• a 3rd-party lib is not on Maven central or the desired version is missing
• you built modules/libraries which will be included in your other projects
• …

With the following steps you will be able to serve any artifact from a public GitHub repository by just added a few lines into your pom.xml. I personally wasted quite an amount of time on this topic so I guess I’ll save it here – for you and me.

Ready? Let’s start!

In our example we’ll use our GitHub repository to server a file which is not available at Maven Central as the time of writing.

1. Creating the GitHub repository

Follow this link and create a new repository named mavenrepo.

You could as well choose a different name but then you will have to change every occurance in the following steps. Your call.

2. Creating the content for this repository

Change into the folder where the new repository will be lying on your disk. From here you will be able to push changes into your remote repository and thus update your artifacts.

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~>cd dev
~/dev>mkdir mavenrepo
~/dev>cd mavenrepo
~/dev/mavenrepo>git init
~/dev/mavenrepo>git remote add origin git@github.com:YOURUSERNAME/mavenrepo.git
~/dev/mavenrepo>mkdir releases snapshots
#empty dirs can't be added to git
~/dev/mavenrepo>touch releases/README
~/dev/mavenrepo>touch snapshots/README
~/dev/mavenrepo>git add .
~/dev/mavenrepo>git commit -m "Initial setup"
#update the GitHub repo just for kicks
~/dev/mavenrepo>git push origin master

Cool, your local maven repository is waiting for it’s first artifact.

3. Creating the first artifact

Now you have to change to the location of your artifact-to-be.

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~/dev>cd ../../downloads/GoogleAnalyticsAndroid_1.3.1
~/downloads/GoogleAnalyticsAndroid_1.3.1>ls
libGoogleAnalytics.jar sample ReadMe.txt
#explanation below
~/downloads/GoogleAnalyticsAndroid_1.3.1>mvn deploy:deploy-file -DgroupId=com.google.android.apps -DartifactId=analytics -Dversion=1.3.1 -Dpackaging=jar -Dfile="libGoogleAnalytics.jar" -Durl=file:../../dev/mavenrepo/releases
 
[INFO] Scanning for projects...
[INFO]
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Building Maven Stub Project (No POM) 1
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO]
[INFO] --- maven-deploy-plugin:2.5:deploy-file (default-cli) @ standalone-pom ---
Uploading: file:../../dev/mavenrepo/releases/com/google/android/apps/analytics/1.3.1/analytics-1.3.1.jar
Uploaded: file:../../dev/mavenrepo/releases/com/google/android/apps/analytics/1.3.1/analytics-1.3.1.jar (43 KB at 751.5 KB/sec)
Uploading: file:../../dev/mavenrepo/releases/com/google/android/apps/analytics/1.3.1/analytics-1.3.1.pom
Uploaded: file:../../dev/mavenrepo/releases/com/google/android/apps/analytics/1.3.1/analytics-1.3.1.pom (400 B at 24.4 KB/sec)
Downloading: file:../../dev/mavenrepo/releases/com/google/android/apps/analytics/maven-metadata.xml
Uploading: file:../../dev/mavenrepo/releases/com/google/android/apps/analytics/maven-metadata.xml
Uploaded: file:../../dev/mavenrepo/releases/com/google/android/apps/analytics/maven-metadata.xml (307 B at 23.1 KB/sec)
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESS
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 1.121s
[INFO] Finished at: Sun Sep 11 01:05:09 CEST 2011
[INFO] Final Memory: 3M/77M
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

That’s (almost) it. Wait, what? No worries, I will explain the whole line for you so you can easily adjust it to your needs.

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mvn deploy:deploy-file 
		#this specifies the artificat and will (=should) match with your dependency-declaration in pom.xml	
		-DgroupId=com.google.android.apps -DartifactId=analytics -Dversion=1.3.1 \ 
		-Dpackaging=jar \ #deploy as jar 
		-Dfile="libGoogleAnalytics.jar" \ #source file to deploy
		-Durl=file:../../dev/mavenrepo/releases #target folder to deploy

For 3rd-party-libraries which aren’t subject to change (i.e. no snapshots) use the releases folder for your own snapshots use – you guessed it – the snapshots folder.

Your maven repository is almost ready to serve.

4. Online artifacts!

Let’s change back to the maven repository. To make everything world accessible we have to commit and push the files.

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~/downloads/GoogleAnalyticsAndroid_1.3.1>cd ../../dev/mavenrepo
# add everything which has changed or is new
~/dev/mavenrepo>git add .
# commit everything into the git-repo
~/dev/mavenrepo>git commit -m "Add Google Analytics library 1.3.1"
# push it to GitHub
~/dev/mavenrepo>git push origin master

So cool,eh? You can jump online to your GitHub repository to check if they’re there as expected. Aaalmost done.

5. Using your new maven repository

There are two ways to make maven aware of new repositories besides the pre-configured one. Either in ~/.m2/repositories/settings.xml which would be global for every repository but just for your user account. Or you can add the information into the pom.xml of your project. Since we want all developers for this project to easily use the new repository we will use the later.

Open your pom.xml and add the following lines for our example. Of course you have to edit the group-id, artifact and version according to your lib.

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<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/maven-v4_0_0.xsd">
    <modelversion>4.0.0</modelversion>
    <!-- ... more project definition -->
 
    <dependencies>
 
        <dependency>
		<groupid>com.google.android.apps</groupid>
		<artifactid>analytics</artifactid>
		<version>1.3.1</version>
        </dependency>
        <!-- more dependecies... -->
    </dependencies>
 
    <!-- build config etc. ... -->
 
    	<repositories>
		<repository>
			<id>YOURUSERNAME-snapshots</id>
			<url>https://raw.github.com/YOURUSERNAME/mavenrepo/master/snapshots</url>
			<releases>
				<enabled>false</enabled>
				<updatepolicy>always</updatepolicy>
				<checksumpolicy>warn</checksumpolicy>
			</releases>
			<snapshots>
				<enabled>true</enabled>
				<updatepolicy>never</updatepolicy>
				<checksumpolicy>fail</checksumpolicy>
			</snapshots>
		</repository>
		<repository>
			<id>YOURUSERNAME-releases</id>
			<releases>
				<enabled>true</enabled>
				<updatepolicy>always</updatepolicy>
				<checksumpolicy>fail</checksumpolicy>
			</releases>
			<snapshots>
				<enabled>false</enabled>
				<updatepolicy>always</updatepolicy>
				<checksumpolicy>warn</checksumpolicy>
			</snapshots>
			<url>https://raw.github.com/YOURUSERNAME/mavenrepo/master/releases</url>
		</repository>
	</repositories>
</project>

That’s it!

6. Final: See it in action

Now we can start up maven to make use of the new configuration.

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mvn clean package

If everything went well you should see “BUILD SUCCESS” and if you scroll up a bit you should see some Download-lines regarding your new repository. Maven will now try to load every new dependency from your GitHub-maven-repo so you can always decide if you want to host it yourself for some reason.

If you encountered errors along the way please let me know. This post is the result of several hours of trail and error and you should be fine following it. But of course it’s always possible you’ll run into problems.

Update:I noticed that I used the wrong group-id for my example. Normally it doesn’t hurt but it confuses everyone and so to be perfect added “.apps” to every occurance of this package-name.

stevie@box:~/dev/myproject/common [master]$


If you add the following lines into your ~/.bashrc you’ll always know which branch you are on.

Additionally you’ll be informed if the remote branch (if any) has been changed by adding “*” to the branches name. How cool is that?

stevie@box:~/dev/myproject/common [master *]$


Here are the lines to add which will do the magic for you:

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export GIT_PS1_SHOWDIRTYSTATE=true
export GIT_PS1_SHOWUNTRACKEDFILES=true
export GIT_PS1_SHOWSTASHSTATE=true
export PS1="${PS1::$((${#PS1}-3))}\$(__git_ps1 ' [\[\e[34;1m\]%s\[\e[0m\]]')\$ "

I thought I’d share it with the world.

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  /**
   * formats the xml output readable
   *
   * @param $simpleXmlObject instance of SimpleXmlObject to pretty-print
   * @return string of indented xml-elements
   */
  function format(&$simpleXmlObject){
 
    if( ! is_object($simpleXmlObject) ){
        return "";
    }
      	//Format XML to save indented tree rather than one line
  	$dom = new DOMDocument('1.0');
  	$dom->preserveWhiteSpace = false;
  	$dom->formatOutput = true;
  	$dom->loadXML($simpleXmlObject->asXML());
 
  	return $dom->saveXML();
  }

PS: In case you don’t know how to get a SimpleXml-Object.

I just love it. Thank you so much!

Link: Andy Maleh – Code Painter: Mouse-less Eclipse

Speed – or to be more precise the lack of it – is one of the major annoyances and a main reason for users to not come back. So it is in your own best interest to reach the best possible speed.

I found a very extensive list of website optimization techniques which I wanted to share with you (and to keep a link for future references). I can’t really say that by now I even follow half the list of improvements but I will certainly try to make the next app better than the one before – as always.

Link: www.chazzuka.com: Website Optimization Best Practices, speed up your website load

Now Adobe’s looking for developers using linux to test a new release and report bugs and other problems with the new package. To check if you’re a fit for this job Adobe has outlined a few key questions you have to check before applying for the job.

If you are interested and applying you have all the best wishes from me.

Link: Adobe AIR on Linux: Call for Pre-Release Users

The guys of JavaRanch.com try to accomplish just that:

Grab your marshmallows and a stick and gather ’round the campfire for some Java stories. The Ranch writers won’t be winnin’ any literary prizes, that’s fer sure. But ya still might learn a thing or two.

I find this approach very refreshing and I’m sure some of you dealing with certain more technical description will enjoy the casual written, funny illustrated yet informing stories.

So hop on your horse, ride on over to the ranch and give it a read @
JavaRanch Campfire – Getting in Touch with your Inner Class.

With this in mind you might tend to avoid any newer techniques, features or elements just to be on the safe side. But this also keeps you from using shortcuts and often results in worse quality.

If you planning to use a newer feature it might help if you knew which users won’t be able to enjoy your work to the full extend. To help everyone with this problem Alexis Deveria compiled a long list of the features and how are they supported by Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera. This list is even searchable and customizable to your needs (e.g. exclude browsers).

I can’t thank him enough for going through all that trouble finding these information and I am certain that this list will have a top spot in my future bookmarks and maybe in your’s too.

Link: When can I use… – a huge, searchable list of browser capabilities

If you could answer all these questions with a “yes” you might have noticed afterwards that you can’t do anything with this project because eclipse created it as “general project”, meaning no java, php or anything other specialized nature. This results in certain functions like Run as Java application not being accessable.

There are several solutions to that problem – but most of them are really ugly, imho. But since I don’t want to keep anything from you I will explain these methods too. So let’s get started…

The wrong way

The intuitive way you propably would start the task “to checkout a new project from SVN” might be “File -> New -> Project -> Others…-> Checkout a project from SVN”. In the result you’d have the previously mentioned “general project” which is pretty useless.

solution #1: edit .project

After the creation of the new project you quit eclipse, browse to the project folder in your file system and open the .project-file in a editor.

You’ll find these lines:

<natures>
</natures>

Change it to match:

<natures>
<nature>org.eclipse.jdt.core.javanature</nature>
</natures>

Save the file and fire up eclipse again, you will have your svn-project recognized as Java-project. This solution might be quick but the drawbacks are the quit/edit/start-sequence outside of eclipse and the necessity to find the right “nature” for your svn project.

solution #2: delete and recreate

After having completed the checkout you will delete your project. Yes, you read right. (I told you these methods are ugly! ) But when deleting be sure you don’t check the box for physically deletion of the files (so they’ll remain inside your workspace).

When you finished deleting the project you create a new project for the kind of project the svn project should represent (i.e. java, php etc.). While in the creation wizard be sure you select the same folder where the svn project has been checked out into.

The newly created project will have the right project type and will contain all files from the repository. Sometimes it is necessary to refresh the workspace (windows: hit F5 on the project).

Although this method also results in having the right data with the correct project type it has a bad taste jumping through these hoops in order to finish a simple task like that.

Since I wasn’t pleased with all those solutions I kept on looking. Finally I found…

The right way

Besides the following solution is the one most hoopless (no pun intended) the claim “right” is justified because it seems that this is the way the eclipse devs want us to check out a project.

In order to accomplish the task at hand you have to

• open the SVN Exploring-perspective
  ( Windows -> Open Perspective -> Other… -> SVN Exploring)
• create a new repository location or select the desired source
• browse to the parent folder of your new project (e.g. trunk)
• right click on the folder, choose Checkout…
• in the new dialogue you will have the chance to select Check out as a project configured using the New Project Wizard, take that chance, fill out the rest as you please and hit Finish
• in the new project wizard which will open next you can choose your desired project type (e.g. java) and set up everything like you would in a normal project (e.g. compliler compliance level, JRE, related projects etc.)
• after hitting this finish button you will notice that the svn is queried to retrieve the code
• and you’re done!

In my opinion this way is the most hazzle-free way to check out a new project though I love to see it the other way around too (New->Project->New Project from SVN -> yada yada yada -> “Please select a project type or press OK to let it remain a generel project.”). Until this is implemented I will go with the second best solution.

Have a good look a the compiled list and be sure to bookmark it for the next crisis with TSVN…

Link: Subversion and TortoiseSVN tips and tricks.

According to him, Sun will continue the work on Swing and even more try to ease the development and enhance the deployment and runtime performance.

The whole post sounds very convincing that Sun hasn’t given up and that Swing will become more and more useful (again).

Danny also mentioned new components in JDK7 like the DatePicker and CSS styling – both are very attractive to me and I can’t wait to use them in the next project.

Read the whole post at: Swing and JDK 7 : The Planetarium.

Till now you might have tried to fix every render bug after another hoping that you still can finish in time.

Eric Meyer, yes the Eric Meyer, was tired of this problem too and created a template to reset all the common differences to a certain standard. If you start your webdesign based on this stylesheet, your design should yield much fewer rendering errors and you won’t have to worry that much about the creepy IE6 or some less common browsers.

Link: Eric’s Archived Thoughts: Reset Reloaded.

For those of you who are already in the business with Silverlight Tim Heuer collected a list of controls useable for Silverlight. The list seems to be very long but he added some comments to help you find your way through it. The user comments below contain additional tips, too.

So, if you ever are afraid of losing control in your Silverlight app – Tim is the man to visit

Link: A comprehensive list to Silverlight Controls for developers

You might remember sentences like “But it worked yesterday!” or “Why the hell did I change that and when?” which were common companions when I looked at code I wrote a while back.

To avoid situations like this, a version control system could be a valid solution with more benefits than just less confusion.

Ernie Leseberg made the effort to collect most of the reasons I could think of on why to use a VCS with a small team or even if you are working alone.

If you don’t use a VCS yet give the article below a read and hopefully you will change your mind.

Link: Why use version control for solo developers or small teams

It is useable in any servlet container but – as you might already expected – it is built to work tighter with JBoss Application Server.

The features list provided on the front page shows very interesting details about the project. It supports various techniques and connection types. It looks worth checking out for the next java based project.

Do you have any experience with RESTEasy? What’s your favorite for implementing web services? Any comments on the featured project?

Links:

• jboss.org: RESTEasy
• Bill Burke’s blog about REST

Sadly the documentation and the usage examples are very poor on this topic so PHPBuilder Forum member iceomnia decided to do something about it and wrote a quick howto on this subject.

With that information you can jump right into the code and generate your own XML files within minutes. Have fun…

Link: PHPBuilder.com, the best resource for PHP tutorials, templates, PHP manuals, content management systems, scripts, classes and more.

Note: The article mentioned here is in German. Sorry if you can’t read it. Maybe this article could be a start for you though.

Link: Code-Inside Blog: HowTo: Einstieg in “Cloud-Computing”

Maybe it’ll help you through the hard time figuring out the basics or solving specific issues.

Link: Zend Framework Book: Surviving The Deep End.

Today in Washington, DC, experts from more than 30 US and international cyber security organizations jointly released the consensus list of the 25 most dangerous programming errors that lead to security bugs and that enable cyber espionage and cyber crime. Shockingly, most of these errors are not well understood by programmers; their avoidance is not widely taught by computer science programs; and their presence is frequently not tested by organizations developing software for sale.

The impact of these errors is far reaching. Just two of them led to more than 1.5 million web site security breaches during 2008 – and those breaches cascaded onto the computers of people who visited those web sites, turning their computers into zombies.

[...much more...]

If you are a programmer and have the urge to make a perfect application you have to admit that this excerpt teases you. You want to know if you are better than these guys who messed up epically.

Let’s see, which errors could you have made?

Well, of course, we have the three regulars SQL Injection, Cross Site Scripting and OS Command Injection. These three are still very common although there are a various number of best practises available to prevent them.

So if you have one of these in your application you would be in good company but you will have ignored some basic rules like “Don’t trust user input!“.

Ok, moving on. What else is there password- and cryptographie-related errors are often a source of fun or blank horror. There are the ones where you should have watched the newspages like “Use of a Broken or Risky Cryptographic Algorithm“, things you should know to avoid like “Hard-Coded Password” and “Client-Side Enforcement of Server-Side Security” and things you could have tested properly like “Execution with Unnecessary Privileges” or “Improper Access Control (Authorization)“.

I know, i know – you would have done (or not done) all these things if you just had enough time for it. Well, I know the clients and I know that they don’t have the feeling for tasks like “testing”. They can’t possibly understand why such a task is taking so much time. But as reality shows it is wise to invest a big chunk of your development time into it.

So it is your tasks to make sure the client (or your boss for that matter) understands the need for testing and making “unnecessarry” code for checking user input etc. It is in both his/her interest and yours to produce an application holding up against real world scenarios and bored high school kids.

Link: SANS Institute – CWE/SANS TOP 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors.