Tucked away in the Keyboard Layout control panel is an Options… button which brings up an options dialog with various options to configure your keyboard strokes – different to the normal Keyboard bindings you find in the normal Keyboard settings. These are more how you want the keys to be mapped rather than mapping them to functions. Under Miscellaneous compatibility options you’ll find ‘Special keys (Ctrl+Alt+<key>) handled in a server‘ and ticking this gives your shortcuts back to the desktop apps.

Most *nix software wouldn’t assign shortcuts to the ctrl+alt+f<n> because its an accepted convention, but for software that works on multiple OS’, its nice to take this back.

I had the same Eclipse 3.7 project both on Windows and Mac, but only the Mac version complained with a very unusal message.

sun.misc.Base64 on mac JDK 5

The complaint was against an internal sun.misc.Base64Encoder class which every 2nd Java dev on the internet recommends replacing its internal implementation with an Apache Commons alternative.

Initially I thought it had something to do with the manifest and access restrictions preventing code outside of the jar accessing the internal code – something I recall the JavaPosse talking about from their days of Java Studio. Since it was only isolated to the Mac JDK, perhaps Apple had included these restrictions in the manifest for the classes.jar that these classes were defined.

Turns out it has to do with Eclipse.  I found out that when I add a JRE/JDK in Eclipse, it appears to add Access Rules to a bunch of select classes in the classes jar.  Its a white list.  Anything not there is forbidden.

I don’t know what defines this, and they are ‘non modifiable’ but adding in an access rule at the top leads this to go.

Java Build Path with Access Rules avoided

Looks like this has been tormenting people since Eclipse 3.3

Even though there are command line tags in javac to produce 1.5 compatible source, the need to use JDK 5 comes into being when implementing interfaces that have grown in the number of methods since Java 5.  A good example is the JDBC classes.  The number of methods in Java 6 versions of the java.sql.Connection interface has grown by at least 6 (look for Since 1.6)

Having the Java 6 rt.jar or classes.jar where that interface resides will expect those new methods to be implemented and lead to a compilation error when you try to build.  On the opposite end, if you blindly start using the latest version of Java, you can easily start using new methods without realising.  Your colleagues will tell you when their 1.5 only environment stops compiling.

https://svn.codehaus.org/jetty/archived/jetty-7/

instead of the one the docs refer to (https://svn.codehaus.org/jetty/jetty/branches/jetty-7 ) which 404s.

There are a lot of other resources that are required jetty-integration-project is req’d by the POM.  Its created in the main jetty-7 that I linked above.  Build that first (I only got as far as building the hightide-distribution) but it was enough to download all the required jars to build jetty-ant.  Phew!

in super short

svn co https://svn.codehaus.org/jetty/archived/jetty-7/
cd jetty-7
mvn install

… builds a few different things, ultimately fails

cd jetty-ant
mvn install

… great success (now I just have to try it out – found in jetty-ant\target\jetty-ant-7.5.0-SNAPSHOT.jar)

EDIT: When I last checked the documentation on the Eclipse documentation notes, it had thankfully been updated with an updated URL to download the ant target directly (18 Dec)

Gareth Thomas Hill: Cookies in JSF.

(hint) they are in the http servlet request and response that you get from the Faces ExternalContext

InfoQ: Tomorrow’s Tech Today: HTML5.

He introduces some good tools and utils that help the forward compatible specification be read by HTML4 browsers none the wiser.

Firstly the HTML5 CSS trick to treat all the new HTML5 elements (header, nav, footer, video) to be treated as block elements in all browsers (except IE) and the html5shiv that does the same thing for IE.

Trivia: <input type=”someType”> gets rendered as a textbox if yourbrowser doesnt knowhow to show it.

There are some references to these sites which talk more about HTML

DiveIntoHtml5.org – an upcoming o’reilly book you can read for free here

HTML 5 Rocks

He talks about some stuff I wasnt too aware of such as HTML5 caching support (5mb) and SQL (25mb but no FF or IE, but useful for iPhone and Android browsers)

html5demos.com

Modernizr (detect support for HTML5 & CSS3) – see findmebyip.com for an example.

“The goal is to program for HTML 5 and backfill for the rest of the browsers”

http://www.teleal.org/weblog/software/Building%20Android%20applications%20with%20Maven%20and%20IntelliJ.html

Grails
Spring MVC
Rails

are the top players

JSF was one of the more poorly ranked. Though they didn’t differentiate between v1 or 2.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=0AtkkDCT2WDMXdC1HOEtnUHpCejJMbUhGeGJWUmh5dVE&hl=en&output=html

The blogger demonstrates how easy it is to integrate the new jquery mobile library with Grails and easily create mobile views in scaffolding.

I wasn’t familiar with the grails install-templates command before which allows you to customise the scaffolding that gets generated.  Pretty neat.

Optimization Made Easy with mod_pagespeed.