Normally this isn't an issue. I've been working with IntelliJ for a few years now and never had this problem before. But no matter what I did, the IDE would only present me with an old version of my filesystem whenever the choose location dialog would come up. Then stranger things started to happen... I couldn't create a new project, builds started to fail and classes that existed on the filesystem wouldn't show up in the project. I took me a while to figure out how to get things back on track, even though the solution takes about 2 seconds once you know what to do.

Our latest software project used CAS for authentication and single sign-on. I couldn't find any good documentation on how Spring Security and CAS played together. There is some documentation about how to configure your application to use CAS but not much on what messages go back and forth by whom and when.

Here's how you can run maven built web applications directly from within Intellij IDEA 8. Once you run this way, you completely eliminate the code, build, deploy, restart cycle just when you want to make a change... you can even change classes on the fly (hot swapping).

I was working on a Weblogic Portal application that needed to get information from a secure (WS-Security) third party web service over https. This web service used a legacy (pre-OASIS) WS-Security namespace and modern clients (like the one bundled with Weblogic server) don't create messages that conform to the old specification. Here's what I did to work around this restriction...

We use client side XSLT to generate our pages. After a push to our testing environment, we noticed that the XSLT would fail in Firefox but not IE.

We recently upgraded Weblogic Workshop to version 10.2. When I went to regenerate an existing Service Control from a new WSDL file, I was greeted with a not so nice error popup...

Here's how to get rid of the log message-- INFO: The Apache Tomcat Native library which allows optimal performance in production environments was not found on the java.library.path when you startup Tomcat on OSX. On Windows, all one needs to do is drop in a precompiled dll, on OSX there are a few more steps...

Recently I was tasked with adding data security to an existing application. The security rules were complex, users within the same user role were supposed to be able to view and edit data differently. I decided to implement this task with a permissions based system whereby users were grouped into roles and each role had a certain set of permissions. Here's how I implemented the solution using Spring and Hibernate...

Previously, I wrote an article on how to achieve dynamic list binding in Spring MVC. Since I wrote that article, I have received emails and comments that ask (in a roundabout way) Why would I need to do this? When I wrote the other article I didn't explain the why; I just wrote the how. Here's why you need dynamic binding and the problems it is trying to solve.

OSX has what I would call an undocumented feature of the operating system- the portable home directory. Basically, it keeps a user's home directory sync'd up between a network share and the local pc. If you are not on the network you work on the local home directory. Whenever you login on the network, the mirror agent running on the local pc synchronizes the two directories. This simple, extremely useful concept came with a steep learning curve. I think it took me two weeks to get this all working...