I will put in this post all the encountered problems. I plan to write more in detail about each issue in a separete posts. This post will be updated regularly. I will be very glad to get an answer for unsolved problems.

I have divided different features/probles into three categories: solved, NOT SOLVED and not started yet. Category “not stared yet” is used to describe the features I am planning to develop.

• how to display a login form when the user is not logged yet – solved
• how to use i18n with struts2 – solved
• how to redirect to the same page after changing locale – NOT SOLVED
• how to set a default language – solved
• how to use a simple theme and error text – solved
• how to put more than one field in a row within s:form – solved
• how to use tiles – solved
• how to use datepicker and date validation for not default date format – solved
• how to use displaytag with i18n – solved
• how to use form validation – solved
• how to upload a file – not started yet
• how to upload multiple files – not stared yet
• how to connect struts2 application with a jasper report – not started yet
• how to log out – solved

Label1: TextField1
Label2: TextField2

I would like to have many columns in one row.

Label1: TextField1 Label2: TextField2

I tried to use simple theme at the beginning but I found out that tooltips are not supported with a simple theme. I found the solution at http://www.vitarara.org/cms/struts_2_cookbook/creating_a_theme. It is a great page but the page is a little bit outdated,

I am using struts2 2.0.11. I copied qxhtml theme from sample application on vitavara page into my project. I succeed to put many columns in one row but there was a problem with datetimepicker. I found out that I have to modified the file datepicker.ftl to make things working. There is a change in a second row. It looks like in the old struts2 version there was a /simple/datepicker.ftl instead of /simple/datetimepicker.ftl.

<#include “/${parameters.templateDir}/${parameters.theme}/controlheader.ftl” />
<#include “/${parameters.templateDir}/simple/datetimepicker.ftl” />
<#include “/${parameters.templateDir}/qxhtml/controlfooter.ftl” />

You can use labelcolspan and inputcolspan to control the size of particular object. Example: the number of columns in a separate row is 8 columns. If we would like to put only one textfield in this row and if the label should take 1/4 then we would put 2 (2/8=1/4) for labelcolspan and 6 (6/8=3/4) for inputcolspan. Please check the code below.
IMPORTANT: Do not forget to use template=”datepicker” inside s:datetimepicker tag.

<s:datetimepicker template=”datepicker” label=”MyDate” theme=”qxhtml”>
<s:param name=”labelcolspan” value=”%{3}”/>
<s:param name=”inputcolspan” value=”%{4}”/>
</s:datetimepicker>

import javafx.stage.Stage;
import javafx.scene.Scene;
import javafx.scene.control.TextBox;

Stage {
   title: "Application title"

   scene: Scene {
      width: 250
      height: 80
      content: [

         TextBox {
            override function replaceSelection(repl)
            {
            //limit text length to 5 charactes
            if (rawText.length() < 5) {
               super.replaceSelection(repl);
            }
         }
      }
    ]
   }
}

I have developed a grid component consists from the following components: JPanel is a basic container, jScrollPaneBasic is used to display horizontal scrollbar to handle a summary table and a data table. A data table (zebraJTable1) has another scrollPabe called jScrollPaneTabel used to display vertical scrollbar.

Picture below presents the summary row from the application.

Do not hesitate to run a demo at http://www.javanus.com/AssistWeb. Here are the steps needed to display summary rows in the application:

Manual: 
1.start the demo  
2.login as a GUEST username, password is empty 
3.select Invoices in the menu and after that select the menu item Review of cash accounts (Invoices->Review of cash accounts) 
4.click Search button to display data

1.JIDE – http://www.jidesoft.com/products/pivot.htm

JIDE software looks amazing but it is not an open source project. At the moment I am strictly “opensource” oriented so the JIDE is not the right choice. I would be very glad if they will decided to opensource their libraries. The screenshots looks great.

2.JMAGALLANES – http://sourceforge.net/projects/jmagallanes

It is an opensource project but the project is not active at the moment. The last update is from 2006. I have written an email to the authors and I have got a reply. They have told me they are planning the next release in a few months.

3.OPENSWING – http://oswing.sourceforge.net/

It is an opensource project. The project is active. I have downloaded the opensource library and the pivotTable worked fine. After a while I found a bug (http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=3296825&forum_id=572329) but Mcarniel did his job fast and well. The bug was corrected in the next week.

Below is a picture from my application which presents the use of pivotTable.

The above screen shot is from the hotel reservation software. You are free to launch a demo from http://www.javanus.com/AssistWeb/. Below are the steps used to test a PivotTable:

1.Select “Reports->Reservations” in the menu

2.Select “Search” button

The data are stored in the tableModel on the client side. TableModel is serialized and sent over the http to the server. The servlet on the server deserializes the data into the tableModel. TableModel is stored into the database.

My client is located in the central Europe and the server is located in the USA. The client time was Jun 06 00:00:00 CEST 2009. The data was transferred over the http and the same date on the server was Jun 05 17:00:00 CDT 2009.

Solution:

I set GMT timezone on both sides.

TimeZone tz = TimeZone.getDefault();
tz.setDefault(TimeZone.getTimeZone(“GMT”));

The client and the server date time are the same after setting default timezone: Jun 06 00:00:00 GMT 2009.

 Do not hesistate to check out a hotel reservation software using the described technology.
 

It is very easy to convert a date in a paricular format in java. SimpleDateFormat is easy to use, programmer should only pass a particular date format  (dd/MM/yy or dd.MM.yyyy).

The problem arise when I want to provide a date format for a jXDatePicker component. I did not know how to set the proper format for JXDatePicker according to selected language. I just need a localized date format pattern to set the format for jXdatePicker. After a few hours I found the solution I would like to share you.

//inicialization

jXDatePickerDateField.setDate(new java.util.Date());

Solution:

Locale locale = Locale.getDefault();

String datePattern = ((SimpleDateFormat)DateFormat.getDateInstance(SimpleDateFormat.MEDIUM,locale)).toPattern();

jXDatePickerDatum.setFormats(datePattern);

I mixed different technologies in this application: swing, servlets, tomcat and mysql. The entire application is written in swing, it comunicates over http using servlets with the application server, servlets communicate over the jdbc with the database. I plan to describe particular parts of the application in more details in the following days.

You can launch a demo at http://javanus.com/AssistWeb/. The picture below presents basic steps to create your first reservation.

Application works fine as a desktop application which communicate with the database using jdbc at the moment. Please send me an email to info at javanus.com if you would like to test it a desktop version.

At the moment I am using Netbeans and I am very satisfied with it. I tried to get a good comparison between them with google. There are a lot of old articles about “The big Three” but I could not get a good answer because they evolve a lot in the recent time. It is time to get an up to date situation!

Here is my opinon:

JDeveloper Pro – if you would like to migrate from oracle forms to java -> use ADF (application development framework), support all phases of software development

JDeveloper Contra – it is not independent (developed by Oracle), does not have future in open source world, slow startup

Netbeans Pro – strong community, open source, independent

Netbeans Contra – bad reputation from the past, I am missing a plug-in for data modelling

Eclipse Pro – a lot of people using it, it is fast

Eclipse Contra – I think it is losing market share, no clear vision

I would be very glad to get your opinion! Do you agree or disagree with my statements? Do not hesitate to put your comment!

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Go to the end if you are only interested how to end the financial crisis…;)

Application has two parameters:

• the process name is used to find out only the specific processes. In my example the parameter value is frmweb. Parameter value frmweb is used to limit the application to check only the cpu time spent by oracle forms processes
• the cpu time used by process is used to define the maximum allowed cpu time spent by particular process

How does it works:

1. Application first get all the processes in desired format.
   1. ps -eo (to see every process with a user defined format)
   2. ps -eo user, pid, time, command (to see every process in format user, process id, time spent by process and command)
2. Application checks only the processes where the parameter value for process name match the command (parameter value is in command string)
3. Application parses the process values and check the cpu time spent by the process. Process is terminated if the cpu time spent is greater than the parameter value for cpu time.

Application could be run using crontab each 15 minutes. Example below shows how to kill oracle forms sessions which exceeds more than 1000 seconds of cpu time
0,15,30,45 * * * * /usr/java/jdk1.6.0_11/bin/java -cp . ZombieKiller frmweb 1000


import java.io.BufferedInputStream;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.io.Reader;


/**
*
* @author http://www.javanus.com/blogs
*/

public class ZombieKiller {
public static String getUnparsedProcessList() {
InputStream in = null;
InputStream buffer = null;
Reader reader = null;
try {
//get all processes
Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("ps -eo user,pid,time,command --sort stime");
in = p.getInputStream();
buffer = new BufferedInputStream(in);
reader = new InputStreamReader(buffer);
char[] charr = new char[1024];
StringBuffer strbuff = new StringBuffer();
while(true) {
int r = reader.read(charr);
if(r<=0) {
break;
}
strbuff.append(charr, 0, r);
}
return strbuff.toString();
}catch(IOException e) {
//todo - error handling
e.printStackTrace();
}
return null;
}

/**
* @param args the command line arguments
*/
public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
System.out.println("Check out http://www.javanus.com/blogs && http://www.javanus.com/blog");
if (args.length==0) {
System.out.println("Usage: java -classpath . ZombieKiller ");
return;
}
String ls_processName = args[0];

}
}


It would be nice to end the financial crisis on the same way. I suggest to use kill -9 42 to end the economic depression. 42???

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