knbknb00 wrote:
> Thanks for providing a fix, (and the other ingenious features of the
> new release, mentioned in the other posting from yesterday)!
> Can deploy the frink.war file now.
>
> However, on my Tomcat, the resource FrinkServletDispatcher (or so)
> cannot be loaded. I am not sitting at that computer right now. So I
> can't give you the true error message.

Okay, I've once again changed the structure of the .war file so that
all classes go into the internal .jar file, instead of having some in
the classes/ directory and some in the lib/ directory. This should
hopefully eliminate potential classloader problems, and it fixes another
problem that probably made the war file not work anyway. It now works
on an older Tomcat installation where it didn't before. Please give it
another try and let me know. Sorry about the problems.

> By the way, your fsps on the futureboy.us site give
> FrinkEvaluationException: java.lang.NullPointerExceptions.

I think one of my servlet environments was having similar problems.
I didn't see the problem occurring, but since I have load-balancing and
failover on my servers, it's possible that the requests were going to
one of the malfunctioning servers, which wasn't malfunctioning badly
enough for it to be taken out of service. :|

> Indeed, considering only the inner solar system, aligned along a
> linear feature, such as a street in my neighborhod, the planets seem
> to be pretty close together, and this is probably slightly misleading.
>
> Today I had another idea while thinking about this little project, as
> follows : the script might optionally accept another parameter, of
> geographic coordinates (longitude, latitude) which could indicate the
> the location of the sun model. The relative positions of the planets
> would be calculated as well, and their corresponding geographic
> coordinates (either on a straight line or the true current positions
> on their scaled-down elliptical model orbits).
> Then let the script write the whole thing out as a .kml File to show
> in Google Earth. Yesterday I already tried plotting the planetary
> distances manually, using Google Earth's line/path tool. Takes too
> much time, though. (And manually, anything else other than aligning
> them along a straight line is infeasible).

I have written several libraries and sample programs that may help
you in this:

High-accuracy navigation libraries for lat/long manipulation,
including very accurate algorithms for navigation on an ellipsoidal earth:
http://futureboy.us/fsp/colorize.fsp?fileName=navigation.frink

A web page that uses this library (and draws maps in Google Maps and
Google Earth once you put numbers into the forms.) Use the "view
source" link at bottom.)
http://futureboy.us/fsp/geocaching.fsp

Program to write very simple Google Earth .kml files (currently just
one point.)
http://futureboy.us/fsp/colorize.fsp?fileName=GoogleEarth.frink

And a FSP page that uses the above library to render the kml file:
http://futureboy.us/fsp/highlight.fsp?fileName=GoogleEarth.fsp
(this is called from geocaching.fsp)

> So, maybe I'll create a ajax-y Google maps App that calls my custom
> fsp behind the scenes. Fun!

I wish you luck on it! I'd be interested in seeing it!

--
Alan Eliasen | "Furious activity is no substitute
eliasen@... | for understanding."
http://futureboy.us/ | --H.H. Williams