Something done in my down time: "Allrangecombat.co.uk"

Allrangecombat Website

I have been a long term student of martial arts and when ask by my senior instructor whether there anything I could do to assist with his website, of course I said yes.

The site is available at allrangecombat.co.uk and allrangecombat.com and has been hosted on a relatively cheep host iPage.
The whole site took about two days to put together and much of that was messing about unnecessarily with uploading content.
The site is based on a nice little CMS called MODX which is 100% PHP which is installable as a standard extra on iPage. While the CSS is based on MetroUI which attempts to emulate Windows Eight's look and feel. I have used it here to provide a CSS which adapts to mobile devices.

Naturally I have attached my own club site to this one as a mini-site: allrangecombat.co.uk/bath.
Enjoy!
Better still come training!

A blatant appeal for work!

Cool tip of the day: Maven & Eclipse ... importing projects

Today I attempted to import a project that had been written using MAVEN as its build process.
So I confidently when to the eclipse option to import existing maven projects ... all went well until I opened the project & tried to build it. when I saw this error:

Plugin execution not covered by lifecycle configuration: org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-resources-plugin:2.4.3:resources (execution: default-resources, phase: process-resources)   pom.xml /test line 6    Maven Project Build Lifecycle Mapping Problem

This was not very welcome and the eclipse autofix options did not fix the issue.
So I turned to Slastdot & found a post (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7638562/import-maven-project-to-eclipse-and-fix-the-errors) but the top solution to to do a project update did not work.

So to fix it I followed a secondary solution (after deleting the .project file previously created) ...

1. Open the project folder in a command prompt;
2. run command mvn eclipse:eclipse
3. Open the project using eclipse;
4. Set project properties "configure-->Convert to Maven Project"

My experience is that this works nicely.... ALMOST!

The issue is that eclipse may not correctly pick up the maven dependencies.
This is because the .classpath file does not include values on the paths as  follows "<attribute name="maven.pomderived" value="true"/>".

This for a simple project means that you needs to convert your .classpath file from this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<classpath>
  <classpathentry kind="src" path="src/test/java" output="target/test-classes" including="**/*.java"/>
  <classpathentry kind="src" path="src/main/java" including="**/*.java"/>
  <classpathentry kind="output" path="target/classes"/>
  <classpathentry kind="con" path="org.eclipse.jdt.launching.JRE_CONTAINER"/>
  <classpathentry kind="var" path="M2_REPO/junit/junit/3.8.1/junit-3.8.1.jar"/>
</classpath>

to this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<classpath>
  <classpathentry kind="src" path="src/test/java" output="target/test-classes" including="**/*.java">
        <attributes>
            <attribute name="optional" value="true"/>
            <attribute name="maven.pomderived" value="true"/>
        </attributes>
    </classpathentry>
  <classpathentry kind="src" path="src/main/java" including="**/*.java">
        <attributes>
            <attribute name="optional" value="true"/>
            <attribute name="maven.pomderived" value="true"/>
        </attributes>
    </classpathentry>
  <classpathentry kind="output" path="target/classes"/>
      <classpathentry kind="con" path="org.eclipse.jdt.launching.JRE_CONTAINER/org.eclipse.jdt.internal.debug.ui.launcher.StandardVMType/JavaSE-1.6">
        <attributes>
            <attribute name="maven.pomderived" value="true"/>
        </attributes>
    </classpathentry>
      <classpathentry kind="con" path="org.eclipse.m2e.MAVEN2_CLASSPATH_CONTAINER">
        <attributes>
            <attribute name="maven.pomderived" value="true"/>
        </attributes>
    </classpathentry>
</classpath>

Now this should pick up your MAVEN dependencies.

Other references:

1. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2037188/how-to-configure-eclipse-build-path-to-use-maven-dependencies
2. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/scala-ide-user/M9pMpZGD624

Cool tip of the day: Formatting source code for your blog

Oh finally!
I have pasted code into my blog & it has been a real pain to get it right.
While looking around I found a resource on blogspot http://formatmysourcecode.blogspot.co.uk/ which provides an online utility to format the script into html to include on your blog.
It has two outputs, one with inline CSS and the other with a set of styles used.
The "linked style sheet" option depends on a PRE.source-code style.

An example of this formatting is as follows:

/**
 * The HelloWorldApp class implements an application that
 * simply prints "Hello World!" to standard output.
 */
class HelloWorldApp {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Hello World!"); // Display the string.
    }
}

A second resource can be found at http://codeformatter.blogspot.co.uk/ which has similar options  but allows you to define whether you have line numbers on your code. When you don't use embedded styles it creates a style element which defines two classes pre.CICodeFormatter and code.CICodeFormatter.

An example of this output is as follow:

1:  /**  
2:   * The HelloWorldApp class implements an application that  
3:   * simply prints "Hello World!" to standard output.  
4:   */  
5:  class HelloWorldApp {  
6:    public static void main(String[] args) {  
7:      System.out.println("Hello World!"); // Display the string.  
8:    }  
9:  }  

A third which I have yet to check is "How to use PrettyPrint to format source code in Blogger" which is a utility on blogger.com which is where this site is.
But more on this an other day.

Transitioning from ANT to MAVEN

Well I have been putting together ANT scripts for some time now and I have created some funky scripts.
My main issue with ANT was that I had to do all the hard work over and over again. I did work to include IVY into my projects but it was just hard work and the scripts grew in complexity.
I had heard good things about MAVEN so I thought I might as well get stuck into it.

After some successes I smacked straight into an issue regarding the precompilation of JSPs which seems to be a dead topic as the plugins do not seem to work correctly or only work if you are building a WAR.
I want to precompile some JSPs and put them into a JAR ... but no joy.
So right now I am looking back at the ANT scripts and looking how best to include them in to MAVEN.

The first clue was a post on Slashdot titled "Multiple antrun tasks in maven".

The key is to have a series of ANTRuns stuck into your MAVEN script as follows:

<plugin>

    <artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>
    <executions>

        <execution>
            <id>clean</id>
            <phase>clean</phase>
            <configuration>
                <tasks>
                    <echo message = ">>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>clean"/>
                </tasks>
            </configuration>
            <goals>
                <goal>run</goal>
            </goals>
        </execution>

        <execution>
            <id>compile</id>
            <phase>compile</phase>
            <configuration>
                <tasks>
                    <echo message = ">>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>compile"/>
                </tasks>
            </configuration>
            <goals>
                <goal>run</goal>
            </goals>
        </execution>

        <execution>
            <id>package</id>
            <phase>package</phase>
            <configuration>
                <tasks>
                    <echo message = ">>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>package"/>
                </tasks>
            </configuration>
            <goals>
                <goal>run</goal>
            </goals>
        </execution>

    </executions>

</plugin>

asas

Debug Java applications remotely with Eclipse

The screens in eclipse

You don't need to debug Java™ applications on just your local desktop.
Remote debugging can be useful for application development, such as developing a program for a low-end machine that cannot host the development platform, or debugging programs on dedicated machines like Web servers, whose services cannot be shut down. Other examples include Java applications running with limited memory or CPU power, such as mobile devices, or developers wanting to separate the application and development environments, etc.

Full article: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-eclipse-javadebug/index.html 

If you don't have it already, download Eclipse V3.4 (Ganymede). In Ganymede, the socket listening connector has been added to the Remote Java Application launch-configuration type. Eclipse's new socket listening connector allows you to start the Java debugger, which listens for a connection on a specific socket. The program being debugged can then be started with command-line options to connect to the debugger. Prior to the Ganymede release, only a socket-attaching connector was provided, and the program being debugged had to be a debug host that was connected by the debugger. It is impractical for mobile devices to be a host due to insufficient memory and CPU power.

The Java Debug Wire Protocol (JDWP) contains many arguments that have been added to invoke the application for the remote Java application. Following are some of the arguments used in this article.

-Xdebug

Enables debugging features.

-Xrunjdwp:<sub-options>

Loads the implementation of JDWP in the target VM. It uses a transport and the JDWP protocol to communicate with a separate debugger application. Specific suboptions are described below.

Starting from Java V5, you can use the -agentlib:jdwp option, instead of -Xdebug and -Xrunjdwp. But if you have to connect to the VM prior to V5, -Xdebug and -Xrunjdwp will be the only choice. Following are brief descriptions of the -Xrunjdwp suboptions.

transport

Generally, socket transport is used. But shared-memory transport can also be used on the Windows platform, if available.

server

If the value is y, the target application listens for a debugger application to attach. Otherwise, it attaches to a debugger application at the specified address.

address

This is the transport address for the connection. If the server is n, attempt to attach to a debugger application at this address. Otherwise, listen for a connection at this port.

suspend

If the value is y, the target VM will be suspended until the debugger application connects. 

This is ideal for setting up remote debugging for eclipse.
The typical settings would be "-Xdebug -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,address=8000,server=y,suspend=n".

This article lists some nice options for remote debugging a Liferay portal.
http://holisticsecurity.wordpress.com/tag/eclipse/
Enjoy. 

PS.

Also see Set up remote debugging in tomcat....

Cool tool of the day: vLetter

Vletter is a nice way to create handwritten text quickly.

As they say on their site:

We create your own handwriting fontto use on your computer. vLetter captures the natural variations in your handwriting to give your letters, cards and other correspondence a unique, personal touch. Your handwriting font also includes your signature, so you can sign documents and letters with ease. We've been creating personal handwriting fonts since 1988!

Any way its kinda fun ...

Cheers