I can smell spring from here.

The honey bees were thick on the snow bells during my walk at lunch. Fifty degrees today and most of the ground is visible. This is supposed to continue all weekend so I'm hoping to get a start on the garden.

The Persistence Layer with Spring 3 and JPA | baeldung

The Persistence Layer with Spring 3 and JPA | baeldung:

I've been banging around with Spring 3 annotations and JPA the past two days. Between a couple of quick tutorials showing the magic annotations and the Spring Reference Manual explaining the details I ended up in no man's land of "So how does it get from here to there?" This article makes the bridge from XML to annotation based configuration clear enough so that even an clod like myself can get it.

'via Blog this'

Lost my Tomcat Server in Indigo

I managed to break my external Tomcat server in Eclipse. When I tried to delete it from servers, fine. When I tried to add it back in, the server type was no longer available. This fixed it: Cannot create a server using the selected type – Eclipse tomcat | My Technical Notes:

'via Blog this'

A Quick JPA Refresher

JPA Relationship Links

Getting back on the Java Enterprise wagon after six months of doing Swing applications. Man Spring has improved since 2.0. Fired up SpringSource STS and launched the Spring Project from Template, generated a JPA project and started coding. The test framework made it simple, however, as the relationships starting coming together I struggled. I used this stuff everyday for over a year, so a quick refresher was in order. Sorted through the top two pages in Google and came up with these:

So you haven't touched JPA in a few months. A quick and dirty refresher is Essential object-relational mapping in JPA.

A good minimalist set of examples on the One to Many and Many to Many relationships.

Understanding JPA

Moving to Systems Support

I'm trying to decide how to split my job functions. Our group was in BIS until this week. Now development is being pulled into marketing and systems work is being moved to the system support group in BIS. Yes, I know that I should have gone with a company that develops software as a principal line of business. I prefer to develop software, but moving to marketing is out of the question. The environment appears very toxic, which may be an understatement.

Provided I can stay on the software side, life shouldn't be too bad. I looks like managing the JBoss and ColdFusion services, along with the databases can provide sufficient work for the foreseeable future. I'm still looking for someone to train on the Subversion and Trac environments. They want to move the Liferay portals in-house, so I have the better part of a year to find something more interesting to do, or move on to someplace that creates software.

What do I do all day?

The boys wanted to know this weekend, what I do all day?

Most days (Monday - Saturday, Sunday I sleep until 0600) start around 0500. I check the main application server for http://www.meaningfulfunerals.net. ColdFusion seems to work better if the services are rebooted daily, scripted after a month of manual work. Then, check the database server. MicroSoft's SQL Server behaves badly if disk space is exhausted, so I check that and Server 2003 health. Now it's off to check the legacy applications. We have an old JSP/XLST application that needs to be checked manually, and an even older Coldfusion (5 cannot get support anymore) application that still needs to be checked by a human. There's some Liferay portals that fall over at the worst time that need to be manually checked, so they get some attention too.

Now I need to eat breakfast and get an hour of physical training. No credit given at work if I find a problem and correct it before the daily maintenance window ends at 0630. (Technically, we're all supposed to be there before 0800, I try for 0815 since I already have an average of an hour in before 0630.) I have to admit, the 35 minute drive to work is sweet, just enough time for an introduction to the world via NPR.


Most days, arrival at work are uneventful. We acquired a "company" in May that might require some special attention. Some days our marketing group wants something that a marketing group might find desirable, and this "company" finds inconvienent. So I create an estimate for how long it will take to create this feature given that the "company" never even considered that the death care industry would even want this feature. Finally, I may get to write some code that makes the whole thing run a little better.

I have the development bug again.

I have the urge to create something again. I keep working on a Java Server Faces Portlet, that seems to be in a constant state of requirements change. Then again, when I think of creating something, I think of it as it will look when it's deployed. Lacking the gratification of a deployed application I have started something else on the side. I couldn't sleep tonight so I decided to give Grails a try. I have been messing around with Groovy for the past few months, more for scripting old Java code and testing new APIs.

After a few hours of playing, I think I've found something that will do 80% of what I need for application development. The domain model is simple, but should work for most cases where I only need one database. The GSPs are easy enough to work with, and I did take the time to look as a couple plug-in demos. If they keep maturing, this could become my development environment of choice. It feels like the Grails development team thought about the things that a developer needs to think about and created the tools to address each issue.