Samstag, 25. April 2009

This must be the quote of the week

Having read the (german) news post on heise.de
regarding the issue of prodcut piratry one quote struck me:
According to the article (no source is quoted there!), Peer Laslo of SAP is supposed to have made this statement:
" ...
Wir sind nicht betroffen. Unseres Software ist so kompliziert, dass man sie schlecht fälschen kann.
..."

eng:

"...
We are not affected. Our software is that complicated that it hardly can be imitated.
..."

Now, I do not have any context information for this statement. Put like this, it sounds really weird. And wrong too: A software can simply be pirated by copy and paste, or reverse engineering.

So the only thing protecting this particular product is the complexity to enhance/change and lastly to use it. Looks like not only security but whole businesses can be built with obscurity in mind....

Samstag, 18. April 2009

Deploying a Groovlet Application to the AppEngine with AntBuilder

Just a quick & dirty info: you can easily use the already defined tasks for Google AppEngine with your Groovlet-based application (as described by Guillaume Laforge on his SpringSource blog)



def ant = new AntBuilder()
def webinf = "war/WEB-INF"
def aesdk = "appengine" //change this to the location of AppEngine SDK

ant."import" (file: "${aesdk}/config/user/ant-macros.xml")
ant.sequential() {
taskdef name: "groovyc", classname: "org.codehaus.groovy.ant.Groovyc"
groovyc srcdir: "src", destdir: "${webinf}/classes", {
classpath {
fileset dir: "${webinf}/lib", {
include name: "*.jar"
}
pathelement path: "${webinf}/classes"
}
javac source: "1.5", target: "1.5", debug: "on"
}
copy toDir: "${webinf}/groovy", {
fileset dir:"groovlets"
}
if(args.find{it.startsWith("-u")}) {
appcfg action:"update", war:"war"
}
}


Please note that appcfg is a task defined in the GAE SDK. By importing the relevant xml file (and having the respective jar files on classpath), this and all other ant tasks become available to groovy scripts.

If you run this script with "groovy build -u" 3 things will happen:
  1. all stuff in "src" will get compiled
  2. all stuff in "groovlets" will get copied over to the appropriate directory (no need to compile those, if you follow Guillaume's hints regarding web.xml configuration
  3. all stuff will get pushed to the AppEngine
If you use strictly Groovlets, nothing needs to be compiled and step 1 might become obsolete.