Codedrop™ Weblog

Trying to integrate support for Oracle XMLDB in a grails app didn’t turn out to be as straightforward as you might think.  By putting the xmlparserv2.jar file in the $GRAILS_HOME/lib folder I was suddenly presented with SAX parse errors…
Luckily I stumbled across this post by Graeme Rocher who had a similar problem and identified [...]

A recent railscast pointed me at a handy tool that has helped tremendously in speeding up my UI development efforts.  In past, I would use FireBug to highlight items on a page and identify the associated id / class.  This worked ok, but did not aid in narrowing down my selector in the efficient mannter [...]

The beauty of ruby makes it simple to add some colorful syntax highlighting to log messages that are displayed in your capistrano scripts.  Here’s a chunk of code I added to my utility.rb file that is included by my capfile that performs the magic.

def colorize(text, color_code)
“#{color_code}#{text}\033[0m"
end

def red(text); colorize(text, "\033[31m"); end
def boldred(text); colorize(text, "\033[1;31m"); end
def green(text); [...]

Neat way to pre-initalize something in capistrano before a task is run
on :start do verifyParametersAndInitialize()end
callback options:

:before, triggered before a task is invoked
:after, triggered after a task is invoked
:start, triggered before a top-level task is invoked via the command-line
:finish, triggered when a top-level task completes
:load, triggered after all recipes have [...]

After working in a rails environment for the past year I found it terribly difficult to go back to traditional database deployment / upgrade practices.
Migrations are a beautiful way to properly version, co-ordinate and apply the changes you need to your various database environments.  I never knew of a way to do this in a [...]

This past week has left me having to learn much more about https certificates then I ever thought I would care to know…   Here’s a synopsis of some of the highlights of my learnings as pulled from various resources on the web.
OpenSSL supports several certificate formats. Certificates are based on the DSA signature algorithm and [...]

I keep coming across instances of ant build files where developers have hard coded a usage target that outputs target actions.  This is not required and should be avoided as it is often not maintained.  Instead, properly maintain the description attribute of each target and use a default target as below:  

<project name=”foo” basedir=”.” default=”usage”>

…

<target name=”usage”>
        [...]

Trying to identify all modules installed on your local server?… try this command:Note: First time you run you might have to configure CPAN… for the most part defaults are good but pick a good local mirror.

perl -MCPAN -e ‘print CPAN::Shell->r ‘

Package namespace installed latest in CPAN file
Archive::Tar [...]

Grails application throwing OutOfMemory error and PermGen space was exceeeded errors… Looks like grails applications require a fairly large permgen space… Here’s a useful  article on how to address this.

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Here’s a quick solution for trying to extract the raw xml string from an Oracle XDB database when working with Grails.
After an initial attempt to hardcode a hibernate query to return the raw sql using .getStringVal() as follows:
SELECT x.id, x.xmlData xmldata.getStringVal(), lines.*
FROM xml_requests x
XMLTable(‘declare [...]