Programming

I have been working on a company-wide PDF search using Lucene and PDFBox.  Everything is being indexed nicely (tip, when debugging wierd search results with Lucene, try Luke sooner instead of later, chances are you need to tune your index options) and I have a pretty html page where users can do plain text searches of all our PDFs or by category.

As hundreds to thousands of results can be returned, I want an easy way for users to page through the results.  Traditionally with PHP or Perl I would parse http get options for the starting results and manually make some navigation code for this.  I am lazy though, so I started searching for Java libraries to help make this easier.  I hit the jackpot with the Display tag library.

With Hibernate's new EJB3 Annotation support, you can easily write classes, add annotations in code, and have Hibernate generate your database schemas for you without needing to manually build any xml config files or build your database schemas yourself.  This is really bleeding edge though, so it has some issues.  The Hibernate tools classes haven't caught up to the new feature set, for example, so when you try:

java -cp <classpaths> org.hibernate.tool.hbm2ddl.SchemaExport --config=hibernate.xml.cfg

To get the schema out so you can build your database, you get errors like:

org.hibernate.MappingException: An AnnotationConfiguration instance is required to use <blah>

Even when everything is properly setup and you have included the Hibernate Annotations jars in your classpath.  Fortunately, there is a simple workaround.

After having spent an hour trying to figure out why Netbeans 5.0 wasn't working with my Java 1.5 enum syntax, I stumbled upon the cause.  By default, Netbeans projects force the source version to Java 1.4.  If you want to use Java 1.5 constructs in Netbeans projects, be sure to de-select the "set source level to 1.4" checkbox when creating a new project, or set the source level to 1.5 in the sources preference for the project.