Contemplating the brave new present
Posted in AWS, Coding, O'Reilly Book on Apr 29th, 2008
Amazon has released an updated version of the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) API with the version name 2008-02-01 . This release includes a number of new features that were not available in the 2007-08-29 version of the API that I discussed in the book Programming Amazon Web Services (PAWS). To help keep my readers up-to-date [...]
Posted in Coding on Mar 19th, 2008
While writing a proof-of-concept Ruby on Rails application (Ruby 1.8.6, Rails 2.0.2) I was stumped by an intermittent problem where long-lived processes would fail with the error message: <ArgumentError: A copy of TransactionController has been removed from the module tree but is still active!> Admittedly, I do some potentially dodgy things in this application. I [...]
Posted in Coding on Feb 19th, 2008
When you work on a Java project with many library dependencies it can be difficult to know which Jar files contain which classes. Hunting down a particular class in a tangled mess of Jar files can be painful, especially if you need to do so on a server over a shell connection. Here is a [...]
Posted in Coding on Feb 15th, 2008
A friend recently asked me how to go about writing code to access a SOAP API to perform a one-off task. Below is the bare-bones step-by-step summary I sent him. I feel sorry for anyone encountering this travesty for the first time… Find a good free SOAP library (eg Apache Axis) Obtain the WSDL (Web [...]