• 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.

JKS has a big advantage over the PKCS12-format: It knows trusted certificates. This way you can use certificates, normally untrusted by your application because the Certificate Authority (CA) is not trusted within the default keystore.

To convert your PKCS12-keystore to a JKS-type use the following line:

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 keytool -importkeystore -srckeystore oldkeystore.pkcs -srcstoretype pkcs12 -srcstorepass oldsecret -destkeystore newkeystore.jks -deststoretype jks -deststorepass newsecret

After execution of this line you will have a 2nd keystore in the directory named “newkeystore.jks”.

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< ?php
 
class Bootstrap extends Zend_Application_Bootstrap_Bootstrap
{
	protected function _initDoctrine()
	{
		$manager = Doctrine_Manager::getInstance();
		$options = $this->getOption("doctrine");
		if(empty($options['models_path']))
			$options['models_path'] =  APPLICATION_PATH . '/models';
 
		foreach($options as $key => $value)
		{
			if($key != 'connection')
				$manager->setAttribute($key, $value);
		}
 
		if(empty($options['connection']))
			throw new Exception("No database connection string provided!");
 
		Doctrine_Manager::connection($options['connection']);
		Doctrine::loadModels($options['models_path']);
		return $manager;
	}
}
?>

The application.ini configuration file then needs some of these information:

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; Database configuration
doctrine.connection = "mysql://user:pass@localhost/database"
doctrine.models_path = APPLICATION_PATH "/models"
doctrine.data_fixtures_path = APPLICATION_PATH . "/data/fixtures"  
doctrine.migrations_path = APPLICATION_PATH . "/data/migrations"  
doctrine.sql_path = APPLICATION_PATH . "/data/sql"
doctrine.yaml_schema_path = APPLICATION_PATH . "/data/schema
; Options for generating models from YAML
doctrine.generate_models_options.phpDocPackage = "Your PHP doc package"
doctrine.generate_models_options.phpDocSubpackage = "Subpackage"  
doctrine.generate_models_options.baseClassName = "Model_"  
doctrine.generate_models_options.phpDocName = "Your name"  
doctrine.generate_models_options.phpDocEmail = "email@address.com"  
; Set this to true to generate base classes. Set to false to make autoloading easier
doctrine.generate_models_options.generateBaseClasses = false

The command line interface is a good way of dealing with model and database generation, this is how the PHP CLI script for Doctrin + Zend looks like (inspired by this post):

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#!/usr/bin/php
< ?php
/**
 * Doctrine CLI script
 */
 
define('APPLICATION_ENV', 'development');
 
define('APPLICATION_PATH', realpath(dirname(__FILE__) . '/../application'));
 
set_include_path(implode(PATH_SEPARATOR, array(
    realpath(APPLICATION_PATH . '/../library'),
    get_include_path(),
)));
 
require_once 'Zend/Application.php';
 
// Create application, bootstrap, and run
$application = new Zend_Application(
    APPLICATION_ENV,
    APPLICATION_PATH . '/configs/application.ini'
);
 
$application->getBootstrap()->bootstrap('doctrine');
 
$config = $application->getOption('doctrine');
 
$cli = new Doctrine_Cli($config);
$cli->run($_SERVER['argv']);
?>

With this you can get started to use Doctrine + Zend Framework.

phpmail() IS OUT! Get rid off it. Now!

One of the most common sources of spam are “hacked” webservers and poorly or even non-secured forms. By using phpmail the webserver must be allowed to send mails without checks for a valid sender. This results – mostly on a shared web host – in having checking every clients installations for the bad script while the mailserver gets blacklisted due to the spam wave.

There are enough possibilities out there on how to send mail without using phpmail such as PEAR Net_SMTP. I even encourage every webmaster to turn off phpmail by blacklisting this function in php.ini. This way the developers would be forced to name an smtp account for sending mail which is much easier to track (and shut off if neccessary).

although we don’t like to blindly follow trends we decided to open up a twitter-account.

You can follow us here. You can expect to be informed when a new blog post is published and we will tweet links and interessting stuff which would be too small for a whole article.

We hope you like our new way of communicating with you and would be glad if you follow us.

easy_install http://svn.edgewall.org/repos/trac/branches/0.11-stable

Since the release of Subversion 1.5 the version of easy_install included in the Debian repository ran into a compatibility issue. Instead of working as expected it always complained:

error: Unexpected HTML page found at http://svn.edgewall.org/repos/trac/branches/0.11-stable

The problem seems to be that the SVN-Web-Output generated by Subversion 1.5+ is not being understanded by setuptools. In the issue tracker for the trac-plugin-project trac-hacks.org I found the easiest way to solve this problem. You will use the setuptools to update itself and then you won’t have problems anymore:

easy_install -U setuptools

PS: This problem also occured when trying to install plugins from trac-hacks.org since they also use SVN 1.5+.

I just love it. Thank you so much!

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

The next steps will be a Zend Form derivate that can generate forms by using the meta information from your doctrine
model but stays fully customizable as well as cool Ajax/ExtJs support.

Download 0.001 PreAlpha

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 team of PostgreSQL wants a redesign of their homepage and started a contest to find the new look. If you are interested to win the 2000$-prize you should visit the page and get involved.

Good luck!

Link: PostgreSQL: News: PostgreSQL.org Website Design Contest

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.

So these tips might become in handy if you have to design your next webapp or if you have to make another site more attractive for users (i.e. redesign/relaunch).

Enjoy.

Link: Top 10 Mistakes in Web Design Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox.

Today I stumbled upon a video which imo describes the situation of our daily work very well. So let’s whine a bit, then get a free hug from a colleague and after that GO BACK TO WORK!

Enjoy…

Thanks to m3nt0r for the article and the other good tips posted in his other blog. Keep it on!

PS: I promise to produce more content in the next few days, mainly about my current experiences with our current CakePHP project.

(morganj): 0 is false and 1 is true, correct?
(alec_eso): 1, morganj
(morganj): bastard.

Cheat sheets for:

• Photoshop (CS3 & 4)
• CSS
• (X)HTML
• JavaScript
• mootools
• PrototypeJS
• and Flash

14 Most Useful Web Design Cheat Sheets | Web Design Ledger.

I guess many people had this problem before and I think everybody managed to solve this quite similar. Anyways, just in case this is useful for anybody: here’s how I added a pagination to a site recently.

Given you have an array of products for example. Or maybe search results, a list of articles… something like that. Unfortunately they are too many to display them on a single page. Well, sure, you could but let’s be honest: that isn’t an option as the page would exceed its “scrollable-with-no-harm-to-scroll-fingers” length. And you don’t want to get sued by your visitors, right
Ok, so you’re going to add a nice pagination to your site, so that everybody is happy.
What I found out to be a bit tricky was to calculate the actual number of pages. We need that number so that we know, how many page links we will show next to our current view.

Two simple examples to illustrate the probelm:
Let’s say we have 8 items. 8 divided by 4 is 2, so we’re going to need two pages. No big deal, right?
Okay then we try this with 9 items. 9 divided by 4 gives us 2.25. So we will clearly need a 3rd page for product number 9, but how do we calculate this from our result?

$itemcount = $res->length();
$pagemin = $itemcount / 4;
$pagemax = ceil($itemcount / 4);
if ( $pagemax - intval($pagemin) === 1) ) {
$pages = $pagemax;
} else {
$pages = intval($pagemin);
}


The code explained

That’s why I compare two values here: the actual division result and the next bigger integer. Now we try to find out if both values differ. If they do, we have a scenario where we do want another page, so we pick the bigger result as our page number. If not we are just happy and use the smaller number.

So now that we know our actual page count we can do something (slightly simplified) like this:


while($i = 0;$i < $pages; $i++) {
print '<a href="?page=' . $i . '">Page ' . $i . '';
}


With a little bit of styling this even looks nice. And of course, this is just a start. You also might want to add “previous” and “next buttons”, or those “first page”, “last page” buttons, limit the maximum number of page links shown, or you could center the currently viewed page in the middle, hide the previous button on the first page, etc… There are a lot of fine tuning options that will improve the user experience of your pagination.

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