Two days of crodaloola soaping

I worked on single soap request for two days and thats because nod32 probably had a bug or my company eset setting were inadequate. Actually I don’t even care. Virus protection should not cause two days of headache – it should avoid it.

So at start my problems revolved around executing soap request with spring ws using weblogic. A lot of message constructing and classloading issues that were resolved using google. But then, after request constructing was fixed, my request was sent and weblogic hanged!! After 10 minutes stack was printed out warning that some thread has been stuck for too long. 

After replacing few soap related weblogic internal components I had an open source solution. Namely I started to use apache httpclient instead of weblogic internal connectionFactory. Now I could configure everything more easily and follow many of the google advices. I tried getting rid of Transfer-encoding: chunked, adding proxy servlets, configuring connection settings, using HTTP 1.0, etc.

During that time I also did enxtensive debugging. HttpClient successfully posted the request after that and before reading the response it tries to read response status. And thread was stuck at inputstream.read(). At this point my head could hold only char[3] -> {‘W’,'T’,'F’}

Then I noticed that my CPU is used 100% during the hang and most of it is used by ekrn system process (Eset Service). After weblogic crashed, CPU usage returned to normal. So run -> services.msc -> Eset Service -> manual seemed like the right thing to do. After restart everything worked like a charm. 

If anyone has any ideas why NOD32 could not check that simple response for my message was virus free with 10 minutes please let me know.

Bouncycastle encryption for PGP 2.6.x

Thanks to David Hook who pointed me to right direction and gave ideas to keep on pushing

The requirement: I had to integrate with external system by sending pgp encrypted xml messages to server X. Sounds easy. But the server X used pgp 2.6.3is for decryption.

I used Bouncycastle (BC) java implementation for encryption and did not find any very good examples. I think BC tries to keep things really flexible by having CompressedDataGenerator, LiteralDataGenerator, EncryptedDataGenerator etc. At first all this looks overwhelming. I was hoping to create and configure single instance and call encrypt method.

Because I had to be compatible with pgp 2.6.x I anticipated more issues. So how did I encrypt my xml. If your interested of the code then read on.

Source attacher

Some time ago I was debugging a few projects and I was frustrated because I had to attach the same source over and over again so I created an Eclipse plugin that helped me out. 

Here it is. Minimal configuration is required after installation. Directory where sources are saved needs to be set.

Please, please try it out and post me any comments, suggestions or bugs. I know there are some. 

Additionally the sourceforge page contains small server application that downloads maven repository indexes and provides source search functionality for eclipse plugin. It searches from indexes and provides options with links to maven repository so that source can be directly downloaded to configured sources directory. Currently there is no central service online, but there could be. So if anyone knows some good public server where I could run this java application and that would provide me approx. 100MB to store indexes then let me know. I would really like to publish search in central location and remove complicated configuration options from plugin.

All the best

Wefeelfine

I found really interesting project online. http://www.wefeelfine.org/ 

It monitors blogs around the world and searches for “I feel ___”  and displays whole sentence. See the author talking about this: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jonathan_harris_tells_the_web_s_secret_stories.html 

I feel curious to see what internet becomes in 10 years.

Java 3D

Today I had some time to play around with java3D and I was quite surprised. At first the learning curve seemed a bit high but I overcame that relatively quickly. Maybe because I have also played arond with some hardcore products like 3dsMax and Lightwave. Most of the concepts were familiar for me but in other context. I had never tried to program something 3d and unfortunately I lack the need to create something cool in 3d because it seemed fun.

What have you created in 3d and how do you like java 3d API?

Cool firefox plugin – Ubiquity

This thing can’t get any cooler. I can do anything with that. It’s like adding another interface upon browser. And being a developer this is super cool because now only my imagination is my limit.

For example my project manager wants some changes done on the site but I can’t quite get him, so I let him show me. Given the power there is already built in I think I could even use it as simple prototyping engine.

I believe my internet habits are going to change a lot. I’m just afraid that I may not be able to use a computer where this plugin is not installed anymore in the future. And because it uses Ctrl-space my Eclipse syndrome gets probably worse. I already try to use that combination in notepad, console and in other “not-so-smart” editors

And what is such revolutionary tool that made my day – it’s Ubiquity

UML modelling tools

Haven’t posted here a while but that’s about to change. 

Few days now I have done some UML drawing with different tools and few things annoy me. UML should be unified language but it defines only how the result should look. There is no standard way to store this data on disk. And I say this being fully aware of the existence of XMI format. 

Two days ago I was drawing my diagrams using Enterprise Architect and I pretty much liked it. I havent used that tool so extensively before and I was easily able to everything I needed. Yesterday I wanted to move some of my diagrams to Borland Together. Should be easy task to export needed stuff to XMI and import them in Together. As you can guess I was disappointed. I don’t know wether its EA’s fault that it couldn’t export in correct format or is Together lacking something.

Finally I recreated my diagrams in Together. It didn’t take longer than an hour but if I would have had larger project to migrate then I would have been in trouble. I had to use Borland Together 2006R2 and if it wouldn’t crash on me after every 10 minutes I would really enjoy that.

I know my post is quite loose ended but the day has been tiresome. You are welcome to ask questions or add comments if something keeps bothering you after reading this

Spring Web Flow console integration

And I finally did it. Wrote a numberguess application that is backed by Spring Web Flow (SWF). Spring has done a great job decoupleing SWF from other APIs, there really is no connection or dependencies to servlet API for example. But still the documentation isn’t very clear concerning integration with other view layers. So how did I do it?

Sweet e-reader from Plastic Logic

I absolutely adore e-reader from Plastic Logic that is coming to market in Spring 2009. The factory should be running by now and I’m really waiting when it hits the market. The pricing has not been announced yet but as the officials have said it’s going to be “priced competitively”. It has touch screen, Wifi and big screen. I’m not going to expect it’s going to be less than iRex’s Digital Reader that is around 600€ (without the WiFi). Doesn’t sound promising but who knows – the production was supposed to be cheaper. And iRex is oriented to business clients and Plastic Logic should target more general audience. If the price should be under 600€ then I most certainly want one even if I have to go to Germany to pick one up myself Although I am little cautious about the artifacts that were visible on the readers screen in the demo but let’s assume that’s just a bug in prototype

See the news.

Cache it

Today I found interesting way to cache stuff and I probably can use it in near future. It is basically LRU cache but it is implemented using rotating hashtables. Check it out.