We are back ;-)

Well, I decided to resurrect this blog. I am still a Google fan-boy, but my language of choice is now Dart. I plan to post a few interesting code snippets, hopefully in the near future. Stay tuned! 

Problems with deploying your app to GAE/J

I had a very annoying problem lately. The deployment of my app to GAE was failing randomly with mysterious errors like this:

com.google.apphosting.utils.config.AbstractConfigXmlReader
getTopLevelNode
SEVERE: Received IOException parsing the input stream for /home/.../war/WEB-INF/web.xml
java.net.ConnectException: Connection timed out
        at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.socketConnect(Native Method)
 ...
SEVERE: Received exception processing /home/.../war/WEB-INF/web.xml
com.google.apphosting.utils.config.AppEngineConfigException: Received
IOException parsing the input stream for /home/.../war/WEB-INF/web.xml
        at
com.google.apphosting.utils.config.AbstractConfigXmlReader.getTopLevelNode( AbstractConfigXmlReader.java:
210) 

After an extended googling session I unearthed a solution in this helpful discussion thread. Just replace the doctype declaration in your web.xml file

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE web-app
    PUBLIC "-//Sun Microsystems, Inc.//DTD Web Application 2.3//EN"
    "http://java.sun.com/dtd/web-app_2_3.dtd">
<web-app>

with the following updated version:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
 xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee" xmlns:web="
http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd"
 xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee
http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd"
 version="2.5">

That's all, one click deployment is working reliably again!

Hello World

Welcome to my new blog!

If you follow my main blog at www.gmosx.com/blog you already know I am a Google fan boy. Google offers a comprehensive platform: there is a mobile operating system (Android), a PAAS offering (Google App Engine), multiple marketplaces, a rich collection of APIs, client side frameworks (GWT, Closure) and tons of free libraries and tools.

It 's not perfect, by any means, but then again, there is no such thing as a perfect development platform. In this blog I will post practical examples of using this amazing ecosystem. Our implementation languages will be Java and JavaScript.