Database preferences and product selection methodolgy

I recently stumbled across an interesting weblog post by a DBA who expresses a strong preference for Oracle over PostgreSQL. I thought I'd respond to it with a few thoughts here, not so much because of the opinion expressed as the reasons given for it.

Solo sysadmin/coder

Are you a solo coder who doubles as a sysadmin or some other role(s) in your organization?

I share your pain - and I want to share these articles with you, because if you struggle with it too they will change how you look at it.

• Coding Horror: In programming, One is the loneliest number
• Burn-out
• Depression, burn-out and writing code

The Coding Horror article was written by Jeff Atwood, a damn fine developer and co-founder of Stack Overflow / Stack Exchange, which to me gives it a bit of added oompf.

While you're at it, read this article on programmer's bad habits ... because you probably do at least one of them. I know I do. They're counterproductive and just make you feel worse, so being aware of them helps.

Of course, nothing is as good as saying "I'm dropping all my other roles, you can hire someone else for them. I'm just programming now, that way I can actually finish the projects I started two years ago." I only have to hold out another two months before the new guy at work is ready to take over :-)

Using Seam 3 with Glassfish 3.1

Seam 3 builds on top of the Java EE 6 standards, filling in holes and omissions in the functionality provided by the specs and providing important enhancements that many programmers would otherwise find themselves implementing themselves. Seam 3 Solder in particular addreses some of the frustrating limitations in the CDI and Java EE 6 specs, providing well-engineered and easily re-used solutions to common problems.

Being a JBoss project, Seam 3 is unsurprisingly better tested on the JBoss application server. However, its goals explicitly cover portability and it's supposed to work on Glassfish and - where possible - even on servlet containers like Tomcat and Jetty. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Glassfish doesn't get as much attention , so it's a bit harder to use Seam 3.0.0.Final on Glassfish than it is on JBoss. It appears that it was also harder for the Seam 3 folks to get quick fixes for the many Glassfish bugs they found into Glassfish than it was for them to get fixes into JBoss AS, so many of the fixes for issues found in Seam 3 won't hit a Glassfish stable release until 3.2 comes out, if then.

In the mean time, there are some quirks to work around. The Seam 3 project documents Glassfish 3.1 compatibility issues here and you should read that document before continuing.

Many of the issues are solved pretty easily once you know what to do and where to look. It's well worth using Seam 3 instead of rolling your own solutions to many of the problems it tackles, so read on.

Scribd is amazing

I've recently been looking for better ways to publish online editions of the newspaper I work for. We don't have a full content managed workflow internally, nor do we use automatic layout, so CMS-driven cross-publshing isn't currently an option. We're stuck with finding something to do with the PDFs that come out of the print production process for the forseeable future.

Scribd appears to be a much more impressive option than direct PDF publishing or tools like flexpaper & pdf2swf. The HTML5 viewer is amazing. Note how all the elements are selectable, columns have been correctly recognised in the pdf text, etc?

Here's an example.

Useful things I've discovered about Glassfish (especially embedded glassfish) lately

I've been working with / struggling with Glassfish a lot lately. The documentation leaves much to be desired, so there are a few bits and pieces you might not know that might come in handy.

These notes refer to Glassfish 3.1.

JavaServer Faces (JSF2) and JAX-RS don't play well together

I've been working with JavaServer Faces 2 (JSF2) since shortly after its release, and it continues to be an annoying mix of excellent and frustrating to work with. It's theoretically a great technology, especially with CDI (contexts and dependency injection) even despite the holes and quirks in the spec. There are just two wee problems.

First, unlike many of the other EE specs, the JSF2 spec really isn't written to be useful for developers intending to use JSF2 in their apps. It's very much a specification not a reference, and I found it hard to read even as a specification. Because I was getting started with JSF2 in the very early days of EE 6, I seem to remember that the now very helpful Java EE Tutorial wasn't EE6 ready yet or was incomplete, so I didn't have that as a basis for learning JSF2 and EE6 either. Perhaps my memory is just failing me. In any case, I often landed up stumbling through Google-land trying to find out details that I thought should be obvious and easy to find in the spec or other reference documentation. At the time, Google-land was full of outdated references to JSF 1, lots of migration guides from Spring to EE 6, and plenty of other things to side-track a confused newbie. All in all, it was really hard to get going with JSF2 alone.

Second, the JSF2 spec was clearly concocted with no thought of or co-operation with the JAX-RS spec, and it shows. They don't work well together, and it's really, really frustrating because they should be so useful in combination.

Edit: Part of the issue here appears to be that I was trying to use JSF2 just for the Facelets templating language, expecting to be able to interoperate with JAX-RS where possible. JSF2 is a framework and doesn't isn't really designed to enable you to easily step outside the abstractions imposed by the framework - not least because you shouldn't need to. I was probably going about this the wrong way in a square-peg, round-hole kind of way, and shouldn't have been trying to use JSF2 in the first place. That's not made particularly obvious by the docs, though.

File upload webapp

I recently became frustrated with the lack of easily self-hosted file upload app options. I needed to replace my employer's reliance on giant email attachments with something that wouldn't melt our mail server - and our clients could still understand how to use. This unfortunately ruled out the classic options like anonymous FTP.

In the end I wrote a new web application to accept files from clients over http and save them to a shared folder on the internal network. Many of the building blocks like uploadify were available, but there wasn't much around in terms of complete applications to do the job. Instead, people seemed to be using services like YouSendIt, Box.net, DropSend, etc ... which have downsides including:

• Inability to provide a canned recipient list, or high per-user per-month fees to support one
• Inability to customise the site's appearance and integrate it into your domain - without paying high fees for an "enterprise" version
• The need to download files once the client has sent them to the provider, often one-by-one via a clumsy web interface
• Windows-only client applications required to do batch downloads of files. Some services have Mac versions, but only one had a Linux client suitable for our advertising thin clients.
• Lack of a web services API - unless you pay high fees for the "enterprise" version.
• Lack of no-flash fallback upload methods
• Sometimes iffy browser compatibility

I wanted something really simple for clients - and staff - to use, that simply dropped files into a shared folder as they were uploaded and sent a notification email to staff when the upload was finished. Now that I've finished it, I'm releasing the result as open source software for the use of anybody who wants it. You can get it here:

https://github.com/ringerc/postupload

It's a Java EE 6 project that runs on Glassfish. Don't stress if you've never used any of that before, if you only know PHP, etc. The client-side is all familiar HTML and JavaScript, and the server side isn't especially complicated code. Detailed instructions for installing and running Glassfish are provided.