Jeannot's Weblog

First time i've seen this...

2009-07-03T07:03:00.001Z

Waitrose Sandwich

2009-06-25T13:26:00.002Z

Am pleased to read that Waitrose don't use Waitrose-disapproved farms...

Prospect of whitby

2009-06-19T15:13:00.001Z

Another sign

2009-06-17T12:31:00.001Z

St catherines dock

2009-06-02T09:43:00.001Z

JAX-WS service with JAXB

2009-05-14T17:59:00.002Z

Things to remember:

1. JAX-WS uses JAXB 2.0 by default, so no need to choose from the myriad of OXM products that are around. Create JAXB 2.0-annotated classes using the xjc compiler - this takes XSDs and makes annotated Java objects out of them. Download the JAXB RI and run xjc, you should get sourcecode of classes which you can then use. If your data doesn't seem to be being serialized/deserialized, check that you've got valid JAXB annotations on it: I created a test class with a couple of fields, and was confused when I didn't get anything on the inbound object. But of course I'd forgotten the annotations - if they're not there JAXB won't try to do anything with it, so nothing will get in or out. If you're creating a test message class, maybe it's a better idea to create an XSD for it and then run it through the JAXB Binding Compiler (xjc)?

2. Be ultra-careful with namespaces: make sure your messages are consistently using the namespaces specified on the SOAP envelope and are defined as the same targetNamespace on the service methods. Especially if your JAXB-annotated objects are in a different namespace to the service methods themselves. You will need to specify both as attributes on the SOAP envelope, e.g.

<env:Envelope xmlns:env="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"
xmlns:ns1="http://services.merlesystems.co.uk/"
xmlns:ns2="http://schemas.merlesystems.co.uk">
<env:Header />
<env:Body>
<ns1:testStructuredName>
<ns2:structuredName>
<ns2:forename>Lily</ns2:forename>
<ns2:surname>Allen</ns2:surname>
</ns2:structuredName>
</ns1:testStructuredName>
</env:Body>
</env:Envelope>

You can specify the namespaces on the elements themselves as well, but that gets quite verbose if you have a lot of elements, you can't see the wood for the trees.

3. Deploying the service is pretty easy using the Weblogic Workshop, it does all the spadework for you, as long as you want to deploy it on Weblogic... Creating a JAX-WS service with Axis2 seems a lot harder than it needs to be. The documentation is a bit random and I just couldn't get it to do what I hoped it would. Spring-WS promises to be easy too, as long as you don't have any problems downloading the Maven artifacts that it needs!

Bath abbey

2009-04-30T07:39:00.001Z

Bracelet 2

2009-04-16T08:49:00.001Z

H

2009-04-15T21:54:00.001Z

Red rubber bands

2009-04-06T16:50:00.001Z

Hudson on Weblogic

2009-03-25T14:49:00.003Z

Hudson is a brilliant continuous integration tool, easier to configure than Cruise Control... but how to deploy it on Weblogic? When I tried it, it complained that the Ant version bundled with Weblogic 10g was incompatible with Hudson's.
Initially I tried giving the hudson.war a weblogic.xml file containing:


  <weblogic-web-app xmlns="http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/weblogic-web-app">
   <container-descriptor>
    <prefer-web-inf-classes>true</prefer-web-inf-classes>
   </container-descriptor>
  </weblogic-web-app>

but it didn't seem to work for me, so I went with the suggestion in this useful post, which suggests wrapping the hudson.war in an EAR, and deploying that, with the classloader configured to prefer application packages for the org.apache.* classes.

So that got me up and running (merci Maxence!), but when I started trying to run builds for projects using Maven, I hit another problem. Under Weblogic, calling out to the bundled Maven agent seems to have a bug. See this post, which looks similar to my problem as it cannot access the Maven agent JAR using the zip: protocol - there are other posts knocking around for similar problems in JBoss and/or Tomcat, but no fix available yet.

Unable to get the native Hudson Maven integration working properly, I resorted to invoking the Maven command line interface from Hudson: create a script which cds to the folder containing the Maven project (as Hudson by default runs scripts from its workspace folder) and then does "CALL mvn clean install" to run your Maven installation. Then, from the Hudson web console, set your Hudson job up to run your script (again, relative to the workspace folder).

Pointless sign

2009-01-27T13:36:00.001Z

Nativity scene

2008-12-15T12:35:00.002Z

Our home nativity scene has attracted some extra worshippers at the crib this year. A dolphin, an unrealistic large blue fish, even a giant penguin. And wait: what's Ganesh the Hindu elephant god doing in the background?

Creating an Oracle stored procedure in Java

2008-12-04T14:31:00.005Z

For haters of PL/SQL, you can create Oracle stored procedures in Java. Here are some notes on how to do it, cobbled together from pages I found on the web plus my own trial and error...

1. Add a Java schema entity:

create or replace and compile java source named "test" as
import java.sql.*;
import oracle.jdbc.*;
public class test {
public static void test(String name) {
System.out.println("Doing something... " + name);
}
}

2. The above doesn't do anything. You can add JDBC handling code, and when you get the connection, if you use the special connection string "jdbc:default:connection:" this will automatically connect to the database in which the class has been stored.

3. Run the above, which should compile the Java class and store it in the database.

4. You can see if it's been stored by doing:

select object_name,object_type,status from user_objects where object_type like 'JAVA%';

If it compiled OK, status should be 'VALID'.

5. Now you have to create a normal Oracle procedure to wrap the method call. E.g:

create or replace procedure test(name varchar2) as language java name 'test.test(java.lang.String)';

If it's not working, check if there were any errors by using "show err;" in SQLPlus or whatever...

6. Now you can run it. Do the following which should make sure you actually see the output...

call dbms_java.set_output(2000);
set serveroutput on;
call test('paul');

You should see your method output in the console...

Pages I referred to for this, thanks to their authors!:

http://programmersjournal.blogspot.com/2008/04/writing-java-stored-procedure-in-oracle.html (includes useful sample JDBC code which actually does something, and has more detail generally!)
http://www.dbasupport.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-19941.html (helped me realize that I needed to declare the argument types in Oracle form (varchar2 etc.) and Java form (java.lang.String etc.) in the procedure which wraps the method call. This wasn't immediately apparent to me...

2008-11-19T09:27:00.001Z

Poppy

2008-06-18T09:53:00.002Z

My new mobile phone just posts photos to my blog without me having to even think about it. The wonders of technology!

Ten Reasonably Random Things About Me

2007-11-18T15:26:00.001Z

Betty C., thanks for this opportunity to think up ten random things about me. They won't be truly random of course: that would just be embarrassing. Instead, they will be apparently random but actually cunningly and subtly selected in order to present myself in a certain light. Isn't that what everybody does?

1. We have 3 cats. Rudy and Sappho are siblings - black, 8 years old, half oriental and half neighbourhood mog. Poppy is a 3 year old short-haired tabby.

2. I went to the University of Warwick where I met my wife-to-be, Helen. I studied French and History. In our final year, we acquired a small white glove puppet in the shape of a rabbit, whom we named Jeannot le Pushkin. Hence the name of this blog.

3. I was in a band at school called Psychosis. "The worst band of the 80s - except for Haircut 100" as a friend fondly recalled recently. I played bass guitar and wore a white lab coat on stage, as we were somewhat influenced by Hawkwind, and knew about as many chords as they do.

4. My father was in the merchant navy, and when I was a child my family sometimes had the opportunity to go on trips on his ship. I remember walking along a dockside in the dark at Guayaquil in Ecuador, huge cockroaches crunching under my feet.

5. The most interesting place I have ever been is Kathmandu.

6. My shoe size is 11. Or 45 in Europe. I hate shopping in general, but especially for shoes, so thank goodness I can buy online now!

7. I am a bit of a sugar addict.

8. My most embarrassing memory about France is of being on a French exchange when I was about 15, losing the keys to my hosts' house at a party and being discovered at about 3am, standing tiptoe on stacked-up dustbins and rabbit hutches, trying to break into my first-floor bedroom.

9. The first records I asked to be bought for me for Christmas were in about 1972: "Solid Gold Easy Action" by T-Rex and "No More Mr. Nice Guy" by Alice Cooper. I think the first record I actually bought myself when I started frequenting record shops several years later, was "See You" by Depeche Mode.

10. In the front pocket of my rucksack are: a radio, half a packet of mints, a mobile phone bill, an Oyster card, a toothbrush, some earplugs, and an adapter for my bike tyres.

I tag Jezz to come up with Ten Random Things next...

Getting ResourceBundles in a webapp

2007-10-25T10:54:00.000Z

I tend to forget that in a container, the working directory will probably be the directory that the container is launched from - e.g. jboss-4.0.5.GA/bin or something like that. Which is no use for retrieving properties files from within a webapp, which have their own contexts managed by the container. So how to retrieve a properties file in a class running in a webapp. Here's a good method I found on the web - see this page: http://www.mambo.net/as/view/170
This is so useful, I'm copying it here for my reference, in case it disappears...

NB: your properties file should be in the WEB-INF/classes directory!


import java.util.*;
import java.net.*;
import java.io.*

ResourceBundle res   = null;               // Resource bundle storage
String         bname = "X.properties";     // in WEB-INF/classes dir

URL url = this.getClass().getClassLoader().getResource(bname);

if (null != url) {
    try {
        String fname   = url.getFile();
        InputStream is = new FileInputStream(fname);
        res            = (ResourceBundle) new PropertyResourceBundle(is);
        is.close();
     } catch (Exception e) {
        res = null;
     }
}

if (null == res) {
    // Screwed. Do something fatal.
}

JBoss - j'y bosse...

2007-10-22T11:59:00.000Z

The JBoss deployment scanner will only redeploy an exploded application when the main config file changes: i.e:
- for a WAR, WEB-INF/web.xml;
- for an EAR, META-INF/application.xml
- for a JAR, META-INF/ejb-jar.xml
So you always need to at least "touch" this file in order to redeploy without restarting the server. This could be done via the Ant build - use the Ant "touch" task to do it.

JBoss web server - logging

2007-10-02T10:51:00.000Z

By default, the Tomcat request logging seems to be switched off. To turn it on, do the following.
JBoss 4 has Tomcat deployed as a service inside Tomcat, called jbossweb-tomcat55.sar. This can be found in the server/default/deploy directory.
In the root of jbossweb-tomcat55.sar is a server.xml file: you need to activate (uncomment) the valve which does the access logging in order to see the HTTP requests in the appropriate .log file in the log directory.
The relevant valve in server.xml looks something like:


<Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.FastCommonAccessLogValve"
    prefix="localhost_access_log." suffix=".log"
    pattern="common" directory="${jboss.server.home.dir}/log" 
    resolveHosts="false" />

Tour de France

2007-06-04T06:41:00.000Z

(Haven't done any blogging for a while as I've been in the process of moving to France, and I haven't had the time.)
Guillaume Prébois, a journalist with Le Monde, is planning to cycle the entire Tour de France route, as part of a controlled experiment to see if someone can really maintain the hours and distance demanded of the riders in the real Tour, without recourse to "certain substances". He will be doing the route (I have read - but not confirmed!) one day before the real stage goes through, and his blood etc. will be constantly monitored and the results published. He says that he really expects to find himself utterly exhausted, contrasting with other Tour riders who apparently can still do a coherent media interview immediately after a feat of extreme endurance such as a stage of the tour should be. He says that there used to be "exhaustion", but not so much any more - why?
I noticed a piece about this on Le Journal de la Santé on France 5, but other information seems a bit thin on the ground (doesn't he have a website for this adventure??). I found a bit of second-hand info here, but not much else.
So for any Tunbridge Wells-based readers out there, Guillaume Prébois will presumably be coming through your neck of the woods on Saturday 7 July - and I wish him lots of luck since the roads will not have been cleared for him, so he'll be running the gauntlet of 4x4s and chav-mobiles that normally plague the town.
Are there any journalists out there who could take this up and perhaps interview him en route through Kent? I don't know where he's planning to stop... or if no journalists, at least somebody could chalk encouraging words for him on the road somewhere. Chapeau!

Write Dumb Code

2007-03-02T12:17:00.000Z

I really enjoyed this article by Brian Goetz of Sun Microsystems, in which amongst other things he exhorts developers to "write dumb code" - in the sense of code which is straightforward, clean and follows obvious principles. I wholeheartedly agree with this.
There are two main reasons why code gets overcomplicated. The first is that in a way it's "easier" to code up a solution for a specific case, and then try to widen the solution to fit other conditions. What tends to happen here is that you end up building in lots of options and special code to cater for different things, which complicates and clouds the original aim. This is where refactoring is important. Refactoring is not a luxury - time needs to be allowed to do it properly.
The second reason is the programmer kudos that comes from complex solutions. I'm looking at a problem at the moment where there are layers of object caching and refreshing options in a situation where it's probably not even needed: the database does its own caching, so why reinvent the wheel?

This guy should've been promoted, not fired!

2007-02-23T11:13:00.001Z

But perhaps he wouldn't have wanted to be. This is a great video though. If only all sales support telephone people were like this, the world would be a lot more interesting place...

PC vs Mac

2007-02-16T10:15:00.001Z

Have you seen these Apple ads featuring Mitchell and Webb of radio and TV fame? Quite funny ads but somehow for me they end up backfiring - in the sense that they make me prefer the PC. They are supposed to make you think that Macs are just cool, relaxed and very competent, whereas the PC is nerdy and riddled with conflicts and problems. But I must admit I end up preferring the PC. The Mac just seems smug, but the PC, for all its problems, is somehow lovable. The ad is based on a wrong idea anyway: that the Mac is somehow for the home (ignoring all the offices - especially in media/creative businesses) which are full of Macs, and the PC is for the office - ignoring most computer-equipped homes which have Windows PCs.
So I was sort of thinking about changing to a Mac (I like the idea of running Unix under a beautifully slick user interface), so headed over to the Apple UK site - but then these ads put me off. Sorry Apple! This whole problem is brilliantly discussed by Charlie Brooker in this Guardian article.
Also check out the US versions of the same ads (same premise, different actors), they are quite funny too. The PC character looks a little bit more, shall we say, Gates-like...

Politics Schmolitics

2007-02-15T14:59:00.000Z

I tried the Politics test at OKCupid - and here are my results. In their graphic mockup, it puts me right on top of Hilary Clinton, which is actually somewhere I wouldn't mind being...

You are a
Social Liberal
(65% permissive)

and an...
Economic Liberal
(23% permissive)

You are best described as a:

Democrat

Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid
Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test