Byte Slinger

Struts 2 form tag action attribute function

Struts 2 is a complex framework that is hampered by poor documentation and books that don't provide enough details. Simple tasks can be accomplished many ways but it is not always obvious what they are. Even something as basic as creating a form tag to invoke an action can cause quite a bit of confusion.

MySQL problem with Apache connection pools

The Apache commons-dbcp-1.2.2.jar doesn't work and play well with MySQL. The symptom is an error when a call is made to MySQL after the connection has timed out. This happens with Spring SQL template as well as many ORM tools such as Hibernate.

Using Blogger missing files host to maintain traffic after conversion

I recently had to help out with a blog that was migrated to Blogger. Afterward, the search engine traffic dried up because the URLs all changed. Combining a 301 permanent move response with a missing files host solved the problem.