Fresh Espresso

As if Time isn't difficult enough! I say this is huge bug in java.sql.Timestamp

2011-03-18T10:07:00.000-07:00

BACKGROUND
I found a bug in java.sql.Timestamp that was making my unit tests fail
once it a while when the planets aligned just the right way. I was
storing java.util.Date values to a Db using Hibernate and when they come
back out, they are represented as java.sql.Timestamp, which is a small
wrapper around java.util.Date.

ISSUE
In TimeStamp, they are storing the time in whole seconds and the
remaining nanos seperately. In the Timestamp.compareTo, they call the
super class first (but pass the time part only). So methods like
before() and after() are all in error when milliseconds count. Check out the following code:


/*
 * Copyright 2001-2009 The Apache Software Foundation.
 * 
 * Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
 * you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
 * You may obtain a copy of the License at
 *      http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
 * 
 * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
 * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
 * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
 * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
 * limitations under the License.
 */
package org.apache.juddi;

import java.sql.Timestamp;
import java.util.Date;

import junit.framework.Assert;

import org.junit.Test;


public class TimeStampDateTest {
 
 @Test
 public void testDates()  {
  
  java.util.Date startDate    = new Date(1300286601055l);
  java.util.Date modifiedDate = new Date(1300286601334l);
  Timestamp timeStamp = new Timestamp(modifiedDate.getTime());
 
  System.out.println(startDate.getTime()                 + " startDate    " + startDate);
  System.out.println(modifiedDate.getTime()              + " modifiedDate " + modifiedDate);
  System.out.println(timeStamp.getTime() + " modifiedDtDB " + timeStamp);
   
  System.out.print("DT:" + startDate.getTime() + " is before " + modifiedDate.getTime() + ": "); 
  if (startDate.before(modifiedDate)) {
   System.out.println("before");
  } else {
   System.out.println("after ******* WRONG!!!!");
  }
  Assert.assertTrue(startDate.before(modifiedDate));
  
  System.out.print("DB:" + startDate.getTime() + " is before " + timeStamp.getTime() + ": ");
  if (startDate.before(timeStamp)) {
   System.out.println("before");
  } else {
   System.out.println("after ******* WRONG!!!!");
   System.out.println("The reason is a bug in Timestamp, it stores the time (whole seconds) and the nanos seperately," +
     "and when running a compareTo it only uses the nanos when the Time part is inconclusive, however" +
     "it is not inconclusive because the compareTo from the super class (java.util.Date) DOES" +
     "already take into account the millies!");
  }
  Assert.assertTrue(startDate.before(timeStamp));
 }
 
}

The second time the date comparison will fail and it will print out: 'after ******* WRONG!!!!'.

Yes Really!!

Then I was told to read the javadoc:

"Note: This type is a composite of a java.util.Date and a separate nanoseconds value. Only integral seconds are stored in the java.util.Date component. The fractional seconds - the nanos - are separate. The Timestamp.equals(Object) method never returns true when passed an object that isn't an instance of java.sql.Timestamp, because the nanos component of a date is unknown. As a result, the Timestamp.equals(Object) method is not symmetric with respect to the java.util.Date.equals(Object) method. Also, the hashcode method uses the underlying java.util.Date implementation and therefore does not include nanos in its computation.

Due to the differences between the Timestamp class and the java.util.Date class mentioned above, it is recommended that code not view Timestamp values generically as an instance of java.util.Date. The inheritance relationship between Timestamp and java.util.Date really denotes implementation inheritance, and not type inheritance."

Ahh that makes it all better! No no no, this is just crap and so easy to fix. Time skrewed up enough, please don't do this Snoracle!

There's a few of my life that I will never get back. The issue is that my unit test failed when the build machine was fast enough to make milli-seconds count when comparing dates!

GRRRR..

--Kurt

IPhone 3Gs Battery Drain - part 2

2011-02-14T18:14:00.001-08:00

OK so after removing all my apps, it was still draining the battery. Turns out the VPN I had installed was causing it. Not sure why it suddenly went sideways. It had been working just fine for about a year.

Now I'm busy putting all my apps back. It's kind off refreshing though to start with a clean phone :).

--Kurt

IPhone 3Gs Battery Drain - part 1

2011-02-13T11:12:00.000-08:00

I've had my iphone for a little over a year, and since last Friday it drains the battery in about 5 hours, this while the day before I could go for 48 hours between charges. I also noticed it being warmish. I figured it is an app that is stuck, however

- hard reset does not alleviate the issue, and
- doing a full restore does not help either.

I figured that before going over to see apple store I would restore it to having the default OS/firmware only. The idea being, that if it still drains in this configuration, then the phone is just defect. Well I did, and.. my phone is fine now! So while this is good news, this must mean that it is an app that is somehow causing the issues. How am I going to find which app is causing the issues?? I guess I have the following options:

1. Leave it the way it is and slow add apps back as I need them
2. Do a full restore and use bisection on app deletion/addition.
3. I guess i could try to figure out which apps I upgraded last week and delete those, hoping that it is one of these updates of last week.
4. There is no taskmon app right? Wouldn't it be great to simply see which process is eating my CPU cycles/battery..

Love to hear your ideas!

Cheers,

--Kurt

Guvnor JCR Implementation Support: JackRabbit and ModeShape

2010-09-11T15:14:00.000-07:00

I have started working on the Guvnor project recently. Guvnor manages a SOA repository and sits on top of a JCR implementation. Up until now there really where not too many JCR implementation available. Really JackRabbit was the only viable Open Source gig in town. This has changed now the ModeShape project really has been picking up steam. They recently completed implementing the JCR 2.0 specification. ModeShape has been designed from the ground up with scalability in mind, and it can run in a clustered environment (using JGroups).

--Kurt

Matt Ridley explains how open source works

2010-07-20T11:22:00.000-07:00

Although he doesn't know it he is explaining the inner workings of open
source, and why it will be more successful as the number of people with
computers increases.

http://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex.html

--Kurt

OSX and slow DNS issue

2010-07-08T07:51:00.000-07:00

I just 'fixed' my macbook from having terribly slow DNS lookup performance by turning off IPv6 in both of my network adapters (switch from automatic to off). The difference is not funny.

Cheers,

--Kurt

Guerrilla SOA in the Cloud.

2010-05-13T15:09:00.000-07:00

This evening I'm listening to a presentation by John Graham "From the ESB to REST and Clouds an Open Source", who is talking about ESB, REST and Clouds at the SUN campus in Burlington, MA. It is a nice overview of the evolution of system architectures, with the conclusion that as system became more distributed we developed different integration solutions; from Corba, Asynch Messaging to ESB. The talk is spiced up by some good word plays ("Being thrown under the ESB"), quizzes and code examples. It's entertaining.

After a little while we arrive at Guerrilla SOA coined by Jim Webber, which is a lighter style of SOA. Finally we arrive at how REST can be used in a cloud environment in a complementary fashion to manage ESBs.

Cheers,

--Kurt

Match made in Heaven: Maven Multi-Project and Eclipse Working Sets

2010-05-07T11:48:00.000-07:00

Recently Maven dropped support for 'nested modules' which was nice from an organizational point of view, but since all the maven modules shared one classpath in this case it wasn't really working. So I started using the 'import maven modules' after checking out the main project, which creates different project for each maven module. This works well, but it explodes the amount of project in my project explorer. I have been looking for a way to organize this and today I tripped over this article from Byron, about Categorization of projects in Eclipse using 'Working Sets'. This is what I had been looking for, and it was there all this time!

Cheers,

--Kurt

JBoss Quick Reference Card

2010-05-04T10:18:00.000-07:00

This is the best Getting Started Guide on JBoss I have seen! Short and to the point.

--Kurt

jBPM Developer Guide Book (P)Review

2010-05-04T10:13:00.000-07:00

When I returned from our spring vacation trip one of the things I found waiting for me on the porch was a copy of the book "jBPM Developer Guide". After my last jBPM book review I mentioned that the target audience for that book was not the jBPM developer. Well that seems to be addressed now. Here is a link the chapter 5, if you're interested while I'm reading the book myself.

Cheers,

--Kurt

JBossESB MBean Service Deployment Order

2010-03-17T16:55:00.000-07:00

In JBossESB, MBeans can be deployed inside of .esb archives. The deployment is pretty much standard and the mbean configuration lives in the jbossesb-service.xml right in the root of the .esb archive. If you need the mbean to be up before the rest of the .esb deployment, then you can reference the mbean in the META-INF/deployment.xml. If the mbean depends on another .esb service archive to be deployed first the you need to add that dependency to the jbossesb-service.xml.

If you're looking for an example check out the jbossesb.esb.

--Kurt

Cool MySQL Database Queries

2010-02-07T08:29:00.000-08:00

1. Select a count of all rows in your database:


SELECT SUM(table_rows) FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES WHERE TABLE_SCHEMA = 'database_name';

2. Select count of all rows of each table in your database:


SELECT table_name, table_rows FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES WHERE TABLE_SCHEMA = 'database_name';

3. Gets stats on a per hour basis, written out to CSV:


SELECT  DATE_FORMAT(date, '%m/%d/%Y %H:00:00') AS date, DATE_FORMAT(date, '%Y%m%d%H') AS hour, count(id) AS requests, max(time), avg(time),  count(distinct userName)  INTO OUTFILE '/tmp/usage.csv' FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' FROM statslog GROUP BY hour ORDER BY hour ASC;

jUDDI Release-3.0.0.beta

2009-06-05T16:44:00.000-07:00

I'm proud to announce the release of jUDDI-3.0.0.beta. Since the alpha release the implementation has shown stability and performance, and it implements the final two UDDI API implementations targeted for the 3.0.0 release; "Subscription" and "Custody transfer". Subscriptions allow you to register for updates in the Registry. The registry will send out the notification by calling an endpoint defined at registration time. The generic UDDI client now supports InVM transport to allow jUDDI to run in embedded mode. For a complete overview of what went into this release see the release notes:
http://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=10401&styleName=Html&version=12313630

Finally, we also started work on the console.

The console is Pluto portal which plugs in uddi-portlets. The portlets are GWT based. We'd have one to Publish, Search, Browse, Subscribe etc.. Right now you can see a tree of services under the publisher you log in as. You can download the portal-bundle from the following url if you want to see it all in action.
http://www.apache.org/dist/ws/juddi/3_0/juddi-portal-bundle-3.0.0.beta.zip

--Kurt

Synergy rocks (for once)

2009-06-05T11:14:00.000-07:00

Whenever companies merge great "Synergies" are promised by upper-management. I hate that word. It's a red flag for me. So for that reason alone I had not tried out Synergy until yesterday. However I really like working on the mac, and this way I can; I can simply move my mouse across to the other machines. This is really pretty sweet. Finally a good use of the word synergy! Great work guys. Thx.

--Kurt

Setup of a Wireless Connection on a Lenovo T400 running centos 5.3

2009-06-03T17:07:00.000-07:00

I recently installed Centos 5.3 on my Lenovo T400, and everything pretty much worked except for the wireless connection. I had a hard time finding instructions on how to get it working but this blog entry was most helpful.

First make sure the RPMForge repo is installed

rpm -Uhv http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/x86_64/rpmforge/RPMS/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm
yum clean all
yum update

Next install the driver for the PRO/Wireless 5100 AGN[Shiloh] card from Intel

yum install iwl5000-firmware

The wireless device should now be working, and you can enable the NetworkManager to start using it

chkconfig NetworkManager on
service NetworkManager start

and you may want to save yourself some wait time at boottime by disabling the network since you don't need that anymore

chkconfig network off

Next you need to configure your wireless connection settings by going to System > Preferences > More Preferences > Network Connections

Select the Wireless tab and click on Add, and fill out your connection settings.

jUDDI v3.0.0 SNAPSHOT

2009-05-23T06:16:00.000-07:00

The jUDDI project has seen a lot of activity lately in the ramp up for the jUDDIv3 beta release. The biggest change with the alpha release is that for beta the Subscription API will be fully implemented. One of the missing features of jUDDI has always been a good console. After the beta release we will work hard to get that work completed. However it is very exciting that we already have the beginnings of the console.

You can download a ready to go bundle (3.0.0.SNAPSHOT) from the repos.

--Kurt

Switch JBossESB-4.5.GA from HSQL to MSSQL

2009-04-03T14:55:00.000-07:00

To switch JBossESB from the default HSQL embedded database to a "real" database like MSSQL, the persistence configuration of JMS, jUDDI, ESB MessageStore and jBPM needs updating.

1. JMS
rm server/default/deploy/jms/hsqldb-jdbc2-service.xml
cp docs/examples/jms/mssql-jdbc2-service.xml server/default/deploy/jms
cp docs/examples/jca/mssql-ds.xml server/default/deploy/jms
mv server/default/deploy/jms/hsql-jdbc-state-service.xml server/default/deploy/jms/mssql-jdbc-state-service.xml

update the mssql-jdbc-state-service.xml to point to the MSSQLDS datasource


<depends optional-attribute-name="ConnectionManager">jboss.jca:service=DataSourceBinding,name=MSSQLDS</depends>

update the "Security domain for JBossMQ" in the server/default/conf/login-config.xml to java:/MSSQLDS

2. jUDDI
cp docs/examples/jca/mssql-ds.xml server/default/deploy/jbossesb.sar/juddi-ds.xml
update the juddi-ds.xml, make sure the <jndi-name>juddiDB</jndi-name>
update the server/default/deploy/jbossesb.sar/esb.juddi.xml to make sure the mssql sql is used to create the jUDDI tables


<entry key="juddi.sqlFiles">juddi-sql/mssql/create_database.sql,juddi-sql/mssql/import.sql</entry>

3. JBossESB MessageStore
rm server/default/deploy/jbossesb.esb/hsql-ds.xml
cp docs/examples/jca/mssql-ds.xml server/default/deploy/jbossesb.esb
update the mssql-ds.xml, make sure the <jndi-name>JBossESBDS</jndi-name>
update the server/default/deploy/jbossesb.esb/jbossesb-service.xml to point to the mssql sql for creating the message table


<attribute name="SqlFiles">
     message-store-sql/mssql/create_database.sql
</attribute>

4. jBPM
rm server/default/deploy/jbpm.esb/hsql-ds.xml
cp docs/examples/jca/mssql-ds.xml server/default/deploy/jbpm.esb/
update the mssql-ds.xml, make sure the <jndi-name>JbpmDS</jndi-name>
update the server/default/deploy/jbpm.esb/hibernate.cfg.xml to make sure the SQLServerDialect is used


<!-- hibernate dialect -->
<property name="hibernate.dialect">org.hibernate.dialect.SQLServerDialect</property>

update the server/default/deploy/jbpm.esb/jbpm-service.xml so it points to the mssql sql file


<attribute name="SqlFiles">
     jbpm-sql/jbpm.jpdl.mssql.sql,
     jbpm-sql/import.sql
</attribute>

Not that the import.sql tries to set the primary key, which is an autoincrement column. MSSQL does not like this. Simply setting this column from this script will get you going.
5. Finishing up
To Finish up, make sure you add the mssql database driver jar to the server/default/lib directory, and make sure you added your credentials to the various mssql-ds.xml files.


<datasources>
 <local-tx-datasource>
   <jndi-name>JbpmDS</jndi-name>
<connection-url>jdbc:jtds:sqlserver://192.168.1.2:1433/jbossesb</connection-url>
   <driver-class>net.sourceforge.jtds.jdbc.Driver</driver-class>
   <user-name>jbossesb_admin</user-name>
   <password>admin</password>
     <!-- corresponding type-mapping in the standardjbosscmp-jdbc.xml (optional) -->
     <metadata>
        <type-mapping>MS SQLSERVER2000</type-mapping>
     </metadata>
 </local-tx-datasource>

Make sure this user has table create rights, so that when you start up JBossESB it can create the tables.

MSSQL Drop all constraints from the database

2009-04-03T11:13:00.000-07:00

Recently I had to drop all tables from a MSSQL Server Database, and this proved to be harder than expected because of foreign key contraints in the database. I found a post on how do disable them but that turned out to be not enough to allow to drop the tables. Instead I had to drop all the constraints from the database. The few lines below generate the commands to do this.


select
'ALTER TABLE ' + so.table_name + ' DROP CONSTRAINT ' + so.constraint_name
from INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLE_CONSTRAINTS so

Smooks XML2Java Transformation

2009-03-25T14:34:00.000-07:00

Previously I wrote about using Smooks for XML2XML transformations. Today I worked on an XML2Java transformation. It so happens that my incoming XML is completely flat, and looks like


  <my-example-data>
  <id>1234</id>
  <fname>First Name</fname>
  <mname>Middle Name</mname>
  <lname>Last Name</lname>
  <jobTitle>Job Title</jobTitle>
  </my-example-data>

Which lends itself really well to be stuffed into a Map, with the key being the name of the element. This is where a really handy Smooks trick comes in handy


<?xml version="1.0"?>
<smooks-resource-list xmlns="http://www.milyn.org/xsd/smooks-1.1.xsd"
 xmlns:jb="http://www.milyn.org/xsd/smooks/javabean-1.1.xsd">
<jb:bindings beanId="inquiryMap" class="java.util.HashMap" createOnElement="$document">
  <jb:value data="inquiry-email-data/*"/>
</jb:bindings>
</smooks-resource-list>

Now when running the following code:


Smooks smooks = new Smooks("smooks-config.xml");
JavaResult javaResult = new JavaResult();
smooks.filter(new StreamSource(new StringReader(xml)), javaResult);
Map results = (Map<String,String>) javaResult.getBean("inquiryMap");
System.out.println("result=" + results);

It prints out:


results={lname=Last Name, mname=Middle Name, fname=First Name, id=1234, jobTitle=Job Title}

The Smooks User Guide talks about something similar when your XML uses property elements.

By the way if you like mapping out your transformation graphically you should check out the new Smooks Graphical Editor.

The Eclipse plugin can be downloaded from http://www.smooks.org/news/eclipseeditorforsmooksinjbosstools.

JBoss Deployment Dependencies of a War

2009-03-12T16:55:00.000-07:00

When your war file depends on another service to deploy first you can add a depends element in the WEF-INF/jboss-web.xml. This will guaranty the deployment order, and the war file will not be deployed until the PluginManager Service is deployed first.

 
   
   jboss.admin:service=PluginManager

I know I looked for this before and was not able to find it. Now I won't forget.

--Kurt

Using Regexp in Drools 5

2009-02-17T18:01:00.001-08:00

I've spend waaay too much time on this, so I need to scribble this 'note to self'. I'm working with JBossESB and I have a piece of text in the body of the message. Now if a certain word is found in this text I want to route the message a certain way. This example is based on the simple_cbr quickstart.

1. So let's first take a look how to match a word in a string. To demonstrate how to do this I created this logging rule:


rule "Logging"
    when 
        b: String(this matches "(?i).*Order(.|\n|\r)*" && this matches ".*EST(.|\n|\r)*")
    then
        System.out.println("b=|" + b + "|");
    end

This rule will print out the incoming string if both the words 'Order' and 'EST' are matched.
The (?i) means 'ignore case', .*Order*. means the word 'Order' or 'order' anywhere in the string will be matched, but this will still not work if the string is multi-line (The '.' character does not match the newline character). So to fix that we need to make it .*Order(.|\n)*. Same story for the '\r'. This is the first word match which we can combine with '&&' or '||' with other matches like I did here looking for 'EST'.

2. Finally to push the String from the default place in the ESB message into the rules engine you need to use an object path of "body.'org.jboss.soa.esb.message.defaultEntry'" as shown in the XML fragment taking from a jboss-esb.xml.


<action class="org.jboss.soa.esb.actions.ContentBasedRouter" name="ContentBasedRouter">
    <property name="ruleSet" value="ShippingRules.drl"/>
    <property name="ruleReload" value="true"/>
    <property name="object-paths">
        <object-path esb="body.'org.jboss.soa.esb.message.defaultEntry'" />
    </property>
    <property name="destinations">
        <route-to destination-name="express" service-category="ExpressShipping" service-name="ExpressShippingService"/>
        <route-to destination-name="normal"  service-category="NormalShipping"  service-name="NormalShippingService"/>
    </property>  
</action>

alternatively you can use a path of esb="BODY_CONTENT".

jUDDI-3.0.0.alpha released

2009-02-17T06:01:00.000-08:00

For details see the jUDDI website or the TSS announcement. This release duplicates the functionality that is available in jUDDIv2.x and we'll be working on the newly added UDDI v3 APIs (such as the Subscription, Replication and Custody transfer) going forward. To get started we created a ready-to-go UDDI v3 server in one download: juddi-tomcat.zip (based on jUDDI-3.0.0.alpha, Tomcat and Derby). Please contact us if you want to help out. Now that the jUDDI-v3.x code base is functional it is relativity easy to contribute.

--Kurt

Java Architecture Management

2009-02-13T09:14:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I attended a NEJUG meeting presented by Alexander von Zitzewitz called "Java Architecture Management or how to avoid the structural erosion of your code base". It was a pretty entertaining talk where he reviewed a number of scenarios that lead to the creation of unmaintainable complexity. He confirmed a lot of what I already knew, but nicely formulated and explained. He argued that no documentation is going to help you, it's prohibitively expensive to create and always outdated by the latest code. A general theme was that you need to have an architecture that slices horizontally (architectural layers) as well as vertically (functional slices). Think of vertical slices as your java package naming and how packages end up in a jar. This way you end up with a grid of subsystems. Next you can start analyzing the dependencies between the subsystems. He described a number of code metrics that can be used to quantify the number of architecture violations in the code. He came up with a list of 6 rules that one should follow to write maintainable code:

Rule 1: Define a cycle free logical architecture down to the level of subsystems and a strict and consistent package naming convention
Rule 2: Do not allow cyclic dependencies between different packages
Rule 3: Keep the relative ACD low (< 7% for 500 compilation units, NCCD < 6)
Rule 4: Limit the size of Java files (700 LOC is a reasonable value)
Rule 5: Limit the cyclomatic complexity of methods (e.g. 15)
Rule 6: Limit the size of a Java package (e.g. less than 50 types)

To break a dependency cycle you can should introduce an interface; this reverses the dependency. It is that simple. This leads to the observation that "good code" can be recognized using certain metrics (see also a white paper by Robert Martin. Good code should have a certain ration of abstractness (classes vs interfaces), and if more code depends on your code, you will likely need more interfaces. The two extremes of this "metric distance" from the optimal ratio, are:
zone of uselessness which means a high number of interfaces and few things depending on you. This happens when coders plan for complexity that never happened.
zone of pain which means very few interfaces and lots of code depends on you. So each change in your class can break lots of other things elsewhere. This usually happens when people cut corners to make a deadline.

To monitor this adherence to the rules you need a tool. Commercially he listed three; Lattix here in Massachusetts, Structure101 and SonarJ, which is his product and which was later demoed. I was actually involved in a case study with Lattix a few years ago, which was interesting but felt like moving the chair on the deck of the Titanic. The case study only took into account the Java side and our major issue was the duplication of code on the server (Java) and the client side (Javascript). Code duplication is something that is not easily picked up and certainly not when it appears in the different Languages. We were simply to deep into our own poo to fix things. I think a rewrite was the only option for that product. Anyway I still learned a lot from it. For one that it is never too early to hook up a static code analyzer to the nightly build. If you register with hello2morrow you can download a free version of SonarJ meant for projects with fewer then 500 Java classes. If you want to go Open Source then you can try: PMD, jDepend (dependencies only) and Architecture Rules (on top of jDepend).

The meeting really confirmed my own experiences, that the process of creating good code is simple. You just have to follow it *all the f***ing time* (much like Bryan Liles' TATFT framework). Bad code is like a black hole attracting other bad code. So simply don't put black holes in your code! If your system gets large, make sure you use tools to monitor that none of these simple rules are broken. Hook them up to the nightly build and have any violations be fixed the very next day. Note that you need an architecture before you can use any of these tools!

--Kurt

jUDDI 2.0rc6 released

2009-02-10T11:48:00.000-08:00

Today the jUDDI team released the -hopefully final- release candidate for of jUDDI-2.0. One of the major new release artifacts is a jUDDI-tomcat bundle which is a jUDDI server bundled with Tomcat and an embedded Derby database. This means that users can start using their UDDI server instantly. It is expected that the jUDDI-2.0 release will follow shortly, as well as a jUDDI-3.0alpha release. The full release notes can be found here. jUDDI-3.0 implements the UDDI v3.0.2 spec, while jUDDI-2.0 implements the UDDI v2 spec.

--Kurt

Code Listings on Blogger

2009-02-09T16:18:00.000-08:00

I finally found a great post about inserting code listings on Blogger. They use a javascript library called syntax-highlighter.
Let's see if it works:


package freshespresso.listing;

public class List {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("That's some high octane cup!");
    }
}

Note that for Java code you would use the class="Java" and name="code" attributes on the pre element, like


<pre class="Java" name="code">
 java code here...
</pre>

I love it! Here is a cup of goodness for you Mr Alex Gorbatchev :)

Maven: The Definitive Guide

2009-01-29T09:00:00.000-08:00

I'm trying to get a jUDDI release out the door, threw a fit with maven and finally picked up a copy of the book "Maven: The Defintive Guide". This book is pretty good and a free online version of it can be found at the Sonatype website.

I love the standardization of Maven, but as the number of plugin grow it is sometimes hard to figure out which plugin to use, and how the configuration works. This book is certainly a help.

--Kurt

JOSSO 1.8 Released

2009-01-19T16:48:00.000-08:00

JOSSO 1.8 was released last week and in my opinion the 5 minute setup is a key feature. Using the deployment console getting started with JOSSO will now be that much easier.

Deploy Ruby on Rails to JBoss (Tomcat)

2008-11-19T13:58:00.000-08:00

Ruby can be run on the JVM as a war file. The Hello World is really very simple following the steps outlined by Arun Gupta.

1. Install jruby.

2. Install rails and JRuby-Jack

kstam-mbpro-2:ruby kstam$ jruby -S gem install rails warbler --no-ri --no-rdoc
JRuby limited openssl loaded. gem install jruby-openssl for full support.
http://wiki.jruby.org/wiki/JRuby_Builtin_OpenSSL
Successfully installed activesupport-2.1.2
Successfully installed activerecord-2.1.2
Successfully installed actionpack-2.1.2
Successfully installed actionmailer-2.1.2
Successfully installed activeresource-2.1.2
Successfully installed rails-2.1.2
Successfully installed warbler-0.9.11
7 gems installed

3. Create a Hello Rails app: jruby -S rails hello -d mysql

4. open hello/config/environment.rb in your favorite editor and uncomment so the line looks like
config.frameworks -= [ :active_record, :active_resource, :action_mailer ]

5. Use warble to create your war file
jruby -S warble

6. copy the hello.war to your server/default/deploy directory

7. Hit http://localhost:8080/hello in your browser.

Conclusion: A rails application is basically packaged up in the WEB-INF/ directory of the war and a ruby filter defined in the web.xml takes care of running it.

I also found that in JBoss 5, there would be no need for deploying it in a war, as the the deployer framework of JBoss-Microcontainer enables in-place native deployment of Rails applications in a way familiar to traditional rubyists.

Voices that matter, Professional Ruby Conference

2008-11-19T07:14:00.000-08:00

As stated before I'm a Java guy, however this week I'm at a Ruby conference in Boston. I'm working on a 2 year old java based application and we started to do Ruby on Rails right when I got on board. The RoR has been pretty successful, and I have to admit it sure is much, much easier to work with than Struts and jsps. There is still a chance Seam may save Java for the web tier, but for the current project Seam is not an option. So we're working on a hybrid architecture where we can run RoR and Java, so here I am at the Ruby conference! So when I write this review you will now hopefully understand my point of view.

Schedule: November 17-20, 2008.

For me the presentation by Thomas Enebo, Ruby and the Java Virtual Machine was an eye opener. Being new to Ruby in general I didn't not have much understanding on how JRuby worked on the JVM until now. It turns out that although JRuby trails Ruby a bit in terms of releases, it is identical to Ruby, but will have a different sets of bugs ;), however the best part is that JRuby is faster, and it can call into Java natively. It does run your code as byte code, but it stays dynamic! On the flipside this means that it won't ever be as fast as running Java on the JVM. Now the cool part is that you can deploy a RoR application as war file to your appserver, and talk natively to any code written in Java. Currently they are working on to finalize Ruby 1.9 features. This presentation really came to live for me when I went to the 'Lightning Round' later that night, where Mark Menard (from Vita Rara) spoke about his experiences with JRuby. He runs a Spring based application and first tried Groovy on Rails, but in the end he discovered that Groovy meta-model is too close to Java and so he started experimenting with RoR deployed to the JVM, and discovered that it really works as advertised. He is rewriting his application from the ground up and just replaced Hibernate by ActiveRecord, which proves that you can port pieces of your app while being in flight. For me this is very exciting to hear. Not necessarily that Hibernate can be swapped out from ActiveRecord, but more that it is not only possible but that it is actually a practical solution to build hybrid apps by running Ruby on the JVM!

Another talk I really liked was given by Ezra Zygmuntowicz, Four Years of Ruby Deployment. He went over the history of Ruby webservers (Mongrel, Thin, Ebb, NginX, Passenger), and liked Rack as the web equalizer since it abstracts these different implementation, and he picked Thin + NginX as his implementation preference. However then he demoed an application called Nanite, which is a web-based app to configure a linux server, with the possibility of cloning a certain configuration to multiple other nodes.

Oh I almost forgot, everyone seems to run their own little consulting firm writing Rails apps, all the speakers wrote a book and everyone uses Twitter.

It's actually pretty cool as I learn more about it!

Anything goes alternative Olympic Games

2008-10-13T17:35:00.000-07:00

I've been toying with the idea of an alternative Olympics where anything goes as long as it is human powered. The rules are simple, (if you're stupid enough) you can use any kind of dope but more interestingly you can use any kind of technology, just as long as it is human powered. I want to see Phelps with one of these things! Maybe he can wear a fin on his back to go with it.

Hibernate Interceptors, Events and JPA Entity Listeners

2008-10-11T08:13:00.000-07:00

Hibernate became is an implementation of the JPA specification. The JPA specification is part of the EJB3 specification (JSR-220). See, SUNs FAQ on that if you want to know more about that.

Hibernate Interceptors
In a recent project I wanted to intercept Create, Update and Delete events. From the Hibernate Reference Documentation it was pretty straightforward to find out how to create an Interceptor class. I extended my AuditInterceptor class from the EmptyInterceptor interface and implemented the onSave, onFlushDirty and onDelete methods but then was a bit puzzled how to activate the interceptor. Chapter 2 talks about specific hibernate configuration properties, but how to use those when you're using a JPA persistence.xml? It turns out the answer is very simple. Pretty much any vendor specific property can be set in the persistence.xml using a properties block. In this case a property with name hibernate.ejb.interceptor needs to be set to the full name of my AuditInterceptor class.

Some advantages are that

you don't to change any of your existing code, just add your interceptor and update the persistence.xml
the onFlushDirty gives you a nice detailed information on what changed

but on the flipside

the interceptor fires for every entity bean, and chances are you're only interested in a subset. I ended up doing the filtering in my AudutInterceptor.
if your primary key is set by the database, the id is still undefined when onSave fires.

Hibernate Events
The capabilities of Hibernate Events API goes beyond those of the Interceptors. It gives you very fine-grained control over where to hook into the event stream. Check out the org.hibernate.event package for all the different interfaces you can implement.

Some advantages

fine-grained control over where to hook into the persistence process (lots of Pre- and Post-event interfaces)
The event objects are contain a wealth of information, including previous and current state of the entity.

but on the flipside

hooking up your EventListener is either done programmatically or using the Hibernate session-factory configuration block. I guess I could use a hibernate.cfg.xml file and reference that in my persistence.xml, but it started to feel convoluted to me.

JPA EntityListeners
FInally there are non vendor specific JPA EntityListeners. To use an EntityListener you simply add a '@EntityListener (class=)' annotation. Then in your listener class you can use other annotations (like @PrePersist, @PreRemove, @PostPersist, @PostRemove, @PreUpdate, @PostUpdate and @PostLoad) to decorate your listener methods.

Some advantages are

fine-grained control as to which entities you want to listen to (annotation on the entity, referencing your listener class)
pretty good control on where you want to hook in your listener (annotation on a method on the listeners class)

but on flipside

the API only gives you the current state of the entity, and does not provide information as to what changed in case of an update.

Conclusion
In my case I ended up with a hybrid solution using a HibernateInterceptor for the Update and Delete, and using EntityListeners for the Create event, listening to the PostInsert events so that the id field on my entities are defined.

Transformation using Smooks, part 1: XML2XML

2008-09-27T10:49:00.000-07:00

Part 1 is sort of the Hello World on Smooks, and how it is better then using plain XSLT.

Smooks is fragment based data transformation framework. It can handle many different data formats and is the default transformation engine of three open source ESBs: (JBossESB, Synapse and Mule ESB). In this case I needed an XML2XML transformation. I'm used to using XSLT for that, but I had some date formatting to do, so I figured I would use Smooks. Currently the latest release is v1.0.1, so this is what I used. Note that some of the documentation on the Smooks website already referring the v1.1.x version (you can tell by the xsd reference, smooks-1.1.xsd), so watch out for that since that will not work using 1.0.x. However you can still use v1.0.x notation in v1.1. x

So how to go get started?

1. First you will need to download the Smooks Libraries, but if you're like me and use JBossESB, then you can skip this step. Note that Smooks is very modular, so if you don't need all the features you'll only need a subset of the jars provided by Smooks.

2. Create a transformation unittest, like the one below to test your transformation. I based this one on the one given in the Smook User Guide, the one at the very end of the document).


package com.sermo.services.foley.transform;

import java.io.FileInputStream;
import java.io.FileNotFoundException;
import java.io.FileWriter;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.io.StringReader;
import java.io.StringWriter;
import java.io.Writer;

import javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamResult;
import javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamSource;

import org.custommonkey.xmlunit.XMLAssert;
import org.custommonkey.xmlunit.XMLUnit;
import org.junit.BeforeClass;
import org.junit.Test;
import org.milyn.Smooks;
import org.milyn.container.ExecutionContext;
import org.milyn.event.report.HtmlReportGenerator;
import org.milyn.payload.JavaSource;
import org.xml.sax.SAXException;

/**
 * Unit test for Smooks transformation.
 *
 * Smooks configuration file is located in src/main/resources/smooks-config.xml
 * Input file for transformation is located in src/test/resouces/input.xml
 * Expected file from trasformation is located in src/test/resouces/expected.xml
 * Smooks execution report will be created in target/smooks-report.html
 */
public class SmooksTest {
 
 public static Smooks smooks = null;
 
    @BeforeClass
    public static void setupSmooks() throws SAXException, IOException
    {
     smooks = new Smooks( "smooks-res.xml");
    }
    @Test
    public void testTransformation()
    throws FileNotFoundException, IOException, SAXException
    {
     InputStream in = this.getClass().getResourceAsStream("/input.xml");
     System.out.println(new InputStreamReader(in).toString());
     StreamSource source = new StreamSource(this.getClass().getResourceAsStream("/input.xml"));
     ExecutionContext executionContext = smooks.createExecutionContext();
        //create smooks report
        Writer reportWriter = new FileWriter( "smooks-report.html" );
        executionContext.setEventListener( new HtmlReportGenerator( reportWriter ) );
        StreamResult result = new StreamResult( new StringWriter() );
        smooks.filter( source, result, executionContext );
        System.out.println("Smooks output:" + result.getWriter().toString());
        InputStream is = this.getClass().getResourceAsStream("/expected.xml");
        //compare the expected xml (src/test/resources/expected.xml) with the transformation result.
        XMLUnit.setIgnoreWhitespace( true );
        XMLAssert.assertXMLEqual(new InputStreamReader(is), new StringReader(result.getWriter().toString()));
    }
}

In this case it transforms the XML in the input.xml file into a format that should correspond to the XML in the expected.xml file. The actual transformation happens at line 55 (smooks.filter), and the result can be accessed using a StreamResult called result. XMLAssert is used to check that the output corresponds to our expectation.

3. Smooks has one configuration file, the smooks-res.xml file, in which you define the smooks-resource-list, and any entry in this list is a resource-config entry. This file contains the definition of the transformation:


<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<smooks-resource-list xmlns="http://www.milyn.org/xsd/smooks-1.0.xsd" >
    
    <resource-config selector="global-parameters">
        <param name="default.serialization.on">false</param>
        <param name="stream.filter.type">SAX</param>
    </resource-config>

    <!--  Date Parser used by all the bean populators -->
    <resource-config selector="decoder:UTCDateTime">
        <resource>org.milyn.javabean.decoders.DateDecoder</resource>
        <param name="format">yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss</param>
    </resource-config>
    
    <resource-config selector="hibernate-event">
    <resource>org.milyn.javabean.BeanPopulator</resource>
    <param name="beanId">eventType</param>
    <param name="beanClass">java.util.HashMap</param>
    <param name="bindings">
        <binding property="type"  selector="hibernate-event/@eventType" />
    </param>
    </resource-config>
   
    <resource-config selector="category">
        <resource>org.milyn.javabean.BeanPopulator</resource>
        <param name="beanId">category</param>
        <param name="beanClass">java.util.HashMap</param>
        <param name="bindings">
            <binding property="name"       selector="category/name" />
            <binding property="type"       selector="category/type" />
            <binding property="id"         selector="category/id" />
            <binding property="createDate" selector="category/createDate" type="UTCDateTime" />
        </param>
    </resource-config>
    
    <resource-config selector="category">
        <resource type="ftl">
            <![CDATA[<caffeine-event type="${eventType.type}">
                     <category>
        <cat-name>${category.name}</cat-name>
        <cat-type>${category.type}</cat-type>
        <id type="integer">${category.id}</id>
        <utc-date><#if category.createDate?exists>${category.createDate?string("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss'Z'")}</#if></utc-date>
      </category>
     </caffeine-event>]]>
        </resource>
    </resource-config>

</smooks-resource-list>

Note that the first sections sets up some global parameters like which parser it should be using under the hood (SAX in this case). Next I defined a date parser called 'decoder:UTCDateTime' which can parse the date format in the input.xml, so that it can be transformed into another date format later. The next two sections set up two Java beans (using a HashMap actually), so we can add name, value pairs. The first bean selects data on the 'hibernate-event' tag, setting the type, by selecting the value of eventType attribute. The second section populates another HashMap by looking at the data in the category element. This is what Smooks means with being fragment based. You can use different types of technologies to parse your incoming message (XML in this case). Finally in the last section it builds the output message. Here I chose to use FreeMarker (ftl), which is very nice templating language.

4. input.xml


<hibernate-event eventType="create">
 <category>
  <name>Sumatra</name>
  <type>Coffee Bean</type>
  <id type="integer">5000</id>
  <createDate>2009-02-09 21:00:01</createDate>
 </category>
</hibernate-event>

This is the incoming XML message.

5. expected.xml


<caffeine-event type="create">
 <category>
  <cat-name>Sumatra</cat-name>
  <cat-type>Coffee Bean</cat-type>
  <id type="integer">5000</id>
  <utc-date>2009-02-09T21:00:01Z</utc-date>
 </category>
</caffeine-event>

This is the XML we want to transform the input.xml to. So this file is the expected output, so we can use XMLUnit to assert that we got what we were expecting.

6. Smooks Execution Report

When you are in the middle of building your smooks-res.xml, the Smooks Execution Report can come in very handy for debugging purposes. The lines


//create smooks report
Writer reportWriter = new FileWriter( "smooks-report.html" );
executionContext.setEventListener( new HtmlReportGenerator( reportWriter ) );

create an HTML based report called 'smooks-report.html', which you can simply open in your favorite browser.

Conclusion
Fragment based transformation rocks, have you ever tried to do any date manipulation or working on a highly normalized XML in XSLT? By the way you can still use XSLT instead of a BeanPopulator; mix and match. I also like having a real templating language to create my outgoing message. By picking the tool for the task you can expect high transformation performance. There was nice thread on theServerSide on that here.

Part 2, will be about how a Java2XML transformation and how you'd deploy the transformation as a service to JBossESB.

Javadoc

2008-08-15T14:57:00.000-07:00

I've been writing Java for more then a decade now and the funny thing is that I never actually read how to write Javadoc. Don't get me wrong I write it alright, but when I came across this document, it was kinda fun to discover the true intentions.

MySQL Profiling and Performance tools

2008-08-06T12:41:00.000-07:00

I'm working with a MySQL database that has been growing, and has reached about 2 Gb these days. So needless to say we're getting more interested in profiling the database. I started a search for some tools and this is the list thus far, in no particular order.

1. MyTop
The first tool I came across was mytop, which is a little tool inspired by 'top'. I also found this quick tutorial tutorial on how to interpret the screens. It does require depend on some Perl libraries, which you can install using MCPAN:
sudo perl -MCPAN -e shell

then at the cpan prompt:
install DBI
install DBD::mysql
install Term::ReadKey
install Term::ANSIColor
install Time::HiRes

In the directory where you extracted mytop execute:
perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
sudo make install

2. Maatkit
MySQL toolkit is now called Maatkit. Maatkit can be found on sourceforge and more recently on code.google. It looks like it can come in very handy with running replicated databases. Peter Zeitsev has nice blog entries on what it can do, or you can just read the docs.

3. MySQL Query Profiling
Recently MySQL added a profiling tool in the server itself called MySQL Query Profiler. This tool provides very detailed information on where the time is spend for a query.

4. MyProfi
MyProfi is a log analyzer and profiler. Extracts the most popular queries grouping them by their normalized form and shows the statistics for each group. Helps you recognize the most frequently run queries to be able to optimize overall db performance.

Where did my class get loaded from?

2008-07-30T05:33:00.000-07:00

In Java is it not always easy to figure out from where a certain class is loaded. Particularly when the same class is packaged up in more then one archive. So if you want to figure out from which archive the class got loaded from, this little piece of code may come in handy

JBoss IDE Timeout waiting for server to come up

2008-07-21T19:06:00.000-07:00

"Did not start in 50s". That's a pretty annoying message to receive when you're trying to fire up JBoss from within eclipse using the JBoss IDE plugin. It turns out that there is a setting called "Server timeout delay" where: Unlimited (-1), Longer (1) - Shortest (9)

Open the file

/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.runtime/.settings/org.eclipse.wst.server.core.prefs

and add

machine-speed=1

PiecesOfFlare Version 1.1.1 released

2008-05-04T10:43:00.000-07:00

I recently upgraded to the Europa version of Eclipse (3.3) and I noticed that my PiecesOfFlare (POF) plugin stopped working. So after 2 years, we now have a new release. The POF plugin is a small plugin that enables you to hit the save button in eclipse, and then have the updated (jsp, js, php, etc) file being copied to another destination outside your source tree. When I say outside, think to your webserver or appserver on the same file system, or even a to a remote machine (using scp).

You can download the plugin from sourceforge, or you can use the update site at http://piecesofflare.sourceforge.net/updates/.

Book Review: Business Process Management with JBoss jBPM

2008-04-08T18:54:00.000-07:00

Business Process Management with JBoss jBPM
A Practical Guide for Business Analysts, by Matt Cumberlidge

I have been working on Service Orchestration in JBossESB, using jBPM, and a few weeks back PACKT Publishing asked me to review the JBoss jBPM book. I have been reading it whenever I had a spare moment. I have to admit the book was not what I initially expected it to be. For some reason I thought the book would be an in depth text book about jBPM and it's features. It is not, well it's got some of that, but what it really is, is what the title already says: “Business Process Management with JBoss jBPM; A Practical Guide for the Business Analyst”. So I guess I skipped over the 'for the Business Analyst' part. However after actually reading the book, I think the author picked the right subject by explaining how to do a BPM project in the first place.

Truth be told I may have some idea about it, but I never read anything that formal on the matter, and the best part is that Matt simply follows a fictitious (or is it?) project about a record company called “Bland Records”. In Matt's words “Bland Records' specialty is in finding talentless, yet attractive youths, assembling them into bands of four or five, partnering the ready-made band with a songwriter and some real musicians, who finish the product with an addictive set of tunes. The end product is released on an unsuspecting public who promptly shoot the band to number one in the charts”.

The book is to the point and an easy read. The first few chapters are about what a Business Process actually is, what the interaction the Business Analyst and the Developer should be and how to set up interaction channels with the customer, how to put together the project team and how to find the right project sponsors to optimize the chances to deliver a successful product. In his book he sets up a workshop for the project team where the business process is analyzed and a flow diagram is created, before breaking for lunch. After lunch the team goes through the flow diagram to identify the roles and responsibilities. He goes over terminology like PID (Process Identification Document), SME (Subject Matter Experts) and RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed), and how to use the RACI Matrix, and finishes by how to end up with a realistic implementation plan. I really enjoyed these two chapters.

Chapter 3 explains how to install jBPM and it gives a quick introduction to the product. The chapter has plenty of screenshots to keep you on track and you should get a good visual picture in your mind about jBPM capabilities, the chapter finishes by implementing the business process as a proof-of-concept system. Chapter 4 adds a user interface to the prototype and by the end of the chapter you have a fully functional system, for which you can get sign off from the client. This is a nice break point in the project where some wrinkles can get ironed out before putting more time into making the thing look nice. Chapter 5 speaks to how to deploy and setup the proof-of-concept and how to go through some iterations with the team. At this point the integration points with other systems should still be stubbed out. Finally, when the iterations have honed the business process implementation, another sign off follows and in Chapter 6 he describes how to convert the proof-of-concept to a production ready system and by setting up a BAM (Business Activity Monitor) to gather process metrics in production. At the end of chapter 6 the project goes to production and in chapter 7 the team comes together for a post mortem, where they try to evaluate the success of the project, and they try to come up with an ROI of the system. Assuming all is in order a final sign-off from the client can now be obtained. Over time the process metrics can be tracked and future projects may implement process change requests.

The book is a quick read and I think it very wise to hand out a copy to each of the members on your team when starting a BPM project. The price may be a little steep, but part of it goes to the jBPM project and I'm sure those costs can be expensed on the project anyway ;). Thumbs up on this one.

Using an EJB3 Interceptor in Seam

2008-03-17T12:37:00.000-07:00

For one of the demos for the NEJUG presentation we integrated the JPetStore (Spring based) and the DVDStore (Seam based) with JBossESB. The idea is that when orders are placed in either store the orders are processed in some ESB based Order Processing Service, using jBPM for the Orchestration. Here I want to show what you need to do to intercept a the order when the user hits the 'confirm' button in the Seam based DVD Store. For this we use an EJB3 interceptor. The beauty of this solution is that no code changes are needed in the DVD Store itself.

1. Modify the ejb-jar.xml
First we need to add some configuration to the ejb-jar.xml, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Add the interceptor to the ejb-jar.xml

So first we define the interceptor class by referencing

com.jboss.dvd.seam.CheckoutInterceptor

, next we need to specify when this class should be called, which is done by adding the second piece of xml which specifies the bean name for which the interceptor should fire. Here we want it to fire when the

CheckoutAction

is called.

2. Add the interceptor class

The interceptor class itself looks like

package com.jboss.dvd.seam;

import javax.interceptor.AroundInvoke;
import javax.interceptor.InvocationContext;

public class CheckoutInterceptor {

    @AroundInvoke
    public Object sendOrderToESB(InvocationContext ctx) throws Exception {

        System.out.println("*** Entering CheckoutInterceptor");
        Object target = ctx.getTarget();
        //Just making sure
        if (target instanceof CheckoutAction) {
            if (ctx.getMethod().getName().equals("submitOrder")) {
                System.out
                        .println("We will send the following completedOrder object to ESB");
                Order completedOrder = ((CheckoutAction) target).currentOrder;
                Customer customer = ((CheckoutAction) target).customer;
                completedOrder.setCustomer(customer);
                System.out.println("Completed Order= " + completedOrder);
            }
        }
        try {
            return ctx.proceed();
        } finally {
            System.out.println("*** Exiting CheckoutInterceptor");
        }
    }
}

Figure 2. The CheckoutInterceptor Code

And that is all there is to it. In the interceptor we check which method is called, and if it is the

submitOrder

method we print out the order. In the demo we added code to serialize the order to XML, and then dropped in onto a gateway Queue, on its way to the ESB.

NEJUG on SOA - The SOA-P Store: Bed, Bath and Beyond (II)

2008-03-17T12:02:00.000-07:00

I'm happy to say that the presentation went over well. We got some great questions and in general I think people really got it. Tom Cunningham compiled a list of the questions we got:

Is the registry different than UDDI?
Is there portability across ESB implementations (Mule / Service Mix / JBoss)?
Is there portability across different BPEL providers?
When you are talking about components for ESB, are you talking about adapters?
How gunshy should I be using JBoss ESB (are people using it in production)?
What strategies can I use for portability between ESB providers?
Is there any inherent security in the content based routing? Are there plans on adding something in this area (ACEGI/Spring Security in particular)?
What would you typically see in an actions block?
Would an example of an action be something execuing a rule?
When do you use a J2EE Servlet Filter approach and when would you use ESB?
How would you roll back a transaction?
How do you integrate with RESTful services?
How tightly couple is the rules engine with the ESB?
What monitoring tools exist to see what is going on inside the ESB?
Is there a way inside the ESB to log payload in and out of the ESB?
Is the ESB's state recoverable? Will it maintain state?
How do you track long transactions?
What's the connection between Rules and the ESB?
Will hot deploy consume all current requests before redeploying?
Is load balancing simple round robin?
Does JBPM compete with BPEL?
Is there interactive debugging so that you can step through the JPDL flow?
Are the enterprise design patterns (wiretap, splitter, aggregatore) available inside of a visual designer in JBDS?
Is the JBPM plugin going to be available for NetBeans?
Who is the jbpm-console intended for?
What's the difference between SOA and ESB?
How do you migrate to ESB?

The most humorous question had to be the last one, where someone wanted to know if content based routing could be used as a method of escaping hardware licenses.

Sorry, you had to be there for the answers, but maybe it can be a start for a JBossESB FAQ page.

WhichJar Utility

2008-03-10T15:50:00.000-07:00

Where oh where is that class? Setting up your classpath in Java is half the battle. And finding in which jar the class you are looking for lives can be a tedious task. Measured in software years it was ions ago that my friend Toby introduced me to a little shell script he wrote called whichJar. I think I have been using it on a daily basis ever since. It may have changed a little over the years, but not too much, so here it goes:


#!/bin/bash
# nasty script to find a string in the contents of a jar file.
# probably a better way to do this, but then again...

if [ "$1foo" = "foo" ] ; then
echo "$0 usage: `basename $0` string"
echo "where string is the string to look for in the jar's contents"
exit 1
fi

for i in `find . -name \*.jar`
do className=`(jar tvf $i | grep $1)`;
if [ "$className" != "" ]; then
   echo -e "$i\t$className";
fi
done

To use it save the above code of to a file called 'whichJar' in your bin directory, and make it executable

chmod a+x whichJar

Then, for example to find the class 'javax.jms.Topic' in any of the jars in the current directory, or any of its subdirectories, simply type

whichJar javax.jms.Topic

Thank you Toby.

NEJUG on SOA - The SOA-P Store: Bed, Bath and Beyond

2008-03-10T07:56:00.000-07:00

This Thursday (March 13th) Burr Sutter and I will speak at the NEJUG on SOA "The SOA-P Store: Bed, Bath and Beyond".

This will be a dynamic session focused on the demonstration of the customary capabilities and best practices associated with an Enterprise Service Bus for SOA-focused deployment.

We will get people involved and empowered with real boots-on-the-ground knowledge of how to do SOA and not just pontificate on abstract theory and marketing-speak. The live demonstrations will illustrate how typical Struts+Spring+Hibernate web applications can be liberated as services and enter the world of ESB & SOA.

See you there.

JBoss SOA Platform (SOA-P) Documentation

2008-03-10T07:38:00.000-07:00

The SOA-P team incorporates a team of technical writers who take the project specific documentation and turn it into documentation for the SOA Platform, which is the supported 'RHEL' version of JBossESB (where JBossESB would be Fedora). In the true spirit of Open Source, this documentation is available for free, under the support/documentation tab of the Red Hat homepage, or you can go directly to the SOA-P 4.2 docs. I was quite impressed with what they did to some of the docs I wrote! Thanks guys.

Service Orchestration using jBPM

2008-03-10T07:20:00.001-07:00

I recently wrote up am entry in the JBossESB blog. This code is now available in the SOA Platform as well as on the trunk of the JBossESB project. For the full documentation in pdf format see the jBPMIntegrationGuide.

Figure 1. Service Integration using jBPM.

Java Generics

2008-02-15T07:19:00.001-08:00

I just found a nice writeup on Generics in Java with lots of code examples.

Single SignOn (SSO) with Seam using JOSSO

2008-02-06T06:21:00.001-08:00

I recently used seam_gen to create a josso_console application. If you want to use JOSSO, but you don't yet want to take the leap to hook it up to an LDAP or other industrial strength credential store, then this is the app may come in handly. Figure 1 shows the welcome screen of josso_console application.

Figure 1. The JOSSO console.

If your objective is simply to hook your Seam application up to JOSSO then you should keep reading too.

1. Seam and JAAS
Seam comes with its own security framework which is based on JAAS. The easiest way to hook Seam up to JOSSO is to first configure your Seam-based application the conventional JOSSO way and then hooking up Seam and JOSSO using a Seam authenticator. I worked on a jossoAuthenticator that will set the SSO user and roles information into Seam context, so that you can use all the Seam security features while using JOSSO.

2. Configure JOSSO
In your josso-agent-config.xml add the josso_console in as a partner app

Now your application will have access to the JOSSO cookie.

3. Configure Seam
Next we're going to protect our application using the standard security constraints to the web.xml. For instance if we only want users that have the admin role to access our console you would add

This web.xml references the login-redirect.jsp which you will need to add to the root of your war file. Now, you will be redirected to the josso login screen when trying to access the web application.

Next we have to propagate the authorization information into Seam context. For this we use the jossoAuthenticator.
Next you need to reference this class in your pages.xml, by adding

and commenting out the default authenticator

Finally we need to modify the pages.xml, where we reference the jossoAuthenticator on our welcome page (index.xhtml) like

which will cause the jossoAuthenticator.checkLogin to be called for this page, and in the exception class configuration we specify the index.xhtml page

All should now be working. If you want, you can obtain the full sources from the josso_console application to see the complete application.

Some other resources in this context you may find useful are:
http://www.josso.org/confluence/display/JOSSO1/JBoss+4.2
http://sdudzin.blogspot.com/2007/12/windows-sso-with-jboss-seam.html, and
http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/CASC/Seam+Identity+Integration+(Seam+1.2.1+-+2.0.0)

Sony Vaio VGN-FS740/W Battery Problem

2008-02-05T12:16:00.000-08:00

The battery on my wife's computer would no longer hold a charge and it was time to replace it. We replaced it with a generic brand battery (little more then $100). It charged fine, but then while it was running a message would suddenly pop up, saying that the battery was not inserted correctly and that it had to switch to hibernate mode. The battery light would flash rapidly after this, and it would never come back long or it would go hibernate again. Re-seating the battery had no effect. It turns out that Sony truly has turned evil. They are running a little service that checks whether the battery is a Sony battery ($300!), and if it is not then it kicks into action and sends your machine into hibernation!

After some digging I found this article, and the fix is easy, the service is called ISBMgr and to get rid of it permanently fire up msconfig like so

go to the startup tab and uncheck the ISBMgr.

Now when you restart it will ask you if you knew that some services where changed, just say yes and it will never bother you again.

Bad Sony. No more Sony for me..

Compare two OpenOffice Documents

2008-01-31T07:14:00.001-08:00

I received some feedback on a document I wrote and I wanted to know what the changes were. In Word you can track the changes, but where is this functionality in OpenOffice? I looked around a bit and found this really nice feature I had been missing - it is the 'compare document' feature, and it allows you to accept changes on a per diff level. Simply open the original document and then under Edit, select the 'Compare Document...'

and browse to the edited version document. After that it will bring up a nice dialog box with all the diffs which you can accept or deny. I think it makes a lot of sense not to do this in the document itself like Word does.

Post XML code fragments

2008-01-30T16:01:00.000-08:00

It turns out that it is not that straightforward to display XML fragments in a blog. Usually I use GeSHi to do the formatting for me. I then look at the source for the HTML page and grab the piece that I need, which I then host on my own site, and I reference it in an iframe like

Switch jUDDI on JBossESB over to Postgres

2008-01-30T13:12:00.000-08:00

By default JBossESB uses HSQL to handle persistence for jUDDI. For production it is recommended to switch it to for example Postgres.

1. First you will need to download the Postgres JDBC driver. I selected the '8.2-507 JDBC 2EE' driver. You can copy it to either the jboss_home/server/default/lib directory, or to the jbossesb.sar/lib directory.

2. Create the juddi database. Run the pgAdmin a shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. The Postgres Admin

and create a juddi user, which has create rights to create tables, see Figure 2.

Figure 2. Add a user called 'juddi'

3. Next you should update the datasource for jUDDI, which is defined in the jbossesb.sar/juddi-ds.xml. Comment out the Hypersonic configuration and add the postgres datasource configuration like

4. Finally we have to tell jUDDI where it can find the DDL to create the juddi schema. For this we edit the jbossesb.sar/esb.juddi.xml. Modify the 'juddi.sqlFiles' setting by replacing the 'hsqldb' occurances to 'postgresql'.

Now on startup JBossESB will create the jUDDI tables in the Postgres juddi database.

For an overview of jUDDI in JBossESB in pdf format see the Registry Guide.

jBPM ant task to deploy a process definition to a running server

2008-01-25T06:16:00.001-08:00

I've been working on jBPM integration into JBossESB to do Service Orchestration, and I created a new ant task to deploy a process definition to a running instance of jBPM. When I say a running instance I mean an instance that deploys the jBPM-console. The jBPM-console ships with a DeployerServlet which is used by the jBPM eclipse plugin to deploy process definitions. The ant task is called "DeployProcessToServerTask" and it uses the very same servlet. The java code for the task has been attached to jira JBPM-1117 so it should hopefully make it into SVN soon.

To use the DeployProcessToServer Task you need to define a new task using the taskdef command


      <taskdef name="deployToServer" classname="org.jbpm.ant.DeployProcessToServerTask">
          <classpath refid="exec-classpath"/>
      </taskdef>

So here I defined a task called 'deployToServer', but you can call it whatever you want. The classpath should obviously point to the jar containing this class. The 'deployToServer' can either deploy a Process Archive (PAR), which is a zip file containing the files you want to deploy, or you can specify a set of files which it will zip up and deploy for you. You can use the following attributes and subelements:

Attribute	Description	Default value
process	The location of process archive	-
servername	The name of the server which is used to build the deployment url	localhost
serverport	The port to which the http protocol is bound	8080
serverdeployer	The address of the deployer servlet	/jbpm-console/upload
debug	Debug flag which, if set, writes out a debug.par zip file. This is especially useful if fileSet subelements are used, so you can check what gets loaded to the server	-
SubElement	Description	Default value
fileSet	A fileSet element	-

The following xml fragment deploys all the files in the processDefinition directory to the server


<target name="deployProcess" description="deploys the process definition">
 <echo>Deploy the process definition</echo>
 <taskdef name="deployToServer" classname="org.jbpm.ant.DeployProcessToServerTask">
  <classpath refid="exec-classpath"/>
 </taskdef>
 <deployToServer>
 <fileset dir="${basedir}/processDefinition" includes="*"/>
 </deployToServer>
</target>

Or if you already have a par archive ready to go you could reference that


<target name="deployProcess" description="deploys the process definition">
    <echo>Deploy the process definition</echo>
    <taskdef name="deployToServer" classname="org.jbpm.ant.DeployProcessToServerTask">
        <classpath refid="exec-classpath"/>
    </taskdef>
    <deployToServer process="${build}/process.par"/>
</target>

WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) XHTML editor

2007-10-06T09:49:00.001-07:00

Just came across this web-based editor. Looks very nice!

VI

2007-10-04T19:56:00.001-07:00

You either are a VI guy or you're not. I am, and I found this cool cheat sheet. Now the thing that worries me a bit is that is it made on April 1st.

YA virtualization flavor

2007-10-01T06:52:00.000-07:00

I just came across a product call coLinux.
It describes itself as: "Virtualization with VmWare, Xen, and Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) are all the rage these days. But did you know that you can run Linux® cooperatively with Microsoft® Windows®?". I guess the main difference is that it runs a privileged process on Windows, so that if it crashes it will also take the Windows down. In other world it's not *really* a virtual machine! Sounds kinda scary, but it maybe cool for my development box, if it turns out that it takes up fewer resources to run.

Stuck on Java

2007-09-22T11:05:00.000-07:00

If you hadn't guess by the title of this blog then you know now. I'm in a longterm relationship with Java. I get headaches when I don't drink it and I find it easier to write Java code then to write this blog. Back in high school we learned programming using Pascal, that was until we got actual computers; 5 Apple II's, which ran BASIC. My first program where a bunch of print lines to show the speed skating results of the speed skate world cup. Man it felt good to see the lines slowly being printed from left to right. No pauses necessary, the machines where slow enough all by themselves to get the desired effect. Next I was allowed to skip geography class to code Population Pyramid graphs. You punched in the current age distributions, the birth and death rates and it would slowly redraw the graphs for each year going by, but I'm digressing.

After BASIC, it was back to PASCAL, FORTRAN, C, C++ and finally Java. Java is just great. I've been doing Java for over 10 years now and it doesn't get old. I think part of it is the vast API combined with the enormous amount of Open Source code out there. That and the fact that I can write it once run it anywhere. Life in the Java world is good. I recently played with the JAI API. It took me a while to catch on but after I discovered the javadocs things got much easier. The Geotools guys are using it too. Something tells me I'm going to spend some time with JScience soon. Java rocks.

How to clean your ipod?

2007-09-22T10:55:00.000-07:00

I own a ipod shuffle, and I guess last week it was time to give it thorough cleaning; it ended up in the washing machine! So a few hours of washing, my Miele super-spinning-washer centrifuged the last drop out of my 'laundry' I finally got my ipod back. Nice and clean. I didn't think the dryer would be a good next step, as it was already unresponsive the way it was. So I just let it sit for a few days, and then stuck it in my PC to see what would happen. And yes ... it still worked just fine!

Maven sucks

2007-06-22T10:11:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to like maven for over a year now, and it simply sucks. The problem is you get all this stuff you really don't need for free, plus it gets you there 90% of the way in no time. So you start off all happy. It's all based on conventions, so as long a you can follow them you are golden. SO now you're golden and in good spirits and then you get to the last 10% and now you're in trouble. The issue is that "The Best Tech Support in the World (Google) just does not index Maven well. Maybe Maven does to much with too little code. I love what Maven does for me, I love most of everything about Maven actually but "What Maven want Maven gets". No wonder Maven2 is a rewrite from Maven1, which -by the way- is making using Google even harder. Maybe in a few years it will suck less.

Karma

2007-06-15T17:09:00.001-07:00

I got some more karma today. Apache is all about Karma, you may have comitter privileges but that is meaningless without karma. Today I found out I that I was left off the 'general comitter list', which was corrected. My Karma is fully restored. I can sleep well tonight.