If you’ve never listened to the Taking Notes podcast Bruce and Julian have been on a break recently but episode 62 has just been released and it’s an especially good one to get into the habit of listening. If you’re involved in Notes and Domino in any way then it’s a superb way of picking up whats going on in the Domino community at large and also what’s coming down the line in future releases. Listen up!
mattwhite
Missed Munich
It was a good trip to Munich, work wise at least. We knocked off a lot of the problems with the web services and it was good to meet the team over there. Unfortunately, as normal with these short trips, there wasn’t time to actually see any of the city. It was airport-office-hotel-office-airport. Still from the taxi ride the place looked nice and the people were very helpful. As ever in Europe it was massively embarassing how every German I met knew at least some English, most spoke it pretty much fluently, there is no way the same would happen in England for a visiting German.
So Munich gets added to the list of places that I have to go back and visit properly.
If ever there was a rule to live by…
… then this is it. A poster produced by the British government during the second world war, as Boing Boing says, so much different from the government of today with their “OMG TERRISTS GONNA KILL US ALL ZOMG ZOMG ALERT LEVEL BLOODRED RUN RUN TAKE OFF YOUR SHOES MOISTURE BOMBS ZOMG!”.
Off to Munich
I’m sat in London City Airport waiting for a plane to Munich at the moment. It’s a short notice trip for a couple of days to work on integrating the Domino app I’ve been working on with two other applications using the web services I’ve been playing with for the last few days. Hopefully in the next couple of days we should be able to deal with the various issues which always arise when two significantly different applications and platforms try to talk to each other, even if they do share the common language of web services. A lot of the problems come from simply understanding how the other apps organise and key their data.
Should be interesting anyway, embarrassingly I have never been to Munich before so hopefully I’ll get a chance to have a look around the city a little tonight as well. Who needs sleep?
Update: The automatic guidance system at City airport failed this morning which reduced the inbound flow of aircraft to two per hour (!) so my flight was delayed a couple of hours. Still I am here now and the weather and city are beautiful so no complaining.
Defeated
Well I had to admit defeat with my web services problem. I tried a few more things this morning which occcurred to me overnight but no luck. So instead I am going to do the work in a JBoss application. What’s especially galling is that it took a grand total of ten minutes to build and deploy a test client for the web services using MyEclipse and JBoss. It’s pretty much unforgivable that Domino can’t do this stuff out of the box. I am guessing it will work in ND8 but unfortunately that’s just too late for me.
The perils of web services
I’ve spent a large portion of the weekend and all of today trying to consume an XFire web service which returns an array of complex objects. Not too difficult I hear you say. Well you’d be wrong, very wrong. Even with the wonderful Stubby I have not been able to get it to work (it’s a documented limitation in the Stubby About document) due to the following error…
org.xml.sax.SAXException Source code of org.xml.sax.SAXException: SimpleDeserializer encountered a child element, which is NOT expected, in something it was trying to deserialize
The problem is down to the version of Axis which is used by Domino. More recent versions are able to deserialize the XML returned by the web service but the version in Domino 7 doesn’t understand arrays of complex object returned by a web service. I’ve tried everything I can think of, including an abortive attempt to replace the version of Axis used by my local server. So I am now looking for ideas from you the community, the only other alternative left for me would be to write a JBoss application and have it talk to Domino which I’d really rather not do.
Parallels v3
The release of Parallels 3.0 rather passed me by last week, but if you are a Parallels user I’d definitely recommend you download the new version and try it out, there are some really cool new features. The killer feature for me is the integration from Windows back to the Mac, for example your Windows drive gets mounted as a drive which accessible from OS X. You are even able to launch files in the Windows client in a Mac application. I haven’t yet used VMWare for the Mac but if Parallels keeps on adding these new features then I just won’t need to bother.
Back to the real world
So I’ve been back at work for three days now and it’s back with a bang. Unfortunately I have to finish off a whole month’s work in two weeks so I am and will be playing catch up for a while to come. But luckily the work I’ve come back to is pretty interesting. We have to try and get Hibernate working from Domino to an Oracle database. Not something I’ve done before and it doesn’t seem to be a trivial so it should keep me busy for a while. If anyone’s got any tips then I’d be appreciative.
And, of course, the weather here in London is especially good at the moment so we have to go to the pub to make the most of it while it lasts 😉 Talking of which, I’m off to a leaving party now. Life is tough.
More comment spam
Over recent weeks there has been a spate of comment spam on the site which has obviously been manually typed in by some idiots trying to increase the pagerank of their sites. Well I now plan to be far more agressive about comment spammers, unless you leave a real name and email address you will be blocked. If you leave a link to a website which is obviously not your own (in my view, this is not a democracy), it will be blocked. If I make a mistake then I apologise in advance, a simple email to me will rectify the problem.