Within this blogpost I’ll explain the installation of maven on Snow Leopard and I’ll present the bash script that can help you to switch between installations of maven.

Maven on the Mac (Snow Leopard)

By default maven is installed in the path: /usr/share/java. The maven executables are installed as maven-3.0.2 and maven-2.2.1. Since the upgrade path is a bit slow I tend to install my own maven binaries. I extract them as provided by apache using the apache-maven-x.x.x format.

A soft link is available in /usr/share/maven. This is the link that points to one of the maven binaries. This is the place where you switch between versions of maven. You can remove the soft link and create one to the right maven home folder. A small catch is that you need to be root to remove and create the link. Using sudo is good enough.

The commands to do this are:

cd /usr/share
sudo rm maven
ln -s /usr/share/java/apache-maven-3.0.2 maven

So not a lot of work, but just annoying to do one or more times a day. Therefore I have wanted to have a bash script to do it for me.

Introducing bash

When automating something on the Mac I tend to use bash. I am not an expert, but using google I can do interesting things. I’ll step to the script. To start off, define the two maven installations that I currently use:

maven2=apache-maven-2.2.1
maven3=apache-maven-3.0.2

Next step is to remove the current soft link if it exists.

if [ -e /usr/share/maven ]
then
	sudo rm /usr/share/maven
fi

Next is to store the maven implementation version in a variable

maven=$maven3

if [ $# == 0 ]
then
	echo "No Arguments supplied, using default maven 3"
elif [ $1 == 2 ]
then
	maven=$maven2
else
	echo "Using the default maven setting, provided argument [$1] is not recognized"
fi

The default is maven 3, than we check if arguments are provided to the script. If no arguments are provided, we do nothing and use the default. if an argument is provided we check if it is 2. If so, we set maven 2 as the implementation. If something else than 2 is provided we take the default which is maven 3. The final step is to create the soft link again.

sudo ln -s /usr/share/java/$maven /usr/share/maven

Using spaces

One thing that took me a few moments to understand is the use of spaces within bash. maven=$maven2 is not the same as maven = $maven2

The complete script

#!/bin/bash
echo "Setting the maven implementation version"

maven2=apache-maven-2.2.1
maven3=apache-maven-3.0.2

if [ -e /usr/share/maven ]
then
	echo "Remove the maven soft link."
	sudo rm /usr/share/maven
else
	echo "Maven soft link could not be found."
fi

maven=$maven3

if [ $# == 0 ]
then
	echo "No Arguments supplied, using default maven 3"
elif [ $1 == 2 ]
then
	echo "Setting maven to use to maven 2"
	maven=$maven2
else
	echo "Using the default maven setting, provided argument [$1] is not recognized"
fi

echo "Creating new soft link to $maven"
sudo ln -s /usr/share/java/$maven /usr/share/maven

Room for improvement

It would be nice to do a scan of the directory /usr/share/java and provide you with options to select from. You could also select the most recent version of maven 2 or 3 or even 2.2 and 3.0. If I have a need for that I’ll update the script

Concluding

That is it, you now have a script that you can call with the implementation you want to set. I called mine setmaven.sh and you would call it like:

./setmaven.sh 2

You can check if it is working with the well known mvn –version command

Feel free to comment for improvements.

This post is about those widgets, hope you find them useful as well. I’ll discuss a widget for storing passwords,

CryptBoard – This little widget let’s you store encrypted passwords. You can close the vault from your dashboard, if you are using it, you can also leave it open. The data in the vault is stored encrypted on your machine.

iStat pro – This widget gives you an idea about the usage of your resources. A very configurable widget with data about your hard disks, temperatures, cpu, memory, network, processes and some others. The look and feel is highly configurable.

Vi cheat sheet – want to become comfortable with the best editor around . This nifty widget will help you find the right keys in those dark days.

After this widget I did not find anything useful. Hmm, makes you think about the usage of the dashboard. There is a lot of very bad widgets to be found, and not to many useful ones. But those that are useful, are the ones I’ll use regularly. I did not mention the out of the box widgets like : systran language translator and accuweather.

So it is by far an extensive list, please use the comment if there are widgets you use often.

Like I said, mac osx comes with a subversion client out of the box. At least Leopard does. If you do not believe me, try the following command and watch the output:

svn –version

svn, version 1.4.4 (r25188)
   compiled May 31 2008, 03:45:57
Copyright (C) 2000-2006 CollabNet.
Subversion is open source software, see http://subversion.tigris.org/
This product includes software developed by CollabNet (http://www.Collab.Net/).
The following repository access (RA) modules are available:
* ra_dav : Module for accessing a repository via WebDAV (DeltaV) protocol.
  - handles 'http' scheme
  - handles 'https' scheme
* ra_svn : Module for accessing a repository using the svn network protocol.
  - handles 'svn' scheme
* ra_local : Module for accessing a repository on local disk.
  - handles 'file' scheme

This is not the most recent version of subversion. That comes with performance as well as use ability problems. I am not going into details here. The biggest problem to me is that I use Versions and IntelliJ with subversion 1.5. Now my command line client does not work anymore. This is a problem for some of the maven projects. Therefore I want to upgrade the commandline subversion client. I was surprised that there are almost no resources on the web to do this without installing other libraries. But I found a pretty easy way. Execute the following steps:

• Download the binaries from the website : http://subversion.tigris.org/getting.html#osx. I used the openCollabnet version. You do have to provided your details to download, just leave everything empty.
• Use the downloaded installer to install all the subversion binaries.
• Make sure that the new binaries are on the path before the original subversion libraries. Issue the following command in a terminal.
  export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH

Those are the most important steps. If you do this in a terminal and execute the svn –version again you get the following output

svn, version 1.5.4 (r33841)
   compiled Oct 27 2008, 11:19:10
Copyright (C) 2000-2008 CollabNet.
Subversion is open source software, see http://subversion.tigris.org/
This product includes software developed by CollabNet (http://www.Collab.Net/).
The following repository access (RA) modules are available:
* ra_neon : Module for accessing a repository via WebDAV protocol using Neon.
  - handles 'http' scheme
  - handles 'https' scheme
* ra_svn : Module for accessing a repository using the svn network protocol.
  - with Cyrus SASL authentication
  - handles 'svn' scheme
* ra_local : Module for accessing a repository on local disk.
  - handles 'file' scheme
* ra_serf : Module for accessing a repository via WebDAV protocol using serf.
  - handles 'http' scheme
  - handles 'https' scheme

That worked, the version is now 1.5.4. If you do not want to execute this command every time you need it, you can add it to you .profile. If you need more info on how to do just that, you can find a good explenation here.

Hope this post helps you use the new and improved subversion.

The first tool I want to talk about is a nice utility that can create applications out of website. With Fluid you take a url, give it an icon and create an application. This application can have it’s own links and preferences. Looks nice and it comes with some advantages. You can place it on your dashboard. It has it’s own icon when going through you apps with command-tab. Very easy interface and free to use.

Find out about more tools by clicking on more

Another tool I want to talk about is not free. Omnigraffle costs a lot of money. Still I want to mention it here because it has so many nice things. This is the best tool I ever used for drawing diagrams. It just works like expected. Has a lot of alignment, sizing, grouping, colouring options to you available.

I was not sure if I really had to mention this one. But I decided that the current release of open office is so good, it would be an error to leave it out. I use it on a daily basis and it does what it should do. Writing documents in a lot of formats including the microsoft 2007 editions of word, excel, etc. Very nice if you do not want to pay any money for the microsoft office suite. Nine out of ten users will find what they need in the suite.

The next application is nice when dealing with zip files. BetterZip feels very comfortable to create new zips. I would like a command line interface but have not found it yet. It would be nice to be able to open a new archive from the the command line. Or just create a new zip based on a folder from within finder. These options seem to be missing. Still a nice utility for less than 20 dollars

Mac OSX comes with out of the box support for subversion. Using the command line is not very difficult for the basic tasks. But for more advanced tasks a graphical interface would be nice. It would be even better if this interface gives the feeling of a mac application. Well search no longer (if you want to pay for at least). Versions is here. This is a very nice application and it seems to work very well. The biggest disadvantage is the price. It costs 46.41 euro’s, which is not cheap for an application that only makes your life easier. Than again, if you work a lot with subversion it could be worth the money.

The last two applications are actually plugins for your system preferences. The first is for setting default applications. This is not easy out of the box, with this application you make it available from the System Preferences panel. The application is called : RCDefaultApp. The second I want to mention is about the temperature of your mac book pro. It can become pretty hot since the fans jump in late. The Mac should be perfectly capable of handling this, however you can have more options available. The speed is better at lower temperature and the machine just feels nicer when the temperature is lower. If you want this as well, go to the website of the utility Fan Control

That is it for now, do not forget to checkout the page with tools, feel free to come with better alternatives or good ideas.

• Quick startup times
• Possibility to startup TextMate from the command line
  # mate <filename>
• Integration with subversion
• Xml formatting

Today I decided to by TextMate, than I saw it was almost 50 euros. that is to much for me for just a text editor. Therefore I started looking for something else. I found the open source tools Smultron. My conclusion, TextMate is better but not worth the 50 euros when you compare them. I did have to integrate an xml formatter to get three of the points out of the four mentioned within Smultron.

read on to find out the small steps I had to take.

installing smultron

Actually installing has two steps, the first step is downloading the application and moving it to the desired location. For me that is the applications folder. The second step is installing the command line. Which is as easy as going to the help menu and choosing the menu item Install Command-Line Utility. You can find the download here:

http://smultron.sourceforge.net/

After unzipping and moving, open de application and go to the mentioned menu item in the help menu. You have to enter your root password twice, which is explained why (for the application and the man pages). Test if everything went well by typing smultron at the command line. It will open the application. It is more useful if you provide a filename at the command line like the following command. Then that file will be opened in smultron

# smultron pom.xml

Now we have a fast text editor with code highlighting and lot’s of other functionality. We can open a file using that editor from the command line. To bad there is no subversion integration, but for my purpose the svn command line application is good enough. Than the final requirement, the xml formatting. This is also not included smultron. But smultron does have an easy way of calling command line applications. The next section deals with just that.

Using Tidy to format xml using smultron

The mac comes standard with a utility called Tidy. I am not sure if this utility is installed the moment you install the developer tools. If it is not installed you can find more information on this page. This is the same page to find information about everything you can do with tidy. I managed to format my files in a reasonable way using the following command

tidy –input-xml true –output-xml true –indent yes –wrap 100 -m pom.xml

Next step is to integrate this with smultron. To be able to do this, we need to add a command. Open the command window by going to the menu tools > Handle Commands > Show Commands Window. There is also a shortcut, command + B. I added my command to the Other collection. Select the Other group and push the plus sign at the right of the screen to create a new command. Give the command a new name, I used format xml document. You can also give it a shortcut. The command is the same as before, only we need the full path. We also provide a special parameter from smultron %%p. This parameters copies the complete path when executing the script.

/usr/bin/tidy –input-xml true –output-xml true –indent yes –wrap 100 -m %%p

Your command window now should look like the following image. If something is not working, check the command result window. Again using the menu tools, or a shortcut alt+shift+command+B.

Telling you about what I do with my other laptop is not the reason to write this post. I want to share a very cool application that can help you to become a lot more effective during all your tasks. It is an application to help you find and then remember all you shortcuts. It integrates with all the applications I use to show possible shortcuts. It is not a free program, but the value you get for only 20 euro’s (excluding vat) is very good. Try it yourself, you’ll be supprised.

Here is the website where you can download a trial
http://www.ergonis.com/products/keycue/

To give you an idea about what it looks like, check the following screendump

read on for the tips.

Downloading java 6

Before you can download the software you need to become a member of the apple developer connection group. Go to the following url to download the java 6 developer preview 9.
http://developer.apple.com/java/download/
The downloaded package contains an installer for the java six library.

Learn about basic usage of java on Mac OSX Leopard

The best starting point for learning about java on Mac OSX Leopard is this link: http://developer.apple.com/java/javaleopard.html. The mac supports multiple version of java out of the box, after installing java 6 there are versions 3,4,5 and 6 available. You can find them in the following location:

/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions
jettro:Versions jettro$ ls -al
total 56
drwxr-xr-x  14 root  wheel  476 Mar 29 12:20 .
drwxr-xr-x  11 root  wheel  374 Mar 18 19:41 ..
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel    5 Mar 18 19:41 1.3 -> 1.3.1
drwxr-xr-x   3 root  wheel  102 Sep 29  2007 1.3.1
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel    5 Nov  4 17:54 1.4 -> 1.4.2
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel    3 Mar 18 19:41 1.4.1 -> 1.4
drwxr-xr-x   8 root  wheel  272 Aug  5  2007 1.4.2
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel    5 Nov  4 17:54 1.5 -> 1.5.0
drwxr-xr-x   9 root  wheel  306 Mar 29 11:15 1.5.0
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel    5 Mar 18 19:41 1.6 -> 1.6.0
drwxr-xr-x  10 root  wheel  340 Mar 29 11:14 1.6.0
drwxr-xr-x   8 root  wheel  272 Mar 18 19:41 A
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel    1 Mar 18 19:41 Current -> A
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel    3 Mar 29 11:16 CurrentJDK -> 1.6

As you can see, there are a lot of different folders and soft links here to be found. For me the softlink CurrentJDK is pointing to a different location than the default. I changed it to 1.6. If you have absolute no knowledge of unix, then I recommend you learn or you be very careful. I removed the old virtual link and created a new one. You have to be the super user to be able to do this.

sudo rm CurrentJDK
sudo ln -s 1.6 CurrentJDK

By going up one folder you can get a general idea about the usage of java. The most important is the Home soft link. This is the one you can use as a Java home when you need it.

/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework
jettro:JavaVM.framework jettro$ ls -al
total 64
drwxr-xr-x  11 root  wheel   374 Mar 18 19:41 .
drwxr-xr-x  84 root  wheel  2856 Nov  4 17:54 ..
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel    27 Mar 18 19:41 Classes -> Versions/CurrentJDK/Classes
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel    24 Nov  4 17:54 CodeResources -> Versions/A/CodeResources
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel    28 Mar 18 19:41 Commands -> Versions/CurrentJDK/Commands
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel    24 Mar 18 19:41 Headers -> Versions/Current/Headers
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel    24 Mar 18 19:41 Home -> Versions/CurrentJDK/Home
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel    23 Mar 18 19:41 JavaVM -> Versions/Current/JavaVM
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel    29 Mar 18 19:41 Libraries -> Versions/CurrentJDK/Libraries
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel    26 Mar 18 19:41 Resources -> Versions/Current/Resources
drwxr-xr-x  14 root  wheel   476 Mar 29 12:20 Versions

Now we made IntelliJ make use of java 6, cool stuff or not. To control the default java versions for applications, applets and java webstart apple has provided us a utility application. Go to /Applications/Utilities/Java Preferences. Using the following screen you can adjust the version of java used by applets and programs.

Now you can check the version of java by opening a command prompt and typing java -version.

jettro:~ jettro$ java -version
java version "1.6.0_04-dp"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_04-dp-b06-110)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 1.6.0_04-b12-45-optimized, mixed mode)

So nice java 6 on the mac, bye bye old stuff.