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Android and XML parsers
My first baby steps into the world of Android development has me started with writing a classic RSS feed application. I started out looking into basic UI and when that was done I focused on how to import a feed into Android. While searching for answers I came across this article on how to read a RSS feed with Android. It explains the different possibilities for parsing the returned XML in a very straight-forward manner and I highly recommend reading the piece. It is a really good read also if you just need to brush up your XML parsing skills on the Java platform.
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Using Java VisualVM with JBoss AS 5.1
Java VisualVM is a nice little tool for monitoring any Java application. I used it for monitoring a JBoss AS 5.1 server and had to add some system properties to the run.sh/run.bat file before it would let me connect. The system properties are
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CPU spikes on JBoss AS 5.1
While deploying a pretty simple web application on JBoss AS 5.1 (using the default profile) I noticed some weird cyclic CPU spikes even without ANY load on the server. It would start right after the server was started and the spikes would use ~40% of the CPU. Not exactly satisfying. I did the usual trip around the good, old web and quickly found out that the administration console in JBoss AS 5.x would create these hiccups. I deleted the administration console and saw CPU utilization drop to ~10%. That is what I call improvement.
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Eclipse and JBoss AS 5.1 with minimal configuration
As I explained yesterday I managed to improve startup times of my JBoss AS 5.1 server dramatically by fiddling a little with the web profile provided by Red Hat. It did however give me some problems when I wanted to start/stop/deploy my web project from Eclipse since this all of a sudden did not work anymore. I decided to fix this and this is what I did.
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Minimal JBoss AS 5.1 configuration
When I deploy applications on the JBoss AS platform I normally just use the default profile provided by Red Hat. JBoss AS 5.1 is however horrendously slow when starting up so I decided to look into the other (lesser) profiles to see if this would speed things up a bit. I am running a standard web application (packaged as a .war file) based on JSF 1.2 (Sun RI) and Hibernate which accesses an Oracle database.
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Muanlai - A true gem in Khao Lak
Traveling to Khao Lak from the south you will pass a little restaurant called Muanlai about 1 km after the entrance to the Khao Lak-Lam Ru National Park. The restaurant sits on the hillside with unspoiled and spectacular views of the Khao Lak beach. It is the perfect spot for watching the sun set or just relax. It does not hurt either that the food is great and pretty cheap too. It is located a bit outside of Khao Lak so if you are staying in Khao Lak you either need to walk 2-3 kms or grab a tuk-tuk. It is within walking distance of most of the resorts in the southern part of Khao Lak but since it is situated in the opposite direction of Khao Lak it is easy to overlook this marvelous place.
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Pimp my blog
I just decided to upgrade the layout of the blog a little and I am very pleased with the results so far. Improvements made are:
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JSF and OnLoad for JDK 1.4
Calling a method in a bean when a JSF page is hit is often a needed requirement when doing JSF. This is however not something you get out of the box unfortunately and you need to look at solutions outside of the scope of the JSF specification. Frameworks like Seam and Shale does address this but if you only need this functionality in one or two places it might seem a little overkill to include frameworks like these. Instead I discovered the JSF On-Load Action Listener from jsf-comp which does excactly what I want.