Archive for January, 2010

WritableFont doesn’t like to be static!

Posted by smoreau in Java on 18 Jan 2010

While using the tool JExcelAPI within my Java application to generate Excel spreadsheets, I got the following exception:

java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 5
	at jxl.biff.IndexMapping.getNewIndex(IndexMapping.java:68)
	at jxl.biff.FormattingRecords.rationalize(FormattingRecords.java:388)
	at jxl.write.biff.WritableWorkbookImpl.rationalize(WritableWorkbookImpl.java:988)
	at jxl.write.biff.WritableWorkbookImpl.write(WritableWorkbookImpl.java:692)
	...

It appears that this exception occurs only when you try to generate more than one Excel spreadsheet! How strange is that! 😯
After a bit of investigation, it seems that the problem comes from the use of the static modifier with a jxl.write.WritableFont variable.

I unfortunately don’t have the time to check the JExcelAPI code source to understand the root cause.
So my advice would be: “if you get EXACTLY the same stack trace, simply delete any static modifier you used with the WritableFont variables”. 🙂

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Deploy your app to the root context

Posted by smoreau in Java, Tricks on 06 Jan 2010

This is an easy trick which I am sure most of you already know.

Let’s take a Java application called MyAddressBook. Its generated war file could be called myaddressbook.war.

By default, when you deploy this web application to Tomcat, the URL to access it will be http://localhost:8080/myaddressbook/. And if you point a domain name such as ‘addressbook.com’ to this server, the URL would be http://addressbook.com/myaddressbook/.

I don’t know for you but I don’t like to systematically have the subfolder ‘myaddressbook’ after my domain. But maybe I am too picky! 😉

The idea is to deploy our application in the Tomcat root context.
You have two ways of doing this:

  • Define a ROOT.xml file in your conf/Catalina/localhost folder, or;
  • Rename your war file to ROOT.war.

Note that the case is important, it has to be ROOT in UPPERCASE! 🙂

Once this is done, you will be able to call your application via the URL http://localhost:8080/
or http://addressbook.com/. Way better! 😎

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