Category Archives: Development

CoheSiVe

I have just added a new project to my github repo: CoheSiVe

From the silly capitalization you can already guess that it’s a CSV library. It differs from other libraries I’ve seen in that it doesn’t attempt to read the whole file in one go, but is uses an event-driven architecture so that your application can decide what to do with each row as it is parsed.

Docs are here: http://www.dataforte.net/software/cohesive/index.html

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Cassandra CacheStore now in Infinispan trunk

Since I have been accepted as an Infinispan contributor, I have committed my first complete implementation of the Cassandra CacheStore to Infinispan’s trunk. This means that it will be included in Infinispan 5.0 whenever that will be released.

In the meantime I have migrated all the code into my repository and have released a 0.0.2 version which can be used with the current Infinispan 4.1.x and 4.2.x. The Maven dependency (if you use my repository) is:


        net.dataforte.infinispan
	infinispan-cachestore-cassandra
	0.0.2

I would be very grateful if you could test it in your environment.

I am also working on adding multiple host addresses and automatic ring discovery to my Cassandra Connection Pool.

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Static resources versioning in web applications

I recently had trouble with a Javascript-heavy application which was deployed to the end users quite frequently in its initial stages. The problem was that users were seeing bugs which had been fixed with the latest release and that was because their browsers were caching the static resources of the web application for too long. A forced refresh (Ctrl+F5 or Ctrl+R) solved the problem but I wanted a better, automatic way.

The solution was to add a version to the path of each static resource and then use url rewriting to get the real file. In practice in my HTML I refer to resources like this:


In my case the 1.0.6 is the pom.version which I get using Maven resource filtering. I then use the wonderful URL Rewrite Filter (but I could also have used Apache’s mod_rewrite ) to rewrite URLs matching

^/[0-9]+[a-zA-Z0-9\.\-]+/(js|css|img)/(.*)$

to

/$1/$2

I think I’ll go back and apply this fix to all my apps 🙂

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Canyon: more JSR-223 and the SimpleBindings

In order to make the widgets available as object during script execution, I have extended javax.script.SimpleBindings so that I lookup keys in the widget hierarchy before handing it down to the backing map by overriding the get() method. This was how I did it when using the Groovy implementation directly. I have discovered that javax.script requires that I override containsKey() as well as get(), otherwise it doesn’t even attempt to invoke get(). Now that is fixed in SVN and I am nearing the first public release of Canyon.

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Canyon: JSR-223

Canyon is my implementation of the concepts behind various kinds of XML-based application interface tools (XAML, Flash MXML, ZK, etc).
Canyon started off as a way to describe Echo2 (http://echo.nextapp.com) applications using XML bound together with Groovy (http://groovy.codehaus.org) scripts.
Recently I’ve been working on refactoring Canyon to support multiple widget libraries (Echo2, Cooee, Echo3, Swing, SWT, etc) and JSR-223 (aka javax.script) instead of just Groovy. Currently canyon and its bits are available on Sourceforge SVN (http://sourceforge.net/projects/canyon).

I promise I will hopefully get a half-way decent site for all these projects of mine and create some sort of community going.

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WARShield: progress

The WARShield stuff progresses nicely: it now implements most of the feature-set I had in mind.

I have also implemented an event/listener method so that other ContextListeners / Servlets /Filters can get notified when the configuration is readily available, changes, etc.

Currently the configuration is stored in a single properties file, but I am adding a “multi-resource” method so that applications supply a set of template files which get populated with the configuration data (similar to the maven resource filtering by using the ${} notation).

I plan on adding hooks for containers such as Spring, so that they look for their data in the appropriate place and wait until the configuration is ready before reading it.

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