Raible Designs

New Blog to Watch - Jon Lipsky

I don't really know Jon, only that he sent me an e-mail about Hibernate's Reverse Engineering Tool. Anyway, he's now blogging and better yet - he's using Roller! Don't forget - I'm biased b/c I think Roller is the best thing to come along since sliced bread. Speaking of the RET, from the documentation, it doesn't even look like it exists - there's no instructions on how to run it??

Man, I wish someone would alter Middlegen to generate Hibernate-tagged classes. Erik Hatcher's been bugging me to do it - any volunteers?

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.

Now Running Tomcat 4.1.17

I upgraded this site to use Tomcat 4.1.17 in about 10 minute tonight. All I had to do was change my server.xml to use the proper ports for my ISP, and copy the MySQL JDBC driver to $CATALINA_HOME/common/lib. Nice and easy - short and sweet. My kinda software - "it just works."

Later: Tomcat seems to be running just fine, but I'm getting the following error in catalina.out. It doesn't seem to affect anything, so I'm not too worried. When running on Tomcat 4.0.6, I kept getting a ClassNotFound error for an hsql jdbc driver, and everything ran fine. I never even used or refered to the hsql driver was the wierd part. The error has been there since my very first post on August 1st.

17-Dec-2002 10:14:40 PM org.apache.jk.common.ChannelSocket processConnection
INFO: server has been restarted or reset this connection
17-Dec-2002 10:14:51 PM org.apache.jk.server.JkCoyoteHandler action
INFO: RESET

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.

Watching TV and Blogging

I have the opposite problem that Jeff has. He says he can't watch TV and blog as he never gets any blogging done. I can't watch TV and blog as I never get any TV watching done. Then again, I have Tivo so I can always rewind. But it is a pain the butt when I settle down to watch some football and I miss the whole game!

But I grew up without TV, so I actually don't like the stuff and I'm one of those parents who fear for their kids TV-watching habits. Julie, on the other hand, is a TV addict and loves the stuff. Should be an interesting compromise to raise Abbie (+1 in a year or two) with our opposite views on the boob tube.

A Christmas Tree

I've added a Christmas Tree to this site to decorate a little for the holidays. Hope you don't mind. Like all new additions, I had to make room for it and adjust some margins so it didn't hide behind anything. Feel free to steal it if you like. The CSS to make it a background is available with a good ol' Ctrl+U. You should be glad this is all I did - the first one I tried was animated... Happy Holidaze!

Jenerator

I heard about Jenerator on the mailing list this morning. Sounds cool.

The Jenerator Version 0.9 is a code generator (Licensed under the Academic Free License version 1.1) and hosted on SourceForge, which takes meta information from different mediums, applies XSL templates and generates code. Unlike other code generators, which use JavaDoc custom tags to define and describe what is to be generated, Jenerator uses XML based Descriptor files.

It's got a heck of a list of features too: supports regeneration, EJBs, VOs, Unit Tests for JUnit and Cactus, Ant's build file, JDO source descriptor, and Servlets. While all this sounds good, I probably won't even download it - I'm just not interested as I really like how XDoclet works right now. I might change my mind in a few weeks, but I've learned too much to give it up now.

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!