Sublime is too simple of a word to describe this music.   Sinatra’s crooning combined with Jobim’s guitar work and Portugese vocals on “Girl from Ipanema”  just ooze style and class. The tuxedos certainly add to the atmosphere. Just amazing stuff.

I have to say though that it’s still shocking to see Sintra dragging on a cigarette right on stage

“Girl from Ipanema” kicks in at about 4:40 (total length of about 6:30).

Just asking…

A creation a day keeps the doldrums away.

Want to be an artiste you gotta do the art.

• Vertical Ruler - the vertical space on the far left of an editor window (next to the gutter that shows line numbers if you have them enabled) that area scrolls along with the content of the editor.  Markers placed here aren’t in view if the line they’re on isn’t in view.    For example: debugger breakpoint indicators are set here and scroll in and out of view as you scroll the editor.
• Overview Ruler - the vertical space on the far right side of an editor window (to the right of the editor scrollbar). This area shows markers for the whole file being edited and it does not scroll along with the editor window.   This area is used to place markers for such things as errors and occurrences of methods, etc.  For example: this allows you to see approximately where all errors occur in a file.  If you click on one of the indicators it will move the editor to that specific line.

Not earth-shattering information but useful nonetheless

It was a great opportunity because I learned what not to do when designing a web-based reporting system the main lesson of which was:

• Don’t store report defintions on the file system.

We experienced a lot of deployment headaches in the clustered application server environment that was provided to us because we were not provided any sort of shared file system for application assets such as reports. Each application server in the cluster only had access to it’s own file system.

This article shows how I solved the file system issue by storing JasperReports report definitions in a database. I’ll assume familiarity with the iBATIS “ORM” database framework since I am not showing a full iBATIS setup here.

Part 1: Oracle Setup

The first thing that I did was get my database tables in place. Our needs were pretty simple and I created two tables: one, REPORT, to hold the various pieces of information about the report such as the name, description, and ID and another, REPORT_XML, to hold the actual report definition. These are tied together via a foreign key on the ID column of the REPORT and a REPORT_ID column on the REPORT_XML table. The most important piece of information here is the choice of the datatype to hold the report definition.

To allow easy creation of reports we are using the iReport visual report designer and saving the reports in the JRXML format. I didn’t see any benefit to compiling the definition and putting that in the database. With XML it makes the report definition fairly easy to read and very easy to parse should that be necessary. With that in mind I chose to use the CLOB type in Oracle.

CLOBs are good for storing large pieces of character data and they are handled effortlessly by iBATIS since the only thing being passed in to the library are String objects. As of release 10g of the Oracle JDBC driver there is no longer a need to use the extensions that Oracle provided for dealing with CLOBs (oracle.sql.CLOB) in previous releases. The only requirement is setting a new Connection property, SetBigStringTryClob, to true. When this is done the String being passed in to a PreparedStatement (or to a ResultSet for data coming out of the CLOB column) is inspected to find it’s size and if its over 32k a different call is made, to an OraclePreparedStatement object, to set the CLOB value properly. This is handled transparently by the driver.

The iBATIS and Java Code

Let’s take a look at how this works. Here is an iBATIS XML snippet to handle inserting a report definition into the REPORT_XML table:

<insert id="addReportXML" parameterClass="map">
  insert into report_xml
  (id,last_modified_date,last_modified_by,description,report_id,xml_def)
  values (#id#,sysdate,user,#reportId#,#reportId#,#xmlData#)
</insert>

There is no special CLOB handling here. We are just dealing with standard types.

Here is the code in my DAO object that is calling the insert statement above:

private int addReportXML(String reportId, String xmlData)
{
 
  IdManager idMgr = IdManager.getIdManager();
  Connection connection = null;
  int result = 0;
 
  Map paramMap = new HashMap();
  paramMap.put("id", idMgr.getUniqueId());
  paramMap.put("reportId", reportId);
  paramMap.put("xmlData", xmlData);
 
try
{
  result = this.getSqlMapClientTemplate().update("ReportConfig.addReportXML", paramMap);
 
} catch (SQLException e) {
 
}
 
return result;
}

In my actual code I do have exception handling code in the catch block above I am just trying to only include the important stuff here and for this posting database error handling isn’t important. I also left out the connection handling.

IdManager is just a class that will generate a unique ID string based on various bits of system information. We could use a sequence generator in the database as well the the ID generator works better for how we deploy our applications.

This code is obviously pretty straightforward. The only thing we are doing here is passing in a String that contains the full XML as well as the report ID this report definition corresponds to. Java Strings can be very large (char array indexed by an integer) so you’d have to have an awfully large report definition to reach that limit.

Just note again that we are only dealing with standard types here. There is no special handling being done by either the Java code or iBATIS. All of the heavy lifting is being done internally by the Oracle JDBC driver.

That is pretty much it. There is nothing special that needs to be done to store the JasperReports report definitions in the database. Had I known on the first project that it was this easy I certainly would have done it this way It is better by far to centralize the storage of the reports when deploying in a clustered environment. It allows easy deployment and updating, easy backup and recovery, and easy access. How can those be bad things?

I’m not sure how it could be so shocking that the company would market to those people first and maybe add a version of the desktop software for the Mac later. Joe mentioned that he really hated Windows. Good for you Joe and good for them you’re not the guy running the company (into the ground) by worrying about a miniscule market (the Mac) first.

Can you guys ever just point out that something only works on Windows without all of the side commentary? Given the lackluster support of Java on the Mac by Apple (ie: a small segment of the overall Mac market) I’m surprised you guys even mention this kind of stuff.

But Lax said: “No, All that is necessary to be a saint is to want to be one. Don’t you believe that God will make you what He created you to be, if you will consent to let Him do it? All you have to do is desire it.”

So says Thomas Merton in “The Seven Storey Mountain”. I ask “is it really that easy”?

I’m not a religious person by any stretch of the imagination. Spiritual yes, but not religious. So in reading this book by Merton my eyes start to glaze over when he starts expounding the virtues of religion and the necessity of faith in God to complete one’s life. Having said that if I try to take a broader view a more interesting picture begins to take shape.

I’ve had enough experiences in my life that proves, to me at least, that there is some “higher power”. I don’t necessarily believe that higher power is God, or resembles God in any way. I don’t think this higher power is watching over us and I certainly don’t think this higher power cares about my sins. But I do think this power is available for us to channel when we need to which is why I’ve found this passage by Merton so interesting.

Is it really that obvious that by thinking about something you can make that thing happen? Is simply asking for it enough? I’ve tried and it has worked in the past. I’ve asked for proof and been given that proof but somehow I always struggle with these ideas. What, in the words of Merton, did God create me to be? How do I figure it out?

In my current situation in life I struggle a lot. Something doesn’t feel right and I feel disconnected, without purpose. Is the answer simply to stop struggling, ask for help, and just be?