louise rochford

Hi,
We're currently running oc4j on OAS & are thinking of moving to JBoss instead of WebLogic at the same time we upgrade our db to 11g.
We need clustering and WebLogic only provides that in it's expensive enterprise version, so that rules that out.
(The other main app server providers seem to offer clustering as part of the standard offering.)
The load on the app servers isn't expected to be particularly heavy (maybe 100 'concurrent' users at most) but it does need to be stable & reliable.

Can anyone offer any opinions about using JBoss in this situation?

We're tentatively ruling out Glassfish as it's another Oracle owned product & we're wary about the future of the product.
Should we be looking at anything else?
I'm guessing Tomcat would be an option, but in 'the old days' Tomcat wasn't recommended as a production server. Have things changed over the last 5 (or maybe more like 10) years?

TIA for your input.

The date & time on my logs produced via log4j are as at UTC, rather than local time. Since I'm running from a location UTC+12 this is really confusing output.
e.g. each log line starts:
2011-05-12 22:01:04,657 DEBUG ...
when it should be:
2011-05-13 10:01:04,657 DEBUG ...

It only seems to effect logs produced running the embedded OC4J - or at least the start up log for the standalone OC4j is in the correct timezone.
I've tried comparing various config & log files from the standalone directories with the embedded directories butt hat hasn't turned up anything likely.
It is picking up the date & time from the pc - I've tried changing the pc date & that gets 'reflected' in the log date - but isn't correct.
Seems to effect the logs for all apps I'm running in jDeveloper on my pc.
Note that the same apps run on other peoples pcs work fine. I'm the only one on Windows 7 so far though.

Any ideas? Trivial but driving me nuts.
Think it might just be doing it to remind me I'm a Brit working in New Zealand...

I think if you've been in the same place all your working life, you don't have the same breadth of experience as you would if you'd moved a couple of times. I decided to make the move after 5 years in my first job, even though the job itself was fine. I think it really helps to work with different sets of people (who have different experience) & for different companies (who have different standards). Obviously this can be taken too far - your cv isn't going to look good if you constantly move round every 6 moths - what belief will a new employer have that you're going to stick around & pay off any training etc they invest in you if you haven't before.
Also after you've worked in a handful of places, you've probably seen enough of a range of environments to be able to make experienced judgement calls as appropriate.

Let me second that. I must have read getting on for a hundred IT books over the last 10 years on various aspects of programming or design. This is by far the best, putting everything into context and giving guidence on how to skill yourself up to be a good developer, whatever language you happen to be working in at the moment. I'd hope it would be on the reading list for anyone coming out of a programming degree course & embarking on their career.

Thanks for the info Lasse.
Although the standard Eclipse download doesn't have j2ee support, the wtp download does & is as easy to find / install as the basic package. I think this may be a new development - I'm sure you had to buy something like MyEclipse only last year.
I'll give jBoss a go...
Cheers

I've been out of java dev for a year or so (defected to .net) & have been given the go ahead to investigate moving our work environments away from IBM & onto open source software.
We're currently using WSAD 5.1.1 & deploying onto WebSphere 5.1 running on linuz on a mainframe.
I've got Eclipse 3.1.2 running but it won't recognise my newly installed Sun appServer PE8.2. When you try to add a new server, it isn't listed as an option. Is there a plug in I need to get Eclipse to recognise the sun server, or are Eclipse & sun having an ongoing arguement & not supporting each other?

Most of our developments are just j2ee minus ejb, but some include ejb, so I'm guessing Tomcat on its own isnlt an option? Maybe this has changed now.

Any recommendations? Over the years I've successfully installed many an IDE & server, so I can figure out what to do, just don't know whats current.

Cheers

P.s. it good to see Jeroen is still as up beat as ever

1

We already have various licences for Crystal - mostly from developing reports for use in VB apps. We also have an enterprise licence - what exactly is the problem with running reports with Crystal Enterprise?

Jasper was OK to develop in - there seemed to be a few bugs which came to light when saving the reports, but providing we followed a certain routine it worked ok.

The real problem was that we were trying to create a big report containing a subreport (several tens of thousands of rows). We needed both html & pdf output. There was a bug fix to allow you to stream to pdf for large reports, but even with this it was slow - approx 4 hrs to run. Creating an html report on the full dataset crashed the machine. We tested the db fetch side of things & that was returning in a few minutes - huge amounts of time were being consumed in the fromatting of the data.
I don't have the time (or maybe the skills) to fix Jasper myself, so I thought it was probably time to turn to a commercial alternative...hence crystal.
BIRT looks like it should work well, but its at the early stages yet so probably doesn't have everything I need (e.g. subreporting capabilities)

Has anyone tried using BIRT from eclipse?

I've used Jasper, but it didn't cope well with big reports. I'm inclined to try Crystal next time, but wondered if BIRT might be the way to go...

We have something that sounds like what you might want.

The user clicks a link on the web page. This triggers creation of a pdf file using Jasper reports & then starts a download process. The user sees their standard download dialog box & if they select 'open' rather than 'save' it automatically opens Adobe & displays the pdf report.

The key bit of code is:
File sourceFile = new File(sourceFilename); response.setHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment;filename=" + sourceFile.getName()); FileCopyUtils.copy(new FileInputStream(sourceFile), response.getOutputStream()); response.flushBuffer();

If this is the behaviour you're looking for, try investigating file download for more info.

By the way, we ran into a problem using the basic JRPdfExporter. If you need to deal with large reports, look into downloading a fix from the jasper sourceforge project called patch.tar.gz. It allows you to use JasperExportManagerStreaming.fillReportToPdfStreaming() instead.

Thanks for the feedback.

No, this particular ear file had nothing to do with any of our own java code. In fact the only reason I was involved was because it was java code that needed deploying - called by & calling non-java code I had nothing to do with at all. I received several versions of the ear over a 9 month period, but my filing wasn't up to the job, so the version I released to testing last autumn wasn't the same as the one I got released to production last week.

I've created a bespoke 'simple' project (using WSAD) & retrospectively booked the ears in to cvs as files in this project. I think this is the safest thing to do & looks like the standard approach - just something I hadn't thought about much before.

Hope I've got the right place for this...

I was wondering what process people use for managing version control of released code. We use cvs for the source java files, and on most projects it has been sufficient to tag these files with a build verison. If we needed to revert to a previous build we could regenerate the ear by checking out & building the tagged source.
But - we don't version & control the ear files themselves -just store them on a lan in some arbitary directory structure.

Now I've just been stung by releasing the wrong version of an ear file. This ear was created by an external company, so never went anywhere near cvs.

I want to tighten up our procedures for managment of the ears / jars etc. What do you do? Build afresh from the source for each release / release previously build ears? When you migrate code through development to testing to production environments, how do you ensure the version eg you're putting live is the same version thats been tested?

Any comments or references?

Cheers,
Louise

What is the 'Spring Web Module'?

I investigated doing something similar in WebSphere 5.1 about 18 months ago & got nowhere except closer to Asprin. WebSphere implements j_security_check using it own classes (just like all containers). After a lot of digging, I found out what the class was called (sorry, can't remember now), but couldn't figure out how to override it.
If the main driving force is the need to use GET instead of POST, I wonder if it might be possible to have your designated login page point to your own servlet (using GET), then have your own servlet internally call j_security_check (i.e. mimic the POST call from the page) & let WebSpheres code do its thing verifying the username/password & setting te user to logged on in its internal registry?
I haven't tried this so I don't know if it will work. I can envisage a future requirement to log a user in on the basis of more information than a username & password - just think of a standard internet bank login - and currently don't know how we'd handle this other than by some sort of a filter on the j_security_check. If you succeed in overriding the WebSphere implementation, I'd be very interested in finding out how you did it.

Cheers,
Louise

Hi Andrew,

Not sure if this would be a problem for Struts, but accessing resources outside of the app often does cause problems.

I would tackle this is a different way. The images might not change currently, but may might do next year? I'd be inclined to include the images in your version control systems or code repository. Just package them up in your war & deploy them afresh each time. That way you can always be sure that the images are there, you're not relying on any sysadmin folks to look after them (i.e. delete them accidentally or fail to promote them into production), and you have the flexibility to change the images in a controlled menner if required to at a later date (which is almost certain to happen, even if you don't think so now)