Archive for October, 2009

Intel linux drivers and new kernel gfx support reach mature state

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

Posted in: , , ubuntu.

The Linux Kernel and the XORG video rendering have been undergoing some significant improvements in the last year, with Intel’s linux open source team bringing in a lot of refactorings an architectural improvements.

I myself suffered from the lack of support for recent integrated intel gfx cards in notebooks and thus followed the excellent Intel Linux graphics performance guide using the bleeding-edge configuration, i.e. with the latest (non-stable) builds of the xorg / intel gfx drivers and the most recent kernels. However, this configuration was (not quite unexpected) somewhat unstable and had a lot of issues.

This phase is now over. I am happy to say that after upgrading to Kernel version 2.6.32 and the xserver-xorg-video-intel driver 2:2.9.0-1ubuntu2~xup~3 the graphics support is now fast, reliable and stable. Desktop effects are back working like a charm, also in a multi-monitor setup and with sending the computer to hibernation and so forth.

I am quite optimistic that this state might make it into the upcoming Ubuntu release (Karmic), thus eliminating a lot of frustration laptop users have been experiencing with their intel gfx cards.

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Using RPC-style, encoded Axis 1 webservices with spring-remoting

Monday, October 12th, 2009

Posted in: , , J2EE, System architecture, java, open source.

Preamble

When working with enterprise integration you will quite often deal with legacy systems integration.

I recently had the case where integration of webservices was requested, and much to my surprise there are huge issues when attempting to integrate old webservices (as in pre axis2 and pre jax-ws).

These webservices use outdated or unsupported methods, such as rpc-style/encoded communication, or even worce, outdated elements in the XML messages, for instance <multiref>’s. Having to integrate such services does of course imply that you cannot change anything on the server side, and thus such an outdated format must still be consumed.
This is a huge problem, since current WS implementations, such as the popular axis2 framework, do simply not support these formats.

What surprised me the most about this is that webservices are designed to make systems independent by defining a common communication and data format, which is the exact opposite of what is going on here – and these formats are not that old, we are probably talking 4-5 years.

Developers facing these problems are taking rather desperate measures to work around these problems, such as using on-the-fly XSLT transformation to convert incoming and outgoing WS messages. However, this binds your application even stronger to the outdated format and specific service data.

In my case I wanted to use Spring-remoting. Since the service was RPC-style, I wanted to use the JaxRpcPortProxyFactoryBean to create an on-the-fly proxy implementing the service interface. What I did not want to do is having to write any additional code to consume the service. Furthermore, I wanted the complex objects transferred by the services to be represented by standard JAVA beans, and not be generated using the wsdl2java axis1 tools. Here is how I got this to work.
Read the rest of “Using RPC-style, encoded Axis 1 webservices with spring-remoting”

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Using apache to redirect from the root “/” context to a webapp context

Monday, October 12th, 2009

Posted in: apache, java, open source, tomcat.

Just a short note:

The best way of doing this avoiding endless recursion is to use apaches RedirectMatch rule, like this:


RedirectMatch ^/$ http://targethost/mywebapp

Easy, agreed. But i’ve seen (and done it wrong my self) quite often…

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