Green Sherpa

Yesturday I found an interesting personal finance management online service - Green Sherpa.
I had been looking for a PFM which would provide planning tools. And Green Sherpa turned out to be one of them.

Despite negative view in Prosper Lending Review, I decided to give it a try:

The promised functionality looked to be available but oops! The controls in the planning module, "Add" (planned amount) buttons in Cash Flow Projection page, did not function. It seems that Green Sherpa overlooked a bug in the module I needed mostly...

So I'm looking further for other tools...

Personal Finance Management software comparison

A couple of days ago I returned to my old plans to make use of up-to-date financial management software. Last year Microsof declare discontinueing MS Money. So, I had to research the market of the like soft.

There two major streams in the field as described in an eHow articl by Maxwell Payne: old good desktop applications and new, most often, WEB 2.0 style, web applications available online. I chosen on-line.

Of course wikies was the most complete source of available choices: the review below is based on its Comparison of personal financial management software.

After filtering only free web based applications which are available internationally (at least as the wiki says) the following list remained:

1. Budgetpulse
2. Manubia
3. Meniga
   
4. MoneyRight
5. moneyStrands
6. MoneyTrackin'
7. Onyem
8. PennyTrac
9. PersonalAccountingSoftware
10. Rudder
11. Thrive
12. Wehuhu
13. Wesabe
14. Winancial
15. Yodlee MoneyCenter

In the wikie all they are qualified either as international or have not this attribute set at all.

The functionality I need is

1. Ability to have an account for a bank which is not supported for automatic transaction download. There is a big number of banks, especially this regards USA, Canada, Western Europe etc, which support this. In other parts the world however there is a bigger number of banks that DO NOT provide such service.
   
2. Ability to have cash accounts.
3. Ability to having repeating payments / planned payments.
   
4. Ability to plan finances. That is ability to graphically view future states, the data being based on the registered planned payments.

So, by its order:
1. Budgetpulse:
Overall the impression is good although planning finances turned to be not possible. (I'm afraid such a functionality is rare).
Requerement #1 - passed. Req. #2 - passed. Req.3 - passed. Req. #4 - failed because charts do not include planned (repeating) transactions.

2. Manubia:
Since I can not make any use of it I give this system 0 points of 10. I only speak English, German, Russian and Lithuanian. Regretably Manubia is in Portuguese only. So I would not consider this system an international at all.

3. Meniga:
It is not international: "Meniga is still in beta and, for now, only registered users of Íslandsbanki’s online bank can sign up" was declared on its registration page.

4. MoneyRight
I could not even sign up due to, maybe, some bug ever invalidating my zip code.

5. moneyStrands
Recurring transactions are not supported.

6. MoneyTrackin'
No analisys tools at all.

7. Onyem
I have not tried this because its tour shows only analisys of the past but nothing about the future.

8. PennyTrac
The industrial niche of this system is not transaction tracking etc... It's more for investors...

9. PersonalAccountingSoftware
It turned out to be windows based software (an error in wikipedia). Wikipedia entry updated.

10. Rudder
Does not support cash accounts

11. Thrive
Does not support cash accounts

12. Wehuhu
Meets all the abovementioned functional requirements while the system crashed after 10 or so operations.

13. Wesabe
Recurring transactions are not supported

14. Winancial
This is single language system. You can use it neither in English.

15. Yodlee MoneyCenter
Has only 10 predefined currencies. Mine is absent in the list.

Thus... there is no single suitable system. At least a free one.

Starting RichFaces with Eclipse

Hello!

Here what I faced when followed yesterday the "An Introduction To JBoss RichFaces", an extremely good article on "kickstart" of using RichFaces with Eclipse. I thank very much the author of the article Max Katz for the excellent tutorial!

But, of course, I never passed through without problems... And I had problems here too...

1 To be smart :) I installed the currently latest release of Eclipse for Java EE Developers (Ganymede: ) instead of Europa release given in the article. Then I had a happy time trying to install latest JBoss Tools plugin (currently JBossTools-2.1.2.GA-ALL-win32.zip) with the all same result: JBoss Tools failed to visualize its palette. Finally I found myself stairing at the bootom right of the JBoss Release 2.1.2.GA page where one can find that the 2.1.2.GA is only for WTP 3.3.2 (Europa release) but not Ganymede (WTP 3.4.x release). That is... the currently latest release of JBoss Tools is not compatible with the currently latest release of Eclipse. Pitty. But nothing doing though.
So, I installed Europa and enjoyed seeing the JBoss Tools palette.

2 Now, let us take the template souce from the article. I put it as instructed but the addition environmental choice had not appaired :( . When tried to create JSF project with JSF Environment "JSF 1.2 with Facelets" I got an error on Tomcat 6.0.18 server start:

SEVERE: Error configuring application listener of class com.sun.faces.config.ConfigureListener
java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: com.sun.faces.config.ConfigureListener

I had to spend a lot of time not knowing that after we install new templates we MUST do something with the workspace directory of Eclipse. In my case, I closed Eclipse, deleted its workspace directory lanched Eclipse again and... voilà! I got the power :) ... The environmental choice did appair.

3 So, its time to server's start... Ooops!!! It crashes again :'(. Thank you, the reason differs and I could start figureing out the reason again. The error message was: Content is not allowed in prolog. Ok, it was quite simple to resolve. In Web.xml between the xml header and web-app version number there a line appaired
(2.5 == "2.5")
surely, xml files may not have anything there. So I deleted this line and successfully started server. This line appaired in xml because in the project creation wizard's I selected Servlet version 2.5 instead of 2.4. If I leave the default the problem does not appair. So you must follow the Max Katz tutorial very precisely: hi writes "

1. For a template, select one based on the Tomcat version you are using
2. Click Finish to create the project

"
If you press Finish you will never go to the wrong place to choose wrong configuration as I regretably did.

So I hope, dear reader, that you will not repeat my mistakes. :)

Embedded JBoss on Tomcat6 with Java JDK 1.6

Several days ago I started evaluating Seam framework (http://www.seamframework.org) . Of course I found that the best application server to use with the framework is for sure JBoss AS.
That is, to follow the tutorial (http://docs.jboss.com/seam/latest/reference/en-US/html/tutorial.html) one has to install either JBoss AS or, if one preferes Tomcat, Embedded JBoss.
Our customer wants Tomcat. Thus, we must go with:

the latest Tomcat release (Tomcat 6.0.18)
the latest Java (JDK 1.6.0_07) and
the latest embedded jbos (embedded-jboss-beta3)
Windows XP SP3

In the installation guide we find that to work with JDK 1.6 a Java option must be set:
-Dsun.lang.ClassLoader.allowArraySyntax=true
That is perfectly clear but... don't expect to work if you install everithing as instucted in documentation: the issues is that if you install Tomcat 6 under its default path ("C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat 6.0") then the Tomcat server will crash starting!!!
After hours of googling I found a forum thread http://www.seamframework.org/18890.lace posing this problem and solving it.
Tomcat log shows

ERROR [org.jboss.kernel.plugins.dependency.AbstractKernelController] Error installing to Parse: name=vfsfile:/C:/Dokumente%20und%20Einstellungen/nes/Eigene%20Dateien/workspace/SUPCockpit/test-build/ state=Not Installed mode=Manual requiredState=Parse

(the example taken from http://www.seamframework.org/18890.lace).
And the problem is that the path to vfsfile includes spaces. Of course it does, because default tomcat installation path does!!! So, just reinstall Tomcat under installation directory with no spaces an the problem must go away! :)

Why am I starting my weblog

Nowadays I am performing an investigation in the field of available Rich Internet Application technologies. The targeted customer is an isurance company which would like to move its client/server intranet applicatio to Web. The programming language is one of the thing we have allready made a positive decisions about.

I spent a lot of time looking for the frameworks and IDE. Everybody knows there is a lot of them and I in no case want to start fruitless discussions on what frameworks or IDE is better. Nevertheless, I would not object comparying them to each other as far as we consider a feature in respect to abovementioned needs.

My main goal now is to help people who are installing a lot of different software, evaluating it, combining it with other pieces of soft and having lots of headackes, not to repeate mistakes that I did.