Kai Mai's Blog - Take Back the Web - Nodes for java

Java: Loading Resource Bundle File with UTF-8

Sat, 08 Mar 2008 22:47:19 -0800

You hear that UTF-8 is the gold standard in internationalization. so you prepare your JSP pages to use UTF-8 charset.

Then you get your resource bundle files(property files) to use UTF-8 encoding. Everything looks fine in your text editor.

Now you load up the pages. Every character retrieved from your resource bundles look garbled.

This is because Java loads property files using ISO 8859-1 character encoding. Resource bundle utf-8 hack comes to rescue.

Tags: java utf-8 internationalization

The Workable Configuration for TestNG, Maven 2, SureFire, and Ecplise

Wed, 02 May 2007 22:19:34 -0700

I started to use TestNG for testing in Java today. and it took me a while to find out that the workable Configuration for TestNG, Maven 2's Surefire, is:

TestNG 5.1,
Surefire 2.3

The real important thing is to specify <classifier>jdk15</classifier> for JDK 1.5+, or <classifier>jdk14</classifier> for JDK 1.4 in your pom file. The reference can be found here

If you don't specify the classifier, it seems to run in jdk14 mode. so all of my tests using annotations didn't run with Maven.

Tags: java eclipse testng maven surefire testing

Framework, CMS - What Do I Really Want from a Web Application Rapid Development Kit

Wed, 15 Mar 2006 21:10:03 -0800

Inspired by the blog What I Want From A Framework, I want to discuss what I want from a web application rapid development kit(WARDK) as a lazy developer. I am going to use PHP language as an example in my discussion, but the discussion can apply to other languages such as Java, Ruby, and Python.

Here’s what I want: the most important and common features (every web application that supports multiple users need to have these):

user management(CRUD operations on users, ban users, user group management), pluggable authentication(LDAP, OpenID, integration with other systems) OpenID)

Tags: java php web application framework development ruby python

NetBeans 5.0 is Out With a Very Good GUI Builder

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 20:44:36 -0800

NetBeans 5.0 is out.

What excited me is the new Matisse GUI Builder that "makes it easier to layout professional looking windows and dialog boxes".

Be sure to check out the demo.

I also tried the new GUI builder myself. I have been very impressed. It's a lot better than JBuilder's. I am not sure how it stacks up against Eclipse as I didn't find any good GUI builder for Eclipse like one year ago.

I used to use Netbeans 4 to develop GUI prototypes because it had the best GUI builder to let me lay out things with different layout managers. But it still required a lot of tweaking (mainly on GridBagLayout) in order to get resizing to behave correctly. Netbeans 5 has made it so easy to get the right resizing behaviors. Thumbs up!

Tags: java ide gui builder eclipse netbeans

Struts: Cannot find message resources under key org.apache.struts.action.MESSAGE

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 18:06:34 -0800

I was working on a Struts-based web application that required two message resources and got a nasty "Cannot find message resources under key org.apache.struts.action.MESSAGE" exception.

The application was working fine with only one message resource factory. Here's the setting in struts-config.xml:

    <message-resources
        factory="company.webapps.resources.WebAppMessageResourcesFactory"
        parameter="company.webapps"/>

I add another mesage resource that's a resource bundle file.

    <!-- specify a key name to distinguish different resources -->
   <message-resources key="defaultResources"

Tags: java struts