Matt’s Blog

Can’t find a decent open source java based wiki

Written on January 7, 2008 – 12:00 am | by mpayne

I admit, early on in the process, the bar was set pretty high with Jive’s Clearspace. Honestly I think it is awesome. Great layout, multiple wiki spaces, personal blogs, forums, polls, LDAP authenication and killer intergation with openfire chat server.

However Clearspace is not open source and its pricing is out of reach at this point in time. I am trying to introduce the wiki as a pilot to a techie and non techie work enviroment. (Maybe at a little point in time)

Look little at JSPWiki, overall I thought it was a little raw for a non-techie corporate enviroment.

XWiki seemed a little better in terms of features. I like the fact individual users can have their own blogs.
It also seems to have the concept of a discussion forum.
I wish it had more than one theme.
Its overall all look and feel is unpolished in some areas and acceptable in others. There are some very good features that are by default not obvious to the overall navigation.

The deal breaker is XWiki is "slop". Its not packaged together with care, just slopped together. This becomes obvious with one look at the WEB-INF\lib directory in recent downloadable .war archives.

Half of the jars is that directory are not need.
I am not intimate with the code, but just glancing the surface the following are build time only jars

• ant-1.6.5.jar
• ant-1.7.0.jar
• ant-launcher-1.7.0.jar
• antlr-2.7.6rc1.jar
• jmock-1.0.1.jar
• junit-3.8.1.jar
• jtidy-8.0-20060801.131059-3-dev.jar

After that, there are two caching implementations ehcache-1.1.jar, oscache-2.3.2-xwiki.jar.
XML api’s appear rundant as well re: jdom AND dom4j.
Pick one
It uses hibernate for persistance so I imagine not oe ever cleaned out what hibernate shipped with vs. what you actually need for your implementation.

Hopefully someone cleans this up, I was considering XWiki, but in its current form, it leaves the impression that it wasn’t packaged with care.

I am open to other suggestions. Perhaps even outside the java area. Deki is a consideration, its clean but would perfer that the wiki also allow individuals to have their personal blog/journals.

Posted in java | 9 Comments »

What do you use to monitor Tomcat?

Written on December 12, 2007 – 12:00 am | by mpayne

Currently take a look at Lambda Probe
Seems to be pretty nice, though we have run into a couple problems while running it under an IBM box under a IBM 5.0 JVM.  I’m curious what else is out there and also open source.

Posted in java | No Comments »

Terrible web programming @Dishnetwork

Written on September 6, 2007 – 12:00 am | by mpayne

IE specific hacks.

Posted in java | No Comments »

try not to hardcode log4j configurations

Written on September 2, 2007 – 12:00 am | by mpayne

Around work, I’ve seen applications where there are
several log4j configurations checked in along side each other(dev,
test, prod).  Often, the only differences are location of where the log
files go. 

A better solution would not require, .war files to be re-built in order
to only change log file destinations.  Log4J will interpret variables
given to it.

e.g. ${LOG_HOME}/mylog.txt

<appender name="FILE" class="org.apache.log4j.FileAppender">
<param name="File" value="${LOG_HOME}/mylog.txt"/>
<param name="Append" value="false"/>
    <layout class="org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout">
<param name="ConversionPattern" value="%d %-5p [%t] %C{2} (%F:%L) - %m%n"/>
</layout>
</appender>
To supply this value to tomcat set variable "CATALINA_OPTS". e.g.

CATALINA_OPTS=-DLOG_HOME=/usr/java/logs
export CATALINA_OPTS
(before calling catalina.sh run)
or on windows
SET CATALINA_OPTS=-DLOG_HOME=/usr/java/logs
(this can also be set via system environment settings in the control panel).

I like this solution better than hard coding the path or referring to ${CATALINA_HOME}, which would be specific to tomcat.
This can easily be construed to work with other app servers as well (jetty/glassfish).
Other notes, on windows I was able to just define LOG_HOME as an
environment variable, where on linux I had to supply it via
CATALINA_OPTS.

I know the above isn’t rocket science, but perhaps we can make use of this generalization.

Posted in java | No Comments »

Example of the crap people try to sell for windows

Written on August 7, 2007 – 12:00 am | by mpayne

WebDrive

http://www.southrivertech.com/purchase/wdpricing.html

For 59.95, you too can have a copy of "webdrive" that allows you to map drive letters to sftp(ftp over ssh).

That kind of stuff has been built into linux for years.
sftp is one of the many kio slaves built into konqueror.

I can’t believe people pay for this kind of stuff.
btw: for other examples of file systems people have been using with linux see: http://fuse.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/FileSystems

Posted in java | 3 Comments »

Gimp vs Photoshop

Written on May 14, 2007 – 12:00 am | by mpayne

Can photoshop to this.
Anyway, thought that was kind of funny.

Posted in java | No Comments »

Racing games cause bad/risky drivers

Written on March 19, 2007 – 12:00 am | by mpayne

according to this cnn article.
video games can influence the behavior of some players.

I am not saying the reports are wrong, just
curious if the people doing these reports ever take a step back and think. Perhaps some people interested in play racing games are already "spicey" drivers
and the games are orthogonal to altering their driving habits.

Posted in java | No Comments »

Anyone using dual widescreen dvi monitors shared with a kvm switch?

Written on January 15, 2007 – 12:00 am | by mpayne

Trying to decided between a single 24/26 inch monitor or two 20/22 inch wide screen monitors. However, which every solution I choose. I would like to be able to toggle it between 2 computers.  Also, 2 22 inch monitors can be found cheaper than many 24 inch monitors (go figure).

However there seems to be a shortage of kvm switches that:

• support dual monitors
• with dvi connections
• support at least 1680×1050 resolution (1920×1200 would be even better)
• has good reviews
• priced under 250.00

Anyone have any good recommendations?

If I can’t find anything, I may go with a single 24/26 inch monitor with dual inputs and toggle between the two.

Posted in java | No Comments »

beagle-helper must die

Written on December 28, 2006 – 12:00 am | by mpayne

Beagle helper keeps spawning behind the scenes and taking up 100%cpu cycle on my ubuntu box. 

re:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=1660226

Last night someone cut the wires to our deer again.  Thinking I would catch them this time with our wireless camera, I was duped, beagle may have something to do with it.

There are whole time slices of images missing from our ftp server.  Perhaps due to wireless outtages or perhap the box/ftp server was unresposiven during that time.

Either way, I am pissed I bought this friggen camera to catch the person and they did strike again.

Posted in java | 2 Comments »

Wicket, whatever happened to separation of concerns?

Written on November 21, 2006 – 12:00 am | by mpayne

Webwork/Struts 2.0 has still has a nice pojo feel to it. Actions don’t look specific to running in a webapp. The Java code is concerned with a buisness process, not a bunch of code to entertain the UI

Stripes has no separation of view destinations. e.g

actions end with....

return new ForwardResolution("/productDetail.jsp");

Wicket has even less separation.

public class HelloWorldPage extends WebPage {
public HelloWorldPage() {
new Label(this, ?message?, ?Hello, World!?) {
@Override
protected void onComponentTag(ComponentTag tag) {
super.onComponentTag(tag); #1
tag.put("style", "color:red"); #2
}
}
}
}

A concept drilled into many frameworks was a need for a separation of concerns.
Java code didn’t print out style attributes. #if/EL logic was used to style odd/even row colors. Rails says stop compiling code & quick reloadablity = productiving. Yet Wicket says html/java source are dependent on each other. Who’s right?

However, if I decide I want to eat their food. Wicket doesn’t seem that complex to learn. Its certainly has a lot less files that need to be edited than Tapestry( hopefully tapesty 5.x will fix that).
Just, I am sure I want(or should) to skin the cat like that. Maybe I’ll have to write a demo app with it.

Posted in java | 1 Comment »