I recently discovered that Skype (at least on Windows) grabs port 80 if it is available. This might prevent your local webserver from starting up. I really don’t understand why my VoIP client has to do this. If your applications main purpose is not associated with a standard port then it should stay away from it. That’s at least my take on this.
Last Week I attended the JBoss World in Chicago and I had a good time. My favorite Session was Large Clusters in JBoss presented by Bela Ban. It was a very hands-on explanation of the new mod_cluster and presented nicely some of the problems with clustered environments (such as binary incompatible rolling updates, management of configuration files, discovery, etc.) and how to work with them (I always like sessions which keep it down a bit and don’t promote the technology as the next holy grail). I also enjoyed Putting Java to REST by Bill Burke which gave a good introduction to RESTeasy. The library (including the JAX-RS standard) looks very straightforward and easy to comprehend (This is always something which I didn’t like about all the SOA stacks). I must say that I’m a bit skeptical about the announced REST-star initiative. I think it may be a little early to start a standardization effort which will certainly make the technology seem more complex.
This is the continued report from the OpenCms Days 2009. If you haven’t read the first part you might as well read it first.
The second day started with the keynote of Joel Tosi and I think this was one of the best talks of the conference (although his question totally took me by surprise since I had had no coffee yet).
Joel took a very critical view on enterprise software and support claims and explained some of the benefits they get from OpenCms at the CME.
I especially liked that he presented very concrete information of implementation and business (numbers & figures) and also think taking the seriousness out of some enterprise label was really good.I saw many people smiling knowingly throughout the whole presentation. You rarely have a talk which is informative and also entertaining.
What often bugged me is that I can upload a set of files into OpenCms as a ZIP file but can not download a tree of files as such (without the use of the database export feature). I had hacked together this little JSP some time ago. It allows you to dynamically download a set of OpenCms resources as a ZIP file.
The JSP has no interface since I mainly use it for development. Simply create a JSP somewhere in the OpenCms VFS and then open the file via the browser. E.g.:
“http://workplace.com/system/createzip?source=/system/modules/foo&filename=foo-module.zip”
The source parameter specifies which directory to zip up and the filename parameter which filename to use for the generated file. You can only zip up resources with a total size of 10 megabytes. This is mainly to prevent OutOfMemory errors to happen. You can easily increase the size by altering the variable maxSourceSize to any value you need.
If you find any bugs or want to give feedback simply leave a comment or send me an email.
Especially with the new JPA driver for OpenCms by Georgi Naplatanov the question of running OpenCms on Google App Engine came up quite often at the OpenCms Days 2009. I had the same Idea when I first heard of the Java support for App Engine and did some quick research on how to do this. The research showed that running OpenCms on Google App Engine would require a huge rewrite of some OpenCms core functionalities.
Since I’m currently working on an OpenCms mutli site solution I was looking for a possibility to restrict the available templates of a site. I know this can be done via permissions but the manual implementation of this is rather painful. I’m currently in the process of extending the OpenCms security manager to take care of this but while doing this I found an (to me) unknown feature.
By usage of the property folders.available (you might have to define it first) on a template you can specify a list of comma seperated folders in which the template is available (in the dropdown).
Unfortunately this property works only on file level and can not be inherited via the folder hierarchy. Also it does not provide a secure solution since the template can always be set via the advanced property dialog.
But you never know when a feature could come in handy.
I’m sure lots of you know it already, but I recently rediscovered this podcast about the 12 Byzantine rulers and the history of Constantinople. Very interesting if you want to listen to something other than the usual technology podcasts.
Have fun listening.
I just debugged a problem with a website not beeing displayed correctly in IE7. It seemed that people had pasted in contents from Microsoft Word. While removing the MS Office comments I found a nice XML-Element.
<w:LsdException />
Im sure it means something very sophisticated but the naming is just not so clever…
From June 15 to 16 the OpenCms Days 2009 are happening in Cologne. I really had a great time last year so for me the decision to go was a no-brainer. Unfortunately I had no time to prepare a session this year but having a quick look at the program tells me it may be better because I can enjoy even more great sessions (doing a session by myself was very exhausting and I only survived it because of Arash Kaffamanesh’s constant water devlivery 
) Here are my must-see sessions:
For a current hosting server I’m using the Plesk control panel 9.0.1 for Ubuntu 8.04. Since version 9 Plesk allows the usage of Postfix as an MTA and PHP via FastCGI. This is very nice and much more secure than the old model using mod_php.
One problem with the current Plesk version (as with most Plesk versions :/) is that it has some nasty bugs. For example mod_rewrite doesn’t work with the FastCGI configuration. The problem is that the generated virtual host configuration has a small but important problem. The generated host looks something like this:
<VirtualHost 88.198.164.10:80>
ServerName playground.himberger.de:80
ServerAlias www.playground.himberger.de
<IfModule mod_fcgid.c>
<Files ~ (\.php)>
SetHandler fcgid-script
FCGIWrapper /usr/bin/php5-cgi .php
Options ExecCGI
allow from all
</Files>
</IfModule>
</VirtualHost>
The issue with this configuration is the line “Options ExecCGI“. This line enables the execution of CGI scripts for this particular directory but overrides all the Options set earlier. These are in parts needed for mod_rewrite. To fix this the line should be “Options +ExecCGI“. Sadly changing the configuration doesn’t help because at the next opportunity Plesk will regenerate the config file and your change is gone.
Luckily there is a way around this…
