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Run a huge query as fast and safely as possible

September 9, 2011 / posted in sql, Technobable / No Comments

Use this as a last resort

Queries that take a long time are generally a bad thing. If your application requires these kinds of measures to perform its duties, then chances are you really need to revise your table structures and/or you queries – ideally these queries should take seconds at the most, while data warehouse type reporting queries should be on the order of minutes. That said, sometimes you may need to update your entire schema, delete columns on a table with millions of records, or run a stored proc that goes in and cleans up data across several…

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Configuring Data Sources, JBoss 7

August 10, 2011 / posted in Jboss, Technobable / No Comments

Yep it’s gonna be a big year for JBoss AS 7

This will be the first in a series I’ll be writing on JBoss’ new application server version 7. Lately I’ve been playing around with JBoss AS 7 recently, and all I can say is.. !@#%, NICE! I downloaded 7.0 with the expectation that it would honor a lot of the previous version’s overall approach and layout. I was in for a BIG surprise. It comes off as a total rewrite, leveraging a lot of the latest and greatest technologies and frameworks – things like Weld…

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Manually override and launch quartz jobs…

January 20, 2011 / posted in Java / No Comments

Override quartz settings?

So you have a quartz job that’s chugging along nicely until you’re hit with the reality that the job details parameters change or the job needs to be suspended, or something happens that you end up having to recompile and redeploy your application just to update the packaged quartz job properties. This is no fun. You will undoubtedly have to take the updated code through the regular qa cycle, regress test, and then ultimately redeploy your code into the production environment. Surely there must be some way to address this problem when using Jboss…

One way…

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Configure ssh authorized keys for cvs access

January 3, 2011 / posted in Technobable / No Comments

Continous Integration

Lately I’ve been working on adding Hudson as the continuous integration (CI) server for projects at work. The whole notion of CI merits an entire discussion, but suffice to say it’s a very clean, approach that helps automate the build process particularly if you run manual builds that use prompted shell scripts.

After looking at a few solutions, Hudson seemed from many accounts to be the easiest to get running, and pretty flexible when integrating into an existing build system. Add to the resume that it could run in a servlet container, divorcing…

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The conf directory, JBoss v5.x

August 10, 2010 / posted in Jboss / 2 Comments

Configure what you need

So you’re ready to configure some JBoss files? Great, lets have a look at the conf directory. The jboss/server/<configured instance>/conf directory is where you’ll find the majority of the configuration files for your jboss instance. For most deployments, the majority of these folders and files will remain untouched as they default to usable configurations. In this article we’ll go over the more practical configurable files, while leaving the really low level configurations alone. 

`-- conf
    |-- bootstrap/
    |--|-- bindingservice.bean
    |   `-- META-INF
    |   |    `-- bindings-jboss-beans.xml *
    |   |-- aop.xml
    |

…

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Apache XSL-FO’ sho v1.0

August 2, 2010 / posted in Java / No Comments

Transforming XML into PDFs.. and stuff

If you’ve ever been tasked with providing PDF documents via xsl, you’ve surely done some homework and shopped around for viable third party libraries. Some are good, some are great and rightly so charge a price, and some are just flat out incomplete or shanty in their documentation. It’s not a knock on anyone, its just a fact well known to open source developers. Historically what has been missing is an open standard for pdf generation, and possibly other output formats.

Enter XSL-FO: XSL Formatting Objects is an open standard for formatting documents in…

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Sardine powered webdav client?

July 28, 2010 / posted in Java / No Comments

Extra Sardines on my pizza please

A few days ago I came across the need for an easy to use webdav client. Currently we’re using jakarta slide, which as it turns out is a project that was discontinued (as of fall 2007!), and whose code base as of this writing is practically 10 years old. Who wants those jars collecting dust in their lib directories? Sure it works, but hey, I’m trying to keep up with the Jones’ here, I’d like an up-to-date library that hasn’t been discontinued.

Dismayed, I took a look a the replacement suggested…

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Sending Attachments with the Javamail 1.4.x API

July 25, 2010 / posted in Java / No Comments

Make your emails interesting with attachments!

Not that your emails aren’t already interesting – if you have some kind of regular job running and you want to produce a results bound file sent to your recipients as an attachment, this code example can illustrate one way it can be done. It’s pretty much the same thing as sending a regular email except that it uses multipart attachments as the body content of the message:

package com.faceroller.mail;

public class Mailer {

	private static final Log log = LogFactory.getLog(Mailer.class);

	public static void send(Email email)
			throws MessagingException, NamingException, IOException {

…

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The Deploy vs Deployers directory, JBoss v5.x

July 23, 2010 / posted in Jboss / No Comments

Tae Bo for JBoss!

JBoss ships with a few configurations that are meant to provide examples of how JBoss can be configured for your environment. It’s recommend you take the “default” configuration (or “all” if you require clustering), and then slim it down by removing the various mbean components found in the “jboss/server/<configured instance>/deployers” and “jboss/server/<configured instance>/deploy” folders until only your minimum requirements are met. If you deploy JBoss with everything as it is, you’re going to end up wasting system resources on services that your application is going to use. For example, if your application doesn’t make any use…

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Jars and Class Loading, Jboss v5.x

July 15, 2010 / posted in Jboss / 3 Comments

So where do I put all my jars?

As you write your applications you’re bound to leverage third party libraries to cut down on the amount of work; lets face it no one wants to reinvent the wheel. A downside is sometimes these third party libraries might not be the most mature or stable releases to date. As your product grows and matures, or you expand your client base or number of implementations, you’re bound to come across multiple third party library dependencies, even ones across the same library but different versions, what a headache! How can we organize these…

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