Category Archives: J2EE

J2EE

Java accessor visibility

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Java accessor visibility: When to make accessors public, and when to keep them private

“So how do you determine the proper visibility of an accessor method? My experience is that you should always strive to make accessors protected, so only subclasses can access the attributes. You should try to make accessors private if subclasses don’t need access to the attribute. Only when an external class or object needs to access an attribute should you make the appropriate getter or setter public. It is quite common for the visibility of corresponding getter and setter methods to be different: in the class Seminar, you see the getTitle() method has public visibility, yet setTitle() has private visibility.”

J2EE

Wafer

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Wafer is a research project which compares the many open source web application frameworks which are available using a common example application. This research project is designed to compare the application frameworks on a level field by specifying an example application so that the application features become irrelevent and the merits of each framework becomes the focus.

ColdFusion, Content Management, J2EE, Open Source, Systems Administration

Verity Spider tips & tricks

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Thanks to Phil for sending me a link to the Verity Spider tips & tricks on daemon.com.au. Daemon is/was a big Spectra shop and probably used the spider to search Spectra sites on a regular basis. So why doesn’t that page show up in a google search for “verity spider” or “verity spider tips“? Maybe it’s because of the way their content management system works, where each page is denoted by a CF UUID appended to the URL. This method probably helps the developers, but in the long run, isn’t so good for getting ranked or even indexed by the larger search engines… which led me to todays’ research: mod_rewrite. I got my MCSE from Microsoft back a couple years ago, so my first exposure to web servers was IIS. IIS was then and for the most part, is now very pointy clicky (although I’ve heard that .NET IIS will have a text-based configuration file). Anyway, Apache wasn’t something I played with much until the last year, when I brought up a couple linux machines and thus Apache. So today I dove headfirst into mod_rewrite and came up a solution for making the next version (due out anyday now) of karensrecipes.com more search engine friendly. In short, to get to a recipe on the development site right now, you’d type in something like this:

http://www.karensrecipes.com/recipes/detail.jsp?r=18

Again, just like the link I mentioned above, this is not an example of how to impress the search engines. Some kung foo regular expressions and a dab of JKMount knowledge and we now get something like this:

http://www.karensrecipes.com/recipes/18/Steamed_Mussels.jsp

and in your Apache httpd.conf:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/recipes/([0-9]+)/.*$ /recipes/detail.jsp?r=$1 [PT]

which in English says something like “if the request starts with ‘/recipe/’ and then is followed by any number of digits and then is followed by a ‘/’ and any number of other characters, then rewrite the URL to this… (wanna know more about regular expressions? get this fabulous book!)

Pretty snazzy eh? It gives me warm feelings inside because my JSP/Servlet code doesn’t have any knowledge that funny stuff is being done to the URL in Apache, which means you can do all sorts of chicanery to your URL without having to change a lick of server side code.

J2EE

Search-Enable Your Application with Lucene

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Reading this month’s Java Developers Journal while exercising today, specifically, the article titled “Search-Enable Your Application with Lucene“. Back a couple months ago when I first added Lucene searching to this site, I thought it would have been a great feature to be able to index a URL. So, for example, when creating and updating an index of files in directory on the file system, you’d do something like this:

IndexWriter writer = new IndexWriter(“index”, new StandardAnalyzer(), true);
File file = new File(“c:\htmlToIndex”);
String[] files = file.list();
for (int i = 0; i Verity Spidering. Very nice! So I guess the same code I mentioned above could be done from the command line like so:

c:\cfusionmx\lib\_nti40\bin\vspider -common c:\cfusionmx\lib\common -collection c:\new -start http://www.mysite.com/products/? -indinclude *

But one of the advantages that Lucene has over a product like Verity is the ability one has to customize indexing and searching routines. For instance, one of the examples the author(Craig Walls) gave was the ability to add synonym-matching capability in your indexing routine. Basically, in Lucene, if you want add synonyms to keywords, you subclass TokenFilter, by writing a short bit of code (he provided an example in the source code) and you’re done. To the best of my knowledge, you can’t do that with Verity. Correction: you can’t “extend” Verity… but it comes with a simliar feature to the above mentioned ‘synonym’ feature called “THESAURUS” (“Expands the search to include the word that you enter and its synonyms”). I’ve not spent much time with Verity, but the evidence operators on the CFMX docs page are really intriguing, specifically the “THESAURUS”, “SOUNDEX” and “TYPO/N” evidence operators.