Cancel Klatch

An old issue with the Cancel tag has broken out on the list. Right now, you can bypass validation on any Struts Action by spoofing the cancel button. In some cases, that might be a bad thing if the Action is not expected to be cancelled. It looks like this might be fixed in 1.3.0, if we can agree on a patch soon enough. (Like before we resolve the Checkstyle issues.)

ODF Rocks

The OpenOffice suite provides an interesting opportunity for open source products. Since the suite is free, open source, and multiplatform, using this tool with our projects is little different than using Subversion or Ant.

Problem is, the format is not change-log friendly. By design, all changes made to a ASF product are logged to one of the mailing lists, where they become part of our “communal memory”. When a change is made to an OpenOffice document and checked into the repository, it is logged as a change to a binary file. No one watching the project knows what changed unless they spend several minutes opening the document and reviewing the internal change log.

Albeit, the Roller community is deliberating whether to use the OpenOffice to maintain it’s user documentation. The vote is pending now. Since OpenOffice can save to multiple formats, my suggestion is that we also checkin a companion HTML document, so that everyone can see what changes in real time. We’d contnue to edit the ODF file, and just Save As to HTML before checking in both files. Film at 11.

Roller 2.1 RC2

Roller 2.1 (coming soon!) is turning out to be a feature-packed release. The headline features are comment management, spam prevention, and performance, but Roller 2.1 will include a host of other small changes, fixes and improvements. While the development team reviews the second release candidate, Roller fans can review the feature roundup.

Agitar Software

I have a few days off from the Oklahoma DEQ project while we sort out some paperwork. Agitar Software asked me to review their Agitator testing tool some time ago, and I finally have some time to try it out. Nice folks. Slick product. Agitar has a stealth open source initiative. Like Atlassian and JetBrains, Agitar will assign complementary licenses to active, verifiable open source projects, like Apache Struts. I’m trying it on the MailReader now. If people like the idea, we could check the tests in the repository and continue to use the Agitator to test Struts applications and even the framework itself.