Java

If you’re writing a JSP using the JSTL tag <c:catch var=”myError”> … </c:catch> then I’m sure that you know that the next thing to do is to check after the closing catch tag to see if myError is empty. If not you can output some useful error message having successfully caught any exception. However, sometimes it’s useful to actually output the stack trace (when debugging a site for example). It turns out not to be difficult to do this. Simply copy in the following:

<c:if test="${not empty myError}">
<p class="error">An error occured: <c:out value="${myError}"/></p>
<pre>
<c:forEach var="stackTraceElem" items="${myError.stackTrace}">
<c:out value="${stackTraceElem}"/><br/>
</c:forEach>

We’ve recently had a problem where we wanted to produce a website in multiple languages including Russian, Czech, Romanian, and other eastern European languages. No problems, we thought, we can just use Java properties files and the fmt:message JSTL tags. (more…)

Hi again, I’m now tackling something I’ve been meaning to do for ages (and probably should have done before I started the project) and that is to use Hibernate rather than rolling my own SQL.

I’m reading the book “Hibernate in Action” by Christian Bauer and Gavin King and have been trying it out. The book relates to Hibernate 2.0 and 2.1 so doesn’t include annotations which is a bit of a shame, but it’s still a good start.

Unfortunately as readers of this blog will know, I’m trying to put UTF-8 strings into the database so you can imagine my disappointment when I saw the familiar question marks appearing where there should be interesting new characters.

The fix turned out to be not so difficult to find however, thanks to Philip Whirlycott’s blog posting More UTF-8 head-thumping with Hibernate 3 (obviously I’m not the only one struggling with these issues).

With Hibernate 3 (maybe not with 2.1, I’m not sure), you need to add some extra connection parameters:

jdbc:mysql://localhost/mydb?autoReconnect=true&useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF-8

If you put this in your hibernate.cfg.xml file for the JDBC URL it works and you can save the UTF-8 correctly.

I’ve been having problems with putting unicode strings into the subject of emails sent using javax.mail.

In the end, the solution was very simple and I found it here:

http://www.velocityreviews.com/forums/t132009-utf8-characters-not-appearing-correctly-in-email-subject-line.html

As long as you use “UTF-8″ and not “UTF8″ it all seems to work fine, so the code you need is:

Properties props = new Properties();
// put in your SMTP host in here
props.put(”mail.smtp.host”, “localhost”);
Session s = Session.getInstance(props, null);

MimeMessage message = new MimeMessage(s);
message.setFrom(new InternetAddress(from));
message.addRecipient(Message.RecipientType.TO, new InternetAddress(to));
message.setSubject(subject, “UTF-8″);
message.setText(body, “UTF-8″);
message.setHeader(”Content-Type”, “text/plain; charset=UTF-8″);
Transport.send(message);

Further to my post about creating properties files when I had text files in unicode, we decided that the best thing was to have a web application to do the conversion. You can then just paste in whatever text you want to encode and it tells you what the java escaped text string(s) should be.

And, we decided we might as well make it publicly available. So here it is.

Let us know if you find any bugs or if you can think of a better way to do it