At my company, we're using Ibatis to do operations on Oracle databases. As most of our software is designed to be international, we keep our XML files in UTF-8 encoding. Recently we discovered that Ibatis had some trouble parsing the XML files when we were using diacritics in them. As it turns out, Ibatis 2.2 actually …

A week ago, we encountered a funny problem where our Tapestry 3.0 application seemed to screw up the encoding of form posts. Every time we tried to post a form with diacritics in the input fields, the data got mangled before reaching the application code. As it turned out, somebody had turned on the RequestDumperValve …

I found a nice blog post which describes how it is after you leave school and start programming for a real company. You discover that programming is more like 80% reading and 20% coding. Read the article at the Tired Architect's blog titled "Hacking Your Way Through Codebases".

Like buildings, software usually a deviation of a standard structure. The architect chooses the structure his design will be based upon. After making design adjustments to the structure to cater the requirements, the architect supervises the builders. Like a building architect, the software architect supervises while …

Recently we had a problem connecting to our GForge CVS through SSH. We added the public RSA key to the GForge user, but because of wrong configuration on the client we tried to connect a couple of times with the wrong key. After a while the GForge CVS will return the following error: Received disconnect from : 2: Too …

Today I spent some time figuring out what the exact format of the CVS comment is when I want to link a commit to a GForge tracker item. I'll try to explain it a bit simpler: * We have [GForge](http://gforge.org/) installed at work. We use GForge to manage a software project for a customer. * The customer reports a bug …

Today, a collegue of mine had a really strange nullpointer problem trying to call a stored procedure in an Oracle 10 database using iBATIS Java 2.2.0. What she had was a normal JavaBean, like so: package com.rolfje.foo public class BarBean { private String barName; private Long barId; ... setters/getters here ... } A …

For those of you trying to request a password from the user at the command-line, without the password being displayed on-screen, Java 6 finaly has the answer, along with better access to the console. I hope that soon we will never see this hideous construction to do the same again.

Does Oracle complain about not being able to drop a table for a currently connected user, but you are sure you disconnected? Do the sessions "hang" in "inactive" state? Just log on as system, and execute the following query: SELECT 'ALTER SYSTEM KILL SESSION ''' || sid || ',' || serial# || '''; --', …

Getting the "Could not find an adaptor for class Foo" Mesage in Tapestry? You probably forgot to make your class Serializable. A simple description of a possible problematic situation follows: Suppose you have some simple class, like so: public class MyItem { private String itemname; public String …