Maven Tips & Tricks – Extension

Just added 3 more topics. Check it out: Maven Tips & Tricks.

Maven Tips & Tricks – Part 1

Check this out: Maven Tips & Tricks.

It is my collection of tips, notes, workarounds and good practices about using Maven 2 and some of its plug-ins. Hopefully a good way to start with the tool and get around some of the initial effort required by the configuration of the POM, plug-ins and various settings.

This is just a start (5 topics) but the goal is to add more samples and notes later, making it (possibly) a good reference.

Hibernate built-in Session Context Management

Starting with v3.1 (notice I work with 3.2.5ga though) Hibernate has introduced the interesting (and really helpful) concept of Session context management where Hibernate itself provides a built-in mechanism to manage the session.

In previous releases the session (and the transaction) had to be maintained by the developer, typically using the Thread Local pattern where the session is stored in a Java ThreadLocal class (more details here). Fortunately a much simpler way is provided by Hibernate v3.1.

ApacheCon EU 2008 – Amsterdam

Apache goes back to A’dam!

It’s fun-time again for the open source addicts: the Apache folks are back in the Netherlands (hotel Movenpick in Amsterdam) as last year.

Find schedule and all other details at the ApacheCon site.

I definitely recommend going: I attended last year and it was great. Lots of interesting sessions about state-of-the-art technology such as Axis2, Lucene, RESTful services, Web2.0, blogger API, Apache XAP, etc.. and many more.

I especially enjoyed the “Comparing Jave Web Frameworks” session, an enlightening overview of the most popular Java frameworks (Struts2, SpringMVC, JSF, Tapestry, Wicket,..). Excellent speaker (Matt Raible) who shared some priceless thoughts based his on experience.

Check my Resources page for some ApacheCon EU 2007 material.

Tips for ApacheCon-goers

Not to be missed in the DAM:

• Brouwerij ‘t IJ (Funenkade 7): the amazing brewery in the windmill. Excellent beer (Zatte), unique atmosphere.
• Pata Negra II ( Reinwardtstraat 1): best Spanish restaurant in town.. con tapas de puta madre
• Bimhuis (http://www.bimhuis.nl/): Jazz music every night, next to the Movenpick
• Rent a bike: Amsterdam is a different world on 2 wheels

Enabling SSL on JBoss 4.2.0

One of the prerequisites in order to install and configure CAS (Central Authentication Service), a popular open-source Single Sign-On, is to enable SSL on the web container. This can actually be quite painful, especially for developers who enjoy focusing on the implementation details rather than the infrastructure aspects (that would be me ).

In this post I present the steps required to enable the SSL support in JBoss 4.2.0: JSSE is required (bundled with JDK 1.4 or higher).

Little tip: when prompted use changeit as password as it is the default keystore password.

Delete existing certificates

This is step is not strictly required but it helps to get rid of previously created certificates (in case you have been playing around with the keystore). Run the following commands:

keytool -delete -alias localhost
keytool -delete -alias localhost -keystore “C:/Program Files/Java/jdk1.5.0_14/jre/lib/security/cacerts”

The first command removes the certificate with alias localhost from the user keystore, the second deletes the certificate from the system trusted certification repository.

The cacerts file is basically the system keystore which stores the CA (Certification Authority) certificates and can be found at ${java.home}/jre/lib/security/cacerts