JBoss DNA 0.3 is available

JBoss DNA 0.3 has been released, and is available in the JBoss Maven repository and in our project’s downloads area. Our Getting Started guide provides a great introduction and shows what JBoss DNA can do by walking you through several examples.

Congratulations to the JBoss DNA team for a job well done. This was our shortest cycle to date, and by all accounts it has worked very well. The major priority with this release was to enhance the connector framework, so that people can start writing their own connectors. If you’re interested in this, check out our Reference Guide‘s new section on how to write a custom connector.

Again, thanks to the whole team! Interest in JBoss DNA continues to grow, and that’s a testament to their hard work and desire to build great software.

No rest for the weary, however. We’ve already started work on 0.4, and are planning what will go in this next release. We’d love to have new members, so please join the team if you think JBoss DNA sounds interesting.

Filed under: jcr, news, repository

Access control with JCR repositories

Michael has a great post that talks about how access control lists (ACLs) work in JCR, and how the JCR approach compares with the traditional approach of having the application (like a web app) performs its own access control checks on whether users can access certain data.

Filed under: features, jcr

Reminder: JBoss DNA presentation at the St Louis JUG

Just a reminder that I’ll be presenting JBoss DNA at tomorrow’s St Louis JUG meeting. (Psst: I’ll be giving away some goodies.)

Update: The presentation is available here.

Filed under: appearances, jcr, news

SAX broken in Java 6 and 7 (and how open source really works)

Not long ago Serge, one of DNA’s committers, found a bug when running our XML sequencer with Java 6. Turns out the culprit is actually the Java 6’s SAX parser, which is calling the handler methods for entity references in the wrong order! Ouch!

Normally, when processing an XML entity reference, whether a standard entity like “<” or a custom one like “&version;“, the SAX parser first calls startEntity(String) method on LexicalHandler with the name of the entity (e.g., “lt”). It then calls the the character(...) method on ContentHandler to process the replacement content (e.g., “<“). Finally, the parser then calls endEntity(String) method on LexicalHandler (again with the name of the entity).

That’s the way it’s supposed to work. In Java 6, the startEntity(String) method is called correctly, but the endEntity(String) method is then called, and the content passed to the characters(...) includes the replacement content and the next set of content that would be processed. WTF?

I had a tough time finding out whether anyone else hand encountered this. Surely they had – a problem like this? In fact, my search results kept including the DNA bug in the top results. (In hindsight, the only reason we care is that we want to keep the original entity reference rather than use the replacement content, which SAX normally does. So most people may not actually notice the problem.)

But, for the moment, it didn’t matter whether it was a JDK problem or not. We want to release DNA in a few days, and the XML sequencer worked correctly in Java 5, but not in Java 6. So, either find a fix or treat as a known issue. Well, this issue could come up a lot with XML sequencing, so we tried a fix. In fact, I found a workaround that was actually pretty minimal, so now the sequencer works on both Java versions. Score!

Okay, now that DNA was on track, back to the JDK bug. Based upon our unit tests, I had a hunch it was just Java 6 on OS-X. So, would I file the bug with Apple or with Sun? This morning I started working on a simple test to show the problem, which I could use to find out exactly which JDKs were a problem and where I’d need to file the bug.

But then open source to the rescue! Daniel (from the Smooks project) found the same problem and he filed a bug report. Today no less. Turns out my hunch about OS-X was wrong, and it’s a problem in Java 6 and 7. Of course, like a good open-source citizen, Daniel commented on our JIRA issue. That’s how I found out about his bug report. Thanks, Daniel – you saved me some time, and hopefully our initial triaging served you well.

I love how open source works.

Filed under: open source, testing

Free JBoss Developers Studio 2 Beta

Download the JBoss Developers Studio 2 Beta for free. Max has all the details here. Did I mention that it’s free?

Filed under: news, tools