Archive for category Languages
Mac OS and Java Me SDK 3.0
Sun have released not too long ago a Java ME SDK 3.0 that finally brings an official Wireless Toolkit Emulator to the Mac platform.
I have been dealing with SUN software for a while now and I was not expecting this to be a smooth ride. Those who’d dealt with the WTK on Windows/Linux platform are well aware of the limitations of these emulators. What I was not prepared for was to get so much clutter that would just not work more than a couple of times.
First impression: this wtk looks like the most polished emulator ever released by Sun.
Sadly, after using the thing for a few days I discovered that the old habits had not changed:
- there is no menu entry to run an existing jad/jar pair. You have to right click on an emulator instance and then run it…
- you cannot set-up a project starting from a jad/jar pair. There used to be an option to do this back in wtk 2.2…
- after running a couple of apps the whole thing crashes an burns
- when closing down the wtk a process is left lingering. Run this in a terminal: ps aux | grep device-manager.app
- switching the verbose mode when launching the emulator kills the whole thing dead!
- they bundled ant 1.7.1 with the distro although ant is built in Mac OS
- Permgen errors are thrown if you try to launch the app too often. LOL
Here’s what happened when I created a new project and tried to run it:
*** Error ***
Failed to connect to device 0!
Reason:
Emulator 0 terminated while waiting for it to register!
The same thing happens with Emulator 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 5 and 6 and … you get the picture.
Googling did return lots of forum posts, but hardly any answers…
So after wasting more than 2 hours on this issue I did the unthinkable: rebooted my mac! To my surprise the miracle happened during the reboot: I was finally able to run the project again.
Needless to say I am very disappointed but not surprised by the quality of this, early access, Java ME SDK.
Cheers…
Updating the UISearchBar programmatically
Posted by Nick in Objective C, Tutorial, iPhone on October 16, 2009
Today I had to update WelliBUS’s search bar programmatically because I needed to use the street picked up via GPS as my street name.
Until this point implementing the search bar seemed easy:
- adopt a couple of protocols: UISearchDisplayDelegate and UISearchBarDelegate
- implement a few callback methods (from the delegates listed above)
- (BOOL)searchDisplayController:(UISearchDisplayController *)controller shouldReloadTableForSearchString:(NSString *)searchString; - (BOOL)searchDisplayController:(UISearchDisplayController *)controller shouldReloadTableForSearchScope:(NSInteger)searchOption; - (void)searchDisplayControllerDidBeginSearch:(UISearchDisplayController *)controller; - (void)searchDisplayControllerDidEndSearch:(UISearchDisplayController *)controller;
- and implement my own filtering function
- (void)filterContentForSearchText:(NSString*)searchText scope:(NSString*)scope;
The problem I had on my hands was how to programmatically update the text in the UISearchBar and force the UISearchDisplayDelegate to call the appropriate callback methods.
Turns out it was simpler than expected (despite not being able to find a solution by googling). All that was needed was:
[self.searchDisplayController.searchBar becomeFirstResponder]; self.searchDisplayController.searchBar.text = returnString;
Cheers…
Urban Airship – Push Notifications
Posted by Nick in Objective C, REST, iPhone on October 4, 2009
Today I have finally added Push Notifications to Parcel Trackr.
I decided not to waste time and I went for Urban Airship. I registered, uploaded my push certificate, downloaded the sample and integrated the two systems.
Not everything went smoothly though because when I first ran the application I got a
Failed to register with error: Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=3000 UserInfo=0×120610 “no valid ‘aps-environment’ entitlement string found for application”
I thought my provisioning profile did not include the right entitlement… so I re-downloaded it and tried again. Turns out I was using the wrong provisioning profile.
So if you want to avoid my mistake just make sure that after you’ve configured push services in the iPhone Dev Center you download the updated provisioning profile and then you install it via XCode.
Other things worth checking include: the product name in your build configuration matches the app id and of course, the ultimate solution, clean all targets before building!
Cheers…
Jersey and Websphere 6.1
If you landed on this page it probably means that you’ve attempted to deploy a Jersey RESTful web service in IBM’s Websphere app server.
First of all: what were you thinking?!?
Secondly: it probably wasn’t your decision and you just need to make it work and move on. That was our case anyway…
So rather than bore you to death with how we ended up debugging the JVM and discovering that a java.lang.TypeNotPresentException is thrown when calling class.isAnnotationPresent from within the cores (com.ibm.oti.reflect.AnnotationHelper.getAnnotation) of the IBM J9 JVM rather than a plain true / false, I will just give you a bullet list of the things that need to happen to keep Websphere happy.
- Get your versions right! Jersey 1.0.3 and Websphere AS 6.1.0.25 (including 6.1.0.25 Fix Pack for Web Services) (Getting here is a blog post in itself and I will not do it here)
- Make sure that the enterprise app that contains your Jersey resources uses “Classes loaded with parent class loader first” and “Single class loader for application” (That is in your application’s “Class loading and update detection” section.)
- In your web xml configure the Jersey servlet to search for resources using ClassNames rather than packages. Basically make sure your web.xml looks similar to what I have below.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 | <servlet> <servlet-name>Jersey Web Application</servlet-name> <servlet-class>com.sun.jersey.spi.container.servlet.ServletContainer</servlet-class> <init-param> <param-name>com.sun.jersey.config.property.resourceConfigClass</param-name> <param-value>com.sun.jersey.api.core.ClassNamesResourceConfig</param-value> </init-param> <init-param> <param-name>com.sun.jersey.config.property.classnames</param-name> <param-value> net.tmro.MyRESTfulResource </param-value> </init-param> <load-on-startup>10</load-on-startup> </servlet> <servlet-mapping> <servlet-name>Jersey Web Application</servlet-name> <url-pattern>/json/*</url-pattern> </servlet-mapping> |
- Okay, some clarification: the reason ClassNamesResourceConfig is used rather than PackagesResourceConfig is that when the packages are browsed for the actual @Path annotated classes an actual jar browsing is done which throws and swallows a nasty SecurityException… I invite you (more like dare you) to try using ClasspathResourceConfig and let me know if it works.
Now go ahead and give this a try… don’t forget to let me know if it worked or failed for you… Good luck!
Cheers….
iPhone how to: center and horizontal align the contents of a UITextField
Posted by Nick in Objective C, iPhone on August 7, 2009
It’s as simple as:
1 2 | theTextField.contentVerticalAlignment = UIControlContentVerticalAlignmentCenter; theTextField.textAlignment = UITextAlignmentCenter; |
Basically this will ensure that no matter how tall your text field is the actual text will be centered both vertically and horizontally.
Cheers…
iPhone build error
Posted by Nick in Objective C, Tutorial, iPhone on July 18, 2009
I had to deal with the same problem twice in the past 2 days so I decided to put together this little post explaining what one needs to do when they see an error message like this:
error: syntax error before ‘AT_NAME’ token error: syntax error before ‘}’ token fatal error: method definition not in @implementation context

Build error message
Basically, what happens here is that the target for my iPhone application is using the wrong C/C++ Compiler version.
Here’s the fix:
Step 1 double click the target (or right click Get Info) and change the Compiler version to GCC 4.0
Compiler Version changed to 4.0
Step 2 add 2 new build setting conditions (one for the simulator and one for the device)

Build Setting Conditions
Step 3 Set the values to GCC 4.2

Final settings
Hit the magic Cmd + B and you should now have a project that builds (or at least no longer complains about the syntax error above.
Cheers…
JATA – Java Application Terminal Alignment
The Sun JavaOne conference is now in progress and one of the interesting things that have been announced so far is the JATA.
Together with France Telecom and Orange, Motorola, Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Vodafone, Sun announced the Java Application Terminal Alignment (JATA), which they promised would reduce the number of tests application developers would need to go through to ensure their applications run on different networks and handsets.
Also promised are a publisher ID digital certificate to authenticate a person and application, and R&D signing for developers to test their applications.
I am looking forward to learning more about it… in the mean time there is always j2mepolish
Jersey 1.0.2 JSON and JAXB
In a previous post I explained how to unit test JAX-RS. Let’s now have a look at a more complex example: implementing RESTful webservices using Jersey 1.0.2.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 | <servlet> <servlet-name>My Jersey Web Application</servlet-name> <servlet-class>com.sun.jersey.spi.container.servlet.ServletContainer</servlet-class> <init-param> <param-name>com.sun.jersey.config.property.resourceConfigClass</param-name> <param-value>com.sun.jersey.api.core.PackagesResourceConfig</param-value> </init-param> <init-param> <param-name>com.sun.jersey.config.property.packages</param-name> <param-value>net.tmro.demo.json;your.packages;separated.by.semicolons</param-value> </init-param> <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup> </servlet> <servlet-mapping> <servlet-name>My Jersey Web Application</servlet-name> <url-pattern>/webappjson/*</url-pattern> </servlet-mapping> |
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 | package net.tmro.demo.json; import javax.ws.rs.*; import javax.ws.rs.core.MediaType; @Path(“/myresource”) public class MyResource { public MyResource() { } @GET @Produces(value=MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON) @Path(“/getsomething”) public MyComplexObject getSomething(@QueryParam(“idOfSomething”) String id) { //your complex object can expose primitive data types, objects as well as collections. //you are not required to do anything fancy as long as you implement return new MyComplexObject(id); } } |
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 | package net.tmro.demo.json; import java.io.*; import java.lang.annotation.Annotation; import java.lang.reflect.Type; import javax.ws.rs.WebApplicationException; import javax.ws.rs.core.*; import javax.ws.rs.ext.*; import com.sun.jersey.spi.resource.Singleton; import net.sf.json.JSONSerializer; @Provider @Singleton public class MyEntityProvider implements MessageBodyWriter<object> { //the json serializer used to write out objects to the output stream private final JSONSerializer serializer = new JSONSerializer(); public long getSize(final Object t, final Class<?> type, final Type genericType, final Annotation[] annotations, final MediaType mediaType) { return -1; } public boolean isWriteable(final Class<?> type, final Type genericType, final Annotation[] annotations, final MediaType mediaType) { return mediaType.isCompatible(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_TYPE); } public void writeTo(final Object t, final Class<?> type, final Type genericType, final Annotation[] annotations, final MediaType mediaType, final MultivaluedMap<string, Object> httpHeaders, final OutputStream entityStream) throws IOException, WebApplicationException { entityStream.write(serializer.toJSON(t).toString().getBytes()); } } |
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 | package net.tmro.demo.json; @XmlRootElement public class MyComplexObject extends AnotherObject { //fields: primitive data types, objects and collections. everything gets serialized unless //marked as transient public MyComplexObject(String id){ [..] } //getters and setters } |
The Java Store – Project Vector
Posted by Nick in Java, The Wonderful Internet on May 25, 2009
UITabBarButtonItem did not change its title
Posted by Nick in Objective C, iPhone on May 18, 2009
Today I needed to implement the UITableView's edit / delete functionality inside my UITableViewController. That is fairly simple:

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