Salient Soft

This post continues from my previous post on using the Tomcat Server Adapter, and details how to enable and configure logging. Configuring this is not obvious, and there are a number of issues :-

1. Eclipse does not fully enable logging for the Tomcat Adapter by default, so you will likely find application log calls not going anywhere, and any logging.properties file you set up won’t have any effect.
2. The Tomcat Adapter ignores any logging.properties file placed in WEB-INF\lib completely. You can only use one in the <Cataline  Base>\conf directory. More is said on the actual location of this directory later.
3. The configuration instructions are somewhat buried in the Eclipse WTP FAQ.

To enable logging for the Server Adapter, see here in the Eclipse WTP FAQ, details copied as follows. Note that the same procedure works on Eclipse Galileo 3.5.1 and Tomcat 6.0.24 :-

How do I enable the JULI logging in a Tomcat 5.5 Server instance?

Tomcat 5.5 comes with an enhanced implementation of java.util.logging, called JULI, which is configured by default in a standard Tomcat 5.5 installation. This JULI logging configuration is not picked up automatically when creating a new Tomcat 5.5 server in WTP. Some manual steps are necessary to add this configuration to your WTP Tomcat 5.5 server.

1. Open the server editor for the Tomcat server and note the folder specified by the Configuration path field.
2. Import the logging.properties file from the conf directory of your Tomcat 5.5 installation into this folder in your workspace.
3. In the server editor, click on the Open launch configuration link and in the launch configuration Properties dialog, switch to the Arguments tab.
4. In the VM Arguments field, add the following two system properties substituting the catalina.base path where noted:
   -Djava.util.logging.config.file=”<put catalina.base path here>/conf/logging.properties”
   -Djava.util.logging.manager=org.apache.juli.ClassLoaderLogManager

The imported logging.properties file can be used to control the JULI logging configuration for the Tomcat server.

Note that in my case I had set up the adapter to use the Workspace Metatdata so that the installed Tomcat server could also be used independently. Therefore, the cataline base path used was the configuration directory used by eclipse, listed as the configuration path on the Server Overview screen (double click the server to see this screen). My settings for the VM arguments were therefore as follows :-

-Djava.util.logging.config.file=
   "E:\Java\Dev\Workspaces\Sentry1\Servers\
     Tomcat v6.0 Server at localhost-config\logging.properties"
-Djava.util.logging.manager=org.apache.juli.ClassLoaderLogManager

This allowed me to expand the Server node for the server in the package explorer, and open the logging.properties file directly from there.

The following example logging.properties file illustrates the configuration of the logging. Tomcat uses JULI, an extended version of java.util.logging which allows extra features. It has the abilility to support per-application logging  – note that as above this is not supported in the Eclipse Server Adapter version, although for development time debugging this is not an issue, as you can have separate Tomcat configuration per Eclipse workspace if you store the Tomcat configuration in the Workspace metadata as above. JULI also allows multiple handlers to be loaded from the same class instance. See here for the official Tomcat documentation for configuring Tomcat logging.

The following example logging.properties file illustrates some configuration points :-

A custom console handler has been added to the handlers property at the top of the file, to allow uk.co.salientsoft to have finer grained logging than the default console logger. The default handler has a level of FINE, which would prevent other lower level loggers from using FINER or FINEST. Adding the additional handler allows all the existing logging to remain as is, but gives full flexibility to uk.co.salientsoft logging :-

handlers = 1catalina.org.apache.juli.FileHandler, \
           2localhost.org.apache.juli.FileHandler, \
           3manager.org.apache.juli.FileHandler, \
           4host-manager.org.apache.juli.FileHandler, \
           java.util.logging.ConsoleHandler, \
           5salientsoft.java.util.logging.ConsoleHandler

The new console handler is used to configure logging at FINEST level at the bottom of the file :-

5salientsoft.java.util.logging.ConsoleHandler.level = FINEST
5salientsoft.java.util.logging.ConsoleHandler.formatter = \
   java.util.logging.SimpleFormatter
uk.co.salientsoft.handlers = \
   1catalina.org.apache.juli.FileHandler, \
   5salientsoft.java.util.logging.ConsoleHandler
uk.co.salientsoft.level = FINEST

The following is a complete listing of the sample logging.properties file :-

# Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
# contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file distributed with
# this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
# The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
# (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
# the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at
#
#     http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
#
# Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
# distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
# WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
# See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
# limitations under the License.

handlers = 1catalina.org.apache.juli.FileHandler, \
           2localhost.org.apache.juli.FileHandler, \
           3manager.org.apache.juli.FileHandler, \
           4host-manager.org.apache.juli.FileHandler, \
           java.util.logging.ConsoleHandler, \
           5salientsoft.java.util.logging.ConsoleHandler

.handlers = 1catalina.org.apache.juli.FileHandler, \
            java.util.logging.ConsoleHandler

############################################################
# Handler specific properties.
# Describes specific configuration info for Handlers.
############################################################

1catalina.org.apache.juli.FileHandler.level = FINE
1catalina.org.apache.juli.FileHandler.directory = ${catalina.base}/logs
1catalina.org.apache.juli.FileHandler.prefix = catalina.

2localhost.org.apache.juli.FileHandler.level = FINE
2localhost.org.apache.juli.FileHandler.directory = ${catalina.base}/logs
2localhost.org.apache.juli.FileHandler.prefix = localhost.

3manager.org.apache.juli.FileHandler.level = FINE
3manager.org.apache.juli.FileHandler.directory = ${catalina.base}/logs
3manager.org.apache.juli.FileHandler.prefix = manager.

4host-manager.org.apache.juli.FileHandler.level = FINE
4host-manager.org.apache.juli.FileHandler.directory = ${catalina.base}/logs
4host-manager.org.apache.juli.FileHandler.prefix = host-manager.

java.util.logging.ConsoleHandler.level = FINE
java.util.logging.ConsoleHandler.formatter = java.util.logging.SimpleFormatter

############################################################
# Facility specific properties.
# Provides extra control for each logger.
############################################################

org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.[Catalina].[localhost].level = INFO
org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.[Catalina].[localhost].handlers = \
   2localhost.org.apache.juli.FileHandler

org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.[Catalina].[localhost].[/manager].level = INFO
org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.[Catalina].[localhost].[/manager].handlers = \
   3manager.org.apache.juli.FileHandler

org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.[Catalina].[localhost].[/host-manager].level = \
   INFO
org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.[Catalina].[localhost].[/host-manager].handlers = \
   4host-manager.org.apache.juli.FileHandler

5salientsoft.java.util.logging.ConsoleHandler.level = FINEST
5salientsoft.java.util.logging.ConsoleHandler.formatter = \
   java.util.logging.SimpleFormatter
uk.co.salientsoft.handlers = 1catalina.org.apache.juli.FileHandler, \
                             5salientsoft.java.util.logging.ConsoleHandler
uk.co.salientsoft.level = FINEST

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I have found the following sites useful :-

Tutorials

• Facelets Reference Documentation
• Icefaces Facelets Tutorial
• IBM Developerworks Facelets tutorial

Reference Information

• java.net Facelets Wiki – main page for the Facelets Wiki
• java.net Facelets Wiki FAQ – excellent and clear answers to common issues/gotchas
• c:forEach vs ui:repeat in Facelets – very useful and clear article on the gotchas around this and EL evaluation by Roger Keays

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This tutorial describes how to use the Component showcase css and icons as the template for your own project.

I’ve not looked into it in detail, but it certainly makes sense to use the same look and feel and borrow from ICEfaces where necessary.

One of the comments is less than complementary about some of the CSS code in the example.

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The following articles give details of the resolution of styles when multiple stylesheets are cascaded, and how styles are prioritised when multiple styles affect the same element.

• This article is a helpful introduction to the basics.
• This article from W3.org gives the full specification, but if starting out you are advised to read the above intro first!
• This article from David’s Kitchen gives a good insight into CSS Style inheritance, priority and the infamous specificity (try saying that one when you’ve had a few too many!)  I found it easier to understand particularly on priority than the W3.org spec above, although the latter is obviously the last word on how it all works.

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The following sites give a good introduction and insight into the use of floats and some of their quirks for the unwary.

This Excellent introductory float tutorial from Max Design is well worth working through entirely as a starter for beginners.

This article from CSS Newbie details some of the quirks of floats and how content flows around floated elements, and how container height is affected. There is a fundamental point which the article illustrates, but which I could not find spelled out clearly and obviously in other articles anywhere. When other elements flow around a floated one, it is the content area of their CSS boxes which flow. It is therefore perfectly possible (and normal) for the floated element to end up sitting inside the margin, border and padding areas of the elements which float around it. The article also describes how the floated element can overlap (extend beyond) the border of the flowing  element if for example the floated element is longer. This is not what you might expect. However, when the flowing element is itself floating, then the height of the (inner) floating element dictates the height of the flowing element.

The ‘flowing of content area’ behaviour is used when designing multi column layouts, as this article from Comunity MX illustrates. For example in a 2 column layout, the left column content is placed in a ‘float: left’ div. The adjacent right colum flows around it, and has a left margin set to the width of the left column plus any desired gap.

This article by Matthew James Taylor describes a template for a 3 column floating layout with header and footer. The interesting thing about this is that Matthew does not use any CSS hacks or browser specific coding, but manages to achieve wide cross browser compatibility. He also has a number of other templates, all freely available, an addition to an interesting article on how to acheive equal height column backgrounds, again by nesting floating column divs inside other divs which are also floating.

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This post details the installation I use for CVS based source control, together with some usage points and gotchas I came across. My preferred installation consists of the Eclipse CVS plugin and TortoiseCVS on the client side. This gives the flexibility of CVS access both inside and outside Eclipse. In my experience both CVS clients coexist well, and changes in one are immediately  reflected correctly in the other as would be expected. My server side consists of CVSNT running on a separate repository server.

I have broken this tutorial down into linked sub-posts as it was becoming too monolithic and covered multiple topics. The steps are as follows :-

1/ Server Installation using CVSNT

3/ Client Installation, Configuration and usage notes- TortoiseCVS

4/ Client Installation, Configuration and Usage notes – Eclipse CVS Plugin

5/ Branching and Merging in Eclipse CVS and TortoiseCVS

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See the Tomcat 6 Download Page

If you use the Windows service installer (self installing Exe) to install Tomcat 6.0.24 under Windows 7 64 bit, it insists on a 64 bit JVM. I am using a 32 bit JVM and if you try to use that, Tomcat will not start.

You can do this by using the 32 bit Windows zip version, which still allows you to run Tomcat as a service. It also allows you access to the Tomcat Configuration/Monitor utility which you can also run in the System Tray, but you have to set this up manually.

The following steps will do this install :-

1/ Download the 32 bit Zip installation above, and unzip to the desired target installation location.

2/ Edit <Tomcat Home>\conf\server.xml to change the default http port from 8080 if required

3/ Edit  <Tomcat Home>\conf\tomcat-users.xml to add an admin user if desired, by inserting the following in the <tomcat-users> section :-

<role rolename=”manager”/>
<role rolename=”admin”/>
<user name=”admin” password=”mypassword” roles=”manager,admin”/>

4/ Issue the command Service install from an administrator privileged command window pointing at the <Tomcat Home>\bin directory.

5/ Create the following shortcuts to run the Tomcat Configuration Utility and the System Tray Monitor Utility.
Substitute your device and directory for <Tomcat Home>.

Configuration Utility – Target:  “<Tomcat Home>\bin\tomcat6w.exe”  //ES//Tomcat6
System Tray Monitor – Target:  “<Tomcat Home>\bin\tomcat6w.exe”  //MS//Tomcat6
(Both Cases) – Start In: may be left blank
(Both cases) – Tick the Run as Administrator check box under either the Shortcut or compatibility tab.

6/ Note that you will have to OK running as administrator each time you run one of the shortcuts, assuming you have User Account Control turned on in Windows 7. This is also true if you try to run the tray monitor automatically in the startup group. Windows 7 insists that each time you log in, you have to OK the administrator usage(!) This is supposed to happen by adding such autostarted tray applications to a “blocked startup” group which have a tray icon to display and then selectively “OK” them to unblock them/OK the administrator usage. This never worked for me – anything I placed in the startup folder which needed administrator access just plain did not run at all, and I never saw this “blocked” icon. As it would mean OKing at each login anyway, it seemed to me that there is no point trying to autostart tray icons that need administrator access as it was more hassle to unblock them (even if it did work) rather than just run them as needed from the super bar or quick launch bar (and of course OK them).

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To set this up, I gave the designated user full permissions on the repository root, with full inheritance to all subfolders and files. I also made the user the owner, but this may not have been required. I also gave full access to the designated temp directory (the one set up in CVSNT admin) to this user.

When I tried to use a dedicated ‘limited’ (non administrator) account under windows XP pro I received the following error when I tried a checkout of CVSROOT :-

CVSNT user does not have read access to CVSROOT

Initially I thought this was an issue blocking all checkouts, as with the user set as an administrator, this checkout is allowed. However, the error only occurs on CVSROOT – all other operations on other modules appear to work normally. As CVSROOT is created internally by CVSNT as part of the repository, we should not be checking it out anyway so this should not be a problem.

Setting up this way minimises security issues especially when saving an explicit password parameter in TortoiseCVS (with the pserver protocol) to get around the lack of password caching.

The CVSNT admin utility, under the Server Settings tab, allows an anonymous user to be specified, allowing anonymous access from the clients. I did test this briefly, but could not get it to play ball with TortoiseCVS – tortoise always seemed to get demands for a password and gave an error if I tried anonymous access. I googled for answers to no avail – no info was available on this setting. I combed the documentation but this all seems to be aimed at the command line interface to CVS rather than the GUI control panel interface used in CVSNT.

My final solution therefore was to use an explicit limited (non administrator) account, which works fine.

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Branching allows version histories of a CVS module to proceed in parallel, by branching from an earlier version in the repository. This typically arises when a new release is under development in the repository (or has been released) and bug fix changes are needed to an older version without affecting the new release. A branch would be made at the older version and the bug fixes placed on the branch. A client (Eclipse or TortoiseCVS) can pick the branch to work with, and the local files are updated to reflect that branch.

1. To create a branch in Eclipse, select Team/Branch… from the context menu for the project
2. To create a branch in TortoiseCVS, select CVS/Branch… from the context menu.
3. To select a branch in TortoiseCVS, you do an Update Special and pick the branch to switch to.
4. To select a branch in Eclipse, you do Team/Switch to another branch or version

When Branching, you should normally branch a complete module not just a file. If you just branch a file in eclipse, Eclipse gives you a warning that you are mixing tags within a project. Tortoise does not give you a similar warning however. See here for the internals of branching in CVS. It seems that whilst internally it is done per file due to historical coding reasons, it should ideally be ‘grouped’ as CVS does group files.

If you branch by mistake, you cannot delete it – just leave it unused in the repository.

You can merge changes back into a branch from another branch with both these clients. In both cases, you should have the target branch (which will often be the head) as the current loaded one. You then pick the branch to be merged into it.

1. To merge a branch into the current branch in Eclipse, use Team/Merge
2. To merge a branch into the current branch in TortoiseCVS, use CVS/Merge

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Eclipse comes with a CVS plugin pre-installed. To connect to a repository, open the CVS Repositories view and add one via new from the context menu. The Eclipse CVS client is a pure Java one with a more limited set of protocols than the full set allowed by CVSNT – I use the pserver protocol, which encrypts passwords but not any other traffic. This is fine for a trusted internal development network behind a firewall. Eclipse does allow password caching and asks for secret questions for password recovery.

Note that if you get timeouts trying to connect to your repository and you are using CVSNT, make sure that you have excluded cvsservice.exe and cvslock.exe fully from both your Antivirus software on the server and the Windows Firewall on the server. In my case I used the default TCP ports in all cases on both clients and the server without problems once this had been done.

By default, my icons in the package/project explorers did not show when a file was dirty, i.e. when I had made local changes to a checked out file (Eclipse terms this an outgoing change). I could see the changes in the Team Synchronization view, which is useful as it isolates your changes from all the unchanged files, and allows filtering on the type of changes (outgoing, incoming, both, change conflicts). However, it is highly desirable to have the simple feature of tagging the icons on the dirty files, and this did not work even though I strongly suspected that such a feature would be available. It turned out that this labelling of the icons is enabled in the preferences.  Select Window/Preferences, then select Team/CVS/Label Decorations in the left pane, then the Icon Decorations tab, and select all the options. In my case, Outgoing changes was not selected, so local changes to a file in Eclipse did not make it show up as ‘dirty’ on the explorer icon. Selecting the option fixed the problem.

Usage Points

1. Most of the CVS options are under the Team submenu in the package explorer context menu.
2. However, one exception which can catch the unwary – to revert to checked out version – use Replace With and Latest from HEAD or Another Branch or Version on the explorer context menu
   i.e. this command is not under the TEAM submenu.
3. The CVS Repositories view is useful for browsing the server side repository including all the branches and files.
4. The Team Synchronization view is useful for viewing your changes – incoming, outgoing, and change conflicts

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