Raible Designs

XDoclet 1.2 and Roller.

I was able to get Roller to compile last night with only a few changes. I tested it on Tomcat this morning and after logging in, I'm getting Invalid path /weblog was requested. After looking at the struts-config.xml, I can see that there are no <action-mappings> in my struts-config.xml file.

Dave, I enjoyed your install-blogging last night. Particularly since I was working on Roller and interested in your progress. By hitting F5 (refresh) every 20 minutes, I received an update on your progress - quite nifty.

The picture on the right was taken at Washington Park in central Denver. If you're from Denver, or have visited, you'll know that this is a very beautiful park. I thought this site needed a little sprucing up today, so here you go.

In other news, I've been looking for a new project in both Denver and Florida (since we're moving there next spring). No calls from Denver, but I'm getting a call or an e-mail per day from Florida. I thought we had more jobs here, guess not.

P.S. Are any of you Java/Struts developers in Cincinnati looking for a job?

Java Persistence Frameworks.

The Blogging Roller has posted a nice chart comparing some of the most popular persistence frameworks. The chart makes Castor look pretty good. I wish one of these frameworks had the same popularity as Struts, then I could just learn it and use it. As it is, it doesn't seem that one stands out above the other. However, I bet one could become the "market leader" by simply putting together a good set of documentation and how-to's. That seems to be the biggest problem with open-source solutions - lack of documentation that works. However, at the same time, a mailing list with lots of subscribers can solve most documentation issues.

JDK 1.4 Keeps Crashing.

Have you been trying to view this site and received timeouts or 500 Internal Server Errors? If so, I apologize and hopefully we've found a remedy for it. I found that this site seems to crash at least once a day, and sometimes several times a day. When it does, I've found the following error in my logs.

#
# HotSpot Virtual Machine Error : 11
# Error ID : 4F530E43505002D5
# Please report this error at
# http://java.sun.com/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi
#
# Java VM: Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (1.4.0_01-b03 mixed mode)
#
# An error report file has been saved as hs_err_pid3103.log.
# Please refer to the file for further information.
#

The admin, Keith, at my hosting company first suggested that we downgrade from JDK 1.4.0 -> 1.3.1. I've had no problems with 1.4 on other projects, so I didn't want to do that. So Keith has been nice enough to schedule a cron job that checks the status of this site every minute, and if it can't load a JSP, then it restarts everything. Hopefully this helps. I hope this isn't related to Roller, and I doubt it is as everyone else seems to be running fine.

Roller 0.9.6-rc1, Issue #1.

The web.xml file does not contain the tag library definitions. I verified this in both in this download and in CVS. It looks like the tablibs.xml file is missing actually :( BTW, there was a bug in the file that used to be there - it was referring to struts.tld and struts-form.tld which are both from Struts v0.5. I removed struts.tld on this site and replaced struts-form with struts-html.

Roller 0.9.6 looks good.

I did a clean checkout from CVS, downloaded this site to my Mac and rebuilt everything from scratch. No problems - even the upgrade script worked flawlessly - less that fact that I still had my temp tables from the last upgrade. Problems I saw in IE/Mac where: 1) the <jsp:plugin> tag doesn't seem to work to render the new editor applet, maybe I should revert back to using the <applet> tag, 2) javascript errors in the editor UI when trying to set focus on hidden elements. Actually this is a Struts bug since it writes the javascript for setting focus. However, the javascript has a check for type != "hidden" - so who knows. It works fine in Windows, so I'll fix it if we get some complaints from Mac users.

Dave's a workin'.

If you're subscribed to the roller-cvs mailing list - you can see that Dave is checking in stuff like a madman tonight! I think that's how most open source projects are successful - one guy writes it, works his butt off and everyone else tags along for the ride. Am I wrong? Let me know - but that seems to be how Struts got started by Craig. Notice that I said started - it's not how it is today.

Struts and XDoclet.

The last release of XDoclet has many more Struts-related features; such as building your validator.xml file and support for adding plug-ins to your struts-config.xml. It seems that a lot of work has been done by Erik Hatcher to make this happen. Is this the same Erik Hatcher that wrote the Ant book I'm reading? I think so. Erik sent this e-mail to the struts-dev mailing list this morning with a brief how-to on integrating XDoclet and Struts.

Apache moving from Bugzilla to Scarab?

I think it's true. While trying to remember Struts' URL for bugzilla tonight, I typed in nagoya.apache.org. Good stuff found there. Why was I going to Bugzilla for Struts? Because I don't think Roller is listed as a Powered by Struts site. This e-mail turned me on to this fact. This site is on there, but only because of Roller - so I figured I'd enter a bug for it.

Who Am I?

Russ says:

Raible - you need an "about" page. I have no idea if Raible is your first name or your last name or a nick name or what. Your contact page is a bit generic... I wasn't really sure if you were going to get the email right away since it goes to "info"... Also a comments feature would be very nice. Are you using Roller? Dave! Get on it! ;-)

I do have an about page, but it's more company specific than me-specific. I'll change it a bit to mention this site is mostly tech thoughts of mine. This is my company site and I try to keep it somewhat PC and professional in case a potential client ever looks at it. I have to say, it's a big improvement (in both content and design) over my last site. Currently, I'm developing an eLearning web application for OnPoint Digital, Inc. out of my home office, where I rarely get to talk to another person (I love reading everyone blogs because it gives me that water-cooler feeling). I'm writing it using Struts (including Tiles and Validator) and DAO's/JDBC on the backend - and has heavy Javascript and CSS on the front end. The app runs on Tomcat/MySQL and all OS's we can think that a customer might want (gotta love Java). Here is a screenshot of the main interface. It's not my design, I just took it from a Photoshop image to a working application.

My name? It's something I've lived with all my life - funny that it's even happened here on the 'Net. My full name is Matt Raible - my friends call me "Raible" and I actually prefer that over "Matt." Through high school, college and now the "real world," many people actually think my first name is Raible because that's what everyone calls me. So, to answer your question, it's all of the above ;)

I'll change my contact page to be [email protected] and see how much spam I get - I haven't been getting too much from [email protected], so why not?

Also, I tried the Eclipse thing on Windows (works fine), but on the Mac, the title bars don't appear to be draggable.

Upgrading Rampage.

I went on an upgrading rampage yesterday and ended the day with the worst feeling. My Struts 1.1b2 application appeared to work fine on most things, however, I kept getting the following error when I tried to submit a form with indexed input values:

java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException
 	at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
 	at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39)
 	at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25)
 	at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:324)
 	at org.apache.commons.beanutils.PropertyUtils.getIndexedProperty(PropertyUtils.java:475)
 	at org.apache.commons.beanutils.PropertyUtils.getIndexedProperty(PropertyUtils.java:410)
 	at org.apache.commons.beanutils.PropertyUtils.getNestedProperty(PropertyUtils.java:749)
 	at org.apache.commons.beanutils.PropertyUtils.getProperty(PropertyUtils.java:780)
...
Caused by: java.lang.IndexOutOfBoundsException: Index: 0, Size: 0
 	at java.util.ArrayList.RangeCheck(ArrayList.java:508)
 	at java.util.ArrayList.get(ArrayList.java:320)
 	at com.onpoint.webapp.form.QuestionForm.getAnswer(QuestionForm.java:321)

The items I attempted to upgrade were:

• Jikes 1.15 -> 1.16
• J2SE 1.4.0_01 -> 1.4.1
• Tomcat 4.0.4 -> 4.1.12
• Cactus 1.4 -> 1.4.1
• StrutsTestCase 1.8 -> 1.9

After hours of banging my head against the wall for hours and even trying versions of my code from a week ago, I decided to try the "classic" compiler in Ant. Which I soon learned should now be named "modern." Whalla - it fixed the above problem! My advice - DON'T USE JIKES 1.16 to compile your Struts-based web app! I also found that switching to modern from jikes reduced my build process from 1 min 20 seconds to 50 seconds - I'm sold.

I ended up not upgrading to Tomcat 4.1.12 (rather to 4.0.5) because I found that my error-pages were not being recognized. I hope that a client using the application never sees an error page, but if they do - I'd rather them see my pretty page vs. a stacktrace.