The article represents the 3rd set of 10 interview questions. The following are previous two sets that have been published earlier on our website. Following are other sets that we recommend you to go through. Interview questions Set 1 Interview questions Set 2 Q1: Directives can be applied to which all element type? Ans: Following represents the element type and directive declaration style: `E` – Element name: `` `A` – Attribute (default): `` `C` – Class: `` `M` – Comment: `` Q2. What is notion of “isolate” scope object when creating a custom directive? How is it different from the normal scope object? Ans: When creating a custom directive, there is a property called as “scope” which can be assigned different values such as true/false or {}. When assigned with the value “{}”, then a new “isolate” scope is created. The ‘isolate’ scope differs from normal scope in that it does not prototypically inherit from the parent scope. This is useful when creating reusable components, which should not accidentally read or modify data in the parent scope. Q3. What are different return types from compile function? Ans: A compile function can have a return value which can be either a function or an object. A (post-link) function: It is equivalent to registering the linking function via the `link` property of the config object when the compile function is empty. An object with function(s) registered via `pre` and `post` properties. It allows you to control when a linking function should be called during the linking phase. Q4. WHich API need to be invoked on the rootScope service to get the child scopes? Ans: $new Q5. Explain the relationship between scope.$apply & scope.$digest? Ans: As an event such as text change in a textfield happens, the event is caught with an eventhandler which then invokes $apply method on the scope object. The $apply method in turn evaluates the expression and finally invokes $digest method on the scope object. Following code does it all: $apply: function(expr) { try { beginPhase('$apply'); return this.$eval(expr); } catch (e) { $exceptionHandler(e); } finally { clearPhase(); try { $rootScope.$digest(); } catch (e) { $exceptionHandler(e); throw e; } } } Q6. Which angular module is loaded by default? Ans: ng Q7. What angular function is used to manually start an application? Ans: angular.bootstrap Q8. Name some of the methods that could be called on a module instance? For example, say, you instantiated a module such as ‘var helloApp = angular.module( “helloApp”, [] );’. What are different methods that could be called on helloApp instance? Ans: Following are some of the methods: controller factory directive filter constant service provider config Q9. Which angular function is used to wrap a raw DOM element or HTML string as a jQuery element? Ans: angular.element; If jQuery is available, `angular.element` is an alias for the jQuery function. If jQuery is not available, `angular.element` delegates to Angular’s built-in subset of jQuery, called “jQuery lite” or “jqLite.” Q10. Write sample code representing an injector that could be used to kick off your application? var $injector = angular.injector(['ng', 'appName']); $injector.invoke(function($rootScope, $compile, $document){ $compile($document)($rootScope); $rootScope.$digest(); }); Feel free to suggest any changes in above answers if you feel so.

In the modern world of microservices it's important to provide strict and polyglot clients for your service. It's better if your API is self-documented. One of the best tools for it is Apache Thrift. I want to explain how to use it with my favorite platform for microservices - Spring Boot. All project source code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/bsideup/spring-boot-thrift Project skeleton I will use Gradle to build our application. First, we need our main build.gradle file: buildscript { repositories { jcenter() } dependencies { classpath("org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-gradle-plugin:1.1.8.RELEASE") } } allprojects { repositories { jcenter() } apply plugin:'base' apply plugin: 'idea' } subprojects { apply plugin: 'java' } Nothing special for a Spring Boot project. Then we need a gradle file for thrift protocol modules (we will reuse it in next part): import org.gradle.internal.os.OperatingSystem repositories { ivy { artifactPattern "http://dl.bintray.com/bsideup/thirdparty/[artifact]-[revision](-[classifier]).[ext]" } } buildscript { repositories { jcenter() } dependencies { classpath "ru.trylogic.gradle.plugins:gradle-thrift-plugin:0.1.1" } } apply plugin: ru.trylogic.gradle.thrift.plugins.ThriftPlugin task generateThrift(type : ru.trylogic.gradle.thrift.tasks.ThriftCompileTask) { generator = 'java:beans,hashcode' destinationDir = file("generated-src/main/java") } sourceSets { main { java { srcDir generateThrift.destinationDir } } } clean { delete generateThrift.destinationDir } idea { module { sourceDirs += [file('src/main/thrift'), generateThrift.destinationDir] } } compileJava.dependsOn generateThrift dependencies { def thriftVersion = '0.9.1'; Map platformMapping = [ (OperatingSystem.WINDOWS) : 'win', (OperatingSystem.MAC_OS) : 'osx' ].withDefault { 'nix' } thrift "org.apache.thrift:thrift:$thriftVersion:${platformMapping.get(OperatingSystem.current())}@bin" compile "org.apache.thrift:libthrift:$thriftVersion" compile 'org.slf4j:slf4j-api:1.7.7' } We're using my Thrift plugin for Gradle. Thrift will generate source to the "generated-src/main/java" directory. By default, Thrift uses slf4j v1.5.8, while Spring Boot uses v1.7.7. It will cause an error in runtime when you will run your application, that's why we have to force a slf4j api dependency. Calculator service Let's start with a simple calculator service. It will have 2 modules: protocol and app.We will start with protocol. Your project should look as follows: calculator/ protocol/ src/ main/ thrift/ calculator.thrift build.gradle build.gradle settings.gradle thrift.gradle Where calculator/protocol/build.gradle contains only one line: apply from: rootProject.file('thrift.gradle') Don't forget to put these lines to settings.gradle, otherwise your modules will not be visible to Gradle: include 'calculator:protocol' include 'calculator:app' Calculator protocol Even if you're not familiar with Thrift, its protocol description file (calculator/protocol/src/main/thrift/calculator.thrift) should be very clear to you: namespace cpp com.example.calculator namespace d com.example.calculator namespace java com.example.calculator namespace php com.example.calculator namespace perl com.example.calculator namespace as3 com.example.calculator enum TOperation { ADD = 1, SUBTRACT = 2, MULTIPLY = 3, DIVIDE = 4 } exception TDivisionByZeroException { } service TCalculatorService { i32 calculate(1:i32 num1, 2:i32 num2, 3:TOperation op) throws (1:TDivisionByZeroException divisionByZero); } Here we define TCalculatorService with only one method - calculate. It can throw an exception of type TDivisionByZeroException. Note how many languages we're supporting out of the box (in this example we will use only Java as a target, though) Now run ./gradlew generateThrift, you will get generated Java protocol source in the calculator/protocol/generated-src/main/java/ folder. Calculator application Next, we need to create the service application itself. Just create calculator/app/ folder with the following structure: src/ main/ java/ com/ example/ calculator/ handler/ CalculatorServiceHandler.java service/ CalculatorService.java CalculatorApplication.java build.gradle Our build.gradle file for app module should look like this: apply plugin: 'spring-boot' dependencies { compile project(':calculator:protocol') compile 'org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-web' testCompile 'org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-test' } Here we have a dependency on protocol and typical starters for Spring Boot web app. CalculatorApplication is our main class. In this example I will configure Spring in the same file, but in your apps you should use another config class instead. package com.example.calculator; import com.example.calculator.handler.CalculatorServiceHandler; import org.apache.thrift.protocol.*; import org.apache.thrift.server.TServlet; import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication; import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.EnableAutoConfiguration; import org.springframework.context.annotation.*; import javax.servlet.Servlet; @Configuration @EnableAutoConfiguration @ComponentScan public class CalculatorApplication { public static void main(String[] args) { SpringApplication.run(CalculatorApplication.class, args); } @Bean public TProtocolFactory tProtocolFactory() { //We will use binary protocol, but it's possible to use JSON and few others as well return new TBinaryProtocol.Factory(); } @Bean public Servlet calculator(TProtocolFactory protocolFactory, CalculatorServiceHandler handler) { return new TServlet(new TCalculatorService.Processor(handler), protocolFactory); } } You may ask why Thrift servlet bean is called "calculator". In Spring Boot, it will register your servlet bean in context of the bean name and our servlet will be available at /calculator/. After that we need a Thrift handler class: package com.example.calculator.handler; import com.example.calculator.*; import com.example.calculator.service.CalculatorService; import org.apache.thrift.TException; import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired; import org.springframework.stereotype.Component; @Component public class CalculatorServiceHandler implements TCalculatorService.Iface { @Autowired CalculatorService calculatorService; @Override public int calculate(int num1, int num2, TOperation op) throws TException { switch(op) { case ADD: return calculatorService.add(num1, num2); case SUBTRACT: return calculatorService.subtract(num1, num2); case MULTIPLY: return calculatorService.multiply(num1, num2); case DIVIDE: try { return calculatorService.divide(num1, num2); } catch(IllegalArgumentException e) { throw new TDivisionByZeroException(); } default: throw new TException("Unknown operation " + op); } } } In this example I want to show you that Thrift handler can be a normal Spring bean and you can inject dependencies in it. Now we need to implement CalculatorService itself: package com.example.calculator.service; import org.springframework.stereotype.Component; @Component public class CalculatorService { public int add(int num1, int num2) { return num1 + num2; } public int subtract(int num1, int num2) { return num1 - num2; } public int multiply(int num1, int num2) { return num1 * num2; } public int divide(int num1, int num2) { if(num2 == 0) { throw new IllegalArgumentException("num2 must not be zero"); } return num1 / num2; } } That's it. Well... almost. We still need to test our service somehow. And it should be an integration test. Usually, even if your application is providing JSON REST API, you still have to implement a client for it. Thrift will do it for you. We don't have to care about it. Also, it will support different protocols. Let's use a generated client in our test: package com.example.calculator; import org.apache.thrift.protocol.*; import org.apache.thrift.transport.THttpClient; import org.apache.thrift.transport.TTransport; import org.junit.*; import org.junit.runner.RunWith; import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.*; import org.springframework.boot.test.IntegrationTest; import org.springframework.boot.test.SpringApplicationConfiguration; import org.springframework.test.context.junit4.SpringJUnit4ClassRunner; import org.springframework.test.context.web.WebAppConfiguration; import static org.junit.Assert.*; @RunWith(SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.class) @SpringApplicationConfiguration(classes = CalculatorApplication.class) @WebAppConfiguration @IntegrationTest("server.port:0") public class CalculatorApplicationTest { @Autowired protected TProtocolFactory protocolFactory; @Value("${local.server.port}") protected int port; protected TCalculatorService.Client client; @Before public void setUp() throws Exception { TTransport transport = new THttpClient("http://localhost:" + port + "/calculator/"); TProtocol protocol = protocolFactory.getProtocol(transport); client = new TCalculatorService.Client(protocol); } @Test public void testAdd() throws Exception { assertEquals(5, client.calculate(2, 3, TOperation.ADD)); } @Test public void testSubtract() throws Exception { assertEquals(3, client.calculate(5, 2, TOperation.SUBTRACT)); } @Test public void testMultiply() throws Exception { assertEquals(10, client.calculate(5, 2, TOperation.MULTIPLY)); } @Test public void testDivide() throws Exception { assertEquals(2, client.calculate(10, 5, TOperation.DIVIDE)); } @Test(expected = TDivisionByZeroException.class) public void testDivisionByZero() throws Exception { client.calculate(10, 0, TOperation.DIVIDE); } } This test will run your Spring Boot application, bind it to a random port and test it. All client-server communications will be performed in the same way real world clients are. Note how easy to use our service is from the client side. We're just calling methods and catching exceptions.

A hashmap which maintains keys as regular expressions. Any pattern matching the expression will be able to retrieve the same value. Internally it maintains two maps, one containing the regex to value, and another containing matched pattern to regex. Whenever there is a new pattern to 'get', there will be a O(n) search through the compiled regex(s) (which have been 'put' as keys) to find a match. Existing patterns will have constant time lookup through two maps. import java.util.ArrayList; import java.util.Collection; import java.util.HashMap; import java.util.Iterator; import java.util.List; import java.util.Map; import java.util.Set; import java.util.WeakHashMap; import java.util.regex.Pattern; public class RegexHashMap implements Map { private class PatternMatcher { private final String regex; private final Pattern compiled; PatternMatcher(String name) { regex = name; compiled = Pattern.compile(regex); } boolean matched(String string) { if(compiled.matcher(string).matches()) { ref.put(string, regex); return true; } return false; } } /** * Map of input to pattern */ private final Map ref; /** * Map of pattern to value */ private final Map map; /** * Compiled patterns */ private final List matchers; @Override public String toString() { return "RegexHashMap [ref=" + ref + ", map=" + map + "]"; } /** * */ public RegexHashMap() { ref = new WeakHashMap(); map = new HashMap(); matchers = new ArrayList(); } /** * Returns the value to which the specified key pattern is mapped, or null if this map contains no mapping for the key pattern */ @Override public V get(Object weakKey) { if(!ref.containsKey(weakKey)) { for(PatternMatcher matcher : matchers) { if(matcher.matched((String) weakKey)) { break; } } } if(ref.containsKey(weakKey)) { return map.get(ref.get(weakKey)); } return null; } /** * Associates a specified regular expression to a particular value */ @Override public V put(String key, V value) { V v = map.put(key, value); if (v == null) { matchers.add(new PatternMatcher(key)); } return v; } /** * Removes the regular expression key */ @Override public V remove(Object key) { V v = map.remove(key); if(v != null) { for(Iterator iter = matchers.iterator(); iter.hasNext();) { PatternMatcher matcher = iter.next(); if(matcher.regex.equals(key)) { iter.remove(); break; } } for(Iterator> iter = ref.entrySet().iterator(); iter.hasNext();) { Entry entry = iter.next(); if(entry.getValue().equals(key)) { iter.remove(); } } } return v; } /** * Set of view on the regular expression keys */ @Override public Set> entrySet() { return map.entrySet(); } @Override public void putAll(Map m) { for(Entry entry : m.entrySet()) { put(entry.getKey(), entry.getValue()); } } @Override public int size() { return map.size(); } @Override public boolean isEmpty() { return map.isEmpty(); } /** * Returns true if this map contains a mapping for the specified regular expression key. */ @Override public boolean containsKey(Object key) { return map.containsKey(key); } /** * Returns true if this map contains a mapping for the specified regular expression matched pattern. * @param key * @return */ public boolean containsKeyPattern(Object key) { return ref.containsKey(key); } @Override public boolean containsValue(Object value) { return map.containsValue(value); } @Override public void clear() { map.clear(); matchers.clear(); ref.clear(); } /** * Returns a Set view of the regular expression keys contained in this map. */ @Override public Set keySet() { return map.keySet(); } /** * Returns a Set view of the regex matched patterns contained in this map. The set is backed by the map, so changes to the map are reflected in the set, and vice-versa. * @return */ public Set keySetPattern() { return ref.keySet(); } @Override public Collection values() { return map.values(); } /** * Produces a map of patterns to values, based on the regex put in this map * @param patterns * @return */ public Map transform(List patterns) { for(String pattern : patterns) { get(pattern); } Map transformed = new HashMap(); for(Entry entry : ref.entrySet()) { transformed.put(entry.getKey(), map.get(entry.getValue())); } return transformed; } public static void main(String...strings) { RegexHashMap rh = new RegexHashMap(); rh.put("[o|O][s|S][e|E].?[1|2]", "This is a regex match"); rh.put("account", "This is a direct match"); System.out.println(rh); System.out.println("get:ose-1 -> "+rh.get("ose-1")); System.out.println("get:OSE2 -> "+rh.get("OSE2")); System.out.println("get:OSE112 -> "+rh.get("OSE112")); System.out.println("get:ose-2 -> "+rh.get("ose-2")); System.out.println("get:account -> "+rh.get("account")); System.out.println(rh); } }

I was involved in a project recently where we needed to capture the http session id for a websocket request - the reason was to determine the number of websocket sessions utilizing the same underlying http session The way to do this is based on a sample utilizing the new spring-session module and is described here. The trick to capturing the http session id is in understanding that before a websocket connection is established between the browser and the server, there is a handshake phase negotiated over http and the session id is passed to the server during this handshake phase. Spring Websocket support provides a nice way to register a HandShakeInterceptor, which can be used to capture the http session id and set this in the sub-protocol(typically STOMP) headers. First, this is the way to capture the session id and set it to a header: public class HttpSessionIdHandshakeInterceptor implements HandshakeInterceptor { @Override public boolean beforeHandshake(ServerHttpRequest request, ServerHttpResponse response, WebSocketHandler wsHandler, Map attributes) throws Exception { if (request instanceof ServletServerHttpRequest) { ServletServerHttpRequest servletRequest = (ServletServerHttpRequest) request; HttpSession session = servletRequest.getServletRequest().getSession(false); if (session != null) { attributes.put("HTTPSESSIONID", session.getId()); } } return true; } public void afterHandshake(ServerHttpRequest request, ServerHttpResponse response, WebSocketHandler wsHandler, Exception ex) { } } And to register this HandshakeInterceptor with Spring Websocket support: @Configuration @EnableWebSocketMessageBroker public class WebSocketDefaultConfig extends AbstractWebSocketMessageBrokerConfigurer { @Override public void configureMessageBroker(MessageBrokerRegistry config) { config.enableSimpleBroker("/topic/", "/queue/"); config.setApplicationDestinationPrefixes("/app"); } @Override public void registerStompEndpoints(StompEndpointRegistry registry) { registry.addEndpoint("/chat").withSockJS().setInterceptors(httpSessionIdHandshakeInterceptor()); } @Bean public HttpSessionIdHandshakeInterceptor httpSessionIdHandshakeInterceptor() { return new HttpSessionIdHandshakeInterceptor(); } } Now that the session id is a part of the STOMP headers, this can be grabbed as a STOMP header, the following is a sample where it is being grabbed when subscriptions are registered to the server: @Component public class StompSubscribeEventListener implements ApplicationListener { private static final Logger logger = LoggerFactory.getLogger(StompSubscribeEventListener.class); @Override public void onApplicationEvent(SessionSubscribeEvent sessionSubscribeEvent) { StompHeaderAccessor headerAccessor = StompHeaderAccessor.wrap(sessionSubscribeEvent.getMessage()); logger.info(headerAccessor.getSessionAttributes().get("HTTPSESSIONID").toString()); } } or it can be grabbed from a controller method handling websocket messages as a MessageHeaders parameter: @MessageMapping("/chats/{chatRoomId}") public void handleChat(@Payload ChatMessage message, @DestinationVariable("chatRoomId") String chatRoomId, MessageHeaders messageHeaders, Principal user) { logger.info(messageHeaders.toString()); this.simpMessagingTemplate.convertAndSend("/topic/chats." + chatRoomId, "[" + getTimestamp() + "]:" + user.getName() + ":" + message.getMessage()); }

Introduction Hibernate provides an optimistic locking mechanism to prevent lost updates even for long-conversations. In conjunction with an entity storage, spanning over multiple user requests (extended persistence context or detached entities) Hibernate can guarantee application-level repeatable-reads. The dirty checking mechanism detects entity state changes and increments the entity version. While basic property changes are always taken into consideration, Hibernate collections are more subtle in this regard. Owned vs. Inverse Collections In relational databases, two records are associated through a foreign key reference. In this relationship, the referenced record is the parent while the referencing row (the foreign key side) is the child. A non-null foreign key may only reference an existing parent record. In the Object-oriented space this association can be represented in both directions. We can have a many-to-one reference from a child to parent and the parent can also have a one-to-many children collection. Because both sides could potentially control the database foreign key state, we must ensure that only one side is the owner of this association. Only the owningside state changes are propagated to the database. The non-owning side has been traditionally referred as the inverse side. Next I’ll describe the most common ways of modelling this association. The Unidirectional Parent-Owning-Side-Child Association Mapping Only the parent side has a @OneToMany non-inverse children collection. The child entity doesn’t reference the parent entity at all. @Entity(name = "post") public class Post { ... @OneToMany(cascade = CascadeType.ALL, orphanRemoval = true) private List comments = new ArrayList (); ... } The Unidirectional Parent-Owning-Side-Child Component Association Mapping Mapping The child side doesn’t always have to be an entity and we might model it as acomponent type instead. An Embeddable object (component type) may contain both basic types and association mappings but it can never contain an @Id. The Embeddable object is persisted/removed along with its owning entity. The parent has an @ElementCollection children association. The child entity may only reference the parent through the non-queryable Hibernate specific @Parentannotation. @Entity(name = "post") public class Post { ... @ElementCollection @JoinTable(name = "post_comments", joinColumns = @JoinColumn(name = "post_id")) @OrderColumn(name = "comment_index") private List comments = new ArrayList (); ... public void addComment(Comment comment) { comment.setPost(this); comments.add(comment); } } @Embeddable public class Comment { ... @Parent private Post post; ... } The Bidirectional Parent-Owning-Side-Child Association Mapping The parent is the owning side so it has a @OneToMany non-inverse (without a mappedBy directive) children collection. The child entity references the parent entity through a @ManyToOne association that’s neither insertable nor updatable: @Entity(name = "post") public class Post { ... @OneToMany(cascade = CascadeType.ALL, orphanRemoval = true) private List comments = new ArrayList (); ... public void addComment(Comment comment) { comment.setPost(this); comments.add(comment); } } @Entity(name = "comment") public class Comment ... @ManyToOne @JoinColumn(name = "post_id", insertable = false, updatable = false) private Post post; ... } The Bidirectional Parent-Owning-Side-Child Association Mapping The child entity references the parent entity through a @ManyToOne association, and the parent has a mappedBy @OneToMany children collection. The parent side is the inverse side so only the @ManyToOne state changes are propagated to the database. Even if there’s only one owning side, it’s always a good practice to keep both sides in sync by using the add/removeChild() methods. @Entity(name = "post") public class Post { ... @OneToMany(cascade = CascadeType.ALL, orphanRemoval = true, mappedBy = "post") private List comments = new ArrayList (); ... public void addComment(Comment comment) { comment.setPost(this); comments.add(comment); } } @Entity(name = "comment") public class Comment { ... @ManyToOne private Post post; ... } The Unidirectional Parent-Owning-Side-Child Association Mapping The child entity references the parent through a @ManyToOne association. The parent doesn’t have a @OneToMany children collection so the child entity becomes the owning side. This association mapping resembles the relational data foreign key linkage. @Entity(name = "comment") public class Comment { ... @ManyToOne private Post post; ... } Collection Versioning The 3.4.2 section of the JPA 2.1 specification defines optimistic locking as: The version attribute is updated by the persistence provider runtime when the object is written to the database. All non-relationship fields and proper ties and all relationships owned by the entity are included in version checks[35]. [35] This includes owned relationships maintained in join tables N.B. Only owning-side children collection can update the parent version. Testing Time Let’s test how the parent-child association type affects the parent versioning. Because we are interested in the children collection dirty checking, theunidirectional child-owning-side-parent association is going to be skipped, as in that case the parent doesn’t contain a children collection. Test Case The following test case is going to be used for all collection type use cases: protected void simulateConcurrentTransactions(final boolean shouldIncrementParentVersion) { final ExecutorService executorService = Executors.newSingleThreadExecutor(); doInTransaction(new TransactionCallable () { @Override public Void execute(Session session) { try { P post = postClass.newInstance(); post.setId(1L); post.setName("Hibernate training"); session.persist(post); return null; } catch (Exception e) { throw new IllegalArgumentException(e); } } }); doInTransaction(new TransactionCallable () { @Override public Void execute(final Session session) { final P post = (P) session.get(postClass, 1L); try { executorService.submit(new Callable () { @Override public Void call() throws Exception { return doInTransaction(new TransactionCallable () { @Override public Void execute(Session _session) { try { P otherThreadPost = (P) _session.get(postClass, 1L); int loadTimeVersion = otherThreadPost.getVersion(); assertNotSame(post, otherThreadPost); assertEquals(0L, otherThreadPost.getVersion()); C comment = commentClass.newInstance(); comment.setReview("Good post!"); otherThreadPost.addComment(comment); _session.flush(); if (shouldIncrementParentVersion) { assertEquals(otherThreadPost.getVersion(), loadTimeVersion + 1); } else { assertEquals(otherThreadPost.getVersion(), loadTimeVersion); } return null; } catch (Exception e) { throw new IllegalArgumentException(e); } } }); } }).get(); } catch (Exception e) { throw new IllegalArgumentException(e); } post.setName("Hibernate Master Class"); session.flush(); return null; } }); } The Unidirectional Parent-Owning-Side-Child Association Testing #create tables Query:{[create table comment (idbigint generated by default as identity (start with 1), review varchar(255), primary key (id))][]} Query:{[create table post (idbigint not null, name varchar(255), version integer not null, primary key (id))][]} Query:{[create table post_comment (post_id bigint not null, comments_id bigint not null, comment_index integer not null, primary key (post_id, comment_index))][]} Query:{[alter table post_comment add constraint FK_se9l149iyyao6va95afioxsrl foreign key (comments_id) references comment][]} Query:{[alter table post_comment add constraint FK_6o1igdm04v78cwqre59or1yj1 foreign key (post_id) references post][]} #insert post in primary transaction Query:{[insert into post (name, version, id) values (?, ?, ?)][Hibernate training,0,1]} #select post in secondary transaction Query:{[selectentityopti0_.idas id1_1_0_, entityopti0_.name as name2_1_0_, entityopti0_.version as version3_1_0_ from post entityopti0_ where entityopti0_.id=?][1]} #insert comment in secondary transaction #optimistic locking post version update in secondary transaction Query:{[insert into comment (id, review) values (default, ?)][Good post!]} Query:{[update post setname=?, version=? where id=? and version=?][Hibernate training,1,1,0]} Query:{[insert into post_comment (post_id, comment_index, comments_id) values (?, ?, ?)][1,0,1]} #optimistic locking exception in primary transaction Query:{[update post setname=?, version=? where id=? and version=?][Hibernate Master Class,1,1,0]} org.hibernate.StaleObjectStateException: Row was updated or deleted by another transaction (or unsaved-value mapping was incorrect) : [com.vladmihalcea.hibernate.masterclass.laboratory.concurrency.EntityOptimisticLockingOnUnidirectionalCollectionTest$Post#1] The Unidirectional Parent-Owning-Side-Child Component Association Testing #create tables Query:{[create table post (idbigint not null, name varchar(255), version integer not null, primary key (id))][]} Query:{[create table post_comments (post_id bigint not null, review varchar(255), comment_index integer not null, primary key (post_id, comment_index))][]} Query:{[alter table post_comments add constraint FK_gh9apqeduab8cs0ohcq1dgukp foreign key (post_id) references post][]} #insert post in primary transaction Query:{[insert into post (name, version, id) values (?, ?, ?)][Hibernate training,0,1]} #select post in secondary transaction Query:{[selectentityopti0_.idas id1_0_0_, entityopti0_.name as name2_0_0_, entityopti0_.version as version3_0_0_ from post entityopti0_ where entityopti0_.id=?][1]} Query:{[selectcomments0_.post_id as post_id1_0_0_, comments0_.review as review2_1_0_, comments0_.comment_index as comment_3_0_ from post_comments comments0_ where comments0_.post_id=?][1]} #insert comment in secondary transaction #optimistic locking post version update in secondary transaction Query:{[update post setname=?, version=? where id=? and version=?][Hibernate training,1,1,0]} Query:{[insert into post_comments (post_id, comment_index, review) values (?, ?, ?)][1,0,Good post!]} #optimistic locking exception in primary transaction Query:{[update post setname=?, version=? where id=? and version=?][Hibernate Master Class,1,1,0]} org.hibernate.StaleObjectStateException: Row was updated or deleted by another transaction (or unsaved-value mapping was incorrect) : [com.vladmihalcea.hibernate.masterclass.laboratory.concurrency.EntityOptimisticLockingOnComponentCollectionTest$Post#1] The Bidirectional Parent-Owning-Side-Child Association Testing #create tables Query:{[create table comment (idbigint generated by default as identity (start with 1), review varchar(255), post_id bigint, primary key (id))][]} Query:{[create table post (idbigint not null, name varchar(255), version integer not null, primary key (id))][]} Query:{[create table post_comment (post_id bigint not null, comments_id bigint not null)][]} Query:{[alter table post_comment add constraint UK_se9l149iyyao6va95afioxsrl unique (comments_id)][]} Query:{[alter table comment add constraint FK_f1sl0xkd2lucs7bve3ktt3tu5 foreign key (post_id) references post][]} Query:{[alter table post_comment add constraint FK_se9l149iyyao6va95afioxsrl foreign key (comments_id) references comment][]} Query:{[alter table post_comment add constraint FK_6o1igdm04v78cwqre59or1yj1 foreign key (post_id) references post][]} #insert post in primary transaction Query:{[insert into post (name, version, id) values (?, ?, ?)][Hibernate training,0,1]} #select post in secondary transaction Query:{[selectentityopti0_.idas id1_1_0_, entityopti0_.name as name2_1_0_, entityopti0_.version as version3_1_0_ from post entityopti0_ where entityopti0_.id=?][1]} Query:{[selectcomments0_.post_id as post_id1_1_0_, comments0_.comments_id as comments2_2_0_, entityopti1_.idas id1_0_1_, entityopti1_.post_id as post_id3_0_1_, entityopti1_.review as review2_0_1_, entityopti2_.idas id1_1_2_, entityopti2_.name as name2_1_2_, entityopti2_.version as version3_1_2_ from post_comment comments0_ inner joincomment entityopti1_ on comments0_.comments_id=entityopti1_.idleft outer joinpost entityopti2_ on entityopti1_.post_id=entityopti2_.idwhere comments0_.post_id=?][1]} #insert comment in secondary transaction #optimistic locking post version update in secondary transaction Query:{[insert into comment (id, review) values (default, ?)][Good post!]} Query:{[update post setname=?, version=? where id=? and version=?][Hibernate training,1,1,0]} Query:{[insert into post_comment (post_id, comments_id) values (?, ?)][1,1]} #optimistic locking exception in primary transaction Query:{[update post setname=?, version=? where id=? and version=?][Hibernate Master Class,1,1,0]} org.hibernate.StaleObjectStateException: Row was updated or deleted by another transaction (or unsaved-value mapping was incorrect) : [com.vladmihalcea.hibernate.masterclass.laboratory.concurrency.EntityOptimisticLockingOnBidirectionalParentOwningCollectionTest$Post#1] The Bidirectional Parent-Owning-Side-Child Association Testing #create tables Query:{[create table comment (idbigint generated by default as identity (start with 1), review varchar(255), post_id bigint, primary key (id))][]} Query:{[create table post (idbigint not null, name varchar(255), version integer not null, primary key (id))][]} Query:{[alter table comment add constraint FK_f1sl0xkd2lucs7bve3ktt3tu5 foreign key (post_id) references post][]} #insert post in primary transaction Query:{[insert into post (name, version, id) values (?, ?, ?)][Hibernate training,0,1]} #select post in secondary transaction Query:{[selectentityopti0_.idas id1_1_0_, entityopti0_.name as name2_1_0_, entityopti0_.version as version3_1_0_ from post entityopti0_ where entityopti0_.id=?][1]} #insert comment in secondary transaction #post version is not incremented in secondary transaction Query:{[insert into comment (id, post_id, review) values (default, ?, ?)][1,Good post!]} Query:{[selectcount(id) from comment where post_id =?][1]} #update works in primary transaction Query:{[update post setname=?, version=? where id=? and version=?][Hibernate Master Class,1,1,0]} If you enjoy reading this article, you might want to subscribe to my newsletter and get a discount for my book as well. Overruling Default Collection Versioning If the default owning-side collection versioning is not suitable for your use case, you can always overrule it with Hibernate [a href="http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/annotations/3.5/reference/en/html_single/#d0e2903" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(1, 160, 219); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(240, 29, 79); background: transparent;"]@OptimisticLock annotation. Let’s overrule the default parent version update mechanism for bidirectional parent-owning-side-child association: @Entity(name = "post") public class Post { ... @OneToMany(cascade = CascadeType.ALL, orphanRemoval = true) @OptimisticLock(excluded = true) private List comments = new ArrayList (); ... public void addComment(Comment comment) { comment.setPost(this); comments.add(comment); } } @Entity(name = "comment") public class Comment { ... @ManyToOne @JoinColumn(name = "post_id", insertable = false, updatable = false) private Post post; ... } This time, the children collection changes won’t trigger a parent version update: #create tables Query:{[create table comment (idbigint generated by default as identity (start with 1), review varchar(255), post_id bigint, primary key (id))][]} Query:{[create table post (idbigint not null, name varchar(255), version integer not null, primary key (id))][]} Query:{[create table post_comment (post_id bigint not null, comments_id bigint not null)][]} Query:{[]} Query:{[alter table comment add constraint FK_f1sl0xkd2lucs7bve3ktt3tu5 foreign key (post_id) references post][]} Query:{[alter table post_comment add constraint FK_se9l149iyyao6va95afioxsrl foreign key (comments_id) references comment][]} Query:{[alter table post_comment add constraint FK_6o1igdm04v78cwqre59or1yj1 foreign key (post_id) references post][]} #insert post in primary transaction Query:{[insert into post (name, version, id) values (?, ?, ?)][Hibernate training,0,1]} #select post in secondary transaction Query:{[selectentityopti0_.idas id1_1_0_, entityopti0_.name as name2_1_0_, entityopti0_.version as version3_1_0_ from post entityopti0_ where entityopti0_.id=?][1]} Query:{[selectcomments0_.post_id as post_id1_1_0_, comments0_.comments_id as comments2_2_0_, entityopti1_.idas id1_0_1_, entityopti1_.post_id as post_id3_0_1_, entityopti1_.review as review2_0_1_, entityopti2_.idas id1_1_2_, entityopti2_.name as name2_1_2_, entityopti2_.version as version3_1_2_ from post_comment comments0_ inner joincomment entityopti1_ on comments0_.comments_id=entityopti1_.idleft outer joinpost entityopti2_ on entityopti1_.post_id=entityopti2_.idwhere comments0_.post_id=?][1]} #insert comment in secondary transaction Query:{[insert into comment (id, review) values (default, ?)][Good post!]} Query:{[insert into post_comment (post_id, comments_id) values (?, ?)][1,1]} #update works in primary transaction Query:{[update post setname=?, version=? where id=? and version=?][Hibernate Master Class,1,1,0]} If you enjoyed this article, I bet you are going to love my book as well. Conclusion It’s very important to understand how various modeling structures impact concurrency patterns. The owning side collections changes are taken into consideration when incrementing the parent version number, and you can always bypass it using the @OptimisticLock annotation. Code available on GitHub. If you have enjoyed reading my article and you’re looking forward to getting instant email notifications of my latest posts, you just need to follow my blog.

REST Easy with SQL/NoSQL Integration and CQRS Pattern implementation New demands are being put on IT organizations everyday to deliver agile, high-performance, integrated mobile and web applications. In the meantime, the technology landscape is getting complex everyday with the advent of new technologies like REST, NoSQL, Cloud while existing technologies like SOAP and SQL still rule everyday work. Rather than taking religious side of the debate, NoSQL can successfully co-exist with SQL in this ‘polyglot’ of data storage and formats. However, this integration also adds another layer of complexity both in architecture and implementation. This document offers a guide on how some of the relatively newer technologies like REST can help bridge the gap between SQL and NoSQL with an example of a well known pattern called CQRS. This document is organized as follows: Introduction to SQL development process NoSQL Do I have to choose between SQL and NoSQL? CQRS Pattern How to implement CQRS pattern using REST services Introduction to SQL development process Developers have been using SQL Databases for decades to build and deliver enterprise business applications. The process of creating tables, attributes,and relationships is second nature for most developers. Data architects think in terms of tables and columns and navigate relationships for data. The basic concepts of delivery and transformation takes place at the web server level which means the server developer is reading and ‘binding’ to the tables and mapping attributes to a REST response. Application development lifecycle meant changes to the database schema first, followed by the bindings, then internal schema mapping, and finally the SOAP or JSON services, and eventually the client code. This all costs the project time and money. It also means that the ‘code’ (pick your language here) and the business logic would also need to be modified to handle the changes to the model. NoSQL NoSQL is gaining supporters among many SQL shops for various reasons including: Low cost Ability to handle unstructured dataa Scalability Performance The first thing database folks notice is that there is no schema. These document style storage engines can handle huge volumes of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. The very nature of schema-less documents allows change to a document structure without having to go through the formal change management process (or data architect). The other major difference is that NoSQL (no-schema) also means no joins or relationships. The document itself contains the embedded information by design. So an order entry would contain the customer with all the orders and line items for each order in a single document. There are many different NoSQL vendors (popular NoSQL databases include MongoDB, Casandra) that are being used for BI and Analytics (read-only) purposes. We are also seeing many customers starting to use NoSQL for auditing, logging, and archival transactions. Do I have to choose between SQL and NoSQL? The purpose of this article is to not get into the religious debate about whether to use SQL or NoSQL. Bottom line is both have their place and are suited for certain type of data – SQL for structured data and NoSQL for unstructured data. So why not have the capability to mix and match this data depending on the application. This can be done by creating a single REST API across both SQL and NoSQL databases. Why a single REST API? The answer is simple – the new agile and mobile world demands this ‘mashup’ of data into a document style JSON response. CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segmentation) Pattern There are many design patterns for delivery of high performance RESTful services but the one that stands out was described in an article written by Martin Fowler, one of the software industry veterans. He described the pattern called CQRS that is more relevant today in a ‘polyglot’ of servers, data, services, and connections. “We may want to look at the information in a different way to the record store, perhaps collapsing multiple records into one, or forming virtual records by combining information for different places. On the update side we may find validation rules that only allow certain combinations of data to be stored, or may even infer data to be stored that’s different from that we provide.” – Martin Fowler 2011 In this design pattern, the REST API requests (GET) return documents from multiple sources (e.g. mashups). In the update process, the data is subject to business logic derivations, validations, event processing, and database transactions. This data may then be pushed back into the NoSQL using asynchronous events. With the wide-spread adoption of NoSQL databases like MongoDB and schema-less, high capacity data store; most developers are challenged with providing security, business logic, event handling, and integration to other systems. MongoDB; one the popular NoSQL databases and SQL databases share many similar concepts. However the MongoDB programming language itself is very different from the SQL we all know. How to implement CQRS pattern using a RESTFul Architecture A REST server should meet certain requirements to support the CQRS pattern. The server should run on-premise or in the cloud and appears to the mobile and web developer as an HTTP endpoint. The server architecture should implement the following: Connections and Mapping necessary for SQL and NoSQL connectivity and API services needed to create and return GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE REST responses Security Business Logic Connections and Mapping There are two main approaches to creating REST Servers and APIs for SQL and NoSQL databases: Open source frameworks like Apache Tomcat, Spring/Hibernate Commercial framework like Espresso Logic Open source Frameworks Using various open source frameworks like Tomcat, Spring/Hibernate, Node.js, JDBC and MongoDB drivers, a REST server can be created, but we would still be left with the following tasks: Creation and mapping of the necessary SQL objects Create a REST server container and configurations Create Jersey/Jackson classes and annotations Create and define REST API for tables, views, and procedures Hand write validation, event and business logic Handle persistence, optimistic locking, transaction paging Adding identity management and security by roles Now we can start down the same path to connect to MongoDB and write code to connect, select, and return data in JSON and then create the REST calls to merge these two different document styles into a single RESTful endpoint. This is a lot of work for a development team to manage and control and frankly pretty boring and repetitive and is better done by a well designed framework Commercial Frameworks Many commercial frameworks may take care of this complexity without the need to do extensive programming. Here is an example from Espresso Logic and how it handles this complexity with a point and click interface: Running REST server in the cloud or on-premise Connections to external SQL databases Object mapping to tables, views, and procedures Automatic creation of RESTful endpoints from model Reactive business rules and rich event model Integrated role-based security and authentication services. Point-and-click document API creation for SQL and MongoDB endpoints In the example below, the editor shows an SQL (customersTransactions) joined with archived details from MongoDB (archivedTransactions). The MongoDB document for each customer may include transaction details, check images, customer service notes and other relevant account information. This new mashup becomes a single REST call that can be published to mobile and web application developer. Security Security is an important part of building and delivery of RESTful services which can be broken down into two parts; authentication and access control. Authentication Before allowing anyone access to corporate data you want to use the existing corporate identity management (some call this authentication services) to capture and validate the user. This identity management service is based on using existing corporate standards such as LDAP, Windows AD, SQL Database. Role-based Access Control Each user may be assigned one or more corporate roles and these roles are then assigned specific access privileges to each resource (e.g. READ, INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE). Role-based access should also be able to restrict permissions to specific rows and columns of the API (e.g. only sales reps can see their own orders or a manager can see and change his department salaries but cannot change his own). This restriction should be applied regardless of how or where the API is used or called. Remember, the SQL database already provides some level of security and access which must be considered when designing and delivering new front-end services to internal and external users. Business Logic for REST When data is updated to a REST Server several things need to happen. First, the authentication and access control should determine if this is a valid request and if the user has rights to the endpoint. In addition, the server may need to de-alias REST attributes back to the actual SQL column names. In a full featured business logic server, there should be a series of events and business rules to perform various calculations, validations, and fire other events on dependent tables. Finally, the entire multi-table transaction is written back to the SQL database in a single transaction. Updates are then sent asynchronously to MongoDB as part of the commit event (after the SQL transaction has completed). Conclusion In the real-world of API services, the demand for more complex document style RESTful services is a requirement. That is, the ability to create ‘mashups’ of data from multiple tables, NoSQL collections, and other external systems is a large part of this new design pattern. In addition, the ability to alias attribute names and formats from these source fields has become critical for partners and customers systems. Using REST with the CQRS pattern to blend MongoDB and SQL seamlessly to your existing data will become a major part of your future mobile strategy. To implement these REST services, one can use open source tools and spend a lot of time or select a right commercial framework. This framework should support cloud or on-premise connectivity, security, API integration, as well as business logic. This will make the design and delivery of new application services more rapid and agile in the heterogeneous world of information.

Spring provides a great out of the box support for caching expensive method calls. The caching abstraction is covered in a great detail here. My objective here is to cover one of the newer cache implementations that Spring now provides with 4.0+ version of the framework - using Google Guava Cache In brief, consider a service which has a few slow methods: public class DummyBookService implements BookService { @Override public Book loadBook(String isbn) { // Slow method 1. } @Override public List loadBookByAuthor(String author) { // Slow method 2 } } With Spring Caching abstraction, repeated calls with the same parameter can be sped up by an annotation on the method along these lines - here the result of loadBook is being cached in to a "book" cache and listing of books cached into another "books" cache: public class DummyBookService implements BookService { @Override @Cacheable("book") public Book loadBook(String isbn) { // slow response time.. } @Override @Cacheable("books") public List loadBookByAuthor(String author) { // Slow listing } } Now, Caching abstraction support requires a CacheManager to be available which is responsible for managing the underlying caches to store the cached results, with the new Guava Cache support the CacheManager is along these lines: @Bean public CacheManager cacheManager() { return new GuavaCacheManager("books", "book"); } Google Guava Cache provides a rich API to be able to pre-load the cache, set eviction duration based on last access or created time, set the size of the cache etc, if the cache is to be customized then a guava CacheBuilder can be passed to the CacheManager for this customization: @Bean public CacheManager cacheManager() { GuavaCacheManager guavaCacheManager = new GuavaCacheManager(); guavaCacheManager.setCacheBuilder(CacheBuilder.newBuilder().expireAfterAccess(30, TimeUnit.MINUTES)); return guavaCacheManager; } This works well if all the caches have a similar configuration, what if the caches need to be configured differently - for eg. in the sample above, I may want the "book" cache to never expire but the "books" cache to have an expiration of 30 mins, then the GuavaCacheManager abstraction does not work well, instead a better solution is actually to use a SimpleCacheManager which provides a more direct way to get to the cache and can be configured this way: @Bean public CacheManager cacheManager() { SimpleCacheManager simpleCacheManager = new SimpleCacheManager(); GuavaCache cache1 = new GuavaCache("book", CacheBuilder.newBuilder().build()); GuavaCache cache2 = new GuavaCache("books", CacheBuilder.newBuilder() .expireAfterAccess(30, TimeUnit.MINUTES) .build()); simpleCacheManager.setCaches(Arrays.asList(cache1, cache2)); return simpleCacheManager; } This approach works very nicely, if required certain caches can be configured to be backed by a different caching engines itself, say a simple hashmap, some by Guava or EhCache some by distributed caches like Gemfire.

The last couple of weeks I've been playing around with docker and kubernetes. If you are not familiar with kubernetes let's just say for now that its an open source container cluster management implementation, which I find really really awesome. One of the first things I wanted to try out was running an Apache ZooKeeper ensemble inside kubernetes and I thought that it would be nice to share the experience. For my experiments I used Docker v. 1.3.0 and Openshift V3, which I built from source and includes Kubernetes. ZooKeeper on Docker Managing a ZooKeeper ensemble is definitely not a trivial task. You usually need to configure an odd number of servers and all of the servers need to be aware of each other. This is a PITA on its own, but it gets even more painful when you are working with something as static as docker images. The main difficulty could be expressed as: "How can you create multiple containers out of the same image and have them point to each other?" One approach would be to use docker volumes and provide the configuration externally. This would mean that you have created the configuration for each container, stored it somewhere in the docker host and then pass the configuration to each container as a volume at creation time. I've never tried that myself, I can't tell if its a good or bad practice, I can see some benefits, but I can also see that this is something I am not really excited about. It could look like this: docker run -p 2181:2181 -v /path/to/my/conf:/opt/zookeeper/conf my/zookeeper An other approach would be to pass all the required information as environment variables to the container at creation time and then create a wrapper script which will read the environment variables, modify the configuration files accordingly, launch zookeeper. This is definitely easier to use, but its not that flexible to perform other types of tuning without rebuilding the image itself. Last but not least one could combine the two approaches into one and do something like: Make it possible to provide the base configuration externally using volumes. Use env and scripting to just configure the ensemble. There are plenty of images out there that take one or the other approach. I am more fond of the environment variables approach and since I needed something that would follow some of the kubernetes conventions in terms of naming, I decided to hack an image of my own using the env variables way. Creating a custom image for ZooKeeper I will just focus on the configuration that is required for the ensemble. In order to configure a ZooKeeper ensemble, for each server one has to assign a numeric id and then add in its configuration an entry per zookeeper server, that contains the ip of the server, the peer port of the server and the election port. The server id is added in a file called myid under the dataDir. The rest of the configuration looks like: server.1=server1.example.com:2888:3888 server.2=server2.example.com:2888:3888 server.3=server3.example.com:2888:3888 ... server.current=[bind address]:[peer binding port]:[election biding port]Note that if the server id is X the server.X entry needs to contain the bind ip and ports and not the connection ip and ports. So what we actually need to pass to the container as environment variables are the following: The server id. For each server in the ensemble: The hostname or ip The peer port The election port If these are set, then the script that updates the configuration could look like: if [ ! -z "$SERVER_ID" ]; then echo "$SERVER_ID" > /opt/zookeeper/data/myid #Find the servers exposed in env. for i in `echo {1..15}`;do HOST=`envValue ZK_PEER_${i}_SERVICE_HOST` PEER=`envValue ZK_PEER_${i}_SERVICE_PORT` ELECTION=`envValue ZK_ELECTION_${i}_SERVICE_PORT` if [ "$SERVER_ID" = "$i" ];then echo "server.$i=0.0.0.0:2888:3888" >> conf/zoo.cfg elif [ -z "$HOST" ] || [ -z "$PEER" ] || [ -z "$ELECTION" ] ; then #if a server is not fully defined stop the loop here. break else echo "server.$i=$HOST:$PEER:$ELECTION" >> conf/zoo.cfg fi done fi For simplicity the function that read the keys and values from env are excluded. The complete image and helping scripts to launch zookeeper ensembles of variables size can be found in the fabric8io repository. ZooKeeper on Kubernetes The docker image above, can be used directly with docker, provided that you take care of the environment variables. Now I am going to describe how this image can be used with kubernetes. But first a little rambling... What I really like about using kubernetes with ZooKeeper, is that kubernetes will recreate the container, if it dies or the health check fails. For ZooKeeper this also means that if a container that hosts an ensemble server dies, it will get replaced by a new one. This guarantees that there will be constantly a quorum of ZooKeeper servers. I also like that you don't need to worry about the connection string that the clients will use, if containers come and go. You can use kubernetes services to load balance across all the available servers and you can even expose that outside of kubernetes. Creating a Kubernetes confing for ZooKeeper I'll try to explain how you can create 3 ZooKeeper Server Ensemble in Kubernetes. What we need is 3 docker containers all running ZooKeeper with the right environment variables: { "image": "fabric8/zookeeper", "name": "zookeeper-server-1", "env": [ { "name": "ZK_SERVER_ID", "value": "1" } ], "ports": [ { "name": "zookeeper-client-port", "containerPort": 2181, "protocol": "TCP" }, { "name": "zookeeper-peer-port", "containerPort": 2888, "protocol": "TCP" }, { "name": "zookeeper-election-port", "containerPort": 3888, "protocol": "TCP" } ] } The env needs to specify all the parameters discussed previously. So we need to add along with the ZK_SERVER_ID, the following: ZK_PEER_1_SERVICE_HOST ZK_PEER_1_SERVICE_PORT ZK_ELECTION_1_SERVICE_PORT ZK_PEER_2_SERVICE_HOST ZK_PEER_2_SERVICE_PORT ZK_ELECTION_2_SERVICE_PORT ZK_PEER_3_SERVICE_HOST ZK_PEER_3_SERVICE_PORT ZK_ELECTION_3_SERVICE_PORT An alternative approach could be instead of adding all these manual configuration, to expose peer and election as kubernetes services. I tend to favor the later approach as it can make things simpler when working with multiple hosts. It's also a nice exercise for learning kubernetes. So how do we configure those services? To configure them we need to know: the name of the port the kubernetes pod the provide the service The name of the port is already defined in the previous snippet. So we just need to find out how to select the pod. For this use case, it make sense to have a different pod for each zookeeper server container. So we just need to have a label for each pod, the designates that its a zookeeper server pod and also a label that designates the zookeeper server id. "labels": { "name": "zookeeper-pod", "server": 1 } Something like the above could work. Now we are ready to define the service. I will just show how we can expose the peer port of server with id 1, as a service. The rest can be done in a similar fashion: { "apiVersion": "v1beta1", "creationTimestamp": null, "id": "zk-peer-1", "kind": "Service", "port": 2888, "containerPort": "zookeeper-peer-port", "selector": { "name": "zookeeper-pod", "server": 1 } } The basic idea is that in the service definition, you create a selector which can be used to query/filter pods. Then you define the name of the port to expose and this is pretty much it. Just to clarify, we need a service definition just like the one above per zookeeper server container. And of course we need to do the same for the election port. Finally, we can define an other kind of service, for the client connection port. This time we are not going to specify the sever id, in the selector, which means that all 3 servers will be selected. In this case kubernetes will load balance across all ZooKeeper servers. Since ZooKeeper provides a single system image (it doesn't matter on which server you are connected) then this is pretty handy. { "apiVersion": "v1beta1", "creationTimestamp": null, "id": "zk-client", "kind": "Service", "port": 2181, "createExternalLoadBalancer": "true", "containerPort": "zookeeper-client-port", "selector": { "name": "zookeeper-pod" } } The basic idea is that in the service definition, you create a selector which can be used to query/filter pods. Then you define the name of the port to expose and this is pretty much it. Just to clarify, we need a service definition just like the one above per zookeeper server container. And of course we need to do the same for the election port. Finally, we can define an other kind of service, for the client connection port. This time we are not going to specify the sever id, in the selector, which means that all 3 servers will be selected. In this case kubernetes will load balance across all ZooKeeper servers. Since ZooKeeper provides a single system image (it doesn't matter on which server you are connected) then this is pretty handy. { "apiVersion": "v1beta1", "creationTimestamp": null, "id": "zk-client", "kind": "Service", "port": 2181, "createExternalLoadBalancer": "true", "containerPort": "zookeeper-client-port", "selector": { "name": "zookeeper-pod" } } I hope you found it useful. There is definitely room for improvement so feel free to leave comments.

As memory gets cheaper and cheaper, our applications can keep more data readily available in main memory, or even all as in case of in-memory databases. To make real use of the growing heap memory, appropriate data structures must be used. Interesting enough, there seem to be no specialized implementations for lists - by far the most used collection. This article introduces BigList, a list designed for handling large collections where large means that all data still fit completely in the heap memory. The article will show the special requirements for handling large collections, how BigList is implemented and how it compares to other list implementations. 1. Requirements What are the special requirements we need to handle large collections efficiently? Memory: Sparing use of memory: The list should need little memory for its own implementation so memory can be used for storing application data. Specialized versions for primitives: It must be possible to store common primitives like ints in a memory saving way. Avoid copying large data blocks: If the list grows or shrinks, only a small part of the data must be copied around, as this operation becomes expensive and needs the same amount of memory again. Data sharing: copying collections is a frequent operation which should be efficiently possible even if the collection is large. An efficient implementation requires some sort of data sharing as copying all elements is per se a costly operation. Performance: Good performance for normal operations like reading, storing, adding or removing single elements. Great performance for bulk operations like adding or removing multiple elements. Predictable overhead of operations, so similar operations should need a similar amount of time without excessive worst case scenarios. If an implementation does not offer these features, some operations will not only be slow for really large collections, but will becomse just not feasible because memory or CPU usage will be too exhaustive. Introduction to BigList BigList is a member of the Brownies Collections library which also includes GapList, the fastest list implementation known. GapList is a drop-in replacement for ArrayList, LinkedList, or ArrayDequeue and offers fast access by index and fast insertion/removal at the beginning and at the end at the same time. GapList however has not been designed to cope with large collections, so adding or removing elements can make it necessary to copy a lot of elements around which will lead to performance problems. Also copying a large collection becomes an expensive operation, both in term of time and memory consumption. It will simply not be possible to make a copy of a large collections if not the same amount of memory is available a second time. And this is a common operation as you often want to return a copy of an internal list through your API which has no reference the original list. BigList addresses both problems. The first problem is solved by storing the collection elements in fixed size blocks. Add or remove operations are then implemented to use only data from one block. The copying problem is solved by maintaining a reference count on the fixed size blocks which allows to implement a copy-on-write approach. For efficient access to the fixed size blocks, they are maintained in a specialized tree structure. 2. BigList Details Each BigList instance stores the following information: Elements are stored in in fixed-size blocks A single block is implemented as GapList with a reference count for sharing All blocks are maintained in a tree for fast access Access information for the current block is cached for better performance The following illustration shows these details for two instances of BigList which share one block. 2.1 Use of Blocks Elements are stored in in fixed-size blocks with a default block size of 1000. Where this default may look pretty small, it is most of the time a good choice because it guarantees that write operation only need to move few elements. Read operations will profit from locality of reference by using the currently cached block to be fast. It is however possible to specify the block size for each created BigList instance. All blocks except the first are allocated with this fixed size and will not grow or shrink. The first block will grow to the specified block size to save memory for small lists. If a block has reached its maximum size and more data must be stored within, the block needs to be split up in two blocks before more elements can be stored. If elements are added to the head or tail of the list, the block will only be filled up to a threshold of 95%. This allows inserts into the block without the immediate need for split operations. To save memory, blocks are also merged. This happens automatically if two adjacent blocks are both filled less than 35% after a remove operation. 2.2 Locality of Reference For each operation on BigList, the affected block must be determined first. As predicted by locality of reference, most of the time the affected block will be the same as for the last operation. The implementation of BigList has therefore been designed to profit from locality of reference which makes common operations like iterating over a list very efficient. Instead of always traversing the block tree to determine the block needed for an operation, lower and upper index of the last used block are cached. So if the next operation happens near to the previous one, the same block can be used again without need to traverse the tree. 2.3 Reference Counting To support a copy-on-write approach, BigList stores a reference count for each fixed size blocks indicating whether this block is private or shared. Initially all lists are private having a reference count of 0, so that modification are allowed. If a list is copied, the reference count is incremented which prohibits further modifications. Before a modification then can be made, the block must be copied decrementing the block's reference count and setting the reference count of the copy to 0. The reference count of a block is then decremented by the finalizer of BigList. 3. Benchmarks To prove the excellence of BigList in time and memory consumption, we compare it with some other List implementations. And here are the nominees: Type Library Description BigList brownie-collections List optimized for storing large number of elements. Elements stored in fixed size blocks which are maintained in a tree. GapList brownie-collections Fastest list implementation known. Fast access by index and fast insertion/removal at end and at beginning. ArrayList JDK Maintains elements in a single array. Fast access by index, fast insertion/removal at end, but slow at beginning. LinkedList JDK Elements stored using a linked list. Slow access by index. Memory overhead for each element stored. TreeList commons-collections Elements stored in a tree. All operations are not really fast, but there are no very slow operations. Memory overhead for each element stored. FastTable javolution Elements stored in a "fractal"-like data structure. Good performance and use of memory. However no bulk operations and collection does not shrink. 3.1 Handling Objects In the first part of the benchmark, we compare memory consumption and performance of the different list implementations. Let's first have a look at the memory consumption. The following table shows the bytes used to hold a list with 1'000'000 null elements: BigList GapList ArrayList LinkedList TreeList FastTable 32 bit 4'298'466 4'021'296 4'861'992 8'000'028 18'000'028 4'142'892 64 bit 8'544'254 8'042'552 9'723'964 16'000'044 26'000'044 8'222'988 We can see that BigList, GapList, ArrayList, and FastTable only add small overhead to the stored elements, where as Linkedlist needs twice the memory and TreeList even more. Now to the performance. Here are the results of 9 benchmarks which have been run for each of the 6 candidates with JDK 8 in a 32 bit Windows environment and a list of 1'000'000 elements: The result table can be read as follows: the fastest candidate for each test has a relative performance indicator of 1 the value for the other candidates indicate how many times they have been slower, so a factor of 3 means that this implementation was 3 times slower than the best one The different factor are colored like this: 
factor 1: green (best)
 factor <5: blue (good) 
factor <25: yellow (moderate) 
factor >25: red (poor) If we look the benchmark result, we can see that the performance of BigList is best for all expect two benchmarks. The only moderate result is produces in getting elements in a totally random order. This could be expected as there is no locality of reference which can be exploited, so for each access, the block tree must be traversed to find the correct block. Luckily this is a rare use case in real applications. And the benchmark "Get local" shows that performance is back to good as soon as elements next to each other must be retrieved - as it is the case if we iterate over a range. 3.2 Handling Primitives In the second part of the benchmark, we want see how big the savings are if we use a data structure specialized for storing primitives compared to strong wrapped objects. For this reason, we compare IntBigList and BigList. The following table shows memory needed to store 1'000'000 integer values: BigList IntBigList 32 bit 16'298'454 4'534'840 64 bit 28'544'234 4'570'432 Obviously it is easy to save a lot of memory. In a 32 bit environment, IntBigList just needs 25% percent of memory, in a 64 bit environment only 14%! These figures become plausible if you recall that a simple object needs 8 bytes in a 32 bit, but already 16 bytes in a 64 bit environment, where as a primitive integer value always only needs 4 bytes. The measurable performance gain is not so impressive, it is something below 10% for simple get operations and something above 10% for add and remove operations. These numbers show that the JVM is impressively fast in creating wrapper objects and boxing and unboxing primitive values. We must however also consider that each created object will need to be garbage collected once and therefore adds to the total load of the JVM. 4. Summary BigList is a scalable high-performance list for storing large collections. Its design guarantees that all operations will be predictable and efficient both in term of performance and memory consumption, even copying large collections is tremendous fast. Benchmarks haven proven this and shown that BigList outperform other known list implementations. The library also offers specialized implementations for primitive types like IntBigList which save much memory and provide superior performance. BigList for handling objects and the specializations for handling primitives are part of the Brownies Collections library and can be downloaded from http://www.magicwerk.org/collections.

We can see from javadoc that javax.net.ssl.HttpsURLConnection provided a static method to override withsetDefaultSSLSocketFory() method. This allow you to supply a custom javax.net.ssl.TrustManagerthat may verify your own CA certs handshake and validation etc. But this will override the default for all "https" URLs per your JVM! So how can we override just a single https URL? Looking at javax.net.ssl.HttpsURLConnection again we see instance method for setSSLSocketFactory(), but we can't instantiate HttpsURLConnection object directly! It took me some digging to realized that the java.net.URL is actually an factory class for its implementation! One can get an instance like this using new URL("https://localhost").openConnection() To complete this article, I will provide a simple working example that demonstrate this. package zemian; import java.io.BufferedReader; import java.io.InputStream; import java.io.InputStreamReader; import java.net.URL; import java.net.URLConnection; import java.security.SecureRandom; import java.security.cert.X509Certificate; import javax.net.ssl.HttpsURLConnection; import javax.net.ssl.SSLContext; import javax.net.ssl.SSLSocketFactory; import javax.net.ssl.TrustManager; import javax.net.ssl.X509TrustManager; public class WGetText { public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { String urlString = System.getProperty("url", "https://google.com"); URL url = new URL(urlString); URLConnection urlConnection = url.openConnection(); HttpsURLConnection httpsUrlConnection = (HttpsURLConnection) urlConnection; SSLSocketFactory sslSocketFactory = createSslSocketFactory(); httpsUrlConnection.setSSLSocketFactory(sslSocketFactory); try (InputStream inputStream = httpsUrlConnection.getInputStream()) { BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(inputStream)); String line = null; while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) { System.out.println(line); } } } private static SSLSocketFactory createSslSocketFactory() throws Exception { TrustManager[] byPassTrustManagers = new TrustManager[] { new X509TrustManager() { public X509Certificate[] getAcceptedIssuers() { return new X509Certificate[0]; } public void checkClientTrusted(X509Certificate[] chain, String authType) { } public void checkServerTrusted(X509Certificate[] chain, String authType) { } } }; SSLContext sslContext = SSLContext.getInstance("TLS"); sslContext.init(null, byPassTrustManagers, new SecureRandom()); return sslContext.getSocketFactory(); } }

This article explains how errors are handled when using the messaging system with Spring Integration and how to handle route and redirect to specific channel.

if someone asked you to develop a rest api on the jvm, which frameworks would you use? i was recently tasked with such a project. my client asked me to implement a rest api to ingest requests from a 3rd party. the project entailed consuming xml requests, storing the data in a database, then exposing the data to internal application with a json endpoint. finally, it would allow taking in a json request and turning it into an xml request back to the 3rd party. with the recent release of apache camel 2.14 and my success using it , i started by copying my apache camel / cxf / spring boot project and trimming it down to the bare essentials. i whipped together a simple hello world service using camel and spring mvc. i also integrated swagger into both. both implementations were pretty easy to create ( sample code ), but i decided to use spring mvc. my reasons were simple: its rest support was more mature, i knew it well, and spring mvc test makes it easy to test apis. camel's swagger support without web.xml as part of the aforementioned spike, i learned out how to configure camel's rest and swagger support using spring's javaconfig and no web.xml. i made this into a sample project and put it on github as camel-rest-swagger . this article shows how i built a rest api with java 8, spring boot/mvc, jaxb and spring data (jpa and rest components). i stumbled a few times while developing this project, but figured out how to get over all the hurdles. i hope this helps the team that's now maintaining this project (my last day was friday) and those that are trying to do something similar. xml to java with jaxb the data we needed to ingest from a 3rd party was based on the ncpdp standards. as a member, we were able to download a number of xsd files, put them in our project and generate java classes to handle the incoming/outgoing requests. i used the maven-jaxb2-plugin to generate the java classes. org.jvnet.jaxb2.maven2 maven-jaxb2-plugin 0.8.3 generate -xtostring -xequals -xhashcode -xcopyable org.jvnet.jaxb2_commons jaxb2-basics 0.6.4 src/main/resources/schemas/ncpdp the first error i ran into was about a property already being defined. [info] --- maven-jaxb2-plugin:0.8.3:generate (default) @ spring-app --- [error] error while parsing schema(s).location [ file:/users/mraible/dev/spring-app/src/main/resources/schemas/ncpdp/structures.xsd{1811,48}]. com.sun.istack.saxparseexception2; systemid: file:/users/mraible/dev/spring-app/src/main/resources/schemas/ncpdp/structures.xsd; linenumber: 1811; columnnumber: 48; property "multipletimingmodifierandtimingandduration" is already defined. use to resolve this conflict. at com.sun.tools.xjc.errorreceiver.error(errorreceiver.java:86) i was able to workaround this by upgrading to maven-jaxb2-plugin version 0.9.1. i created a controller and stubbed out a response with hard-coded data. i confirmed the incoming xml-to-java marshalling worked by testing with a sample request provided by our 3rd party customer. i started with a curl command, because it was easy to use and could be run by anyone with the file and curl installed. curl -x post -h 'accept: application/xml' -h 'content-type: application/xml' \ --data-binary @sample-request.xml http://localhost:8080/api/message -v this is when i ran into another stumbling block: the response wasn't getting marshalled back to xml correctly. after some research, i found out this was caused by the lack of @xmlrootelement annotations on my generated classes. i posted a question to stack overflow titled returning jaxb-generated elements from spring boot controller . after banging my head against the wall for a couple days, i figured out the solution . i created a bindings.xjb file in the same directory as my schemas. this causes jaxb to generate @xmlrootelement on classes. to add namespaces prefixes to the returned xml, i had to modify the maven-jaxb2-plugin to add a couple arguments. -extension -xnamespace-prefix and add a dependency: org.jvnet.jaxb2_commons jaxb2-namespace-prefix 1.1 then i modified bindings.xjb to include the package and prefix settings. i also moved into a global setting. i eventually had to add prefixes for all schemas and their packages. i learned how to add prefixes from the namespace-prefix plugins page . finally, i customized the code-generation process to generate joda-time's datetime instead of the default xmlgregoriancalendar . this involved a couple custom xmladapters and a couple additional lines in bindings.xjb . you can see the adapters and bindings.xjb with all necessary prefixes in this gist . nicolas fränkel's customize your jaxb bindings was a great resource for making all this work. i wrote a test to prove that the ingest api worked as desired. @runwith(springjunit4classrunner.class) @springapplicationconfiguration(classes = application.class) @webappconfiguration @dirtiescontext(classmode = dirtiescontext.classmode.after_class) public class initiaterequestcontrollertest { @inject private initiaterequestcontroller controller; private mockmvc mockmvc; @before public void setup() { mockitoannotations.initmocks(this); this.mockmvc = mockmvcbuilders.standalonesetup(controller).build(); } @test public void testgetnotallowedonmessagesapi() throws exception { mockmvc.perform(get("/api/initiate") .accept(mediatype.application_xml)) .andexpect(status().ismethodnotallowed()); } @test public void testpostpainitiationrequest() throws exception { string request = new scanner(new classpathresource("sample-request.xml").getfile()).usedelimiter("\\z").next(); mockmvc.perform(post("/api/initiate") .accept(mediatype.application_xml) .contenttype(mediatype.application_xml) .content(request)) .andexpect(status().isok()) .andexpect(content().contenttype(mediatype.application_xml)) .andexpect(xpath("/message/header/to").string("3rdparty")) .andexpect(xpath("/message/header/sendersoftware/sendersoftwaredeveloper").string("hid")) .andexpect(xpath("/message/body/status/code").string("010")); } } spring data for jpa and rest with jaxb out of the way, i turned to creating an internal api that could be used by another application. spring data was fresh in my mind after reading about it last summer. i created classes for entities i wanted to persist, using lombok's @data to reduce boilerplate. i read the accessing data with jpa guide, created a couple repositories and wrote some tests to prove they worked. i ran into an issue trying to persist joda's datetime and found jadira provided a solution. i added its usertype.core as a dependency to my pom.xml: org.jadira.usertype usertype.core 3.2.0.ga ... and annotated datetime variables accordingly. @column(name = "last_modified", nullable = false) @type(type="org.jadira.usertype.dateandtime.joda.persistentdatetime") private datetime lastmodified; with jpa working, i turned to exposing rest endpoints. i used accessing jpa data with rest as a guide and was looking at json in my browser in a matter of minutes. i was surprised to see a "profile" service listed next to mine, and posted a question to the spring boot team. oliver gierke provided an excellent answer . swagger spring mvc's integration for swagger has greatly improved since i last wrote about it . now you can enable it with a @enableswagger annotation. below is the swaggerconfig class i used to configure swagger and read properties from application.yml . @configuration @enableswagger public class swaggerconfig implements environmentaware { public static final string default_include_pattern = "/api/.*"; private relaxedpropertyresolver propertyresolver; @override public void setenvironment(environment environment) { this.propertyresolver = new relaxedpropertyresolver(environment, "swagger."); } /** * swagger spring mvc configuration */ @bean public swaggerspringmvcplugin swaggerspringmvcplugin(springswaggerconfig springswaggerconfig) { return new swaggerspringmvcplugin(springswaggerconfig) .apiinfo(apiinfo()) .genericmodelsubstitutes(responseentity.class) .includepatterns(default_include_pattern); } /** * api info as it appears on the swagger-ui page */ private apiinfo apiinfo() { return new apiinfo( propertyresolver.getproperty("title"), propertyresolver.getproperty("description"), propertyresolver.getproperty("termsofserviceurl"), propertyresolver.getproperty("contact"), propertyresolver.getproperty("license"), propertyresolver.getproperty("licenseurl")); } } after getting swagger to work, i discovered that endpoints published with @repositoryrestresource aren't picked up by swagger. there is an open issue for spring data support in the swagger-springmvc project. liquibase integration i configured this project to use h2 in development and postgresql in production. i used spring profiles to do this and copied xml/yaml (for maven and application*.yml files) from a previously created jhipster project. next, i needed to create a database. i decided to use liquibase to create tables, rather than hibernate's schema-export. i chose liquibase over flyway based of discussions in the jhipster project . to use liquibase with spring boot is dead simple: add the following dependency to pom.xml, then place changelog files in src/main/resources/db/changelog . org.liquibase liquibase-core i started by using hibernate's schema-export and changing hibernate.ddl-auto to "create-drop" in application-dev.yml . i also commented out the liquibase-core dependency. then i setup a postgresql database and started the app with "mvn spring-boot:run -pprod". i generated the liquibase changelog from an existing schema using the following command (after downloading and installing liquibase). liquibase --driver=org.postgresql.driver --classpath="/users/mraible/.m2/repository/org/postgresql/postgresql/9.3-1102-jdbc41/postgresql-9.3-1102-jdbc41.jar:/users/mraible/snakeyaml-1.11.jar" --changelogfile=/users/mraible/dev/spring-app/src/main/resources/db/changelog/db.changelog-02.yaml --url="jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/mydb" --username=user --password=pass generatechangelog i did find one bug - the generatechangelog command generates too many constraints in version 3.2.2 . i was able to fix this by manually editing the generated yaml file. tip: if you want to drop all tables in your database to verify liquibase creation is working in postgesql, run the following commands: psql -d mydb drop schema public cascade; create schema public; after writing minimal code for spring data and configuring liquibase to create tables/relationships, i relaxed a bit, documented how everything worked and added a loggingfilter . the loggingfilter was handy for viewing api requests and responses. @bean public filterregistrationbean loggingfilter() { loggingfilter filter = new loggingfilter(); filterregistrationbean registrationbean = new filterregistrationbean(); registrationbean.setfilter(filter); registrationbean.seturlpatterns(arrays.aslist("/api/*")); return registrationbean; } accessing api with resttemplate the final step i needed to do was figure out how to access my new and fancy api with resttemplate . at first, i thought it would be easy. then i realized that spring data produces a hal -compliant api, so its content is embedded inside an "_embedded" json key. after much trial and error, i discovered i needed to create a resttemplate with hal and joda-time awareness. @bean public resttemplate resttemplate() { objectmapper mapper = new objectmapper(); mapper.configure(deserializationfeature.fail_on_unknown_properties, false); mapper.registermodule(new jackson2halmodule()); mapper.registermodule(new jodamodule()); mappingjackson2httpmessageconverter converter = new mappingjackson2httpmessageconverter(); converter.setsupportedmediatypes(mediatype.parsemediatypes("application/hal+json")); converter.setobjectmapper(mapper); stringhttpmessageconverter stringconverter = new stringhttpmessageconverter(); stringconverter.setsupportedmediatypes(mediatype.parsemediatypes("application/xml")); list> converters = new arraylist<>(); converters.add(converter); converters.add(stringconverter); return new resttemplate(converters); } the jodamodule was provided by the following dependency: com.fasterxml.jackson.datatype jackson-datatype-joda with the configuration complete, i was able to write a messagesapiitest integration test that posts a request and retrieves it using the api. the api was secured using basic authentication, so it took me a bit to figure out how to make that work with resttemplate. willie wheeler's basic authentication with spring resttemplate was a big help. @runwith(springjunit4classrunner.class) @contextconfiguration(classes = integrationtestconfig.class) public class messagesapiitest { private final static log log = logfactory.getlog(messagesapiitest.class); @value("http://${app.host}/api/initiate") private string initiateapi; @value("http://${app.host}/api/messages") private string messagesapi; @value("${app.host}") private string host; @inject private resttemplate resttemplate; @before public void setup() throws exception { string request = new scanner(new classpathresource("sample-request.xml").getfile()).usedelimiter("\\z").next(); responseentity response = resttemplate.exchange(gettesturl(initiateapi), httpmethod.post, getbasicauthheaders(request), org.ncpdp.schema.transport.message.class, collections.emptymap()); assertequals(httpstatus.ok, response.getstatuscode()); } @test public void testgetmessages() { httpentity request = getbasicauthheaders(null); responseentity> result = resttemplate.exchange(gettesturl(messagesapi), httpmethod.get, request, new parameterizedtypereference>() {}); httpstatus status = result.getstatuscode(); collection messages = result.getbody().getcontent(); log.debug("messages found: " + messages.size()); assertequals(httpstatus.ok, status); for (message message : messages) { log.debug("message.id: " + message.getid()); log.debug("message.datecreated: " + message.getdatecreated()); } } private httpentity getbasicauthheaders(string body) { string plaincreds = "user:pass"; byte[] plaincredsbytes = plaincreds.getbytes(); byte[] base64credsbytes = base64.encodebase64(plaincredsbytes); string base64creds = new string(base64credsbytes); httpheaders headers = new httpheaders(); headers.add("authorization", "basic " + base64creds); headers.add("content-type", "application/xml"); if (body == null) { return new httpentity<>(headers); } else { return new httpentity<>(body, headers); } } } to get spring data to populate the message id, i created a custom restconfig class to expose it. i learned how to do this from tommy ziegler . /** * used to expose ids for resources. */ @configuration public class restconfig extends repositoryrestmvcconfiguration { @override protected void configurerepositoryrestconfiguration(repositoryrestconfiguration config) { config.exposeidsfor(message.class); config.setbaseuri("/api"); } } summary this article explains how i built a rest api using jaxb, spring boot, spring data and liquibase. it was relatively easy to build, but required some tricks to access it with spring's resttemplate. figuring out how to customize jaxb's code generation was also essential to make things work. i started developing the project with spring boot 1.1.7, but upgraded to 1.2.0.m2 after i found it supported log4j2 and configuring spring data rest's base uri in application.yml. when i handed the project off to my client last week, it was using 1.2.0.build-snapshot because of a bug when running in tomcat . this was an enjoyable project to work on. i especially liked how easy spring data makes it to expose jpa entities in an api. spring boot made things easy to configure once again and liquibase seems like a nice tool for database migrations. if someone asked me to develop a rest api on the jvm, which frameworks would i use? spring boot, spring data, jackson, joda-time, lombok and liquibase. these frameworks worked really well for me on this particular project.

I’ve been playing around with Python over the last few days while cleaning up a data set and one thing I wanted to do was translate date strings into a timestamp. I started with a date in this format: date_text = "13SEP2014" So the first step is to translate that into a Python date – the strftime section of the documentation is useful for figuring out which format code is needed: import datetime date_text = "13SEP2014" date = datetime.datetime.strptime(date_text, "%d%b%Y") print(date) $ python dates.py 2014-09-13 00:00:00 The next step was to translate that to a UNIX timestamp. I thought there might be a method or property on the Date object that I could access but I couldn’t find one and so ended up using calendar to do the transformation: import datetime import calendar date_text = "13SEP2014" date = datetime.datetime.strptime(date_text, "%d%b%Y") print(date) print(calendar.timegm(date.utctimetuple())) $ python dates.py 2014-09-13 00:00:00 1410566400 It’s not too tricky so hopefully I shall remember next time.

In my continued playing around with R I’ve sometimes noticed ‘NA’ values in the linear regression models I created but hadn’t really thought about what that meant. On the advice of Peter Huber I recently started working my way through Coursera’s Regression Models which has a whole slide explaining its meaning: So in this case ‘z’ doesn’t help us in predicting Fertility since it doesn’t give us any more information that we can’t already get from ‘Agriculture’ and ‘Education’. Although in this case we know why ‘z’ doesn’t have a coefficient sometimes it may not be clear which other variable the NA one is highly correlated with. Multicollinearity (also collinearity) is a statistical phenomenon in which two or more predictor variables in a multiple regression model are highly correlated, meaning that one can be linearly predicted from the others with a non-trivial degree of accuracy. In that situation we can make use of the alias function to explain the collinearity as suggested in this StackOverflow post: library(datasets); data(swiss); require(stats); require(graphics) z <- swiss$Agriculture + swiss$Education fit = lm(Fertility ~ . + z, data = swiss) > alias(fit) Model : Fertility ~ Agriculture + Examination + Education + Catholic + Infant.Mortality + z Complete : (Intercept) Agriculture Examination Education Catholic Infant.Mortality z 0 1 0 1 0 0 In this case we can see that ‘z’ is highly correlated with both Agriculture and Education which makes sense given its the sum of those two variables. When we notice that there’s an NA coefficient in our model we can choose to exclude that variable and the model will still have the same coefficients as before: > require(dplyr) > summary(lm(Fertility ~ . + z, data = swiss))$coefficients Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|) (Intercept) 66.9151817 10.70603759 6.250229 1.906051e-07 Agriculture -0.1721140 0.07030392 -2.448142 1.872715e-02 Examination -0.2580082 0.25387820 -1.016268 3.154617e-01 Education -0.8709401 0.18302860 -4.758492 2.430605e-05 Catholic 0.1041153 0.03525785 2.952969 5.190079e-03 Infant.Mortality 1.0770481 0.38171965 2.821568 7.335715e-03 > summary(lm(Fertility ~ ., data = swiss))$coefficients Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|) (Intercept) 66.9151817 10.70603759 6.250229 1.906051e-07 Agriculture -0.1721140 0.07030392 -2.448142 1.872715e-02 Examination -0.2580082 0.25387820 -1.016268 3.154617e-01 Education -0.8709401 0.18302860 -4.758492 2.430605e-05 Catholic 0.1041153 0.03525785 2.952969 5.190079e-03 Infant.Mortality 1.0770481 0.38171965 2.821568 7.335715e-03 If we call alias now we won’t see any output: > alias(lm(Fertility ~ ., data = swiss)) Model : Fertility ~ Agriculture + Examination + Education + Catholic + Infant.Mortality

Originally Written by Arunjith Aravindan Percona Toolkit’s pt-table-checksum performs an online replication consistency check by executing checksum queries on the master, which produces different results on replicas that are inconsistent with the master – and the tool pt-table-sync synchronizes data efficiently between MySQL tables. The tools by default use the CRC32. Other good choices include MD5 and SHA1. If you have installed the FNV_64 user-defined function, pt-table-sync will detect it and prefer to use it, because it is much faster than the built-ins. You can also use MURMUR_HASH if you’ve installed that user-defined function. Both of these are distributed with Maatkit. For details please see the tool’s documentation. Below are test cases similar to what you might have encountered. By using the table checksum we can confirm that the two tables are identical and useful to verify a slave server is in sync with its master. The following test cases with pt-table-checksum and pt-table-sync will help you use the tools more accurately. For example, in a master-slave setup we have a table with a primary key on column “a” and a unique key on column “b”. Here the master and slave tables are not in sync and the tables are having two identical values and two distinct values. The pt-table-checksum tool should be able to identify the difference between master and slave and the pt-table-sync in this case should sync the tables with two REPLACE queries. +-----+-----+ +-----+-----+ | a | b | | a | b | +-----+-----+ +-----+-----+ | 2 | 1 | | 2 | 1 | | 1 | 2 | | 1 | 2 | | 4 | 3 | | 3 | 3 | | 3 | 4 | | 4 | 4 | +-----+-----+ +-----+-----+ Case 1: Non-cryptographic Hash function (CRC32) and the Hash collision. The tables in the source and target have two different columns and in general way of thinking the tools should identify the difference. But the below scenarios explain how the tools can be wrongly used and how to avoid them – and make things more consistent and reliable when using the tools in your production. The tools by default use the CRC32 checksums and it is prone to hash collisions. In the below case the non-cryptographic function (CRC32) is not able to identify the two distinct values as the function generates the same value even we are having the distinct values in the tables. CREATE TABLE `t1` ( `a` int(11) NOT NULL, `b` int(11) NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (`a`), UNIQUE KEY `b` (`b`) ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8; Master Slave +-----+-----+ +-----+-----+ | a | b | | a | b | +-----+-----+ +-----+-----+ | 2 | 1 | | 2 | 1 | | 1 | 2 | | 1 | 2 | | 4 | 3 | | 3 | 3 | | 3 | 4 | | 4 | 4 | +-----+-----+ +-----+-----+ Master: [root@localhost mysql]# pt-table-checksum --replicate=percona.checksum --create-replicate-table --databases=db1 --tables=t1 localhost --user=root --password=*** --no-check-binlog-format TS ERRORS DIFFS ROWS CHUNKS SKIPPED TIME TABLE 09-17T00:59:45 0 0 4 1 0 1.081 db1.t1 Slave: [root@localhost bin]# ./pt-table-sync --print --execute --replicate=percona.checksum --tables db1.t1 --user=root --password=*** --verbose --sync-to-master 192.**.**.** # Syncing via replication h=192.**.**.**,p=...,u=root # DELETE REPLACE INSERT UPDATE ALGORITHM START END EXIT DATABASE.TABLE Narrowed down to BIT_XOR: Master: mysql> SELECT BIT_XOR(CAST(CRC32(CONCAT_WS('#', `a`, `b`)) AS UNSIGNED)) FROM `db1`.`t1`; +------------------------------------------------------------+ | BIT_XOR(CAST(CRC32(CONCAT_WS('#', `a`, `b`)) AS UNSIGNED)) | +------------------------------------------------------------+ | 6581445 | +------------------------------------------------------------+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec) Slave: mysql> SELECT BIT_XOR(CAST(CRC32(CONCAT_WS('#', `a`, `b`)) AS UNSIGNED)) FROM `db1`.`t1`; +------------------------------------------------------------+ | BIT_XOR(CAST(CRC32(CONCAT_WS('#', `a`, `b`)) AS UNSIGNED)) | +------------------------------------------------------------+ | 6581445 | +------------------------------------------------------------+ 1 row in set (0.16 sec) Case 2: As the tools are not able to identify the difference, let us add a new row to the slave and check if the tools are able to identify the distinct values. So I am adding a new row (5,5) to the slave. mysql> insert into db1.t1 values(5,5); Query OK, 1 row affected (0.05 sec) Master Slave +-----+-----+ +-----+-----+ | a | b | | a | b | +-----+-----+ +-----+-----+ | 2 | 1 | | 2 | 1 | | 1 | 2 | | 1 | 2 | | 4 | 3 | | 3 | 3 | | 3 | 4 | | 4 | 4 | +-----+-----+ | 5 | 5 | +-----+-----+ [root@localhost mysql]# pt-table-checksum --replicate=percona.checksum --create-replicate-table --databases=db1 --tables=t1 localhost --user=root --password=*** --no-check-binlog-format TS ERRORS DIFFS ROWS CHUNKS SKIPPED TIME TABLE 09-17T01:01:13 0 1 4 1 0 1.054 db1.t1 [root@localhost bin]# ./pt-table-sync --print --execute --replicate=percona.checksum --tables db1.t1 --user=root --password=*** --verbose --sync-to-master 192.**.**.** # Syncing via replication h=192.**.**.**,p=...,u=root # DELETE REPLACE INSERT UPDATE ALGORITHM START END EXIT DATABASE.TABLE DELETE FROM `db1`.`t1` WHERE `a`='5' LIMIT 1 /*percona-toolkit src_db:db1 src_tbl:t1 src_dsn:P=3306,h=192.**.**.**. 10,p=...,u=root dst_db:db1 dst_tbl:t1 dst_dsn:h=192.**.**.**,p=...,u=root lock:1 transaction:1 changing_src:percona.checksum replicate:percona.checksum bidirectional:0 pid:5205 user:root host:localhost.localdomain*/; REPLACE INTO `db1`.`t1`(`a`, `b`) VALUES ('3', '4') /*percona-toolkit src_db:db1 src_tbl:t1 src_dsn:P=3306,h=192.**.**.**, p=...,u=root dst_db:db1 dst_tbl:t1 dst_dsn:h=192.**.**.**,p=...,u=root lock:1 transaction:1 changing_src:percona.checksum replicate:percona.checksum bidirectional:0 pid:5205 user:root host:localhost.localdomain*/; REPLACE INTO `db1`.`t1`(`a`, `b`) VALUES ('4', '3') /*percona-toolkit src_db:db1 src_tbl:t1 src_dsn:P=3306,h=192.**.**.**, p=...,u=root dst_db:db1 dst_tbl:t1 dst_dsn:h=192.**.**.**,p=...,u=root lock:1 transaction:1 changing_src:percona.checksum replicate:percona.checksum bidirectional:0 pid:5205 user:root host:localhost.localdomain*/; # 1 2 0 0 Chunk 01:01:43 01:01:43 2 db1.t1 Well, apparently the tools are now able to identify the newly added row in the slave and the two other rows having the difference. Case 3: Advantage of Cryptographic Hash functions (Ex: Secure MD5) As such let us make the tables as in the case1 and ask the tools to use the cryptographic (secure MD5) hash functions instead the usual non-cryptographic function. The default CRC32 function provides no security due to their simple mathematical structure and too prone to hash collisions but the MD5 provides better level of integrity. So let us try with the –function=md5 and see the result. Master Slave +-----+-----+ +-----+-----+ | a | b | | a | b | +-----+-----+ +-----+-----+ | 2 | 1 | | 2 | 1 | | 1 | 2 | | 1 | 2 | | 4 | 3 | | 3 | 3 | | 3 | 4 | | 4 | 4 | +-----+-----+ +-----+-----+ Narrowed down to BIT_XOR: Master: mysql> SELECT 'test', 't2', '1', NULL, NULL, NULL, COUNT(*) AS cnt, COALESCE(LOWER(CONCAT(LPAD(CONV(BIT_XOR(CAST(CONV(SUBSTRING (@crc, 1, 16), 16, 10) AS UNSIGNED)), 10, 16), 16, '0'), LPAD(CONV(BIT_XOR(CAST(CONV(SUBSTRING(@crc := md5(CONCAT_WS('#', `a`, `b`)) , 17, 16), 16, 10) AS UNSIGNED)), 10, 16), 16, '0'))), 0) AS crc FROM `db1`.`t1`; +------+----+---+------+------+------+-----+----------------------------------+ | test | t2 | 1 | NULL | NULL | NULL | cnt | crc | +------+----+---+------+------+------+-----+----------------------------------+ | test | t2 | 1 | NULL | NULL | NULL | 4 | 000000000000000063f65b71e539df48 | +------+----+---+------+------+------+-----+----------------------------------+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec) Slave: mysql> SELECT 'test', 't2', '1', NULL, NULL, NULL, COUNT(*) AS cnt, COALESCE(LOWER(CONCAT(LPAD(CONV(BIT_XOR(CAST(CONV(SUBSTRING (@crc, 1, 16), 16, 10) AS UNSIGNED)), 10, 16), 16, '0'), LPAD(CONV(BIT_XOR(CAST(CONV(SUBSTRING(@crc := md5(CONCAT_WS('#', `a`, `b`)) , 17, 16), 16, 10) AS UNSIGNED)), 10, 16), 16, '0'))), 0) AS crc FROM `db1`.`t1`; +------+----+---+------+------+------+-----+----------------------------------+ | test | t2 | 1 | NULL | NULL | NULL | cnt | crc | +------+----+---+------+------+------+-----+----------------------------------+ | test | t2 | 1 | NULL | NULL | NULL | 4 | 0000000000000000df024e1a4a32c31f | +------+----+---+------+------+------+-----+----------------------------------+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec) [root@localhost mysql]# pt-table-checksum --replicate=percona.checksum --create-replicate-table --function=md5 --databases=db1 --tables=t1 localhost --user=root --password=*** --no-check-binlog-format TS ERRORS DIFFS ROWS CHUNKS SKIPPED TIME TABLE 09-23T23:57:52 0 1 12 1 0 0.292 db1.t1 [root@localhost bin]# ./pt-table-sync --print --execute --replicate=percona.checksum --tables db1.t1 --user=root --password=amma --verbose --function=md5 --sync-to-master 192.***.***.*** # Syncing via replication h=192.168.56.102,p=...,u=root # DELETE REPLACE INSERT UPDATE ALGORITHM START END EXIT DATABASE.TABLE REPLACE INTO `db1`.`t1`(`a`, `b`) VALUES ('3', '4') /*percona-toolkit src_db:db1 src_tbl:t1 src_dsn:P=3306,h=192.168.56.101,p=..., u=root dst_db:db1 dst_tbl:t1 dst_dsn:h=192.***.***.***,p=...,u=root lock:1 transaction:1 changing_src:percona.checksum replicate:percona.checksum bidirectional:0 pid:5608 user:root host:localhost.localdomain*/; REPLACE INTO `db1`.`t1`(`a`, `b`) VALUES ('4', '3') /*percona-toolkit src_db:db1 src_tbl:t1 src_dsn:P=3306,h=192.168.56.101,p=..., u=root dst_db:db1 dst_tbl:t1 dst_dsn:h=192.***.**.***,p=...,u=root lock:1 transaction:1 changing_src:percona.checksum replicate:percona.checksum bidirectional:0 pid:5608 user:root host:localhost.localdomain*/; # 0 2 0 0 Chunk 04:46:04 04:46:04 2 db1.t1 Master Slave +-----+-----+ +-----+-----+ | a | b | | a | b | +-----+-----+ +-----+-----+ | 2 | 1 | | 2 | 1 | | 1 | 2 | | 1 | 2 | | 4 | 3 | | 4 | 3 | | 3 | 4 | | 3 | 4 | +-----+-----+ +-----+-----+ The MD5 did the trick and solved the problem. See the BIT_XOR result for the MD5 given above and the function is able to identify the distinct values in the tables and resulted with the different crc values. The MD5 (Message-Digest algorithm 5) is a well-known cryptographic hash function with a 128-bit resulting hash value. MD5 is widely used in security-related applications, and is also frequently used to check the integrity but MD5() and SHA1() are very CPU-intensive with slower checksumming if chunk-time is included.

In this article, we learn how to utilize AngularJS's array filter features in a variety of use cases. Read on to get started.

I prefer OpenCSV for CSV parsing in Java. That library also supports parsing of tab delimited files, here's how: Just a quick gist: import au.com.bytecode.opencsv.CSVReader; public class LoadTest { @Test public void testLoad(String row) throws IOException, JobNotFoundException, InterruptedException { CSVReader reader = new CSVReader(new FileReader("/Users/bone/Desktop/foo_data.tab"), '\t'); String[] record; while ((record = reader.readNext()) != null) { for (String value : record) { System.out.println(value); // Debug only } } } }

As part of a project to create a GPU based reaction diffusion simulation, I stated to look at using Metal in Swift this weekend. I've done similar work in the past targeting the Flash Player and using AGAL. Metal is a far higher level language than AGAL: it's based on C++ with a richer syntax and includes compute functions. Whereas in AGAL, to run cellular automata, I'd create a rectangle out of two triangles with a vertex shader and execute the reaction diffusion functions in a separate fragment shader, a compute shader is more direct: I can get and set textures and it can operate of individual pixels of that texture without the need for a vertex shader. The Swift code I discuss in this article is based heavily on two articles at Metal By Example: Introduction to Compute Programming in Metal and Fundamentals of Image Processing in Metal. Both of which include Objective-C source code, so hopefully my Swift implementation will help some. My application has four main steps: initialise Metal, create a Metal texture from a UIImage, apply a kernel function to that texture, convert the newly generated texture back into a UIImage and display it. I'm using a simple example shader that changes the saturation of the input image. so I've also added a slider that changes the saturation value. Let's look at each step one by one: Initialising Metal Initialising Metal is pretty simple: inside my view controller's overridden viewDidLoad(), I create a pointer to the default Metal device: var device: MTLDevice! = nil [...] device = MTLCreateSystemDefaultDevice() I also need to create a library and command queue: defaultLibrary = device.newDefaultLibrary() commandQueue = device.newCommandQueue() Finally, I add a reference to my Metal function to the library and synchronously create and compile a compute pipeline state: et kernelFunction = defaultLibrary.newFunctionWithName("kernelShader") pipelineState = device.newComputePipelineStateWithFunction(kernelFunction!, error: nil) The kernelShader points to the saturation image processing function, written in Metal, that lives in my Shaders.metal file: kernel void kernelShader(texture2d inTexture [[texture(0)]], texture2d outTexture [[texture(1)]], constant AdjustSaturationUniforms &uniforms [[buffer(0)]], uint2 gid [[thread_position_in_grid]]) { float4 inColor = inTexture.read(gid); float value = dot(inColor.rgb, float3(0.299, 0.587, 0.114)); float4 grayColor(value, value, value, 1.0); float4 outColor = mix(grayColor, inColor, uniforms.saturationFactor); outTexture.write(outColor, gid); } Creating a Metal Texture from a UIIMage There are a few steps in converting a UIImage into a MTLTexture instance. I create an array of UInt8 to hold an emptyCGBitmapInfo, then use CGContextDrawImage() to copy the image into a bitmap context let image = UIImage(named: "grand_canyon.jpg") let imageRef = image.CGImage let imageWidth = CGImageGetWidth(imageRef) let imageHeight = CGImageGetHeight(imageRef) let bytesPerRow = bytesPerPixel * imageWidth var rawData = [UInt8](count: Int(imageWidth * imageHeight * 4), repeatedValue: 0) let bitmapInfo = CGBitmapInfo(CGBitmapInfo.ByteOrder32Big.toRaw() | CGImageAlphaInfo.PremultipliedLast.toRaw()) let context = CGBitmapContextCreate(&rawData, imageWidth, imageHeight, bitsPerComponent, bytesPerRow, rgbColorSpace, bitmapInfo) CGContextDrawImage(context, CGRectMake(0, 0, CGFloat(imageWidth), CGFloat(imageHeight)), imageRef) Once all of those steps have executed, I can create a new texture use its replaceRegion() method to write the image into it: let textureDescriptor = MTLTextureDescriptor.texture2DDescriptorWithPixelFormat(MTLPixelFormat.RGBA8Unorm, width: Int(imageWidth), height: Int(imageHeight), mipmapped: true) texture = device.newTextureWithDescriptor(textureDescriptor) let region = MTLRegionMake2D(0, 0, Int(imageWidth), Int(imageHeight)) texture.replaceRegion(region, mipmapLevel: 0, withBytes: &rawData, bytesPerRow: Int(bytesPerRow)) I also create an empty texture which the kernel function will write into: let outTextureDescriptor = MTLTextureDescriptor.texture2DDescriptorWithPixelFormat(texture.pixelFormat, width: texture.width, height: texture.height, mipmapped: false) outTexture = device.newTextureWithDescriptor(outTextureDescriptor) Invoking the Kernel Function The next block of work is to set the textures and another variable on the kerne function and execute the shader. The first step is to instantiate a command buffer and command encoder: let commandBuffer = commandQueue.commandBuffer() let commandEncoder = commandBuffer.computeCommandEncoder() ...then set the pipeline state (we got from device.newComputePipelineStateWithFunction() earlier) and textures on the command encoder: commandEncoder.setComputePipelineState(pipelineState) commandEncoder.setTexture(texture, atIndex: 0) commandEncoder.setTexture(outTexture, atIndex: 1) The filter requires an addition parameter that defines the saturation amount. This is passed into the shader via anMTLBuffer. To populate the buffer, I've created a small struct: struct AdjustSaturationUniforms { var saturationFactor: Float } Then newBufferWithBytes() to pass in my saturationFactor float value: var saturationFactor = AdjustSaturationUniforms(saturationFactor: self.saturationFactor) var buffer: MTLBuffer = device.newBufferWithBytes(&saturationFactor, length: sizeof(AdjustSaturationUniforms), options: nil) commandEncoder.setBuffer(buffer, offset: 0, atIndex: 0) This is now accessible inside the shader as an argument to its kernel function: constant AdjustSaturationUniforms &uniforms [[buffer(0)]] Now I'm ready invoke the function itself. Metal kernel functions use thread groups to break up their workload into chunks. In my example, I create 64 thread groups, then send them off to the GPU: let threadGroupCount = MTLSizeMake(8, 8, 1) let threadGroups = MTLSizeMake(texture.width / threadGroupCount.width, texture.height / threadGroupCount.height, 1) commandQueue = device.newCommandQueue() commandEncoder.dispatchThreadgroups(threadGroups, threadsPerThreadgroup: threadGroupCount) commandEncoder.endEncoding() commandBuffer.commit() commandBuffer.waitUntilCompleted() Converting the Texture to a UIImage Finally, now that the kernel function has executed, we need to do the reverse of above and get the image held inoutTexture into a UIImage so it can be displayed. Again, I use a region to define the size and the texture's getBytes() to populate an array on UInt8: let imageSize = CGSize(width: texture.width, height: texture.height) let imageByteCount = Int(imageSize.width * imageSize.height * 4) let bytesPerRow = bytesPerPixel * UInt(imageSize.width) var imageBytes = [UInt8](count: imageByteCount, repeatedValue: 0) let region = MTLRegionMake2D(0, 0, Int(imageSize.width), Int(imageSize.height)) outTexture.getBytes(&imageBytes, bytesPerRow: Int(bytesPerRow), fromRegion: region, mipmapLevel: 0) Now that imageBytes holds the raw data, it's a few lines to create a CGImage: let providerRef = CGDataProviderCreateWithCFData( NSData(bytes: &imageBytes, length: imageBytes.count * sizeof(UInt8)) ) let bitmapInfo = CGBitmapInfo(CGBitmapInfo.ByteOrder32Big.toRaw() | CGImageAlphaInfo.PremultipliedLast.toRaw()) let renderingIntent = kCGRenderingIntentDefault let imageRef = CGImageCreate(UInt(imageSize.width), UInt(imageSize.height), bitsPerComponent, bitsPerPixel, bytesPerRow, rgbColorSpace, bitmapInfo, providerRef, nil, false, renderingIntent) imageView.image = UIImage(CGImage: imageRef) ...and we're done! Metal requires an A7 or A8 processor and this code has been built and tested under Xcode 6. All the source code is available at my GitHub repository here.

introduction in this tutorial, the apache lucene and apache tika frameworks will be explained through their core concepts (e.g. parsing, mime detection, content analysis, indexing, scoring, boosting) via illustrative examples that should be applicable to not only seasoned software developers but to beginners to content analysis and programming as well. we assume you have a working knowledge of the java™ programming language and plenty of content to analyze. throughout this tutorial, you will learn: how to use apache tika's api and its most relevant functions how to develop code with apache lucene api and its most important modules how to integrate apache lucene and apache tika in order to build your own piece of software that stores and retrieves information efficiently. (project code is available for download) what are lucene and tika? according to apache lucene's site, apache lucene represents an open source java library for indexing and searching from within large collections of documents. the index size represents roughly 20-30% the size of text indexed and the search algorithms provide features like: ranked searching - best results returned first many powerful query types: phrase queries, wildcard queries, proximity queries, range queries and more. in this tutorial we will demonstrate only phrase queries. fielded search (e.g. title, author, contents) sorting by any field flexible faceting, highlighting, joins and result grouping pluggable ranking models, including the vector space model and okapi bm25 but lucene's main purpose is to deal directly with text and we want to manipulate documents, who have various formats and encoding. for parsing document content and their properties the apache tika library it is necessary. apache tika is a library that provides a flexible and robust set of interfaces that can be used in any context where metadata analyzis and structured text extraction is needed. the key component of apache tika is the parser (org.apache.tika.parser.parser ) interface because it hides the complexity of different file formats while providing a simple and powerful mechanism to extract structured text content and metadata from all sorts of documents. criterias for tika parsing design streamed parsing the interface should require neither the client application nor the parser implementation to keep the full document content in memory or spooled to disk. this allows even huge documents to be parsed without excessive resource requirements. structured content a parser implementation should be able to include structural information (headings, links, etc.) in the extracted content. a client application can use this information for example to better judge the relevance of different parts of the parsed document. input metadata a client application should be able to include metadata like the file name or declared content type with the document to be parsed. the parser implementation can use this information to better guide the parsing process. output metadata a parser implementation should be able to return document metadata in addition to document content. many document formats contain metadata like the name of the author that may be useful to client applications. context sensitivity while the default settings and behaviour of tika parsers should work well for most use cases, there are still situations where more fine-grained control over the parsing process is desirable. it should be easy to inject such context-specific information to the parsing process without breaking the layers of abstraction. requirements maven 2.0 or higher java 1.6 se or higher lesson 1: automate metadata extraction from any file type our premisses are the following: we have a collection of documents stored on disk/database and we would like to index them; these documents can be word documents, pdfs, htmls, plain text files etc. as we are developers, we would like to write reusable code that extracts file properties regarding format (metadata) and file content. apache tika has a mimetype repository and a set of schemes (any combination of mime magic, url patterns, xml root characters, or file extensions) to determine if a particular file, url, or piece of content matches one of its known types. if the content does match, tika has detected its mimetype and can proceed to select the appropriate parser. in the sample code, the file type detection and its parsing is being covered inside the class com.retriever.lucene.index.indexcreator , method indexfile. listing 1.1 analyzing a file with tika public static documentwithabstract indexfile(analyzer analyzer, file file) throws ioexception { metadata metadata = new metadata(); contenthandler handler = new bodycontenthandler(10 * 1024 * 1024); parsecontext context = new parsecontext(); parser parser = new autodetectparser(); inputstream stream = new fileinputstream(file); //open stream try { parser.parse(stream, handler, metadata, context); //parse the stream } catch (tikaexception e) { e.printstacktrace(); } catch (saxexception e) { e.printstacktrace(); } finally { stream.close(); //close the stream } //more code here } the above code displays how a file it is being parsed using org.apache.tika.parser.autodetectparser; this kind of implementation was chosen because we would like to achieve parsing documents disregarding their format. also, for handling the content the org.apache.tika.sax.bodycontenthandler wasconstructed with a writelimit given as parameter ( 10*1024*1024); this type of constructor creates a content handler that writes xhtml body character events to an internal string buffer and in case of documents with large content is less likely to throw a saxexception (thrown when the default write limit is reached). as a result of our parsing we have obtained a metadata object that we can now use to detect file properties (title or any other header specific to a document format). metadata processing can be done as described below ( com.retriever.lucene.index.indexcreator , method indexfiledescriptors) : listing 1.2 processing metadata private static document indexfiledescriptors(string filename, metadata metadata) { document doc = new document(); //store file name in a separate textfield doc.add(new textfield(isearchconstants.field_file, filename, store.yes)); for (string key : metadata.names()) { string name = key.tolowercase(); string value = metadata.get(key); if (stringutils.isblank(value)) { continue; } if ("keywords".equalsignorecase(key)) { for (string keyword : value.split(",?(\\s+)")) { doc.add(new textfield(name, keyword, store.yes)); } } else if (isearchconstants.field_title.equalsignorecase(key)) { doc.add(new textfield(name, value, store.yes)); } else { doc.add(new textfield(name, filename, store.no)); } } in the method presented above we store the file name in a separate field and also the document's title ( a document can have a title different from its file name); we are not interested in storing other informations.

introduction i had an interesting conversation today about the cost of using string concatenation in log statements. in particular, debug log statements often need to print out parameters or the current value of variables, so they need to build the log message dynamically. so you wind up with something like this: logger.debug("parameters: " + param1 + "; " + param2); the issue arises when debug logging is turned off. inside the logger.debug() statement a flag is checked and the method returns immediately; this is generally pretty fast. but the string concatenation had to occur to build the parameter prior to calling the method, so you still pay its cost. since debug tends to be turned off in production, this is the time when this difference matters. for this reason, we have pretty much all been trained to do this: if (logger.isdebugenabled()) { logger.debug("parameters: " + param1 + "; " + param2); } the discussion was about how much difference this “good practice” makes. caliper this kind of question is perfect for a micro benchmark. my own favorite tool for this purpose is caliper . caliper runs small snippets of code enough times to average out variations. it passes in a number of repetitions, which it calculates in order to make sure that the whole method takes long enough to measure given the resolution of the system clock. caliper also detects garbage collection and hotspot compiling that might impact the accuracy of the tests. caliper uploads results to a google app engine application. its sign-in supports google logins and issues an api key that can be used to organize results and list them. a typical timing methods looks like this: public string timemultstringnocheck(long reps) { for (int i = 0; i < reps; i++) { logger.debug(strings[0] + " " + strings[1] + " " + strings[2] + " " + strings[3] + " " + strings[4]); } return strings[0]; } the return string is not used; it is included in the method solely to ensure that java does not optimize away the method. similarly, the content of the variables used should be randomly generated to avoid compile-time optimization. the full example is available in one of my github repositories , in the org.anvard.introtojava.log package. results the outcome is pretty interesting. string concatenation creates a pretty significant penalty, around two orders of magnitude for our example that concatenates five strings. interesting is that even in the case where we do not use string concatenation (i.e. the simplestring methods), the penalty is around 4x. this is probably the time spent pushing the string parameter onto the stack. the examples with doubles, using string.format() , is even more extreme, four orders of magnitude. the elapsed time here about 4ms, large enough that if the log statement were in a commonly used method, the performance hit would be noticeable. the final method, multstringparams , uses a feature that is available in the slf4j api. it works similarly to string.format() , but in a simple token replace fashion. most importantly, it does not perform the token replace unless the logging level is enabled. this makes this form just as fast as the “check” forms, but in a more compact form. of course, this only works if no special formatting is needed of the log string, or if the formatting can be shifted to a method such as tostring() . what is especially surprising is that this method did not show a penalty in building the object array necessary to pass the parameters into the method. this may have been optimized out by the java runtime since there was no chance of the parameters being used. conclusion the practice of checking whether a logging level is enabled before building the log statement is certainly worthwhile and should be something teams check during peer review.