Category: Java

doing a little java work — getting set up

whbeebe
IntelliJ IDEA 2023.3.2 (Community Edition) with a basic boilerplate project it created.

I suddenly find I have need to do a little Java development. It’s been a long time since I dipped my fingers, as it were, into writing Java code. This was back around Java 9 (September 2017) and it was such as mess with the way Oracle had blown up Java’s libraries that I just basically walked away from Java. I still install it when I need it because I have some tools that depend upon the Java runtime.

Here I am trying to come up to speed, which at this point in my life may be impossible. I haven’t changed so much as Java has. Right now I’ve installed Java 21, what now passes for an LTS. I’ve installed the JDK and an IDE to work with it on my M1 Max MacBook Pro. Here’s what I did to get something working.

First I tried to install the JDK. I went searching for the latest LTS that would run on aarch64/arm64. When I searched on Duck Duck Go, I got nothing but hits on installing the Oracle version, which is not what I wanted. Instead I had to remember to search for Adoptium ( https://adoptium.net ). Rather than take the default offered on the landing page I chose to go to the alternate downloads page and pick it that way;

Adoptium Latest Releases page

As you can see I whittled my choices down to two. I went with the .pkg because it’s a Mac, so that should be a no-brainer installation. That was a mistake. It installed alright, I just don’t know where. I came back and downloaded the tar.gz archive, unpacked it in a location in my local folder, defined JAVA_HOME to point to the location and then added it to my path. Once that was all done I could do a java --version and get the LTS version release.

I then decided to install NetBeans 20. I was a long-time NetBeans user and felt comfortable trying it again. The problem is that it would never find my installation of Java. I finally went into the app directory structure and ran, from the command line, ./netbeans --jdkhome $JAVA_HOME, at which point it finally came up. I was able to set up a decent look-and-feel and began to get comfortable with it. I even checked to see if NetBeans knew about the local Java installation, and it appeared to. However, when I closed NetBeans and tried to start it via Launchpad, it failed to start just like before. After that I removed NetBeans and installed IntelliJ IDEA 2023.3.2 (Community Edition) and immediately got to work learning how to get productive with it. I’ve used IntelliJ tools in the past for a number of years and I’ve never been disappointed. This time I chose to use the Community Edition because I didn’t need the full-blown suite, and I don’t have the funds right now to pay for a full commercial license. Maybe if this bit of work leads to something more substantial then I’ll expense it. Right now I’m just getting started.

So far the choices I’ve made appear pretty solid, and IntelliJ IDEA is a very nice environment.

apache tomcat development configuration

whbeebe

I’ve been an Apache Tomcat user since 2001 when it was selected by one of my colleagues for an internal work project in a closed lab. We were looking for a way to provide centralized access for project and lab information, especially test instructions. We also wanted to provide a nascent dashboard showing how certain systems were operating, and to control those systems. Over time we managed to do all of that via Tomcat.

Tomcat provided an opportunity for me to learn how to write web-based applications using the then-new Servlet and Java Server Pages (JSP) specification implementation. I also learned how to wire MySQL into the back end of Tomcat, and used that to hold quite a bit of the data our lab was generating at the time. Another opportunity it provided was hosting on various operating systems. The first implmentation of our Tomcat lab site was on a small Windows 2000 system sitting in a corner and unused by the lab staff. It was quickly moved over to a Sun box running Solaris, where it stayed for about a year. The following year we took that old Windows 2000 box and installed Red Hat Linux 7 (not RHEL!) on it, and moved the lab site over to it and brought it all up. It stayed there for the rest of the time I worked in the lab (I left in 2004). It was still running when I returned to the lab in 2013, although by that time that stand-alone system had been imaged and moved to a VMware virtual machine.

I’m running an instance of Tomcat version 10.0.23. I wanted to brush up my very rusty skills and knowledge, and see what has changed across the years (nearly two decades, in point of fact) since I last worked with Tomcat. Since this is a development-only deployment it’s installed in my local development folder. To make things as easy as possible for me, here is how I have my Tomcat configuration file set up.

<tomcat-users xmlns="http://tomcat.apache.org/xml"  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"  xsi:schemaLocation="http://tomcat.apache.org/xml tomcat-users.xsd"  version="1.0">  <role rolename="admin"/>  <role rolename="admin-gui"/>  <role rolename="admin=script"/>  <role rolename="manager-gui"/>  <role rolename="manager-script"/>  <role rolename="manager-jmx"/>  <role rolename="manager-status"/>  <user username="admin" password="admin" roles="manager-gui, manager-script, manager-jmx, manager-status, admin-gui, admin-script"/></tomcat-users>

I’ve defined all the role names and assigned all the roles to one username, admin. See lines 5-12. Remember this is a development deployment local to my machine, not something in production. This allows me to work with every page provided by the stock Tomcat web pages.