But don’t fuss, because it’s not that hard to configure SVN support (using Subversive) with a few simple steps. This document aims to guide you with the install process.

The first time you try to run Eclipse Galileo and click any of the update sites, you’ll probably receive the “Unable to read repository at …” error like what is shown below:

To fix this problem, simply select “Galileo” (or any other update site you wish to use) from the “Available Software Sites” link (Help>Install New Software) and click the “Test Connection” option on the right.

Click “OK” when done and select “Galileo” from the “Available Software” dropdown.

From the Galileo Update site, choose “Collaboration > Subversive SVN Team Provider”.

Click Finish/OK when done. Due to licensing restrictions, the connectors need to be installed using another update site.

To do this, simply “Add” the “Subversive SVN Connectors” Update Site: http://community.polarion.com/projects/subversive/download/eclipse/2.0/galileo-site/

Select the Subversion Connectors you need (select all if you’re not sure which ones) and Install.

After the installation process, you will be  asked for restart of a Eclipse for the changes to take effect.

To see the available options for SVN, open the “SVN Repository Exploring” perspective.

Hope this helps. Comments and feedback are much appreciated.

Thanks.

We encountered a problem when we needed to convert one of our routines for writing out a binary file. We were using Java’s DataOutputStream.writeUTF(String) method and had a hard time trying to write binary data in PHP.

After much research on the web, we found a method in PHP called pack(). Below is our PHP implementation of Java’s DOS.writeUTF(String).

	public static function writeUTF($string) {
		$utfString = utf8_encode($string);
		$length = strlen($utfString);
		print(pack("n", $length));
		print($utfString);
		flush();
	}

We don’t claim this to be the exact equivalent of the method, but it gets the job done and the receiving end of the file was able to parse the binary file properly with the new PHP implementation with no modifications to the client code.

Please checkout the pack() documentation for more details.

Beginning Groovy and Grails

I’ve been entertaining the thought of trying out either Wicket or Grails for my next web project.

The release of this discounted book answers my question of which framework to try out first.

Will this finally be the end of JSF for me?

Thank you for submitting a review of the Eclipse release to the Ganymede Around the World contest. We have an Eclipse shirt for you! Please send me your:

1) Name

2) Shirt size (men’s small, medium, large, X-large, 2X-large or women’s small, medium, large)

3) Mailing Address

4) Phone Number (Fedex requires this for deliveries)

The contest closed yesterday, so all blog entries have been passed on to a panel of judges and we hope to have the winners of the Eclipse jackets and conference pass announced in a few weeks.

Thank you for participating and best of luck in the contest.

Hope my blog entry gets included for the other freebies!

Thanks Eclipse!

I tried several approaches including this one from BEA, but I could not seem to make them work.

It was already very late when I saw an interesting blog post from CB1.

And guess what? His solution worked!

The outlined steps use a special utility from Jetty’s libraries.

java -classpath lib/jetty-6.1.8.jar org.mortbay.jetty.security.PKCS12Import MyCert.pfx MyCert.jks

Thanks to the Jetty developers for providing this utility.

And thanks to the original blog author for the tip.

Jetty rules!

Effective Java (2nd Ed)

InfoQ has an interesting article about the upcoming book and provides a sample chapter on Generics free for download.

Other books from Bloch include:

• Java Puzzlers
• Effective Java (1st Ed)
• Java Concurrency in Practice (co-authored)

I’ve benefited a lot from the original book and I’m excited to see how this updated version will turn out.

Now in its 10th year, Tech Days is a Worldwide Developer Conference that spans 15 cities across the world reaching more than 100,000 developers. This is your chance to develop skills and advance your career in a Web 2.0 world; share knowledge and grow your network; participate in communities with fellow developers changing the face of technology.

Below are some details on what the sessions will be like:

Two Java development tracks will cover sessions in the following areas:

• Java EE 6 and GlassFish
• Java SE 6 Top 10 features, Java SE 7 and OpenJDK
• Next Generation Web and Java Server Faces
• Consumer JRE: Java on Every Desktop OR Java Performance Myths
• Project Metro and REST: Web Services Everywhere
• Java ME: Extreme GUI Makeover for Mobile Phones
• SOA using OpenESB and JCAP
• Java Scripting: JavaFX Script and JRuby

So if you’re in the area, and have some annual leaves to spare, be sure to check them out.

Subject:

Does Certification Help?

Message:

Hi, I have done SCJP, SCWCD and will now give SCBCD and then SCEA. You have done these certifications. Does these help in career? Which country do u reside and what technology u work on. Which technologies do u see as emerging ones in the next 2 to 3 years which will stay long.

Reply:

I’m from the Philippines and in a way it helped me in my career because whenever we get assigned to a different client, our ‘paper’ credentials are what they are interested in first.

But when you start working in a project, those certifications don’t really matter anymore and what matters more is that you deliver on time and with quality.

I must say that my drive for taking certifications is really to push myself towards a learning objective. Without these certification exams, I think I’ll be learning on a per need basis (I’ll just search the web whenever I encounter a problem). But these exams help me focus on topics which should come in handy in the future (even though some of them I don’t need yet).

For technologies, I think Web Services will be there for quite some time (but it’s unfortunate Sun hasn’t released the new exam for JAX-WS yet). After I finish SCEA Part II and III, I’m thinking of taking exams from other providers such as the Adobe Flex exam and probably some .Net exams.

Anyway, I hope this reply isn’t too long and I hope these are the kind of answers you’re expecting.

In summary, I think certifications help in two areas.

1. It helps in the candidate screening process
2. It helps developers have a learning objective

So would I recommend taking certifications?

By all means do take certifications, especially if your company sponsors them.

But remember that at the end of the day, it is your work attitude and contribution that will really matter.

We need to explicitly include the toplink.target-database property in the persistence.xml file to make it work.

<property name="toplink.target-database" value="HSQL"/>

Without that, you are most likely to get this error below when you run your application:

Query: DataModifyQuery()
	at oracle.toplink.essentials.exceptions.DatabaseException.sqlException(DatabaseException.java:304)
       ...
Caused by: java.sql.SQLException: Table not found in statement

I did not have that property set when I was using TopLink JPA with MySQL so I was a bit surprised why it was not working initially when I switched to HSQLDB.

Anyway, here’s the complete properties element of persistence.xml for HSQLDB for your reference:

      <properties>
         <property name="toplink.ddl-generation" value="drop-and-create-tables" />
         <property name="toplink.jdbc.driver" value="org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver" />
         <property name="toplink.jdbc.url" value="jdbc:hsqldb:notifications" />
         <property name="toplink.jdbc.user" value="sa" />
         <property name="toplink.jdbc.password" value="" />
         <property name="toplink.target-database" value="HSQL"/>
      </properties>

Hope I can save you guys a lot of trouble through this post.

Because it certainly took me hours to figure this thing out.

Among them are sending notifications through email, IM or even JMS when your log levels reach a certain threshold. It’s a pretty useful feature especially if you need to be notified in real-time of problems encountered in your application.

I’d like to share with you some articles which I found useful about this topic:

• Reporting Application Errors by Email
• Receive Application Errors via Yahoo Messenger
• Instant logging: Harness the power of log4j with Jabber
• Develop an Asynchronous Logging Framework using log4j with JMS and WebSphere MQ
• Track Your Apps with the Open Source Logging Framework, Log4j

So whether you’re developing a desktop or a web application in Java it’s nice to know that you have these options.