Here at Mystic we’re invested in what the Java platform has to offer for our clients, and our developers. Since the IBM talks with Sun on purchasing, the community was in heated debates over what this would mean for the Java platform.

As of this morning, unless stockholders and regulatory agencies veto anything, by this summer there will be a new organization to own the Java assets. Information is still being trickled out, but a certain part of it is sad, since Sun has been father to the Java kid for 15 years, and we don’t know how Oracle will foster the next releases of the platform. Oracle has a lot of software built using the Java platform, so let’s hope that means they will have a hand in keeping things moving forward, and open.

Here’s and FAQ from Oracle about the Sun purchase.

Most of our developers got an email weeks ago from Sun about the JavaFX Coding Challenge. We’ve got a great idea that we are working on implementing, and this contest just gives us some extra incentive to plow through and get it done in short order. The only caveat with the submission in this contest, is that it must run in 3 places:

• Applet in a web browser
• Standalone
• JavaFX capable mobile

This might hamper a bit, we’re investigating any impact … and we’ll release our creation into the world in late May it seems!

If you’d like to be part of a closed beta team to help us out, please contact us!

To our success!

In our previous post, we showed you how to use socat, ssh, and some fancy footwork to pipe a UDP-based request coming from Net::Growl, through a TCP-based reverse-proxy ala SSH, and back to the Mac as a UDP-request straight to Growl.

What happens if you’ve got more than one person wanting to do the same thing from that same shell server? Aside from everyone agreeing on a few ports they’d like to reserve for their Growl activities, here’s the skinny.

The problem

When we first wanted to do this, the only technology hurdle, was that Net::Growl in its current incarnation does not support passing a unique UDP port in the register and notify calls. Not a big deal, here’s what you do to fix:

1. Download Net::Growl distribution to your linux machine
2. Apply this patch to the distribution
3. Rebuild it via: perl Makefile.PL, make, sudo make install

If you’re using our super fancy growl-net-notify.pl script for Weechat, it is already set up to pass a different UDP port by changing the settings in the /growl setup call.

Scenarios

For the TCP side of the equation, you’ll each have to pick your own TCP port (above 1024 of course) to reverse-proxy with. In my previous example I chose 9999, so you can have others choose 9900, 9901, 9902, whatever flows off the tongue.

On the local side, socat and your ssh reverse-proxy will change, but using UDP 9887 will not. Growl is listening there.

On the linux side, where weechat + screen is running, we’ll use whatever our agreed upon TCP port was, and pick our own UDP port to pass messages to from Weechat. This is easily modified from growl-net-notify using /growl setup [host] [pass] [port] where port is whatever your agreed Growl port is going to be. And setup socat to use your agreed upon TCP port, and agreed upon UDP port and do a /growl test hello, world!

Examples

A lot of times reading manuals, I skim through to read the examples, in man pages its usually near the bottom. I need to see the commands in action. So here is an example with a situation you’re likely to run into.

2 people using the same host for IRC. For the sake of example, we’ll use the names: Steve and Andrew.

Steve will use: TCP 9900 and UDP 9889

On the Mac side the commands he’ll use:

% socat TCP-LISTEN:9900,reuseaddr,fork UDP:127.0.0.1:9887 &
% ssh myserver -R 9900:127.0.0.1:9900

On the Linux side the commands he’ll use:

socat UDP-LISTEN:9889,reuseaddr,fork TCP:127.0.0.1:9900 &

And from within Weechat’s growl

/growl setup localhost mypass 9889

Andrew will use the defaults: TCP 9999 and UDP 9887

socat TCP-LISTEN:9999,reuseaddr,fork UDP:127.0.0.1:9887 &
ssh myserver -R 9999:127.0.0.1:9999

On the Linux side the commands he’ll use:

socat UDP-LISTEN:9887,reuseaddr,fork TCP:127.0.0.1:9999 &

And from within Weechat’s growl

/growl setup localhost mypass 9887

It’s that simple.