Eolas Nightmare Coming to an End?

After two years of patent-induced pain, Microsoft will be removing the Eolas “fix” from IE in April of next year.

At that point, users should no longer be forced to click on embedded active content (such as Flash, Java, Quicktime, or Windows Media) to interact with it after April ’08. Consequently, we will not be required forced to write out our object tags with JavaScript.

I can only hope this will come to pass! This one change was a major setback to Web Standards and Web Accessibility efforts.

Unit Testing and Subversion – Where should I put the test classes?

I’m starting a strong push to institute Unit Testing in a relatively new project; I figure it will be easier to really get into the habits in a new project from the start, rather than trying to steer some of our ancient existing projects in that direction right away. But I’ve hit a snag… where should I keep the test classes?

We’ve been using Subversion to manage our project files since shortly after I started here… getting us into source control was one of my first imperatives. So our code is laid out nicely in folders:


Project A
|____ src
|____ lib
|____ docs
|____ db

Project B
|____ src
|____ lib
|____ docs
|____ db

In the src folder, I have things organized in packages like


src/edu.psu.ist.project-a.component-a
src/edu.psu.ist.project-a.component-b

So where do I put the test cases? I could put them in a test package at the root of the project:


src/edu.psu.ist.project-a.test.component-a
src/edu.psu.ist.project-a.test.component-b

But what I’m really leaning toward is mirroring the main folder structure of the package in a test package in the root of the repository, at the same level as the src folder:


src/edu.psu.ist.project-a.component-a
src/edu.psu.ist.project-a.component-b
test/testComponent-a
test/testComponent-b

My thinking is that the classes in the test package would not get deployed with my actual project code, so they shouldn’t be in the real source package tree. But I’m still not sure.

Advice for jumping into Java Web Services?

So I’ve landed on a new project. We’ve been asked to port a well-studied
scientific algorithm into a Web Service, hoping to link the calculated
results into a networked client for visualization (likely Google Earth).

Now, porting the algorithm (from MATLAB) should be relatively
straightforward. What I’m unsure about is where to start building the Web
Service! I’ve previously just used ColdFusion for anything that needed to serve a
data feed (like sending RSS or feeding a Flash or Flex app), but the requirements from the
contracting agency really point to something more portable like Java, Python or Ruby. Since I’m most familiar with Java, and there have been a few articles here and there on Java Web Services, that seemed to be a likely path.

I’ve read about SOAP, REST, and XML-RPC, and the Apache Axis library. Then I found Axis2, and heard about CXF from a colleague. Can anyone
offer any advice as to where to start? Does anyone even build Web Services by hand anymore?

Oh, and Barry… I know I still owe you those 8 things you asked about.

Adobe MAX ’07 Day Zero: Hands-on AIR for Flex Developers

Sitting in the hands-on session on AIR for Flex Developers. Things got off to a rocky start — the trial version of Flex Builder on my workstation was expired! What made this especially crazy is all of the workstations are imaged with VMWare Windows systems… why just me? We figured it out pretty quickly; somehow my system clock got set to September 2nd. uh, ooops.

- Brian P.

Which JVM for ColdFusion development on Mac?

I’ve been having a lot of UI freezes lately on my MacBook Pro. The system will lock up for 20-30 seconds, with mouse movement, but no responses to clicks or the keyboard.

I’m suspecting that this is something to do with CF 8 and/or Eclipse on Apple’s Java 1.5 JVM. The freezes happen most often when one or the other of these applications are running.

Things seem a whole lot better when I roll back to Java 1.4, but CFEclipse stops working.

I’ve also found references to running CF 8 on Java 1.6. Maybe that’s the next thing to try.