30.12.06

Windows Live Blog Client

Blogger.com got upgraded and my blogger client w.Bloggar refused to work properly with the new beta.blogger.com. Althought the newly announced beta -> production change, w.Bloggar didn't still work.

I started looking at alternatives and found Microsoft Windows Live Blog Client that seems to work nicely with the new Blogger.com.

As the new year 2007 is arriving I wish you all:

29.10.06

Configuring Jetty 6 to work with Oracle DB

I had the need to print out certain things from my OracleXE database + setup a Web Services engine. My Linux box was running only on 256MB of RAM so I needed a small servlet engine to acts as application server for my JSP application. There were two main options I considered:

  1. Tomcat

  2. Jetty



Tomcat



Started with Tomcat 5.5. Installed Tomcat. Installed Axis 1.4. For Axis I needed to manually install bunch of missing JARs. Tried a simple JSP page with JSLT and SQL tags to dig out information from OracleXE. Just to get into phase where I didn't get any missing class exceptions took me a while. I had to manually install mail.jar, activation.jar, xmlsec.jar etc. In the end of stripping out the exceptions I finally could connect the OracleXE database but the only problem was that none of the results were not displayed in the actual JSP result HTML (despite the connection to the database was working). Weird... I used quite a bit of time searching internet for answer how to get this working.

It was time to throw the towel to the ring. Farewell Tomcat.

Jetty



Downloaded Jetty 6.0.1. Installed it. Installed Axis 1.4. Axis installation was a nice surprise, almost all the needed libraries were already there for Axis 1.4. I only needed to add xmlsec jar file and Axis was happy. Axis installation was much more fluent in Jetty than in Tomcat. Tried my test JSP to connect OracleXE. There I faced some challeges but got over them very fast and was up and running with working JSP, using JSLT + SQL tags printing results out of my Oracle database.

Jetty was a pleasant surprise to me. For those folks that needs sample application that works with Oracle database using data sources, here are the steps to do it:

1. Create directory webapps-plus under $JETTY_HOME if that directory doesn't exists.
Jetty 6.0.1 is configured out-of-the-box with JNDI support if you deploy your application under webapps-plus directory. Also in order to get the JNDI support you need to start the Jetty engine with following parameters:

java -jar start.jar etc/jetty.xml etc/jetty-plus.xml



2. Create a sample application subdirectory $JETTY_HOME/webapps-plus/mysample.
3. Copy WEB-INF from $JETTY_HOME/webapps/test to $JETTY_HOME/webapps-plus/mysample
4. Copy Oracle JDBC driver to $JETTY_HOME/webapps-plus/mysample/WEB-INF/lib. I use ojdbc14.jar.
5. Edit the jetty-web.xml in $JETTY_HOME/webapps-plus/mysample/WEB-INF

You can configure the Oracle datasource in this config file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE Configure PUBLIC "-//Mort Bay Consulting//DTD Configure//EN" "http://j
etty.mortbay.org/configure.dtd">

<Configure class="org.mortbay.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext">

<Call class="org.mortbay.log.Log" name="debug">
<Arg>executing jetty-web.xml</Arg>
</Call>

<!-- Add a DataSource only valid for this webapp -->
<New id="oraclexe" class="org.mortbay.jetty.plus.naming.Resource">
<Arg>jdbc/oraclexe</Arg>
<Arg>
<New class="oracle.jdbc.pool.OracleDataSource">
<Set name="user">scott</Set>
<Set name="password">tiger</Set>
<Set name="URL">jdbc:oracle:thin:@myhostname.com:1521:XE</Set>
</New>
</Arg>
</New>
</Configure>


6. Create a sample JSP file that reports data from Oracle database using the data source defined in jetty-web.xml:

Here is the sample JSP with SQL tags:

<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/sql" prefix="sql" %>
<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" prefix="c" %>

<html>
<head>
<title>Oracle DB Test</title>
</head>
<body>

<h2>Results</h2>
<sql:query dataSource="jdbc/oraclexe" var="rs">
SELECT * FROM dual
</sql:query>

<c:choose>
<c:when test="${rs.rowCount == 0}">
Sorry, no messages found.
</c:when>
<c:when test="${rs.rowCount == null}">
Sorry, no messages found (null).
</c:when>
<c:otherwise>
Messages found (${rs.rowCount})
</c:otherwise>
</c:choose>

<c:forEach var="row" items="${rs.rows}">
Dummy ${row.dummy}<br/>
</c:forEach>

</body>
</html>


7. Bounce jetty to get all the changes in effect.

If everythings went well, you should be having a working connection to Oracle database printing out something like:
Results
Messages found (1) Dummy X

18.8.06

Disabling Gnome/KDE in RedHat startup

Here is something that I consider FAQ but never remember how to do it after installing RedHat Linux.
How to disable graphical desktop in server startup? This is to conserve system resourses when server is used only remotely e.g. SSH.

su -
vi /etc/inittab

Look for a line like this: id:5:initdefault:

This line specifies default runlevel on boot.
Default runlevel. The runlevels used by RHS are:
0 - halt (Do NOT set initdefault to this)
1 - Single user mode
2 - Multiuser, without NFS (The same as 3, if you do not have networking)
3 - Full multiuser mode
4 - unused
5 - X11
6 - reboot (Do NOT set initdefault to this)

Change the 5 in the quote above to a 3. Save and reboot.

27.3.06

HAM

BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) is cool new technology for business monitoring.
There are products like Oracle BAM

Home Activity Monitoring (HAM?) is a word I could describe following ultra COOL Dutch site: http://www.bwired.nl/
.

Amazing !! :)

22.2.06

OC4J (9.0.4, 10.1.2 and 10.1.3) log file rotation

For those that want to rotate the OC4J log files under $ORACLE_HOME/opmn/logs, there are new parameters not documented in 9.0.4/10.1.2 documentation:

[New JVM parameters]
"stdstream.filesize"
Max file size limit of each archive. Unit is megabyte.
"stdstream.filenumber"
Max number of files that oc4j can keep as archives. The oldest file
will be automatically deleted if the limit is exceeded.
"stdstream.rotatetime"
Time when the log file is rotated. Format is "HH:mm". The archive
will be rotated at the specified time everyday.

[Usage]
ex 1: rotate stdout/stderr when the file size is reached to 2.5M byte.
java -Dstdstream.filesize=2.5 -jar oc4j.jar -out std.out -err std.err
ex 2: rotate stdout at 13:30 everyday
java -Dstdstream.rotatetime=13:30 -jar oc4j.jar -out std.out
ex 3: rotate stdout at 13:30 everyday and keep 10 files as archive
java -Dstdstream.rotatetime=13:30 -Dstdstream.filenumber=10 -jar oc4j.jar -out std.out

The generated log file would look like <filename w/o extension>_yyyy_MM_dd_HH_mm_ss.<extension>
e.g. std_2004_07_08_13_24_53.out

[Note]
1. The same parameter are used for both "-out" and "-err".
2. In AS mode, the log files will be created under <island name and process id> directory
(this isn't changed by this fix, existing code handles this)
3. Both "filesize" and "rotatetime" parameters can be used at the same time.

opmn.xml
In order to get these parameters in opmn.xml you need to define it as follows:
...
<category id="start-parameters">
<data id="java-options" value="-server -Djava.security.policy=$ORACLE_HOME/j2ee/home/config/java2.policy -Djava.awt.headless=true -Dstdstream.filesize=0.2 -Dstdstream.filenumber=5"/>
<data id="oc4j-options" value="-out std.out -err std.err"/>
</category>
...

You will find the new log files under:$ORACLE_HOME/j2ee/home/home_default_island_1

The file naming will be like:
std_2006_02_22_14_01_17.out
std_2006_02_22_14_16_25.out

15.1.06

HTML DB Region Title Dynamic Translation

I've been working at home to build our family web site using OracleXE and HTML DB (2.1). One of the targets for the new design is to support multiple languages dynamically so that whenever user has either English, Finnish or Swedish browser preference the web site should display using that language.


HTML DB has translation capabilities built-in but the functionality wasn't exactly what I was looking for. I wanted the same HTML DB application to support all above languages, not to have multiple languages and multiple applications.


Everything else was doable, I created dynamic content relational tables and the content of the web pages is retrieved from the database using the language preferred.


One problem are was region titles, which doesn't support translatability within the same application out of the box. I am able to print out the region title using application level attributes, so called substitution variables. This is half way what I wanted but there is no language perspective to this. I want to print out the welcome region box title as "Welcome", "Tervetuloa", "Välkommen" dependent on the browser language.


I finally discovered a way to do this. First of all I have to use javascript to do this. Secondly I thought I could use the "navigator.language" variable from the client browser to discover the preferred language of the browser, but this didn't work exactly as I thought. Namely this variable prints out the installed browser language, not the preferred language that user has selected from the browser preferences.


The workaround to discover how to get the "HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE" -setting took awhile. Finally I got a working Javascript snippet that did the trick with HTML DB:
<script type="text/javascript">var language = '&BROWSER_LANGUAGE.';
if (language.indexOf('fi') > -1) document.write("Tervetuloa");
else if (language.indexOf('sv') > -1) document.write("Välkommen");
else document.write("Welcome")</script>



So the key is to use the &BROWSER_LANGUAGE. -substitution variable to find out the preferred browser language to get the right result.

31.10.05

OpenCMS and OC4J 10.1.2 (part 2)

Trying to get OpenCMS working with OC4J 10.1.2 (or 10.1.3 dp4) seems to be quite challenging task. What makes this very interesting is that I don't seem to get any errors or exception messages in any of the logs despite of enabling full debugging in log4j.properties file.

There were definitely something wrong with the installation of OpenCMS on OC4J. The installation failed on NPE but system somehow managed to start up. Perhaps some of the modules got installed correctly. I can see that some of the config files point to Tomcat setup (like pointing to ROOT -default web application), so there might be something Tomcat specific behind the scenes that affect the application execution on other containers.

Anyways, to fork the problem area I installed OpenCMS using Tomcat (which works fine) so that I got the repository installed correctly on my Oracle 10.1.3 database. What I did then was I copied all the OpenCMS config etc. files under Tomcat webapps to the OC4J directory to make sure everything is as it should be after the installation. What happens is that systems starts up nicely, the log file compared to Tomcat looks exactly the same (used UltraEdit file diff'er to find out the differences). But what happens next after entering login (Admin/admin), is not something I am looking for. The login screen keeps popping up all the times and the workspace isn't shown. No error messages, no exceptions, no beeps, no nothing.

One step closer to despairness was when I downloaded the whole OpenCMS sources tree on my JDeveloper and re-built the whole application from sources. Now the only thing to find out was to remotely debug the OpenCMS server using JDeveloper's remote debugger and starting OC4J in debugging mode. Ok. This should work... or should it? I set the debug break point and debug the application line-by-line. For some reason the debugger freaks out in the critical moments that should point out the problem area. What is going on?

I also see that other people face the same problem when looking at OpenCMS mailing list.

Battle continues. Having the sources and detail debugging should eventually reveal the source of the problem. Let's see how long this takes.

19.10.05

OpenCMS and OC4J 10.1.2

For those that want to get OpenCMS working with OC4J here is an important note. The OpenCMS installer uses Java threads when setting up the modules. If you don't have user threads enabled in OC4J, you will face errors like "Unable to read opencms xml configuration". To work around this, you have to enable background threads for the container and this you do by adding following parameter to the OC4J container startup:
-Doc4j.userThreads=true

So if you start the OC4J from command line: java -jar oc4j.jar, you need to start with java -Doc4j.userThreads=true -jar oc4j.jar.
After this you will be able to run the setup successfully and continue using OpenCMS.

Re-packagaging EAR



For those that need helping hand on the re-wrapping the OpenCMS war file to be deployed as EAR in OC4J here are the steps:
1. Create a new subdirectory
2. Copy the opencms.war file to that directory
3. Create META-INF -directory and new file application.xml

<?xml version = '1.0' encoding = 'windows-1252'?>
<!DOCTYPE application PUBLIC "-//Sun Microsystems, Inc.//DTD J2EE Application 1.3//EN" "http://java.sun.com/dtd/application_1_3.dtd">
<application>
<display-name>opencms</display-name>
<module>
<web>
<web-uri>opencms.war</web-uri>
<context-root>opencms</context-root>
</web>
</module>
</application>

4. Package EAR file: jar cvf opencms.ear *

Deployment


For deployment I usually use a script that uses admin.jar. Here is a sample I use on Windows:

set OC4JDIR=D:\apps\oc4j_extended_101202\j2ee\home
set FILEE=%1%
java -jar %OC4JDIR%\admin.jar ormi://localhost admin welcome -undeploy %FILEE%
java -jar %OC4JDIR%\admin.jar ormi://localhost admin welcome -deploy -deploymentName %FILEE% -file %FILEE%.ear
java -jar %OC4JDIR%\admin.jar ormi://localhost admin welcome -bindWebApp %FILEE% %FILEE% http-web-site %FILEE%

For Linux you need to figure out yourself how to replace the variable names in Unix style ;)

Login Problems


In the end of the installation I still faced some NPE exceptions, looks like they were related somehow to user management.
Once I re-started the instance I got following errors in the opencms.log:
19 Oct 2005 06:59:21,578 ERROR [ org.opencms.main.OpenCmsCore: 296] Critical error during OpenCms initialization: The OpenCms setup wizard is still enabled.

This can be fixed by setting the setup wizard setting to false in opencms.properties -file.

Once trying to open up the admin workspace using URL: http://localhost:8888/opencms/opencms/system/login, I will get the login dialog where I enter the default Admin username and password. From the log files seems like I get successful authentication but the workspace never shows up. The login dialog will always be shown to user. Seems like browser type (IE, TB) doesn't have anything to do with this.

The login problem is still to be resolved until OpenCMS can be successfully used with OC4J.

I'll be back.


10.8.05

BPEL Orchestration versus Choreography

I found a great arcticle (by Matjaz Juric) describing the concepts of BPEL Orchestration versus Choreography in simple way:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/matjaz_bpel1.html

8.7.05

Jakarta Slide on OC4J

Never give up (referring to this post). Finally got Jakarta Slide server running on OC4J. The issue was with XML stack, there seems to be some sort of differences between the default Oracle XDK and the XML stack used with Slide. Anyways, to get Slide running you should define the Xerces and Xalan parsers as the JAXP factories in the OC4J startup.
Here is a sample startup script for my OC4J:
cd $HOME/oc4j/j2ee/home
java
-Djavax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory=org.apache.xerces.jaxp.DocumentBuilderFactoryImpl
-Djavax.xml.parsers.SAXParserFactory=org.apache.xerces.jaxp.SAXParserFactoryImpl
-Djavax.xml.transform.TransformerFactory=org.apache.xalan.processor.TransformerFactoryImpl
-jar oc4j.jar

Xalan and Xerces libraries should be placed under JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/ext and remember to give at least read access to the account running the OC4j container.

JDeveloper 10.1.2 and Linux-x86_64 with JDK 1.5 (64-bit)

For those running on 64-bit Linux (e.g. using AMD64 CPUs) it is possible that you have 64-bit JDK 1.5 pre-installed. This is the case at least with Fedora Core 4.0 (64-bit).

If you want to get 10.1.2 JDeveloper running with JDK 1.5 you might get an error message such as:
Error: Hotspot VM not supported
Error: JDeveloper can't recognize the JDK version

Tha last error message is because of the first. To work around this you should edit the $JDEV_HOME/jdev/bin/jdev.conf -file and comment out the line that shows:
SetJavaVM hotspot

After this you should be able to start JDeveloper 10.1.2.

You might get some weird sticky startup screen showing in front of the initial questionnaire windows. After passing these (either try moving the windows or just pressing Enter) you should be fine with JDeveloper.

21.6.05

Powerpoint notes removal add-in

I described earlier a way to add a VBA macro in Powerpoint to allow removing the comments out of PPTs. This required adding the macro each time manually or having the macro in the powerpoint template by default. I decided that I make this small utility more handy by adding this as PPT add-in. This way the macro will be available all the times when dealing with PPTs.

Here is the PPT add-in (HJK_Remove_Notes.ppa), which you need to copy to the Microsoft add-ins directory. In my workstation the target directory is: C:\Documents and Settings\hkaukovu\Application Data\Microsoft\AddIns

After this you should restart the Powerpoint and navigate to Tools -> Add-Ins and press "Add New...". Choose the HJK_Remove_Notes.ppa -file and press Enable Macros button to start the add-in. You should have Plugins -menu item after the "Help" and from there if you choose "Delete Notes" you should be able to delete all the notes from the currently open PPT. The VBA macro will confirm you before you delete the notes.

If you find any issues pls let me know.

Comment on Blojsom installation on OC4J

I wrote in my earlier article about installing Blojsom on OC4J.

There is an easier way for installing applications on OC4J as pointed by Olaf Heimburger in his blog:

http://www.orablogs.com/olaf/archives/001043.html

20.6.05

OC4J: Adding your own logging handler for J2EE application logging

For those that have the need to use their own custom or ready-made logging handlers with Oracle OC4J container, here is a sample how to do it.

Oracle OC4J J2EE logging is based on the J2SE 1.4 java.util.logging. This is the new standard logging utility that has most of the same features log4j has, althought log4j still has more custom logging handlers compared to JUL logging.

You can add your own JUL (java.util.logging) handler as logging handler in the container component (defined in j2ee-logging.xml), but this doesn't affect any of the sub-component loggings, like JMS, server, RMI etc. j2ee-logging.xml affects on custom logging events used in the applications.

One thing to note here is that in order to use e.g. java.util.logging.FileHandler, you must set the "-Djava.util.logging.config.file" -option in the "java -jar oc4j.jar" call to configure the logging options. Setting the properties in the j2ee-logging.xml doesn't have any effect on the java.util.logging handlers.

So in order to run the OC4J with the wanted logging handler you need to startup the container with following command line:
java -Djava.util.logging.config.file=d:\apps\jdev1012\j2ee\home\properties\logging.properties -jar oc4j.jar




Here is a sample j2ee-logging.xml:

<logging_configuration>
<log_handlers>
<log_handler name="oc4j-handler" class="java.util.logging.FileHandler">
</log_handler>
</log_handlers>
<loggers>
<logger name="oracle" level="ALL" useParentHandlers="false">
<handler name="oc4j-handler"/>
</logger>
</loggers>
</logging_configuration>



Here is a sample logging.properties file:

java.util.logging.FileHandler.level=ALL
# "/" the local pathname separator
# "%t" the system temporary directory
# "%h" the value of the "user.home" system property
# "%g" the generation number to distinguish rotated logs
# "%u" a unique number to resolve conflicts
# "%%" translates to a single percent sign "%"
java.util.logging.FileHandler.pattern=%h/central%u.log
java.util.logging.FileHandler.limit=0
java.util.logging.FileHandler.count=1
java.util.logging.FileHandler.append=true
java.util.logging.FileHandler.formatter=java.util.logging.SimpleFormatter

oracle.emp.kaukovuo.logger.test.LoggerServlet=ALL

11.4.05

Loading Java properties file inside EJB component (OC4J)

Loading properties file inside Java is common way to parametrize the application. Under single JVM you would use following code to load the properties file:


Properties prop = new Properties();
try
{
prop.load(new FileInputStream("hello.properties"));
}
catch (FileNotFoundException e)
{
e.printStackTrace();
}
catch (IOException e)
{
e.printStackTrace();
}


Under OC4J you might want to keep all the properties files under the same directory e.g. $OC4J_HOME/properties. For this you should edit the container application.xml file under $OC4J_HOME/config -directory. Add following line to the application.xml:

<library path="../properties"/>


In the J2EE application you can trust the class loader to find the properties file under this directory. For this you should code your application as:


Properties prop = new Properties();
try
{
prop.load(Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader().getResourceAsStream("hello.properties"));
}
catch (FileNotFoundException e)
{
e.printStackTrace();
}
catch (IOException e)
{
e.printStackTrace();
}

24.3.05

Calling C/C++ gSOAP Web Services from JDeveloper

gSOAP is publicly developed C/C++ SOAP framework for Web Services client and server development.

Here is some loggin information trying to get Java -> C++ (via Web Services) to work together.

gSOAP distribution does not have ready made *.dlls or *.lib libraries for direct compilation. I had already Microsoft Visual C++ 6, which was just perfect environment for compiling the gSOAP basic *.dll's and sample C/C++ application. I tought I start the mini-project with the calculator samples mentioned in the manual. Generated the needed source code (*.cpp and *.h) + resource files using soapcpp2.exe.

Ok. after little bit of tweaking I got the first calc.exe to run as Web Service. Remember to add the "soap_set_namespaces(&soap, namespaces);" line after "soap_init(&soap)" in the C++ code. This will result the response message having all the needed namespaces and avoiding "SOAP version mismatch or invalid SOAP message" -error. Also noticeable was that the simple samples in manual did not work "as is" but the multi-threaded (with pooling) seems to work just fine, so that code base was used to serve the Web Service calls.

Imported the generated WSDL to the JDeveloper (9.0.5.2) and generated the Java sample code. Trying to run the Web Service stub results in following error message: "Method 'ns1:add' not implemented: method name or namespace not recognized".

=> The problem was that the sample Calc.cpp had some odd namespace definitions. After I copied the namespace definitions form Calculator.nsmap the Web Service started working.

After this the TCP packet monitor showed that Web Service returns the right answer, but Java deserializer returns an exception at Java side:

[SOAPException: faultCode=SOAP-ENV:Client; msg=No Deserializer found to deserialize a ':result' using encoding style 'http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/'.; targetException=java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: No Deserializer found to deserialize a ':result' using encoding style 'http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/'.]
at org.apache.soap.SOAPException.<init>(SOAPException.java:78)
at org.apache.soap.rpc.Call.invoke(Call.java:308)
at oracle.emp.kaukovuo.ws.mypackage.CalculatorStub.add(CalculatorStub.java:79)
at oracle.emp.kaukovuo.ws.mypackage.CalculatorStub.main(CalculatorStub.java:36)
Process exited with exit code 0.


Looks like the result -element should be data typed (the same kind of problems as with Microsoft SOAP Toolkit). This is easily worked around with J2EE Web Services by adding web.xml initialization parameter "accept-untyped-request" to "true". How is this done in Java client environment when receiving response?

The response to the question lies in gSOAP manual chapter: "8.1.5 XSD Type Encoding Considerations".

The most important thing is to compile the header file with "-t" option. This generates code to send typed messages (with the xsi:type attribute).
For fast development you should take a look at the *.xml files that soapcpp2 compiler generates. These will reflect the requests and responses that the SOAP client/server will receive. In the first phase you don't need to get everything running to test.

1.12.04

Slide WebDAV server on Oracle or Orion J2EE, not working?

Ran into very interesting Apache project "Slide":
http://jakarta.apache.org/slide/index.html

This is an open source WebDAV J2EE implementation that is runnable (theoretically) on any Servlet 2.3 compliant web container.
Well, of course I could not resist trying this out on Oracle OC4J server. Deploying went fine but trying to run the engine will result on errors complaining on XML libraries. Apparently this product is built on top of open source XML libraries and out of the box they are not compliant to be run on any J2EE container.

The second trial was with Orion J2EE server. The deployment went fine but received errors when trying to access the http://localhost/slide -URL. The errors seem to complain about missing encoding libraries. If I just knew what should I do...
Here is the error message:

Orion/2.0.5 initialized
28 Nov 2004 22:06:07 - org.apache.slide.webdav.WebdavServlet - ERROR - java.io.UnsupportedEncodingException: "UTF-8"
java.io.UnsupportedEncodingException: "UTF-8"
at sun.io.Converters.getConverterClass(Unknown Source)
at sun.io.Converters.newConverter(Unknown Source)
at sun.io.CharToByteConverter.getConverter(Unknown Source)
at sun.nio.cs.StreamEncoder$ConverterSE.<init>(Unknown Source)
at sun.nio.cs.StreamEncoder$ConverterSE.<init>(Unknown Source)
at sun.nio.cs.StreamEncoder.forOutputStreamWriter(Unknown Source)
at java.io.OutputStreamWriter.<init>(Unknown Source)
at com.evermind.server.http.EvermindHttpServletResponse.getWriter(Unknown Source)
at javax.servlet.ServletResponseWrapper.getWriter(ServletResponseWrapper.java:37)
at org.apache.slide.webdav.util.DirectoryIndexGenerator.generate(DirectoryIndexGenerator.java:165)
at org.apache.slide.webdav.WebdavServlet.doGet(WebdavServlet.java:352)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:244)
at org.apache.slide.webdav.WebdavServlet.service(WebdavServlet.java:158)

at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:336)
at com.evermind._ha.doFilter(Unknown Source)
at org.apache.slide.webdav.filter.LogFilter.doFilter(LogFilter.java:141)

at com.evermind._ctb._psd(Unknown Source)
at com.evermind._ctb._bqc(Unknown Source)
at com.evermind._ax._luc(Unknown Source)
at com.evermind._ax._ucb(Unknown Source)
at com.evermind._bf.run(Unknown Source)
ApplicationServerThread, 28-marras-2004 22:06:07, unauthenticated, GET, 500 "Internal Server Error", 40 ms, /

27.11.04

Deploying Blojsom on Orion J2EE Server

As many of you might know already is Oracle J2EE technology based on Orion J2EE server. Currently these two servers go their separate ways in development, but there are still quite a lot similarities. I use this container at home for my personal web projects (family home pages etc). The installation of blojsom Blog server is pretty much the same as in Oracle J2EE server, with the exception of different name in http web site XML configuration file.

Here is the steps to deploy the blojsom blogging application on ORION J2EE container. Tested on 2.0.5 version.

  1. Download the WAR file for blojsom (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=72754)

  2. Copy blojsom.war to it's own directory, without any other files in it.

  3. Make subdirectory META-INF

  4. cd META-INF

  5. Create/edit application.xml -file with following content:


  6. <?xml version = '1.0' encoding = 'windows-1252'?>
    <!DOCTYPE application PUBLIC "-//Sun Microsystems, Inc.//DTD J2EE Application 1.3//EN" "http://java.sun.com/dtd/application_1_3.dtd">
    <application>
    <display-name>Blojsom</display-name>
    <module>
    <web>
    <web-uri>blojsom.war</web-uri>
    <context-root>blojsom</context-root>
    </web>
    </module>
    </application>

  7. Change directory to the root directory where blojsom.war exists. Create an EAR file out of the directory:

  8. <path_to_your_jdk_home>\jdk\bin\jar cvf blojsom.ear *
    You should see something like:
    added manifest
    adding: blojsom.war(in = 2493553) (out= 2449558)(deflated 1%)
    adding: web-inf/(in = 0) (out= 0)(stored 0%)
    adding: web-inf/application.xml(in = 387) (out= 240)(deflated 37%)
  9. Copy this *.ear file to ORION_HOME/applications -directory

  10. Edit ORION_HOME/config/server.xml

  11. Add following line under the application-server -root element:
    <application name="blojsom" path="../applications/blojsom.ear" auto-start="true" />

  12. Edit ORION_HOME/config/default-web-site.xml

  13. Add following line:
    <web-app application="blojsom" name="blojsom" load-on-startup="true" root="/blojsom" />

  14. Start the ORION server

  15. Auto-deployment should start at this point.
  16. Edit ORION_HOME/applications/blojsom/blojsom/WEB-INF/default/blog.properties

  17. Change the blog-base-url and blog-url to point to your server and ORION port.
    Change also other meaningful descriptive parameters to match your needs.
  18. Restart the ORION server

  19. Point your browser to url http://localhost:<port>/blojsom/blog/default/

26.11.04

Removing Powerpoint slide comments

I am working as a sales consultant and use Powerpoint slides quite often to describe the presented material. Many time some of the Powerpoint slides are annotated by someone else and if I want to deliver the PPT to the customers/partners I must remove the annotations. Doing this manually is time-consuming. Here is a trick to add a simple Visual Basic macro that automatically removes the annotations and leaves the slides.


Sub DelNotesShapes()
Dim oSld As Slide
For Each oSld In ActivePresentation.Slides
If oSld.NotesPage.Shapes.Count > 0 Then
oSld.NotesPage.Shapes.Range.Delete
End If
Next oSld
Set oSld = Nothing
End Sub


Press Alt-F11, choose from menu Insert->Module and copy above VBA code to the editor. Press Save and exit the VBA editor.
Run the macro in PPT with Alt-F8, choosing above macro name DelNotesShapes and "Run". After this all the notes/annotations are removed.