So, to make things easier I added a maven repository for you maven lovers to enjoy. Have fun.

And sure enough: It’s not.

The salesperson was nice enough to let me know, that for the whole spring software stack and 10 incidents plus some development software, I would have to shell out 630€ – about 900 US$ per year and per CPU. Affected are only production systems, not developer machines. For all she cared I would’ve been able to supply every developer in India with a fresh release, as long as he works for me and doesn’t violate the EULA. Also, cores do not count as additional CPUs.

I don’t know what kind of support Ryan was talking about when he was offered the 22k$ package, but I suppose he wanted Rod Johnson to hold his hand while coding, singing him a lullaby and basically giving him the teet – for that, 22k$ seem pretty reasonable to me

Still, getting a community hooked on an open source product and then charging them for their dependence on said product – after all learning spring is a big investment – smells kinda funny to me. I will have to decide carefully if I really need Spring 3 and all those tools after all.

Now, why would I write something as simple as a timestamp plugin? Well, I am the first to admit that adding timestamp in your build process is not exactly rocket science. But unfortunately most of the procedures to do just that made it seem more complicated than it should be. Either you jump through hoops trying to get a filter output back into your pom.xml, or you end up using a plugin that doesn’t have the ability to give you a customized date format (who the hell knows at first sight that the timestamp 1212931073482 means 8th june 2008 15:18h?!). So out of this frustration, the timestamp plugin was born. Have fun with it folks

Well, let me save you some time here. At first you might be looking for a function that matches strings. By looking into the w3c xpath function reference you’d find a function called contains(). ‘contains()‘ takes two parameters. And here the fun starts.

What the reference doesn’t tell you (ok I’m sure it does tell you somewhere), is how to fiddle your matches into the first contains() parameter, which incidentally is the text you want to scan. If your document looks something like this:

<mydocument>
   <food>Bavarian Donuts</food>
   <food>Cheesecake</food>
   <food>Oranges</food>
</mydocument>

Your first approach might look like this: /mydocument/food[contains(/mydocument/food,'Donuts')] Which, in a universe where everything makes perfect sense, would yield you one hit. However, this one just breaks your XPath processor, because contains() doesn’t accept multiple matches as the first parameter.

Instead you can do this: /mydocument/food[contains(.,'Donuts')]

The trick is that you use the '.' which is a shortcut for the current node function to reference the currently matched node as input to your contains() function. That’s all there’s to it.

My pet peeve was this one bug, where you’d delete a package and try to commit and your server tells you that your directory is out of sync. I only now discovered that “out of sync” means you’ll have to “svn update” the parent folder of your deleted packages to be able to commit the delete. See the developer comments on this here – the gist of it: it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Oh brother.

I guess I’ll have to give mercurial, git or some other versioning system a try in the next project. SVN just makes me want to cry.

Sure, you can still wire your static beans if you want to, but much more excitingly you can use component scanning to look for beans at runtime. No fiddling with XML at all.

Mark Fisher does a very good job of explaining the full impact of this in his InfoQ article on Spring 2.5. Also there is the much more comprehensive Introduction to 2.5 by Rod Johnson on TSS.com.

But what really caught my interest was Interface 21 CTO Adrian Colyer’s elaboration on Spring’s investment into the OSGi spec. If you listen to him you suddenly realize why exactly the runtime wiring became necessary. The upcoming Spring OSGi API takes the fact into account that Spring configuration at runtime is cool and all, but modularity gets ever more important. Coyler talks about all the interest the application server vendors have in OSGi and how big Web application projects may look like in the future.

In large applications we may see lots of dynamic service OSGi modules, wired together at runtime by Spring, that, as a whole, make up one or more applications. Spring takes into account that OSGi services may come and go at any given moment. Thus updating parts of the application (deploying a new service) instead of changing out a monolithic WAR file becomes a possibility. Exciting stuff. I will look into that some more.

Of course there is plenty of other cool stuff in 2.5, just check out the SpringSource blog or read the Changelog.

What happens if you mix the two is this: The AOP Advice will open a Hibernate session for the method you are currently doing work in, then you invoke your DAO code which is wired up with your old TransactionProxyFactoryBean and the HibernateInterceptor. HibernateInterceptor will say: “Alright, this isn’t so bad, there is already an open session.” and pass the steering wheel back to your DAO. When the DAO is finished, HibernateInterceptor is called again and closes whatever session it finds…which happens to be…the ONLY session you have. All further code that involves accessing your pojos will fail, from this point on.

Note to self: Read the docs more carefully.

-showsplash
org.eclipse.platform
–launcher.XXMaxPermSize
256M
-vmargs
-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.5
-Xms40m
-Xmx512m
-XX:PermSize=64m
-XX:MaxPermSize=128m

Well, to make a long story short – the only way I found to make that go away is using the brilliant MBR fix by KÃ¥re Smith which will make your pain (i.e. Grub) disappear in a heartbeat…you just need something to boot your system into DOS mode. Ah well…time to connect that damned old floppy disk drive again *sigh*

First I’d like to mention the fabulous TreeSize, which shows you the size of your directories in a Treeview. For fans of the good old Directory Opus which, by the way, has been available for the PC for quite some time now, this is a true godsent.

Then there is the super cool launchy, which basically enables you to access every program and play every media file on your computer lightning fast. Not only that, but it also lets you access websites really quickly. It’s a real producitvity enhancer.

If you don’t own a Mac, but you like the Comic life application that comes with it, you might want to check out the Comic Life for Windows beta. It’s great for creating your own comics (Thanks to Serhat for the link).