Sending books to your Kindle

Found this article that introduced me to the SendToKindle desktop app from Amazon. This is the effective way of having your non Amazon books synced to your Kindle cloud account, so that all of your devices can have them, rather than side loading them. There are versions for PC and Mac.

Additionally, you can use Calibre to convert PDF docs to .mobi before sending them to your Kindle account. 

Outputting JMX Monitoring Points

If you need to programmatically access all JMX monitoring points for your Servlet app, do the following:

1. Add the following VM arguments to the Tomcat Run Configuration (This can be done in Eclipse/STS run configurations):

-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=8234
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false

2. Then run the following Java Program:

package com.rim.platform.mdm.core.service.email;

import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.Set;

import javax.management.InstanceNotFoundException;
import javax.management.IntrospectionException;
import javax.management.MBeanAttributeInfo;
import javax.management.MBeanInfo;
import javax.management.MBeanServerConnection;
import javax.management.MalformedObjectNameException;
import javax.management.ObjectInstance;
import javax.management.ReflectionException;
import javax.management.remote.JMXConnector;
import javax.management.remote.JMXConnectorFactory;
import javax.management.remote.JMXServiceURL;

public class MonitoringPoints
{

    public MonitoringPoints()
    {
    }

    /**
     * @param args
     * @throws Exception
     */
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception
    {
        String host = "localhost"; 
        int port = 8234;
        String url = "service:jmx:rmi:///jndi/rmi://" + host + ":" + port + "/jmxrmi";
        printAll(url);
    }

    public static void printAll(String url) throws IOException, MalformedObjectNameException, 
            InstanceNotFoundException, IntrospectionException, ReflectionException
    {
        JMXServiceURL serviceUrl = new JMXServiceURL(url);
        JMXConnector jmxConnector = JMXConnectorFactory.connect(serviceUrl, null);
        try
        {
            MBeanServerConnection mbeanConn = jmxConnector.getMBeanServerConnection();
            // now query to get the beans or whatever
            Set beanSet = mbeanConn.queryMBeans(null, null);
            for (ObjectInstance instance : beanSet)
            {
                MBeanInfo info = mbeanConn.getMBeanInfo(instance.getObjectName());
                MBeanAttributeInfo[] mai = info.getAttributes();
                System.out.println("\n******* Monitoring points for: " + instance.getObjectName());
                for (MBeanAttributeInfo object : mai)
                {
                    System.out.println(object.getName());
                }
            }
        }
        finally
        {
            jmxConnector.close();
        }
    }
}

Content assist for static imports in Eclipse

Take a look at the following link on how you can enable auto complete in Eclipse for static imports:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/288861/eclipse-optimize-imports-to-include-static-imports

This is very helpful when you are writing JUnit and Mockito code. Below is the relevant part of the StackOverflow answer: 

Partial implementation of Interface

Java Stuff: If you are implementing an interface and planning on not supporting all the methods, it a good practice to do the following for not implemented methods:

        throw new org.apache.commons.lang.NotImplementedException.NotImplementedException(
                  "method not implemented by This class");

More details here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1062937/java-equivalent-to-nets-notsupportedexception

Git Tricks

I started maintaining a new page at Zoho docs to document my git learning:

Code highlighting in Blogger

There are helpful instructions on the link below for high-lighting code in your blogger posts:
http://lukabloga.blogspot.com/2008/10/to-test-new-highlighting.html

UPDATE: I found GitHub Gist to be a faster and elegant alternative

There are other alternatives here:
http://stackoverflow.com/q/679189/747479

Stack Overflow rocks!

Dealing with International Characters in Web Services [Java]

Recently, we had to develop an API where data (resource in RESTful terms) gets created with an emailId as a primary key and then a subsequent lookup is performed to access that resource.

There is an RFC that allows email ids to have international characters:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6530

e.g. Rδοκιμή@παράδειγμα.δοκιμή

More details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_address#Internationalization

To support international characters in our API, we had to do the following:

We develop our web services in Java Servlets using the Spring Framework and deploy them using Tomcat. The Create (resource) API had the emailId in the requestBody and the lookup API was a HTTP GET call with the emailId in the URL. 

To get the Create (resource API) working, the client needs to make the request with the charset parameter in the ContentType header:

Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8

This instructs the Servlet container to treat the requestBody as an UTF8 encoded string. Without the charset parameter, the encoding is assumed to be ISO-8859-1 (default for Java Servlets). If you ever have to store the string in a DB or encrypt it, remember to retrieve the string in UTF8 encoding. String.getBytes("UTF-8") like stuff.

Now for the lookup API, where the emailId is in the URI, you need to keep two things in mind:

1. Special characters in URIs are percent encoded.  For a non-ASCII character, it is typically converted to its byte sequence in UTF-8, and then each byte value is percent encoded.
2. Instruct the Servlet container about the UTF8 URI encoding. This can be done by updating the HTTP connector in server.xml:
   

   <Connector connectionTimeout="20000" port="8080" 
   protocol="HTTP/1.1" redirectPort="8443" URIEncoding="UTF-8"/>
   

For additional insight, the below StackOverflow link has great nuggets of knowledge:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/138948/how-to-get-utf-8-working-in-java-webapps/138950#138950

I did try the CharacterEncodingFilter filter approach but didn't get it to work. I did set it up as the first filter, also did the force encoding bit wasn't doing anything.