Java Thinking

Sometimes its useful to expose the version of your web application - I find it useful so vsConsole can display the version of the deployed application for each environment on the dashboard. If you build your app with Maven, you can use this code to get the version, and simply wire up a controller/rest endpoint to return it as text/plain. To expose the version of your maven built spring web application, you can use a REST controller like that shown below. Note, you won't see a valid version while running in the IDE - it'll only work when running the Maven built WAR. If you want to add the Jersey dependencies to your spring application try using the following dependency declaration.

I've seen projects where the application code base contains database connection information - passwords and all, or, WAR files are rebuilt for each environment with properties substituted appropriately for the target environment. Rather than putting database information in the application code, it makes more sense to use a JDNI data source provided by the container. This way the exact same application code is deployed to all environments, and we don't encounter any exposed passwords - since the owner of the container (in production environments the infrastructure/support team) define the data source themselves. Database access via JNDI data source in Tomcat In your application server you want to define a data source which points to the database server and schema of your choice. Here, I'm using the H2 database , and assuming this is the DEV Tomcat server, I point it to the DEV schema - define this resource in the Tomcat context.xml :  <Resource name=" jdbc/...

It's sometimes nice to be able to update a development Tomcat 7 server from Maven - this makes it simple to hook automatic deployment into a CI server or just update the dev server as a developer. First, the Tomcat manager application needs to be installed (check Tomcat's webapps directory for the manager application) and configured with the appropriate user credentials: Now, I needed to define the server admin credentials in my maven settings (~/.m2/settings.xml): Then, I updated the POM to configure the maven tomcat plugin : Now, using 'mvn tomcat7:redeploy' lets me update the dev server. Note however, on Windows you may have some problems with undeploying the application - after an undeploy command, some jars may be left over in the webapps/appname directory. When you try to redeploy your app you'll see an error containing " cannot invoke tomcat manager fail - unable to delete... ". To work around this, you can change the TOMCAT_HOME/...

photo credit: markchadwickart via photopin cc I just encountered this exception: Exception in thread "main" java.lang.AbstractMethodError: com.mchange.v2.c3p0.impl.NewProxyPreparedStatement.setCharacterStream(ILjava/io/Reader;J)V at org.hibernate.type.descriptor.sql.ClobTypeDescriptor$4$1.doBind(ClobTypeDescriptor.java:114) at org.hibernate.type.descriptor.sql.BasicBinder.bind(BasicBinder.java:92) It turns out that upgrading c3p0 does the trick (from 0.9.1.2 to 0.9.2.1):         <dependency>             <groupId>com.mchange</groupId>             <artifactId>c3p0</artifactId>             <version>0.9.2.1</version>         </dependency>

Print to Google Drive I just noticed 'Save to Google Drive' in my 'Print' options in Chrome! This is awesome - when you want to save something for reference, and you don't want to go through thousands of bookmarks, this is exactly what I wanted! Media Problems Here is a great blog post about trying to find a decent movie streaming service. Now I have FetchTV (this lets me buy movies to stream, much like the Google Play option) I'm considering turning my MythTV media center off, but I still need an option for playing music/displaying photos/etc. There are lots of options, from AppleTV to Western Digital et al media players. Props to Google for actually selling us here in Australia movies and music - unlike Amazon (we still can't buy movies and music from Amazon in 2013). Andrew Chen quits RSS - WTF! Andrew Chen just announced that he's quitting RSS in favour of email notifications. Look at the comments though, and there isn't a single p...

I came across this problem with an older project - when I switched from jdk6 to jdk7, when the application started I encountered: nested exception is org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException: Error creating bean with name 'org.springframework.transaction.annotation.AnnotationTransactionAttributeSource#0': Initialization of bean failed; nested exception is java.lang.IllegalArgumentException:   error annotation type patterns are only supported at Java 5 compliance level or above I didn't want a purely maven solution because during development I run the app in Tomcat via the IDE (Intellij IDEA). In the end I just upgraded my aspectjweaver dependency to 1.7.2 (it was 1.5.4) <dependency>    <groupId>org.aspectj</groupId>    <artifactId>aspectjweaver</artifactId>    <version>1.7.2</version> </dependency> Everything seems okay now.

photo credit: @Doug88888 via photopin cc Installing Windows Vista For the first time since I bought it, my old Dell Inspiron 1525 has Windows Vista back on it. It's been running Ubuntu Linux since I got it, so why does it now have Windows again? My children are using computers at school now and they are using Windows - mainly Office. So rather than confuse them with different operating systems it seems more constructive to just give them some consistency and let them have their own computer set up like it is at school. I'm going to have to buy Microsoft Office for them - which after seeing how Libre Office handles clip art, I'm quite happy to do! (MS Office has a nice search and browse for clipart which the kids love and can use well. Libre Office didn't seem to have any search and you were left to click into each folder one at a time to see the clipart - not particularly useful). Downloading statements I've just noticed PayPal have an interesting fea...