Eric's Notes

Unit testing Spring-LDAP code with ApacheDS
The Spring LDAP framework is a great library to assist in working with LDAP servers through a more manageable API. It provides the niceties that the DataSource interface does for JDBC along with support similar to the Spring JDBC framework. One area that has been lacking though is testing. With JDBC based code it is easy enough to use HSQLDB to provide an in-memory database to test against. With

Apple's JDK6 Broke My Scripting!
uPortal 3 uses the new (JDK5+) Java scripting APIs via Cernunnos, the scripting language used in the data import/export scripts. This has been working great and is a huge step forward for the uPortal project. I've been building uPortal 3 on my Apple computer since development started and it has been working great. Until I installed the Apple JDK6 Update. Now I've been itching for JDK6 on my

Java SQLException Chaining
In JDK 1.4 chained Throwables were added and made logging and tracing exceptions much easier. Being able to create a new exception and specify the causing exception in a standard way, tied to JVM printing out the stack chain, was a big boost to tracking down problems in an application. There are still some exceptions that do not use this standard chaining mechanism and one of the most

PostgreSQL Backups
While shell scripting is not my strong suit I put this together to do automatic backups of the Postgres database that backs the ja-sig.org services. The script will vacuum each database, do a full dump of each database, do a dump of each schema and do a global meta-data backup. All the dumps are compressed with bzip2 and date/time stamped. Logs and backups older than 7 days are removed. The

Using Ant with a Maven project
I recently had to take a Maven 2 WAR project and make it buildable on a system that did not have Maven available. Not being one to duplicate configuration I put together an Ant build script that, when Maven is available, can be used to pull the dependencies into the project file structure in an organized fashion and write out properties about the maven project for use by the script. Currently

Spring 2.5 Module Contents
The 2.5 release of the Spring Framework re-organized many packages and classes in the specific module JARs. Moving from Spring 2.0 to 2.5 introduces some pain in figuring out what moved where and I couldn't find anything detailing which packages reside in which module JARs. So after a few lines of shell-fu I produced the following to help with the upgrades: spring-jms.jar META-INF/ org/ org/

Poor Man's TimeMachine: rsync
The shell script on the computer being backed up, needs a no-password ssh key to work. #!/bin/bash BACKUP_HOST=user@host SSH_KEY=/home/user/.ssh/host_rsa LOG_DIR=~/logs LOG_FILE=$LOG_DIR/backup.`date +%Y%m%d_%H%M`.log SRC_DIR=/home/user/ DEST_BASE_DIR=/home/user/backups/localhost DEST_DIR_NAME=backup_`date +%Y.%m.%d_%H.%M.%S` PREV_DIR_NAME=previous DEST_DIR=$DEST_BASE_DIR/$DEST_DIR_NAME

Contact Information

Eric Dalquist
Portal Framework Developer
University of Wisconsin - Madison
DoIT - IIAT

eric@dalquist.doit@wisc@edu