Feeling Homesick

Reading this travel article this morning really makes me feel homesick

"Vietnam offers some of the most charming tropical scenery in the world. The mist rising from the land against the morning sky is resplendent. The lush mountains and gorges and verdant valleys and endless rivers create a colorful landscape. A coast line that stretches for hundreds of miles along the South China Sea makes it a marvel of geography."

Wonder if this is a case of 'opportunities missed are opportunities gain'.

Oracle8 and INNER JOIN

The 'new' ANSI syntax (INNER JOIN, NATURAL JOIN, etc.) is only supported when dealing with Oracle9i and higher.

All the more reason to move to Oracle9i. Especially since Oracle did announce End of Life for 8i.

XStream and Dynamic Proxies

So I've been bragging a bit (yeah, just a bit) about XStream because I'm currently using it in my unit testing framework. I started out with the original DynamicProxyConverter and there is already a very good post on how to use it from Straun's blog. But then I soon ran into problems trying to set a super class for the resulting proxy object for the following class hierarchy:

public interface MyObjectInterface { void doSomething(); }

public class MyObjectBase { public void intialize() {} }

public class MyObjectImpl extends MyObjectBase implements MyObjectInterface {
   public void doSomething() {}
}

The solution is to clone DynamicProxyConverter.java and replace the last line of code in the unmarshall() method:

   return Proxy.newProxyInstance(classLoader, interfacesAsArray, handler);

With

   return newProxyInstance(superClass, interfacesAsArray, handler);

Where newProxyInstance is a method which utilized javaassist package to create the proxy instance in the cloned DynamicProxyConverter:

private Object newProxyInstance(Class superClass,  Class[] interfaces, InvocationHandler handler)
{
   ProxyFactory factory = new ProxyFactory();

   if (superClass != null) {
      factory.setSuperclass(superClass);
   }

   factory.setInterfaces(interfaces);

   Class clazz = factory.createClass();

   Object proxy = clazz.getConstructor().newInstance();
   ((ProxyObject) proxy).setHandler((MethodHanlder) handler);

   return proxy;
}

For this to work, your InvocationHandler class should also need to implement MethodHandler interface, ie.

public Object invoke(Object self, Method thisMethod, Method proceed, Object[] args)
throws Throwable
{
   if (proceed == null) {
      return invoke(self, thisMethod, args);
   } else {
      return proceed.invoke(self, args);
   }
}