java

Have fun RESTing!

Cheesy post titles aside… I just discovered the very simple but incredibly useful RESTClient at: http://code.google.com/p/rest-client/ . It’s a simple Java GUI app for testing out one’s REST services. You can choose your: URL, HTTP method, add any custom headers, add a body for PUT/POST, set auth info, SSL info, and do simple scripting. This is an incredibly useful tool, AND a far cry better than doing it all on the command line with curl.

VPN on Ubuntu Linux with Juniper Network Connect

There’s one standard document on HOWTO get Network Connect working on Ubuntu Linux. It’s mad scientist’s doc: http://mad-scientist.us/juniper.html . However, there are a few things not covered. I’ll assume that you’ve followed mad scientist’s excellent guide before going any further. Issue #1: 64-bit Ubuntu By default, when you install java on your 64-bit system, you get a 64-bit java. No surprise there, right? Well, Juniper’s tools don’t play nice with 64-bit java.

Fixing Binary File Corruption from Ant Copies

So there I was, poking around in some java / j2ee code, trying to learn how it all works. I did some testing on a Linux server and realized, something is broken. It seemed something was corrupting ALL the Jar files in WEB-INF/lib/. A co-worker guessed that the token filtering Ant was doing might be the culprit. He was right. It seems Ant has issues with detecting whether files are binary or not, given that it uses a Reader class which runs the files through a character decoder.