Gosling blogged "As to why I left, it’s difficult to answer: Just about anything I could say that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good…" Ouch.
Tag: Java
Building a Tomcat 6 Appliance
TurnKey have done a great job of putting together a collection of open source software appliances using Ubuntu JeOS 8.04. Unfortunately TurnKey’s Tomcat appliance uses only Tomcat 5.5, instead of Tomcat 6 featuring Servlet 2.5 and JSP 2.1 support, which was released in March 2007. On the plus side, however, Turnkey have also published their appliance core, which you can use as the basis of your own appliances. The core includes Webmin at port 12321 and SSH. Turnkey appliances are distributed with no password for root so make sure to set it as as possible. The hostname for Turnkey Core is ‘core’, but that can be changed by editing /etc/hostname.
Tomcat 6 has been backported to Ubuntu 8.04, so it is easy to add, just edit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sources.list and uncomment hardy-backports universe, then:
apt-get update apt-get install tomcat6 # ~70MB
Note Tomcat6 is run with CATALINA_HOME set to /usr/share/tomcat6 and CATALINA_BASE set to /var/lib/tomcat6. If you read the Tomcat RUNNING.txt doc (available at /usr/share/doc/tomcat6-common/RUNNING.txt.gz) you’ll see that Tomcat6 is looking for libraries in CATALINA_HOME/lib and not CATALINA_BASE/lib. Since it is ignored, the presence of a CATALINA_BASE/lib directory is, at best, confusing.
Tomcat defaults to port 8080 and 8443. As Tomcat is being run on the appliance as root we can change the ports to 80 and 443 by editing /etc/tomcat6/server.xml.
The tomcat service is managed using
There is a tomcat6-admin package also, but I do not use, and have not tested it. To deploy a war file I simply copy it into /var/lib/tomcat6/webapps, eg.
apt-get install wget cd /var/lib/tomcat6/webapps wget http://.../...jar
Hudson
This week I’ve been upgrading from CruiseControl to Hudson. CruiseControl has served well for the past eighteen months, completing hundreds of builds with only the occasional restart. Once configured with a couple of XML files CruiseControl is low maintenance, but my impression is that now Thoughtworks is offering a commercial product it is no longer getting as much attention as its competitors. Hudson in particular is an open source CI solution that has received good reviews, and with the need to configure new Maven projects I thought this a good time to switch.
The best way to use Hudson seems to be with a dedicated VM including any infrastructure required to test the project being built, in my case for example Java 6, Maven2 and a dedicated instance of Oracle XE. Although it is possible to simply start Hudson from the command line it makes more sense to install it as a service, and this is exactly what the Debian/Ubuntu package does. I use Hudson with a Nexus maven repository, with settings.xml stored in …/tools/_usr_share_maven2/conf/, so far it seems to be working well.
Google Trends – Databases & Languages
Google Trends is a great tool for graphing search term popularity over time. Here is a comparison of searches for several makes of database.
Perhaps it’s a quirk of the phrases I used, but I was surprised to see Oracle so dominant, and even MySQL more popular than SQL Server. PostgreSQL languishes in obscurity compared to MySQL, and Ingres barely registers at all.
Here’s some languages that I’m interested in. Java is hugely dominant.
Let’s take out Java and zoom in. I was surprised to see Ruby’s recent decline relative to Python. Books on Scala have come out only recently.
Looking more specifically at JVM language dialects I’m surprised to see Jython competing so strongly with JRuby. I’m not sure if I picked the right phrase for Groovy.
Choosing tools solely on the basis of popularity is obviously not a great idea, but I do feel better now about continuing to use Oracle, Java and Python.
P.S. See also the TIOBE Programming Community Index
facelets-tutorial javax/el/ELResolverClass
ICEfaces have published a facelets-tutorial
Deployment instructions were limited so I downloaded and unzipped the source file into the samples folder provided with ICEfaces-1.7.2-SP1.
ant help ant clean ant tomcat6.0
I then copied dist/facelets-tutorial.war to tomcat-6.0/webapps… localhost…log showed:
Feb 21, 2009 11:11:07 AM org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext listenerStart SEVERE: Exception sending context initialized event to listener instance of class com.sun.faces.config.ConfigureListener java.lang.LinkageError: loader constraints violated when linking javax/el/ELResolver class at com.sun.faces.config.ConfigureListener.registerELResolverAndListenerWithJsp(ConfigureListener.java:581)
Incompatibility between the EL included with ICEfaces and the EL provided with Tomcat 6? Stopping Tomcat, removing webapps/facelets-tutorial/web/WEB-INF/lib/el-api.jar and restarting provides a quick fix. Closer inspection of the facelets-tutorial build.xml reveals it has entries obsoleted by the newer version of samples/etc/build-common.xml and so is still including jars not needed or desired with Tomcat 6.