Tapestry 4 Tutorial

Posted on March 4, 2008 by Ahmed Tawfik

During the last few weeks, I’ve been searching for tutorials for Tapestry; the Java front-end web framework I use in my main project right now in IBM (A very nice and mature framework, you have to check it out). Frankly speaking, the resources for Tapestry (either books or articles) are not much and not easy to find, also, most of the tutorials I found are not comprehensive and contain many missing information. At last, I found the BEST TAPESTRY TUTORIAL on Devshed starting from absolute beginner’s level to advanced developers, here is its URL, I use it a lot and I consider it among my main resources for developing with Tapestry, Enjoy!

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Ubuntu, The Best Linux Distro Ever!

Posted on February 21, 2008 by Ahmed Tawfik

As the title shows, yes, IN MY OPINION, Ubuntu is the best, after trying a lot of Linux distros; Fedora 7, openSUSE 10.3, SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 SP1, Red Hat 9 and Ubuntu. Ubuntu is the one that is nearest to logical thinking; my logical thinking :D; its Debian based package management and software installation and update system is the easiest of them all, it’s the best in recognizing hardware, comes with the latest Software and best of all, it has the best community ever! You can never find any question in your mind unanswered. I’m currently using SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 on my IBM Thinkpad, but once I get the chance, I’ll remove it and re-install my love, my Ubuntu :), I’m so sorry Ubuntu for leaving you, muuuuuuuuuuuuah

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Disable Caching in Tapestry

Posted on February 20, 2008 by Ahmed Tawfik

Tapestry strives to be as efficient as possible, so it caches page templates and specifications in order not to reload them every time when they are needed. This is a very useful behavior in a production application; however, during development it can become annoying, as we might not immediately see the changes we have just made to the page.

Thankfully, there is a way to ask Tapestry not to cache any pages in our development environment.

In Eclipse, double click on your server (Tomcat in my example) in the Servers tab, click “Open launch configuration”, click the “Arguments” tab and append the line below into the VM arguments text box:

-Dorg.apache.tapestry.disable-caching=true

Restart Tomcat, Enjoy! You no longer need to restart your server during development in order to see your changes in action, this used to bug me a lot!

Source

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Using .rpm packages for Ubuntu

Posted on February 1, 2008 by Ahmed Tawfik

As all of you know, Ubuntu is a Debian-based distro, which means that it uses the .deb packages, but the more I work with Ubuntu, the more I discover that many packages are available in .rpm format only (or alternatively you can download and compile the source yourself of course, but that’s not what I recommend especially for beginners), what’s the solution then?? It’s simply “Alien”, and what is alien? It’s a package converter software that can simply convert .rpm packages to .deb ones!! It’s as simple as this:

sudo apt-get install alien //to download the alien software
sudo alien packageToBeConverted.rpm //where $path is the path to the .rpm file

You’ll then simply find the corresponding .deb file in the same folder as the source .rpm file, happy conversion 🙂

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A Great MP3 Player!

Posted on February 1, 2008 by Ahmed Tawfik


Before now, I was using Totem Movie Player to play my MP3 collections, but I didn’t feel it was as convenient as Winamp or Windows Media Player, and yesterday I saw one of my friends running what I thought at first Winamp on Linux, but it was XMMS, a great audio player for Linux, and is available for nearly all Linux distros. Get it using sudo apt-get install xmms, Happy MP3s!

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