Author: doozer

  • VerifyError Expecting a stackmap frame

    I’ve just added a couple of new projects to my Hudson CI system and I noticed that one of the projects, which was configured to build with Java 7, had every test fail with an exception. I decided to use Java 7 after I’d already started working on the project so Java 7 features were…

  • Which Java XML Library Should You Use

    In the past I have always used either JDOM or Dom4J to interact with XML but I’ve never really been overly happy with either library. JDOM is very simple to use and great for simple XML structures but as soon as you want to do something a little more complex it becomes hard work. Dom4J…

  • Pretty Printing XML with JAXP

    Java has a wide selection of built in XML handling capabilities but they are little used by most developers because they are felt, unfairly I think, to be difficult to use. I freely admit that I fell into that camp until fairly recently when I became a convert. Over the next few days I hope…

  • Using a Java Web Service Hosted Behind Apache

    I recently set up a new system running most of the software my business produces. Unlike our other sites right from the beginning all of Java servers (a mixture of Tomcat and GlassFish) will be access via Apache using Apache Tomcat Connector mod_jk. Typically we start of will one server and add Apache in later but…

  • Starting and Stopping Services from Java

    Most of the applications I develop are web based and therefore, when deployed on Windows, are running as a service. This is great most of the time but when I want to programmatically control the application it can present some problems because starting and stopping services requires elevated permissions. This article discusses a solution that…

  • Providing EL Access for Beans

    There are a lot of good ideas in JEE but there are also some sharp corners that the unwary developer could hurt themselves on. Over the next few articles I’m going to point out a few of these less than brilliant pieces of design so that hopefully you’ll be able to avoid them. This article…

  • Google Analytics Data Ranges

    I use Google Analytics to monitor the number of visits I get to this website. For the most part I find Google Analytics to be an exceptionally well put together service but, as with a lot of Google tools, there are a few sharp edges that just never seem to get fixed.

  • Applying Updates on ESXi 5

    I was recently faced with the task of having to apply updates to an server running ESXi 5. Now, you would think that this would be a pretty simple job but it actually turned out to be more difficult that I would have though. The main problem was that I couldn’t find any concise instructions.…

  • Monitoring an LSI MegaRAID on ESXi 5

    I’ve been installing a new ESXi 5 based VMWare server recently. The machine contains an LSI MegaRAID 9260-4i RAID card and four decent sized disks. The host operating system installed fine and I thought everything was going well until I got almost to the point of completion when I went to check that error reporting…

  • Epic Template Modifications

    This site currently uses the JSN Epic template by JoomlaShine. While I’m normally allergic to spending money I felt I had to cough up some cash and buy this template as I use it in a few places and a good amount of work has clearly gone into it.

  • LSI MegaRAID Firmware Upgrade under VMWare

    I was recently faced with the task of upgrading the firmware on an LSI MegaRAID 9260-4i RAID card. Normally this would be a fairly simple process as LSI provide an easy to use command line utility called MegaCLI. The difficulty was using this utility on a machine that was running VMWare ESXi 5 Update 1.…

  • MySQL JDBC Connection Pool in GlassFish

    Creating a connection pool should be a simple and straight forward task in an application server but sometimes it just becomes unnecessarily difficult. That is completely true for creating MySQL connections pools in all versions of GlassFish from 3 onwards.