If anyone will be in or around Atlanta, GA, October 24 – 26, you should think about attending the Atlanta Java Software Symposium which is part of the No Fluff, Just Stuff symposium series. I’ll be presenting a session entitled “Scripting on the JVM” in which I will present various scripting languages like Python and Ruby running on top of the Java virtual machine and trying to explain why that’s cool. The session abstract is located on the sessions listing page; I’m about 1/3 of the way down the page.

I attended this symposium last year and had an excellent experience. The ratio of useful information to vendor-specific sales-weasel crap was extremely high, which is a good thing. I wrote about it in the February Java Developer’s Journal if you want to read about it. There is also a review of one of the other symposia in the series in the current issue.

I’m really looking forward to presenting at it this year’s symposium.

I’ve just been digging through the J2SE 1.4 regex stuff, and every time I have to do regex work in Java I keep thinking how much easier it is in other languages. Specifically I’m talking about the clunkiness of the various regexen APIs in Java and the requirement to double-backslash regex operators. We need a better way. Ruby and Perl both have native regex support built in to the language, so the backslashes are just fine. Python, which doesn’t have native regex support (it’s in the library), does have “raw” string quoting, which allows you not to double-up the backslashes. So what I have to write like this in Java:

1  Pattern p =
2      Pattern.compile("(\(\d+\))?\s*(\d{3}\s*\-\s*(\d{3})");
3  Matcher m = p.matcher(my_string);
4  if (m.matches())
5  {
6      ...;
7  }

or

1  if (Pattern.matches("(\(\d+\))?\s*(\d{3}\s*\-\s*(\d{3})", my_string))
2  {
3      ...;
4  }

looks like this in Python:

1  if re.match("((d+))?s*(d{3}s*-s*(d{3})", my_string):
2      ...

and could be even more easily written in Ruby thus:

1  if my_string =~ /((d+))?s*(d{3}s*-s*(d{3})/
2      ...
3  end

See the difference? The built-in regex support is really nice and the ease of quoting is a beautiful thing. I doubt that we’ll ever see either of these in Java since they would certainly be considered non-trivial to add.

I discovered something interesting the other day at the office. We have a guy who has been unable to build a certain entire jar of entity beans ever since he started working there and I had only given it scant thought as to why. I knew that I had had no problems… So he came by my office on Wednesday and I said “OK. Let’s figure this out.” I ran our Ant build file that is specifically used for building this particular jar full of entity beans and got the same errors he was reporting. Odd, thought I. The errors being reported by ejbc were that the compiler couldn’t resolve symbols with names like Foo$ValueObject. That was odd since that looked like the inner classes defined in each of the entity beans were not there. But looking at the classes directory, those classes were definitely there. What was really odd was that simply dropping back to J2SE 1.3.1, or even 1.4.1 worked.

For reference, we have a group of entity beans that each have a nested class called ValueObject. (I don’t particularly like that, but they’re there nonetheless.) Essentially we have 80 entity interfaces that follow this basic pattern:

public interface Foo extends EJBLocalObject
{
   ...

   public ValueObject getValueObject()

   public static class ValueObject
   {
       ...
   }
}

and then 80 entity bean classes that actually implement the getValueObject method.

It was at this point that I started looking at that “$” in the class name. It then hit me that the code should be using a “.” between the outer and inner class names, not a “$”. But the code where the error was occurring was generated by ejbc. I’ve tried this now with WLS 7.0 sp2 and sp3 and the results are identical.

Even though I’ve not been able to find this documented in the release notes of J2SE, it would appear that versions prior to 1.4.2 allowed code to specify an inner class using a dollar sign, even though it was not technically correct, and that 1.4.2 has stopped being lenient in this regard. Yes, I know that WLS 7 is not officially supported with 1.4.2… I haven’t tried with WLS 8 yet; I would assume that since it is supported with 1.4.2 they’ve changed the code generation routines inside ejbc.

So the moral of the story is that if you find yourself needing to run WLS 7 with J2SE 1.4.2, and you happen to have entity beans that you need to run through ejbc, first run your build file for those entities using J2SE <= 1.4.1, and run everything else under 1.4.2.

After this morning’s surprise announcement that JBoss Group was essentially forking, there has been a lot of speculation about what this means for JBoss Group specifically and JBoss in general. The new company was started by 8 now-former JBoss Group consultants and was announced with much fanfare this morning. Ben Sabrin of JBoss Group just posted a “rebuttal” of sorts to the jboss-user mailing list. He took a few jabs at the departing consultants and made one statement that’s a bit hard to swallow. The jabs:

“…the most important developers are on board with JBoss Group.”

“WE have the financial resources to patch the departures of three consultants in our US consulting operation.”

and the dinger is

“It is business as usual and JBoss Group is currently growing.”

The statement that all the “important” developers are on board is an attempt to downplay the reputations of those who have left by implying that they were second string, while the second is attempting to indicate that the new company is going to be strapped for cash, probably to scare off potential customers. I have no personal info on either statement or situation, nor do I know if the developers in question are useful or not. From what I can tell, though, in reading the various articles about the split, the consultants who left all seem like integral parts of the team… I can’t blame JBoss Group for being ticked off, but these statements just strike me as a little smarmy.

The dinger is a dinger because how can you be growing if half of your consultants just left?

I think it will be interesting to see how all this plays out over the next several months. Will this lessen or increase the business use of JBoss? I actually think the potential is there to increase it because you have more options for support, but that’s just me.

I had a really interesting time tracking down a Log4J problem. We’ve been using Log4J for over a year now happily and even happier with the Commons Logging package on top of it. But last week (while I was on vacation) something went pear shaped: the logs got created but after some initial log messages got sent to the logs, no further messages would get logged. I checked the config file (the XML variety, not the properties file) and it was correct. I then set about digging through code to see if someone had programatically changed the logger, but found nothing. Finally today I found the culprit: a rogue log4j.properties file in a war file in our ear file (that had been there the whole time) had been changed to set the root logger to a level of WARN. Since all of our log messages are at INFO level, thus they never made it. I’ve tested this and it is indeed the problem.

That was a real pain to diagnose, especially since the offending file had not been checked into our source repository. Had it been checked in, I probably would have spotted the change sooner.

Why can’t the Java Plugin on Windows unload itself after you leave a page with a (stupid) applet on it, or after X amount of inactivity? I generally despise applets, but sometimes I have to use them, such as the one on the WebLogic console. What I really hate is pages that have an applet just for ad rotation. I have no problem with sites having ads, but loading up the Java VM (no small amount of RAM there) just to rotate ads bothers me.

But anyway, if they won’t do an auto-unload feature, at least give me the option of killing it via the Windows systray? (I am pretty sure that on Linux systems the plugin doesn’t hang around, but I could be wrong.)

How hard is that?