- Invest time in building network:  You work so hard to push your business ahead that you do not even have time to meet up, hang out, club. Over the time, you will realize that hard work is not enough. You need to meet new people every week, talk to different kind of folks. There are several benefits of constant socializing. Firstly, you keep updated on current issues, business environment, economic situation. New ideas for business may also come out from any talk. Secondly, you may meet your possible partners who could provide what you need in your business.

-Do not fear of being different: Many young entrepreneurs, especially in Singapore where I am currently living are afraid being different. As a result, whatever they do they will find out if someone has already done it before. In the end, entrepreneurship is about risk taking so if you do not dare to enter the area that noone has stepped in yet, you just may well miss a big fish.

- Get customer feedback early: At initial states of business development, I tried to hide myself from others what I was doing. Since the lack of user feedback, we developed our products based on your beliefs of what customers think. That’s wrong. Never assume that customers will perceive  the products the same way you do.

$base_url = ‘http://localhost/my-site-name‘;

and

$db_url = ‘mysqli://database-username:database-password@localhost/database-name‘;

Of course, you need to replace the italic texts with your own names.

So the database settings was fine and I could go to the homepage. However, whatever links I clicked from the homepage the 404 Not Found error came out.  What was wrong? After some research, I discovered that the clean URL did not work on my apache and drupal. What “clean URL” does is to map query strings to a “flat” URLs. For example, http://localhost/drupal?q=user will be mapped to http://localhost/drupal/user. Following some online instructions, I realized that the .htaccess file which goes with drupal installation was missing. I copied the default .htaccess to the site folder and made necessary changes to enable Rerwrite mode on apache. Here is what segment you need in .htaccess:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /my-site-name
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]

I tried again, but the links still did not work. What turned out to be missing is the apache configuration, in particular the settings in /etc/apache2/sites-available/default file. The original file looks like this:

………………………………..
………………………………..
DocumentRoot /var/www
<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
</Directory>
<Directory /var/www/>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>
………………………..
……………………….

All you need to do is to change from

AllowOverride None

to:

AllowOverride All

Now at command line, run:

sudo a2enmod rewrite

and then restart apache:

/etc/apache2/init.d/restart

That’s it.

This article instruct you how to connect Tomcat with Apache:

http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/000223

Once I was asked to find the way to build reports for our clients and integrate those reports into our Grails application. We looked at Jasper Report, an open source Business Intelligence platform, because it has a plugin for Grails.

My first attempt is to install iReport 3.7.1 for report layout, jasperserver for managing reports on server.  Since I had experience with SQL reporting server, iReport caused me no problem (it is not bad).  To make the jasper server up I downloaded the jasperserver.jar and deployed it to glassfishv3 just to realized that it is only supported by glassfish 2. So I went for alternative: Tomcat 6 and the reporting server  was up. The jasper sever provide you with nice GUI to manage your reports. With jasper server plugin, you can even connect with your server from iReport.

However, now it comes to another problem, how to integrate the jasper server into my current application, in particular how to merge the access control of application and jasper report.

I investigated further and discovered a great blog which provides you with a nice solution. The solution is elegant. He created 2 domain classes for report and report parameters. When you want to create a report, you will need to define report parameters first. His code has 2 types of parameters: textbox or date. I feel it is not complete since many times we will need to have a dropdown list in the report for user to choose from. Therefore, I customized the code to add in this third type.  This thing which i can nicely integrate into my app only helps you to handle report parameter definition.  The report layout will be created by iReport which is separated from the application. I also dropped the iReport software but installed the iReport plugin for Netbeans, so that I do not have to switch back and forth between Netbeans and iReport.

So iReport create .jrxml files with layout and data query. You will need to install jasper plugin for grails to run the .jrxml files and produce the actual reports on format of your choice (pdf, xls, text, csv,…)

Other than that, take note  that the jasper plugin used the outdated version of jasperreport library, so you will need to update it by replacing  the jasper report jar library in plugin folder with the lastest version (3.7.1) and also update iText.jar file.

Ok, now you have reasonable solution to the report issue for a grails application.

Actually IBM developerworks has a good set of tutorial on Grails development here: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/views/java/libraryview.jsp?search_by=mastering+grails

Before this method, I have tried and failed to make below approaches to work:

http://econym.org.uk/gmap/basic3.htm

http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/google-maps-api-jquery

Well, let’s extend the discussion to good programming practice in general, especially in big projects which involve many developers. What I have learnt from working in medium and big development projects is that setting and following standard is important to project scaling, transferring, maintenance and development. It worth our efforts to set the standard at early stages of the project development. Some of the standards that we need to take care of include:
- Set the naming convention for every member of project group. Be consistent in naming.
- Never mix up the presentation with business logic. In the best case, a single line of business logic in presentation page should not be allowed. A good practice is to put them in separate files and make use of include, register or import.
- Minimize using of string literals. All literals should be declared as constants.
- Common tasks for all modules should be coded separately and put in a shared folder. For example, upload file, insert into database, select from database,…
- Always logging the actions performed on database or system. It is also considered a common task and is good for diagnosis.
- Be consistent in coding style. This is pretty hard to achieve because each developer has his own style.
- Never have a long methods/functions. Divide it into smaller methods if possible.
- Reuse the code as much as possible. The code can even be reused across multiple projects.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/readwritestart/2009/05/are-you-really-an-entrepreneur.php

- Ubuntu: I have used the desktop version for a while (in my another machine). I would say Ubuntu is very easy to install, easy to update and download softwares. It is the most popular Linux distro, so I will get plenty of support online. Since I wanted to use the OS in my server, so I looked for the server edition. Unfortunately, there is only Ubuntu server for AMD 64 platform.
- FreeBSD: Heard that this platform is good for server. However the installation process is tedious. It is all text-based and I got lost many times. Even though I got the OS to be installed in VirtualBox eventually, I bumped into another issue: I could not get the networking work in virtual environment. After few days, I gave up on this and uninstalled FreeBSD.
- Fedora: Unlike FreeBSD, installing Fedora 11 in VirtualBox is way smoother and easier. Right after the first boot, the network is up without any configuration. I would say Fedora is comparable to Ubuntu in terms of convenience. The Yum tool is just impressive. Only one command to download Apache, mySQL and PHP and took me less than one hour more to do research and make them work together. This installation and configuration process used to take me several days on Windows. So decided to stick with Fedora.
- OpenSUSE and OpenSolaris: These two candidates are not bad actually. The only reason I single out them coz it seems that I will get less help than Ubuntu or Fedora if you encounter problems due to the popularity of the latter twos.