tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1131270310109486733Sat, 07 Nov 2009 17:00:32 +0000http://syrupsucker.blogspot.com/noreply@blogger.com (Jason Drake)Blogger53125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1131270310109486733.post-2941516980918395314Sat, 07 Nov 2009 16:56:00 +00002009-11-07T09:00:32.644-08:00gamescivilization4If you install and attempt to run Civilization 4 on Windows 7 you will likely receive an error similiar to the following: I was able to resolve this by downloading and installing the latest released runtime version of DirectX. I suppose if you install and play many games you likely have a newer version of the DirectX runtime, but this game was my favorite and was the first (and currently onlyhttp://syrupsucker.blogspot.com/2009/11/civilization-4-on-windows-7.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Jason Drake)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1131270310109486733.post-116095133599485120Sat, 06 Jun 2009 21:19:00 +00002009-06-06T14:21:53.873-07:00I mentioned to a colleague a week ago that I wanted to provide better syntax highlighting of source code in my blog entries. He suggested I look at Pygments which is a "generic syntax highlighter for general use in all kinds of software such as forum systems, wikis or other applications that need to prettify source code.". I have to admit, I kind of like it and it is relatively easy to use (http://syrupsucker.blogspot.com/2009/06/pygments-for-source-highlighting.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Jason Drake)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1131270310109486733.post-6887305779236559610Sat, 06 Jun 2009 05:33:00 +00002009-06-06T14:23:04.299-07:00GWTSeleniumGXTFor those of you who follow the GXT toolkit know, they are currently in the process or preparing for the release of the 2.0 version. I converted to the 2.0 M1 version a few weeks ago and other than a few issues, have been able to continue using my application (and building on it). However when I upgraded to the 2.0 M2 version, I had several key areas that no longer worked. Of course, while I http://syrupsucker.blogspot.com/2009/06/gxt-20-and-selenium.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Jason Drake)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1131270310109486733.post-6982846800092119621Thu, 28 May 2009 18:28:00 +00002009-06-06T14:23:17.537-07:00SeleniumGXTIn my Stamp Editor I have a tree browser which can browse collections, albums and countries. Directly above this, I have a StoreFilterField in which I can type text to filter the tree. I wanted to write a few selenium tests for this functionality to verify the items are found. The problem I ran into is when I told selenium to type the text, the text would appear but the filter would not get http://syrupsucker.blogspot.com/2009/05/selenium-with-gxt-getting-textfields-to.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Jason Drake)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1131270310109486733.post-224860933032522940Fri, 27 Mar 2009 04:30:00 +00002009-03-26T21:48:41.129-07:00JSONJAXBRESTJerseyJAX-RSJersey 1.0.2 was released in early February and I just got around to updating to it. I was quite excited to read about the new support for JAXB marshalling to JSON formats (this was introduced I believe in an earlier release but not well detailed). Jakub Podlesak has some nice articles on this functionality on his blog and would recommend reading them. One thing I found, is initially I http://syrupsucker.blogspot.com/2009/03/using-json-with-jaxb-in-new-jersey-102.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Jason Drake)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1131270310109486733.post-8684651413042299269Sat, 14 Mar 2009 21:05:00 +00002009-03-14T14:09:40.431-07:00GAEThe Google App Engine revolves around keys. If you have references to other objects within your Models, it is important to understand the consequence of accessing the model (to prevent fetch statements). In particular, if you only need to Key of the item (or an attribute on the Key such as the id()) then you want to avoid inflating the persistable. There are numerous suggestions on how to http://syrupsucker.blogspot.com/2009/03/referencing-keys-of-objects-in-dbmodels.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Jason Drake)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1131270310109486733.post-812433500388626796Tue, 10 Mar 2009 15:47:00 +00002009-03-10T12:29:20.575-07:00GAEGWTIn my previous post GWT and Google App Engine - How to Develop! I outlined an approach one could take to develop a GWT application using the Google App Engine (either from the outset or partially mapping services to GAE over time). In the article I recommended the usage of the HttpRedirectFilter. While this filter worked well using the GAE SDK, I ran into problems connecting to google's remote http://syrupsucker.blogspot.com/2009/03/gwt-and-google-app-engine-update.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Jason Drake)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1131270310109486733.post-3573059790432085664Sun, 01 Mar 2009 16:45:00 +00002009-03-01T09:38:27.777-08:00GAEGWTEclipseSo I have developed an application in GWT using the GXT library which is currently connecting to a Restful WebService through Tomcat and using JPA to access my MySQL Database. I recently had a disk failure on this system, and so have become acutely aware of the possibility at some point I might want to have my application hosted. I was looking at the Google App Engine, and wanted to experiment http://syrupsucker.blogspot.com/2009/03/gwt-and-google-app-engine-how-to.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Jason Drake)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1131270310109486733.post-1831019806357600470Wed, 18 Feb 2009 21:48:00 +00002009-02-18T14:08:17.853-08:00MySQLEclipseLinkHSQLDBJPAI had a situation where I needed to write a query which would perform upper case comparisons in a LIKE statement. It took me a while to figure this out, mainly because I didn't realize the right-side of the LIKE statement does not support any of the functions. So given a query like this: SELECT name FROM Countries WHERE name LIKE '%someValue%'; to write this in a valid JPQL format (http://syrupsucker.blogspot.com/2009/02/jpql-and-upper-case-queries-in-like.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Jason Drake)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1131270310109486733.post-7561278738115066064Sun, 07 Dec 2008 03:03:00 +00002008-12-06T19:08:09.323-08:00In my previous blog I had proposed a design which I could use to dynamically load the tree based on several different modeled objects. I was successful in implementing this. One of the tricks was to ensure the stores were loaded prior to building the tree, and to do this, I wrote a handler which would load each of the stores and listen for the completion of the loads and then build the tree http://syrupsucker.blogspot.com/2008/12/gxt-tree-and-loading-alternative-design_06.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Jason Drake)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1131270310109486733.post-5799880755752928138Sun, 07 Dec 2008 02:52:00 +00002008-12-06T19:01:32.893-08:00If you run YSLow on one of your web applications, you can obtain some really useful information about improving the performance of your application. One common performance improvement is to set expiration headers on static resources (such as CSS, JS and image files). Setting this header, will help preserve the file in the browser cache, thus preventing reload of the image on subsequent page http://syrupsucker.blogspot.com/2008/12/yslow-and-cache-headers.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Jason Drake)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1131270310109486733.post-4244626757805776412Tue, 02 Dec 2008 20:41:00 +00002008-12-02T13:15:40.736-08:00GWTGXTExtJSThis is a followup blog to my previous blog entry on GXT Tree and Loading from Restful URLs. While this approach worked, I had concerns over the number of AJAX requests as the tree is fully "expanded". As well, I was considering another possible issue: The BaseModel objects representing the Country, Album objects are used elsewhere in the client (not just within my tree). In this sense, the http://syrupsucker.blogspot.com/2008/12/gxt-tree-and-loading-alternative-design.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Jason Drake)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1131270310109486733.post-6427217027769886061Tue, 02 Dec 2008 03:44:00 +00002008-12-01T20:37:41.945-08:00GWTRESTExtJSAnyone who has used GXT can tell you that it is very powerful, but examples (and the javadoc) are still few and hard to find. The examples that come with the SDK are great (see Ext GWT 1.2 Samples), but if you need to something beyond these you typically need to figure it out on your own. I hope to be able to write a series of blog articles on some of the designs I have figured out for the http://syrupsucker.blogspot.com/2008/12/gxt-tree-and-loading-with-rest.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Jason Drake)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1131270310109486733.post-4351125129745295233Sat, 04 Oct 2008 06:11:00 +00002008-10-03T23:19:18.325-07:00ExtJSWhen an ExtJS form is submitted, the successful completion of the asynchronous call will call the function mapped to the success config value. This function will take two parameters form and action. If you are returning JSON from the call you an access this directly from the action parameter. var _form = // ... get your form (eg. formPanel.form) _form.submit({ scope.this, waitMsg:'http://syrupsucker.blogspot.com/2008/10/extjs-actionsubmit-response.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Jason Drake)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1131270310109486733.post-6065383483035473859Sat, 04 Oct 2008 03:31:00 +00002008-10-03T20:43:29.216-07:00JAXBRESTJAX-RSAs I had previously reported, both RestEasy and Jersey both suffered from the inability to return a collection of JAXB marshalled objects. I was thinking on this a little, and while I could use the JAXBCollection fix in Jersey, it seemed a little bit of a hack until it goes into the 1.0 release. Instead (for now), I have written a few wrapper classes which they themselves are XmlRootElements http://syrupsucker.blogspot.com/2008/10/collections-and-jax-rs.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Jason Drake)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1131270310109486733.post-2358491800313589256Fri, 03 Oct 2008 21:14:00 +00002008-10-03T14:47:03.169-07:00ServletRESTEclipseJAX-RSSince I was successful deploying Jersey to Tomcat 6.0, I decided to check out RestEasy from JBoss. One issue I ran into with Jersey was it's inability to XML serialize a collection of objects. This is bug ID is 18, and it is fixed for the 1.0 release (however a beta of this does not appear to be available yet), but I decided to see if RestEasy (a non-reference implementation) has the same issuehttp://syrupsucker.blogspot.com/2008/10/deploying-resteasy-in-tomcat-60.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Jason Drake)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1131270310109486733.post-9209720705100368748Fri, 03 Oct 2008 02:39:00 +00002008-10-02T20:07:21.735-07:00ServletRESTEclipseJAX-RSJersey is a reference implementation for the JAX-RS (JSR-311) for building RESTful Web services. It is nearing approval with the JSR committees. While there are many wikis and articles in using Jersey with Netbeans (downloading the Netbeans 6.1 EE package includes everything you need for JSR-311), there was very little information on using Tomcat 6.0 with Jersey. After piecing together severalhttp://syrupsucker.blogspot.com/2008/10/deploying-jersey-in-tomcat-60.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Jason Drake)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1131270310109486733.post-8348187042045008617Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:40:00 +00002008-10-02T12:48:06.076-07:00ServletGWTJavaRESTIf you are a developer who likes to work with Java you may have come to know REST and Restful Web Services. The real advantage of REST is its ability to get rid of some of the "webspeak" and make your URLs a little more platform independent. As a client developer it is much nicer to make a request to http://somehost/Application/stamp/5533 to retrieve stamp 5533 than the traditional http://http://syrupsucker.blogspot.com/2008/10/making-your-servlet-application-urls.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Jason Drake)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1131270310109486733.post-160090545230900223Tue, 30 Sep 2008 03:12:00 +00002008-09-29T20:17:39.579-07:00I ran into a situation where I could not connect to my fathers PC using Remote Assistance. Now, given that he lives about 3000 miles away it is essential that I am able to connect with Remote Assistance to help him with miscellanious activities. I discovered that the Remote Assistance files are really nothing more than XML, and upon edting the XML I realized there was a series of invalid IPs inhttp://syrupsucker.blogspot.com/2008/09/remote-assistance-not-always-able-to.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Jason Drake)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1131270310109486733.post-7771282929516306224Tue, 30 Sep 2008 02:58:00 +00002008-09-29T20:11:18.657-07:00ExtJSAt first I struggled to get my ExtJS ComboBoxes to act like a straight HTML Select. In my application, I have a grid which loads the data into a store via AJAX. Later, create or edit dialogs display which contain a combobox of items represented by the store. Rather than load these again from the server, I wanted to reuse the data from the store. The problem I had is selecting a value in the http://syrupsucker.blogspot.com/2008/09/extjs-combobox-act-like-html-select.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Jason Drake)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1131270310109486733.post-8561957433450500713Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:30:00 +00002008-09-12T09:32:52.123-07:00EclipseLinkToplinkJPAI was writing some unit tests to test a few of my queries and noticed they were failing to return results (even though the resultant rows were clearly in the database). Looking into my changes, the only differences was that I recently added the EclipseLink eclipselink.join-fetch for two one-to-many relationships. From looking at the resultant SQL, it became clear what the problem was. By adding http://syrupsucker.blogspot.com/2008/08/jpa-and-optional-associations.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Jason Drake)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1131270310109486733.post-2276611574976578571Fri, 22 Aug 2008 21:14:00 +00002008-08-23T09:52:30.977-07:00While I was quick to point out that my refactoring of my services end up being a little bit painful on the Swing Heavy-client side, when it came time to refactor my web-services client (currently a series of dedicated servlets used by my mobile devices) it was surprisingly a clean update. Why was this? What lesson can I pull from this. The main one was that the web-services code was very http://syrupsucker.blogspot.com/2008/08/refactoring-followup-strange-side.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Jason Drake)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1131270310109486733.post-4272640131424331099Fri, 15 Aug 2008 17:48:00 +00002008-08-15T11:00:59.956-07:00So as most can assert from reading my blog I have developed a stamp tracking software "suite" of tools. The core of this was based off a JPA implementation which was recently moved to EclipseLink. With some of the new tools available to Eclipse for use with JPA (in particular Dali), I decided to think about reorganizing my services and trying to streamline some of my code (Using http://syrupsucker.blogspot.com/2008/08/refactoring-biting-off-more-than-you.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Jason Drake)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1131270310109486733.post-105829015611258821Tue, 05 Aug 2008 18:31:00 +00002008-08-05T11:51:43.106-07:00Those of you who know me know that I sometimes shun the world of academia. Not that I do not think education is useful. I do. I am the current holder of two bachelor degrees and numerous certifications and I can honestly say they have proven useful in my career. But too often I see a candidate interviewing at my company who has years of academic training (multiple bachelor degrees, masters http://syrupsucker.blogspot.com/2008/08/certifications-even-for-experienced.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Jason Drake)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1131270310109486733.post-7876884023546605584Mon, 28 Jul 2008 02:42:00 +00002008-07-27T20:08:54.293-07:00UnitTestEclipseJPANow that I am using Bugzilla to track various bugs and enhancements for my projects, I finally got around to addressing this issue of "Provide the ability to record the create/update timestamp." for my stamp objects. This seems simple enough, and most database applications record this information, however by default this is not something that is automated by the JPA frameworks (unlike the http://syrupsucker.blogspot.com/2008/07/automatically-recording-createupdate.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Jason Drake)0