All posts by arungupta

Data as a Service: JBoss Data Virtualization and Hadoop powering your Big Data solutions

Guest blog by Syed Rasheed (@Junooni).

Red Hat and Cloudera, announce the formation of a strategic alliance. From JBoss perspective, the key objective of the alliance is to leverage big data enterprise-wide and not let Hadoop become another data silo. Cloudera combined with Red Hat JBoss Data Virtualization integrates Hadoop with existing information sources including data warehouses, SQL and NoSQL databases, enterprise and cloud applications, and flat and XML files. The solution creates business-friendly, reusable and virtual data models with unified views by combining and transforming data from multiple sources including Hadoop. This creates integrated data available on-demand for external applications through standard SQL and web services interfaces.

The reality at vast majority of organization is that data is spread across too many applications and systems. Most organizations don’t know what they’ve lost because their data is fragmented across the organization. This problem does not go away just because an organization is using big data technology like Hadoop; in fact, they get more complicated. Some organizations try to solve this problem by hard coding the access to data stores. This simple approach inefficiently breaks down silos and brings lock-in with it. Lock-in makes applications less portable, a key metric for future proofing IT. This approach also impedes organizational agility because hard coding data store access is time consuming and makes IT more complex, incurring technical debt. Successful business need to break down the data silos and make data accessible to all the applications and stakeholders (often a requirement for real time contextual services).

redhat-jboss-datavirt

A much better approach to solving this problem is abstraction through data virtualization. It is a powerful tool, well suited for the loose coupling approach prescribed by the Modern Enterprise Model. Data virtualization helps applications retrieve and manipulate data without needing to know technical details about each data store. When implemented, organizational data can be easily accessed using a simple REST API or via familiar SQL interface.

Data Virtualization (or an abstracted Data as a Service) plugs into the Modern Enterprise Platform as a higher-order layer, offering the following advantages:

  • Better business decisions due to organization wide accessibility of all data
  • Higher organizational agility
  • Loosely coupled services making future proofing easier
  • Lower cost

Data virtualization is therefore a critical part of the big data solution. It facilitates and improves the use of big data in the enterprise by:

  • Abstracting big data into relational-like views
  • Integration with existing enterprise sources
  • Adding real time query capabilities to big data
  • Providing full support for standard based interfaces like REST and OData in addition JDBC and ODBC.
  • Adding security and governance to the big data infrastructure
  • Flattening data siloes through a unified data layer.

Want to learn more, download, and get started with JBoss Data Virtualization visit http://www.jboss.org/products/datavirt

Data Virtualization by Example https://github.com/datavirtualizationbyexample

Interested in community version then visit http://teiid.jboss.org/

Silicon Valley Code Camp for Kids 2014

300+ kids, 16 speakers (4 from middle/high school), 6 rooms, 24 sessions of 75 mins each = extremely rewarding weekend + inspired kids!

And the name is Silicon Valley Code Camp 2014 Kids Track.

300+ kids, wow! Is that the biggest known event focused on getting kids excited in technology ? :-)

The event covered topics ranging from Minecraft modding, Building your first iOS app, Raspberry Pi, Arduino, Python, LEGO Mindstorms, Scratch, Squishy Circuits, and a whole lot more.

Check out some pictures from the event:

Check out complete set of pictures:

svcc2014-album

Many thanks to all the attendees, volunteers, parents, and of course Silicon Valley Code Camp organizers, especially Peter Kellner (@pkellner) for providing all the support to educate and inspire kids!

We’d love to have your kid deliver workshops for us next year. Help us increase the young presenters more. We’d also love female presenters, help us create gender balance in this otherwise imbalanced industry :-)

We’ll be back next year, bigger and better. Feel free to leave feedback on this blog.

Are you interested in opening a local Devoxx4Kids chapter in your city ?

Join www.meetup.com/Devoxx4Kids-BayArea if you are interested in an event that provides technology workshops for kids through out the year.

 

Log your miles and community runs: Java EE 7 Real World Experience

miles2run-logo

miles2run.org is an easy way to track your running activities and share with friends and families. Day-based or distance-based goals can be created and then tracked. It also allows to create community run goals and have multiple runners participate and track their activities towards that goal. You can also find out local runners and connect with them.

The project was started to help track running activities for #JavaOneStreak. The goal was to run at least a mile every day all the way until JavaOne and use this website to track the runs. There are tons of sophisticated applications and websites that allow you to track running activity. Most of them provide integration with your GPS watch, phone GPS, and other fancy features. Some of them even allow creating a group but none of them is based on Java :-)

The application is hosted as a website and built using HTML5 and Java EE 7. The landing page provides a summary of total runners, their city/country, miles, and hours logged so far.

miles2run-landingpage

The website can be viewed on a desktop, tablet, or a cell phone. The runners can login to the website using common social brokers such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter.

Any body can click on “Community Runs” on the top-right corner to see what all group runs have been created so far. These can only be created by an administrator. The group run page for JavaOne shows how many runners have joined this run and other statistics.

miles2run-javaone-mainpage

Each runner is presented with a dashboard showing how much distance they’ve run so far and total/completed/remaining/missed days.

miles2run-javaone-dashboard1

A visual representation of the progress and a heat map of the activity calendar is shown:

miles2run-javaone-dashboard2

A line chart of mileage over the days is shown:

miles2run-javaone-dashboard3

And then a summary of activities over the past months is shown as well:

miles2run-javaone-dashboard4

Runners also have the opportunity to follow other runners and track their activities.

Here is a conceptual view of the application:

miles2run-architecture

And here is a technology view of the application:

miles2run-tech

Here is a brief description of the technology stack:

  • Presentation
    • Thymeleaf template engine views rendered by JAX-RS
    • Social brokering using native APIs for Facebook, Google, Twitter
  • Middle Tier
    • @Stateless EJB for all transactional JPA interactions, @Asynchronous for posting status to social networks
    • JAX-RS for exposing REST endpoints. ContainerRequestFilter and ContainerResponseFilter for security for cross-cutting concerns like authentication, injecting profile, and CORS.
    • Bean Validation constraints in JAX-RS resources.
    • Bean discovery mode=”all”
  • Backend
    • CDI producers for creating EntityManagers and other configuration objects like Redis connection pool objects or MongoDB configuration object. All NoSQL services are created @ApplicationScoped.
    • Using native drivers for Redis and MongoDB. Jedis is being used for Redis and MongoDB Java driver is used for MongoDB. CDI services wrap these driver API and expose business functionalities that other layers could use.
    • JPA + Bean Validation. Database scripts are generated from JPA model, added to source control, manually applied to the database. Using @Index and Entity Graph.
    • Servlets are used for callback URLs for social brokers.
    • Error pages are configured using <error-page>.
    • MySQL is used for all business entities like Activity, Goal, User Profile etc. Redis is used for storing counters and timeline data. MongoDB is used for location-based user recommendations and follower/following recommendations.

Technologies from outside the platform:

  • JavaScript
    • D3.js and C3.js for visually appealing graphs
    • AngularJS for views
    • Cal Heatmap for calendar heatmap
    • jQuery
  • Google Geocoding API to convert Location Text to latitude and longitude
  • Jadira usertype for storing dates in UTC
  • Joda-Time for working with dates
  • Thymeleaf was used instead of JavaServer Faces because:
    • Allows JAX-RS to be used as an MVC framework to render server side HTML pages and exposing REST services.
    • This application is a Single Page application built using AngularJS. So, we needed a lightweight approach to render server side pages. JAX-RS along with Thyemleaf render the main HTML 5 page and then we use AngularJS to render different partials/views on that page. For example, the main home page is rendered by JAX-RS and Thymeleaf. When you work with different sections of this page all of them are part of a SPA managed by AngualarJS.
    • Thymeleaf documents are valid HTML 5 documents so you can work with them offline for static prototyping.
  • Redis is used for storing all the counters like number of runners, cities, counters specific to goal like total distance covered in a goal etc. To avoid lots of read/write from the database, an an in-memory database is used so all the write and read operations are very performant. Redis counters are atomic, which means there are no concurrency issues associated with it. INCR andINCRBY Redis operations are used to update counters.
  • MongoDB is used for location data.

Toolset

  • JDK 8
  • IntelliJ 13.1 with Maven
  • Wildfly 8.1.0.Final – Development was done using a local WildFly instance and then pushed to scalable WildFly instances on OpenShift for deployment. HA Proxy is used as the load balancer.The advantage of working with OpenShift is that there is no OpenShift specific code in your application. So, it’s the same application that work locally that is deployed to test and production environment. You just have to use environment variables to abstract out environment specific configuration.
  • Github

Planned updates

  • Use Jenkins for Continuous Integration and manage deployments
  • JPA 2.1 converter instead of Jadira
  • Keycloak instead of native social broker
  • Opensource the application

Wish list for Java EE 8

  • Integration with OAuth providers
  • A real MVC framework with support for pluggable template engines
  • Seamless working with NoSQL databases

Download WildFly 8.1 today, learn the technology by reading/trying Java EE 7 samples, browse through Java EE 7 resources.

Or if you want to be on the bleeding edge, check out WildFly 9.0.

Many thanks to Shekhar Gulati (@shekhargulati) for authoring the application and providing all the answers!

Are you using Java EE 7 and WildFly to deploy your projects ? Would love to feature you here! Send me an email or leave a comment on the blog.

Java EE 7, JBoss, WildFly, Devoxx4Kids, and Parties at JavaOne 2014

JavaOne 2014 is about a week away, although some of festivities will start next Friday! This is going to be my 16th JavaOne in as many years and I’ve really enjoyed participating in each one of them. As always, there is great content lined up with rockstar speakers. This conference is a confluence of movers and shakers in the Java world and provides plenty of opportunities to engage with them. This is going to be my first year as Red Hatter and looking forward to catching up with friends and colleagues.

And in case you are wondering, and care about it, here are my engagements for that week:

Saturday, Sep 27

Devoxx4Kids Day
7pm – 11:30pm: NetBeans Party

Sunday, Sep 28

8am – 9:30am, Java Champions Brunch
7pm – 8:30pm: Duke Choice Awards
8pm – 11pm: Java EE Appreciation Event

Monday, Sep 29

8:30am – 10:30am Java EE 7 Soup to Nuts Tutorial [TUT1952]
11:30pm – 12:30pm Meet the Experts on Java EE and HTML5 Enterprise Application Development
1:30pm – 2:00pm Java EE 7 Essentials book signing at O’Reilly Booth

Tuesday, Sep 30

8:30am – 10:30am: Devoxx4Kids for Parents Tutorial [TUT1878]
12:30pm – 1:30pm: Lessons learned from real-life Java EE 7 Deployments [CON2450]
2:30pm – 4pm: Java EE Hackergarten
6pm – 9pm: Oracle Authors Appreciation Party
7pm – 9pm: JavaOne IGNITE
7pm – 10pm: PartyOne
7pm – 9:30: Java Champions Social
8pm – 8:45pm: Technology Evangelists Gathering [BOF12166]

Wednesday, Oct 1

1pm – 1:30pm: Book signing on Java EE and HTML5 Enterprise Application Development book (OOW bookstore in Moscone South, Upper Hall Lobby)
4pm – 6:30pm: #JavaOneStreak meetup, Hilton San Francisco Union Square, Sutter

Thursday, Oct 2

11:50: Broadening JCP Program Participation [CON9775]

I’ll also be running my own “hallway track” and so feel free to meet there. Of course, you can catch me at Red Hat booth as well!

There are lots of Red Hat speakers and sessions at the conference as well. And if you are not able to attend a Red Hat session then you can check out the mini-sessions in the exhibit hall.

See ya there!

Advise to Microsoft on Mojang and Minecraft

Microsoft bought Mojang for $2.5 billion, wow! Here is official press release by Microsoft.

minecraft-logo

The game is extremely popular within 8-14 years of age range, but also within other ages, including adults, as well. The education community has been extremely excited because of all the opportunities it provides to engage kids at an early age and teach them Java programming, object-oriented, and mathematical concepts by “modding” the game. The community is highly engaged, passionate and diverse. This “global phenomenon” indeed binds the community very well and gives them a common language to talk with each other. My son has been attending Minecraft-themed birthday parties for last 3 years. There are halloween costumes, 3d printed Minecraft worlds, tshirts, hoodies,  hats, slippers, swimming trunks, plates, spoons, and you name it, its all there!

On a personal level, My son and I’ve personally delivered multiple Minecraft Modding workshops around the San Francisco Bay Area. This workshop has also been delivered around the world by Devoxx4Kids volunteers, and even translated in German, Dutch, and French.

My first reaction to this purchase was a grandpa company that is desperate to be innovative just used their cash power to buy a company behind one of the most innovative game. I felt really miserable, especially knowing that the game is written in Java. Microsoft has no significant history of delivering or maintaining Java programs particularly. I may be wrong, but Microsoft J Sharp is dated 2006. And Visual J# was removed from Visual Studio a few years ago as well. Heck, you even need to install JDK on a Microsoft Windows machine.

Microsoft is known to provide tight integration within their portfolio. So another thought that came was that Microsoft will start integrating Silverlight, .NET, Office 365, Exchange integration, and their complete slew of Windows-specific technologies in the game. May be all backed Microsoft Access, Sharepoint, and Azure, oh no!

Another thought came to mind was that the newer features of the game will be released on XBox first, and then probably limp along on PC and other platforms later. May be make the game exclusive on Windows-based mobile phones, I hope not!

In general, the younger generation seems to not be very excited with Microsoft ecosystem. Anything ranging from virus-infected Windows, legacy Internet Explorer, to mobile phones. At least, that’s the reaction I’ve seen and heard from my family, friends, and hackathons around around the world. Players play Minecraft if they have XBox, they don’t buy XBox because they want to play Minecraft. The experience on PC/Desktop is pretty good IMHO. Although you can easily host a server and then join from any device, which is the cool part about the game.

I seriously hope, I’m wrong on all these initial, may be somewhat emotional, reactions. I really hope so!

Phil Spencer (head of Xbox, @XboxP3) has made it clear that “we plan to continue to make Minecraft available across platforms – including iOS, Android and PlayStation, in addition to Xbox and PC. ” I hope they stick to their promise on PC at the least 😉

Notch (@notch) has left Mojang already, and so have other co-founders. Minecraft was not intended to grow this big but it turned out to be, and he does not want to be responsible for it now. I respect that he likes to enjoy building games, and would continue to do so. The BIG payoff is accidental, and will allow him to focus his energy on what he is good at.

As father of an avid modder, an educator, Java evangelist, Java Champion, JUG leader, software engineer, here is my wish list for Microsoft to help with Minecraft:

  1. Maintain Minecraft on PC/desktop as a first class game. Make sure the latest snapshots are always available on PC first than any other platforms.
  2. Mojang has talked about delivering an official modding API for the past 2+ years but the status is unclear. It has been very disappointing to see Bukkit dying but fortunately there is Forge and other modding platforms. Deliver a formal modding API within next one year would really allow Microsoft to gain huge favors.
  3. Provide simpler tools/IDE that allow to create mods easily. Eclipse, IntelliJ, and NetBeans are too complex to be used by young developers. Please do not require Visual Studio or any other similar heavy weight tools to be downloaded in order to facilitate it though.
  4. Start bundling JDK with Windows machine so that Minecraft can run out-of-the-box instead of requiring to download it separately. Work on your relationship with Oracle, and help developers instead of getting stuck in your own rut.
  5. Keep Minecon as a separate conference. Do NOT mix it with other Microsoft shows. And organize it more frequently around the worlds.
  6. Start a formal Minecraft User Group (MUG) community where players can open local user groups and exchange ideas.
  7. MVP could now also embrace Minecraft Valueable Player.
  8. Open source Minecraft ?
  9. Do not introduce any Microsoft technologies in the game, keep it true Java on PC.
  10. Mojang launched Realms a few months. Make it more widely accessible.

If there is one thing Microsoft need to do about Minecraft, that is to at least maintain the same experience of the game on PC, or only make it better. DON’T screw up there, otherwise you’ll completely loose the community.

I’m happy that a big company is behind the game now. Hopefully, you’ll take the game to new heights, empower the community more, and truly help address the issues with your experience.

Good luck Microsoft!

Load Balance WebSockets using Apache HTTPD (Tech Tip #48)

JBoss EAP 6.3 provides a technology preview of WebSocket and WildFly have supported them as part of Java EE 7 compliance.

github.com/javaee-samples/javaee7-samples/tree/master/websocket provide tons of Java EE 7 samples that run on WildFly. If you are interested in similar functionality on JBoss EAP 6.3 then github.com/jboss-developer/jboss-eap-quickstarts/tree/6.4.x-develop/websocket-hello is a quickstart. In addition, there are a few more samples at github.com/arun-gupta/jboss-samples/tree/master/eap63.

One of the common questions asked related to WebSockets is how to how to load balance  them. This Tech Tip will explain that for WildFly and JBoss EAP 6.3.

First, what are the main components ?

  • At least Apache HTTPD 2.4.5 is required. Now HTTPD binaries are not available for Mac but fortunately compiling instructions are explained clearly in Tech Tip #45.
  • mod_proxy_wstunnel is an Apache module that provides support for tunneling of Web Socket connections to a backend Web Sockets server, such as WildFly or JBoss EAP. It is a support module to mod_proxy that provide support for a number of popular protocols as well as several different load balancing algorithms. The connection is automagically upgraded to a WebSocket connection.  And all the modules are already included in the modules directory.
  • mod_proxy_balancer module is required that provides load balancing for HTTP and other protocols.

Let’s go!

  1. Download and unzip WildFly 8.1.
  2. Start WildFly 8.1 in domain mode using ./bin/domain.sh.
  3. Download this chat sample, rename the file to “chat.war” and deploy to “main-server-group” as:
    The only difference from the original Java EE 7 WebSocket Chat sample is the addition of System.getProperty("jboss.node.name") to display the name of WildFly instance serving the application. The source code is available at github.com/arun-gupta/wildfly-samples/tree/master/websocket-loadbalance.
  4. Uncomment the following lines in /usr/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf:
    This will enable all the required modules.
  5. Add the following code fragment at the end of “httpd.conf”:
    Proxy is a container for proxied resources and is creating a load balancing group in this case using balancer directive. BalancerMember adds a member to this load balancing group.  ProxyPass is a standard directive that maps remote servers running on different ports into the space of the local server. In this case, WildFly is started in domain mode and so starts two instances on port 8080 and 8230. Both of these instances are mapped to localhost:80, which is where Apache HTTPD is running by default.

The deployed chat sample is now accessible at localhost:8080/chat (first instance in the managed domain), localhost:8230/chat (second WildFly instance in the managed domain), and localhost/chat (via Apache HTTPD).

Now even if you kill one of the WildFly instances, the other instance will continue to serve the client. Note, this only gives application availability as there is no session failover in this.

This was also verified on JBoss EAP 6.3 and there are a few differences:

  1. Use the sample from github.com/arun-gupta/jboss-samples/tree/master/eap63/websocket-chat instead.
  2. The generated archive name is different and so the command would look slightly different too:
  3. Configure “httpd.conf” as:

And that’s it!

Watch this live in action:

An important point to understand is that there is no concept of “sticky sessions” in WebSocket as, unlike HTTP, there is a direct and “permanent” connection between the client and the server in this case.

Enjoy!

WildFly with a custom configuration in OpenShift (Tech Tip #47)

WildFly instances can be easily started in OpenShift. Tech Tip #7 shows how to spin up an instance of WildFly in OpenShift. Tech Tip #21 explained how to get started using JBoss Tools.

Now this WildFly instance is started with the stock configuration.xml. However some times you may want to configure the containers or specify additional configuration information in this file. This Tech Tip will show you how to do that.

Let’s go!

  1. Start a WildFly instance as explained in Tech Tip #7.
  2. On the application page, clone the workspace associated with this application. The command will look something like:
  3. This workspace has .openshift/standalone.xml file. Edit this file to meet your need. For example, if you want to use Infinispan as a persistency solution in standalone mode, then you’ll add the following code fragment:
    under <subsystem xmlns="urn:jboss:domain:infinispan:2.0"> section.
  4. Commit and push the change:
    This will automatically restart the cartridge and show the output as:

Now the WildFly instance in OpenShift will use the updated configuration file.

You can even verify this by logging into your application as:

And checking for the updated elements in wildfly/standalone/configuration/standalone.xml file.

Alternatively, you can ssh into your instance and use the JBoss CLI to make updates to your standalone.xml file.

Enjoy!

Java EE 7 Real World Experience: Campground Management with Tipi.camp

tipicamp-logo

Tipi.camp provides a simple campground management software and targets 25,000+ independent campgrounds all over Europe. It provides a customer-friendly booking-portal and a RESTful API for partners to integrate. The project was conceived in September 2013 when Christoph returned from vacation, disappointed because of the missed booking for their tent. And now he has created a new solution connecting campers and campgrounds with each other.

The website offers a SaaS where campgrounds can register their camp sites and campers can look at the availability of these campgrounds, check out their calendar, pick a site and make a reservation. It is also available for on-site installation if you prefer running it on your domain. Think of it as koa.com, but available to all the independent campgrounds and much more modern 😉

The landing page is certainly very fancy:

tipicamp-opening-page

Websites of smaller campgrounds are typically characterized by low data maintenance and absence of a booking possibility. tipi.camp has advantages:

  • Easy-to-use portal for campground owners and campers
  • Campground owner administrate and book his sites independently
  • Customer data management
  • External sales channels, for example booking.com, can be connected to sell the log cabins
  • RESTful API it is also possible to handle larger individual installations

Campgrounds get their own portal, reservations, channel management, email and much more for €1/day if they are located in Europe or $1/day if they are in US. Each campground with an Internet connection and browser (whether computer or iPad) can use the software.

In terms of the overall flow, campground owner register their campground with tipi.camp. Traveler checks out the calendar and books the campground using the responsive portal.

tipicamp-architecture

 

Check out the welcome page:

tipicamp-welcome

Campers can search through the available camps and then look at the calendar of a particular camp:

tipicamp-calendar

Pick a particular site on the campground:

tipicamp-maps

And then checkout to make the payment:

tipicamp-checkout

This website is built using Java EE 7:

tipicamp-technology

 

Here is a brief description of the technology stack:

  • Presentation
    • JavaServer Faces + Expression Language. Different templates are used for desktop and iPad apps. JSF Template Library might be used to provide a fully customized portal for the campground owners later.
    • Security: JAAS Principal + JDBC realm
    • Bean discovery mode=”all”
  • Middle Tier
    • EJB for business boundaries
    • Servlets with JSON for web hooks: response from Paypal and Sendgrid
    • JAX-RS for exposing API to partners
  • Backend
    • JPA + Bean Validation, use @Index for database generation during development. Flyway API for database migrations in production.
    • Concurrency: Calculation of statistics and sending messages, Sendgrid takes ~1-4 seconds to send messages
    • Using @Startup @Singleton @Schedule to run a job at pre-defined time

Technologies from outside the platform were:

  • Primefaces 5 for the GUI and Bootstrap for the responsive Enduser-Portal.
  • Sendgrid API for sending mails. This is required as opposed to JavaMail because specific meta information needs to be added to each email.
  • Misc apache commons (eq. FileUtils.writeByteArrayToFile or IOUtils.toByteArray) – there are only a few sections.
  • Flyway API for database migrations
  • Junit with Derby – for testing

Toolset

  • JDK 8
  • IntelliJ 13.1 with Maven
  • Wildfly 8.1.0.Final – Single instance of WildFly is used. The app was previously deployed on GlassFish.
  • Apache httpd is used to:
    • performance-tuning with KeepAlive, mod_expires for the images and the compression
    • easy SSL configuration
    • handle more WildFly under 1 hostname with the mod_proxy
    • mod_redirect for redirect all http requests to the app to https
  • Github
  • Jenkins
  • loader.io for Load-Testing
  • Currently the application is deployed on a self-hostet Linux-Server in the hetzner.de data center.

Wish list for Java EE 8

  • Most used Apache Commons Libs
  • @Temporal works with LocalDate and LocalDateTime
  • Batch processing API does support generics

And here are supporting quotes on Java EE 7

And on WildFly:

So, do you want to start on this terrific two combination of Java EE 7 + WildFly ?

Download WildFly 8.1 today, learn the technology by reading/trying Java EE 7 samples, browse through Java EE 7 resources.

Or if you want to be on the bleeding edge, check out WildFly 9.0.

Many thanks to Christoph Gapp (info@tipi.camp) and Adam Bien (@adambien) for providing all the answers!

Are you using Java EE 7 and WildFly to deploy your projects ? Would love to feature you here! Send me an email or leave a comment on the blog.

 

Cloud in a Box: OpenShift Online in VirtualBox (Tech Tip #46)

OpenShift-logo

OpenShift is Red Hat’s PaaS platform and comes in three flavors:

  • Origin is the Community PaaS offering. You can explore the community-driven open source upstream of OpenShift. Join the community.
  • Online is the Public PaaS offering. Host your applications in the public cloud with automated provisioning, management, and scaling of applications. Sign up for free.
  • Enterprise is the Private PaaS offering. Leverage PaaS in your own data centers and private cloud. Request evaluation.

This Tech Tip will show how you can setup a Virtual VM running with OpenShift Online. Instructions at openshift.github.io/documentation/oo_deployment_guide_vm.html are pretty self explanatory. Here are the exact ones that I followed on Mavericks:

  1. Download VM:
  2. Unpack VM files
  3. Follow the instructions to create a VirtualBox instance. Create a new hard drive using the unzipped origin-vm.vmdk file.

    IMPORTANT: Instead of 4.2.4 to add bridged networking, setup a host-only network using 4.2.5.

  4. Boot the VM to see the output as:

    openshift-online-techtip46

    Type “5” to exit to the command prompt.

  5. VM comes pre-configured with Avahi DNS service and so now you can access OpenShift console at broker.openshift.local and seen as:

    openshift-origin-console-techtip46

    The username/password are “demo”/”changeme”.

  6. Create an SSH tunnel into the VM as:

    Password is “changeme”. OpenShift admin console is now accessible at localhost:8080/admin-console and looks like:

    openshift-console-techtip46

    More details about Admin Console are well documented.

Many thanks to Harrison for guiding me through creating this process!

Ask your OpenShift questions at stackoverflow or follow them at @openshift.

Enjoy!

 

Compiling Apache HTTPD on Mac (Tech Tip #45)

One of my blogs needed Apache HTTPD 2.4.x on Mac but quickly realized that the binaries are available only for Netware and Win32. Even the build instructions were only for RPM-based systems. So I downloaded the source code and started building it.

Complete compile instructions are explained here. However there were some issues on Mavericks and so decided to document it.

Let’s go!

  1. Download the source bundle and unzip:
  2. Source code comes with INSTALL instructions and per that the following should’ve worked:
    So gave the command
    and got the first error:
  3. Moved past “checking whether the C compiler works… no” error by following instructions on stackoverflow #13587001.In short, do the following for Mavericks
  4. Issued the command to compile the server again and got the error as shown:
    This was resolved using stackoverflow #10663180. In short:

    1. Download PCRE as:
    2. Compile and install as:

    The compilation output is shown here.

  5. Compile HTTPD source again as:

    Complete output of this configuration is here.

  6. Now issue the command make:

    Complete output of the command is shown here.

  7. Finally install Apache2 as:

    Complete output of this command is shown here.

Version for HTTPD can be checked as:

Server can be started as:

Stopped as:

Restarted as:

Enjoy!

Java EE 6 Sample, with HTML5, jQuery, Hybrid mobile: aka Ticket Monster (Tech Tip #44)

Java EE 7 was released last year, Java EE 8 preparations have already started, so what tempts me to write a blog about Java EE 6 ?

A few reasons …

  • Even though Java EE 5 was the first version where some of the specs were updated to simplify the platform, Java EE 6 is where higher productivity became the primary focus and kicked into high gear.
  • All commercially available application servers are still Java EE 6 compliant.
  • Java EE 7 is pretty cool and provide an awesome bunch of new technologies like WebSocket, Batch, JSON, and Concurrency. But customers are still sticking around with older version of the platform because these applications, servers, and environments cannot change overnight.

So if you are looking for a real-world Java EE 6 sample application that:

  • Use Eclipse for building a Java EE 6 application
  • Build persistence layer with JPA2 and Bean Validation
  • Build business services with JAX-RS
  • Building the User Interface with HTML5
  • Building Administration UI with JBoss Forge
  • Building statistics dashboard using HTML5 and JavaScript
  • Hybrid mobile version of the app using Apache Cordova

In addition, it also shows:

  • Deploy your application on a local instance or a remote instance running in OpenShift
  • Run tests against your JBoss instance

Ticket Monster is your ultimate source. It not only shows how the key Java EE 6 technologies can be used together but also integrate jQuery, HTML5, and mobile version of the application as well.

The video below gives a quick preview of the application:

An instance of Ticket Monster can be previewed at ticketmonster-jdf.rhcloud.com or timo-milestogo.rhcloud.com.

So how do you get started ?

  1. Download Ticket Monster 2.6.0 (with tutorials). Corresponding source code is at github.com/jboss-developer/ticket-monster/tree/2.6.0.Final-with-tutorials.
  2. Set up Red Hat Maven repositories as explained here. If you don’t care reading through the instructions, overwrite .m2/settings.xml with this settings.xml.
  3. Build the WAR of your application
  4. To run on local JBoss instance:
    • Download JBoss EAP 6.3
    • Unzip and start as
    • Deploy the application as
      This will also build the application again.

      The application is now accessible at localhost:8080/ticket-monster.

  5. To run on JBoss instance in OpenShift
    • Create a JBoss EAP 6 application in OpenShift
    • Add PostgreSQL cartridge for this application
    • Create an archive as

      This will use the installed PostgreSQL cartridge for persistence.

    • Clone the git workspace from OpenShift

      The actual git url will be specific to your application.

    • Copy generated WAR file to git workspace and rename to ROOT.war

    • Remove existing source and pom.xml from git workspace, add WAR, and push

    • Access the application at htp://<appname-domainname>.rhcloud.com.The following video shows the steps for running TicketMonster on OpenShift:

Ask your questions about Ticket Monster at jbossdeveloper@lists.jboss.org.
Enjoy!

WildFly 9: Features and Getting Started (Tech Tip #43)

WildFly 8.1 provides a Java EE 7 compliant application server, and is pretty awesome!

WildFly team has been actively working this summer on the next release. WildFly 9 features were announced a few weeks ago. Here is a quick summary and links to discussions on wildfly-dev:

  • Core/Servlet/Full Split
  • Graceful shutdown
  • Elytron (Security improvments)
  • Switching to the JDK ORB from JacORB
  • Undertow as a mod_cluster frontend
  • Subsystem Capabilities and Requirements
  • EAP 6.4 RFEs (TBA)

Links/details to rest of the features TBD.

So how do you get started with WildFly 9 ?

  • Building WildFly 9 requires at least have Maven 3.2.1, download the latest here.
  • Clone the workspace as:
  • Build the workspace as:
    Took 02:36 mins to build on my machine :)
  • Unzip dist/target/wildfly-9.0.0.Alpha1-SNAPSHOT.zip to a new directory
  • Run WildFly as:

Note that is still very early in the development stages and workspace is constantly evolving. So things may be broken but you know that Red Hat is working actively on your favorite application server :-)

Some useful references …

  • Feel free to subscribe to wildfly-dev alias and participate in the discussion
  • Ask your questions on WildFly forum
  • WildFly 9 docs (very early, mostly placeholder)
  • Follow us at @WildFlyAS

Java EE 7 Javadocs Download, Online, Tutorial, Samples (Tech Tip #42)

I was surprised when Google could not find Java EE 7 Javadocs download link clearly on the first page. StackOverflow was helpful here again, but even that was the last link on first page.

Now, I do know the location and can find my ways around. But this needs to be simplified and made more accessible for developers around the world.

So here are some usual Java EE 7 references:

  • Java EE 7 Javadocs Download Full Platform (bit.ly/ee7-javadocs), Web Profile
  • Java EE 7 Javadocs Online
  • Java EE 7 Tutorial
  • Java EE 7 Whitepaper
  • Java EE 7 Samples

Javadocs can also be installed on Dash as explained in Antonio’s blog.

And as usual, you can download WildFly or GlassFish to get started with Java EE 7!

Enjoy!

Using Infinispan as a persistency solution

Cross-posted from https://vaadin.com/blog/-/blogs/using-infinispan-as-a-persistency-solution. Thanks Fredrik and Matti for your permission!

Various RDBMSs are the de-facto standard for persistency. Using them is such a safe bet by architects that I dare say they are used in too many places nowadays. To fight against this, I have recently been exploring with alternative persistency options, like graph databases. This time I played with Infinispan.

In case you are not familiar with Infinispan, or distributed key/value data stores in general, you could think of it as a HashMap on steroids. Most essentially, the map is shared among all your cluster nodes. With clustering you can gain huge size, blazing fast access and redundancy, depending on how you configure it. There are several products that compete with Infinispan, like Ehcache and Hazelcast from OS world and Oracle Coherence from the commercial side.

Actually, Infinispan is a technology that you might have used without noticing it at all. For example high availability features of Wildfly heavily rely on Infinispan caches. It is also often used as a second level cache for ORM libraries. But it can also be used directly as a persistency library as such.

Why would you consider it as your persistency solution:

  • It is a lightning fast in-memory data storage
  • The stored value can be any serializable object, no complex mapping libraries needed
  • It is built from the ground up for a clustered environment – your data is safer and faster to access. It is very easy for horizontal scaling
  • It has multiple optional cache store alternatives, for writing the state to e.g. disk for cluster wide reboots
  • Not all data needs to be stored forever, Infinispan has built-in sophisticated evict rules
  • Possibility to use transactional access for ACID changes

Sounds pretty amazing, doesn’t it? And it sure is for certain use cases, but all technologies have their weaknesses and so do key/value data stores. When comparing to RDBMSs, the largest drawback is with relations to other entities. You’ll have to come up with a strategy for how to store references to other entities and searching based on related features must also be tackled. If you end up wondering these questions, be sure to check if Hibernate OGM could help you.

Also, doing some analysis on the data can be considered simpler, or at least more familiar, with traditional SQL queries. Especially if you end up having a lot of data, distributed on multiple nodes, you’ll have to learn the basics of MapReduce programming model to do any non trivial queries.

Using Infinispan in a web application

Although Infinispan is not tied to Wildfly, I decided to base my experiments on Wildfly. Its built in version is available for web applications, if you explicitly request it. The easiest method to do this is to add the following MANIFEST.MF entry to your war file. If you don’t want to spoil your project with obsolete files, just add it using a small war plugin config.

Naturally you’ll still want to add an Infinispan dependency to your application, but you can leave it to provided. Be sure to use the same version provided by your server, in Wildlfy 8, Infinispan version is 6.0.2. In a Maven project, add this kind of dependency declaration:

Before accessing Infinispan “caches”, you need to configure them. There are both programmatic and xml configurations available. With Wildfly, it is most natural to configure the Infinispan data store right into the server config. The “right” config file depends on how you are launching your Wildfly server. If you are testing clustering locally, you probably want to add something like this into your domain.xml, under the <subsystem xmlns="urn:jboss:domain:infinispan:2.0"> section.

Note that with this config, the data is only stored within the memory of cluster nodes. To learn how to tweak cache settings or to set up disk “backup”, refer to the extensive Infinispan documentation.

To remove all Infinispan references from the UI code, I created an EJB that does all the data access. There I inject the CacheContainer provided by Wildfly and fetch the default cache in an init method.

I guess you are already wondering it: yes, the Map is the very familiar java.util.Map interface and the rest of the implementation is trivial to any Java developer. Infinispan caches extend the basic Map interface, but in case you need some more advanced features, you can also use Cache or AdvancedCache types.

The MyEntity in the previous code snippet is just a very simple POJO I created for the example. With Vaadin CDI usage, I can then inject the EJB to my UI class and do pretty much anything with it. The actual Vaadin code has no special tricks, just normal CDI spiced Vaadin code.

Based on this exercise, would I use Infinispan directly for persistency in my next project? Probably not, but for certain apps, without hesitation. I can also imagine certain hybrid models where some of the data is only in an Infinispan cache and some in traditional RDBMS, naturally behind ORM, taking the best of both worlds.

We’ll also be using Infinispan in our upcoming joint webinar with Arun Gupta from RedHat on September 8th, 2014. There we’ll show you a simple Vaadin application and how easy it can be to cluster it using Wildfly.

Ceylon JUG Tour – US 2014

Ceylon is a statically and strong-typed programming language, created by Red Hat. Version 1.0.0 was released late last year and 1.1 is coming soon.

Gavin King (creator of Hibernate and CDI) and Stéphane Épardaud will be touring the USA East coast JUGs in October. At each venue, they will explain what Ceylon is, and why you will want to use it for your next production applications. The talks will be aimed at people who have never heard of Ceylon, or who have heard about it but want to know more. At the end of the evening you will be up to date with all that Ceylon is and has to offer.

Their complete itinerary is explained at https://community.jboss.org/docs/DOC-52715.

Don’t miss this opportunity. Make sure to show up at JUGs in your neighborhood and ask all your questions to the language creators!