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