CK's Developer Blog

How will you force reload a page in Seam when user clicks Back button

Karthikeyan C — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 04:33:28 +0000

In Seam, to force reload a page when user clicks Back button add the following in pages.xml. That is to make the page expire immediately once it is rendered. If the user clicks on back button, the page is reloaded again by hitting the server.



 no-cache, no-store, max-age=0, must-revalidate

How To ReRender PrimeFaces growl after Ajax request from RichFaces component

Karthikeyan C — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 13:57:22 +0000

The trick is to embed p:growl within a4j:outputPanel (else for some reason PrimeFaces growl is not rerendered even after assigning an id to it)

The usage is like

Google’s Chatback badge similar to Yahoo’s PingBox

Karthikeyan C — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 15:56:00 +0000

Recently came across Google’s chatback badge for your website or blog’s visitors to chat with you.

http://www.google.com/talk/service/badge/New

Fixing audio hiccup (breaking) when using mencoder for conversion

Karthikeyan C — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 10:04:43 +0000

I use recordmydesktop to produce screen casts occasionally. I was using the below command to convert from ogv to flv format.


mencoder -of lavf -oac mp3lame -lameopts abr:br=56 -srate 22050 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=flv:vbitrate=250:mbd=2:mv0:trell:v4mv:cbp:last_pred=3 -vf scale=800:600 -o tutorial.flv out.ogv

In the output file which is tutorial.flv, there were small breaks in audio (hiccups). The ogv file was fine as when i played in movie player there were no hiccpus. So the hiccups were introduced during the conversion.

http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/HOWTO_Mencoder_Introduction_Guide helped me to make use of the command mencoder -oac help to view the options available and I chose the right options. This helped me to create the output file without any audio hiccups.

How to install wordpress 2.9 in Apache on your localhost in Ubuntu 9.10

Karthikeyan C — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 04:44:59 +0000

This post contains the steps involved to setup wordpress on your local machine in Ubuntu. ( You may want to setup a wordpress blog on local machine to customize your blog (look and feel etc) so as to save the time to FTP to a remote location.)

Install Apache server using the command sudo apt-get install apache2
Install PHP with sudo apt-get install php5
Install the MySQL Database sudo apt-get install mysql-server
Install the PHP module for the Database sudo apt-get install php5-mysql
Download the latest stable version of wordpress from http://wordpress.org/download/
Extract the wordpress tar.gz or zip file to /var/www (using the command tar -C /var/www -zxvf wordpress-2.9.tar.gz)
Create a MySQL database and if needed a new user who has required privileges.
Navigate to /var/www/wordpress and execute the following command cp wp-config-sample.php wp-config.php (You may do this logging in as root user with the command sudo su )
Edit wp-config.php using the command nano wp-config.php (or use any other editor like gedit) and configure the values for Database connection.

Edit /etc/apache2/httpd.conf file to add the following lines.

LoadModule php5_module modules/libphp5.so
AddType application/x-httpd-php  .php .phtml

Restart apache server using the command sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
You can access the blog using http://localhost/wordpress

Tutorial – Your first CXF web service in 10 minutes

Karthikeyan C — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 14:07:19 +0000

This post is for Java developers who wish to start developing web services using CXF.It is assumed you have Tomcat 6.0.x installed on your machine and an IDE that supports Maven projects.

There are 2 Maven projects involved.

Project 1 is the web application (deployed in Tomcat) which contains the CXF web service which accepts time in milliseconds and returns the related java.util.Date object.
Project 2 is the client side standalone Java code invoking this web service.

Please click here to browse/checkout the source code of the web application is available in Google code.

Please click here to browse/checkout the source code of the standalone Java client.

We start with the web service interface provided below which has the method to convert time in milli seconds to Date format.


package com.karthik;

import javax.jws.WebParam;
import javax.jws.WebService;

@WebService
public interface DateConversionService {
 java.util.Date convertDate(@WebParam(name="timeInMilliSecs") Long timeInMilliSecs);
}

The implementation class is as below.


package com.karthik;

import java.util.Date;
import javax.jws.WebService;

@WebService(endpointInterface="com.karthik.DateConversionService")
public class DateConversionServiceImpl implements DateConversionService{

 @Override
 public Date convertDate(Long timeInMilliSecs) {
 return new Date(timeInMilliSecs);
 }

}

We have to inform CXF to deploy the web service by providing the necessary details in a Spring Bean configuration file. The file name is cxf.xml and contains the following code (Few XML name spaces are not needed but provided so that we can reuse the same for future posts in CXF series).

Now in web.xml we configure the URL at which CXF servlet will be listening and also inform the location of the configuration file (that is the above cxf.xml).




 karthikeyanc.com CXF example
 
 contextConfigLocation
 classpath:cxf.xml
 
 
 
 org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener
 
 
 
 CXFServlet
 
 org.apache.cxf.transport.servlet.CXFServlet
 
 
 
 CXFServlet
 /services/*

Note: The pom.xml of this web application uses Maven assembly plugin to pack the web service interface which will be referred as a dependency from the standalone Java client. By doing this we do not duplicate the web service interface file.

Please navigate to the project root folder and run mvn install. Under Tomcat_Home/conf/Catalina/localhost, create file called convertdate.xml to configure the context for this web application (As convertdate) and point to the target directory of the maven project as below. (Please change the docBase accordingly). Then start Tomcat. The WSDL can be obtained by typing the following in the URL http://localhost:8080/convertdate/services/DateConversionWS?wsdl

Running the standalone Java client:

Now you may open the stand alone client project in an IDE (I use NetBeans 6.8) and run DateConversionServiceClient.java. This is the only Java file in the client project. The web service interface comes from the distribution jar ( created when running mvn install command for the web application Maven project). The source code of DateConversionServiceClient.java is as below. (Please change port number accordingly).


package com.karthik.client;

import com.karthik.DateConversionService;
import org.apache.cxf.jaxws.JaxWsProxyFactoryBean;

public class DateConversionServiceClient {

 private static final String ADDRESS="http://localhost:8080/convertdate/services/DateConversionWS";
 public static void main(String[] args) {
 JaxWsProxyFactoryBean fb=new JaxWsProxyFactoryBean();
 fb.setAddress(ADDRESS);
 fb.setServiceClass(DateConversionService.class);
 DateConversionService service=(DateConversionService) fb.create();
 System.out.println("The date converted is :"+service.convertDate(System.currentTimeMillis()));

 }
}

JBoss Tricks – How to deploy WAR JAR EAR in an external folder (directory)

Karthikeyan C — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 05:31:04 +0000

With JBoss 6.0.0.M1 out to try out the new JSRs the following may be helpful in reducing time to deploy.

The usual way in which we deploy an application (war , jar or ear ) is to drop the application archive ( or in expanded mode with the folder name ending with .war or .ear) under deploy folder of the server.

But how to deploy an application archive or a folder when it is not residing under deploy folder but resides in some other external folder?

Let’s say the application ROOT folder is E:\javaapps\myapptodeploy\webapplication.war, then in jboss-service.xml (under conf folder of the JBoss server profile (like default, all)), we mention the following. This is very helpful when we build the project using Maven as we can mention the target directory directly without copying the files after each build.



 deploy/,file:///E:/javaapps/myapptodeploy

Step By Step Guide – Setup Seam 2.2.0.GA based Integration testing with Maven TestNG Cobertura

Karthikeyan C — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 19:27:41 +0000

This step by step guide explains / contains the following

Configure a Seam 2.2.0.GA, Hibernate (as the JPA implementation provider), RichFaces, PrimeFaces based project to be built by Maven (tested on 2.0.9 plus).
A simple Seam based web application which allows us to save (create and update) Employee details (just name and email to keep it simple) in MySQL database.
Write Seam based Integration test cases that run in JBoss Embedded container that run with TestNG.
Code coverage report generation using Cobertura.
The given project in this post is deployed on Tomcat 6.0.x.

The executable project code is available in Google code and can be obtained by downloading here. (Please note that I have excluded files that ship with embedded JBoss download. I have provided screen shots of the final folder structure to avoid any confusion)

Choose a folder of your choice. This will be known as ROOT folder for the project. Create a folder called src under it. Also create an empty file called pom.xml
Under this src folder, create two folders called main and test.
Under main folder, we will create the following folders – java, resources, sql and webapp.
Under test folder, we will create the following folders – java, resources and a empty file called testng.xml.

What have we done so far ?:

- We have almost created a Seam based Maven archetype. The main folder contains files that are bundled in the deployable web application. test folder contains files used in various testing (Unit, Integration etc).

The final folder structure is provided as screen shots.

Let us start with the employee table in database.


CREATE TABLE employee (
 id INTEGER NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
 name varchar(100) NOT NULL,
 email varchar(70) NOT NULL UNIQUE,
 PRIMARY KEY  (id)
);

The related JPA entity class is as below. The package is com.karthik.entity (full source code available in the zip file that can be downloaded).[This file is under src/main/java/com/karthik/entity]


@Entity
@Table(name = "employee")
@NamedQueries({
 @NamedQuery(name = "Employee.findAll", query = "SELECT e FROM Employee e")})
public class Employee implements Serializable {
 private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;
 @Id
 @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY)
 @Basic(optional = false)
 @Column(name = "id")
 private Integer id;
 @Basic(optional = false)
 @Column(name = "name")
 private String name;
 @Basic(optional = false)
 @Column(name = "email")
 private String email;

Now we need a Seam backing bean to save a new Employee data, update existing Employee data and retrieve all employees in database. The source code of the backing bean EmployeeSaveAction.java is provided below. [This file is under src/main/java/com/karthik/action]


package com.karthik.action;

import com.karthik.entity.Employee;
import java.io.Serializable;
import java.util.List;

import javax.persistence.EntityManager;
import org.jboss.seam.ScopeType;
import org.jboss.seam.annotations.Create;
import org.jboss.seam.annotations.Factory;
import org.jboss.seam.annotations.In;
import org.jboss.seam.annotations.Name;
import org.jboss.seam.annotations.Scope;
import org.jboss.seam.annotations.datamodel.DataModel;
import org.jboss.seam.annotations.datamodel.DataModelSelection;

@Name("employeeaction")
public class EmployeeSaveAction implements Serializable{

 @In
 EntityManager em;
 private Employee employee;
 @DataModel
 List employeeList;
 @DataModelSelection("employeeList")
 Employee selectedEmployee;

 @Create
 public void init() {
 employee = new Employee();
 }

 @Factory("employeeList")
 public void populateEmployeeList(){
 employeeList=em.createNamedQuery("Employee.findAll").getResultList();
 }

 public void createEmployee() {
 em.persist(employee);
 //clear UI values
 employee = new Employee();
 populateEmployeeList();
 }

 public void update(){
 selectedEmployee=em.merge(selectedEmployee);
 populateEmployeeList();
 }

 public Employee getEmployee() {
 return employee;
 }

 public void setEmployee(Employee employee) {
 this.employee = employee;
 }

}

Now we focus on configuring Seam to do the necessary injection in the above backing bean. First comes components.xml (this is under src/main/webapp/WEB-INF)

Now we need a UI to create, update values. Part of the source code of employee.xhtml is provided below [The file is under src/main/webapp]. Complete source code is provided in the zip file that can be downloaded from Google code.


  
            
            

                
                    
                       Seam Example
                    
                    
                        
                        

                        
                        

                        
                    
                    

                    List of Existing Employees
                    

                    
                        
                            
                               Name
                            
                            
                        
                        
                            
                                Email
                            
                            
                        
                        
                            
                                Update

The faces-config.xml file is provided below (File is under src/main/webapp/WEB-INF)




    
    
        com.sun.facelets.FaceletViewHandler

We do not utilize pages.xml defining page navigation in Seam but for the sake of completeness it is provided below. (File is under src/main/webapp/WEB-INF)

And here comes web.xml (The file is under src/main/webapp/WEB-INF].




    

    
        org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamListener
    

    
        Seam Filter
        org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamFilter
    

    
        Seam Filter
        /*
    

    
        richfaces
        org.ajax4jsf.Filter
        
            forceparser
            false
        
        
            enable-cache
            true
        
    
    
        richfaces
        /*
    
    
        Seam Resource Servlet
        org.jboss.seam.servlet.SeamResourceServlet
    
    
        Seam Resource Servlet
        /seam/resource/*
    
    
        Document Store Servlet
        org.jboss.seam.document.DocumentStoreServlet
    
    
        Document Store Servlet
        *.csv
    
    
        Document Store Servlet
        *.xls
    
    
        Resource Servlet
        org.primefaces.resource.ResourceServlet
        1
    
    
        Resource Servlet
        /primefaces_resource/*
    
     
    
        Faces Servlet
        javax.faces.webapp.FacesServlet
        1
    
     
        Faces Servlet
        *.seam
    
     
        Faces Servlet
        *.jsf
    

    
    
        javax.faces.DEFAULT_SUFFIX
        .xhtml
    
    
        facelets.DEVELOPMENT
        true
    
    
        org.richfaces.SKIN
        DEFAULT
    
    
        org.ajax4jsf.COMPRESS_SCRIPT
        true
    
    
        20

Dont get bored , there are only two more files left under main folder that are part of our web application.
We need to have a marker file called seam.properties under src/main/resources folder (that will eventually be under WEB-INF/classes of your web application).
Seam will scan and register our Seam components only if this file is detected.

And the last one is persistence.xml (The file is under src/main/resources/META-INF)



  
    org.hibernate.ejb.HibernatePersistence
    
   java:comp/env/jdbc/exampleDatabase

Now we shift our focus to test folder. Let us start with testng.xml (TestNG configuration file which is under src/test)

Next file is the Seam based TestNG test case which runs test cases to verify the creation of a new Employee in database. The file is under src/test/java/com/karthik/test
and the source code is provided below.


package com.karthik.test;

import com.karthik.entity.Employee;
import javax.faces.model.DataModel;
import org.jboss.seam.mock.DBUnitSeamTest;
import org.testng.annotations.Test;

public class EmployeeTest extends DBUnitSeamTest {

    private int numOfEmpBeforeAdd;
    private String name;
    private String email;

    @Test(groups = "embeddedcontainer")
    public void testEmployee() throws Exception {

        new FacesRequest("/employee.xhtml") {

            @Override
            protected void updateModelValues() throws Exception {
                name = "Name of employee" + System.nanoTime();
                email = "abc" + System.nanoTime() + "@xmail.com";

                setValue("#{employeeaction.employee.name}", name);
                setValue("#{employeeaction.employee.email}", email);
            }

            @Override
            protected void invokeApplication() {
                DataModel empList = (DataModel) getValue("#{employeeList}");
                numOfEmpBeforeAdd = empList.getRowCount();
                assert invokeAction("#{employeeaction.createEmployee}") == null;

            }

            @Override
            protected void renderResponse() {

                DataModel empList = (DataModel) getValue("#{employeeList}");
                assert empList.getRowCount() == (numOfEmpBeforeAdd + 1);
                empList.setRowIndex(numOfEmpBeforeAdd + 1);
                boolean isEmployeeAvailable = false;
                for (int ctr = 0; ctr < empList.getRowCount(); ctr++) {
                    empList.setRowIndex(ctr);
                    Employee employee = (Employee) empList.getRowData();

                    if (employee.getName().equals(name) && employee.getEmail().equals(email)) {
                        isEmployeeAvailable = true;
                    }

                }//for loop ends
                assert isEmployeeAvailable;
            }
        }.run();
    }

    @Override
    protected void prepareDBUnitOperations() {
    }
}

Now comes the most important part of configuring the embedded JBoss container. The configuration is involves 3 easy steps.
Step 1: Please download embedded-jboss-beta3.SP10.zip. Extract it to any temporary folder and copy the content of bootstrap folder (do not
copy bootstrap but only the content in it) and paste it under src/test/resources
Step 2: Configure the datasource for the embedded JBoss container. The file testmysql-ds.xml (The file is placed under src/test/resources/deploy)
is as below.




   
      exampleDatabase
      jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/ck
      com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
      root
      password

Step 3: In the above testng.xml configuration we had mentioned the binary folder as img. So create a folder called img under src/test/resources
and place an empty marker file called marker.txt (An empty marker file is needed so that Maven copies the empty folder also).

With that we complete the files under test folder. And now the most important file pom.xml which is under ROOT folder parallel to src folder.




2.2.0.GA
3.3.2.GA

4.0.0
com.karthik
seamtest
war
1.0
karthiks Seam TestNG Example

seamtest


org.apache.maven.plugins
maven-compiler-plugin

1.6
1.6



maven-dependency-plugin





javax.xml.bind
jaxb-api
2.1


${project.build.testOutputDirectory}/endorsed

download-jaxb-api
process-test-resources

copy





maven-antrun-plugin


process-test-resources








run





org.apache.maven.plugins
maven-surefire-plugin
2.4


src/test/testng.xml


true
true
-Djava.endorsed.dirs=${project.build.testOutputDirectory}/endorsed -Dsun.lang.ClassLoader.allowArraySyntax=true



org.codehaus.mojo
cobertura-maven-plugin
2.1


false


com.karthik.*
70
70






com/**/*.class






clean
pre-site

clean



instrument
site

instrument
cobertura
check








repository.jboss.org
http://repository.jboss.org/maven2

true



repository.central.org
http://repo1.maven.org/maven2

true



primefaces.repo
Prime Technology Maven Repository
http://repository.prime.com.tr
default





org.jboss.embedded
jboss-embedded-all
beta3.SP10


org.jboss.embedded
jboss-embedded



org.jboss.microcontainer
jboss-deployers-client-spi


org.jboss.microcontainer
jboss-deployers-core-spi


test


org.jboss.embedded
thirdparty-all
beta3.SP10
test


org.jboss.embedded
jboss-embedded
beta3.SP10
test


org.jboss.microcontainer
jboss-deployers-client-spi








org.testng
testng
5.10
test
jdk15



javax.el
el-api
1.2
test



mysql
mysql-connector-java
5.1.6
test


org.dbunit
dbunit
2.2
test


xerces
xercesImpl


xerces
xmlParserAPIs





org.jboss.seam
jboss-seam
${seam.version}


javax.el
el-api




org.jboss.seam
jboss-seam-ui
${seam.version}


org.jboss.seam
jboss-seam-pdf
${seam.version}


org.jboss.seam
jboss-seam-mail
${seam.version}


org.jboss.seam
jboss-seam-ioc
${seam.version}


org.jboss.seam
jboss-seam-remoting
${seam.version}


org.jboss.seam
jboss-seam-rss
${seam.version}


org.jboss.seam
jboss-seam-excel
${seam.version}




javax.transaction
jta
1.1


javax.persistence
persistence-api
1.0


org.hibernate
hibernate-validator
3.0.0.GA


org.hibernate
hibernate-commons-annotations
3.1.0.GA


org.hibernate
hibernate-entitymanager
3.4.0.GA


org.hibernate
hibernate-annotations
3.4.0.GA


org.hibernate
hibernate-search
3.1.0.GA


org.slf4j
slf4j-api
1.5.8


org.slf4j
slf4j-log4j12
1.5.8



javax.faces
jsf-api
1.2_12


javax.servlet
jstl
1.2


javax.faces
jsf-impl
1.2_12


com.sun.facelets
jsf-facelets
1.1.14


org.richfaces.framework
richfaces-api
${richfaces.version}


org.richfaces.framework
richfaces-impl
${richfaces.version}


org.hibernate
hibernate
3.2.6.ga


org.richfaces.ui
richfaces-ui
${richfaces.version}





javax.mail
mail
1.4.1




apache-log4j
log4j
1.2.14


jfree
jfreechart
1.0.8a


javassist
javassist
3.8.0.GA


org.apache.tomcat
servlet-api
6.0.16
provided


org.primefaces
primefaces
1.0.0.RC


net.sf.ehcache
ehcache
1.6.0

Things to consider:

To run the Integration test cases comment the Tomcat specific datasource configuration and uncomment JBoss specific datasource configuration as shown in the comment section of persistence.xml reproduced below. (You can avoid this ugly way of comment and uncomment by using Maven profiles – one profile for testing and the other for a deployable in Tomcat).





java:/exampleDatabase

The test cases are executed when we run a command like mvn install

To run cobertura and generate reports, the command is mvn cobertura:cobertura (The cobertura reports will be under target/site/cobertura. Please click on the index.html to view the report.)

To create a deployable, make the required change in persistence.xml (as explained in Things to consider) and run the command like mvn install -Dmaven.test.skip (As the test cases will not execute with a Tomcat specific data source configuration in persistence.xml. I will try to do more analysis on this and check if it is possible to pick up different files one for test and the other to be packaged in web application deployable).

Hope this post is of some use. Please provide your suggestions (to improve this configuration) as a comment.

Seam Example By Karthikeyan C Seam Example
List of Existing Employees
Name Email Update

How to uninstall NetBeans from Ubuntu

Karthikeyan C — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 07:38:46 +0000

NetBeans has been releasing in short cycles (The difference between NetBeans 6.8 RC1 and RC2 was just 4 days). So how to uninstall (remove) the older installations in Ubuntu ?

There is a file uninstall.sh under the root (home) directory of NetBeans installation. Navigate to root directory and execute uninstall.sh. A window pops up and you can proceed with the uninstallation.

Checking memory usage of your server in Java website hosting

Karthikeyan C — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 08:33:34 +0000

If you host your website on a JEE web or application server on a shared hosting plan (either private or shared instance), you may use the JSP code below to check the memory usage of your server. This will help you to know if the web hosting company really provides you what they promised. This is a simple but efficient tool.


<%@page contentType="text/html" pageEncoding="UTF-8"%>



 
 
 Your title here
 
 
 Total memory : <%=Runtime.getRuntime().totalMemory()%>
 Free memory : <%=Runtime.getRuntime().freeMemory()%>
 Max memory : <%=Runtime.getRuntime().maxMemory()%>
 Java version : <%=System.getProperties().getProperty("java.version")%>