Thursday, October 14, 2004

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

Wednesday, October 13, 2004

TinyMCE - Tiny Moxiecode Content Editor

http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/

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

Thursday, October 07, 2004

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.

Tuesday, October 05, 2004

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