Some irish guy wrote up a short blogging APIs mini how-to yesterday. Then some other guy from England (I think) commented that he had written up a quick example of using the apache xml-rpc package to call the metaWeblog api. So I had to try it too. Turns out that a) xml-rpc is really easy to do and b) the Moveable Type xml-rpc api is really easy too… the code below calls the getRecentPosts() method of the metaWeblog api using the apache xml-rpc package:

import org.apache.xmlrpc.*;
import java.util.*;
public class MTTest {
  public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {

   System.out.println(“Starting Movable type stuff”);
   Vector params=null;

   // Create XML RPC Client object
   XmlRpcClient xmlrpc = new XmlRpcClient(“http://yourhost.com/MT-2.21/mt-xmlrpc.cgi”);

   // blogger.getRecentPosts
   // String appkey, String blogid, String username, String password, int numberOfPosts
   System.out.println(“Adding the parameters”);
   params = new Vector();
   params.add(“your_weblog_id”); // weblog id
   params.add(“yourusername”); // username
   params.add(“yourpassword”); // password
   params.add(“4”); // number of posts to retrieve…

   System.out.println(“Making the call”);
   Vector v = (Vector)xmlrpc.execute(“metaWeblog.getRecentPosts”,params);

   System.out.println(“This call results in ” + v.size() + ” posts.”);
   System.out.println(“These are the results:”);
    for (int i=0; i

I was looking for any best practices related to overriding the equals() method in objects and came across javapractices.com, which has a section devoted to the equals() method: Implementing equals. This article doesn’t really answer the question of “when” you override the method, although from other reading I can surmise that you do so whenever you think you or someone else may need to use the object as a key in a hashtable. Any other opinions as to the “when” of overriding the equals() method?

On the subject of free books, Marty Hall’s book Core Servlets & JSP is available for free as well, you can download the PDF here.

We had a thread going at work about finding out if the user is requesting a URL securely, ie: using HTTPS. Various methods were thrown about: getScheme(), getProtocol(), getServerPort()… We missed the most obvious one: isSecure()

I posted some notes a couple weeks ago about .NET configuration files, came across the code for doing the same thing in a servlet container tonight. Basically, you get a ServletConfig object using the getServletConfig() method of the Servlet interface and then call getInitParameter(String initParamName) on that. For example, let’s say that I put a global database connection string in my web.xml deployment descriptor:

<web-app>
  <servlet>
   <servlet-name>myservlet</servlet-name>
   <servlet-class>MyServlet</servlet-class>
    <init-param>
     <param-name>connection_string</param-name>
     <param-value>user id=sa;password=mypassword;initial catalog=mydb;data source=mydbserver;Connect Timeout=30</param-value>
    </init-param>
  </servlet>
</web-app>

Then, in my servlet code init() method, I could write this:

ServletConfig sc = getServletConfig();
String connection_string = sc.getInitParameter(“connection_string”);

After retrieving the value from the ServletConfig object, you’ll probably want to store it for later use in the ServletContext object:

ServletContext c = getServletContext();
c.setAttribute(“connection_string”, connection_string);

Now I can get the connection string in a JSP or a servlet later using this short snippet:

String myCS = (String)getServletContext().getAttribute(“connection_string”);

Manning Publications is offering their J2EE and XML Development book for free as a PDF on TheServerSide

From TheServerSide.com: New Portal Launched: PatternsCentral.Com: “PatternsCentral is a portal website and supporting e-newsletter aimed at the growing community of architects, designers, and developers using pattern-based development for enterprise and web-based applications.“