Blogging Roller

I didn't get a good response on the Weblogic forums for this question, so now, dear reader, I bothering you.

If you deploy a simple Servlet/JSP application with an error page on Weblogic 8.1 and your application throws an error, the Servlet Container will save and then restore the contents of your ServletContext. So, if you have any non-serializable ServletContext attributes, you will lose them. (Strange thing is, and this part is definitely a bug, if you deploy the very same application, but without an error page specified in web.xml, then the save and restore will not occur and all of your ServletContext attributes will be preserved.)

This doesn't seem quite right. I realize that the best practice is to only store serializable attributes in your context and in your session, but it is not a requirement of the Servlet specification. If it was a requirement, then setAttribute would take a Serializable rather than just a plain old Object.

Seems to me, non-serializable attributes should only break your application if you try to run in distributed mode. Also, the behavior of ServletContext attributes should be the same regardless of the presence or absence of an error page.

Is this save-and-restore-on-error behavior a bug in Weblogic?

Must context attributes be serializable?

Is there a way to turn off the save-and-restore-on-error behavior on Weblogic?

<a href= "http://www.jroller.com/page/Sandymountster/20031111#the_roller_weblog_gatorjug_topic"> Mike Levin This month we'll learn about Roller, the open-source weblog. Written entirely in Java, Roller uses many design patterns and java components and has a fascinating architecture. Pizza and refreshments will be served. ...Welcome to the Gator JUG in sunny Gainesville, Florida.

I've been working on my own Roller presentation, now Mike has beat me to the punch.

James Robertson: How hard was it in the past to get ahold of the product manager for something at an outfit as big as MS? Now look at it - straightforward access, including contact information. That's huge. It used to be that you had to go to a trade show (and swim through huge crowds) or be an important customer and get ad hoc access. Now anyone with a browser or news aggregator can get far more details.

Joe Gregorio on Longhorn: That basically covers it. Three major components, all useless in their own right, now stacked together on a shaky foundation to make an even more useless heap.

Joe Gregorio makes lots of valid points in response to Marc Cantor's gushing fanboy Longhorn post, but I'm not sure Joe has all of his facts straight. Is Dot-Net really built on top of COM? I thought Dot-Net was a whole new component model and required bridging technology to hook it up to COM. Is user-supplied meta-data the whole idea of WinFS? I thought the whole idea was to suck SQLServer into the operating system so that DBMS vendors Oracle and IBM can be microsofted as Netscape, Stac, and others were. Is it be true that Microsoft has never shipped a pure Dot-Net application? I hope this one is true, is it?

NY Times : Cornell University physicists reported they had used a laser beam to pluck the strings of a tiny silicon guitar just 10 millionths of a meter long.

Is that really necessary? Bunch of showoffs!

365gay.com: If Charles succeeds to the throne, and the allegations are proved true, it would make him the first known bisexual monarch since William III. The only openly gay British monarch was Edward II, who was put to death in 1327 by having a red hot poker brutally shoved into his anus by rebellious barons.

Is that really necessary? Take it easy on poor Charles.

Luke Hutteman has released a new version of his excellent Dot-Net based RSS newsreader, Sharpreader. Get it at sharpreader.net.

Because open source software is software.

All software has bugs, design flaws, irritating limitations, and security vulnerabilties. It is silly to generalize across all of the various types of open source software together as Cameron did. It does not make sense throw together all of the tiny, single developer, spare-time SourceForge projects with big well-funded commercial open source efforts like Eclipse, OpenOffice, Netbeans, MySQL, etc.

Via the Struts-User mailing list: FWA Software announced Visual Tags for Struts, a plugin for Dreamweaver MX that provides full support for the Struts custom JSP tags in Dreamweaver's code view, design view, and live data view.

Lance has been working on improving Roller's plugin support. He also committed some fixes to Roller's RSS 0.91 support. I've also been working on refactoring and enhancing Rollers bookmark management. We been making changes, so now I have to decide what to deploy next to JRoller. Should I support JRoller through a nice safe 0.9.8 branch, or should JRoller stay in the main branch which is now considered to be 0.99-dev? The JavaLobby guys said they want to be on the bleeding edge of Roller development, so perhaps 0.99-dev is the way to go.

Paul Gielens blogs about Microsoft's new O/R mapping solution, named ObjectSpaces. Comments include a link to an ASP Alliance article on ADO.NET v2.0: ObjectSpaces.  Who is going to bother with NHibernate now?

Jason Nadal blogs about Microsoft's new command line shell, code-named Monad. Like Longhorn, the new shell is years away, but it does sound very cool. Thomas Lee's post MSH Rocks provides some more details:

Thomas Lee: MSH takes the incredible power of the pipelined cmdlet approach of Unix, but instead of passing raw text, MSH sends NET Managed objects between cmdlets. That's right, objects, not raw text. Managed, typesafe, and easy to write/extend .NET Managed objects!

How did I miss the OSCache 2.0 release?

Matt Croydon posted a link to some awesome screenshots of the next version of Visual Studio, codenamed Whidbey, and it's ASP.NET web development tools. Microsoft creates killer tools and it is difficult to imagine how IBM's Eclipse, Sun's Rave, IDEA IntelliJ, or MyEclipse will match the kind of ease-of-use Microsoft can achieve. I have yet to see a WYSIWYG HTML editor, the basis for any web development IDE, written in Java (Swing, SWT, or otherwise) that is worth a damn.

Let the code freeze.

Via Kevin Dangoor: the updated Eclipse 3.0 plan shows that we'll have to wait until June 2004 for a final Eclipse 3.0.

In my work, the most important new features are in the extended Java theme: "Improve support for Java-like source files" like JSP and "Support Java references outside Java code". Unfortunately, there is no indication that JSP support will extend beyond the basic code-completion, refactoring support, and syntax coloring for Java code embedded in JSP files. I'm still holding out some foolish hope that maybe, just maybe, IBM will move Websphere Studio's WYSIWYG HTML/JSP editor and Struts support into Eclipse while reserving the upcoming JavaServer Faces support for paying customers. Please? After all, by June 2004, Struts support will be the old hat to JSF's brand new bag.

Rick Ross has posted what he calls "probable items" for the JRoller terms of service (TOS). I think the items he outlined are quite reasonable. Also on JRoller, Lowem has posted a number of good suggestions for improving Roller including better navigation to past weblog entries, better handling of comments, and showing more weblogs and weblog posts on the Roller main page.

Very strange, very bloody in a Monthy Python Black Knight sort of way, and I enjoyed it. However, I did not like it nearly as much as QT's other flicks: RD, PF, or JB.

I followed up my "not impressed with MyEclipse" post by posting some of the problems I encountered to the MyEclipse "private messages" support forum. That was yesterday. I didn't get a response, so today I posted each of my issues in the Bug Reports and Fixes forum (see below). The MyEclipse site is very slow and I haven't been able to muster the patience to figure out if there is a separate forum for paying customers (like me).

• JSP editor is very slow to start
• MyEclipse's inflexible project directory structure
• Can't remove MyEclipse from project
• JavaScript breaks the JSP syntax coloring
• Can't handle TLDs referenced by URI

What a jackass and he is totally wrong. We don't ship 50 jars, we ship 49! I do wonder how many of those 49 jars could be deleted without affecting Roller. I just got back from Kill Bill, so perhaps it is time for some hack and slash on the WEB-INF/lib folder. Update: I was able to reduce the number of jars from 49 to 34. Of the 34 remaining jars, 9 belong to Struts and 6 belong to Hibernate.

I've only spent a little while working with MyEclipse, so perhaps I'm just a clueless newbie, but... I still haven't figured out how to get the JSP editor to work as expected or to avoid the 5-10 second startup every time I launch the editor on a new file. So far, I am not impressed.