Raible Designs

iCal for Denver JUG

I am once again gripped with that emotion - "there's not enough time in the day!" I wake up at the ass-crack of dawn and still can't seem to get everything done that I need to. So I began planning my days and writing down "to do's" for each day. I'm using iCal for the time being, with Outlook and Yahoo's Calendar in my back-pocket if this doesn't work out. As a small experiment, I created the Denver JUG's upcoming meeting list as an iCal. Feel free to subscribe, I don't plan on deleting it.

How to run Tomcat on Port 80

I've had people ask me how to run Tomcat on Port 80 before (as a non-root user). I've never had an answer until now. Today I found that Holger Klawitter has a solution using Kernel space port forwarding. I don't have a need to try this at the moment, but if someone is using it - please share your experiences.

As an FYI, Tomcat 5 will use commons-daemon making this much easier to do. Also, the first Beta of Tomcat 5 (5.0.9) has been released.

Good CSS Design at Lee Jeans

Russ reminds us why Web Standards are cool:

From Zeldman which I just recently added to my aggregator, I just saw this great awesome article on how the XHTML/CSS design was created for the new Lee Jeans - One True Fit website.

The overview is short and to the point and gives links to all the tricks used on the page to get the design desired. Adding ?style=false to any of the page's urls will show the non-css markup. The difference is astounding. I'm more and more amazed at the power of a good designer and CSS every day.

This article is very elegant in explaining how CSS and XHTML can simplify your life. I'm a huge fan of web standards and (luckily) have been able to convince most teams/clients to use them in the past couple of years. Just to remind you how easy it is to write XHTML, check out the New York Public Library's XHTML Guidelines.

On a related topic, I've had a few folks ask for my wiki's theme recently. So here it is. Enjoy!

Hibernate's New Site

I can tell I've been out of the loop for awhile. Hibernate has improved their site and moved to their domain (hibernate.org). Cool - looks very nice fellas. I especially dig the fact that you're now hosting your own user forums.

I'm not doing much Hibernate work these days - my new gig already has all the persistence layer written with JDBC DAO's, so there's not much reason to re-write them. The funny part is that if I need to write a new DAO, it'd probably be faster for me to do it with Hibernate, but since politics require all technologies be approved - it'd never happen. Why do the tools developers use have to be approved? So new (and existing) developers don't have to constantly learn new stuff. Bad for brain, good for business.

Sunset on Fisherman's Wharf

Last night, we had a scrumptious dinner at the Crab House on Pier 39. While walking home, we were honored to see a beautiful yellow and gold sunset along the water. Today, we're heading out to Alcatraz and possibly a on winery tour.

On Vacation...

After working 12 days straight, this is gonna be fantastic...
(Returning September 2nd)

Maven vs. Ant

I presented my views on why we should use Maven over Ant today in a meeting. My basic reasons are simple: 1) the ability to download jars (and have a central repository for all projects) and 2) to have a standard directory structure and build/test/deploy mechanism. It's going over like a fart in a crowded room so far. The major pushback is because supposedly you can convert JBuilder's .jqx files to Ant build files. Has anyone does this? How does it work? They mentioned that if there is a converter for .jqx -> maven build files, then they'd be happy to try it.

If we do use Ant (high probability), now begins the arduous task of standardizing across projects, as well as creating a "lib" module in CVS to store all the jars for the different projects. Good thing I'm on vacation next week! ;-)

PHP vs. Java - which is better?

I have a former client that has a customer. This customer asked them - "so when are you migrating from Java to PHP?" So evidently this person has the impression that the next wave of web applications will be written in PHP. My former client has asked me to provide an answer for their customer. If I translate it, I think they mean to ask "what is different between Java and PHP and why should we use Java over PHP." Here are my opinions - please add yours as you see fit. I must admit I don't know a whole lot about PHP, except that it's widely popular among the Linux/Apache/MySQL crowd and that it's similar to ASP in it's lack of a MVC architecture (yes, I know about the PHP MVC project).

• I think Java is more of an industry standard, whereas PHP seems to be popular among hackers and hobbyists.
• Java provides better separation of layers - key for testability. PHP has all the code embedded in the page, so you have to run it through a browser to test if database connections work (for instance).
• Java is more scalable.
• More folks know Java and it's easier to qualify someone's Java skills. How do you test someone knows PHP? Is there a certification?
• More for-profit organizations use it.

If you're a Java or a PHP-lover, I'd love to hear your opionions (facts are always better). I'm going to point my client to this post, so keep it clean.

Maven Questions: Webapp best practices and local repositories

I can't seem to subscribe to the Maven User Mailing List for the life of me, so I'll ask my questions here, and hopefully get some answers. The first question is regarding local repositories. Ideally, I'd like to put this on a network drive, so all developers can get to it by mapping a drive or something. When I try to use a network drive, I get the following error (WinXP, Maven CVS pull from yesterday):

Artifact '\\server\share\repository\velocity\jars\velocity-1.4-dev.jar' 
    not found to add to classpath 
java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: velocity 
        at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:199) 

The reason I'd like to use a network share (over an FTP server or HTTP server) is because then we can easily add the .jar files to the classpath in Eclipse or JBuilder. If Maven downloads the files to each user's local hard driver - then we can use an FTP server. Another option is to use the default (~/.maven/repository), but then each developer has to copy javamail and our custom jars onto their hard drive.

My second question is regarding webapp best practices with Maven. The Maven Tomcat Plugin seems nice, but it mangles my server.xml file. I'd like a solution similar to the way I've done it with Ant. I use a context.xml file and place this in $CATALINA_HOME/webapps and then I "deploy" the expanded war into Tomcat. Tomcat detects when any files change under WEB-INF/ and reloads the app. Works great. A better solution would be to point the docBase to target/webappName. So I guess what I'm saying is - should I just create a context.xml file and make my own custom "setup-tomcat" task (which does an ant:copy)? Then use war:webapp to refresh the app's files from source? How are you experts doing it?

Make money drinking beer and discussing MySQL

I got a call from a nice lady from a Market Research company on the way home from a mountain bike ride this afternoon. She said she'd pay me $100 if I came in and discussed MySQL for 30 minutes! Sounds great, eh? She asked me if I'd attended a paid "research discussion" before. I told her, "Yes, in college we drank beer for $50."

Well, guess what - she's paying for drinking beer too. I can't attend either one because we're heading out to California next week. You should probably live in (or near) Denver to make it worth your while. For the beer taste test, contact Kari Allen at 303-980-1909 (must be male 21-29). For the MySQL Discussion, contact Christine at 303-980-2262. Good luck - hope you make some cash and catch a buzz! ;-)