Obviously "EDS" doesn't stand for "consistency"

Looks like EDS veeps don't pay much attention to what their company does. The following is from a case study on the EDS site.

Our Approach

• Implemented Linux server environment to ensure stability and security while keeping costs low
• Implemented Linux-based messaging application that meets EDS' corporate security standards while enabling communication with users of other messaging software

. . .

The new Linux environment provides a level of security and stability unavailable elsewhere. Because it is open-source software, it also offers significant cost savings on licensing and allows EDS to provide faster, more responsive support because programming problems can be diagnosed and repaired more quickly.

Maybe ole Robb is channeling George "They've got WMD" Bush after all.

Is Dubya moonlighting for EDS?

A recent quote from EDS Global Alliances Veep, Robb Rasmussen, might make you wonder if you've ever seen him and George Bush together. Talking about why the Alliance members like Sun and Microsoft don't believe Linux is right for big business (Surprise, surprise!), Robb opined,

"A large enterprise needs to be sure because it relates to securifying the environment. ... it could splinter into many different types of languages."

Well, about all I can think to say about that is HUH?

Jef Raskin

I just found out we lost one of the great pioneers of modern computing last week. While at Apple, Jef Raskin started the MacIntosh project in parallel with Steve Jobs' PARC-inspired Lisa. Raskin's Mac was character based and keyboard driven, far different from the final product produced after Jobs forced him out. His concepts were then used in the Canon Cat, a computer that didn't last long in the marketplace either because of its unique user interface or Steve Jobs' meddling.

The result of his time spent post-Apple is a UI he called The Humane Interface, about which you can learn more from The Raskin Center For Humane Interfaces. The link below is a Flash demo of the Archy UI that he thought would make computers as usable as humanly possible today. It's a remarkable vision incorporating ideas like the spacial indexing of stored information (it's easier to remember visually where you put something) that stretch back decades to his more recent ideas that you are better off directly manipulating information than you are doing indirect manipulation through proxies like icons.

http://www.raskincenter.org/main2/img/zoomdemo.swf

Winter daffodil

JNDI dns:// Provider in WebSphere

Newsgroups: ibm.software.websphere.application-server

Best I can tell, WAS (5.0 at least) does not have a JNDI Service Provider that can perform DNS lookups. I'm successfully using the Sun one from http://java.sun.com/products/jndi/serviceproviders.html, but I wanted to confirm that I'm not missing some other option in WAS.

I'm using this technique to do an MX Record lookup to validate an email domain. It's described http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/guide/jndi/jndi-dns.html#USAGE and http://www.rgagnon.com/javadetails/java-0452.html. Alternatively, if anyone knows of other methods to do this, I'm willing to consider that too.)

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/