maven-datapower-plugin

I’ve been contributing to the creation of a maven-datapower-plugin here on Zystems. It started out as a stand-alone application. I then moved on to fitting the code into the maven plugin framework. To communicate with the DataPower server it uses port 5550 which is commonly used by DP for SOAP based XML management of the device. Only some of the functions have been implemented and can be put in as goals in the different build phases.

I’m now looking into handling certificates when communicating with the server. I found a nice article handling the subject on JavaWorld:

Construct secure networked applications with certificates Part 1/Part 2/Part 3/Part 4

Zutubi Pulse 2.0 Beta

Zutubi has released a 2.0 Beta version of their automated build server Pulse. We use Pulse for our software projects at Zystems, it really easens the process of continuous integration. I got to play around with it pretty much during my master thesis and it is a really stable and functional server! It supports both cvs and svn and several build tools.

Try it out! Get a 30-day evaluation license: http://zutubi.com/sales/evaluation/
Download the Beta here: http://zutubi.com/products/pulse/downloads/

Ports of Doom

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is, amongst other things, in charge of the development of ip addresses on the Internet. Here’s a list of the well known port numbers (1-1023) and registered port numbers.

http://www.iana.org/assignments/port-numbers

The fun part lies amongst the well known ports; check out 666!

Open cmd from Explorer

By writing “explorer .” in the Windows XP command prompt you can easily open an Explorer window displaying the cmd path. Now you can do it vice versa by downloading a part of the newer Microsoft Powertoys. This part will allow you to right click a folder in Explorer and choose to “Open Command Window Here”:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/whistler/Install/2/WXP/EN-US/CmdHerePowertoySetup.exe

Install it (no restart required), it’s one of the most comfortable tweaks I’ve found in a long time. ^^

Mozilla Firefox suffix shortcut

You know how you can write a word in Firefox’s address bar, hit Ctrl + Enter and the www.[WORD].com page will load? If you didn’t, then that’s your tip.

If you did, here’s another tip:
Go to the about:config page (The Firefox preferences page) and set the preference “browser.fixup.alternate.prefix (or suffix)” to the prefix (or suffix) of your choice. If you don’t have the preference in your list you can just add it yourself and it will do the job.

There are lots and lots of things to tweak in the about:config page. Google around for the things that you find annoying with FF. Salvation lies within!

[edit] By default; Shift + Enter gives you the suffix .net and Ctrl + Shift + Enter .org

RegEx online validator

I just found a page where you can enter a regular expression and then add some Strings to test it against. All this is done against the java.util.regex-package.

http://www.fileformat.info/tool/regex.htm

What’s really nice about this tool is that you get the expression as a Java String when you make the comparison (\d becomes \\d). Enjoy!

IBM DataPower

I’m reading up on the IBM DataPower products, thought I’d add some links to a set of IBM Redpapers:

Arrays$ArrayList

Today I got a ClassCastException for trying to cast a java.util.Arrays$ArrayList to java.util.ArrayList. I couldn’t understand how that cast was forbidden until I had read some forums and documentation:

If you have an Arrays-object and call its function asList(), you will get an Arrays$ArrayList-object back. However, this is a List representing the Arrays-object rather than an ArrayList. So, besides the ‘normal’ ArrayList, there is also an inner class in the Arrays-class (which also belongs to the java.util-package) that is named ArrayList..and it is NOT a ‘normal’ ArrayList! Confusing? Very.

I would have named it ArraysList…or just List, since that’s what it is.

cmd tip of the day


In the Windows command prompt you can hit F7 to get a menu where you can choose to paste one of your previous commands. Apparently this has been around for quite some time without me knowing. It’s shortcuts like these that makes life a little easier! On top of that; the choice of colors are amazing.

A WS-Addressing namespace issue

At a customer’s integration solution, we’re trying to make a SOAP-request from a message flow. The web service has been created using WSE 3.0 (Web Service Enhancements) and requires WS-Addressing. We added a web service invoking sub flow by creating a project using the WSDL. Then we created a proper policy set, a UserName token and a matching binding. Using the Axis TCP Monitor we were able to get the input and output to and from the request.

Even though everything seemed to fit, we got an error message back from the service:

Fault

After digging around on a number of blogs, forums and Information Centers, we found the issue: The WS-Addressing namespace. WSE 3.0 sets the WSA-ns to:
http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2004/08/addressing

while WMB 6.1 uses:
http://www.w3.org/2005/08/addressing

Since the WS-Addressing feature cannot be configured we decided to contact the developer of the web service to see if he can change the namespace (or perhaps remove WSA altogether). As a last resort we’d probably have to download Axis (which is used by WMB when communicating with web services) and change the namespace constant. An update is soon to come..