Struts Menu Tag Library - Overview

Struts Menu Tag Library

Elena goes riding again

Recovered from her ride through hell, this time she's on an off road history tour of her home town. http://www.theserpentswall.com/

WAS 6 Move

Ray wrote:

Is moving a non-EJB app from 3.5 to 6 any more difficult than moving it from 3.5 to 5.1? From an administrative standpoint is 6 close enough to 5 that an admin who has taken the WAS 5 Admin class feel comfortable jumping into 6?

Fredrik wrote:

No problems, just did it. If youre only talking jsp/servlets here, there is really no issues (apart from classloading differences between the releases). But as soon as your invloving JMS, EJB etc, then thats another ball park.

V6 admin seems a little bit easier to navigate / find around than the V5 admin app, so that should not cause any troubles.

CVS WSAD too many branches displaying

Using WSAD 5.1.2 on Win2000 with CVS 1.11 on Linux server. We have many branches that display in the CVS Perspective that aren't relevant to our developers anymore such as old dead-end branches that have long since been merged to the main (HEAD) branch. We would like to be able to filter out some of these branches so they don't display to the developer. The only way I can think of is to try to delete the branch tag (cvs rtag -B -d ), but the cvs documentation warns not to do such a thing unless you really really are sure and I really don't want to remove the tag... I just want to unclutter the developer's view. Any ideas? TIA

To answer my own question, we did the delete branch tag as shown below as well as deleting the "root_xxxx" version tag that wsad creates behind the scenes. It works, but the tags are still "remembered" by WSAD. To completely clear them you have to go into the CVS perspecitive, right-click each project under the Version icon and select Configure Branches and Versions. In this dialog click Remove All.

Java Sockets (C++ Sockets for Java)

http://www.alhem.net/jsockets/

Trudeau's Reading List

This week in Doonesbury, Garry Trudeau is giving us some pointers to interesting online articles from Mr. Honest Voices® Guy.

An overview of how well Bush has served Republican principles

John Eisenhower:
Why I will vote for John Kerry for President

An analysis of Bush's war in Iraq

WSJ reporter Fassihi's e-mail to friends

A reasoned critique of the Bush record by a Reagan Republican

Why conservatives must not vote for Bush

What distinquished Republican legislators have to say

LOCAL VIEW: Going to war in Iraq was a mistake
BY REP. DOUG BEREUTER

Let's see what Bush's home town paper has to say

Kerry Will Restore American Dignity
2004 Iconoclast Presidential Endorsement

And finally, conservative columnist George Will chimes in

A Questionable Kind Of Conservatism

TinyMCE - Tiny Moxiecode Content Editor

http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/

Looks great at first glance! Add a WYSIWYG HTML editor to your web app.

Preventing the Eclipse debugger from stepping into utility code

From: Chemi
Newsgroups: ibm.software.websphere.studio.application-site-developer

An interesting tip from: http://www.eclipsenews.com

When stepping through your code in the Eclipse debugger, it's very frustrating when you inadvertently step into utility code. Normally what happens in that situation is that the Java editor opens with an error telling you that Eclipse can't find the source. This can really mess up your debug session, so it's important to be able to keep the debugger out of utility code.

Eclipse has a preference setting called Step Filtering. You invoke it with Window => Preferences => Java => Debug => Step Filtering. The Step Filtering panel will have the following default list:

• com.ibm.*
• com.sun.*
• java.*
• javax.*
• org.omg.*
• sun.*
• sunw.*
• java.lang.ClassLoader

To disable stepping into a package's code, click its check box. You can click the Add Class or Add Packages button if you want to add a package or class to the list.

The last and most important part of this tech tip is that to enable step filtering, you need to toggle the Use Step Filters/Step Debug icon. That icon is at the top of the Debug view. It is a yellow arrow that goes right and then forks (visualizing a step into) down.

Thanks, Chemi!

Seamless failover and WebSphere App Server 5

(Answers)From: Paul Ilechko
Newsgroups: ibm.software.websphere.application-server

I am trying to set up a test environment to test seamless failover for a Java application. I have looked over everything on WebSphere clustering that I can find, but I still have a few questions.
Hopefully, someone here is a clustering/failover guru, and can answer these questions in their sleep. ;)
1. I have looked at the HTTP plug-in, Network Dispatcher, and some other methods of clustering WAS. It *seems* that the HTTP plug-in provides session failover, but the user would have to re-authenticate to get back to their session. Is this true?

Not at all, no. If you wish to continue using the same session on a new application server in a failover situation you would need to configure some form of session persistence (either to a database or using the publish/subscribe model). There would be no re-authentication required.

2. Would Network Dispatcher provide seamless failover? (Specifically, user A logs into an intranet site. They are authenticated, and routed to WAS node 1. In the process of going through screens of the web app, WAS node 1 loses connectivity. Will Network Dispatcher sense that Node 1 is down, and automatically re-route the user to node 2? Or, does the user have to click back button in browser, reload page, and/or re-authenticate?)

Don't use Network Dispatcher for this, the HTTP plug-in is the correct solution. Use Network Dispatcher to spread load across your HTTP servers.

3. Would a Tivoli Webseal junction assist with re-authentication in case of failure of a particular WAS instance?

Not required

4. What is the "typical" WebSphere component mix to enable seamless failover?

Some form of IP sprayer such as Network Dispatcher, obviously with a hot standby. This sprays to at least two HTTP servers. These send work using the HTTP plugin to at least two appserver nodes. Recommend that you use session affinity. You may also wish to use session persistence depending on the need to recover in-flight sessions during failover. Also think about dMgr failover - this is a potential single point of failover, you need some solution for this.

Using READ_UNCOMMITTED in CMP2.0

(Answers)From: Paul Ilechko
Newsgroups: ibm.software.websphere.application-server

I need to use the transaction isolation level of READ_UNCOMMITTED for some of my CMP2.0 beans. The "EJB deployment descriptor Editor" is not allowing to define an isolation level for CMP2.0. Seems like that the only way to set it is to use access intent. But even with access intent of wsOptimisticRead, I get the isolation level of ReadCommitted only (for DB2).
I am not going to update this datasource ever and also don't mind dirty reads. Is there a way I can do this in WAS 5.1?

Yeah, this is one of the reasons I don't like access intents - the defaults don't make any sense, and some of the combinations of isolation level and locking strategty that you really need (such as pessimistic locking with READ_COMMITTED) aren't even possible.
May I ask why you are even using CMP EJB here? CMP is quite good for doing CRUD operations on a single row, and really pretty poor at dealing with queries, lists and larger result sets. If you're mostly dealing with the latter, you're better off using straight JDBC.

How to subversion respository

(Answers)From: Mike
Newsgroups: ibm.software.websphere.studio

Hello Mike,

Yes, you are correct. My installation is a little messy, that I have installed included WSAD5.1.2, WSDD 5.5.x and others. After I have copied the following DLLs from the zipped package to the win2k system32 directory :-

libdb42.dll libeay32.dll ssleay32.dll

Now the subclipse plug-in works perfectly in WSAD5.1.2.

Thank you very much.

John

Hmmm, I thought the instructions on the site are ok, though you have to interpret a bit. Keep in mind I don't use subversion and this does not install subversion you need to obtain and install that separately. Looks like you had a previous version of WSAD or something installed, the 5.1.2 directory is the one you want I think For Windows get the .zip file from http://subclipse.tigris.org/files/documents/906/13512/org.tigris.subversion.subclipse_0.9.3.1.zip and unpack it, lets say, into your c:\ directory. End WSAD Then copy the contents of c:\org.tigris.subversion.subclipse_0.9.3.1\eclipse\plugins into C:\Program Files\IBM\WebSphere Studio\Application Developer\v5.1.2\eclipse\plugins Well, at least when I did the above I had the option of creating a new SVNExplorer perspective, though I don't have subversion installed so it won't load. Q.E.D. Mike

TiddlyWiki - a reusable non-linear personal web notebook

http://www.tiddlywiki.com/

WSAD 5.1.2 - Keeping generated JSP sources

Is there a way to keep the java source code generated by the JSP compiler in a wsad/was 5.1 test environment?

---

When using a WebSphere Application Server, you can save the generated .java files compiled from JSP files, by adding the following statements to the ibm-web-ext.xmi file in your Web application:

<jspattributes id="/JSPAttribute_1/" name="keepgenerated" value="true" />
<jspattributes id="/JSPAttribute_2/" name="scratchdir" value="/C:\temp/" >

The generated files are stored in the location specified by the *"scratchdir"* property.

IBM WebSphere Developer Technical Journal: Firewall Port Assignments

IBM WebSphere Developer Technical Journal

Firewall Port Assignments in WebSphere Application Server V5

JGraph - The Java Graph Diagram Component

http://www.jgraph.com/

IBM Publications Center - Download Free Documentation

IBM Product Publications

Home of the IBM Product Infocenters

LiteStep

Here's something you might be interested in exploring. It replaces Explorer as the Windows shell and gives you a very linux-like feel to the desktop, including multiple virtual desktops. I read stuff about it for an hour or two looking for "Oh my god, I installed this and it thoroughly trashed my system!" messages and found none. Having done my due diligence 8-) I installed it this morning and it's working like a champ.

WebSphere Studio Version 5.1.2 JavaServer Faces Redbook

The draft is available now.

Fiber to the Premises

After walking down the street, looking at all the little yellow flags and flourescent orange spray paint that showed up some time today I see a reference to this press release on slashdot and The Reg.

Sprayed in red on the sidewalk at the corner "OK SBC" and "OK COMCAST".

The press release states that SBC is looking at 15-25mb/s down and 1-3mb/s up. Now I wonder just how much of this is related to the changes in third party access to the ex-AT&T local networks that went into place recently.

Struts And WSAD

• Writing a Simple Struts Application using WebSphere Studio V5
• Using the Struts Framework with WebSphere Studio V5
  Part 1- Using Struts with Tiles
• Using the Struts Framework with WebSphere Studio V5
  Part 2- Using the Struts Validator

Gambas - Gambas Almost Means Basic

This should be of interest to an old VB hacker. Yet another one drops off the "reasons I have to run Windows" list. http://gambas.sourceforge.net/

Another Microsoft Gaff

Lord have mercy. Microsoft is really starting to lose it when they start suing critics rather than responding directly to their charges. Lawrence Lessig is reporting that Microsoft is suing a Brazilian government official for describing their OS pricing tactics as a "drug-dealer practice." They also didn't like being accused of using Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt as a standard marketing ploy. All I've got to say to that is, "If you don't like it when people point out what you're doing then stop doing it, Bill."

Favorite Web and Email Tools

First, let's get one thing clear. Microsoft has not made the Web what it is today. They totally missed the importance of the Internet, they still don't understand it and they're deathly afraid of the fact the Web makes the user's computer operating system irrelevant. The company that made this obvious was Netscape. Netscape is gone now as a company but the technology has evolved through the open source Mozilla Foundation; the dinosaur became the bird.

There is no better web browser than the Mozilla Firefox browser. One of its biggest benefits is the elimination of unwanted pop-up windows without requiring the user to install an add-on "popup blocker" that is itself a piece of spyware. A web developer working without Firefox is basically working in the dark. Microsoft has made it where you can't uninstall Internet Explorer but you can install Firefox and make it your default browser. Do it today!

The single biggest threat to email as we know it today is Microsoft's Outlook Express email client. It is responsible for the distribution of 99% of the trojans and viruses that plague modern computing. Uninstall Outlook immediately then get Mozilla's Thunderbird and make it your default mail and news reader. It won't keep you from being an idiot and running unknown programs attached to messages you receive but it will not execute arbitrary programs on its own. A big feature I use daily is Thunderbird's Junk Mail filter. It deals with the spam that isn't caught by my mail hosts' filters by collecting it up in a Junk folder, the content of which I can forward to the mail providers so they can better tune their filters.

If you'd like the best of browsing, email and news along with a web page editor then you can still get the combined product, commonly refered to just as Mozilla. In general I prefer it that way, too, but I took the time to switch to Firefox/Thunderbird and now I kind of like the fact they can be updated separately at their own speed. One of the primary benefits to open source software is that there is no rush to market pressure so things get fixed as needed and features are not added until they are probably ready to work correctly.

The Redmond Worms Turn Again

"Microsoft changes its mind again" is pretty much a "dog bites man" item but my reader says he needs more content. A short time ago MS announced it would allow XP/SP2 to upgrade any system, pirated or not. Well it only took them about a week to reverse themselves on that one based on this report at BBC News. This is unfortunate for the Internet as a whole since infected current generation Windows systems are the major source of DDOS attacks. These are completely of MS's making due to incompetent MS developers and managers and should be repaired regardless of MS revenue considerations. I wonder how many of those "20 most pirated" keys belong to big F500 customers. Wouldn't it be a hoot if a few of them found themselves unable to install a critical patch set due to the "key leakage" of their employees?

Also in the same article was the fact that MS's UK XP manager admitted the abandonment of another practice that was probably still born at MS anyway. Real OS publishers know that you NEVER release new software along with patches designed to fix problems. Of course MS never understood this principle but for one shining moment they claimed to have put that behind them. Alas, Paul Randle said, "We are breaking our own rules that said we would not put new code into service packs." Now I'll have to admit that I can't find any example of a statement that MS ever actually made such a rule.

Why being an engineer in the US now sucks

This is a rant related to an IEEE press release. If you look at the background of the current federal polititians, national policy is being made by managers and lawyers. Neither of these groups consider engineering to have any value except when it involves ownable intellectual property. IP is not a totally evil concept, although I do work with folks that think it is, but these polititians see no fundamental difference in the "IP" refered to by the MPAA/RIAA and the "IP" refered to by the IEEE/ACM. Obviously the former group would like to see Copyright eliminated and replaced with something like a 100 year Patent and they're well on their way. Of course with the advent of tele-medicine, maybe it should be pointed out to Dr. Frist that his profession can now safely be outsourced to the worldwide lowest bidders as well.

CSS Tutorial by Example

Thanks to davidg47 and company I've got some raw material for a tutorial on going from a site design image to a working page using CSS rather than tables for layout. Here's the related thread at WebDeveloper Forums. Now all I have to do is figure out where my web site is since the ones I had on Comcast will be toast Real Soon Now. 8-)

Bye Bye Comcast

May 25 will be the last day of my Comcast service. Want to hear the tale? I knew you would. Comcast HS Internet is not cheap. It runs about $50/month for 3 mega-bit downstream and fairly good service in this area. Comcast wants to sell you more stuff, especially if you're just a cable Internet customer like we are. Comcast wants you to buy cable TV. Given how much they're charging my take on it is they should be giving us basic cable for free bundled with the ISP service. Well they don't see it that way.

At the end of March they sent us a little letter saying we were a bunch of freeloaders for only using their wire for networking and they had discovered that we were getting a $10/month discount that we didn't deserve because we were scum of the earth HSI customers and not glorious TV viewers. The gist of it was they were going to start taxing us an extra $10 unless we coughed up another $30/month for TV! Nope, that was the last straw.

SBC/Yahoo is currently offering up to 1.5 Mb service for $26, no setup fees, no modem cost. Say what you will about the difference in speed but the bottom line is that your speed with a broadband (>1 Mb) connection is totally dependent on the speed of the server on the other end of your request.

SBC delivered on everything on or ahead of schedule. I'm getting >1 Mb downstream, my old Linksys router is running as the PPPoE client and keeping my connection hot all the time. Everything is going quite smoothly. The trade offs? Well, there's no free web site without ads but a personal site hosted much better than this one is easy to come by for no more than $5/month and that will include lots of server-side goodies that aren't available here. The absolute top downstream is less than a third but it's generally unnoticable and, hey, it's half the cost of these shysters!

So long cable guys. If you had a clue you'd still have some customers but I suspect a lot of others will be jumping your ship in the near future.

A ride through hell

Elena is a nuclear engineer and a motorcyle enthusiest. Sometimes she rides where no one else has the courage to go. In our push to "energy independence" these are pictures that must not be lost from our collective memory.

The Router Saga

Lots of fun and games with networking. About the first of Feb my email and newsgroups flaked out. This has happened with mail a few times in the past and generally it was something squirrelly in the infrastructure at Comcast, ne ATTBI, ne @Home. Well it never came back so I started fiddling with software. I had updated my Mozilla to 1.6 around that time so that's where the fiddling began. I uninstalled 1.6, reinstalled 1.5, uninstalled 1.5, reinstalled 1.6, installed Thunderbird, got some email functionality back, migrated as much as possible to Thunderbird, still no news, installed Xnews, same symptom with it. The symptom was the news readers could connect to the servers with no errors but no news protocol seemed to ever take place.

After determining Comcast wasn't conciously interfering with news in a dastardly plot to force everyone to Giganews, I tried Mozilla 1.4 on another PC and it didn't work any better. This meant basically a range of software on more than one machine was experiencing the same problem. The only program I could talk to the news servers with was telnet and that's not a very satisfying news reading experience.

Finally I decided the one black box I hadn't shook up was my Linksys router that was running the latest version of its software. So, out of desparation, I reloaded its software with the previous version and everything came back to life. I've reported the whole mess to Cisco/Linksys and I'll post the result here when they respond. So if you're running a Linksys BEFSR41, stick with version 1.44.2 of the firmware and be very leery of installing 1.45.7.