Creating video tutorials in Windows

If you ever needed to introduce your application(s)/technology to new developers or just create an end user tutorials, here are a few tips that helped me when I was creating instructional videos.

I used CamStudio video capture software and iWisoft video converter. With first application, you will record your video and with second application, you can convert it to desired format. After that, you might want to integrate something like  JWPlayer  in your Wiki site (if you do not have one already) and play the videos.

My setting for video codec is Cinepac Codec by Radius and Volume options are set to default mic and PCM format. When converting, I usually select MP4 format (Apple TV MPEG-4). This should cut the file size ~3 times and still retain the good quality of the recording. You can, of course, adjust more video/audio settings for different formats using only CamStudio.

When recording instructional videos please keep in mind to:

• Speak slowly and clearly
• Prepare your concept in advance and practice if you need to
• Keep your videos short and to the point (15 min/video should be enough as users need to absorb a lot of information in short time)
• Start the video with agenda that is not too complex and yet clearly states what the intent of the video is

Please let me know if you have a better approach or suggestion and if this information helped you.

Thanks.

Accessing Maven Profiles

I have just spent some time trying to figure out how to determine which profiles are active  during the build using Maven. This functionality would be useful if you needed to put your profile activation in JAR MANIFEST file if your project supported various versions of dependency files (for example different servers, portals or Ajax libraries ...) and in case that your version information did not include this.

Here is a snippet that will make you life easier using GMaven plugin:


If you know easier way, please let me know.

TOAD for SQL Server - hide empty tables

If you are using SQL server and TOAD and have a lot of empty tables that you do not want to show, you can use Object Explorer filter to add this code to prevent them from being shown:


Thanks TOAD forum for the help!

Displaying jBPM diagram of the current process

In large enough processes, user might need to see where in the diagram process stopped. Now jBPM console comes with this, but to actually integrate it with front end application, I had to change it slightly. Code base used was from bpm-console. First part is setting up properties with the location of your Guvnor (jbpm.console.properties):


Following is the code (you can remove static if you want):


To run everything I use JIBX to compile XSD schemas for BPMN2 (you can find them in jbpm-bpmn2-5.2.0.Final.jar). You will need to slightly modify JIBX output with extending classes to compile it, but after that it should work OK.

Before running this, you will need BPMN2 file and PNG in you resources directory (named same as process ID). In case that in the future versions of Designer positioning of the elements inside BPMN2 becomes absolute, then JIBX will not be needed as PNG you can get from Guvnor directly and source will not be parsed as positions are already in the metadata of the node. Currently, as positions are relative we need to calculate the offset to overlay the arrow correctly over PNG. Please also note that I only offset positions for the Lanes and not, for example, from the  Sub-process. You can extend this code to fit your needs.

Usage in xhtml:

And not to forget, you need to initialize JPAWorkingMemoryDbLogger and add corresponding Entities to persistence.xml (ProcessInstanceLog, NodeInstanceLog, VariableInstanceLog).

As always, if you have any suggestions, please drop me a note.

Thanks to tsurdilo for help!

JSF2 Byte Boolean Checkbox

A few days ago I needed to convert old Icefaces 1.8.2 (JSF1.2) project to Icefaces 3.1 (JSF2) and found a problem when converting Byte to Boolean for the checkboxes. Byte value was generated by Hibernate from database and that is the model that already exists so we really cannot change that. The option with JSF1.2 was to implement Byte to Boolean converter and override rendering kit to call it. JSF2 does not allow this anymore or it is not working (expression library only coerces String to Boolean). After some research, the only option was to automatically generate Boolean getters and setters for existing files. Since there is quite a bit of them spread through different projects, I needed an utility to do this. I ended up writing a small Ruby application for this job. Here is the code:


This is by no means perfect code, but it did the job. If you have a better suggestion, please let me know!

Thanks

Why use jBPM and Drools

I just wanted to give some intro to the people that are considering using jBPM but still need some picture as where this would fit in their system.

1. What is BPM?

Taken from Wiki:

Business process management (BPM) is a holistic management approach focused on aligning all aspects of an organization with the wants and needs of clients. It promotes business effectiveness and efficiency while striving for innovation, flexibility, and integration with technology. BPM attempts to improve processes continuously. It can therefore be described as a "process optimization process." It is argued that BPM enables organizations to be more efficient, more effective and more capable of change than a functionally focused, traditional hierarchical management approach.

From my perspecitve, simply said, BPM should allow company to circumvent complex development cycles, give more control to customer over what is happening in the process itself and significanetly cut the cost of creating new solutions for the customer as most of components should be reusable. Documentation and help are readily available and development is constant as jBPM is open source.

2. Why use it?

To develop a custom solution is sometimes needed but when exapanding usage and bringing in new technologies where companies are trying to cut costs, we need to be focused on how to implement what we have with anything that might potentialy benefit us and customers at the same time. This means using the knowledge of majority of the people that are alreay experts in the matter but they are not directly working for your company. Maintating and testing such complex sultions takes a lot of time and effort. Also, constantly thinking about new ways to improve functionality and tying the resources into this is not always the best idea, unless your budget allowes you to do it. Contributing to the community (should your company allow it) would be a much better and cost effective way of doing it.

3. What was the need in our company?

We are always faced with the question of how to improve the functionality of the system to allow it to easily integrate with various tools, but on the other hand, to make it so it is stable and reliable as our solution needs to be used in insurance industry. Most of the problems that we are solving are common for the insurance industry but going from customer to customer there are frequent requests to implement a specific functionality that separates one customer from another in the market. Having some competition just makes this process more intense as legacy systems are not so easily replaced.

BPM came into story as we needed more flexibility in our back end systems to allow customers to create and shape processes using only Desinger where we would create custom sevices that can be assembled into different processes with minimal help from development team.

4. How to implement and take the most from this technology?

This is the scenario that we envisioned on how BPM and Drools would be used:

• Development team creates processes and back-end logic with custom work items where most of the logic that we already have is reused and fortified so it can be called independently
• Development team creates initial processes to show how BPM should be used 
• BA team creates initial rules using BRL and DRL file packed into the PKG so we can version every release and use agents to reload resources dynamically 
• Development team creates integration of the BPM engine into the system
• Customer starts modifying processes and submit them to Guvnor. These resources are automatically applied (after QA testing and busniess approvals)
• Customer starts modifying rules by changing and removing old ones and introducing new rules as needed. Rules are dynamically loaded into application (no need for restart or recompiling)
• Process is iterative and has minimal involvement from IT team (only for implementing new functionality)

When integrating BPM, there are several things to consider:

1. Is your system stateful or stateless? BPM generaly uses stateful session, so you need to know the bounds and lifecycle of this session even if it is executed briefly.
2. Where to create your Knowledge Base. Crating knowledge base can take time, so you can consider either creating it in some application scoped object that is initiated once or creating singleton object for the Knowledge Base as you access BPM engine.
3. How to invoke rules? There is an option to invoke rules through BPM directly, but we chose to do it in the work item code by creating another stateless session. This gives us much more control over which objects are passed into the session and we can reuse code if we want to use Drools without BPM.
4. How to load resources? KnowledgeBuilderFactory vs KnowledgeAgentFactory. Static vs dynamic. We chose this to be configurable to allow us to load resources from packages and to connect to Guvnor and load resources from there. If you are loading resources from Guvnor, you need to consider that the Guvnor will not only become your source control but integral part of the application. On the other hand, resources can be loaded dynamically from files too, if you choose not to use Guvnor. This allows you to change the process and deploy the resources without touching the application. You should not forget to start the listeners though, if using agent to check for changes in packages.
5. Transport and security of the user tasks. If you need user tasks, you can use several different types of handlers (WorkItemHandler). Please note that you will need to build/configure some security around those. Sine the source is open, you can change queries that are executed through already defines interface by defining custom mapping-file in persistence.xml. 
6. Versioning. When you deploy one ID of the process, you will still need the old one as you might have some processes persisted and in need of continuing. You will then copy process and create new version with different ID. When starting new process you will need to use new ID and also have both BPMN resources loaded as the one that is deserializing and continuing will need old definition. The other option is to fail the process or manually convert to new process.
7. Transaction management. We needed to implement 2 data sources (one XA) to make this work, so plan where your transaction will start, join and where it will commit/rollback.

There are probably many more, but these were important to me.

I hope that I gave you some ideas on why would you choose jBPM in your application and hopefully this will make your customers happy. As always, to find extensive information, please use JBoss help site(s)/forums and manual as there is plenty of information there. You can get a lot of help from IRC too.

Thanks!

Hunting in Canada

A few weeks ago I passed my Ontario Hunter Education course. I decided to take the course as I felt that I needed to connect more with nature through hunting as something that was common for people to do in the past centuries. Becoming a hunter and hunting is something that I have always wanted to do but somehow never found the time to do it. Well, if you decide to start with this and live in GTA, these resources might help:

1. Ontario Hunters Education Program
2. Ready AIM

The second link is from the company that offers hunting and firearms courses. I have had a great time listening to the courses as people working in Ready AIM are great and knowledgeable. A word of advice, book your courses soon as they get sold quickly.

I decided that I wanted to Bow-hunt but even for that, to get a hunter license, you will need to pass non-restricted firearms course (Canadian Firearms Safety Course). Course is not difficult and you will get a lot of help there.

All the best to the future hunters and please hunt safely and ethically.

Working with jBPM 5

I just wanted to say a few words about jBPM. jBPM is a great product that comes from JBoss and used with several other technologies we can use it to make effective and easy to understand workflow. Our task was to replace current Java based back-end and integrate it loosely with jBPM with possibility to replace BPM engine with some other vendor in the future, if needed. Together with this we would need to modularize our back-end and expose it to BPM adding greatly to the ability for our customers to custom craft and change processes to the way that best fits their business. We already have a great platform for insurance and BPM should make it even better and more versatile. Time to change the process flow and to apply new design should be dramatically cut after BPM is introduced.

After some time of using it I have to say that it is a great product that comes free and that will add a lot of value to already established backend.

In this blog I want to point out to several problems that costed me a lot of time to figure it out and hopefuly this should make understanding jBPM easier.

To start of we needed some documentation and found some basic usages on the JBoss site. It should be enough to start using jBPM but I have to say that initially I was not pleased with the amount of details and some complex usages requirements that we had. We needed following components to make this work:

1. jBPM libraries
2. Drools libraries 
3. Guvnor and Designer setup
4. Database setup for jBPM

Our deployment and usage was for JBoss 5.1 and Lifray 6. Database version was not much important except that we needed three extra data sources.

1. Data source to load users from Liferay into BPM database so we can use it to assign human tasks to our users and verify user roles and groups when accessing MINA server
2. Data source for BPM
3. Data source for Human Task Service

Please note that all three data sources were implemented using JPA as this is JBoss implementation. The difference in our application is that we needed to combine such approach with Hibernate mapping files that we already had. One of the big issues that I have faced was initiating EntityManagerFactory. Initiating this factory in the middle of the EJB call was not an option, so creating JNDI connection when JBoss started was a way to go.

Sample code:

In persistence.xml:


In your code:



Our code structure was also a bit different from the examples as we had this call structure: Web->Business Delegate->EJB (Stateless)->BPM->Java back-end. The problem is that command based listener is coded in such a way that is has asynchronous code inside that assumes that your session is stateful. In our case this was not good and we needed to rewrite this listener into two classes, one that would create human tasks and other that would process messages with blocking handler. Otherwise, you would need to create some loop to wait for the execution of the code (checking status of the process) in some cases or your EJB call would end up sooner than BPM call.

Some of the other things that need to be watched for is that when you create knowledge base (talking about KnowledgeBuilderFactory), you would preferably do it as a singleton, as creating and importing resources every time takes valuable time. We chose not to bind our application to Guvnor and we decided to use Guvnor only as a development resource (we already have plenty of repositories to worry about).

JBPMHelper is a nice class to start with and I used most of it while rewriting some parts to offer better separation when doing unit tests (during Maven builds) and production usage. We also needed to integrate our configuration engine there and to apply custom created command based listener.

When developing for jBPM pay close attention to ksession.dispose();. You need to call this when you no longer want to work with BPM as resources are not automatically disposed.

Creating custom work item handler is a must in BPM when you have much back-end code, so here are couple of tips that might save you some time. When handling Exceptions, pay close attention to nesting in BPM depending on your structure as you might end up messing up some of the transactions. BPM code executes like this A->B->C->code->C->B->A. In the middle of that you should properly completeWorkItem or abortWorkItem. It is important that you catch your exception and know what to do with it rather that let BPM decide. In our case letting BPM decide what to do was not a good option.

One of the things that I like to do is to group work items so I do not have to write same code over and over again. This means that I would have one input parameter called "function" that would indicate which peace of code would I like to execute once the work item is called. If you have dozens of function, this will save you a lot of time.

Finally, I would like to say a few words about a Designer. A developer from JBoss helped me a lot (Tihomir Surdilovic) with understanding and I wish to thank him for that. For a free product, it offers great possibilities and it is very easy to work with. Your developers and customers will enjoy using it. I say customers as you can expose this directly to them to create shell of a processes that can be later passed on to developer to implement some basic "plumbing". Customer->BA->Developer integration was never more easier.

Designer comes as separate WAR that is deployed together with Guvnor. Guvnor is a repository and the Designer is a tool to craft your processes. Here are a few tips for using and deploying it. When deploying, rename wars to guvnor.war and designer.war Guvnor can find Designer. When creating processes, you can rollback to previous version. Just open process, go to Attributes->Version History and select which version do you want. If you need to delete anything, you need to archive it first and then delete it from the archive. When deploying your resources, I strongly advise you to deploy them as a package (you need to compile them and then package all resources). This way, it will be easy to bundle all the data in a single file and give it a version. The only problem that you might have is the migration of the current processes to the new version if there are saved processes in the database. This means that you will need to convert those manually as they will not be able to deserialize into a new process structure.

These are just a few tips and I intend to write more about BPM and Drools as we progress with development and integration of the BPM into our own platform.

Here are some of the useful links:

1. BPM User Guide
2. Guvnor Manual
3. Drools Introduction
4. Tihomir's Blog

Thanks

Shihan Fred Haynes 7th Dan - Aikido Georgetown

On May 7th, we had a fantastic seminar held by Fred Haynes from Victoria, BC. Seminar was held in Georgetown Aikido club. It was my first visit there but, I have to say that the club and people training there are great. We had a good time and there were two senior Dan grading held (4th and 5th Dan). 4th Dan grading was for my Sensei Fred Springer from Seikeikan Yoshinkai Aikido. I have to say that it was a great grading and we all enjoyed watching. These are some of the photographs taken by Dan (he trains with us too :)):

Shihan Fred Haynes 7th Dan - Aikido Georgetown

Anyway, grading was great, training even better. Most of the training was focused on center line when doing technique and what Shite needs to do to maintain control of the opponent and keep focus on that line. One of the techniques that we touched was Sankajo (Sankyo) and effectiveness of the pin regarding the position of the Uke shoulder when finishing the technique. This one in particular was focusing on making space between yourself and Uke and keeping Uke's shoulder pinned to the ground. A very nice and effective way to finish the technique. 

I do hope to attend more seminars from Fred H as he has very effective and entertaining way to teach Aikido. If you were at the seminar, please let me know what you think...

Working with .NET

I have been working with Java most of my professional life, and I have to say that not always has it been easy. In fact, most of the times it was rather difficult to build up knowledge, find and use dependencies, write unit tests and apply correct patterns.

A few days ago, I needed to build an application in .NET as we needed to print and process some Word documents. I have been using C# before but it is not my area of expertise. Obviously, I needed to refresh my knowledge and build an application that can perform well. I was simply amazed how easy was it to pick up basics, start development in Visual Studio and create variations of the application be it, console, form or web. It took mere hours to understand basic concepts, get to know Visual Studio and to be productive. For Java, to achieve the same for the person coming from .NET would take days to achieve same results (think Swing)! I am not a big fan of Microsoft products (being able to run only on Windows machines) but BRAVO Microsoft for making development so easy! It is no wonder that this platform is so widely accepted.

Java development tools are getting there, but having so much diversity can be good and bad at the same time and we will just have to wait and see. Until then, listen to this song (my friend sent this to me) We Code Hard :).

Moving from Ant to Maven

I have to admit that I have not used Maven a lot until perhaps mid last year, when I realised how difficult it is becoming to maintain dependencies and builds for J2EE projects using Ant. Many of my colleagues were faced with same problems but most of them still choose to stay with Ant.

Ant was here, it seems, forever. It is well established and mature product and almost all developers understand it and know how to finish the job with it. On the other hand, when Maven came on the first look it seems that developers could not define explicitly what needs to happen when building the project (or at least this was my experience). Everything was implicit with an option to override the default settings. This was a confusing part opposing to the Ant where you needed to define everything explicitly. Not all understood what a project lifecycle was and why it was important. What Maven is today is described here, "What is Maven".  In simple words, these are few benefits that Maven provided to me:

• Default setting out of the box with need to change build and deployment setting where needed
• Dependency management, where if I need one dependency, Maven will automatically include all other needed dependency files and will exclude conflicted dependencies
• Ability to define which dependencies are used for deployment and which are used for test (for example, you need to start in memory database for unit tests and do not want to deploy those jar files to production)
• If we want to change version of the main dependency, all other relative dependencies will be updated automatically
• Standardizes project builds through build lifecycle
• Allows easy separation of code and unit tests

Maven does a lot more, but if we take only items listed, it will be clear how much more your life will become easier. One of the major problems in switching to Maven is how we are thinking about referenced projects (for example if we have dependencies on other projects in the workspace). Maven will not support this (there are workarounds but the only proper way is to create local repository). Maven needs to work with artifacts (basically versions of jar files). To achieve this, all you need to do is to setup in-house Maven repository (for example Sonatype Nexus or Artifactory from JFrog Artifactory) for local files and proxy repositories that are on the Internet. This will enable you to have you own repository with your artifacts (libraries). Many developers will usually avoid this (versioning) as when including them with it would mean that every time they change library project updates with dependencies will need to happen (for every library). On the other hand, working with same version would help avoid updating references. Developers would usually track libraries in the version control systems (or similar) where files are always given the same version under a different release. This, of course, has to change if we want to use Maven, and we need to start versioning the libraries and then uploading them to a local Maven repository. Then we can start including those dependencies in our project, but not as a referenced projects, but as a Maven dependencies. In the case that we need a quick build of the library, we can always install it in our local repository (in Win 7 \Users\User\.m2). This way, it will become available to be included in a project that needs this dependency and later on, it can be published in centralized repository for the rest of the team. This, of course, requires change of culture in the organization. In the end, it pays off big time.

One of the other problems developers are faced with is setting up local environment when starting a new development and making it easy to start being productive (business-wise) and not spending time resolving technical issues with environments and dependencies. Maven does this in an easy way. It not only saves you trouble of uploading you jar files to CVS or SVN, it has different plugins (like Eclipse plugin) that can start projects very easily and where it will setup dependencies from repository based on what is in the pom.xml file. Try it one, and you will never go back to Ant.

So basically, for Maven to work correctly, we need correct directory structure and correctly setup pom.xml file. For directory structure, you can reference this Maven directory layout and for POM setup, this Maven POM. Please note that POM can be simple as just as adding a few lines to describe your artifact and group. (This is like the project name and the package). If you have, for example, m2e plugin for Eclipse, you can see an example of Effective POM that will have a lot of information that you can use to customize your POM. It is up to you how much customization you want or need.

In my experience, even though Maven has an Ant plugin, mixing two of them is not a good idea as it might interfere with Maven build lifecycle (Maven build lifecycle).

And for the end, just to mention that Maven helps with one of the biggest problems that developers have when debugging the code. What happens when the source code from the 3^rd party libraries is missing? Maven gets this for you automatically. That means that you can now see what you are debugging when going in depth to figure out you problems.

Please note that this text was written in very simple terms and if you would like to fully understand how Maven works, please refer to Maven site for further documentation. This article is not comparison of Ant vs Maven, but rather it reflects on benefits of having Maven builds in your environment. All projects can be built with both Maven and Ant.

Spring and JiBX

When I first heard about JiBX I could not have know that this would be one of the greatest tools for processing XML files that I would use.

It all started when we had a project where a speed and flexibility of XML processing was required and we started of with using XMLBeans as this was already packed with Weblogic server. A little did we know that JiBX will beat XMLBeans in almost every aspect. We had about 100 schemas to process with average of 100 tags and tons of imports. XMLBeans compiled 1 schema for almost a minute and created file that was more that 1MB. JiBX compiled all schemas in a little more than a minute. One jar file was packed at 10 times less space than XMLBeans. When thinking about loading all those files into memory, you will end up using quite a bit of PermGen space. Don't get me wrong, I still use XMLBeans today for some tasks, but I believe that if you can choose a tool for XML processing, choose JiBX and you will not be sorry.

To start off, you would create an XML file (do not forget namespace as this will be used as a package in the jar file) as this is easier than creating XSD from scratch. After that, you can use XMLBeans inst2xsd to convert it to XSD.

..\inst2xsd -design rd -enumerations never -outPrefix test test.xml

When choosing design, you might want to experiment with options. Russian Doll Design is simplest one, so you might want to start with that until you understand how types and elements are used not just in regards to XSD but also how is this going to be reflected in your classes. Turn off enumerations as this will mess up the file. You can add them later manually.

At this point you can copy this to your JiBX directory and create a custom XML (using <custom> - optional) if you have to specifically process some elements and leave others out (cool feature if you need to keep the size of your jar file down, especially if a lot of types and imports are used). One of the advantages of the JiBX is it's high speed and adaptability. For example, if you wanted to pass some custom date in XML, you would need to use string type. But not with JiBX. You can specify how you want to serialize/deserialize the elements when binding them. This is generated by either using predefined classes or creating your own  (you can do that by extending org.jibx.runtime.JodaConvert and then creating your Utility class). A very handy thing to use to adapt to different environments and clients.

JiBX comes with both ANT and MAVEN support and it is very easy to setup. You can find a lot of examples on JiBX site.

When integrating with Spring, it is extremely simple and you can use it to custom build your beans, web services or anything that deals with XML. Spring comes with a lot of support for different Object/XML Mapping and you can read about it here.

Representing Java classes in diagrams

You probably wanted to display relationships from the Java classes in diagram if you needed to understand how the projects and files are related to each other. Eclipse can show you Call and Type hierarchy, but seeing it all in one graph can help you understand how project is structured. I have created the diagram for the docx4j using small application (using Apache BCEL 5.2) to create it (to import it I converted CSV file to XLSX and used yEd):

Application code that is creating CVS is this:

Once you have run this code, open file in Excel, save as XLSX and then open file in yEd. After that, choose Edge List and fill in your ranges. Import as Circular and then change Layout to Organic (I think that it is faster this way and it looks better). With graphs big as this one, some layouts will be extremely slow. What is useful in the end is that you can select neighboring nodes, and create new document out of that. That should give you a good overview of what your class is using or where it is being used.

Ruby log analyzer: rula

This would be my first Ruby application. Name of the application is rula, meaning RUby Log Analyzer. I started this project as I needed to do several searches on the log files that would include previous filters and that would not consume a lot of memory (I intended to run this on the server). I have submitted the code to Git, to location https://github.com/bcavlin/rula, so please feel free to check it out. Application is only working in console mode right now, but I intend to create curses support too. As far as the version, this would be version 0.1. Please feel free to develop it to suite your needs. Here is the image:

SyntaxHighlighter and blogger

If your blog uses SyntaxHighlighter from alexgorbatchev.com then setting it to display items correctly might require a small addition in styles. I needed this to make it look correct (additional style is to limit the length for mobile devices):

JSF, ICEfaces and resetting component values

I just spent some time trying to figure out how to reset the value of the HtmlSelectOneMenu when cancel button is clicked using ICEfaces. The solution is to add actionListener to your ice:commandButton (in this case Cancel) and to find any component that you want to reset. My reset code was:

MyEclipse and JUtils

This morning I needed to generate toString() for the few bean classes, but I could not find JUtils in MyEclipse 9 menus. I checked in the Common/plugins directory and found that it is already there but could not install it. What I did to get JUtils in MyEclipse is, I downloaded JUtils from sourceforge.net unzip it in MyEclipse 9/dropins folder. Restarted eclipse and system reported that it found new plugin. Done.

Working with graphs: yEd

If you ever worked with Visio or needed to create some graphs, you will appreciate any tool that can simplify the process and as a plus, be freeware. One of such tools that I tried is yEd graph editor. This tools was written  in Java and it is absolutely amazing. It is simple, intuitive and can do everything that Visio can and even more. Just to mention some of the things that I found very useful:

1. Creating your own shapes very easily
2. Organizing shapes and lines in different layouts (and I can tell you that it works much better than Viso and it gives amazing results)
3. Importing graphs from Excel (now this is very useful feature that gives you ability, for example, to have a list of classes in txt file, and to create Excel tables from it which you can import in yEd and entire graph with relationships that you defined will be created for you)
4. Searching nodes, links and everything else is very simple and powerful as you have many options for search (for example you want to select nodes that are only of specific color)

 

Check out link for yEd Graph Editor if you want to download this tool.

Spring and Hibernate

Creating configuration for Spring to use Hibernate is not difficult. Basic configuration can look like this, providing that you put in your variables. Just remember that you want annotation based configuration and then you can use @Transactional annotation for your classes/methods. Working with transactions has never been easier.

Visual Studio and log4net

One of the projects here at Sapiens, required me to add logging to AddOn for the Word. I googled the subject and found a good logging framework, log4net. It is very similar to log4j if one is working with Java, so no surprises there. At first, I had a bit of difficulty on how to initially setup this, but I found a good post on this blog and a few other places. What this blog was missing is that once you download log4net, you need to decide which DLL you want to use, or otherwise, you will get compilation error. You can decide by going to Project->Properties->Application and under Target framework, you will find what is your current setting. You can then navigate to proper DLL.

Also, what I changed is location of my log, and added ${TMP}\myfile.log instead what original author put in place.

For all those experienced in Visual Studio, this would probably not be a problem, but I am a Java developer so this kind of post would help me :).

Spring and IBM MQ Series

Working with IBM MQ Series server can be at some times complicated, but if you follow a few basic steps, you will be able to connect and read/post messages from the MQ server. Posted is the configuration that will enable you to connect to your desired server.

Be careful what you set to transportType property as communication between client to server has to use same type as which is set on server.

Spring configuration: web.xml

When dealing with web.xml there are only few basic step that you can implement and have your application running Spring in no time.

This is initialization:


This is configuration if you have web services:


This is configuration if you have regular servlets:


Please be mindful about who loads which configuration file and at what time. For example, main context file is loaded in the beginning (when you deploy the application), but ws or servlet configuration might be initialized once you access them by the container and not by the Spring (depending on your configuration).

Working with VIM

VIM is one of the most useful editors that I have worked with (even though you will need a lot of time to learn and remember all commands). What you can accomplish with it is simply amazing, just if you remember some basic commands. The only other tools that I prefer more is Eclipse, but only because I work with Java most of the time.

Anyway, I just though to publish my config file, just in case anyone is having difficult time to get their own configuration. I copied most of mine from this blog, and changed a few things to better suit my needs. (BTW, config if located in your /Users/username/_vimrc file in Windows 7. I often find myself editing the file in Program Files/Vim directory :)).

Here is the config:

Spring configuration: applicationContext

When I started working with Spring framework, I immediately recognized the value and simplicity of using such framework to develop and maintain J2EE applications. It is collection of best practices for coding, great design patterns implementation (some of them), and fantastic guideline for putting enterprise level applications together. However, starting with Spring can sometime be overwhelming experience, so I would like to create a few posts that would make this job easier. This is just one of the templates that works for me, but with Spring you have infinite number of possibilities on how to integrate and develop you code.

More about Spring framework can be found at Spring documentation. Of course, Springsource (and community) have created many other additions and standalone products that fit well with Spring. Please feel free to explore this product.

File included in this post would be the first applicationContext.xml file that will be loaded from the web.xml.

Windows 7 Unidentified Network and VMWare

I have spent some time trying to figure out why if Windows 7 showing Unidentified Network constantly. The reason was that I have VMWare installed and it is causing Windows to assign it's adapters as unidentified.

One of the solutions you can find here: www.moore-logic.com.

Merging Word documents with docx4j

Recently I needed to merge some Word .docx  documents and the tools that we chose for this was docx4j (www.docx4java.org). This is library for Java for working with Microsoft Open XML. There we two things that we needed to accomplish:

1. Binding XML to various templates
2. Merging documents as a result of the binding

I will write about merging documents as binding them is already explained well in docx4j site. Author of docx4j also offers commercial package for merging documents but if you want to try it for yourself, here are couple of things that I managed to do and got pretty decent results.

In version 2.7.1 docx4j you can work with java.util.File or java.io.InputStream. First one will do a god job if you have file present in your drive and second one if you keep content in the database (for example).  When merging Word documents you have to take care of relationships in the document itself. There are several elements that have relationships that can span through the document, but we were interested in just a few of them (images, footers and headers). It is worth to mention that if you miss one relationship, your document will be unreadable (in most cases). These are listed as resources and have references that you can use in your paragraphs.

So, to start we would:

1. Load our initial file in WordprocessingMLPackage (this is the file where we want to attach the rest of the files, so in the end they look as one)
2. Create unique section template
3. Reset sections (this will serve the purpose of removing all references from the existing template, remember that section defines page layout)
4. Remove body section (we can add this in the end)
5. Loop through the attachment files (if you do not have sections separating pages, you might add page breaks)
6. Copy relationships that you are interested in
7. Copy elements
8. If you do not want page breaks, then you can add empty section
9. Add body section
10. Reapply all headers and footers to empty sections

This all might sound complicated, but in the end, once you get to know the structure of the WordprocessingMLPackage, it becomes easier.

These are the code snippets that might be useful:

Note: All code displayed in upper window is property of Sapiens North America