I have started fooling around with the iPhone SDK. I am planning to release a product soon but the plans are quite preliminary so mums the word on exactly what is coming. However, I ran into a little problem right off the bat.

For the most part, Mac OS X programs do not use environment variables or the PATH. They behave in a very different way from other Unix environments on this score. However, as Java developer I use several tools that require that other command line programs be available on the system PATH. In Windows and Unix there are well known places to put this kind of information but in Mac OS X the location for these changes is obscure.

It seems there is a bug in WAS that was introduced with 6.1.0.3. I found this forum post on the subject.

Apparently, WAS looks for a resource in the WAR that matches the URL before allowing the servlet filters a chance to process the URL. Despite the fact that the design of the Servlet Filter mechanism is to allow web applications more control over their URLs and how they are accessed.

Well I figured out what was causing my IE Rendering problems. I was using a "code" tag and that seemed to throw off the floating of the right hand navigation elements. Weird but it looked great in Firefox. This is not new but, damn I wish IE would just implement the standards. Perhaps a meta tag could be created that tells IE to use a standards compliant interpretation of CSS and HTML. That way, a standards compliant web site can just add a meta tag and IE will render it correctly without all the weirdnesses that are left in for "backwards compatibility".

I am aware of the IE rendering problems this site is experiencing and I am working on the issue. Thank you for your patience.

I am always looking for ways to limit the amount of typing I have to do. Hibernate helps me alot because I don't have to write all the SQL and I can concentrate on the less tedious aspects of designing my persistence model. Spring helps me alot because I don't have to write all those factories and other "glue" code.

Most J2EE developers have at least heard of the Spring framework and know that it is an excellent framework for creating enterprise applications. I have recently needed to create an application that runs from the command line and is short lived. It has no GUI but I wanted it to be configurable and extendable in various ways. To that end, I defined a bunch of interfaces for the objects in the system to use when interfacing with other objects. Then I started thinking about the implementations of these interfaces and the factory classes I would need to create. I said to myself "Self, doesn't Spring already do this?" and I answered myself, "Why, yes". So I decided to try it.

Lately I have been reading the hype surrounding the concept of Business Process Modeling (BPM) systems. I always take this stuff with a grain of salt because I have not seen an idea that lived up the hype since the Object Oriented hype of the early nineties. I know some would debate that point and of course I don't mean to say that OO lived up to some of the more absurd hype. I remember some marketing fools actually were saying that OO would allow us to get rid of programmers. However, in this case, I think BPM and Graph Oriented Design/Programming has the potential to rival OO in its impact on our industry and jBPM is an excellent entry into this market.

To better serve our customers and partners we have redesigned DHPTech.com. We are now using the Drupal Open Source Content Management System. This software is an excellent example of what community development can achieve. If you would like a website with similar capabilities, please contact us.

Please feel free to post your comments about the new look.

I have placed a new article on my blog about my experiences with Gentoo, I am doing it in three parts, I hope to have them done over the next two weeks.