Making powerpoint movies: RESTful services with FUSE

I made my first powerpoint movie last week, on building RESTful services with FUSE. It's part of the FUSE Master Class, and has been posted on open.iona.com wiki. I've presented that material at a number of places now, but there really is something very challenging about presenting to nothing but Camtasia on a dusty laptop. Not having an audience to feed off is unnerving: I found when I did a playback that there was an irritating amount of "ommm" and "ehhh", and I ended up doing a lot re-takes.

In the end, I settled on writing a script for my narration. Reading from a script does take a bit of magic out of the delivery, but you can still improvise around it and it saves a whole lot of time. Also, I filmed segments of no more than 4 or 5 slides at a time. This keeps you on track and allows you to redo stuff quickly. I have a hunch it also saves on edit time trying to edit large tracts of movie.

Camtasia's an OK tool - this being my first time doing screen capture I don't have any thing else to compare with. I do drool with envy at my colleague's MacBook Pro: Apple's "Keynote" provides built-in support for "filming" your powerpoint, and then you can use i-Movie to edit in talking heads to minimise the "death-by-powerpoint" effect and add a little character. Gotta get me one of those machines :)

That not found in this context JAX-B exception

I was throwing together a Java code-first example for a CXF web service this morning, and I encountered a scary gotcha. I want to create a simple customer information service, with an interface like this:

public interface CustomerService {
Customer findCustomerByName(String firstName, String lastName);
}

... The Customer type is a straightforward bean, as per below:


public class Customer {
private String firstName;
private String lastName;
private String skypeId;
private String telephoneNumber;
private int age;

public String getFirstName() {
return firstName;
}

public void setFirstName(String firstName) {
this.firstName = firstName;
}

public String getLastName() {
return lastName;
}

public void setLastName(String lastName) {
this.lastName = lastName;
}

public String getSkypeId() {
return skypeId;
}

public void setSkypeId(String skypeId) {
this.skypeId = skypeId;
}

public String getTelephoneNumber() {
return telephoneNumber;
}

public void setTelephoneNumber(String telephoneNumber) {
this.telephoneNumber = telephoneNumber;
}

public int getAge() {
return age;
}

public void setAge(int age) {
this.age = age;
}

public Customer(String firstName, String lastName,
String skypeId,
String telephoneNumber, int age) {
super();
this.firstName = firstName;
this.lastName = lastName;
this.skypeId = skypeId;
this.telephoneNumber = telephoneNumber;
this.age = age;
}
}

When my service implementation returns a Customer, I get an exception:

org.apache.cxf.interceptor.Fault: Marshalling Error: com.iona.ps.codefirst.Customer is not known to this context

Looks quite scary. I lost a lot of time trying to figure out what was going on, thinking that maybe I needed to add JAXB annotations to my Customer class. It turns out however that the problem is that my Bean class doesn't have a default constructor. Ouch. Without a default constructor in place, the JAXB runtime cannot create a default instance of the class. Adding the default constructor to the bean makes everything better.

I've seen through Google that lots of people have encountered this problem before - feels like a usability issue to me. While it may be the case that you need a default constructor in JAXB, CXF should give a more helpful message than "not known to this context".