New jaev Release
Today I made a new release of the jaev Framework for "advanced" e-mail validation. After being in productive use for quite some month now it was about time to offer a bugfix release. Some issues with domains containing no MX but an A DNS record where resolved. E-mail belonging to this kind of domains will now be accepted. An issue with a file handle leak due to unclosed UDP connections during the DNS lookup was also fixed.
Due to the generosity of Google I got a nice Google wave test account. Now I am looking desperately to some spare time to evaluate the integration of jaev to the wave. One idea is to expand the validation to wave addresses via the wave protocol. Maybe an online validation as wave bot is another exciting idea.
jaev 1.0 released
After some weeks the third release candidate of the jaev was the final one yesterday.
The jaev framework is in productional use at least one installation and no major problems where filed so far. I'm keeping my fingers crossed 
I am working already on some new features:
- Caching negative responses of mail servers
When a mail server refuses communication due to suspected spam, the result will be cached to reduce network traffic. - Suggest e-mail addresses
When the validation fails suggest a list e-mail addresses. This algorithm may use the previous request and a default list of domains to compute some suggestions.
If you have any good ideas, file them on the issue tracking system or the google group.
Maybe I am applying for a google wave developer sandbox access to provide a google wave robot for online e-mail suggestion. Bah, that sounds like some work
Tomcat 6.x … doing it the right way!
Some days ago I posted a blog entry about using Glassfish v2 EJBs with the Tomcat. At this moment I thought that I solved the problems, but last week we were setting our testing evironment on a Debian Linux box and the problems reoccured.
At this moment I thought of a glitch in the server setup but some nagging hours later I realized that my so clever solution was a dirty hack. Which works in a Microsoft Windows environment, but refuses to work on in a Linux environment.
Ok, I have to confess, that I wasn't really happy with my first solution in the end. Renaming JARs to provide the correct order of class loading always leaves a bad taste. But at that moment I was happy, no other solution was in sight and I had absolutly no time.
JSF 2.0 RI EDR1 … getting mature
Friday evening I read about the new version of JSF. The reference implementation (RI) Mojarra made an early draft review (EDR) of Mojarra 2.0 which implements the lastest specification of the JSR-314 which features JavaServer Faces (JSF) 2.0.
Tomcat, Glassfish and EJB … what a mess!
I was quite busy in the last weeks, we are starting couple of new projects for a long time customer so I had lot's of work to do and very few time for blogging. On the other hand side I have some new topics to blog about, so it was quite a fair deal.
The last days I had some fun trying to access some Glassfish EJB from a Tomcat web container. Some of you will now start to suggest to use only the Glassfish, so that is the whole story: There is a service layer which provides access to services on the different backend systems. This service layer is provided by our customer using the Glassfish J2EE container. Our application is planned to run on a Tomcat 6 web container - which is some kind of work horse in the company.
Still messing around with “ETag” and “Last-Modified”
Stating with this whole website performance an ETag topic opened pandoras box. It's a real mess and lame compromises all over the place. But I have to admit that the whole thing is not as easy as I expected it to be.
Anyway ... today I had a nice discussion with a colleague about this topic. He's a senior front-end developer. This means he is a real pro in HTML, CSS, Java-Script and stuff like this and he's the one who showed me the whole Yahoo! performance stuff. After this discussion I wanted to check some things out in detail.
An ETag is not about aliens
So what is this ETag thing. I am working since 1998 in the web business but I came across ETags some weeks ago when some of my customers starting to worry about their perfomace. Don't get me wrong, out apllication worked - as always - fine, but some pages where slower as the equivalent pages at the websites of their competitors. We checked our monitoring data, it's always good to know of the webstite performed on yesterday, yesterweek or yestermonth, but were unable to find some issues. So we went from the server to the protocol and the client and checked some static and dynamic pages. As I was taking a closer look at a static webpage I stumbled over a HTTP header which I didn't know: ETag.