Raible Designs

Subversion - CVS Replacement?

I heard of Subversion this morning from Erik Hatcher's publisher. It looks to be a CVS replacement, but as I'm happy with CVS (and satisfied that I've learned it), I don't think I'll be using it any time soon. It comes from the folks at Tigris.org, who have also provided us with Scarab. I am using Scarab, or I've at least installed it at work and intend to use it on our project. Scarab is a bug tracking application that is cheaper than JIRA and supposedly better than Bugzilla. I wish I could use JIRA b/c I really like the product, but as with most things - clients just want you to do something with free tools, rather than shelling out some extra cash to get things like IDEA and JIRA.

BTW, I'm sure you've heard that IDEA is on sale now. Will I buy it? Nope, I'm in love with Eclipse. Would I buy it if I'd used it for more than 2 days? Probably, but everything is working as I like it in Eclipse, and I'm such an IDE-minimalist, it just makes no sense.

You might be wondering why I was speaking with Erik Hatcher's publisher this morning? Heck if I know?! He sent me an e-mail saying that Erik had recommended me as a source for the newest and coolest Java Tools. Thanks Erik - but I don't know that I'm much of a source. I told him I thought that Maven, XDoclet and Hibernate would probably get a lot of attention in the coming months. He was interested in seeing if they deserved books. I don't think XDoclet does, as it's got so many different modules, it would be difficult to cover them all. It would be VERY cool to see a book written that develops an application using these tools.

This is why Erik's book is popular - people can take stuff from it and learn. Sure, they learn initially by copy/paste, but it's still learning. Hibernate probably deserves a book as I can't seem to grok it - although I did delete approx. 100 lines of code today after I learned some good tricks. I don't know if Erik's publisher was serious, but he did ask me if I'd be interested in writing a book. I told him "thanks, but no thanks" - Julie has asked that I never write a book again. I can't blame her, it's too much stress and computer time in my opinion. Especially considering that I killed my weekly Virus Scan (Friday nights) for the 10th time since I'm working (again) on a Friday night. It hasn't run in over two months!

I'd definitely like to speak about this stuff, maybe at conferences or such. Of course, I'd have to learn a helluva lot more before I could make that happen.

Connecting to your home folder on OS X

I know I had it working at one time, but I can't seem to get it working now. In Jaguar, I have "Windows File Sharing" on, and I can map a drive to it from my Windows machine, but no username nor password I type in will work. I've tried minime\matt and everything for the username, but no joy. I also have the User (me) setup so they can login from Windows. What gives?!

Copying Properties: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

I realize that having an ActionForm and a POJO with the same getters/setters is ridiculous, but please bear with me for this example. I have a Form and a POJO with Strings, Longs and Dates. The Longs and the Dates get converted into Strings when I get the data from the database using BeanUtils.copyProperties. This works great.

BeanUtils.copyProperties(userForm, user);

However, when going back, it's a different story - here's the ugly way:

SimpleDateFormat format = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd");

Date dateChanged = format.parse(userForm.getDateChanged());
Date dateCreated = format.parse(userForm.getDateCreated());

user = new User(userForm.getUserId(), userForm.getPassword(), 
                Long.valueOf(userForm.getDesktopId()),
                Long.valueOf(userForm.getCubeId()), 
                userForm.getCreatedBy(), dateCreated,
		userForm.getChangedBy(), dateChanged);

While this works, it's ugly and a pain. I want something like the ActionForm-Value Object mapper. This mapper allows you to easily copy properties between VOs (or Hibernate Objects) and Forms, and vise-versa.

vo = FormToVOMapper.map(form, new ExampleVO());

So I could do something as simple as user = FormToVOMapper.map(userForm, new User()); I like this mapper and I used it on my last project, where it works great. However, I get the feeling that developers in the Struts Community are using something better - and I want to use it. So please, tell me what it is and lets figure out the best way to do this. Another method I've used in the past is to set the VO (or object) on the form itself, allowing for setting of Strings without copying - and setting dates on the form, to be manipulated by the setter. This framework worked great, and I was actually the happiest with it out of any of the above. Chime in and give me your opinions!

Bailey's at 9:00 a.m.

I was up until 3:00 a.m. last night as a friend was passing through town and stopped by to say hi. He (and his dad) didn't get to our place until 12:30, so I didn't get to visit long, but it was worth the lack of sleep. I got up at 7:00 and went to work feeling like a zombie - only to find out that there was a Bailey's party at 9:00! That's right - one of the ladies made some home-made Baileys and brought it in for everyone to enjoy. I have to say, it's the first time I've had spiked coffee at work!

We just got home from dinner at a friend's house and I am beat. I do have a couple questions and news items though.

• Is it possible to configure Java to use a proxy server to connect to the Internet. The only way to connect to the Internet at work is to setup your browser to use an Automatic Configuration URL. This means that Struts can't validate to it's DTDs (unless I change to use a System DTD) and I can't use Maven to download jars.
• Can Hibernate generate classes and it's mapping files from an existing database?
• Konstantin Priblouda has published a demo of using Hibernate, XDoclet and JBoss. You will need a current version of XDoclet from CVS to run it.

Erik Hatcher's Blog

I saw it a couple weeks ago, but now Erik appears to be updating it regularly. Just in case you didn't know - you can find it here. Erik is an Ant Guru and has written many cool Struts extensions (i.e. LookupDispatchAction, XDoclet integration). He's made my life a lot easier with his Ant wisdom and Struts goodies - thanks Erik.

Jakarta's POI

I went to the kick-off party for my project tonight - too bad no one I'll be working with showed up! Oh well, everyone else that was there was very cool. Margaritas and nachos is always fun. I finally met the recruiter I've been working on the phone - and she's even cooler than she sounded on the phone. Apparently, there was a requirements meeting for the project on Monday. Doh! That would've probably been a good meeting to attend.

I heard that the hardest requirement will be parsing/reading Excel files, on a Unix box. I think the ol' POI project can come to the rescue for us.

The POI project consists of APIs for manipulating various file formats based upon Microsoft's OLE 2 Compound Document format using pure Java.

OLE 2 Compound Document Format based files include most Microsoft Office files such as XLS and DOC.

You just gotta love open source!

Why do you blog?

I received the e-mail below from Andy Katz (no need to broadcast his e-mail) this afternoon. Messages like this make blogging worthwhile and the world a better place in general.

Date: Tue Dec 17, 2002  12:10:11 PM America/Denver
Subject: thanks for the great site ...

hello matt,

i just wanted to drop you a quick note to let you know how much 
valuable and interesting information i find on your website 
every day!

thanks so much for taking the time to put it all together.  as 
you know, it's often difficult trying to stay on top of all the 
latest software and tools.  you make it that much easier as well 
as providing unbaised feedback and commentary on all of the above.

i look forward to visiting your site every morning.

AWESOME! I'm glad I could help and I'm even more pumped that you took the time to send me this e-mail. Thanks Andy, much appreciated. I feel the same way about reading Dave and Russell's sites - good stuff.

Eclipse Plugins and Hibernate

I found a new site with a list of Eclipse plugins tonight. I was hoping that the Ant View plugin could solve my Ant problems in Eclipse, but I can't seem to figure out what it does. I gave it the ol' 30 seconds of investigation - maybe I should read the documentation. The problem I'm having now is (after swapping Ant 1.4 jars for 1.5.1) is:

Unable to find a javac compiler;
com.sun.tools.javac.Main is not on the classpath.

Hmmm, works fine from Cygwin, and Eclipse (2.0.2) has tools.jar and rt.jar in the classpath. Must be time to download a nightly build.

There was a lot of talk today in the java.blogs community about Hibernate. I'm happy to see this as it feels like I just bought a new car and everyone is saying it's the best car on the road. I decided to use Hibernate based on Dave's implementation in Ag. It looked easy enough, so I figured - why not?! It turns out, at the same time, that the XDoclet folks were in the midst of creating a new hibernate module in CVS. In fact, I got the hibernate module from Joel Rosi-Schwartz (I'm assuming a hibernate developer) before it was even in the XDoclet source tree.

I got to be a guinea pig in making hibernate tags work with XDoclet. I have to say that with Dave's working example, I was able to markup a POJO with hibernate/xdoclet tags and generate my persistence layer in a matter of minutes. It just worked. Kinda like Tomcat IMHO. That's how software should be. Check out my security-example if you're interested in using Hibernate with XDoclet. The readme in the source will explain how to run initial generation and tests. Currently, it generates a Struts Validator Form and VO from an Entity bean (located at src/ejb/org/apache/template/User.java). Why? Because Struts Forms can only be generated from Entity Beans. This needs to change IMO. But at the same time, the EJB architecture is already in place, I just need to execute the ejb-related tasks, and I'm in business.

In other news, a couple of Struts related goodies:

• ONJava.com has an introduction to the Validator Framework by Chuck Cavanass, an Introduction to Eclipse and Creating Reports with FOP. I used FOP on a project last year around this time and it's super slick. It's basically using XSL to generate PDF and RTF from an XML file. I highly recommend using something like RTF2FO to generate an XSL Template from a Word document.
• Struts Kick Start is now shipping from Amazon. I'd buy all the Struts books just to say you have them. I've got three ;) Haven't read any. Damn, I wish I had the time! Reading Erik Hatcher's Java Development with Ant was one of the smartest things I did this year. Actually, the smartest thing I did was get my wife pregnant
• I downloaded TogetherSoft's Control Center to do some UML Modeling for the Struts Chapter, and found that they use Struts on their site. Nice...

XDoclet and EJBs

I saw the following on the xdoclet-user mailing list today:

Chapters from Manning's "EJB Cookbook", by Ben Sullins and Mark Whipple will be made available on TheServerSide for public review. A chapter on "Code generation" is now available for download. "Code generation" presents the most common uses of XDoclet, an open source tool, tightly integrated with Ant, that lets you generate source code or other files.

Also, I just received the following e-mail from a fellow Denverite, Mike Clark:

Subject: Nice Blog

Hi Matt!

I've been enjoying reading your blog for a while and meaning to introduce myself since we both live in Denver. I'm speaking at the DJUG in April, so perhaps we can meet each other there.

By the way, my weblog is at: http://www.clarkware.com/cgi/blosxom.

Nice - gotta like e-mails like that!! Apparently, Mike is the Author of BitterEJB and also has some chapters for review at TSS:

If you're into JMS and message-driven beans, my "Bitter Messages" chapter is up for review on TheServerSide. As always, any feedback you might have is greatly appreciated!

Matt on Google

Matt Croydon (yeah, I can't spell your last name either ;-) is the 45th Matt on Google. I'm at #213, hopefully all the Matt's in this post will boost my rankings. BTW, did you know you can adjust your preferences in Google to show more than just 10 records per page? Kinda handy for silly searches like this.