Today I took a look at Drool. Since JBoss recently got together with Drool for their jBPM Module.

Upfront Drool looks pretty cool and I can see plenty of instances where I can use drool to sort of factor out the business logic.
One thing that comes to mind is the using drool to do tax computation since tax changes every year.
Initally I thought of having the tax module as a seperate jar which could be changed every year. But now with drool I think I will be changing drools metadat (xxxx.drl) file.
I will be posting a more detailed post with my discoveries and pains I had with drool.
Ciao.
Thomas

Yesterday and today I dug into JBoss and tried the tutorial which is put up at JBoss site.

I downloaded
JBoss AS 4.0.3
JBoss IDE 1.5.0.M3
And all the tutorials.

Initally I tried downloading the JBoss Plugin but that did not work with my version of Eclipse. So I decided to download the IDE provided JBoss incluse of Eclipse etc.

The bundled one worked for me.

Following the tutorial was a breeze. However when I deployed the application the first page came out fine. When I tried to run the servlet it threw a Servlet Exception. Dug in a found that the Servlet Exception was being caused by a ClassCastException at
home = (FiboHome) PortableRemoteObject.narrow(ref, FiboHome.class);

Since I am new to JNDI I started poking around with the
Object ref = context.lookup(“java:/comp/env/ejb/Fibo”);
and the deployement discriptors.
Trying all permutations and combinations of one or the other. Then I got back to searching the net. I also lurked in IRC channels to get some hints. Thats when I hit the site.

http://www.jboss.org/?module=bb&op=viewtopic&t=59192

which lead me to sites

http://www.jbossgroup.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3887843

http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/JBAS-1775

http://wiki.jboss.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=ClassLoadingConfiguration

http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/JBAS-1691

Finally like I mentioned in the forum

This is basically a classloading problem.
The new JBoss does not have a flat classloader like the old JBoss. So if you load a class in your EJB and you load a class in your servlet even though the bytecode is the same they are treated as diffrent classes.

So for the tutorial to work you should remove the FiboEJB-client.jar from your FiboWEB.war file. Your servlet will reference the class FiboHome from the FiboEJB.jar file.

Hopefully the maintainers will fill in this part in the tutorial.
Till the next blog……

Yesterday I had a terrible time with Drupal. It all started with some consern regarding overwriting files with the Drupal Upload Module later I found out that the upload renames the files even if we upload files with the same name. However they Have to be in diffrent pages.

Sombody on the Channel told me to try the Attachment module. Reading the docuementation it looked pretty straight forward. Install the fileManager Module. Install the Attachment Module and you are ready to go.

However it was not that easy. When I Installed the Attachment Module a UI to attach files did not appear in the pages. Only digging in deep into the documenation did I find that not only do you have to enable the module in access control but you will have to enable it in
Administrator – content – content types – xxx – configure and enable it to get it working.
That was not the end of my worries. When I attached my files the link that pointed to the files were all in a mess. I used to get a url http://mysite.com?p=http://mysite.com/files/active/0/xxx.yyy
Where it was supposed to be only

http://mysite.com/files/active/0/xxx.yyy

Looking deep into the forum I found that it was a bug and there was a patch written for it.
The problem has been discussed at Drupal Attachment Moduel URL problem

— attachment.module 2005-07-15 11:20:29.000000000 +0200
+++ attachment.module.new 2005-07-15 11:30:07.000000000 +0200
@@ -336,7 +336,7 @@

$attrib = empty($attachment['description']) ? array() : array(‘title’ => $attachment['description']);
- $row[0]['data'] = l($text, module_invoke(‘filemanager’, ‘url’, $attachment['fid']), $attrib);
+ $row[0]['data'] = module_invoke(‘filemanager’, ‘l’, $text, $attachment['fid'], TRUE, $attrib, TRUE);
$row[0]['class'] = ‘filename’;

Recently I set up php list for sending birthday messages to people on the loyalty list. I was worried when I got 2 emails when I sent a test message. However I found out that it is a feature and not a bug because 2 mails are sent only when testing to show you what the text version and the html version will look like.
You can find a discussion about it here Duplicate Messages

Yesterday I nearly finished porting my web site to Drupal CMS (Content Management System). Everything works seamlessly however I will have to change the site header and keep it common among all the applications on the web site. The applications I currently have are Drupal for my web site, b2evolution for the Blog, phpGedView for the Family Tree.
The down side to all this is that I cannot get a common look and feel for the whole site and each application has its own look and feel.

What I’m really happy about is that my old home made php script works seamlessly with the new site so I did not have to leave out any content and adding content is a breeze.

Hopefully I will have a lot more content in the weeks to come.

We needed to implement an application that could send news letters to a list of subscribers. The first thing that came to my mind was to set up a mailing list because that was the usual way to go. However a friend suggested an application called PHPList.
As with most applications studying the UI is the most difficult part. However the features that PHPList offers is pretty cool. And would fit right in for our Newsletter applicaiton.
Since we are all lazy to implement the infrastructure to manage lists of users, their subscription, an option for them to unsubscribe, change their attributes, monitor views etc.
All these are implemented in PHPList. Our newsletter also needed to send customised letters to all the users. Ie the mail should contain the Users name.

PHPList has a feature where you can get the content of a message from a website. What we did was implement a JSP that took an attribute (ie. Name and added that attribute to the output) now PHPList could grab the page after passing the Name of the user. This fit right in to how we wanted our application.

I will let you know how it progresses.

Today I ran into a funny problem. I tried to set up a moden on a FC4 Box. I went through the manuals and it suggested using a tool “wvdialconfig”. The configuration went on Fine but when I tried to dial out. The thing just would not dial. The OH LED did not come on. However it did dial when when I pulled out the Telephone line. Looks like it could be a AT Command problem. I will try again this week and post the results on this blog.