Kev’s Blog – Page 211 – Kev's Development Toolbox

March 27, 2012

Could Oracle end up losing money on their Java lawsuit against Google?

According to their original claims in 2010/2011, Oracle’s lawsuit against Google for Android violating Java related patents and copyright was worth somewhere between $1.6 billion and $6 billion in damages.

As the courts continued to throw out an increasing number of the claims, the estimated damages has come tumbling down. Right now, Oracle’s estimates are around $32 million. Google’s estimates are around $37 million.

At this rate, I wonder if it’s possible for Oracle to actually lose money on the case due to legal costs? $32 million is hardly big bucks for Google.

If Oracle had any sense, they should have licensed Android from Google as the replacement for Java ME, and not try to remove Android from the picture with legal action. Android is everything that Java ME should have been from the beginning but has always been so far from the mark.

March 22, 2012

Installing and hosting a Joomla site on OpenShift

OpenShift have an example Joomla app ready to deploy on github, but it’s currently not working – once you’ve deployed it, it gives you a page with this error:

Infinite loop detected in JError

Given that it’s relatively simple to setup Joomla, I set up a new app on OpenShift, downloaded the latest install for Joomla, and then pushed it up to OpenShift. Using this approach you can walk through the admin screens to configure your site and point it to your hosted MySQL, and it’s just as easy as installing it locally.

Here’s the steps:

1. Create your PHP app on OpenShift:

rhc app create -a your_app_name -t php-5.3

2. Add the MySQL cartridge:

rhc app cartridge add -a your_app_name -c mysql-5.1

3. Download Joomla. Unzip the download into the php add inside your app dir that was created by ‘rhc app create’

4. Add, commit and push your changes to OpenShift:

git add .
git commit -m "Joomla initial commit"
git push

5. Now hit your URL for your hosted app, and then walk through the setup steps as normal. When prompted for your MySQL config, use the values given in step 2 above.

March 21, 2012

Adding new views to a Spring Roo app using Tiles

Spring Roo by default uses Tiles to construct your views. Without some digging through the generated configuration files, this is not as obvious as you’d think, so by dropping a new jspx file in one of your views subdirs and trying to forward to it from your Controllers will give you an error like this:

Servlet.service() for servlet ContestEntry threw exception:
javax.servlet.ServletException: Could not resolve view with
name 'somedomain/someview' in servlet with name 'WebappName'

Each of your view subdirs beneath /WEB-INF/views/ has it’s own views.xml file that declares it’s Tiles definitions. To add a new view, you need to add both an entry in the corresponding views.xml file and drop a new jspx file in the same views dir

March 21, 2012

Ted Neward: Junior developers need to unlearn what they think they know

This is a great commentary by Ted Neward on a blog post on the pitfalls of junior developers: the importance of asking questions, and realizing as a junior developer (and we all have areas where we are junior developers, regardless of industry experience), you don’t know everything.