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Showing posts from 2011
As much as I like Windows 7 relative to previous versions of Windows, I'm again taking a stab at using Linux as a development desktop OS.  This is complicated by the fact that I still have to work in a shop where the supported IS boxes are all Windows 7. I'm a bit disappointed that open source support for Microsoft Exchange seems to be waning, as Evolution doesn't support newer versions of Exchange . I'm very happy with Linux Mint 11 , as it seems to correctly do a number of things that vanilla Ubuntu 11 doesn't do out of the box. Right now I'm working on getting my development environment functional again.  I've used Component Software Diff on Windows for years, since it's no-nonsense, visually appealing, and usually just works.  Under Linux, I'm trying out Meld and followed a tutorial to get this working with git , though firing up Python just to launch another command-line tool seems a little overkill when this would suffice: #!/bin...

manifest classpath + taglib jars + Tomcat = FAIL

I found an interesting side-effect of using manifest classpaths in our application jar files as it applies to taglib jar dependencies and embedded Tomcat 6. ·          Manifest classpaths do not appear to be expanded in the URLClassLoaders that load the jars with the manifests, so only the jar file referenced directly on the classpath are included in its URLs. The taglib search mechanism in Tomcat 6 (haven't checked Tomcat 7 to see if there's a difference) only walks the classpath looking for URLClassLoaders, looking at the underlying JAR URLs. Thus, if the taglib jar is referenced only as a dependency in the manifest of the main jar file and is not specifically on the classpath, it will not be spotted and use of that taglib by the JSP engine will throw an exception. This problem won’t actually show up in tests as IDE environments and builds generally include all the jar files in the classpath, so this one will bite you at runtime. ...