English – Jiří Kratochvíl

Generated sources by JAXB and problem with encoding

Jiří Kratochvíl — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 18:03:23 +0000

I recently had to solve the problem with JAXB to generate bad source from XSD. The problem was basically that the XSD source from which they were subsequently generated Java code contained in the tag Czech diacritics characters, and unfortunately, the output files were not generated in the UTF-8, but the native format of operating system of my laptop, which is MacCentralEurope.

What hapened when I then started building my code with Maven, I obviously – I had got exception that the generated files contain non-UTF characters. So I started investigation how to force the JAXB to generate source code in UTF-8 instead of using platform specific encoding.

A quick look into the source code JAXB again assured me that JAXB is not (politely spoken) the best written piece of software because there is something like this:

private final CharsetEncoder encoder = EncoderFactory.createEncoder(bw.getEncoding());

This piece of code always returns encoder by platform depend encoding and there is no way, how to force different encoding and only one way is to tell JVM wat encoding is the right one.

Fortunately, the solution is easy. Just set the system variable MAVEN_OPTS like this:

export MAVEN_OPTS="$MAVEN_OPTS -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8"

What surprised me that this issue is not documented, and even Google could not help me. So I hope these few lines will help to someone.

SSL in Jetty plug-in

Jiří Kratochvíl — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 06:00:11 +0000

Yesterday I had a chat with my colleague. We talked about how the Maven Jetty plug-ins enable SSL. In my last article I described how to enable SSL in Tomcat, so now let’s see how to achieve the same result in the Jetty plugin.

It is a few simple steps.

At first we have to create a keystore with a server certificate:

keytool-genkey-alias-jetty6 keyalg RSA-keystore target / jetty-ssl.keystore-storepass changeit-keypass changeit-DNAME "CN = Your Domain Name"

Then modify the configuration of the Maven pom.xml:


    org.mortbay.jetty
    maven-jetty-plugin
    
        /context
        5
        
            
                8080
                60000
            
            
                8443
                60000
                ${project.build.directory}/jetty-ssl.keystore
                changeit
                changeit

In the previous configuration, we defined the connection on port 8080 and port 8443 for SSL connections.

If we did not want to manually generate a server certificate, you can use other Maven plugin as shown below.


    org.codehaus.mojo
    keytool-maven-plugin
    
        
            generate-resources
            clean
            
                clean
            
        
        
            generate-resources
            genkey
            
                genkey
            
        
    
    
        ${project.build.directory}/jetty-ssl.keystore
        cn=localhost
        changeit
        changeit
        jetty6
        RSA

Now, when we invoke mvn jetty: run command, plug-in automatically creates a certificate that is then used in Jetty.

How to enable HTTPS on Tomcat

Jiří Kratochvíl — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 09:12:41 +0000

In this article I would like to describe how to enable SSL support in Tomcat. Basically it is a few steps, but there will be recorded for cases when some of my colleague asked me

The first step is creating a server certificate. It is possible to create in two different ways. Either you can create „self-signed certificate“ or you can import certificate issued by some certification authority.

In this article we will create a self-signed certificate and then configure Tomcat to use the certificate. This configuration is enough for development.

For creating a server certificate, we will use keytool utility of the JDK.

On Windows

%JAVA_HOME%binkeytool-genkey-alias tomcat-keyalg RSA

On Linux

$JAVA_HOME/bin/keytool-genkey-alias tomcat-keyalg RSA

Then uncomment the file server. (XML configuration file of Tomcat) this section:

And thats all. Your server supports both in SLL and non-SSL connections.

Forcing SSL

In case you need to make all connections to your application has been secured with SSL, and even when a user enters the address only as http you can use the following.

Edit the web.xml file of your application by adding the following element:


        AppOverSSL
        
            
                ResourceName
            
            /
            POST
            GET
        
        
            CONFIDENTIAL

Don’t forget to define right port number for SSL in your server.xml file in attribute redirectPort of element that is defined your unsecured connection:

Now when users use non-secured connection is redirected on HTTPS connection.

Problem with Java Server Faces on JDK 1.6

Jiří Kratochvíl — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 08:34:36 +0000

On my new project, I had a problem with the web application deployment, which consisted of the classic combination of Java Server Faces, Spring Framework, iBatis. I guess it was because I asked Google’s bad, but I spent it, how to solve this problem, some time, so they deserve an entry in my blog.

So what was the problem? Once I tried to deploy to Tomcat, I got this error message:

java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: [Ljava.lang.String;
at org.apache.catalina.loader.WebappClassLoader.loadClass (WebappClassLoader.java: 1645)
at org.apache.catalina.loader.WebappClassLoader.loadClass (WebappClassLoader.java: 1491)
at com.sun.faces.config.ConfigureListener.configure (ConfigureListener.java: 635)
at com.sun.faces.config.ConfigureListener.configure (ConfigureListener.java: 422)
        ...

I tried various queries, but I was not successful. When I lost hope, I found the following link, which is described bug in JDK .

Before I come across this error, because the last one was a web application to JDK 1.5, where everything works fine. So if anybody knows this bug, I offer the „official workaround.

Just pass the JVM startup parameter:

-Dsun.lang.ClassLoader.allowArraySyntax = true