Raible Designs

Deploying to Tomcat using Ant

If you're using Tomcat 4.1.x, did you know you can deploy using an Ant task that ships with Tomcat. You'll need to add $CATALINA_HOME/server/lib/catalina-ant.jar to your classpath, but then you can configure your ant task as follows:

<taskdef name="deploy" classname="org.apache.catalina.ant.DeployTask"/>

<deploy url="${manager.url}"
         username="${manager.username}"
         password="${manager.password}"
         path="/${name}"
         war="file:/${dist.dir}/${name}.war" />

I haven't tried it, but it looks cool. Right now I use a simple copy task that works pretty well for me, so no need to change at this point.

<target name="deploy" depends="package-web" if="tomcat.home"
    description="unwar into the servlet container's deployment directory">
          
    <unwar src="${webapp.dist}/${webapp.war}" 
        dest="${tomcat.home}/webapps/${webapp.name}"/>
    
</target>

If you know of any advantages to using Tomcat's deploy task, or you'd like to share your experience using it - please post a comment.

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.

iMovie, iPhoto, iCurve and Zeldman Redesigns

Apparently, Apple is going to release iMovie 3 and iPhoto 2 today. Thanks to Erik for the tip. Hopefully, I'll be downloading later today.

James recommends buying iCurve. After looking at their site, you can see that it would look nicely next to your new 23" display. Couple that with a 17" PowerBook and you've just spend a whole lotta money. For me, it's a waste of money as my Mac is really nothing more than iCandy and a nice Jukebox. I'll still trying and rationalize buying the 23 and the 17 though...

Zeldman has redesigned again, and I actually like it better than the last design. It almost inspired me to come up with some new themes for Roller. I really like James's Plain Jane approach. Maybe I'll replicate his and Zeldman's... someday.

Finally, the good/bad in my life. The Good: it was in the 60s yesterday and it's supposed to be even nicer today. I'm taking my bike to work and I hope to take a ride around lunchtime. Also, my sister and parents are flying in for the weekend. It'll be the first time that Abbie and Aunt Kalin have met. The Bad: I lost my phone. And I lost my sunglasses a couple of weeks ago. Damn.

[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!

Cool Log Analyzer: AWStats

Both Jeff and Anthony provide us with a tip to look at AWStats.

AWStats is a short for Advanced Web Statistics. It's a free tool that generates advanced web (but also ftp or mail) server access statistics graphically. This log analyzer works as a CGI or from command line and shows you all possible information your log contains, in few graphical web pages.

This package looks very cool - and it's free, Free, FREE! I wonder if I can get my ISP to replace my existing stats software with this one.

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.

Good Prices Galore: T68i and Apples 23" Cinema Display

I found a tip from Gizmodo today that the T68i from Sony Ericsson (I have this phone and love it) is now FREE (with service activation) at Amazon.com.

I also did a bit of surfing and discovered that Apple's 23-inch Cinema Display is now only $1999! Still a little rich for my blood, I'll wait until it hits $1200 this fall.

Back From Florida

We all survived the Florida trip and we arrived home safely a couple of hours ago. Abbie was awesome on the plane(s) and only cried when she was hungry. I'll post pictures soon. Also, it was cool to find that there was FREE wireless Internet access at the Fort Lauderdale airport. That's where I discovered this site was down, and Keith fixed it over the course of the day. It turned out to be related to the Tomcat/MySQL Connection - which was preventing the AJP Apache/Tomcat connector from starting. Restarting MySQL fixed the problem.

BTW, if you're flying Delta on your next trip - didja know you can check-in online 6 hours before your flight? You just print out your boarding pass and show it at the gate. Very cool in my book.

Roller Development Sidelined

Unfortunately, I won't be working on Roller tonight like I'd hoped. It's 9:30 right now and I'm just finishing up my first release at the new job. I'd rather not pull an all-nighter after working a 50-hour week in 4 days. Ugh - I'm burnt. Good to be done though - and the customers here (internal) are really excited about using a webapp to do their jobs.

Sorry Roller, you're going to have to wait a while for my features. I'm planning on taking my PowerBook, but I won't promise anything. The last time I took it on a trip and tried to get some work done - it was brutal. I was up until 6:00 a.m. trying to finish my first release for the last project I was on. I gave up and slept for an hour - hoping to finish it up on the plane. Needless to say, I suck developing on a Mac and it took me all the way until Monday morning to release. The client was furious and the project almost ended right then and there. I tried to quit, but they wouldn't let me.

It's kinda funny that it's been almost a year since then, and I'm in the same situation again. Luckily, I finished before my plane took off this time! I wish I could work on ya Roller, but I need a vacation...