Random thoughts once in a while

It has been a while I found the time to blog. Here is a little entry.

I’ve often hear that a Servlet filter was not working while trying to filter some Java resource. Usually this is because the filter is defined like:

<filter-mapping>  <filter-name>My Broken Filter</filter-name>  <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern></filter-mapping>

and the filtered content is accessed through request dispatching.

This look correct, but this is not. In the 2.4 version of the Servlet spec you can now filter resources accessed directly from the request, through an include request dispatcher, through a forward request dispatch or through the error mechanism of the spec.
By default, if nothing is specified, the filter will only apply to direct requests. This is the case here and this is what confuses people.

If you want to filter request coming from an include request dispatcher you need to add: <dispatcher>INCLUDE</dispatcher>

Here are few examples:
The following will only filter direct requests:

<filter-mapping>  <filter-name>My Filter</filter-name>  <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern></filter-mapping>

The following will only filter direct requests too:

<filter-mapping>  <filter-name>My Filter</filter-name>  <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>  <dispatcher>REQUEST</dispatcher></filter-mapping>

The following will only filter direct requests and inclusions:

<filter-mapping>  <filter-name>My Filter</filter-name>  <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>  <dispatcher>REQUEST</dispatcher>  <dispatcher>INCLUDE</dispatcher></filter-mapping>

The following will only filter inclusions:

<filter-mapping>  <filter-name>My Filter</filter-name>  <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>  <dispatcher>INCLUDE</dispatcher></filter-mapping>

The following will filter all:

<filter-mapping>  <filter-name>My Filter</filter-name>  <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>  <dispatcher>REQUEST</dispatcher>  <dispatcher>INCLUDE</dispatcher>  <dispatcher>FORWARD</dispatcher>  <dispatcher>ERROR</dispatcher></filter-mapping>

Want more ? Check the servlet spec, “SRV.6.2.5 Filters and the RequestDispatcher“

No comment so far… Still waiting on my “Student permit”.

As I’m working on a multiple supported database application, most of the issues i faced are because of Oracle Database…
Point 1 – The official jdbc driver sucks.
Since i write in Java, i need to go through the JDBC driver to access the Oracle Database server, while it should be transparent and a fairly easy piece of software to maintain, they do an horrible job… Let’s consider a moment that Oracle DB server is the best database server in the world, going through it with their JDBC driver is just pure abomination… It’s like driving a Porsche with a loose steering wheel, i would rather drive a Renault then.
Point 2 – Empty string is not NULL !
Oracle DB is the only database that i know considering “” (Empty string) as NULL. This is plain stupid.
Let’s say you want to enter a value which can be empty or undefined, well you can’t… (unless you have a special string that means undefined).

Those are the two main points I’m thinking about at the moment.

I just realized that i have some symptoms of Mid-life crisis.

I’m literally changing many things in my life right now, and want to do lot of new things.
First i’m buying my very first house up in the mountains. Second i’m getting married next year. (Chronological order)

Now I regret i didn’t pursue on skydiving but will do my first paragliding fly this year !

Also, if you would have asked me about motorbike riding 3 weeks ago, i would have tell you this is something for people willing to die and wanting to show-off. For the past two weeks, i just kept thinking about riding a motorbike to come from my house to the office… And i don’t want to die, neither i want to show off. I want to learn something new, i’m very excited about learning that. (I still need to find some money and a place to park…)

Anyway what scares me now is that it looks like a mid-life crisis. Nobody really teached me how that works, but since i just turned 30 last November, does that mean i only have 30 more years to live ? I’ve been told that there is a one-third-life crisis too, i hope that’s it.

I finally took some time to check why my cookies were not saved on the iPhone embedded Safari. It appears that it’s a bug that came with the 1.1.4 firmware, a stupid write permission missing, something that takes few seconds to fix on an open platform.
Unfortunately the iPhone is a closed platform if you don’t do anything and you can’t fix that bug yourself, you need to wait on Apple to get a new version of the firmware. Not everybody is affected by this bug so i don’t know the whole story behind, what i know is that when you have that bug it’s very annoying.

Anyway, i was always wondering if i would jailbreak it (open it, against the will of Apple) if i had an iPhone the “standard way”, the answer is “hell no” i can’t live with bugs if i know that it would be easy to fix after opening it.

(Now we could wonder why buying a closed platform at all, well just because it’s a well done gadget)

If you are not so romantic or very shy, you can always propose your beloved through Facebook.
See, if you change a friend status to “engaged” it says “A notification will now be sent to xxx yyy for approval”.
Just wait and you’ll know if he/she says “Yes” !

By the way, this blog entry is also a good way to let you know that she said “yes” (in real, not on Facebook yet though).

JBoss World parties usually have nice open bars (This year was a bit different, with a multi-disco place).

With an open bar, you come at the bar, you drink, you don’t pay and most people thank (or even tip) the barmaid. It works because a company pays for the barmaid salaries and the drinks. It’s a financial efforts that lasts for a couple of hours.

Open source definition was made on February 9th 1998, just 10 years ago. Happy birthday Open Source !
The whole notion of open source is quite new and its face is changing, it’s not a hippie thing anymore (considering that it has been).

I don’t exactly know why but many people are still convinced that you owe them more than the piece of software and documentation you wrote. Too many consider support as something you *must* also provide for free if you want them to give you the satisfaction to use your products. Why would they search or make efforts to understand your products if they are already kind enough to use what you wrote ?

So what’s different between free software (with documentation) and free support ? Answer: free support doesn’t scale. If i need to explain installation of a software, i can spend a couple of hours writing it, and i’m done. But sure there will be many cases where people prefer to ask rather than reading the fine prints (the authors knows better and it will only take 5 seconds of his time), the problem is that we need to spend 5-10min per questions and the same question will popup again

Don’t get me wrong, I, like many, enjoy answering forums, see people using my code, help people (i ran a forum for years just for the pleasure to be helpful) in their issues to either improve the doc (if they ask it can be missing) or improve the software by making it easier to use. But, noone should ever assume that he can come, grab a cocktail, not even say thank and drink for a long period of time.

When we start an opensource project we are very cautious to answer everybody’s question since the documentation is immature, we want to get people hooked on the product and such, but then comes a time where you have to decide where to spend your time between your family, developing the opensource project, answering people in a forum (and answering customer cases in my case which is a priority).

Now, please keep asking questions in forums, but:

1. There is no commitment on answers, be prepared that nobody will have time to answer you
2. Answer other people questions, it will push them to look at your cases, it also shows your commitment. It’s like helping the barmaid
3. Do a bit of searching before, maybe the answer is in the FAQ, the doc, or the question have been answered many times before (Either someone will tall you to RTFM, and he will look at the bad boy “Why are you so rude”, or nobody will answer and you won’t know why)
4. The search may help you to better explain your problem (again if nobody understands, everybody will more likely ignore your question, hoping someone else will understand)
5. The answer to your question should be short, don’t ask “what is the universe ?”
6. Be nice ! Nobody owe you anything (you can avoid to be nice if you have support contracts but i would not recommend it to keep good contacts )

If everybody could follow those rules (there are more to add) we would have much better OSS out there, see the time wasted by developers to answer those questions.

Anyway, i’ve been told that on our project, 2/3 of the questions are answered which is quite good I think.

Again, forums feedback is *very* important so keep posting, just don’t get angry if someone reminds you one of those rules.

This JBoss World was particularly interesting for our project.

We had two major announcements:
- JBoss Portlet Bridge: The JSR-301 bridge with Seam and Richfaces supports for portlets, it is *huge*.
- JBoss Portlet Container 2.0: The implementation of the public final draft of Portlet 2.0. Julien demoed a mashup-style portal that uses the spec ! It is also *huge*.

It’s also always very interesting to hear people from the field facing our customers. The good news is that what they want totally fit with what we plan to provide.
Meeting users with whom i only interacted through the customer support portal or through the public forums is also something that worths a lot.

Last but not least, i got the opportunity to meet coworkers that i never met before.

Finally, partying with friends is always good, even though this year i wasn’t totally into it (tired).