Still haven’t gotten to write any tests for the auction program =:(. There’s way more business logic in the JSPs than I realized. I started to enter some bidding data to develop the tests and ended up debugging the errorhandling on the JavaServer pages. But it works, and that’s the endgame. As soon as this iteration ships, I’d like to take this whole thing back to drawing board and rebuild it, test by test. The reinstall on the new server cured our missing library woes, and everything went up just fine. Once we straighed out which keystore we were using, and the correct certificate type, the SSL certificate updated just fine too. Only glitch is that port 443 is not responding on the new server. It seems to be a firewall issue, but the sysop hasn’t found the problem yet. I tried SSL over 80 and that worked well enough.

The kids need shoes! We got Jake a new pair last night at the mall. Katie almost found a pair, but the purple ones didn’t come in her size. Stopped at Friendlys: slow service, great food. Tried the open meatloaf sandwich. Hmm, hmm good. Jake entertained his mom with the story of the Donner family, while Katie patiently awaited her sundae. Even managed to get back in time for Wife and Kids!

Got the new Buy It Now feature up and running now. Wanted to get some tests running against the bid process in the bargain, but the opporunity never presented itself. By the time I got the feature cut into the (monsterous) JSPs, there was very little business logic left. All I needed to do was put in a short clause to close the lot if a valid BIN bid came by. Not to be foiled, I’m forging on with the Retract Bid story. There must be something in there I justifiably test!

Meanwhile, the sysops ran a fresh install on the new server, with the X-Window libraries this time, so Java could run on native threads. JVM and Resin went in just fine. (Tracing that one down drove me nuts!) Still couldn’t get the MySQL benchmark RPM installed. Seems to be some RPM naming glitch (Mysql vs MySql.) N’suth.

Been liking the Struts Generic DataSource lately, since it makes it so easy to switch between both databases and containers. But, alas, it’s not working out well for the impending auction launch (April 21). Ran the DBCP over the weekend, and it kept exhausting connections. Tried the settings for reclaiming the connections, but it only helped marginally. The Auction application uses RowSets for retrievals, and they seem to be eating connections unless I use the JNDI form. The Resin connection pools supports JNDI directly, and I know that works just great, so it’s back to that for this launch. Just need to get Tomcat configured to use its JNDI datasource so I can run the IDEA debugger in development. Very glad that I refactored the RowSet routines last week to eliminate duplication. Made switching back and forth between connections and JNDI quick and easy. Kent is absolutely right: normalization is just as important for programs as it is for schemas.

As a prank, Jake changed the screen savers on all the computers today. Reminds me of my networking days. I’d put in a batch of new computers. No one in the office would know how to use them, but still, I’d come back in the next day, and they would have managed to get all screen savers changed. =:0) “Agatha Christy” – “JungleBook” – what a cacophy!