Raible Designs

Export JSPWiki pages to HTML using Hula

This morning, I discovered Hula - a Java client API to the WikiRPCInterface. The nice feature I really like is that it allows you to export your wiki pages to static html. Here's how to set it up on your JSPWiki:

• Uncomment the XML RPC servlet-mappings in web.xml.
• Download Hula.
• Rename hula.zip to hula.jar and put it into JSPWiki's WEB-INF/lib.
• Copy apps/*.jsp to webapps/JSPWiki/.

You can use my trimmed down version if you like, it only has hula.jar and the JSPs.

Now I can write all my AppFuse documentation on the wiki and bundle it with the downloads - very nice.

Denver JUG: XSLT and New EJB 2.0 Certification

Tonight I attented the Denver Java User Group meeting. Tom McQueeney did a nice basic concepts meeting on XSLT. Tom's presentation was a nice refresher on XSL and I learned a few things I hope I can remember the next time I use it. I've used XSL a couple of times in the last few years, and for those applications that I still maintain - I'm very glad I did. The e-learning app I developed last year uses JSTL's XML Transformation tags to render assets with different HTML (i.e. Flash, QuickTime, Image). It's worked great, and has always been very easy to add a new asset type to the XSL stylesheet.

The main speaker tonight was Kathy Sierra, the founder of JavaRanch. Her presentation was supposed to be on the new EJB 2.0 Certification, but it turned out to be a explanation of how EJBs work. Only about 1/3 of the room (approx. 40 attendees) had used EJBs, so I guess that's why she went that route. She didn't ask if we weren't using them by choice. ;-).

She started off her presentation talking about how the brain works and how it fights all day long to forget stuff. Your brain has a built-in crap filter. It only remembers those things that it needs to survive. It will only automatically remember those events that spark high emotions - fear, humor, arousal - because the chemicals caused by the emotions help you remember better. So when you're studying for your Java Certification (or any certification), the brain is going "screw this shit, I can survive without it." Repetition is a way to convince your brain that it is important. Another way is to get involved with your learning - be the EJB. Kathy did a captivating one-hour presentation with a number of audience members who acted out how EJBs work.

It was a very humorous presentation and great fun. An EJB presentation that was fun - WTF?! At one point, I looked around the room and almost everyone was learning forward and smiling. This lady is a captivating speaker, one of the best I've ever seen. I was very impressed with her teaching/learning techniques and I might just have to buy her book, Head First Java. Another highlight of the evening was that I actually won a free book.

Later: I forgot to mention what Kathy said about upcoming Sun Certifications. A couple new ones are coming: Mobile Application Developer, Web Services and an update to the Web Component Developer exam. She mentioned that the EJB 2.0 exam would probably remain at 2.0 for at least another year - until all the vendors caught up and support EJB 2.1. She said the Web Services one is going to be hard as will the next Web Component Developer Exam. The Web Component Developer exam will cover JSP 2.0 and Servlet 2.4. She also mentioned that she was reading Pro JSP to help create the WCD exam. How's that for an endorsement?!

Upgraded to Roller 0.9.9

I upgraded this site to Roller 0.9.9-dev about an hour ago. Seems to be humming along quite nicely - and the GZip Filter is back in action (wasn't working before I upgraded). There looks to be a few issues to iron out still, but since I was able to figure them all out - I'm pretty darn happy with this release.

• oscache.properties is missing from CVS
• a bunch of the editors had leftover (?) taglib declarations - I replaced them with an include to /theme/taglibs.jsp
• the value in Website > Config > Site Name shows up where "Home" used to - I had to rename my site to "Home" to maintain my same menu selections
• there's a lot of SQL (or HQL) logging going on that I can't turn off
• bookmark display macros are broken - you'll need to change the name of your bookmark names (in the macros) to have a /root/ prefix. For example, #showBookmarks("Articles" true true) -> #showBookmarks("/root/Articles" true true)

Hope this helps any early adopters...

Unix Utils for Windows

If you develop on Windows, and you use Microsoft's "cmd" to run Ant or compile your classes - you really should install Cygwin - it's much easier and provides the same functionality as cmd. Even better, Dan sent me an e-mail (can't find it now) about UnxUtils - Native Win32 ports of some GNU Utilities. You can even download an executable to install it. I dig it - symlinks that actually work on Windows.

User-Mode Linux ~ should I switch my ISP?

This User-Mode Linux sounds like a great opportunity for hosting this site. I currently pay around $50/month to host this site, and there's two things that are frustrating:

• I only get 5 GB of bandwidth, and I pay the same as my provider for any extra - I usually pay $30 extra per month for bandwidth.
• I get a max of 20 connections per mysql instance. While this should be plenty, it does seem to cause this site to crash, and I'm not motivated enough to dig into Roller/Tomcat and figure out why.

I do have a cable internet connection, so I could host this site myself, but my upload speed is only 241 KB. For you folks that do use UML, does anyone have experience with running Java (i.e. Tomcat or Roller) and MySQL?

Wanted: View Source with syntax highlighting

The Display Tag has a nice feature in it's documentation: the ability to view the source of a JSP [example]. This is done using a servlet, and works fairly well. However, as I write documentation for Struts Menu, I'm finding I need to view more than just the source of JSPs, but also the source of stylesheets, scripts and Velocity templates. So far, I've found that the view source protocol works fairly well for this.

Nice Tabs Menu Examples: generated HTML, its JavaScript file, its CSS file

Normally, I would be perfectly happy with this - except the view-source protocol doesn't seem to work in Safari (last time I checked). Secondly, I got to thinking - it sure would be nice to have a Servlet (or some other technology) that would read in a file and spit out it's contents with syntax highlighting. This is to say that you'd see in your browser what you see in your editor (i.e. BBEdit, HomeSite, Eclipse, etc.).

The ideal tool would allow me to pass in a URL to a file, and it would spit out an HTML version of that file, complete with syntax highlighting. It'd be similar to Java2HTML, but it would allow HTML, JavaScript, Java, CSS and JSP. I noticed that it might be possible to generate HTML from Java using Java2HTML on the fly, but that only covers one file type. Another option is to instruct documentation readers to change their view-source editor to be their favorite editor.

Has anyone seen such a tool? It sure would be sweet for writing better and more readable documentation for web developers.

Yet Another Web Application Framework: Shocks

From watching the struts-dev mailing list, I discovered a new Servlet Framework called Shocks. The thing that interests me about this framework is that the author looked extensively at Struts and WebWork both before creating it. It's feature-set sounds nice too:

It has an aspect-oriented workflow engine that can add crosscutting
system logic (like form processing, L10N, security, logging, etc) dynamically at
runtime (without having to mess around with the bytecode).  It can trade actions
across classloader boundaries, enabling web applications to span across multiple
.WAR files.  This allows users to drop in a new .WAR with new metadata and new
actions, which updates the application workflow at runtime across all modules in
the application namespace.  It handles workflow versioning and version rollback
(in case you make changes you come to regret).  It does instance pooling of all
components and sequences.  Every aspect of the system can be managed with JMX at
runtime.

Sounds like Spring, eh? Yes, says the author.

I think there are appreciable differences that have yet to be realized between 
the two (I haven't read their code at all), but definitely a lot of conceptual 
crossover.

I would think that introducing a new framework into the mix (and convincing folks to use it) must be pretty tough at this point, unless you create an IDE to go with it or introduce it in a book. BTW, did you know you can use Tiles with Spring.

Run Multiple versions of IE on the same Windows OS

This is HUGE in my opinion. It's always been a pain to test multiple versions of IE - you either had to install VMWare, install multiple OS's, or use a separate machine. No longer, my friends. Joe Maddalone of Insert Title Web Designs, has figured out a way to run multiple versions of IE on the same machine. Awesome - thanks Joe!

Thanks to The Scobleizer for the link. I also found these standalone downloads for IE 5.1 and 5.5 from Ryan Parman.

How can I import local html/text files into a JSP page?

I posted the following message to the taglibs-user mailing list, but thought I'd do it here as well - since I know I have some smart readers.

I have a requirement to allow reading of "assets" for a website from a local CD. These assets might be images, flash movies, html/text pages, etc. I've got everything working but rendering html/text. When I do the rendering of text/html online, I use <c:import url="/assets/filename.html"/>, and offline, I do <c:import url="file:///e:/assets/filename.html"/>. I can enter this fine in Mozilla and the page will come up, but JSTL's c:import tag says it can't find the file.

2 questions:

1. Can I use c:import to import a local HTML file onto a page?
2. If not, is there any way to do this?

Any ideas?

Web Frameworks - which one should I learn?

I've seen a lot of talk about Web Frameworks these last couple of weeks - particularly JavaServer Faces, WebWork and Spring. There's also been great articles posted comparing Spring and WebWork as well as an Introduction to Spring from TSS. Spring, WebWork and JSF all look like excellent frameworks to me, but I also continue to believe that Struts is a great framework. And I would go so far as to say that it's the best web application framework. Yep, I said it - Struts is the best web application framework to learn if you are a web developer wondering what to learn. Why? Because it will get you a job.

I've continued to receive a fair amount of calls and e-mails over the last couple of weeks - and they're all calling because of my Struts experience. Good luck in finding a company that wants you to build their web application using WebWork or Spring. Maybe someday I'll be lucky enough to hire employees for Raible Designs and build web applications in my own office with my own employees. Then we'll get to choose whatever technology we want to build customers' apps. Until then, I'll stick with Struts and continue to be an employed developer.

I strongly believe the best way to learn anything is to get paid to do it. I've learned Struts over the past couple of years, not because I wanted to, but because someone else wanted me to - and they paid me to do it. Of course, there are some companies that will probably pay you to learn WebWork or Spring, but most would rather not.

Another thing to consider is that WW and Spring will probably someday develop "migrating from Struts" documentation. Sounds like a good idea to me - until then, and until someone pays me to learn the others, Struts is #1 for me.

Now it's your turn to tell me why my logic is flawed... if you can. ;-)