Congratulations to Brian McCallister on getting his Cocoon project live. In the comments, he mentions that he didn’t use most of Cocoon, which I think is pretty standard. The nice thing about Cocoon is that if you know what you want, you can strip out the stuff you don’t want, and just use what you need.
This will be taken to an even higher level in 2.2 with the fabled release of “Real Blocks(tm)”. 2.2 probably won’t be usable for a while, however…
Well, after about 3 hours of compiling, I got the native FreeBSD JDK running. Tomcat 5 is fast, and feels stable. Not just stable, but rock solid, like I’ve come to expect things in the world of FreeBSD. Running Linux emulation binaries always felt like a shaky proposition to begin with.
Additionally, now I only see one Java process listed in the output of “ps” instead of 50+. Hooray!
What’s the big deal about Portlets? I tend to pass off “portal technology” as a holdover from the pre-doctom era where companies would try to give users everything on a single page, and have newsfeeds, stockquotes, etc. I could almost see the usefulness, especially with RSS being big now.
Maybe I’m wrong about Portlets, because I haven’t looked deeper. I just don’t understand the fascination with portals. Great, more abstract, complex junk. *throws in the pile with EJBs*.
I’m probably stating the obvious, but I spent wayyyy too much time wrestling with Tomcat’s admin app trying to get a datasource that I previously had working functional again. Even though the datasource gets added “globally”, when I look up my datasource by name, it claims it can’t find it. Oh well.
Tomcat 5 doesn’t even like how I had datasources working in Tomcat 4. It appears I need some sort of pooled connection, instead of just plugging in com.mysql.jdbc.Driver and telling Tomcat to create a javax.sql.DataSource. I suppose I’ll be looking into the Apache Pooled Database stuff. Maybe I’ll even look into Jetty Plus.
Welp, my employer, the University of Minnesota, seems to have deftly blacklisted daedalus.apache.org, which is the mail server for the ASF. All of my mailing list subscriptions originate from there, which explains why I haven’t gotten any messages from any of the Cocoon mail lists, or Forrest, or OJB, or Geronimo, or…
I noticed the interruption Friday afternoon when I sent a message to the cocoon-dev list, and never saw the message come back to me. I assumed the U of M’s mail server was bogged or something, but checking my spam settings, I see the following:
INS - Insecure Server
Sites with this classification may be either open proxies or open relays. See the sections on open relays or open proxies for details.
Welp, great. I wonder what happened. Either the U of M admins screwed up, or this was something that was triggered in the recent power outage experienced by the ASF. I sent a message to the mail server admins, and hopefully they can de-blacklist daedalus:
And that’s why I’ve been so quiet lately :)
Bad Gateway
The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Stefano, restart Jetty, man! :)
Not a lot going on lately. Yesterday, just as I was about to whiz onto the freeway, a recruiter called me about a position that they might be able to place me in. As my car crept closer to the meter light (the stoplight on the freeway on-ramp to control traffic levels), I explained to the recruiter that it was a bad time, and would she please call me back in a half hour. She seemed surprised, and agreed.
30 minutes later, she calls back, and we chat. Tomorrow I have to go in for an interview with the recruiter. The position is at a large local insurance company, and it would be Java/J2EE/Servlet development. Just the break I’ve been looking for :)
Congrats to Steven and all of Outerthought on breaking even! It’s a big thing for a small company to do so, especially this early. Outerthought is just the kind of place I’d want to work for… except it’d have to be here in the states :)
I am tempted to subscribe to Chris Pirillo’s Brain Trust, but some things are keeping me back:
Sure, there’s testimonials, and I suppose it’s hard to “sample” the conversations, but sheesh, $97/mo is really steep, especially when I have very little income. I need income to be able to subscribe, so I can get more information about expanding what I do.
*sigh*
I’ve just committed Stavros Kounis’ little project, entitled Othello, to Cocoon’s CVS Scratchpad. It’s a neat minimal template-based website with some I18N. Unfortunately, it’s broken since being moved to scratchpad. If you’re desperate, you can take the othello/ subdirectory and move it under your top-level Cocoon directory, and play with it there using the auto subsitemap mounting.
Todo: Hibernate w/Tomcat Quickstart (via dsuspense).
Oh yeah, and my desk and monitor are shaking because there are train tracks no more than 300 meters from my apartment. It’s nothing bad, just very subtle. Now I know what an earthquake feels like.