LibreOffice: OOo without Oracle

The OpenOffice public domain community has separated itself from its Oracle head. The body will walk on as The Document Foundation.
Back in the previous millenium Sun Microystems bought a German office suit, called StarOffice, running on Unix as well as Windows.
Sun rebranded the product to OpenOffice and made it a free, public domain competitor for MS Office.
OpenOffice came under the stewardship of Oracle, when it acquired Sun.
Oracle's decision to charge for a previously free MSOffice plugin, that allows it to read the Open Document Format (ODF), created a lot of irritation in the public domain community.
Meanwhile Oracle is continuing work on, Oracle Cloud Office, based on JavaFX technology. Remark that it  does not have the Open word in its name.
Recently Oracle closed up Sun's OpenSolaris OS. In response a community project, OpenIndiana, was created.
In a preemtive strike, the community (FSF, Oasis, Google, Novell, Red Hat, Gnome...)  now has declared it's independance of Oracle. Because Oracle holds the trademark, the suite has been rebranded to LibreOffice.

Glassfish 3 Admin Console hangs behind a proxy

When installing glassfish you can install the updatetool (default on) and configure proxysettings for it.
If the proxy settings do not match the currently active proxy the glassfish admin console may hang.
The glassfish web admin console will not forward your browser proxy settings to the updatetool, which has its own settings. It will wait for the updatetool to return, which never happens.

Here's a solution from the forums:
Change the update configuration using updatetool in GlassfishInstallDir/bin (it may ask you to install the tool first, just do so and start updatetool again).
In the tool go to preferences and enter correct proxy settings  (or disable automatic updates in the updates tab).

Alternatively, if you fail to install the tool, you can just kick out the module $GLASSFISH_HOME/glassfish/modules/console-updatecenter-plugin.jar by renaming it.

Google just bought you some GWT tools

Google bought the instantiations developer tools and makes them avaialable for free. The suite contains Eclipse GUI builders, code analysis and testing tools. more...

JSP Model 2 / Web MVC

Bronze medal for website Sint-Niklaas

The new website of the city of Sint-Niklaas, we built in partnership with the fine crew at coworks, ended on a third place in the Indigov Monitor. Indigov monitor screens all communal websites in Flanders and Brussels.
Great news!

How to get Java EE6 libraries

If you want to download Java EE6 libraries, Oracle bundles the whole glassfish server, and more with the java EE6 SDK. Other application servers also bundle the libraries.
That’ a whole lot of bloat if you just want to compile a little webapp. You can just put a small subset of the glassfish jars in your classpath:

• glassfish_install_dir/glassfish/modules/javax.servlet.jar
• glassfish_install_dir/glassfish/modules/javax.servlet.jsp.jar
• glassfish_install_dir/glassfish/modules/javax.servlet.jsp.jstl.jar 
• glassfish_install_dir/glassfish/modules/jstl-impl.jar
• glassfish_install_dir/glassfish/modules/javax.ejb.jar (if using ejb)

If you are using maven this is not so much of a problem, just add a dependency to your POM.

<dependencies>
  <dependency>
    <groupId>javaee</groupId>
    <artifactId>javaee-api</artifactId>
    <version>6.0</version>
    <scope>provided</scope>
  </dependency>
</dependencies>
<repository>
   <id>java.net</id>
   <name>GlassFish Maven Repository</name>
   <url>http://download.java.net/maven/2</url>
</repository>

Use artifactId javaee-web-api if you just want the web profile.
If you are not using maven, you can just download the jars from the maven repository:

• http://download.java.net/maven/2/javax/javaee-api/6.0/javaee-api-6.0.jar
• http://download.java.net/maven/2/javax/javaee-web-api/6.0/javaee-web-api-6.0.jar

For Java EE5 that is:

<dependency>
  <groupId>javaee</groupId>
  <artifactId>javaee-api</artifactId>
  <version>5</version>
  <scope>provided</scope>
</dependency>

• http://download.java.net/maven/1/javaee/jars/javaee-api-5.jar

Project cycle coverage by methodology

Internet map

French/Belgian newspapers sue public television

Newspapers judge that articles on the new RTBF site are unfair comptition, given that RTBF articles are payed by the government.The RTBF site is slooow, but that might just be a youth disease.
Having worked for the Corelio newspapers, I've seen the difficulty of making an online newspaper profitable.
You can argue that a public server is not needed where a good commercial service exists.
Then again, I would not like to see public television dropped in favour of commercial television, which is a case that is very similar to the public/commercial e-newspaper debate.

Google scribe

This is the ultimate blog entry: Written by the tool on topic. Put Scribe in your toolbar and it will autocomplete web forms.
Superb toy, at first glance it seems a bit too eager though, when positioned in the middle of a sentence, it tends to add stuff without asking.