Tip of the Iceberg

Category show-n-tell thursday
As Julian mentioned, I didn't share how I ended up approaching web page retrieval in Java. Guess I was too busy ranting. Which violates my cardinal rule of programming: leave the emotion out of it. I was reminded again this morning (for other reasons entirely) of a discussion years ago about passion in the workplace... no, not that kind of passion, silly. I mean the tendency for programmers to get all worked up about what they're working on, with which I have historically struggled. As time passes, it becomes less of a problem - ironically, because I know it's a problem and consciously attempt to overcome it, whereas the areas that don't cause me as much trouble often get overlooked and end up causing more problems because I don't focus as much energy on combatting them.

Anyway, the point is that I stubbornly attempt to remain objective about the task at hand, whatever that may be at the time. Occasionally that is perceived as apathy: if I cared more, I'd be more melodramatic. Come to think of it, I've occasionally lost girlfriends for precisely the same reason. But in reality it's the opposite. The more I care about something, the more energy I expend trying to avoid melodrama, because losing objectivity results in blowing things out of proportion, creating problems that didn't exist to begin with, and distracting from the search for a creative solution to any real problems. So when I find myself ranting, it's because for some reason I lost objectivity. Which almost always means that I've settled for a solution that is less than ideal.

In that light, here's the agent in HTTPUpgrade that searches the upgrade site for available versions to present to the user:

import java.net.*;

import java.io.*;

import lotus.domino.*;

public class JavaAgent extends AgentBase {

 public void NotesMain() {

 PrintWriter pw = null;

 try {

 Session session = getSession();

 AgentContext agentContext = session.getAgentContext();

 pw = getAgentOutput();

 pw.println("Content-type: text/html");

 pw.println("Cache-control: no-cache");

 Document docContext = agentContext.getDocumentContext();

 String strQuery = docContext.getItemValueString("QUERY_STRING");

 String strURL = strQuery.substring(strQuery.indexOf("=") + 1, strQuery.lastIndexOf("&"));

 URL urlVersionList = new URL(strURL);

 DataInputStream in = new DataInputStream(new BufferedInputStream(urlVersionList.openStream()));

 String inputLine;

 while ((inputLine = in.readLine()) != null) {

 pw.println(inputLine);

 }

 in.close();

 } catch(Exception e) {

 e.printStackTrace(pw);

 }

 }

 }

See? It works, but it just ain't elegant. I like Julian's better.