMEs

Matt Kruse's JavaScript Toolbox is awesome. So good, in fact, that I've actually made a donation (small, but nevertheless, a donation). Today, I noticed a new script: Draggable IFRAMEs. I dig it. Don't know that I'll ever use it, but I've always liked drag n' drop examples for the web. While they are cool, I've found that sometimes a true popup window is much easier.

Open XUL Alliance Site Goes Live

From The ServerSide.com, I became aware of the Open XUL Alliance.

The Open XUL Alliance site went live today.

The goal is to promote all things XUL (XML UI Language) and also to provide free test suites to help ensure interoperability between different XUL motors/browsers/runtimes and free, open-source show-case examples (aka blue prints) to demo the power of XML for creating UIs.

For now the Open XUL Alliance Site sports:

* XUL News Wire - Breaking News About XUL; also known as the xul-announce Mailing List

* The Richmond Post - Chronicle of the XUL Revolution; XUL News Weblog

* xul-talk Mailing List - Beyond Mozilla; Talk about XUL issues touching more than one XUL motor/browser/runtime

* XUL Lecture Series - Rich Clients, Rich Browser, Rich Portals and much more

* XUL Link-opida - Articles, FAQs, Cheat Sheets and much more

Use the XUL, XForms and SVG trio to build rich clients for web services today.

Visit the Open XUL Alliance

News you can use - Quartz Plugin for Struts

While plowing through the 5000+ e-mails at work this morning, I tripped over the QuartzPlugin for Struts. This looks very cool - a way to configure scheduled tasks (i.e. a cron job) as part of your web application.

The QuartzPlugin for Struts allows you to automatically configure and start a Quartz scheduler upon initialization of your Struts application. It also places itself in your application context to make a scheduler available within your actions. That is, in addition to statically scheduled events like "every six hours," you can dynamically schedule events from Struts actions for "24 hours from now".

Now I just hope I get a chance to utilize this bad boy in the near future.

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?!

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.

Windows Media Player Blogging Plug-In

If you have Windows XP and Windows Media Player 9, you might want to check this out.

Blogging Plug-in for Windows Media Player 9 Series
Add more personality to your blog with this plug-in that adds the artist, song, and album name to the Windows Media Player 9 Series title bar. Blogging clients like LiveJournal, w.bloggar, Semagic, and others can then easily add that information to your next entry while you compose.

It sounds cool at least. If you've tried it, please post your review as a comment!

Blogger API and Titles

Is there any compelling reason that moblogger should support the MetaWeblog API in addition to the Blogger API? I like Blogger because it's already in moblogger and it looks pretty simple. Roller supports it, so why not?

The only problem I have with it is that it doesn't support titles. For Roller, here's a workaround I was thinking of. If the post has a <title> tag in it, use the contents of that tag as the title, or for mobile users, we'd also offer this alternative:

#t put your title here #

Where "#t" is the trigger that there's a title (short for phone bloggers) and "#" is an indicator signifying the title has ended. It's a very simple way IMO to add title support to Roller for Blogger clients.