atc » Java

Weblogic Errors

atc — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 17:27:35 +0000

I’ve been plowing through Maven2 & Weblogic at work recently, in an attempt to get an EJB/MDB & EAR deployed for testing out JMS. I would often hit the following errors when deploying an App in Weblogic 9.2:

Unable to access the selected application.
Exception in AppMerge flows’ progression

Baffled, I almost gave up – the errors mean nothing.

Thankfully trial and error (and plenty of web searching) I have discovered that the errors are caused by invalid deployment descriptors or invalid WAR/EARs (an empty WAR or EAR will cause these errors immediately). So don’t fret, it’s not the end of the world!

First check your web.xml, application.xml and then ensure the contents of the WAR/EAR are as expected – APP-INF, META-INF only for the latter!

Hope that helps someone, it annoyed me for a while!

Ant TODO Update

atc — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 21:34:38 +0000

Quick update regarding Ant TODO: there’s now a JAR available for download, so you can get it running even quicker!

Ant Task for TODOs

atc — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 15:58:35 +0000

I often felt the need to scratch an itch when it comes to source code and a little fragment called //TODO. It’s scattered everywhere; I’m sure you’ve seen it. Yet no matter what codebase you’re looking at, there’s never any real exposure to them.

I therefore decided to implement an Ant Task for parsing TODOs in source code. You can read more about it over on the Google Code project. Please feel free to review code, suggest features or try it out and report a bug.

Happy new year to all; many happy returns.

See you in 2010!

Sky Songs and Linux

atc — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 22:55:02 +0000

If you want to use the Sky Songs download client in Linux (say Ubuntu or Debian), just paste the following into a file called skysongs in $HOME/bin and then chmod a+x it:
cd $SKY_SONGS_DIR; /usr/bin/java -cp . -jar downloader.jar $*

Note, $SKY_SONGS_DIR should be changed to your installation directory. If you used wine to install Sky Songs, have a look under /home/YOURUSERNAME/.wine/drive_c/windows/profiles/YOURUSERNAME/Local Settings/Application Data/Sky Songs/.

Sky Songs works by giving you “SKS” files that describe to its client (“Sky Songs MP3 Downloader“) what and how to download; i.e. your songs. Once you’ve downloaded one (say Renegades.sks; the “Renegades” album by Rage Against the Machine), just execute the skysongs script as follows:
alex@prometheus:~/Music$ skysongs Renegades.sks

Thankfully the Sky Songs download client is written in Java so it’s not only cross-platform but its structure is obvious.

Please note that these instructions are absolutely not intended for circumventing Sky’s download procedure, nor are they to be used to break the Terms of Service you’re most likely bound to by law. This information is purely for educational purposes and to assist those who are new to Linux get to grips with their everyday software in a new environment.