David R. Heffelfinger

For the longest time, 64 bit versions of the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) and Java Development Kit (JDK) have not included a Java Plugin.

This fact has let us 64 bit Linux users out in the cold when it comes to running Java applets in our operating system of choice. There are workarounds, but they involved downloading a 32 bit browser and a 32 bit JRE, a less than ideal solution.

There has been a bug in Java's bug parade reporting this issue (submitted in 2003!), finally, today I got notice that this issue will finally be addressed.

According to the comments in the bug report, JRE 6u12 will include a Java plugin for 64 bit Linux, freeing us from jumping through hoops to be able to execute Java applets under 64 bit Linux.

JRE 6u12 is scheduled to be released early 2009.

Recently I acquired a new client that has a lot of client side Java technology as part of their infrastructure. A lot of this infrastructure is in the form of Java applets.

My primary operating system is Ubuntu Hardy 64 bit. Unfortunately there is still no Java plugin for the 64 bit Linux version of Firefox, therefore, I was finding myself having to boot to Windows to be able to use some of these utilities.

Since I am much more comfortable in a Unix environment, I wanted to find a solution to run this software on my Linux laptop. I knew from past experience that a 32 bit version of Firefox can be installed under 64 bit Linux, and a 32 bit JRE can be installed as well, and the 32 bit firefox can be made to work with the 32 bit JVM.

I searched around and found this thread in the Ubuntu forums, which provides a link to a script that will install the 32 version of Firefox, along with the 32 bit version of the Java plugin and other plugins such as Flash. I downloaded the script and ran it, but unfortunately Java applets were still not working, at least I had 32 bit Firefox in place.

In order to get the Java plugin under Firefox 32, I had to download the 32 bit JRE from java.com, since Ubuntu is a deb based distribution (as opposed to RPM based), the right version to download is the self extracting file.

After downloading the JRE, it needs to be installed, which can be done by simply executing the downloaded shell script as root. I installed mine under /opt.

Once the JRE is installed, I had to cd to my home directory, then cd to .mozilla. At this point, I had to create a plugins subdirectory, and cd to it.

Then I needed to create a symlink for the Java plugin in the downloaded JRE to the ~/.mozilla/plugins directory: ln -s /opt/jre32/jre1.6.0_10/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so ~/.mozilla/plugins.

At this point I started the 32 bit version of Firefox, navigated to a test page and verified that my Java plugin was working properly.

By default, JSF 1.2 uses JSP as its view technology, however JSF was designed to be very modular, allowing defaults to be swapped out for alternative technologies.

Facelets, by Jacob Hookom, is an alternate view technology for JSF. The main advantage of Facelets is that pages are written using standard XHTML, which allows web designers to freely design the pages, using design tools such as Dreamweaver. Using Facelets allows a true separation of concerns, with web designers designing the user interface of the system, and Java developers implementing the functionality.

Another advantage of Facelets is that it provides templating for JSF. Facelets templating is similar in functionality to tools such as Sitemesh and Apache Tiles. Using Facelets templates, common areas of all pages in the application, such as headers, footers and navigation menus, can be placed in in separate files, and they are "included" by all pages in the application. Templating allows us to make changes to these common areas in a single file, and they are "inherited" by all pages in the application, greatly simplifying maintenance.

Until now, in order to take advantage of Facelets additional dependencies had to be added to our project, since Facelets was non standard. Well, according to Arun Gupta and Ed Burns, Facelets will become the default JSF technology as of JSF 2.0. This will be a great step in simplifying JSF application development.

Arun Gupta has a very nice tutorial explaining how to get started developing JSF 2.0 applications under GlassFish today.

After I implemented and deployed the PDF Unlocking Tool, I was fortunate to find out it became very popular. Apparently I had written and deployed a useful tool.

It's popularity got me thinking, what else I could write that would be helpful to others? Then it hit me, just like PDF files are sometimes restricted, preventing users from copying and pasting their content, sometimes Excel spreadsheets contain locked, uneditable cells.

I started looking around for Java libraries to manipulate Excel spreadsheets, and found JExcelAPI. I started researching this library and sure enough, I found a way to unlock cells in an Excel spreadsheet.

Using this API, I developed an online utility to unlock cells in a spreadsheet, which can be found at http://ensode.net/xls-crack.jsf. It soon became a very popular destination on my site.