Coming Up for Air

From OS X to Linux

By Jason Lee on April 23, 2012

When I joined Sun Microsystems “way back” in 2008, I was asked if I wanted a Mac for my work system. Having heard many extol the numerous virtues of the OS, I jumped at the chance. Since then, I’ve even migrated my wife and family to the OS. Trouble arose last fall, though, with the delivery of a new MacBook Pro (whose purchase was somewhat a miracle, brought about by the tireless efforts from my upper management). Simply put, I got a lemon. After five trips to the Apple Store, which resulted in overnight diagnostic runs; shipment to an offsite, more advanced repair facility; the replacement of the hard drive; and the replacement of the motherboard, I finally broke down and asked for a new machine, knowing it wouldn’t be a Mac. Just over a week ago, a new Lenovo Thinkpad arrived, and, after putting Linux on it, I have to say I’m generally very happy with the system. (more…)

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Java 7, NetBeans, Mac OS X, and a Little Bit of JavaFX 2

By Jason Lee on April 9, 2012

In a recent post showing how to use JavaFX 2 and NetBeans on the Mac, I noted that I have been unable to run NetBeans using Java 7 on my Mac for reasons I had not been able to figure out. Now, thanks to a pointer from Scott Kovatch, the technical lead at Oracle for the Mac OS X port of Java, I think I can show you how to do that. (more…)

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Getting Started with JavaFX on the Mac

By Jason Lee on April 5, 2012

As you may have guessed from my recent book review, I’ve been tinkering with JavaFX some, as time as permitted. I’ve been following the technology fairly closely since Sun announced the project way back in 2008. When it was announced that JavaFX 2.0 was finally available, albeit in preview form, for the Mac, I was ecstatic. I ran into issues, though, trying to get it to run in my IDE, though. After some guess work and googling, I finally figured it out. In retrospect, it may be obvious, but if you’re like me and are missing the obvious, I’m going to detail the steps I took to get it running on my Mac. Perhaps it can help someone out. (more…)

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Posted in JavaFX, NetBeans | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Book Review: Pro JavaFX 2: A Definitive Guide to Rich Clients with Java Technology

By Jason Lee on April 3, 2012

Pro JavaFX 2I was privileged to be given a copy of the recently released “Pro JavaFX 2: A Definitive Guide to Rich Clients with Java Technology” from Apress, authored by James Weaver, Weiqi Gao, Stephen Chin, Dean Iverson, Johan Vos. This review is a bit overdue, but I hope you find it as helpful as I found the book. (more…)

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GlassFish 3.1.2, REST Security, and the Jersey Client

By Jason Lee on March 12, 2012

I recently blogged about a change we made in GlassFish 3.1.2 with regard to REST security. Specifically, we added some CSRF protection (you can read the details here). For those of you using the Jersey Client, updating your code to support this change is very simple:

import com.sun.jersey.api.client.filter.CsrfProtectionFilter;
// ...
Client client = new Client();
client.addFilter(new CsrfProtectionFilter());
// ...

On the client side, that’s all you have to change. Jersey will take care of the details.

Hat tip to Dan Allen for suggesting this post. : )

Popularity: 2% [?]

Posted in GlassFish, REST | Tagged , | 9 Comments

GlassFish 3.1.2 and REST Security

By Jason Lee on March 1, 2012

As you may know by now, we released GlassFish 3.1.2 yesterday. Tim Quinn has a nice overview of some of the security-related changes, but one change he didn’t cover was one in the RESTful administration area, namely CSRF protection. I won’t go into the details of what CSRF attack is here, but I do want to show we’ve added protections to GlassFish to make sure the server is as secure as possible.

For the curious, we implemented the CSRF protection using a filter provided by the Jersey team. As you can see from the javadoc, this change only affects requests that change state (POST, PUT, DELETE, etc).

To update your client code, all you need to do is add the X-Requested-By header. Its value doesn’t matter:

curl -X POST -H 'X-Requested-By: YeaGlassFish' -d key=value http://localhost:4848/management/domain/path/to/resource

That’s all there is to it. It’s a very simple change, but an important one. If you run into any issues with this, please let us know!

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Posted in GlassFish, REST | Leave a comment

Comparing JVM Web Frameworks – A Critique

By Jason Lee on February 15, 2012

Recently, Matt Raible again presented his “Comparing JVM Web Frameworks“, this time at JFokus 2012. The intent of the presentation, as best as I can gather from half a world away, is to prevent some of the major JVM-based web frameworks, showing the various strengths and weaknesses, which will allow the audience to choose a framework more easily. While the goal is laudable, I’m just not sure how well executed the attempt was. (more…)

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Posted in Java, JavaEE | 3 Comments

CDI @OKCJUG

By Jason Lee on February 14, 2012

I had the opportunity today to present an introduction to CDI at the Oklahoma City Java Users Group. It was a smaller crowd, but they had great questions nonetheless. After a rough start in a workspace that wasn’t quite as clean as it should have been, I think the went fairly well. I had a good time at least. : )

Thanks to all those that came out and asked questions during and after. If you’d like to play with the code (WARNING: for those of that weren’t there, these examples are 100% creativity free : ), you can download the project here.

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A Jersey POJOMapping Client/Server Example

By Jason Lee on January 26, 2012

JAX-RS is the specification that describes how to build RESTful interfaces in a Java EE environment. Jersey is the reference implementation of that spec, and, like many implementations, offers features above and beyond what spec does. One feature that I’ve been working with recently is the POJOMapping feature, which makes writing services and clients much easier, as well as typesafe. (more…)

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Posted in JavaEE, REST | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Grabbing Screenshots of Failed Selenium Tests

By Jason Lee on January 24, 2012

For the GlassFish Administration Console, we have quite a few tests (about 133 at last count). Given the nature and architecture of the application, we’ve chosen Selenium to drive our tests. One of the problems we’ve faced, though, is understanding why a test failed due to the length of time the tests take (roughly 1.5 hours to run the whole suite). Sometimes, we can look at the log and know exactly what failed, but not the why. Did the screen render correctly? Did, perhaps, the click, etc. not get performed (we’ve seen instances of that) leaving the application in a state not expected by the test? Since I usually start the tests and move on to something else, we had no way of knowing. Until now. I finally sat down and figured out how to grab a screen shot when a test fails. I’ve distilled that technique down to its essentials, which I’ll share here. (more…)

Popularity: 5% [?]

Posted in Java, Testing | Tagged , | 2 Comments
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