Bootstrapping is the Rage
by Frank Kim on Jan.24, 2011, under Miscellaneous
Web startups boot strapping themselves are all the rage. Every few weeks someone approaches me with a new idea. The implementation plans for the venture are almost always identical.
- web application
- open source framework, usually Ruby on Rails, sometimes PHP
- free database, almost always MySQL
- cloud hosting
- small group of guys, typically people who have made money at a previous venture
- no salaries, just equity
Inspirations for these companies are places such 37signals, Wufoo, Plentyoffish and World of Goo.
I enjoy hearing the ideas and almost joined one venture. But in the end none have been compelling enough for me to risk 6 to 12 months of income. Hopefully I’ll think of one on my own. 
Tweets for November, December 2010
by Frank Kim on Dec.20, 2010, under Miscellaneous
ATG Development
- For JBoss ATG standalone applications the CLASSPATH is set in ATG.ear/atg_bootstrap_ejb.jar/META-INF/MANIFEST.MF. #
- When setting up your ATG module’s MANIFEST.MF the ATG-Required property should list the modules in the order you would for the CLASSPATH. #
- Turning on Secure for ATG Applications « betweenGo. It’s pretty simple, enable the ProtocolSwitchServlet. http://bit.ly/a7DHen #
- Load ATG Order « betweenGo. Programmatically do this using the OrderManager. http://bit.ly/load-atg-order #
- ATG Confirm Password User Bug in ProfileFormHandler « betweenGo. Talking to ATG Support about it. http://bit.ly/atg-confirm-pwd-bug #
- ATG Community: ATG REST Web Services Technical Training Presentation: http://bit.ly/f5ZfhA Pretty cool, useful for mobile applications. #
- Turning On Debug in JBoss « betweenGo http://bit.ly/ePcUNV JBoss makes it easy to attach a debugger like Eclipse for happy bug fixing. #
ATG Buys Oracle
- Oracle buys ATG for $1 billion | silicon.com. Why didn’t this happen when I worked there? http://bit.ly/9Dh02a #
- ATG Swept Up in Oracle Spending Spree. ATG customers nervous. Oracle has bad rep supporting its acquisitions’ customers http://bit.ly/dgUgWT #
- ATG’ s official page about its pending acquisition by Oracle. Includes letters from management and an FAQ. http://bit.ly/dkMuMD #
VNC
- I tried TigerVNC, @TightVNC, @UltraVNC for connecting to my iMac from my Windows XP laptop. TigerVNC seems the fastest http://bit.ly/9EGUS0 #
- Is UltraVNC a virus/adware/malware/spyware? I kept getting a dial-up connection popping up until I removed UltraVNC. #
Miscellaneous
- WordPress › WP-reCAPTCHA « WordPress Plugins. Forced to install because of spam that gets past Akismet. http://bit.ly/dCChoh #
- Developing and Monetizing a Niche Website » My Money Blog http://bit.ly/fEQizu Big Adsense ads, sell products, Amazon affiliates, direct ads #
- The JCP Is Dead – Jim’s Ramblings "Java Community Process" http://bit.ly/fCkISY Apache leaves Java Community Process. Bad bad bad news. #
- Why ‘Anonymous’ failed to take down Amazon over WikiLeaks – Dec. 9, 2010 http://bit.ly/i8CE25 #
- I just got a $5 credit for movies and TV shows @amazonvideo. Click http://amzn.to/hh8gTP to get yours. #get5 #
Turning On Debug in JBoss
by Frank Kim on Dec.19, 2010, under JBoss
There are probably many ways of turning debug on in JBoss.
In windows the way I do it is by uncommenting the line in<JBoss>/bin/run.bat that starts with:
rem set JAVA_OPTS=-Xdebug
Uncommenting in DOS bat files is simply done by removing the rem command:
set JAVA_OPTS=-Xdebug
I created aliases for turning debug on and off. I use a script which simply replaces one string with another.
alias debugon='changeString.sh "^rem set JAVA_OPTS=-Xdebug" "set JAVA_OPTS=-Xdebug" ${JBOSS}/bin/run.bat && chmod 755 ${JBOSS}/bin/run.bat && unix2dos ${JBOSS}/bin/run.bat'
alias debugoff='changeString.sh "^set JAVA_OPTS=-Xdebug" "rem set JAVA_OPTS=-Xdebug" ${JBOSS}/bin/run.bat && chmod 755 ${JBOSS}/bin/run.bat && unix2dos ${JBOSS}/bin/run.bat'
On Unix I do a similar thing, uncommenting this line in <JBoss>/bin/run.conf:
#JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,address=8787,server=y,suspend=n"
Uncommenting in Unix shell scripts is simply done by removing the # character at the beginning of the line.
JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,address=8787,server=y,suspend=n"
These are my aliases on UNIX for turning debug on and off.
alias debugon="changeString.sh '^#JAVA_OPTS=\"\$JAVA_OPTS -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket' 'JAVA_OPTS=\"\$JAVA_OPTS -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket' ${JBOSS_HOME}/bin/run.conf"
alias debugoff="changeString.sh '^JAVA_OPTS=\"\$JAVA_OPTS -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket' '#JAVA_OPTS=\"\$JAVA_OPTS -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket' ${JBOSS_HOME}/bin/run.conf"
One of the reasons I created the scripts was because on Windows suspend=y by default. Therefore when in debug mode you have to start your debugger or the JBoss server will not completely start up. On Unix suspend=n by default. If you change suspend=n on Windows too then the server will start up without waiting for the debugger to attach.
Note that you can only have one server with debug on for a given port, e.g. port 8787. So if you try to start more than one JBoss server with that port, only the first will start. The solution is to start only one server with debug on or start different servers with different debug ports.
ATG Confirm Password Bug in ProfileFormHandler
by Frank Kim on Nov.22, 2010, under Personalization
Long-billed Curlew birds by mikebaird
Hi ATG Support,
I noticed a bug in how ATG’s ProfileFormHandler (ATG Java API) handles confirm passwords when creating a new profile. Note that this bug happens only if you persist anonymous profiles.
During registration when you call handleCreate it calls createProfileItem and then updateProfileAttributes. In updateProfileAttributes it checks if the password matches the confirm password. If they don’t match it adds a form exception.
However at this point it has updated the profile attributes including the login. Therefore after the user sees the error about the passwords not matching, corrects it and resubmits the form she will see an error that the login is already taken.
The work around is to set creatNewUser to true but since the default value is false most developers will see this bug.
Update 12-22-2010: ATG confirmed this is a bug.
Hi Frank,
Thanks for the information and details. I’m glad that using ProfileFormHandler.createNewUser=true works for you. You might want to periodically check the size of the dps_user table and purge the anonymous profiles, if needed.
For your reference, I have created PR#DPS-167714 “ProfileFormHandler Confirm Password” to track the issue.
Kind Regards,
Kristi Coleman
Load ATG Order
by Frank Kim on Nov.14, 2010, under Commerce, Programming
You can always look up an order in the repository using it’s ID. But then you want to use the properties of this order object you will always be calling getPropertyValue and casting it to the type you expect.
A better and much simpler way is to look up the order using the OrderManager. Then you get a strongly typed Order object and don’t have have to deal with the repository. Life has become a little easier.
OrderManager orderManager = getOrderManager; Order order = orderManager.loadOrder(orderId);
Now that you have the order you can also get the profile for that order.
RepositoryItem profile = getProfileTools().getProfileForOrder(order);
Turning on Secure for ATG Applications
by Frank Kim on Nov.10, 2010, under Configuration
Closed for business by maistora’s Photostream | Flickr
Almost all web applications have some parts of their site they want to be secure such as login and profile pages.
To enable security ATG has a ProtocolSwitchServlet, located at /atg/dynamo/servlet/dafpipeline/ProtocolSwitchServlet. Set the enable property to true and configure the other properties appropriately.
The only other properties that you will need to configure are the secureList property and the ignoreList property. Examples of how these properties would be configured follow.
secureList=/myapp/account,/myapp/checkout ignoreList=/myapp/css,/myapp/javascript
Optionally you might want to change the secureHostName and the httpsPort but typically it would be better to change siteHttpServerName and httpsPort respectively in /atg/dynamo/Configuration.
The default values for the other properties should be fine.
Tweets for September, October 2010
by Frank Kim on Oct.03, 2010, under Miscellaneous
PHP
- Disallowed Key Characters – CodeIgniter Error | Snaver.net Blog. Excellent way to debug it, should be part of library. http://bit.ly/bVkRF6 #
- Wiki | CodeIgniter – mod rewrite. This article explains how to take away “index.php” from your CI application URLs. http://bit.ly/bpfL8z #
SQL
- The Rhodium Toad » Selecting random rows from a table. High performance, very smart. http://bit.ly/cj9b8D #
- Multi Column Indices in PostgreSQL. Pretty cool. http://bit.ly/aQ8NOO #
ATG
- ATG Log Error from JSP Page « betweenGo. How to log an error to the @ATG server log from a JSP page. http://bit.ly/atg-log-error-jsp #
Unix
- .bash_profile vs .bashrc. On the Mac .bash_profile is called for each terminal window so there isn’t a reason for both. http://bit.ly/aWqsW9 #
Java
- Write simpler equals & hashCode Java methods using EqualsBuilder & HashCodeBuilder from Apache Commons http://bit.ly/8XiB2j #
ATG Log Error from JSP Page
by Frank Kim on Sep.27, 2010, under Page Development
"The page cannot be displayed" by Peter Kaminski
Unlike this IKEA sign, you usually don’t want to display errors on your web pages. ATG allows you to log errors to the server log from a JSP page. Below is an example of how to do this. In this case if we find the price is null we log an error to the server log.
<dsp:getvalueof id="price" idtype="java.lang.Double" param="currentItem.priceInfo.amount"><%if (price == null) { atg.servlet.DynamoHttpServletRequest dreq = atg.servlet.ServletUtil.getDynamoRequest(request); dreq.logError("price is null!”);}%></dsp:getvalueof>
Subversion Undeleting
by Frank Kim on Sep.22, 2010, under Subversion
I am always forgetting how to undelete. I wish subversion made it easier but the only way to do it is to do an svn copy of the last version. For example:
svn cp url/to/removed/foo.txt@4 .
You can find the URL by looking in .svn/entries.
For more info please see What’s a simple way to undelete a file in subversion?
Persistent Cart for Anonymous Users
by Frank Kim on May.03, 2010, under Personalization
Isn’t it iconic? by Mykl Roventine
Convenience
eCommerce sites want to make their users’ experience as convenient and intuitive as possible. One convenience found on most major eCommerce sites is remembering what the user put in his shopping cart, even if that person didn’t log in. Therefore when the user returns to the site he will see what he left in his shopping cart.
Persistent Cart
ATG makes it relatively simple to do this by:
- creating a profile in the repository (database) for all users that visit the website
- automatically logging in users by cookie
Therefore if a user returns, she/he will be automatically logged in and if there were any items in his cart they will be added to the current cart.
Implementation
- Turn on persisting anonymous profiles in the ProfileRequestServlet.
# /atg/dynamo/servlet/dafpipeline/ProfileRequestServlet persistAfterLogout=true persistentAnonymousProfiles=true
- Turn on auto-login by cookie and turn off auto-login by basic authentication.
# /atg/userprofiling/CookieManager sendProfileCookies=true # /atg/userprofiling/ProfileRequestServlet verifyBasicAuthentication=false
- Make all profile properties not required except for login and password in userProfile.xml. Also make autoLogin true.
<table name="dps_user"> <property name="login" required="true" /> <property name="password" required="true" /> <property name="firstName" required="false" /> <property name="lastName" required="false" /> <property name="email" required="false" /> <property name="autoLogin" default="true" /> </table>
Notes
When a profile is created for an anonymous user the login and password are set to the user’s ID (i.e. the profile’s repository ID).
If you are adding this functionality to an existing up and running site you may have to modify your user tables so that there no “not null” columns except for the id, login and password columns, you can leave those as how they were. Also you will need to set auto_login to true for all your existing users.
update dps_user set auto_login = 1;
To determine when the anonymous user was created look at the registrationDate profile property. To determine when was the last time the anonymous user logged in look at the lastActivity profile property. Both of these are updated by ATG’s TrackActivity scenario which is in the DSS folder.
For further reading please see Tracking Guest Users and Tracking Registered Users in the ATG 9.1 Personalization Programming Guide.
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