Raible Designs

Panther ships with postfix instead of sendmail

I've been using localhost as my smtp server for quite some time on my PowerBook. It hasn't worked for a couple of days, and therefore, I've just stopped sending e-mail when I'm at work (I use my ISPs server at home). Finally, I buckled up and did 5 minutes worth of research to figure out the problem. It turns out that Panther doesn't ship with sendmail (which I previously had configured), but rather postfix - which I've never even heard of. Thanks to a little searching on the Apple Support site, I came across this discussion which has detailed instructions on how to configure postfix. The bonus is and that they actually worked! I still don't know what postfix is, but I assume it's just like sendmail, but for some reason it's better (or why would they have replaced sendmail).

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?

Blogging leads to Free Book

This blogging thing rocks. Today I got one of the books I've been meaning to buy - for FREE! Check out the following e-mail I received from Manning:

Hello Matt:

We are contacting you regarding Vincent Massol's new book, JUnit in Action, which Manning will be publishing in November. Vincent mentioned that you might be interested in certain parts of the book which relate to topics recently discussed on your blog http://www.raibledesigns.com/page/rd. There is a chapter on unit testing tag libraries.

He has asked us to offer you a complimentary copy of the PDF ebook which just became available today. We hope you will find it of interest.

Sweet! Thanks Vincent! I read the chapter on unit testing tag libraries - very clear and to the point. Unfortunately, for tags with bodies, you still have to verify HTML, so tagunit might be better for these. I like the coverage on the Maven Plugin for Cactus and also how to use JSTL's ExpressionEvaluatorManager for reading tag attributes. The link I found, the chapter has code samples.

I've never really liked eBooks, but I have to admit, this is pretty damn convenient. Especially since I tend to pack around 10-20 books to each new contract. What about sharing? Can I let co-workers borrow my PDF like I let them borrow my books?

New Jobs and School starts November 3rd

When we had Abbie last year, Julie took a year leave from her job at Qwest. She was never planning on going back to work, but her old boss called her up last week and they've been negotiating. To make a long story short, she's going back to her old gig part-time (3 days per week) and starts on the same day I start my new gig (Monday, November 3rd). Because of this, Julie went searching for day care providers today. After seeing a couple nasty ones (she actually left crying), she visited a Montessori school across the street from her office. They have a 6 month waiting list for infants - Abbie's not a toddler because she can't walk unassisted nor drink from a cup on her own. Luckily, Julie was able to sweet talk them into accepting Abbie as an infant and she starts school in a mere week and a half. The place is damn expensive, but hopefully she'll learn some cool stuff. We have some friends who's daughter is going to a different Montessori school in Broomfield and she is almost potty trained at 15 months! She also knows 4 or 5 signs (sign language) and helps clean around the house.

I'm sure this will prove to be an interesting chapter in our lives - Abbie cries every time we leave the room now - so that Monday will probably suck for her. Should be a good winter though - Julie is planning on working Tuesday through Thursday and I hope to work from home on Monday and Friday.

As for the move to San Diego? We still want to, but the weather has been so nice here (80s) that Julie hasn't been motivated lately. The biggest reason for moving is to be closer to family (her sister lives there), but the job market is hopping here right now, so neither of us is that motivated to leave. I think my best bet is to get a telecommuting gig and move during that contract, but those are pretty tough to come by. Who knows - there definitely seems to be more Java opportunities in San Diego than there is in South Florida. I love it here, especially with ski season just around the corner ... I wonder where we'll be next year at this time? I predict California or in a new house (our current one is only 675 square feet).

My IDEA Evaluation - Eclipse is better

I've been trying to use IDEA (on OS X) for the past few weeks and I keep reverting back to Eclipse for features that seem to be missing. I know the features must be there, but I just can't find them. Why else would everyone like it so much? Sidenote: I've never used IDEA for a feature that doesn't exist in Eclipse - I'm sure there are some, I'm just not using them. It sure would be cool if someone created a HowTo explaining how to migrate from Eclipse to IDEA. In the meantime, I'll settle for posting my questions here:

• Debugging in Tomcat - I'm currently using Sysdeo's Tomcat Plugin in Eclipse for Tomcat 4.1.27. It's super easy to setup and use - I expect the same ease-of-use from IDEA. I haven't looked much, but I'd love to hear feedback on IDEA's Tomcat debugging support.
• Renaming a variable in a JavaBean renames getter and setter methods. Sounds simple enough, in my 10 second search, I couldn't find it. In Eclipse, right-click -> Refactor -> Rename.
• Override/Implement methods (from parent classes and interfaces). Right click -> Source -> Override/Implement methods in Eclipse.

I'll add more as I think of them throughout the day. So far, I like IDEA, but to be honest - it's not saving me any time over Eclipse. It also locks up as much as Eclipse and it's responsiveness is still a big sluggish on OS X (10.2.8) with 1 GB of RAM (1.33 MHz processor). Hopefully Panther will make both IDEs faster. Two weeks ago, I was thinking of buying it (as well as Dreamweaver) - now I'm frustrated with IDEA's lack of features and Dreamweaver's slowness. I'll probably pass on shelling out the cash since Eclipse and BBEdit are giving me all the features I need in IDEA and Dreamweaver.

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. ;-)

OS X: Apps I dig

I'm suspicious that there's more cool apps for OS X out there, so I'll tell you my favorites, and maybe I'll hear about some new ones in the process.

• Transmit (FTP Client) and CandyBar for Icon customization.
• SmartCVS for CVS access.
• CodeTek's Virtual Desktop.
• Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection - just because you have a Mac doesn't mean you have to give up Windows.
• Fire Instant Messaging Client - because iChat sucks and only lets you see one line at a time (while typing).
• iTerm - a tabbed terminal for OS X.
• MySQL Cocoa - for administering MySQL. It's invaluable with Roller to correct HTML errors in comments. On Windows, I use MySQL Control Center, which will have OS X support someday.

There's more that I didn't feel like listing because I figured most folks know about them - NetNewsWire, Tiger Launch and Clutter to name a few.

512 MB is not enough for Java Development

At least not on my PowerBook (1.33 GHz) - good thing another 512 is on the way!

Load Avg:  0.98, 0.98, 0.98     CPU usage:  20.9% user, 17.8% sys, 61.2% idle                       
SharedLibs: num =   81, resident = 18.4M code, 1.27M data, 2.78M LinkEdit                           
MemRegions: num = 11097, resident =  295M + 4.59M private,  116M shared                             
PhysMem:  63.3M wired,  291M active,  149M inactive,  504M used, 8.28M free

OS X Rocks, but it sucks too

OS X is awesome ~ it's beautiful to look at and it's based on Unix. What more could you ask for? Windows XP looks good, RedHat 9 doesn't. Windows XP with Cygwin is almost tollerable, but you still have to type "cd c:" when you want to change drives. What bugs me about OS X is simple *nix things don't work on it. Integrating Apache + Tomcat is a 5 minute job on WinXP and RH 9, but I've spent the at least 10 hours trying to do it on OS X with no luck. I could post the errors here, but what good would it do? This kind of stuff just works on RH 9 and WinXP. Therefore, OS X sucks!

What am I ranting for? No reason really - it just sucks that I've spent so much time trying to do something that still doesn't work. This HowTo didn't help either (building from source had errors, no binary of Apache available). I guess this is all due to the fact that OS X has a 1% (maybe 2%) market share among developers?

A day of upgrades

I upgraded this site to the latest code from Roller's CVS, and I'm now running Tomcat 5.0.12 Beta. It seems to be working like a charm for FreeRoller so why not? I also upgraded to Eclipse M4 on OS X and WinXP. For those of you looking for a JSP Editor for Eclipse, try Lomboz. I'm using it and it seems to work fairly well. As far as I can tell, all it gives you is syntax highlighting. I tend to use Homesite or BBEdit for JSP pages - they're better HTML editors and always will be IMO. There never will be a "I can do everything" IDE, so why keep searching? Though it would be nice if someone would figure out code-completion for custom tag libraries.

All upgrades seem to have gone smoothly and backups were made in case they crap out.

Update: The Lomboz plugin sucks, at least with the latest Eclipse. Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V don't work ~ maybe that's a good thing...