Raible Designs

Where do you locate your daemons?

On my current project, we're developing an application that has two components. One is a webapp that lives in Tomcat and the other is a standalone jar that runs as a daemon. The daemon checks an e-mail Inbox every few minutes and if there's new mail, it processes the Excel attachments and enters this information in a database. My question is: where on the filesystem should we put this daemon? We're running on Red Hat 8 - maybe /usr/local/mail-daemon or something? BTW, we were running on BSD, but it's Java wasn't up to snuff (didn't support 1.4) - so we're running Linux instead. I dig the Linux/Java combo - it just works!

Clustering Tomcat

If my load balancing with Tomcat and Apache article is not what you're looking for - maybe you want to setup Tomcat clustering. If so, check out the tomcat-javagroups project at SourceForge.

I saw a couple of e-mails yesterday on the tomcat-user mailing list asking about migrating a Resin-based application to Tomcat. Turns out that Resin let's you do a bunch of non-standard stuff and doesn't validate DTDs, so migrating can be a headache. So, if you're smart, you'll follow standards and chances are your webapp will work on all appservers. Kinda like XHTML - follow standards and the containers/browsers will follow.

Flash and J2EE and Apache 2.0.44

Erik hooks us up with some small but cool headlines on this early Tuesday morning.

Enhance your J2EE presentation layer. Flash Remoting introduces an alternative. Apache 2.0.44. A security and bug fix release.

While you're here (if you are actually viewing this post through a browser), check out the cool help tip on the picture of red rocks. Click and read. To see how I did this, check webfx.nu.

[ANNOUNCE] Manywhere Moblogger

Russ has released moblogger, which maybe exactly what I am looking for. It seems that I can use it to e-mail posts to this site.

This application runs as a background process that monitors a POP3 email account for new email, then downloads it, detaches any files such as pictures, sound or video, uses the Blogger API to post the text in the email to your blog and uses FTP to post the files to your server. Send the email from a phone and you immediately start "moblogging".
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When you send email, put your password in the subject line!! Since the blogger API doesn't support titles, this is a good place to make sure that some random person or spammer doesn't start posting to your blog by sending an email.

That's a cool way to get around the authentication problem. I think the latest blogger API does support titles, but I definitely could be mistaken. I suppose if I were an ambitious fellow, I could do some research on the bloggerDev mailing list - but I'll pass. Unfortunately, I dig titles and while I may use Russ's tool, I'll probably still have to edit/create titles. One thing I'd like to do with Roller's Editor UI is to make is WAP compatible - since it's XHTML, I could be able to create a set of JSPs with JSTL and XSL and blowee, there's your mobUI. I don't know that I'd actually ever use it though. I rarely even make phone calls on my T68i, let alone browse the web.

Another E-Mail to Blog Project

I found that someone else is doing an e-mail to blog project. Probably something to keep our eyes on for GeekBlog and Roller. BTW - does any blogging software support this? Maybe we can sponge some ideas of an existing implementation. My latest idea is to use digital certificates for authentication. Should work, right? Check out digital certificates from Thawte - there's even a link to get your FREE personal email certificate. I'll bite.

Safari has Tabs?

I found this nugget of information from James Duncan Davidson's blog tonight:

The big fuss since Safari was released has been the lack of tabbed browsing. I've been wanting it as well, but I've had this nagging suspicion that there may be a better way to do it. D'Arcy Norman appears to have stumbled into it. Take a look. (found via 0xdecafbad)

The screenshot from the post might inspire one to revisit using Safari over Chimera. However, if you've got a piece of #@#$! PowerBook like me, where Safari, Mail and Finder all quit are startup - it's just a hopeless dream. I'm afraid to call Apple Support b/c I doubt they can help and a re-install probably won't help either - unless I do a clean slate install. Sorry Apple, you've made it harder - not easier. It's probably a missing friggen font or something.

NOTE: The screenshot is NOT a current feature of Safari - just a mockup of how tabs might be done.

Connection Timeout using Oracle with Tomcat

Hopefully one of you java-bloggers has seen this before and can assist. I've already sent this to tomcat-users, but since this blog seems to be more google-friendly than mailing lists - I like to post problems/solutions here. Hope you don't mind.

I am using Tomcat's JDBCRealm as well as a DBCP Connection pool. I am connecting to Oracle 9, and everything works fine - for about 24 hours. I've experienced this with MySQL and adding autoReconnect=true to the connectionURL fixed the problem. However, adding this to Oracle's connectionURL causes a "Cannot load JDBC driver class 'null'". My connectionURL is:

jdbc:oracle:thin:username/password@host:1521:sid

Inspire Teamwork

I don't know what her name is, but she's got good stuff to say. I read her post this morning about self importance and thoroughly enjoyed it. So much, in fact, that I sent it to a co-worker.

Next time, I won't belittle my collegue behind his back because he didn't use a stringbuffer instead of a string when he was concatenating, I will just send an email to the whole team, copying the section from "effective programming", articulating innocently but clearly how the strings work compared to stringbuffers, believe me, I know, i will feel whole a lot better. And when someone comes up to me with an idea, I will listen like my life depends on it, I will show my fear of not getting it, ask a stupid question or two and I will applaud them for their courage in sharing their ideas despite the fear of being ridiculed, I will work with them through their idea/hypothesis, no matter how much i might think it is stupid or impossible to achieve. We will arrive to that point together, but in the process, each one of us will connect, in a way where mutual trust is established, where we feel safe and be as stupid or as brilliant as we can be. And I guarantee you that we will be brilliant, because I have never seen an environment more fun to work or productive than that of a team of peers who understand, trust, respect, and and are humbled by one another.

I actually took her message to heart this afternoon and involved my co-workers with my ConvertUtils problems I was having. Simply discussing it with them helped me solve my problem. Communicate. Openly. It will make your job more fun - it did mine. We are already collaborating more from a little inspiration.

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.

The Road to Happiness

As you may have noticed, I didn't write anything on this site yesterday. Believe me, I wanted to, especially after reading this call to arms for Struts Developers. But instead, I did some work on my New Years resolution. First I went to the gym and played basketball (yeah, you really wanted to hear about that ;-) with one of greatest friends, Shane Murphy. Then I came home and relaxed a bit. As I was getting ready to jump on the ol' computer and blog about how much I loved Hibernate and such, Julie asked me if I'd change Abbie. I said "Sure!" As I was changing her, she smiled at me and giggled. If you have children - you know how cool this is - especially when it's one of the first times. She started smiling a couple of weeks ago - but now you can tell she really means it. So I said, "happiness it is," and I read her a story (Father's Flying Flapjacks) and played with her for a good hour. We were sticking our tongues out at each other and had an awesome time. She is the coolest kid in the world! What an sweet way to end the day. I'm happy to say that I ended up falling asleep (with Abbie on my arm) without getting on the computer.