Importing Thunderbird mails in Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express

It might sound strange, but sometime it is necessary to migrate from Thunderbird to Outlook.

Robert Ploschek explains in his blog how this can be done:

Robert Peloschek aka Unic0der: Importing Mozilla Thunderbird mails in Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express

This actually works, but is somewhat cumbersome.

I guess if one has access to an imap server, it is easier to move everything onto the imap account and pull it over to outlook from there.

[mac] OmniGraffle - Diagram successor?

Some of you probably remember the drawing software Diagram on the NeXT computer. Years ago I used that to draw all the graphics for my diploma thesis. Since then I have never found such a good drawing program. Now I stumbled over
OmniGraffle and it looks like this is the successor of diagram. I downloaded the professional version to try it out and the very first steps already look familiar. When you add a few shapes on screen, it just looks good. PDF export works also like a charm and it has a SVG export as well. The latter two are very important for me, as I want the best quality of the drawings when writing a book or an article.

So if you need a drawing program on the mac you should check out OmniGraffle - this is definitively a good option.

2 cache presentations upcoming at SIG-JBoss

SIG-JBoss of Java User Group Stuttgart will soon have two presentations about caching technologies:
19. Juni, Cameron Purdy: Distributed Caching ... Lessons Learned
13. Juli, Bela Ban: JBossCache

Both presentations will start at 6:30pm and will be hosted at the
VRS building at Kronenstr. 25, Stuttgart.

There will be separate invitations to those events, but: keep an open slot for them in your calendar.

JAVA:JAVA-CAMP2006 - Rootserver

A few guys from Sachsen-Anhalt are doing a Java-Bootcamp.
Check out their webpage.

This sucks

Andy writes in his blog that the mentionned webmail client doesn't suck.
But then
- it is written in Flash!
- is is written in a version of Flash that Andy can not even use on his Linux computer.

I don't get it...

JBoss 4.0.x plugin for Eclipse WTP [updated]

The Eclipse WTP 1.0 only has a server definition for JBoss 3.2.3 which is quite old (3.2.x is at x=8.sp1 and 4.0.x is at x=4).
The webseite at the following link gives an explanation on how to build a definition for 3.2.5
How to build a JBOSS 3.2.5 Server Definition for Eclipse Web Tools Platform
If you want a definition for 4.0.x, you can just follow the document - it is quite detailed.
I have also provided a org.eclipse.jst.server.generic.serverdefinitions_1.0.0.zip that contains a definition for 4.0.3sp1 as well.

Don't forget to run eclipse -clean or you won't see the fruit of your work.
[Update]
The config is still not yet complete. There are a few libraries missing that are needed for starting the server from within eclipse.
When those are included, there is still a problem with parsing of login-config.xml

org.jboss.security.auth.login.ParseException: Encountered "Was expecting one of:
<EOF>
<IDENTIFIER> ...

As the server starts nicely standalone, this seems to be a eclipse related problem.

Hacking JBoss snmp-adaptor

I'v been hacking JBoss snmp-adaptor in the last few days, providing support for
get and set operations. The code currently is only available in cvs head, as it still needs some tweaking. Dimitris set up a forum to discuss the adaptor and a possible mib. Please contribute to the discussion. Tell me / us your needs.

JBossXB - X/O-Mapping made easy

JBossXB is part of the JBoss application server, but will also be used in other projects. As far as I understand, it will be moved to a "common" paltform, so that it can be used separately. Currently you can find it in jboss-common-client.jar.

If you have a simple structure like
<list-of-foo>
<foo>
<bar>
<baz>
</foo>
<foo>
...
</list-of-foo>

You basically need a POJO for <foo> and a few lines of code to get things parsed into a list with all Foo-objects.

Alexey has quite some documenation on the wiki page for it.

Is it still April 1st?

Wow, I am confused by the announcement that RedHat is buying JBoss. Does anyone have a clue what this means (other that some VCs get a good bonus on their invested money)?

Two day course at FHT Esslingen

On March 7th and 8th I'll give a two day course at the University of Applied Science Esslingen (FH Esslingen). Title is "J2EE mit JBoss".
Planned agenda is:

• Software layers and views on them
  
• Architektur JBoss
  
• Install, Directories and files
  
• Lab 1
  
• Services of a J2EE-Server
  
• Lab 2
  
• Intro into EJB 3
  
• Lab 3
  

Outdated/incorrect docu is worse than no documentation

I was struggling with this How to use JDBC and transactions in Tomcat with JOTM. JOTM was always throwing java:comp away after the first request (the first lookup went through nicely). Thanks to a bug report from Matt Raible, I found out that carol now needs more options in the property file:

carol.protocols=jrmp

# do not use CAROL JNDI wrapper
carol.start.jndi=false

# do not start a name server
carol.start.ns=false

# use the apache naming factory
carol.jndi.java.naming.factory.url.pkgs=org.apache.naming

While browsing more tracker items, more and more things come clear.
Please: update the documentation if you make such big changes in a project. Wrong documentation is worse than none.

EJB3 session visibility

EJB3 started with the claim to reduce the artefacts needed to program with EJBs. Unfortunately if you want to expose a SessionBean locally *and* remotely, you start to either list all business methods in a POJI for the local interface and the same again in an interface for the remote view. If you update the session bean class by a new method, you need to remember to update both interface files (this calls again for generators like Xdoclet ...)

Another variant to acheive the same result is by using the following view pattern:



In this case you only list the business methods in the "Business" interface. IRemote and ILocal are only marker interfaces that just extend the "Business" interface and which carry the respective annotation:


package foo;

import javax.ejb.Local;

@Local
public interface ILocal extends Business {
// empty
}


This way extending the session bean by new methods just means to update one additional file. Unfortunately this yields again four artefacts for this task, which is far from simple.

Are there better ways to do this?

LaTeX on Rail

Ever wondered how to graphically represent EBNF?

There are some packages out there that can produce so called Railroad diagrams.

Phillips has a package called Elegant (you can see some examples in this document)

Then there is LaTeX-style rail.sty online, where the results are quite ok as well (the png image is scaled to 600pt in width, so the real quality is better) :



So, how does one read the diagram? For the start form left to right :-) Words in rounded boxes are terminals (i.e. words that you put literally in your code) Words in normal boxes are non-terminals that refer to other diagrams. A construct like in the start with "AVG", "MAX", ... is a switch statement, where you can choose one ot the options. You will see that above "DISTINCT" is a line without a box. This means that "DISTINCT" is optional.
And this is basically all about reading those diagrams.

Unfortunately, this package does not directly know about the 'ususal' EBNF syntax ( AggreagateExpression ::= ....), but uses its own, which looks like the following for the above example

AggregateExpression : ("AVG" |"MAX" |"MIN" |"SUM")
 (
   (
    'DISTINCT' ?  StateFieldPathExpression
   ) | 'COUNT'
   (
    'DISTINCT' ?  IdentificationVariable
                  | StateFieldPathExpression
                  | SingleValuedAssociationPathExpression
   )
 )
   ;

Perhaps I am going to write some translator between the formats in Perl ...

Java Magazin - Internet & Enterprise Technology - Buch-Tipps

German Javamagazin has a review of my JBoss book in the current issue and also online.
Sounds good to me :-)

Presentation at Hochschule Heilbronn

On 25th of january I will give a presentation at Hochschule Heilbronn. From their website:

Heiko W. Rupp, Autor des ersten deutschsprachigen JBoss-Buches, wird einen Gastvortrag bei uns halten. Thema seines Vortrages im Studiengang Software Engineering: Die interne Architektur von JBoss.
Start 25-01-2006 14:00
End 25-01-2006 15:30
Where A311 - Hochschule Heilbronn

I just left project Xdoclet

I just left project Xdoclet. The basic reason for this is that I just lack the time to contribute any more to this. I try to update my JBoss book, write a new book (this is still a secret :-) and I also have to take care some more of my son, who currently is in a somewhat exhausting age. And then I have a day job as well.
In fact I did not contribute anything to the project within the last half year. Also from current employments etc. the need for Xdoclet is somewhat vanishing with with the new Java 5 annotations.
I still think Xdoclet is a very fine thing and it did help me a lot in the past.
So everyone still involved with it: keep up the good work.

EJB3 proposed final draft is out

The proposed final draft of ejb3 is out.
You can find it at the jcp page

iX-Conference on Better Software is over

I spent the last two days on the iX-conference on better software in cologne.
This conference had a different target audience than W-Jax where I have been last week.
Two highlights definitively have been the keynotes by Tom de Marco and Nilaus Wirth. De Marco was talking about why some companies are faster than others. Reasons are (amongst others) meetings that are held like ceremonies, intra company email spam or presentations that convey no information at all. He also identified the addiction to status reports as one of the retarding factors. All in all a very good presentation.
Niklaus Wirth, who became professor of computer science a year before I was even born, gave a retrospective of that time and about some values that have been lost. He clearly indicated that a (very) good formation is one of the ways to better sofware.

I my self had the luck to talk about tools that can help building better software, why this fails and what you can do about it. My boss was giving a talk about agile quality management and AspectQ.

One of the results of the many presentations is for me that the human factor is getting more and more important.

Nearly all tracks of the conference have been of high quality. Also the catering was good this time as oposed to last week. I am definitively looking forward to the next iX-Conference.

W-Jax is over

I've been the last two days at W-Jax conference in Munich. I only took a few sessions as I did quite some talking with conference participants. Overall it was quite interesting and I am sure that I will go to one of the next (W-)Jax conferences as well. In fact I just submitted some proposals for sessions on upcoming Jax in May 2006.

The sessions I participated in were

- EJB 3.0 by Oliver Ihns. At least parts of the presentation seemed to be based on the early draft and not of the public review version. So this might be confusing to some listeners.
- News in JBoss 5 (my own presentation)
- a few keynotes. In one of those, given by a tool vendor, there was the comparision between the software industry and the car industry with its assembly lines. 'd say, that this part of the development process has been solved in it as well. It just means putting software on cd and putting the cd into a nice little card box.
- a session on "why developers can't listen and domain guys can't develop" by two OOse gyus. This was a very good presentation about the needed soft skills in projets. Many projects don't fail because of technical reasons but e.g. because the developer is running in short through a bank where everyone is wearing a suit.
- (partially) in model driven software development by Markus Völter. Markus really has a clue about how to give good presentations. Also the content was very interesting. Unfortunately I had to run off to meet a client offsite.
- "How reliably is WS-reliability" by Marcel Tilly of Innoq. Well, this was hard stuff, but nevertheless interesting. The baseline was that if you want to use an upcoming standard in webservices, use it only if it is supported by IBM and/or Microsoft.

In total the atmosphere of the conference was good and there were intersting sessions and good food :-) The only real bad thing was that the hotel where the conference took place was not able to provide enough stuff to drink. And we are not talking about alcoholic beverages, but about soda water and coke etc.

Review of my JBoss book in c't magazine

German c't magazine has a review of my JBoss-Book in its current issue (24/2005) on page 228.