Monthly Archives: September 2006

Subversion client for Mac OS X

This question is probably asked a lot, but are there any really good Subversion clients for Mac OS X? By really good, I’m thinking of something along the lines of TortoiseSVN on Windows.

I’m currently using svnX which is good, but it doesn’t support properties yet which makes it impossible to tell it to ignore directories (e.g. the build directory).

Are there any other good Subversion clients for Macs (apart from the command line of course !)?

Security for JSF Applications

I see a lot of posts around the internet by people asking what the standard mechanism for security is in JSF web applications.

From a security standpoint, JSF applications are no different from any other servlet based framework applications. If you’re deploying applications on J2EE / EE servers (e.g. GlassFish or JBoss) or even on Tomcat, then my first choice would be to use JAAS for security.

JAAS is straightforward to configure, is flexible and is a standard.

Next time you need to implement a security mechanism, I’d recommend you take a look at JAAS before embarking on writing custom security mechanisms. You never know – it may save you a lot of time.

Starting the Java DB in GlassFish

I’ve been doing a lot of development in NetBeans 5.5 beta 2 recently using Glassfish as my target application server. When doing development, its often quite useful to use the Derby DB bundled within Glassfish. As you’d expect from a modern IDE, NetBeans makes this easier for you by starting the database automatically so you don’t need to worry about it. When you deploy your application to a standalone Glassfish that isn’t “controlled” via NetBeans, you will probably find that the Derby DB doesn’t start automatically when Glassfish starts. Starting the DB is easily done from the command prompt though using the command:

asadmin start-database