Ok. I’m extremely pumped. I’ve just used commons modeler to deploy an MBean to JBoss and it’s actually working! Commons Modeler makes JMX so incredibly simple compared to doing this stuff by hand, that I had to see the thing running before I believed it. Now, JBoss has its own way of deploying MBeans via a declaritive XML mechanism, which is cool, but I’m after something that I can play with on JBoss then deploy [...]

I’m doing a review of a new Manning Book called “Jakarta Commons in Action” and it is one sensational piece of work. This is the ultimate missing manual to the Commons suite, and there is stacks to learn here, even if you’ve used a few of the commons suite in your projects. What I *love* about this book is not just the content but also the writing style. All of the examples I’ve seen are [...]

I’ve started exploring some of the available cache software out there, and kicked things off with ehcache. I’ve gotta say that first experiences have been excellent! It’s been very easy to learn, (create a CacheManager, create a Cache, add the Cache to the CacheManager, presto!), and it’s a very tight implementations (50Kb). Persists itself to disk. Handles expiry of elements from the Cache. It’s battle tested (looks like the guys from Wotif.com have opened it [...]

If your project uses XDoclet and you’re sick of seeing those warnings like: warning – @web.servlet is an unknown tag. then what you’re after is the new Ant 1.6 <tag> element of the <javadoc> task. You can use this bad boy by embedding something like: <tag name=”web.servlet” scope=”all” enabled=”false”/> in your source. Be warned, though, if you’re trying to ignore a hyphen separated tag, (say web.servlet-mapping), you’re out of luck. It will interpret it without [...]

For our little spam filter app, we’ve been evaluating embedded storage options. For commercial apps, the options are surprisingly few. HSQL and McKoi are nice but neither sports a commercial-friendly license. Axion shows a lot more promise (but it’s dependent on an older version of commons-collection). Of the commercial options, you’ve got Daffodil and ObjectDb which both look very good, but have prohibitivly high per seat licensing options – which is no good for a [...]

I’ve been having ongoing hassles with Tomcat 5 on my 64Mb Linode – and it’s the only software on that box that’s been unreliable. After getting sick of killing the thing off, I’ve made the jump to Jetty. It’s smaller, faster, and hopefully more robust. Configuration is a snack – once you workout that the XML format just mirrors the API calls it support. My subdomains are working just great, but now I just need [...]

Upgraded from Pebble 1.4 to the slick new Pebble 1.5.1. If you’re in the market for some nice Java blogging software, I can recommend Pebble very highly. Easy to install, great interface, and you can manage the whole thing via the web. Great stuff, Simon! For those looking to upgrade, things went fairly smoothly. Some of the entries previously in web.xml seem to have migrated to a properties file in WEB-INF/classes, but that probably only [...]