Nice slides about negative corporate environments

Corporate Design vs Startup Design - A Love Story

View more presentations from Amir Khella.

Sequences not allowed here

OK, this was just annoying, but since I couldn't find anything on the web when I looked, here's what my problem was:

I was modifying some hibernate code to use the SequenceStyleGenerator annotation, so it will work cross-DB. I'd initially developed using MySQL, and had a MySQL hibernate dialect specified in my config files. I exported the schema to an Oracle XE instance using hbm2ddl in Eclipse, and started using an Oracle driver in my datasource.

Every time I tried to insert anything, I got an oracle error - Sequence not allowed here. Ultimately, just removing the dialect entirely from the config files worked, since Hibernate can auto-detect the dialect most of the time.

Hibernate / Spring WAR issues in Weblogic 10 - antlr

I had an issue today deploying a straightforward WAR file to WLS 10. The classloader hierarchy was preventing Hibernate from using the correct version of the antlr jar that was bundled in my webapp.

For my particular situation, the solution had to be simple. In the end, I created a new Eclipse project to bundle the WAR into an EAR, and then added a file called weblogic-application.xml in the META-INF folder of that EAR with the following content:

<weblogic-application>
   <prefer-application-packages>
       <package-name>antlr.*</package-name>
   </prefer-application-packages>
</weblogic-application>

..which solves the problem.

The future of computing

Trillions from MAYAnMAYA on Vimeo.

UTF-8 hell

Localisation is a common requirement. So why is it so nightmarish to actually get it all working? I'm developing an app with Spring MVC and MySQL via Hibernate. You'd think that this should be quite straightforward, right? Think again. I've not got time to lay this all out nicely (as usual), but here's a quick list of things you need to do:

1. First, make sure your tables are created with UTF-8 encoding. e.g.
   

   CREATE TABLE `aTable` (
   `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
   `name` varchar(100) DEFAULT NULL,
   `value` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
   `category` varchar(45) DEFAULT NULL,
   `description` text,
   PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
   UNIQUE KEY `ind_setting_key` (`name`)
   ) ENGINE=InnoDB  DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8

2. Ensure your web pages are served as UTF-8
   

   <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
   charset=UTF-8" />

3. Set content type in JSPs:
   

   <%@ page language="java" contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8"     pageEncoding="UTF-8"%>

   
   
4. Add servlet filter to web.xml to set character encoding of request:
   

     <filter>
         <filter-name>charsetFilter</filter-name>
         <filter-class>org.springframework.web.filter.CharacterEncodingFilter</filter-class>
         <init-param>
             <param-name>encoding</param-name>
             <param-value>UTF-8</param-value>
         </init-param>
     </filter>
   
     <filter-mapping>
         <filter-name>charsetFilter</filter-name>
         <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
     </filter-mapping>

5. Ensure your forms submit UTF-8:
   

   <form action="targetpage.html" method="post" 
   enctype="application/x-www-form-urlencoded" accept-charset="UTF-8">

6. Set JDBC connection character set:
   jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/db?characterEncoding=utf8
7. When you read from the DB, issue SET NAMES 'utf8'; or you'll see garbled characters.

I think that's it...

Edited Blogspot template

Some regular blog readers may notice that this blog has a flexible width but still has rounded corners. The template I chose was a fixed width template using images for corners, which I generally dislike, having used them in the past without too much cross-browser success.

For this template, I make a 5-minute edit to remove the CSS for any corners and then just added a couple of JQuery includes and a few lines of Javascript:

<script src='http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js' type='text/javascript'></script>
<script src='http://malsup.com/jquery/corner/jquery.corner.js' type='text/javascript'></script>
<script type='text/javascript'>
  $(document).ready(function() {
    $('#header-wrapper').corner();
    $('#main-wrap1').corner();
    $('#sidebartop-wrap').corner();
    $('#sidebarbottom-wrap1').corner();
    $('#footer-wrap1').corner();
  });
</script>

JQuery is so cool. I could have gone further and simplifed the HTML, but I couldn't be bothered. However, I have to say, I'm a recent convert to JQuery, having tried Dojo as well. JQuery is just brilliant! I may post more on that later, since I recently created a nice little linked list mechanism, to move items from one list to another (useful for multiple item selection).

Typos

OK, so maybe it's just me, but I keep typing new ArrayLust(); instead of ArrayList(). It's an honest mistake, but I thought it was a moderately cool name for a blog, and I fancied blogging again. It's been a while since I last blogged (http://nanoitx.blogspot.com).

These days, I generally develop Java apps, although that could change. So, expect to see Spring and Hibernate stuff for a while, and possibly some Google Android notes as I get into that. I've also been having fun with UTF-8 in MySQL recently, so I'll probably dump my thoughts on that here later on as a starter, in case it helps someone out.