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We are having some problems with a JBoss 3.2.6 instance running out of memory (java.lang.OutOfMemoryError) with an error message about not being able to create native threads. First of I though it was memory for the instance so I added a bunch of more memory that that didn’t seem to fix the problem. I poked a little around on Google and found JBoss issue 1369 which is basically what we are experiencing. For the moment I have tried disabling the UIL2 (Universal Invocation Layer 2) and just leaving the JVM Invocation Layer (jvm-il) to see if that solves the problem. Only using the jvm-il should solve the need to using separate threads etc.

We are crossing our fingers.

Quoted from “New features in Lotus Domino 7.0 Beta 4” on developerWorks:

For a web application we are hosting for some customers we use the Ultimate Dropdown Menu which is a CSS formatted menu product. The UDM is a third-party product – not something we did at my company.

The primary reason that we are using it is that it allows the developer to set a shortcut key so the users can access and use the menu using only the keyboard. This is a must for a web application that users use each day as their primary tool for data entry. Another reason is that the license is cheap! At 70 USD per server it is very competitive – you can’t even code a decent stylesheet for that amount of money.

The menu had one short coming though. The menu is based on unordered HTML lists (<ul>) which may be nested to desired level of nesting and we needed to add menu items to the menu dynamically using the DOM (Document Object Model) through JavaScript. However the menu API was missing a way to have it rebuild its internal state and make it update dynamically. This short coming has been solved in the new 4.43 release.

The Load XML extension is only possible because of a new public method called um.refresh, which re-initialises the navigation tree as though the page had been reloaded – many thanks to Mikkel Heisterberg for suggesting this.

Well it would but first things first… VERY nice. I really like the DominoWiki – the wiki is really easy to install, configure and work with. I think I’ll introduce the other guys at the office to the concept.

After proper credit has been given let me get back to the initial focus of the post. The wiki should mainly be used to share code examples within my team of developers but I like code to look like code which it doesn’t when you just paste it into DominoWiki. My first and obvious problem was that all datatypes showed up as WikiWords. This is understandable due to their CamelCase nature. The fix was easy though – enclose all code in the <nowiki> tag which basically tells DominoWiki not to parse the text. Nice. This a new problem emerged – the code was displayed using the same font as the rest of the text. This made it hard to read and see what was introduction and what was code. Hmmm… Using the <code> HTML tag inside the <nowiki> tag helped me there. I now had nice Courier formatted code. But wait a minute… Didn’t Julian Robichaux do a script library for converting LotusScript code into HTML so it would display on the web like it does in the Domino Designer. Well I believe he did. 🙂 I went and fetched the code and hacked a little at the WikiPage.class script library. Now I can embed the <lotusscript> tag inside a <nowiki> tag and have nice formatted LotusScript in my wiki. <nowiki> <lotusscript> Some LotusScript code... </lotusscript> </nowiki> Really nice if I have to say so myself.

(Click image to open a bigger version)

Below is the patched version of the wikiFormat method from the WikiPage.class script library (remember to also get the ls2html script library from http://www.nsftools.com (I had to make small tweaks to the library to make it compile under Notes 6.5.4). The code has been formatted with ls2html – what else… 🙂

.lotusscript { font-family: courier; font-size: 9pt; color: black; }
.ls-comment { color: green; }
.ls-quote { color: black; }
.ls-datatype { color: black; }
.ls-operator { color: blue; }
.ls-keyword { color: blue; }
.ls-statement { color: blue; }
.ls-function { color: blue; }
.ls-class { color: black; }
.ls-constant { color: purple; }

Public Function wikiFormat (txt As String) As String
  '** call all of the wiki formatting functions, in a somewhat specific
  '** order (we also need to ignore anything in a <nowiki></nowiki>
  '** block, so you'll see the logic for that in here as well)
  Dim s1 As String, s2 As String, s3 As String, s4 As String
  Dim a1 As Variant
  Dim i As Integer
  Dim pos As Long
  Dim style As StyleDef

  Const NOWIKI_START = "&amp;lt;nowiki&amp;gt;"
  Const NOWIKI_END = "&amp;lt;/nowiki&amp;gt;"
  Const LS_START = "&amp;lt;lotusscript&amp;gt;"
  Const LS_END = "&amp;lt;/lotusscript&amp;gt;"

  'create default style as I like it (using courier for code)
  Call GetDefaultLsStyleDef(style)
  style.script = "font-family: courier,sans-serif; font-size: 9pt; color: black;"

  '** convert rn linefeeds to just n
  s1 = parseLinefeeds(txt)

  '** remove all user-entered HTML from the page
  s1 = removeHTML(s1)

  '** ignore things that are within <nowiki></nowiki> sections
  a1 = Split(s1, NOWIKI_START, -1, 5)
  For i = 0 To Ubound(a1)
     If (i = 0) Then
        '** text before the first <nowiki> tag (if any), so we need to
        '** parse the whole block of text
        s1 = a1(i)
        s2 = ""
     Else
        '** check to see if there's a </nowiki> tag in here anywhere;
        '** if there is, we only want to parse everything after it, but if
        '** there's not we have to assume that all the text in this block
        '** is inside of the <nowiki> block, so we'll ignore everything
        '** in that case.
        pos = Instr(1, a1(i), NOWIKI_END, 5)
        If (pos > 0) Then
           s1 = Mid(a1(i), pos + Len(NOWIKI_END))
           s2 = Left(a1(i), pos - 1)
        Else
           s1 = ""
           s2 = a1(i)
        End If
     End If

     s1 = parseWikiWords(s1)
     s1 = parseLists(s1)
     s1 = parseRules(s1)

     '** it's possible that the user would expect us to only look for
     '** bold, italic, and header matches along a single line. If that's
     '** the case, you can adjust the matchCondition filter.
     matchCondition = "*"
     matchCriteria = True
     'matchCondition = "*[" &amp; chr(10) &amp; "]*" ' on a single line only
     'matchCriteria = False

     s1 = parseBold(s1)
     s1 = parseItalics(s1)
     s1 = parseHeaders(s1)
     s1 = parseMonospace(s1)

     '** parse anything inside of single or double brackets ( [ ] or [[ ]] )
     s1 = parseBrackets(s1)

     s3 = s3 &amp; s2 &amp; s1
  Next

  a1 = Split(s3, LS_START, -1, 5)
  For i = 0 To Ubound(a1)
     If (i = 0) Then
        '** text before the first <lotusscript> tag - just add it to the 
        '** result string
        s4 = s4 &amp; a1(i)
     Else
        '** check to see if there's a </lotusscript> tag in here anywhere;
        '** if there is, we only want to get the text before it, but if
        '** there's not we have to assume that all the text in this block
        '** is inside of the <lotusscript> block, so we'll get all remaining 
        '** text in that case.
        pos = Instr(1, a1(i), LS_END, 5)
        If (pos > 0) Then
           '** there is a </lotusscript> tag
           s1 = Mid(a1(i), pos + Len(LS_END)) 'text after the ending tag
           s2 = Left(a1(i), pos - 1) 'text before the ending tag
        Else
           '** no stop tag - get rest of text
           s1 = ""
           s2 = a1(i)
        End If

        '** convert s2 using lotusscript2html
        s2 = ConvertStringEx(s2, style, False)

        '** add to s4
        s4 = s4 &amp; s2 &amp; s1
     End If
  Next
  s3 = s4

  '** a few additional fixes
  s3 = fixAmp(s3)
  s3 = fixRelativeLinks(s3)

  '** put back any "safe" HTML that was fixed
  s3 = allowSafeHTML(s3)

  '** convert linefeeds to <p> or <br>
  s3 = parseParas(s3)

  wikiFormat = s3
End Function

Very, very nice… This article on xml.com Joe Gregorio shows how you could encrypt data in RSS feeds by combining Blowfish, Greasemonkey and RSS.

When combining OOP with the basis design patterns from the GoF book your code really becomes better. It should be obvious but sometimes it takes a success to fully realize and appreciate it.

I just spent some time extending a framework I am developing in LotusScript with some new functionality. Because I used the Factory and Template Method pattern I was able to add the functionality in mere 20 minutes. My initial guess was 2 hours!!

Quite a difference.

Now that I’m ranting about OOP in Notes I am really surprised how difficult it is to get Notes developers to adopt OOP in LotusScript. Maybe because Lotus doesn’t push it harder by providing a decent IDE supporting the task. Maybe it is because everything else in Lotus Notes is so easy that the learning curve is too steep. OOP is hard to learn and use properly, but once you get there you reap the reward. Big time.

Firefox 1.0.5 has been released – get your copy now…

As announced in the beta forum the Lotus Domino 7 beta 4 will be posted in a couple of days. Beta 4 will be the final beta before the Gold release something in Q3 2005. Full announcement.

The Tomcat Domino Redirector is a DSAPI filter written by Andy Armstrong of Tagish. DSAPI is a plug-in infrastructure that allows you to write plug-ins that runs under the Domino HTTP stack and allows you to process HTTP requests before they reach the Domino HTTP stack. For those familiar with ISAPI, DSAPI is the same but for the Domino server.

The filter has recently been moved to be a official part of the Tomcat Connectors instead of being a separate project. The connector now also supports the JK2 protocol for those interested in such details. JK2 is the same protocol you use when you setup Tomcat being the Apache HTTP server using the mod_jk module.

To setup the DSAPI connector I simply followed the steps in a howto document I found on Google. I had to get the binary Tomcat 5.5.9 distribution from the Jakarta site since I couldn’t find the workers2.properties file anywhere else. Furthermore – the Registry file provided from the page didn’t set the “serverRoot” key for some reason so I had to create that key manually afterwards.

Other than that the whole process was painless and now JIRA runs happily behind Domino configured using Internet Sites documents without any issues and the users didn’t even notice. Nice.