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JRebel Rocks

After working for iText for nine months, I’ve now turned back to consultancy and the web application world.

The web application I’m working in is rather big and redeploying takes time. Luckily the JRebel guys were so friendly to offer me a 3 month license. I hope this three months is enough to convince the guys at my current job location that investing in JRebel is really worth it’s money! (1 week should be enough to convince them, look at the time savings for 2 days down here)

Look what JRebel did:

Over the last 2 days JRebel prevented
at least 79 redeploys/restarts saving you about 3.2 hours.

Otherwise:

Oct 17, 2011 11:44:56 AM org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina start
INFO: Server startup in 210210 ms

Of course during the time of restarts/redeploys you can do other stuff, thus the 3.2 hours is not really the saved time. ( I would say 1.6 would be more realistic.)

What does JRebel do?

JRebel reloads the changed classes and files inside your container. Thanks to this you don’t need to restart and/or redeploy for every change you make. You can instantly see what changed. It even watches your spring configuration, logging configuration, your defined properties files and more for changes and applies the changes to your environment without the need to restart.

I can only say: “Once you go JRebel you never want to go back without it!”

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itextdoc 2.0.0

itextdoc has been updated to version 2.0.0

2.0.0 introduces a code styler module. This module styles Java code by colouring it like in your IDE.

By adding the attribute code=”java” to a tag, the inner text is seen as Java code. It is even possible to include a file through a new tag.

The <codepart> tag.

With the codepart tag you can designate a file that will not be seen as html and hence will not be parsed as such but for example as Java code a.

<codepart file="SomeKlass.java" code="java"/>

will do the trick.

see here for itextdoc usage and some background info

Posted on

Format time.

For a change I decided to give Ubuntu 11.04 a try on my laptop. With earlier version there were always issues with the wireless card disconnecting itself, these seem to be solved with the newest drivers so finally I don’t have a reason anymore to not use Ubuntu.

Installing Ubuntu is a piece of cake. Inserts cd, click a couple buttons and done. I disabled the Unity interface, didn’t like it at al!

Of course I need a JDK so sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk was my choice for installing the JDK.

Maven cannot be left out. It seems the software repository of Ubuntu only has a maven2, so I’ve manually downloaded maven3 from ASF, extracted and moved it to /opt/apache-maven-3.0.3 ( sudo mv apache-maven-3.0.3 /opt ) To be able to execute maven in the terminal I create a symlink to mvn in /bin ( ln -s /opt/apache-maven-3.0.3/bin/mvn /bin/mvn ) Now the maven executable should be reachable from any where.

Installing git and svn is also a piece of cake sudo apt-get install git and sudo apt-get install subversion

As IDE I use eclipse, there is an eclipse package from Ubuntu. But again, it’s not the latest and the greatest. I don’t want to wait for the latest to be packaged and then be able to just one click install it so this one also gets downloaded manually. I did the same as for maven and placed it in the /opt folder. I don’t know if that’s a good place for it but I’m the only one using that machine so I guess it’s ok.

Other applications installed: CopyXML Editor a very simple but effective xml editor.
FileZila ftp client.
Nautilus which adds icons and actions to files and folders that are connected with git or svn, just like tortoise on windows.
Replaced Evolution with Thunderbird.
Wireshark. MySQL Admin and Querybrowser.

Some other stuff installed from command line:
Gnu-gpg, ntfs. Mysql.

Probably I added more, but can’t remember. That is the reason for this post. If I post it I don’t have to remember, I can look it up.