Archive for January, 2009

The Everyblocks Dilemna

H/T To Trevor F. Smith for alerting me to this interesting article.

Why is there no European support? Paris, London, Rome… hello?

The best way solve any problem is to figure out how to avoid it, making
the solution trivial. To help you in this effort, we have set up something
so if you want to build and run Nuxeo EP 5 from source–you don’t have to
do any of the work! Woot! In honor of this year’s Super Bowl (American
Football, or “Gridiron,” championship) coming up this weekend, I’ll break
this blog post into football-sized chunks.

Pre-Game Analysis

As most of you know, I’m a big fan of “the cloud.” I have spent a lot
of time over the last couple of years working with the amazon cloud pretty
extensively. I’ve set things up for you so that you can quite easily
“grab, rebuild, and deploy” nuxeo from the source code repository. I must
admit, though, in all honesty that I really built this so I could do the
same. I … Read more

Thanks to Colleen Kehoe of the University of Chicago for pointing this out to me.
Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors

A Software Populist Who Doesn’t Do Windows

Here you can find a dependency graph for the major subsystem that I work with in my job. (If you use some browsers, like FF3, you will probably have to click this image to see it at full size.) Of main importance are the number of items on this list that *don’t* start with “nuxeo-”, these are modules that we are consuming from the internet-ocean of open source projects. All of the code shown is java but that’s not all the code! Be sure to glance and some of the “version numbers” for some of things that we use.

This is not everything I need to deal with for my part of the system, and there are substantially larger dep graph for the Nuxeo EP product and the Nuxeo RCP products (although these have some overlap with this image). For reference, it took 976 jar files to build Nuxeo EP … Read more

If you check out all the sources from nuxeo.org, you need to do two things before building (big H/T to Stefane F. on this one):

1. In the top-level (nuxeo) directory copy the build.properties.sample to build.properties and edit the file to point to your copy of jboss.  Use the forward slashes as shown in the sample. 
2. Set the maven options to “-Xmx512M” and get rid of the -o that is in the sample, unless you are sure you want that and if you don’t know why you want it, you probably don’t.

The -Xmx512M sets the amount of heap allowed for the java process that runs maven itself, not necessarily the compilations that maven launches. Without this, you may find that builds are very slow or fail entirely by running out of resources. I have found that this makes my builds take about 20 minutes instead of about 50!

I have added some support to various parts of the source to help folks understand and debug OSGi bundle loading problems when using webengine. This is currently checked in so if you build from source you should receive it on your next pull. If you don’t, it should be included in the 5.2.M4 distribution that is imminent.
Basically, this is a log4j hack. In the log4j.properties file (nxserver/app/config/log4j.properties), there is a new logger that inherits from no other logger so it is totally independent of other logging. This is the bottom section of the file now:

##
##
## Use this to see only the OSGi bundle debugging information
## Use DEBUG to see nuxeo bundles as well (lots more output)
## Use WARN to see only webengine OSGi related messages
##
#log4j.logger.nuxeo.bundle.debug=INFO

You’ll want to uncomment the last line and choose your log level for this special logger appropriately. … Read more

There are a lot of great xkcd comics. This one, though, was required for the first post on my blog….

Trans-Consciousness Messaging Protocol (TCMP)