Raible Designs

Approved for Google Ads

After seeing that Tim Bray is making $500/month of Google Ads, I decided it was high time I try to get this site approved again. Low and behold it worked! So they've approved me, but I only want to show them when folks come from Google. As in, when the referer (yeah, I know that's spelled wrong, but it is in Java and JavaScript too) contains "google" - show the ads. Anyone know how to do this cleanly in Roller/Velocity? Or JavaScript? I tried the following, but it doesn't work:

if (document.referer != null 
    && document.referer.toString().indexOf("google") != -1) {
    // define variables
    document.write("<scr" + "ipt type='text/javascript' src='ads.js'><\/scr" + "ipt>");
}

Since Google is my top referrer - I think I'll get a fair amount of users seeing the ads, and it won't disturb the folks who come here just to read my ramblings.

Tomcat's Ant Tasks

Since I hold the top 3 spots on Google for Tomcat's Ant Tasks, I figured it was about time I figured out how to use them. So I did - you can read the How-To on my wiki. They're pretty slick now that I have them working. The real power (as I see it) is that ability to install a WAR on a server other than localhost. Does your appserver have Ant tasks to ease your deployment headaches? If so, I'd like to hear about them.

I also upgraded to DBUnit 2.0 and JSTL 1.0.5 today. They seem to be good releases - all my tests run without errors.

What's new in Tomcat 5

Want to know what's different between Tomcat 4 and Tomcat 5? If so, you should check out this article. I haven't read it (yet), but I hope to soon. Today, I was planning on working from home, plowing through my stuffed head and headache with the power of DayQuil. However, Julie had to run into work (she stayed home with Abbie yesterday, who is also sick). So Abbie and I are going to be sickos together all morning. The problem is that Abbie doesn't know she's sick - she's still happy as a pig in sh*t and wrecking the place. I'd better go and stop her...

Oh wait - Telletubbies just came on - she's mesmerized, that gives me a half hour. I'd love to work on AppFuse, there's never been more stuff I'd like to integrate. Here's a list of stuff waiting for SF's CVS to get it's act together:

• Start integrating Spring.
• Various bug fixes as reported by users.
• Charles' persistent cookie strategy.
• WebTest patch to work with Ant 1.6.0.
• Figure out how to run AppFuse on JBoss - thanks to Rick Hightower and Brian Topping (on the roller-user mailing list) this should be pretty easy.
• Figure out how to run AppFuse on Orion - I got an e-mail yesterday with some hints, so this shouldn't be too hard either.

As far as SourceForge's CVS, if you were to checkout AppFuse right now, you'd get the latest code, but you'd also get a bunch of files I deleted ages ago. I submitted a bug - here is the response I received:

This issue (file present both Attic and non-Attic) would have been caused by a file removal between the time of our full repository sync and the update sync; or by outdated data being present after our initial sync (due to a sync bug) -- both possible cases with our recent systems upgrade. We are presently in the process of generating a list of such duplicates (using a set of scripts we wrote) and will perform a clean-up of this issue once the script run completes. Additional information will be posted to this request no later than 2004-01-30. Your patience is appreciated.

Back to babysitting, Abbie's getting bored with Telletubbies.

Tapestry vs. Struts

I've been watching the Tapestry mailing lists in hopes of picking up some tips before I start learning it. In reality, I'm waiting for Tapestry in Action, which will hopefully make it easier to learn. Today, there was a very interesting thread comparing Tapestry to Struts. It looks to me that Tapestry is easier to develop with once you get the hang of it, but apparently, it has a steep learning curve.

The Tapestry Mailing list is interesting - it seems to have a different level of users. Maybe it's just me, but they seem to be a more enlightened crowd. You could almost say the same for the WebWork mailing lists. If I compare these two lists to the questions on the Struts mailing lists - it seems like there's a bunch of idiots over there (on Struts). Don't these people know how to use Google?! To be fair to Struts, I have a theory.

If WebWork or Tapestry ever becomes as popular as Struts, they'll get their fare share of idiots too.

It's just the nature of mailing lists - it's so much easier to ask your question than to look for the answer. Which reminds me...

[Review] Java Open Source Programming

Today I finished reading Java Open Source Programming. It took me one week to read - and I only read about an hour a day. This book is nice to read - you can breeze through 20 pages in no time. I appreciate a quick-read technical book. I enjoyed the simplicity of this book, especially since I'm such a rookie at WebWork, SiteMesh and Mock Objects. I knew most of the Hibernate and XDoclet stuff, but I did manage to pick up a few tricks, and since it's the only book on Hibernate (that I know of), I'll refer to it when I need to do components or proxies. Overall, this book made WebWork and SiteMesh look like great technologies and I'm excited to start using them.

The sample app, PetSoar, continues the "call your persistence layer from your action class" that I've seen in all WebWork sample apps. I still don't know if this is a good idea, but since Actions aren't tied to the web, maybe it is. This means you put your business logic in your controllers (a.k.a. actions). Kinda breaks the whole controllers should only be controllers mantra, but whatever floats your boat. To be honest, in AppFuse, all the Managers (a.k.a. business layer) do is transfer POJOs to ActionForms, and then back again. The Managers are were my business logic should go, but I often find it easier to put it in my actions. I sense a paradigm shift - will the WebWork version of AppFuse only contain a "dao" layer and a "web" layer? Who knows - only time will tell.

One interesting thing I picked up is the different way that Dependency Injection (a.k.a. Inversion of Control) is handled in WebWork compared to how its handled in Spring. In Spring, all you need to do is add a setter (and local variable) to prepare a class for IoC. When using WebWork, you have to create an Interface that has the setter defined, and then your Action must implement that interface. If Spring can do it without an interface, why can't WebWork?

All in all, I enjoyed this book - though it didn't peak my interest as much as J2EE Design and Development. I think that's probably because Spring solves some issues I've had with AppFuse (binding interfaces and implementations), whereas this book doesn't really solve anything for me. As a WebWork newbie though, I do feel this is a good read. I also found myself saying "Wow, that's cool" a fair amount of times (re: SiteMesh and WebWork).

I was disappointed that i18n was not covered at all. I tend to always prepare my Struts apps for i18n (extracting text into a .properties file). However, in most cases, a 2nd translation has never been put in place. So, I bitch about the lack of i18n coverage, and I write my apps with i18n in mind, but it's never been used in any of the apps I've written. Maybe I should just quit doing i18n in my apps - it'd probably save an hour a week of development time.

So it comes down to this - if you don't know anything about WebWork, this book is a worthwhile read. If you know WebWork - I'm sure you'll be disappointed because it is written for newbies.

Next up, upgrading my programmer certification to 1.4 with the Sun Certified Programmer & Developer for Java 2 Study Guide.

AppFuse 1.3 Released!

This release fixes a few compatibility issues with Resin and other databases - specifically PostgreSQL and DB2. The major new functionality in this release is Easy Database Switching. Basically, you can very easily switch from using MySQL to PostgreSQL by only changing a few properties in your build.properties. I implemented this on my current project last week because I do most of my development (at the client) on a PowerBook. The client wants to deploy onto a DB2 database - and there is not DB2 install for the Mac. Since Hibernate allows you to easily switch between databases, I figured I could develop using MySQL on the Mac, but have the default (CVS version) use DB2. One of the things I didn't want to do was to have a build.properties.sample, because I love projects that "just work" when you type "ant". So I changed the the build process so that database.properties is generated from default settings (MySQL) or the settings in build.properties (if specified). As part of the build process, Ant looks for the following build.properties files:

• ${user.home}/.${ant.project.name}-build.properties
• ${user.home}/.build.properties
• build.properties

What this allows you to do is to take your customized database settings and put them in ~/.build.properties and they'll be applied to any AppFuse-derived project. This makes it easy to keep the CVS version of your project tied to one database and a developer's local version tied to a different database.

While it's true that you'll most likely only talk to one database during the duration of your project, this exercise proves that it's easy to migrate from MySQL to another database. It also proves that AppFuse can easily integrate with other database (at least as of this release). Slick stuff IMO.

• Download (~12.1 MB for src, ~4.3 MB for bin)
• Release Notes

One of the best parts about developing AppFuse is that it's not a library. As a developer, I don't really have to concern myself with backwards compatibility. This means that new functionality can be added quickly and easily and old stuff can be ripped out. It's too bad all OS "products" can be this easy.

What about AppFuse's future? Check out the AppFuse Roadmap to see what I'm thinking about.

MD-5 password encryption and the "secret key"

According to a post on the Struts User mailing list, it's possible to encrypt a password using MD-5 (which is one-way), stuff it into a cookie, and then use a server's "secret key" to verify that it's a good one. Since I'm guilty of storing base64 encrypted passwords in cookies for a "Remember Me" feature, I'd love to figure out a more secure way of doing this.

So the question is - is it possible to implement "Remember Me" in J2EE in a secure way?

Setting the cookies on a certain path (i.e. /roller/security/) works, but not on Tomcat 5. I want to securely set my userid/password/rememberMe cookies at the root level of my app, map a filter to login.jsp (dispatcher = forward for TC 5) and be done with it.

Inversion of Control - what the heck is it?

I really didn't know what Inversion of Control meant, until I started reading Rod Johnson's book. Today, on the spring-user mailing list, and article was posted about Inversion of Control. The article is by Martin Fowler and is titled Inversion of Control Containers and the Dependency Injection pattern. If you don't understand all this IoC stuff, or just want to learn why Spring and PicoContainer are the talk of the town, you should read this article.

On a side note, the guys at TheServerSide shouldn't feel bad about not setting their background color - Martin Fowler is no HTML genius either.

Cactus and Form-Based Authentication

Quick Summary: Did you know it's possible to login (with form-based authentication) before running each of your testXX methods in a ServletTestCase or CactusStrutsTestCase? Just add a "begin" method in your Base class, or in each of your Tests, and it will be called automatically, just like setUp() is called.

    public void begin(WebRequest request) {
        request.setRedirectorName("ServletRedirectorSecure");
        request.setAuthentication(new FormAuthentication("tomcat","tomcat"));
    }

Long and Winded: Yesterday, I began adding the "roles" attribute to my Struts action-mappings - to limit access for certain user roles (Yes, XDoclet 1.2 supports this). This worked great in my web UI, until I tried to run my StrutsTestCases. Access was denied because I was not logged in. Rather, I was "faking it" by retrieving a UserForm object in my setUp() method and stuffing it into the session [View Source]. This worked like a charm until I added the roles restriction.

Cactus has a nice feature: if you write a beginXX method, it will be called before your testXX method. In other words, begin = client, test = server. So I added a number of beginEdit, beginSave, etc. method to my Action Tests. Great - everything worked. But it was ugly to add all those beginXX methods. Then, via Vincent Massol's wisdom, I learned of the global begin(WebRequest wr) method. Now I simply have a begin() method in my BaseStrutsTestCase class, and everything works as smooth as pie.

    public void begin(WebRequest request) {
        request.setRedirectorName("ServletRedirectorSecure");
        request.setAuthentication(new FormAuthentication("tomcat","tomcat"));
    }

A couple of issues I discovered:

• If you have an Action that doesn't have any roles in any of it's mappings, this will fail, so you have to override the begin() method with an empty {} method in your *Test.class. I believe the error message was it couldn't find the SecureServletRedirector.
• You must define all the roles (you plan to authenticate with) in your Ant build.xml file. [Read More]
• My <error-code>403<error-code> is not working on AppFuse or the current real-world app I'm working on. [Read More]

All in all, I'm pretty pumped that Cactus makes it this easy to test my app in its true production environment.

Later: I figured out the source of the 403 error-page not rendering. Once again, my Compression Filter does more harm than good. I switched it out for a more recent GZIPFilter and the same thing happens. The good news is that the new filter works on Resin, whereas the old one did not.

Eclipse Plugins on OS X and 3.0 M5

I did a bit of tinkering yesterday and today and finally got the Colorer plugin to work on OS X. From the Colorer Forums, you can now see how to build the colorer plugin for OS X and how to get the plugin working with Eclipse M5. I also discovered that the Lomboz plugin now supports M5 too (even on OS X!).

So, you ask, "What happened to using IDEA?" I do use it, but not as much as Eclipse. The main problem I have with IDEA is that I can't have more than one project open at a time. I typically copy code from AppFuse and it's just easier in Eclipse - I can even copy a whole class and it renames the package for me. And now that I've discovered the Ant View in Eclipse, they're pretty much equal to me. Another reason for targeting Eclipse is there's more users. Most of the folks that download AppFuse use Eclipse - so being aligned with the my "users" (all 6 of them) makes things much easier.