Jamie Raut

jarfinder.com

2008-11-17T11:27:00.000-08:00

Kudos to Frank Kelly for alerting the world -- via his blog -- to the existence of jarfinder.com. This is an online tool that helps people track down class path issues by reporting what JARs a particular class belongs to. It also helps you find the download pages for JARs you don't have. Over the years I have used a couple of different sites to do the same thing but for different reasons, those

JUnit and the Working Directory

2008-09-15T16:52:00.000-07:00

This is a quick post for my own notes more than anything. Oftentimes, your JUnit tests need to load up some stuff from files. Most of the time, you'll want to use getClass().getResourceAsStream() to do this. If that's not possible for some reason or another, and you need to use a relative path name to some resource for your JUnit test, and you're using an IDE to kick off your tests, what should

Installing Tomcat on OS X (The Hard Way)

2008-08-08T14:45:00.000-07:00

Last week I set about installing Tomcat on an OS X client machine. Being a UNIX based OS, I figured I would put my sys admin hat on and install Apache's servlet container in a manner befitting of a multi-user UNIX environment. Looking at the OS X directory structure, I didn't see an obvious place for local application installations besides /usr/local. (I've seen various conventions used on

Load Testing with fhb

2008-07-09T10:18:00.000-07:00

As part of an effort to stand up a new production environment for a client, some load testing was required to provide some baselines for tweaking and tuning. As part of some due diligence to find the latest and greatest in load generation tools, I happened upon Shanti Subramanyam's excellent post on the Faban HTTP Bench (fhb), part of the Faban project from Sun. I wanted to touch on a few things

Clustering with Sun's Web and App Servers

2008-07-09T09:49:00.000-07:00

I recently setup a cluster of Sun Java System Application Server (now called Sun Glassfish Enterprise Server1) instances, front-ended by a software load balancer in the form of the Sun Java System Web Server equipped with the load balancer plugin. Within this environment, I chose to split off static content from a dynamic JavaEE web app and have the static content served from the web server,

JavaOne 2008: Java+You

2008-05-09T23:35:00.000-07:00

I managed to get my hands on a pass to JavaOne this year and thought I'd share my impressions of some of the presentations I went to. First up, the keynote was very impressive. The theme of JavaOne this year was Java+You, with the bulk of the keynote devoted to consumer-oriented Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) and devices. Sun demonstrated a JavaFX app running in a browser on top of the new

Dumping a JNDI Tree in a JSP

2008-05-09T00:29:00.000-07:00

I'm sure anyone who's ever had to look up a DataSource or EJB home interface in an enterprise has come across an occasional difficulty with objects not being bound where they were expected. Sometimes, an application server vendor (e.g. BEA Systems) has thought it wise to include a function to peruse the contents of JNDI. Sometimes not. For the latter case, I've put together a simple JSP to

Books, Books, Books

2008-03-27T02:56:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd lay out in this post a good selection of books that I have on my bookshelf. I believe these books can take any developer to the next level in terms of understanding the Java language, design patterns and enterprise application architecture, which will be invaluable when applied to the design and development of enterprise Java applications.

Migrating from GNU Keyring for Palm OS to 1passwd on the iPhone

2007-11-08T14:36:00.000-08:00

So I was one of those guys that bought an iPhone on the day it came out. (I didn't wait in line though!) My previous phone was a trusty, yet very chunky Palm Treo. Since then though, I've found that there was still one super useful application residing on the Treo that I could not do without and for which there was no equivalent on the iPhone. Since the day I got my iPhone, I've had to carry two

vi Trick for Removing Carriage Returns

2007-10-30T16:18:00.000-07:00

I hate it when people edit files on Windows and deploy them on a *nix box, then wonder what went wrong when everything blows up. I have traditionally dealt with these issues with either (easiest first):dos2unix filename filename or tr -d "\r" <filename >filename2 && mv filename2 filenameToday I learnt a new trick in vi to get rid of carriage returns. Start typing out your substitution command: :%

Challenges with Netbeans 6.0 Beta 2, Subversion and Cygwin on Windows

2007-10-26T14:31:00.000-07:00

I came across a challenge today in using the new Netbeans 6.0 Beta 2 release with Subversion and Cygwin. The solution wasn't very googleable (yes, that's a real adjective) so I'm jotting this down in the hope that someone else will find it useful. When trying to commit changes to a project in a Subversion repository, Netbeans kept complaining about a missing entries file:svn: Can't open file '.

Maintaining BPM Applications

2007-01-12T12:56:00.000-08:00

One of the lessons learnt from my BPM projects that I'd like to pass on is thinking about subsequent releases of your BPM application. As we pull together version 1.0 of whatever processes we're building, we'll typically be writing custom code to handle aspects of system-to-human or system-to-system interactions. As we progress through releases 1, 2, 3... and on to release n, that custom code

Solaris 10 Privileges

2006-11-27T10:40:00.001-08:00

I recently had to figure out a nice way to allow a non-privileged user on a Solaris system to bind to a privileged port. This is the same old problem of figuring out how to bind your web server process to a privileged port, let's say 80, and not have it run as root. Some people would just run the process as root, or as setuid root but the process can still be compromised and give the attacker

JDBC Is Not a Protocol (Neither Is JMS)

2006-11-07T09:49:00.000-08:00

This will sound like a little bit of a rant but I don't know how many times I've seen this in architecture diagrams (and always from very experienced people). We all know what you mean but seriously, JDBC is not a protocol. It is a means by which your Java application translates Java calls into the database's native protocol, be that TNS (Transparent Network Substrate, for Oracle [actually a bit

Accelerating Requirements with Process-Centric Prototyping

2006-06-12T12:55:00.000-07:00

In Miami this year, I spoke about a techniques used to accelerate business understanding of the problem and solution space for projects at a large financial institution in order to more rapidly drive out better requirements. The talk outlined the tools used, the iterative approach taken, aiming to show working software as early and often as possible (in line with the Agile mantra). The session

A Bit of Fun In Advance of the World Cup

2006-06-02T12:55:00.000-07:00

This year I coaxed a group of colleagues to take a small financial interest in the outcome of the upcoming world cup. This will be a friendly competition where everyone puts in $5 into the pot and picks some teams out of a hat to follow throughout the competition. The people who have picked the top three finishers will split the pot. To make it a little more fair, I wrote a small Java program to

Applying a BPM Approach to Three Similar but Distinct Business Environments

2005-06-13T11:27:00.000-07:00

Last week in Miami, I delivered a presentation on how BPM was used to deliver business value to three distinct divisions of a large financial institution. The divisions in question were a Commercial Banking, Private Banking and Commercial Real Estate. While different technologies were ultimately used for each, the approach taken was the same. The talk outlined the type of business processes to be

A Practical Approach to Introducing BPM into the Enterprise

2004-06-07T12:54:00.000-07:00

Last week in Philadelphia, I co-presented a talk on an approach I've used to introduce BPM to large enterprises. The abstract from the talk follows:BPM is touted as being able to solve a number of business and technology challenges ranging from simple process modeling to complex application integration. Given this broad range of capabilities how does an organization get started? What tools can