Things that help, hinder, or horrify happy developers at work. I used to call this category Development, but delicious has more tags for programming. “Go with the grain” – Jethro Gibbs
Developer.com has a series on Google integration with PHP at http://www.developer.com/services/article.php/3680076.
I suppose this would be a good time to grouse that they never gave my two series (WSRP and POI) a page of their own 🙂
Between the York District Boy Scouts Spring Wateree Campout and a cold, I have not been posting much lately, so this a is re-tread from Frequently Unasked Questions.
I find balancing my desire to learn with my time available to be an endless source of frustration. Especially as I actually like work with web technologies (I know lots of folks who only do it for a living).
My most recent episode (for those waiting for me to get to the point) is wanting to work on my personal site on my work laptop. This is because I am a traveling consultant, and when I’m on the road this is my only machine. This particular machine does not have IIS installed and the XP Pro disk was not shipped with the laptop (I’m a virtual office, also). So, I needed to set up a WAMP environment with Apache. I generally deal with Java app servers and haven’t touched Apache in seven years. It does not appear to have changed much since then. I’m sure there are lots of improvements, but nothing that I would notice with my casual relationship to it. So casual that, while I mostly remember the tasks to set things up, I don’t remember the actual steps to accomplish the tasks.
I found one site that had a good Quick Start guide. It was a bit outdated, but it is easy enough to find the newer versions following the steps outlined there. Unfortunately, it still takes more free time than I have. While looking up the resolution to one issue I ran into a discussion post pointing to steps for a much easier install. The recommendation was to get an all in one package from SourceForge called Apache2Triad. This has the whole stack in one installer. I didn’t even need the steps on the site where I got the link from. The installation took all of 5 minutes, with another 15 minutes to get my workspace set up and configured. Sweet!
I’m the first to admit that if you are looking for breaking news, I am not the source. Broken news, maybe…
Anyway, I just noticed the FastSwap feature for WLS 10.3. This allows for updating classes in a running instance without having to do a full redeploy. If you have spent anytime developing WebLogic Portal applications, you know what a boon this is. Two of the major productivity killers in building WLP solutions is the time it takes to redeploy the whole portal to test every little change, and eventual Out of Memory errors that will occur with repeated redeployment of the same application.
Turning on the feature is a simple matter of updating weblogic.xml and weblogic-application.xml (see the documentation for the specifics).
One note of caution: This is for development use only. If your deployment processes do not include either deployment plans or environment-specific deployment descriptors, you will need to maintain a local copy outside of your normal source control.
While the message does not impact functionality, if you have to read the logs it becomes tedious to scroll past the following over and over:
<BEA-403302> <An unexpected SQL exception occured java.sql.SQLException: ORA-00001:
unique constraint (PORTAL.PK_LEASE) violated.
java.sql.SQLException: ORA-00001: unique constraint (PORTAL.PK_LEASE) violated
at oracle.jdbc.driver.DatabaseError.throwSqlException(DatabaseError.java:112)
at oracle.jdbc.driver.T4CTTIoer.processError(T4CTTIoer.java:331)
Not to mention how the fun of having every person who hasn’t looked at your application before reporting it as a problem or insisting it is the root of a bug you are chasing (it isn’t).
If you have a support account, you can surpress this with the following WLP 10.2 patch:
VZGR | 9AS6D7D9
Once I got MySQL running on Vista, I then needed to manage it. While I ran MySQL from the command line eight years ago, that was, well, eight years ago. I remembered enough to get the server started, set up the root user, and find the databases that are pre-configured. This was enough to get my local version of WordPress running.
To do more interesting things for the casual user, the best tool I ever found is the one made by DBTools. I started using it with version 1.02, and find 3.2.4 just as delightfully simple and feature-rich as my first foray into getting fast results with very little ramp-up back in 2001.
I’m also notoriously cheap, and DBTools has a free version for personal use. Price aside, it is still my preferred tool for basic interaction with MySQL.