doobries domain

I recently posted about using JAAS for controlling security within JSF web applications. Today, I’ve read an article by Duncan Mills explaining in detail how to build a JSF based login form. If you’re interested in JSF and security, I’d recommend you check it out.

I’ve just been caught out by Subversion! I copied a directory to another branch in my code tree using the cp command from a command shell and then tried to add the new directory to Subversion. To my surprise, Subversion told me that the directory was already under source control. When you copy directories that are under Subversion control, you have to be careful about the .svn directories as Subversion uses these to keep track of what is going on. In the Windows world this isn’t too much of a problem as the files are there to see in explorer. In the Unix/Mac world however they are hidden files and are easily forgotten about ;)

This question is probably asked a lot, but are there any really good Subversion clients for Mac OS X? By really good, I’m thinking of something along the lines of TortoiseSVN on Windows. I’m currently using svnX which is good, but it doesn’t support properties yet which makes it impossible to tell it to ignore directories (e.g. the build directory). Are there any other good Subversion clients for Macs (apart from the command line of course !)?

I see a lot of posts around the internet by people asking what the standard mechanism for security is in JSF web applications. From a security standpoint, JSF applications are no different from any other servlet based framework applications. If you’re deploying applications on J2EE / EE servers (e.g. Glassfish or JBoss ) or even on Tomcat, then my first choice would be to use JAAS for security. JAAS is straightforward to configure, is flexible and is a standard. Next time you need to implement a security mechanism, I’d recommend you take a look at JAAS before embarking on writing custom security mechanisms. You never know – it may save you a lot of time.

I’ve been doing a lot of development in NetBeans 5.5 beta 2 recently using Glassfish as my target application server. When doing development, its often quite useful to use the Derby DB bundled within Glassfish. As you’d expect from a modern IDE, NetBeans makes this easier for you by starting the database automatically so you don’t need to worry about it. When you deploy your application to a standalone Glassfish that isn’t "controlled" via NetBeans, you will probably find that the Derby DB doesn’t start automatically when Glassfish starts. Starting the DB is easily done from the command prompt though using the command: asadmin start-database