Before starting this sample, it is necessary for you to create a Book domain object as described in the Grails Quick Start tutorial.  Create one or two books for testing purposes.

After you initialize your data and have your application up and running, we can proceed.  Let’s create a SOAP service to access this data.  For this example, I utilized the Apache Axis2 plugin instructions to create my service.

To test, we can use the command line utility curl.  To do so, we first need to create a simple XML document to pass to our service.  Create a file called availableBooks.xml

<soap:Envelope
  xmlns:soap="http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope"
  xmlns:axis="http://ws.apache.org/axis2">
  <soap:Header/>
  <soap:Body>
    <axis:availableBooks />
  </soap:Body>
</soap:Envelope>

We can now try passing this document to our service:

curl --header "Content-type: application/soap+xml" -i \
    --data @availableBooks.xml -X POST http://localhost:8080/soap-proto/services/test

The default plugin configuration will give you this error:
Please enable REST support in WEB-INF/conf/axis2.xml and WEB-INF/web.xml

You can’t just follow the instructions here because the Grails plugin framework has changed the location of this parameter.  Locate the file Axis2GrailsPlugin.groovy, and update the disableREST parameter:

    "disRest"(org.wso2.spring.ws.beans.ParameterBean) {
        name = "disableREST"
        value = "false"
        locked = "false"
    }

You may have to perform a “grails clean” and a restart of your application for this setting to take effect.

Retry your curl command from earlier.  You should now get the desired response (formatted for readability):

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: multipart/related;
  boundary=MIMEBoundaryurn_uuid_6A2C4C79E6979D3E371226968077707;
  type="application/soap+xml";
  start="<0.urn:uuid:6A2C4C79E6979D3E371226968077708@apache.org>";
  action="urn:availableBooksResponse"
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Server: Jetty(6.1.4)

--MIMEBoundaryurn_uuid_6A2C4C79E6979D3E371226968077707
Content-Type: application/soap+xml; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Content-ID: <0.urn:uuid:6A2C4C79E6979D3E371226968077708@apache.org>

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<soapenv:Envelope
  xmlns:soapenv="http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope">
  <soapenv:Body>
    <ns:getBookByIdResponse xmlns:ns="http://ws.apache.org/axis2">
      <ns:return xmlns:ax21="http://ws.apache.org/axis2/xsd" type="Book">
        <ax21:author>John</ax21:author>
        <ax21:id>1</ax21:id>
        <ax21:name>HOWTO Program</ax21:name>
        <ax21:version>0</ax21:version>
      </ns:return>
    </ns:getBookByIdResponse>
  </soapenv:Body>
</soapenv:Envelope>
--MIMEBoundaryurn_uuid_6A2C4C79E6979D3E371226968077707--

You can try the same thing if you need to pass a parameter by modifying the XML request:

<soap:Envelope xmlns:soap="http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope"
  xmlns:axis="http://ws.apache.org/axis2">
   <soap:Header/>
   <soap:Body>
      <axis:getBookById>
        <axis:id>1</axis:id>
      </axis:getBookById>
   </soap:Body>
</soap:Envelope>

Please note that we need to set the content type header for curl to “application/soap+xml”.  Without setting it, your application won’t know how to deal with the XML document.  Here are some common errors for other content types that I tried.  They don’t work with axis2, but they may work for other SOAP libraries:

"application/xml": <faultstring>The endpoint reference (EPR) for the Operation not
found is /soap-proto/services/test and the WSA Action = null</faultstring>

"text/xml" - <faultstring>com.ctc.wstx.exc.WstxEOFException: Unexpected EOF in prolog
 at [row,col {unknown-source}]: [1,0]</faultstring>

I’ve included those error messages because it was near impossible to find the reason for them elsewhere.  Hopefully they help solve your problem.

If you are looking for a way to test your SOAP API through a Grails application, you can do so by creating a simple Controller:

class TestController {

def index = {

def soapRequest = """
<soap:Envelope
xmlns:soap="http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope"
xmlns:axis="http://ws.apache.org/axis2">
<soap:Header/>
<soap:Body>
<axis:availableBooks />
</soap:Body>
</soap:Envelope>
"""
def soapUrl =

new URL("http://localhost:8080/my-project/services/test")

def connection = soapUrl.openConnection()
connection.setRequestMethod("POST" )
connection.setRequestProperty("Content-Type" ,

"application/soap+xml" )

connection.doOutput = true
Writer writer = new OutputStreamWriter(connection.outputStream)
writer.write(soapRequest)
writer.flush()
writer.close()
connection.connect()
def soapResponse = connection.content.text
render(soapResponse)

}

}

Change the XML document as necessary. Notice the “application/soap+xml” content type being set here as well.

Hopefully someone else benefits from my experience piecing together this puzzle.  If so, let me know by leaving a comment.

The documentation at grails.org is available online in Wiki format.  This means that the community can help to make it suck less.  However, whoever wrote the Wiki software obviously thought that useless Ajax functionality was more important than important things like edit timestamps and revision comments.

Nonetheless, I’ll do my part to update the documentation when I find it outdated, missing essential information, or just plain wrong.

Besides the first tutorial on creating a Grails application, the grails.org website has not been the primary source of information for me to learn about Grails.  Most of my information comes from nabble.com and markmail.org, usually found with numerous Google searches.  I’ll also recommend the Pragmatic Bookshelf Groovy Recipes book, it’s a great resource for example code.

Ok, time for me to stop complaining and get back to work.

After years of disliking my Garmin eTrex, I decided to splurge and buy a new GPS. I decided to try another brand, as I felt the Garmin firmware was difficult to use and sluggish. Since I use my GPS unit to geocode local businesses, a camera to take photos, and a pad of paper to record notes, the all-in-one functionality provided by the Triton 2000 caught my eye.

I purchased my Triton 2000 in January, 2008. The price was a bit steep – $420, but the feature set made the price tag seem reasonable. Without reading the manual, I turned on the unit and hated the user interface after 2 minutes of use. I’ve shown the unit to 2 other people and they have had similar experiences. It’s been a month now… I am much more proficient on the unit now, but I still hate the user interface as much as ever. I don’t write product reviews, but I felt I needed to to either 1) get the company to update the firmware to solve many of these problems, or 2) convince other potential buyers to look elsewhere.

I’ve broken my review into 2 parts, one for the device/UI, and one for the Windows software, VantagePoint.

The Magellan Triton 2000 unit and firmware

One of the features that immediately caught my eye was a touch screen and its pen input. This has probably turned into the biggest disappointment of the entire unit. It is nearly impossible to perform any task using only the pen or only the cursor control pad. Also, small complaint about the pen position – the unit must be designed for the 10 percent of the world’s population that is left-handed (citing Wikipedia, see reference there), since the pen release is on the left side of the unit. It is a hassle to release it when holding the unit in your left hand.

There are a few places where the pen input was implemented well. The main menu, and sub menu have big icons, easy to find and use. The text input screen is another. However, the places where the pen input is poorly implemented greatly outnumber the positive uses. For example, although the menus are layered (hitting ESC will generally return you to the previous menu), there is no way to close or cancel a menu using the pen. This forces the user to use the ESC button. Another example is the create waypoint screen. If you quickly want to add a waypoint, you need to scroll down to see the green “accept” checkbox. The scroll bar is so thin that you usually end up tapping in the large comment box, popping up the text entry screen.

The control pad is a complete piece of junk. It is difficult to manuever, and makes an annoying squeaky noise every time it is pressed. It feels cheap and I fear breaking it from pushing with enough force to have it accept my commands. Pressing down on the cursor control pad is often mistaken for pressing the enter button, which frequently causes unintended behaviors. All too often, the control pad ceases to function, until you use the touch screen to change screens.

The buttons on the sides and front of the unit are well designed and have a solid feel to them. Kudos!

The user interface has a variety of issues. As mentioned previously, the menus need close or cancel functionality. The UI tends to become unresponsive to pen input time after time. I find that I can tap something 4 or 5 times and it will not be accepted, but then pressing the enter button on the control pad will work immediately. Taking a photo and attaching to a previous waypoint does not work because the only waypoints that show, regardless of sort order, are the first 4 or 5 waypoints stored on the unit. There is no scroll bar to browse for additional ones, either. The speed of the UI is sometimes quick and responsive, and other times sluggish and painful. It has not crashed as of this writing.

Setting the time… why is this so difficult? The the time can be determined based on the timestamp in the GPS signals, but changing the time zone was difficult to find, buried deep in the profile settings. There should be a top level menu item for settings, and the time zone should be one of the first things you can change.

The camera… to take a photo, you need to click on View-Media-Take Photo. Maybe I’m too nit-picky, but “Take Photo” being under the “View” menu does not seem intuitive – Create would have been more logical. Enough about that. The camera start up time is between 10-15 seconds, even between photos. The image quality makes all photos appear dark and gloomy, even under bright sunlight.

Start up time is better than my 4 year old Garmin unit. Although, a minute wait, even in the same location seems too long.

There is no feedback when a waypoint is saved. You are only returned to the previous menu.

Scrolling through the GPS screens can only be done using the Page and ESC buttons. There should be a popup menu that easily allows you to jump to a certain screen.

The metal contacts of the unit are always exposed. I’m not sure this is a good design for boating or living in a tropical environment like I do. They are gold plated, so I’m hoping they do not rust or corrode. I am worried about scratching the contacts when I carry the unit in a backpack or my pocket.

After downloading all my saved waypoints to my compuer, I wanted to erase them from the unit. After finding the settings menu, I clicked “Clear memory”. This not only took the waypoints, but my saved profile information as well. The waypoint images that I took remained, and I needed to manually remove those from the Media menu. There was also an option for “Format SD card”, I’m not certain if that would have only removed the images, the waypoints, or the profile settings.

VantagePoint software for Windows

It amazes me at the poor quality of software that companies are still able to create. This software looks like something a 13 year old could whip up over a two week period. My apologies to 13 year old programmers!

The unit comes with an installation CD, but there is no software actually on the CD. You have to go to the website and download it. You are also forced to register in order to download the software.

There is no typical drop-down menu bar at the top of the application. However, this appears to be a new trend in UI design – making things more difficult for the user to find. After all, you can’t do anything wrong if you can’t DO anything!

The coordinate system on the unit is in decimal format (useful for Google Maps geocoding). However, the units in the software are in degrees/minutes/seconds. There is no way to change the displayed units. If you export to CSV, the units are in degrees/minutes/seconds, but exporting to LOC you can get the decimal coordinates.

I have not used this software for too much just yet – there is no street map software for my city of Playa del Carmen. Therefore, my use is limited to pulling off the stored information. With that said, I have not yet been able to find a way to remove stored waypoints from the GPS unit or manage the photo waypoints I’ve taken.

The settings you can configure are very limited. For example, there is no way to change the directory for saved media retrieved from the device. It is saved automatically to a directory located under the installation directory for VantagePoint.

When trying to sync media, it complains about duplicate file names that it had previously downloaded from the unit. All images are selected by default, so you need to unselect all duplicates manually, or it will download new versions of the images and create new copies with a number appended to the file name. This wasn’t too bad with 20 images, but I can see this turning into a nightmare under heavy use.

I am hoping that many of these issues can be resolved with firmware and software updates. The cheap feel of the contol pad, sluggish response of the camera, and poor picture quality of the camera probably cannot.

firmware: 1, 14, 0, 46, 2007/12/21
VantagePoint v. 1.25

Unfortunately, whatever day the aerial view images were taken, there were some serious clouds hanging over Playa del Carmen’s downtown area. Nonetheless, the new map images appear much clearer than the old ones. Plus, they provide great views of the two brand new shopping centers built here in the last year (Centro Maya and Plaza Las Americas). All in all, I think I like images.

I have regenerated my map images and re-geo-coded all my locations over at In The Roo, my interactive map of Playa del Carmen. If you haven’t been there in a while, please click on over. My street map coverage has been extended and I’ve also added many little tweaks here and there.

Is it wrong that I almost laughed when it crashed within 2 minutes of being demo’ed to me?

I guess not.  I’m used to Apple products crashing… My iPod Nano locks up every five or so times that I turn it on.  Playing audio files for an hour a few times a week must be extremely difficult for … an audio device.  I would imagine that a combined phone/mp3/camera/video player/photo gallery/email client/instant messenger/game system must be a little more challenging to pull off.

In all honesty, it’s probably the heat and humidity of the tropical environment here that causes these types of problems.  However, it’s fun to rip on people for spending more than $150 on a glorified cell phone. 

USB thumb drives, web cameras, and wireless accessories are pretty standard gear at these shops. However, looking for speciality equipment is sometimes a challenge. Cat 5 cable and connectors are at one store, but the crimp tool I need is in a store across town (and they might need to have it shipped from their store in Cancun or Merida). It can be quite frustrating at times.

I had an interesting experience yesterday. I had a client with a fried video card in her business computer. She needed a new one ASAP. I went on a mission to find her a replacement. After visiting 4 different stores, I was only able to locate 1 compatible card. All the new AGP cards had prices marked, but the PCI card I needed did not. I asked how much, but the employee was not sure – he guessed it was around $90. Unfortunately, he had no way of verifying the price until the owner came in the next day. Say what?!

Great! I have a client who cannot do her job because her video card is dead and the only replacement card in town can’t be purchased because there was no price tag.

I spent a few minutes speaking horrendous Spanish, trying to explain that my client needed it right now. After I got that point across, he asked if I lived here. I assured him that I did and gave him my business card. He said I could come back tomorrow to pay for it. Wow!! Although I’m honest, and he was obviously very trusting, I felt much better convincing him to let me pay the $90 now and promising to return the next day to settle any differences.

Experiences like this are priceless. I can’t imagine something like this ever happening to me in a place like Chicago.

And, for the curious, there appears to be a markup between 20-30% on most computer equipment compared to U.S. prices. I’d imagine bigger chain stores with more inventory would be able to cut that down a bit and still make a nice profit. Hint, hint – Best Buy!

According to the Guinness Book of Records, Playa del Carmen is currently the world’s fastest growing town (by a rate of 26 percent per annum). Paper maps of streets, restaurants, bars and hotels in the area are outdated long before they hit the tourists. And, unfortunately, this area (by area, I mean Mexico) does not yet have a wonderful resource like Yahoo! Yellow Pages to easily find and display this information.

So, when I’m out taking my frequent walks, I’m going to try and take my handy Garmin GPS unit with me and try to start plotting some of the area’s attractions. Who knows, maybe one of these days Google or Yahoo! will wake up and realize that Mexico needs this type of service as well, and they’ll pay me lots of money to provide them with the data I’ve collected.

Currently, my work in progress demonstrates how to add custom overlays (street names) on the satellite images of the area. This is where the I’ve spent a bulk of my time thus far (it’s isn’t obvious yet!), since Google has made it a painstaking process to piece together the image tiles and make a map to work with.

Another piece of my project is the use of markers. I’ve added some markers showing some bars, restaurants and hotels. In the future, I hope to use different colored markers for each attraction, and possibly toggle the display based on user preferences.

I’d like to discuss my accomplishments and hurdles, but it’s late. I’ll hopefully get around to that in future installments. Until then, check out my progress at In The Roo Google Map – Playa del Carmen.

Even before I got to use the new browser, I was put off by the fact that it took about 10 minutes to install and also required the typical post-Microsoft-install reboot. And, I noticed that it disabled my virus scanner when it started installing — doesn’t that mean that any application can do that?

Anyhow, on to my first impressions…

A slimmed down, cleaner user interface. It’s not really a shock as other MS products have been going down this path for a number of years. However, I’m not convinced that this is a good thing.

Tabs. I didn’t like them when Opera introduced them, but over the years, I’ve grown to love them in Firefox. Now I find it irritating when my browser opens new windows unless I explicitly tell it to do so. IE7’s tabs blend too much into the UI, so it’s almost difficult to see them. I like how IE7 has a nice little tab that you can click on to open a tab.

RSS. I didn’t play with this, but it’s cool that it’s finally supported.

Anti-phishing security. Again, I didn’t play with it, but hopefully it’ll help the average Joe.

Login and form completion. IE7 must have remembered my preference to not ask to store passwords for IE6. However, I couldn’t figure out how to convince it to start asking again. The options were set correctly under the “AutoComplete Settings” dialog, they just weren’t working. Since I didn’t have any special settings configured already, I just used the new “Reset Internet Explorer settings” feature under the Advanced tab to get rid of any IE6 preferences that might have been lingering. That seemed to fix the problem for a few sites. Saving a login/password for some restricted access sites like SharePoint doesn’t appear to be an option.

View Page Source. Why is there still no keyboard command to do this? As a web developer, this is extremely frustrating.

Internet Options. Instead of trimming the browser UI, they should have cleaned this configuration section up. I’m a tech guy, and I hate trying to find how to change options in their options menu. I pretty much just leave things alone unless some reason or another forces me to find how to tweak an option. (See Login and Form completion above).

Crashes and shutdown delays. After 3 hours of moderate use, I’m happy to say that it hasn’t locked up yet. Although it has become unresponsive and/or slow, and has forced me to close the window. Sometimes clicking on the close window icon takes 15 seconds for IE7 to give up and die.

First-run start page. It asks you some configuration questions when you start, then sets the home page to MSN. Fine, but I changed it to a blank page because MSN takes too long to load. 2 hours later, it decided to change back to the First-run page again. How often is this going to happen?

Speed. I haven’t clocked anything, but page loads appear noticably slower than Firefox and IE6.

Page load icon. The rotating “e” has been replaced with a spinning circle on the tabs. It gives up waiting for pages that take a long time to load. You can only tell that the connection is still open by looking at the bottom status bar that says “Waiting for …”

Although I’m happy Microsoft has finally updated it’s antiquated IE6 browser, I guess I’m just underwhelmed with this latest version. This took how many months to deliver?

However, now that Microsoft is once again developing IE, I hope they continue to enhance it and get compliant with all of the existing web standards instead of waiting another 5 years for their next major overhaul. We can only hope.

First off, I had been using RedHat and Fedora Core versions of Linux for more than 5 years. I wanted to try something new, just to see what was out there. I heard wonderful things about Ubuntu, so I thought I would give that a shot. After verifying that the install would work with my hardware, by using the LiveDVD, I installed Ubuntu 6.0.6 and got to work. I am not sure exactly what I did wrong, but when I tried to install new applications using their package manager, I kept running into dependency mismatches that were not automatically resolved.

I honestly spent 2 days trying to get my system up and running with Eclipse, Postgres, IntelliJ, Apache ant, and the Sun JDK 1.5. It did not go smoothly, and things just constantly felt broken. Probably the biggest decision to bail was the fact that with a fresh install, Ubuntu did not recognize my dual core CPU. I wasn’t about to go down the path of recompiling the kernel for smp support. If I had more time, I would have attempted another install, in case I had selected a wrong option or something, but I had work that needed to be done.
So, I downloaded the FC5 DVD and got to work. After installing and applying all of the latest updates, I was ready to roll. The installer even recognized the 2 CPUs and installed a pre-compiled smp kernel. Nice!

Unfortunately, I soon discovered, that the brand new Shuttle I had custom built did not include the built-in internal 802.11g adapter. The nice folks at Shuttle offered to fix the problem for me after 7 days of phone tag. Their solution involved me sending the machine back so they could install the adapter. I explained that this was not an option as I am now living in Mexico, and shipping packages to/from the US was too much of a gamble. Well, at least they will refund my money… it’s been over 10 days and I still haven’t seen a credit, so I’ll be bugging them again this week.

Unfortunately, due to setup of our network, the router is located in our bedroom, and all our computer equipment is out in our living room. Therefore, I had a few options… 1) Run a long cable across the apartment to hook into the LAN connector (my wife would kill me), 2) Move my computer into bedroom (there’s not enough room, and my wife would kill me), 3) Buy a USB wireless adapter (can I find one in this part of Mexico?), or 4) Bridge my Windows XP machine so that I could access the network.

I decided option 3 was going to be the best, but I needed to find an adapter first. So, in the meantime, I was stuck with option 4. Suprisingly, Windows XP made the process quite simple, I’m quite pleased to say. Unfortunately, sharing a wifi connection bridged through another machine is probably a speed demons worst nightmare!

Eventually, a Belkin F5D7050 USB wireless adapter was located at the local Sam’s Club. Thanks NAFTA!

I had a bad feeling about Linux and USB and wireless cards playing nicely together. My fears soon became a reality. I spent the next 3 days trying to find a driver that would work with my adapter. The wireless chip on the card is supposedly a rt2500 (Ralink Tech 2500), although I can only access the card by using an unsupported legacy driver for the rt73. I was able to hobble along for a few days with using a tool called ndiswrapper to load the Windows driver… however, besides the fact that it didn’t work with wireless encryption, the stupid thing would cause a total system lockup after a few hours of use.

Luckily, I stumbled upon the Rt2×00 SerialMonkey website. These guys took over the maintenance of the Ralink proprietary driver when Ralink open sourced it. They are currently in the process of rewriting, from scratch, the drivers for all of the Ralink chips. Excellent. After I solved a few problems, namely compiling the driver on Fedora Core (it involves a manual patch), and finding the mislabeled firmware for my chip on Ralink’s site, I was up and running. It’s now been 2 days without a lockup.

Although I’m up and running with the SerialMonkey driver, I’m sad to report that any high volume network traffic (bittorrent) will cause the driver to freak out and unload. Luckily, I don’t need that to do my work.
I love the stability and reliability of Linux, the massive amount of open source and free software available; however, I am not shocked that more people haven’t made the switch just yet. Although things like the LiveDVD from Ubuntu will help some people get a feel for Linux, getting the system functional and easy to maintain still needs some work. I am positive that things will continue to get better. I look forward to it.

Software Patent Lawsuits Against Open Source Developers