On several occasions recently I have needed to mirror a remote Subversion repository on my laptop for development. The circumstances were a little different in each case, but the basic need was the same. In the most recent instance I wanted to track the Typo Subversion repository while at the same time managing my own […]

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Capistrano is a great tool for deploying Rails applications. However, by default Capistrano requires that the servers being deployed to have access to the version control repository to check out the code. While this may not seem like a big deal at first, there are situations where it is just not feasible.

I have run into […]

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I have been playing around with Typo and decided to see how difficult it would be to try to migrate my content from WordPress. As it turns out, the conversion script that comes with Typo is completely non-functional with the pre-release version of Typo 4 and WordPress 2.0.x. Like a good open-source user I checked […]

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Update: This problem was fixed in Rails 1.1.4. Kudos to the Rails core team for a quick response.

I just upgraded to Rails 1.1.3 and ran into some strangeness in the routing code. In my application I have a set of controllers that are dedicated to administrative functions so I have put them in a subdirectory […]

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I was at RailsConf 2006 where DHH gave a great keynote on what amounts to REST principles. I had heard a lot about REST, but until DHH’s talk couldn’t really wrap my mind around the concept. Now that I have a better mental map of the REST concepts, I have been doing some research. Here […]

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This past week I ran into an interesting issue with Log4J. We had an appender in our log4j.xml file that used PatternLayout with the following pattern: “[%-5p] %d{DATE} %c {%F:%L} - %m%n”. I was looking to reduce the amount of information being written to the log files as they are getting difficult to read. I […]

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Patterns are all the rage is the software development community these days, and with good reason. Patterns can help simplify the software design process and provides well understood solutions to common problems. J2EE development can be especially complex as it encompasses many challenging problem domains. Clearly, a good set of design patterns would help any […]

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The Command pattern is very powerful and flexible. Swing and Struts both make heavy use of the Command pattern in their respective action classes. However, it can be a little too flexible, and if you aren’t careful it can turn into the Ambiguous Command antipattern. This particularly nasty antipattern can take a nice, loosely-coupled design […]

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Ah, Portal. It’s the answer to all of our content troubles: SSO; content aggregation; personalized pages; “easy” portlet integration; etc. There exists an extremely large number of companies that are getting raked over the coals for portal solutions that they may not even need. In fact, I personally have been involved with or worked around […]

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