I’ve been reading and hearing a lot of rumbling lately from designers lately desperately looking for a better way to add fonts to their web design.

I feel that there is a lot of confusion in the design and web developer community as to what the issues are with font embedding or linking and when there isn’t confusion I often find myself on the opposite side of the debate and end up at a impasse with whoever I am talking with. In the past month I have found myself in this position more than once in person.

Last week I was posting a response on MildFuzz (link) and I realized that just debating the technical merits of the problem and proposed solutions isn’t going to get me anywhere. I set out to write a blog post to express my positions and beliefs and explain the technical problems to people but as I was writing I realized that there is just too much to dump into a single blog post.

My goal here is to write a long multi-part post that frames the technical issues, talks about proposed solutions, touches on the debates going on in the community, and offers my thoughts on a solution to the problem. This first post will just be an introduction.

first. About me:
I have been working as a professional web and application developer for 11 years now. Before that I did some type design and released several commercial and free fonts over at GrilledCheese.com. While the site may appear very very stale, I have been working for months now updating all of my typefaces and preparing them for a re-release. (Cleaning up glyphs that are over 10 years old and converting to OpenType is quite a chore, not to mention the 10 or so unfinished works I never released). I am most likely going to release most of my typefaces as Creative Commons licensed works or some hybrid commercial entity that I will talk about in a later article. Since I am now a professional programmer and not a designer I tend to look at things from more of a technical perspective and that will probably come through in this writing.

here is an outline of the posts I am working on

• A brief history of type and fonts
• The type industry compared to other creative works
• Type on the web – methods and controversy
• My proposed solution

Microsoft and Asus just launched a new site called It’s Better with Windows (link).

The basic premise of the site is that Windows is familiar and Linux is different and scary.

The marketing premise sounds reasonable but I think the problems with Microsoft is that they actually believe it. They believe that consumers would rather have something familiar than have something better.

I’m not saying Linux on a netbook is better than Windows. I am saying though that I think this “familiar” argument is what caused Microsoft to be totally blindsided in the mobile space in the past few years.

“It’s familiar” was their primary selling point for why you should buy Windows Mobile and not Palm. Palm fell flat on it’s face a few years later, but not because all the users were finally convinced that the Microsoft UI paradigm was superior. As MS tends to do, once they because the dominant player in the space, they completely stopped trying to improve their product.

Microsoft: People aren’t as loyal to the start menu as you think. The lower cost the device the more true this is.

When Apple and then Google came around with their mobile offerings, they had a UI that was totally unfamiliar to everyone, but substantially better. Now Microsoft is caught playing catch up. They are just now coming to grips with the fact that the Windows Start Menu and tiny icons isn’t how people want to interact with their phone or PDA.

Microsoft should be making a custom version of windows with a netbook centric UI that takes advantage of the small screen and stop trying to cram windows into everything. It is only a matter of time before Apple and Google release netbooks and leave them wondering why people aren’t yearning for a start menu and taskbar.

Another side note, the secondary argument they are making, is that “Windows has better device support than any other platform” is just absurd. Anyone that has plugged in an older or a newer printer or scanner into a Windows computer knows that more often than not the computer doesn’t know what the hell to do with it. At this point, OSX tends to recognize way more devices and know exactly what to do with them way better than Windows.

I’m moving a bunch of single WAR sites from Tomcat 6 to Jboss AS5. Here are the configuration steps that need to be taken.

Assuming this is your tomcat config file:
%TOMCAT_HOME%/conf/server.xml:

<Host appBase="/home/wirelust/wirelust.com" autoDeploy="false"
     debug="0" deployXML="true" liveDeploy="true"
     name="domainname.com"
     unpackWARs="true">
 
    <Alias>www.wirelust.com</Alias>
 
     <Context cachingAllowed="true" cookies="true" crossContext="true" debug="0"
             displayName="wirelust" docBase="." path="" privileged="false"
             reloadable="true" swallowOutput="false" useNaming="true">
             <Resource auth="SERVLET" name="wirelustDatasource" scope="Shareable" type="javax.sql.DataSource"
                     username="username"
                     password="password"
                     driverClassName="net.sourceforge.jtds.jdbc.Driver"
                     url="jdbc:jtds:sqlserver://sql.wirelust.com/database"
                     removeAbandoned="true"
                     removeAbandonedTimeout="30"
                     logAbandoned="true"
             />
     </Context>
</Host>

Becomes the embedded tomcat config file:
%JBOSS_HOME%/server/default/deploy/jbossweb.sar/server.xml

<Host appBase="/home/wirelust/deploy/wirelust.com.war" autoDeploy="false"
     debug="0" deployXML="true" liveDeploy="true"
     name="domainname.com"
     unpackWARs="true">
 
    <Alias>www.wirelust.com</Alias>
</Host>

Notice that the appBase is now in a folder called “deploy”. You have to add this deploy folder to the config file:
%JBOSS_HOME%/server/default/conf/bootstrap/profile.xml

<bean name="BootstrapProfileFactory" class="org.jboss.system.server.profileservice.repository.StaticProfileFactory">
    <property name="bootstrapURI">${jboss.server.home.url}conf/jboss-service.xml</property>
    <property name="deployersURI">${jboss.server.home.url}deployers</property>
    <property name="applicationURIs">
        <list elementClass="java.net.URI">
            <value>${jboss.server.home.url}deploy</value>
 
            <value>file:/home/wirelust/deploy</value>
        </list>
    </property>
    <property name="attachmentStoreRoot">${jboss.server.data.dir}/attachments</property>
    <property name="profileFactory"><inject bean="ProfileFactory" /></property>
</bean>

Make sure your exploded directory ends in .war or jboss won’t see it.

Then in that new deploy directory, create a datasource file, in this case called “wirelust-ds.xml” with these contents:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 
<!DOCTYPE datasources
    PUBLIC "-//JBoss//DTD JBOSS JCA Config 1.5//EN"
    "http://www.jboss.org/j2ee/dtd/jboss-ds_1_5.dtd">
<datasources>
    <local-tx-datasource>
        <jndi-name>wirelustDatasource</jndi-name>
        <connection-url>jdbc:jtds:sqlserver://sql.wirelust.com/wirelust</connection-url>
        <use-java-context>false</use-java-context>
        <driver-class>net.sourceforge.jtds.jdbc.Driver</driver-class>
        <user-name>username</user-name>
        <password>password</password>
 
        <Pool.LogAbandoned>false</Pool.LogAbandoned>
        <Pool.RemoveAbandoned>false</Pool.RemoveAbandoned>
        <Pool.RemoveAbandonedTimeout>50000</Pool.RemoveAbandonedTimeout>
   </local-tx-datasource>
</datasources>

In order to bind to the correct virtual host, you have to create a new file in your exploded WEB-INF directory called jboss-web.xml with these contents:

<!DOCTYPE jboss-web PUBLIC
    "-//JBoss//DTD Web Application 4.2//EN"
    "http://www.jboss.org/j2ee/dtd/jboss-web_4_2.dtd">
 
<jboss-web>  
    <context-root>/</context-root>  
    <virtual-host>wirelust.com</virtual-host>
</jboss-web>

Then the last change you have to make is how you are looking up your datasource in the application.
If you have code like this in your tomcat application it will fail because your jndi is not bound to java:comp/env:

Context ctx = new InitialContext();
Context envCtx = (Context) ctx.lookup("java:comp/env");
DataSource ds = (DataSource)envCtx.lookup("wirelustDatasource");
con = ds.getConnection();

This of course can be fixed with some further configuration and resource-ref settings but I couldn’t get that to work so I just changed the code to work either way:

Context ctx = null;
Context envCtx = null;
DataSource ds = null;
Connection con = null;
 
try {
	ctx = new InitialContext();
} catch (NamingException e) {
	e.printStackTrace();
}
 
if (ctx != null) {
	try {
		// look for the datasource in the tomcat location
		envCtx = (Context) ctx.lookup("java:comp/env");
		ds = (DataSource)envCtx.lookup("wirelustDatasource");
	} catch (javax.naming.NameNotFoundException nnfe) {
		try {
			// look for it in the jboss location
			ds = (DataSource)ctx.lookup(wirelustDatasource);
		} catch (Exception e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		}
	} catch (Exception e) {
		e.printStackTrace();
	}
}
 
 
// open the connection
if (ds != null) {
	try {
		con = ds.getConnection();
	} catch (Exception e) {
		e.printStackTrace();
	}
}