Then I have to talk about the album itself and there is a lot to say (or write …). As I said, “One Nigh” is the first track of a serie of … eleven. So the album starts with a joyfully song, making you want to dance. And listening to the whole album, Martina succeeds in giving you a lot of emotions. “I’m gonna love through it” is more than just a song. It is a wonderful ballad about fighting cancer and how family, friends, wife or husband are important in such a fight, such an experience in the life of a human being. It makes you realize not only the person which has cancer suffers, but the circle also does. I think that it is not a one-more-song-about-cancer saying cancer-is-bad but a song about relationships between people being in this tough situation, the words proving it: “When you’re weak, I’ll be strong, When you let go, I’ll hold on […] I’m gonna love you through love it”. We know cancer is bad, so no need to sing it again. But the way the cancer not only hurts affected one has not been said so powerfully, so truly, so humbly. For me this song means a lot, I already was in such a situation. But Martina also succeed in saying that even if you win your fight against cancer, your life is changed for aways: “To hide what the cancer took from her, But she just want to feel like a woman again”. Martina just found the right words for describing a tough situation. In my mind this song is one of the most beautiful of the album.

But the album also have its lot of beautiful emotions like “Marry Me” which is incredibly touching and powerful. For me it’s a song about marriage saying that “I don’t just love when I want to or when I need to” (not a quotation). Martina sings “Marry me Today and every day” that makes me think of this. So romantic. “Broken Umbrella” is also a sweet and beautiful love ballad remembering everyone when they felt in love, and everything was perfect, like it was always sun in your heart. These two songs are “complementary” in my mind because one is like about the beginning of a relationship, and the other for saying “love should last, I want your love for me last”. It’s a beautiful combination.

For me the funniest song is “Teenage Daughters” with its incredibly honesty. When we have kids, it is true we sometimes blame our children when they break the rules we fix, or something else. It is also true kids are so sweet, with their hazel eyes when they need something. And Martina just reminds us we were … the same. And that is really funny the way she brings it, she sings it. She doesn’t take the party of kids, but the songs could say “Hey, you were the same, you’ve just grown up and realize it is bad or not good”. It’s pretty interesting! It is just another part of the life of a human being which is sing here. The song also contains a lot of “do do do” which make you sing loud. You just want to swing (again) by listening to this song. Incredible.

The album contains a lot of love, that’s a fact. But not the usual i-love-you-so-much-that-i-could-die-for-you (yeah you know the kind) songs but love in every way, some “unusual” ways that we may not be used to listen the … way Martina sings it: love facing the cancer, love facing the time, love facing the sins, love facing difficulties, love facing the distance. To make it short: love facing the life. And all of this in this album. Simply amazing!

I’m not going to describe every song of the album (I did enough) and I will just have some words about Martina’s vocal performance. The emotions you will have listening to this album is not just because of the strong words of each song, but because Martina made such a vocal performance. For example in the “Long Distance Lullaby” song, sometimes you really think Martina’s whispering to her daughters with this sweet-mother-voice every woman can have talking to her kids. Or in “Watcha Gonna Do” she ends the song slowly and low letting you questioning yourself, thinking “Am I sometimes acting like this” (probably …) or something else. In “Broken Umbrella” she takes a joyfully voice to talk about love, because loving somebody is really beautiful, joyfully. She just has the right voice for what she’s singing: when it is happy you feel it her voice, when it is hard she makes you feel it. It is really hard to describe but when you’re listening to the album, you say to yourself “Wow, her voice is really the right for what she’s singing right now”. It is simply amazing!

To finish, Eleven is an amazing album (buy it, better twice that one), nothing more nothing less. I would like to say it is a “truth” album: every song is so strong, so true, so powerful. It’s not like i-m-gonna-make-a-new-album-just-for-making-one-yay. No, it is a bunch of emotions, the kind of album that at the end you’re saying to yourself “W-O-W, play it again”. Powerful, true, beautiful, touching, full of love.

Thank you very very very much Martina McBride, you truly deserve it, “It always be this way”

Maybe have you ever been confronted to the problem of getting the value of a field of an annotation. You see what I’m talking about? No. Example:

@Foo(myField="Hello there")
public class FooClass implements Serializable {
// ...
}

Let’s imagine you want to retrieve the value of myField (ie Hello there). How could You do that? Let me propose you two ways.

First way
The easier way but absolutely not scalable is to do the following code:

// ...
String myFieldValue = "Hello there";
// ...

Well it’s working, isn’t it? But imagine you have to get this value a lot of times, in different classes and so on … Are you going to use your favorite IDE’s function “Find and replace …”? Why not. But, lets take a look to a different way.

Second way
The other solution, much more scalable, is to use reflexivity. And the great thing about that is that you will be able to use for whatever annotation and whatever field. Lets take a look at this:

public String getClassAnnotationValue(Class classType, Class annotationType, String attributeName) {
        String value = null;

        Annotation annotation = classType.getAnnotation(annotationType);
        if (annotation != null) {
            try {
                value = (String) annotation.annotationType().getMethod(attributeName).invoke(annotation);
            } catch (Exception ex) {
            }
        }

        return value;
    }

How invoke that snippet of code?

// ...
String myFieldValue = getClassAnnotationValue(FooClass.class, Foo.class, "myField");
// ...

As you can see, you can use it for whatever class annotation on a class. You can now imagine doing the same for a field Annotation. Give it a try!

This is a pretty useful when you work in JEE. Imagine a SessionBean with may implementations, or an EntityBean with the @Table annotation, or a simple field with the @Column annotation. And these two last examples, it is useful if you build your own SQL queries. Because with this snippet of code, you won’t have to look everywhere you use your EntityBean and change the table name in your query …

Well, I hope this could help you sometimes.
Enjoy.

Context-Path in Java EE is kind of strange. Indeed, if you only have a WAR (not en EAR) changing the CP for the WAR is working fine. But if you are in an EAR, things are little bit different!

So how to do that? You have to create a file called a Standard Deployment Descriptor and put it into your EAR. The name of this file must be application.xml. This file contains the name of all modules you have in the EAR, and you can specify the context-path for your Web module. Let’s see an example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<application version="6" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/application_6.xsd">
  <display-name>JustMyApp</display-name>
  <module>
    <ejb>JustMyApp-ejb.jar</ejb>
  </module>
  <module>
    <web>
      <web-uri>JustMyApp-war.war</web-uri>
      <context-root>/JustMyApp</context-root>
    </web>
  </module>
</application>

The URL to enter to access your web application is just specified by the <context-root>…</context-root> markup. So put there whatever you want and just try it ! That’s how the Context-Path for EAR can be changed !

Enjoy.

For Mac users: find your NetBeans.app and right-click on it and choose Show Package Content. Then go to the Contents > Resources > NetBeans folder. Place the uml6 folder here. It’s done.

Enjoy.

You need to deploy Java applications on Mac? Take a look at : http://thierry.wasylczenko.free.fr/?p=108

Enjoy.

Enjoy

I’m writing a new post because I saw an awfull code to maximize a JFrame in Java. Maybe You’ve ever tried to maximize Your GUI at the startup of Your application. It’s something which is very basic but which can be done in several ways (and some awfull ways too…).

First of all, You could retrieve the size of Your screen, and set it to Your JFrame like this :

// Get the screen size
Dimension screen = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getScreenSize();
// Create a jframe, just for the example
JFrame myFrame = new JFrame();
// Set the size
myFrame.setPreferredSize(screen);
myFrame.setVisible(true);

Well this is bad… Why? Because imagine You created Your application on Linux, and then try to launch it on Windows (I test an application recently…). On Linux, fine. On Windows, the application was under the task bar… So a part of the application was hidden… And the developpers used a similar code. So, this is not really a good practice.
There is a much simplier and efficient way to do that. Just look at this :

JFrame myFrame = new JFrame();
myFrame.setVisible(true);
myFrame.setExtendedState(JFrame.MAXIMIZED_BOTH);

That’s all ! Much more simplier and better working. Notice that setting the state is after making the frame visible

Have You ever used JAI (Java Advanced Imaging) ? If You used the class ImageIO in order to read and save images, the answer is yes.
Most of the time, You should not have problem when You deploy Your application with an executable JAR even if You’re using JAI. But, most of the time doesn’t mean never, so that’s a problem !
Recently I had to deploy an application as a JAR, and this application was using quantity of external library. And of course it used JAI.
Well, doing a JAR is not really a problem but …

In my case, the application was developped with Eclipse, and was running fine in it. But, when it comes to run it with a JAR, that was problematic…
I got an exception when a tried to load images, especially TIFF images. This exception was thrown by JAI and told me that the vendorName was null. Interessting : but which vendor ??

The answer is quiet simple : JAI needs sometimes to know the name of the vendor who developped the application, and the implementation of it… OK, you’ll tell me “Fine. It seems it’s my application, so I’m the vendor. But how do I specify that?”. And that’s the point.

When You deploy an application as an executable JAR, You probably know that You need a manifest file. And that manifest file is the key. A complete valid manifest file could be this :

Manifest-Version: 1.0
Main-Class: fr.free.thierrywasyl.myproject.launcher.Launch

But where did I specify the author? No where. But JAI will maybe need to know that, or You’ll get an exception about the vendor. So let’s add some lines, which are good to add (take it as a good practice) which are general:

Manifest-Version: 1.0
Implementation-Vendor: Sun Microsystems, Inc
Implementation-Title: Java Runtime Environment
Implementation-Version: 1.6.0
Main-Class: fr.free.thierrywasyl.myproject.launcher.Launch

So far so good. So are You a null vendor? Of course not, You get over the exception
Enjoy.

I’ve been looking how to change the URL of a website I’m developping in JEE. You probably have noticed that the URL of the project You’re developping is something like : http://localhost:8080/theContextPathOfYourProject.
I’m currently developping my application with NetBeans and Glassfish V2 and I would like to change this URL with something more simple, like http://www.mysite.com/

So I checked out and a nice feature of Glassfish could be used : Virtual Hosting.
This article will show You how to do that, in the easiest way possible. So let’s go.

First of all, You’ll need to have a JEE application. With this application, You can change its context-path to something simple. For example, my application is named jacc so I changed its context-path to jacc. Do this is pretty simple.
In NetBeans, open the Projects window, right-click on Your application and choose Properties. In the new window, go to Run and change the context-path, as shown below :

After that, we’re going to work in the Administration console of Glassfish. So if Glassfish isn’t started yet, do it and go to the admin console.

Step 1:
We will create a virtual server. So let’s go to Configuration, HTTP Service and Virtual Servers. You should be there :

Click on the New… button. Give an id (for example jacc), the hosts (which corresponds to the address You’ll enter in Your browser to access Your website : I want jacc.com). Hit the OK button. We’ll create a listener and then, go back here.

Step 2 :
Here we will create a listener. This listener will listen requests on a given port. The default port Glassfish is listen to is 8080. If You don’t want to run Your app on  another port, You can go to step 3. Otherwise, let’s go.
We’re going to create a listener for the port 8282. On the left of the admin console, click on Configuration, then HTTP Service and HTTP Listeners. You should be there :

Right, click on the New… button. Give Your listener a name such as http-listener-3, the network address (in our case, for localhost, we enter 0.0.0.0), the listening port (8282 as we said) and the default virtual server, created before. So in the list You should see jacc. If not, restart Glassfish and restart this step. Hit Next and the Finish.

Step 3:
Then go back to the virtul servers list and click on the one You’ve created before. And in the text field for the HTTP Listners, enter the name of the listener You’ve created before. For me http-listener-3.
Then, in the list of Default Web Module, You will choose Your web application. Mine is called jAcc-war. So I select it. With that, You won’t need to type the context path of Your application in the URL
Ok, should be nice. Now, we have to indicates Glassfish our web application will run on our brand new virtual server.

Step 4:
So, go to Applications, Web Applications and select Your application. Mine is jAcc-war. Then select Your virtual server in the list like this :

So now, restart Your Glassfish. Then we’re going to work somewhere else…

Step 5:
When You type the hosts address You defined in the creation of Your virtual server (jacc.com for me) in the address bar of Your browser, it shouldn’t go to the right place… So You have to tell Your computer that this host is Your computer. So find a file named hosts in Your system. In Unix based OS, it should be in /etc/. On Windows system : C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc. Edit this file and add a line like this :
127.0.0.1    jacc.com

Well, now it should work So in Your brower, You should type the URL You wanted and the port on which Your virtual server listens. So for me jacc.com:8282
So it is more convenient, isn’t it?
So now You know how to deploy virtual servers using Glassfish.
Enjoy

The latest version of Eclipse is out Codename : Galileo. So be sure to grab it on : http://www.eclipse.org/
If You’re on Mac OS X : Leopard, You will prefer the Cocoa version of the IDE

Then, let me give You a little tip : if You’re on Mac OS X, and even if You’ve setted up the JDK 1.6 by default, Eclipse won’t recognize it, and will still use the JDK 1.5. So to change that, go to the Preferences of Eclipse and then to Java, Installed JREs. You should be there :

So click on the Add button. In the new window, select MacOS X VM as JRE type. Click next and now enter something like this in the JRE Home text field : /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6.0/Home
Right, You’ve done the most tough part of it
Enter an explicit name like JRE 1.6 for example and hit the Finish button. Now You just have to select the new JRE in the list.
Now under the Installed JREs node, select Your execution environment as shown bellow :

Well, it will soon be ok Just setup the compiler now. Go under Java, Compiler and select 1.6 in the list, as shown bellow :

That’s all
Enjoy.