2008

June

• Quercus on GlassFish via the Update Center

  Jim Driscoll wrote a really helpful blog entry regarding the GlassFish Update Center module he wrote for Mojarra. After reading that, I decided to revisit Quercus on GlassFish. Using Jim’s incredibly detailed entry, as well as looking at the code in the Mojarra 2.0 SVN repo, I was able to get an Update Center module working that installs and configures Quercus for you, so now all you have to do to get WordPress running, for example, is install this module, and extract WordPress into your document. Easy!

  For those interested, the Update Center url is http://uc.steeplesoft.com/quercus.xml. To set this up, you’ll need to start the Update Center ($GF_HOME/updatecenter/bin/updatetool.*), switch to the Preferences tab, click Add, and fill out the form. Once that’s done, switch to the "Available Software" tab, click the "Check for Updates" button in the upper right corner, and wait for the process to finish. You should now see Quercus available under the "Web Technologies" section.

  For those interested, the source code is in my Mercurial repository here.

  Due to some issues in GlassFish v2, automatic uninstallation is a bit complicated. The module supports it, but you have to get your hands dirty to make it work. Jim has details on his blog.

  If you use this, please let me know how it works out for you. :)

• GlassFish, PHP and WordPress

  With all the hype around JRuby, Jython, Scala, Groovy, etc., an oft-overlooked dynamic language with JVM support is PHP. Thanks to the hard work of the folks at Caucho Technology, the Quercus project offers a pure Java implementation of the PHP language, sporting support for a lot of the major PHP-based applications. In this entry, we’ll look at how to configure GlassFish to provide easy PHP support, and then look at installing WordPress, the popular blogging software (which runs this site) on GlassFish.

2006

December

• Why CakePHP?

  A reader recently asked me why I chose CakePHP over other frameworks, such as Prado, so I thought I’d answer that question briefly.

2005

April

• There has to be a decent ORM for PHP

  For quite a while now, I’ve been using PEAR’s DB_DataObject to do data persistence, but I’ve never been quite satisfied with it. As I’ve used Hibernate more and more, I find myself increasingly disappointed with DB_DataObject, so I went searching for a solution.

March

• To PHP or not to PHP…​

  After years of PHP development, I find myself trying to decide if I should stick with the language…​I have been doing PHP for years; since the PHP3 days. I have found it to be a powerful and flexible language that is easy to code in and deploy. Every web application I have running at home, on this site, or any of the other hand full of sites I maintain or help maintain is written in PHP. I love the language. However, after having professionally written in Java in addition to other languages, including PHP, I am now in a full time, 100% Java position, and, having had the opportunity to dig deeper into the myriad of libraries available in Java, I find myself wondering if I should use only that.