Today I downloaded Eclipse 3.0 M1 because I wanted to see how Eclipse/SWT is improving on OS X. Long story short: very nice! The performance is much better than the current stable release 2.1. Most parts now feel very smooth on my G4 733. Scrolling large Java files is really fast. I guess I will stick to IDEA for now because personally I think that the workflow in IDEA is still better. But if you are looking for a free Java IDE you might give Eclipse 3.0 M1 a try =)

There's a nice article about Jakarta commons over at ONJava.com.

After some weeks of hacking I finally replaced the backend of my little website. The new version is based on 100% pure Java technologie. Actually I wanted to learn about all those new cool frameworks such as Jakarta Struts, Hibernate, Jakarta-Commons, JSTL, EJB and so on. I ended up with an entire rewrite of the old backend. In fact my new backend has a lot of more features such as news, weblogs, comments, private messages and profiles. This page, however, only uses the weblog feature currently. I am working with some friends on a new project which will be based on my new system. You may ask which project? Well, stay tuned =) I will release the source under an open source license and perhaps even host it on sourceforge.net. Currently we are searching for a nice name. Suggestions?

Some days ago I've installed Gentoo 1.4 on my Dell box because I was sick of the RPM hell. The good thing is that Gentoo is up-to-date concerning system software packages. The bad thing is that Gentoo is up-to-date concerning system software packages? Err? Well, in case you are able to compile the sources on your own ... fine! But commercial software very often requires old system packages, mostly older versions of the GLIBC. IBM's WebSphere 4.0 is such a candiate (in fact the bundled JVM is affected) and therefore it requires some tweaking in order to run on Gentoo 1.4. After some investigation I found out that WebSphere 4.0 requires a GLIBC with kernel 2.2.5 support. Fortunately the GLIBC which comes with Gentoo 1.4 can support this feature. It is, however, disabled by default and therefore you must recompile the GLIBC. The following steps are required: [code] 1. Change into the directory /usr/portage/sys-kernel/linux-headers 2. Emerge linux-headers-2.2.20.ebuild 3. Drink some coffee 4. Change into the directory /usr/portage/sys-libs/glibc 5. Emerge glibc-2.3.2-r1.ebuild 6. Drink lots of coffee or take a walk [/code] Make sure that you do not have "ntpl" in your USE variable before rebuilding the GLIBC. Afterwards WebSphere 4.0 should run fine =)

Restarting a webapp via HTMLAdapter (jmx-console) works fine. Restarting a webapp via RMIAdapter, however, produces a lot of errors, mostly javax.management.InstanceAlreadyExistsException. Reading through the sources I could not find any serious differences between the way the HTMLAdapter invokes an operation on the MBean and the way RMIAdaptor does. The provided Ant task (jbossjmx-ant.jar) doesn't work either. Perhaps someone has a good hint or tip for me?