Coming Up for Air

Android at the OKC JUG

By Jason Lee on September 13, 2011

Today, I presented basic Android development at the Oklahoma City JUG. In the presentation, we walked through a very simple (and very ugly) note-taking application. The app allows the user to list, view, add, edit, and delete notes. There are no bells and whistles in the app, as I was trying to find something that is non-trivial enough to be interesting, yet no so complex that the audience gets lost in all the details. Overall, I think I succeeded there, though I guess the evaluation slips should tell me how far off I really was. :)

As I said at the start of the talk, it’s not a pretty app, and I likely violate many of the best practices the Google and other experts suggest, but it’s a functional app and, for that reason alone, I think, a decent start. I’ve pushed the sources to GitHub so anyone can take a look at it, fork it, etc. As time permits, I hope to clean the code up some, and add, via comments, some of the discussion we had in the talk itself. That will likely make the code a bit more valuable and interesting.

Thanks to all who attended, especially those who shouted out hints for things I broke. :P

Popularity: 1% [?]

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My First Android App: Cub Tracker

By Jason Lee on April 19, 2011

Over the weekend, I published my first Android application, Cub Tracker. Cub Tracker is really a pretty simple application, but one born out of a personal need. My oldest son is a Cub Scout Wolf, and I am his den leader. There have been countless times where we had been out somewhere, and my wife and I would ask each other, “I wonder if there’s a Cub Scout achievement or elective for this?” At the time, there was no easy to find out. There are web sites that list these, of course, but it wasn’t convenient to load the page and search it while we’re in the middle of something.

Given what I do for a living, I immediately thought, “There should be an app for that!” and Cub Tracker was born. I won’t go into all the details here (there’s a site for that, though it’s pretty bare at the moment), but Cub Tracker allows you to track the achievements and electives of one or more Cub Scouts on your mobile device. It will also generate a report that can be emailed to, say, your Scout’s den leader.

It’s not flashy and probably isn’t very exciting for many people, but I’m pretty proud of it and expect I’ll get a lot of use out of it. If you have a Scout, please check it out and let me know what you think.

Popularity: 3% [?]

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Managing GlassFish JDBC Resources via REST

By Jason Lee on March 10, 2011

I was asked this morning about creating JDBC resources via REST. As with user management, it’s actually pretty simple, once you’ve seen how. Let’s take a look. (more…)

Popularity: 3% [?]

Posted in GlassFish, REST | Tagged ,

Adding Users to a GlassFish Realm via REST

By Jason Lee on March 9, 2011

A user on the GlassFish forums recently asked how to create users in bulk. The asadmin command create-file-user doesn’t support passing the password as a parameter, which makes scripting difficult. The REST interface, though, can help there, and it’s really pretty simple. (more…)

Popularity: 3% [?]

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Debugging GlassFish REST Requests

By Jason Lee on March 4, 2011

If you’ve been following my series on using the GlassFish REST interface, you’ve probably noticed that your JSON and XML output isn’t pretty-printed like mine. While there are several online tools that can fix that for you, there’s no need for the extra step. GlassFish will do that for you. Let’s look at how to make that happen. (more…)

Popularity: 3% [?]

Posted in GlassFish, REST | Tagged ,

GlassFish 3.1 Is Now Available

By Jason Lee on February 28, 2011

For those that may not have noticed, today the GlassFish team officially released version 3.1. This new release brings in a myriad of features, the most significant of which is probably clustering and high availability. The Aquarium is the best place to find links to blogs, screencasts etc. from various GlassFish engineers (though Markus Eisele has a nice run down of the new features here as well). The Aquarium’s list is pretty extensive, so certainly check it out, but I’d like to highlight a few that I found interesting from teammates of mine:

People often ask what the difference is between the free GlassFish and the commercially-supported version. The answer really is “not much” in terms of the core server itself (pretty much just branding changes). The commercial version, though, has some nice value-add features, such as the Performance Tuner, amongst others.

I’m really, really pleased with how GlassFish 3.1 has turned out. We still (and will always) have more work to do, but this is a solid release that finally fills in some enterprise holes that v3 didn’t have time to fill. Download it, install it, kick the tires a bit, and tell us what you what you think. In the meantime, we’re going to go ahead and get started on 3.2.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Posted in GlassFish | Tagged ,

RESTful GlassFish Monitoring

By Jason Lee on February 28, 2011

In previous posts, I’ve shown various ways to manage a GlassFish 3.1 server via its REST interface. As nice as that is, we also support monitoring your server via REST as well. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the things you can ask of your server. (more…)

Popularity: 4% [?]

Posted in GlassFish, Java, REST | Tagged , ,

Java EE’s Buried Treasure: the Application Client Container

By Jason Lee on February 22, 2011

From time to time, I’m asked about accessing various EE artifacts (EJBs, etc) from a standalone client. Almost invariably, the user is having trouble getting the environment setup, grabbing an InitialContext, etc. Also almost invariably, my answer to them is “use the application client container”, which is as far as I can take them. The topic of application client container, or ACC, came up again recently when I was asked on Twitter about an issue with ACC and GlassFish in a clustered environment. While this user (hi, Markus! : ) figured out his issue before I could be of much help, I took this opportunity finally to learn exactly what the ACC is and how to use it. Thanks to Oracle’s Tim Quinn for his patient and tireless help, here’s what I learned… (more…)

Popularity: 10% [?]

Posted in GlassFish, Java, Tutorials | Tagged ,

GlassFish 3.1, REST, and Secure Admin

By Jason Lee on February 17, 2011

After posting my last entry, GlassFish 3.1, REST, and a Secured Admin User, I was asked about an entry on using GlassFish 3.1′s REST interface with secure admin enabled. Some of you may be asking, “Isn’t that what you just wrote about?” While the titles sound the same, they’re slightly different, but in a very significant way. Let’s take a quick look at secure admin and then see what our REST client needs to do make use of this new server configuration. (more…)

Popularity: 4% [?]

Posted in GlassFish, REST | Tagged ,

GlassFish 3.1, REST, and a Secured Admin User

By Jason Lee on February 17, 2011

In my last post on using the GlassFish REST interface, a commenter asked about how GlassFish handles security. So far, all of my examples have been using GlassFish 3.1 out of the box, which doesn’t require authentication (as a convenience for developers, as well as system admins evaluating the server). In production, of course, the server will be secured, which means our client code will have to be modified. In this installment, we’ll see how that might be done in Java. (more…)

Popularity: 4% [?]

Posted in GlassFish, REST | Tagged ,
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