Building Collaborative CRUD Applications With ICEfaces and NetBeans Tutorial

I spent yesterday afternoon getting the ICEFaces modules installed in NetBeans 6.5 and trying the Building Collaborative CRUD Applications With ICEfaces and NetBeans tutorial on the ICEFaces site. This time, unlike the last time I tried it, it worked with some minor issues.

Note: Read the instructions carefully. The images do not show how to do everything.

When creating the Editing Form make sure that when you drag a new ice:form is NOT inside the first ice:form. Dragging and dropping the form on the page will automatically embed it in the other form. Use the Navigator tab in NetBeans to drag it outside of the first form.

Adding AJAX Push

Items #3 and #4: has you create a bean called RenderManager, and then use it in Item#4. The problem is that in one case it is called RenderManager and the other is called renderManager. A big difference. Fix it by calling the bean renderManager.

Configure The Grizzly ARP Engine

I was using GlassFish version 2.1 so I did not need to configure the Grizzly engine. I did however need to Comet support to the http-listener in the domain.xml file.

<property name="cometSupport" value="true"></property>

Thoughts

I was impressed with the ease of doing the tutorial. I would suggest that the ICEFaces folks update the tutorial for NetBeans 6.5 and fix some of the minor deficiencies as I noted above.

Swing Listener Example

I was asked about using a listener to handle Swing GUI events. I created a simple example which uses a PropertyChangeListener that captures events. You can see the KeyEvents output to the System.out

Here is a link to the NetBeans 6.5 project SwingGUIListenerExample

LDAP Digest Authentication SunOne Directory Server

I was experimenting with Digest (DIGEST-MD5) authentication using SunOne Directory Server. There are not a lot of notes to explain how to use it, nor is the Sun tutorial on JNDI very helpful.

Note: Here is the important thing to remember. You can ONLY use DIGEST-MD5 with plain text passwords. For example, if the passwords are set using SSHA (Secure Salted Hashing Algorithm), you will need to change them to plain text to use it. This is not something I would recommend doing, because DIGEST-MD5 is not as secure as SSHA.

I would recommend using SSL without using DIGEST-MD5, and keep the passwords secured.