User friendly URL’s are a personal pet peeve. The last couple consumer focused web applications I’ve written using Struts used a servlet filter to effective rewrite the URL from something like /articles/pets to /do/articles/pets or /articles/pets.do. This same pet peeve kept from me taking any more than a cursory glance at Tapestry, which (at least in the examples I’ve seen) produce some pretty ugly URL strings. Until today that is… Matt Raible pointed out that some guys just converted a 300 page JSP site to Tapestry and the resulting URL’s are pretty nice looking. You can read about how they did it on the Tapestry user list.

Also of note, in Matt’s comments, Dave Keller pointed out an URL rewriting tool on java.net called urlrewrite that looks like it might come in handy sometime.

Allen Holub from SD Times wrote a flattering article on Hibernate in this month’s magazine. He thinks that the “.. main strength of Hibernate is its ease of use.” I’m not sure I want to work on a project involving databases where Hibernate isn’t used and everytime someone whispers that I might have to work on a .NET web application at work, I wonder what the .NET equivalent of Hibernate is. Are .NET people satisfied with this:

String sql = "update newsletter set title = 'New Article'";
String connstring = "...";
SqlConnection sqlcon = new SqlConnection(connstring);
SqlCommand sqlCmd = new SqlCommand (sql, sqlcon);
sqlcon.Open();
sqlCmd.ExecuteNonQuery();
sqlcon.Close();

when you could be doing this:
...
newsletter.setTitle("New Article");
...
getDAO().save(newsletter);


If you’re using the SQL Server 2000 Driver for JDBC and Commons DBCP and you either you see this error in your logs:

java.sql.SQLException: [Microsoft][SQLServer 2000 Driver for JDBC]Connection reset by peer: socket write error

and / or your application stops functioning after your SQL Server is restarted or the connection between the your application and the SQL Server is terminated, then you need to add this to your JDNI setup:

<parameter>
  <name>validationQuery</name>
  <value>select $somecolumn FROM $sometable</value>
</parameter>

where the value is a query that returns at least one row from your database. According to the documentation, the validation query is:

“… invoked in an implementation-specific fashion to determine if an instance is still valid to be returned by the pool. It will only be invoked on an “activated” instance.”

In my testing, if I add the validationQuery parameter to my JNDI setup, restart the servlet container (in this case Tomcat), request a page and then stop SQL Server, an error is returned (as expected). After starting SQL Server and requesting another page, the application returns to normal usage (which doesn’t happen if the validationQuery parameter is not present).