Testing is a major part of our development process. After working with JUnit for some time we leaned back and thought: How can we improve our test productivity? Since we were all fond of Scala we looked at ScalaTest. We liked it from the start so we decided to go with ScalaTest for all new tests. Sure enough there were and are critics in the team who say “I just want to write my tests without having to bother with a new technology…” to convince even the last person on the team I will give you my top 5 reasons to choose ScalaTest over JUnit. 1. Multiple Comparisons Simple yet very nice is that you can do multiple comparisons for a single object. Say we have a list of books. Now we want to assure that the list contains exactly one book which is our book “Ruling the Universe”. The test code allows us to express it just like that: books should { not be empty and have size 1 and contain rulingTheUniverse } 2. Great DSLs There are many great DSLs to make the test code much shorter and nicer to read. These DSLs for Scala are much more powerful that those for Java. I will give you just two small examples for Mockito and Selenium. Mockito Sugar Say I have a book mock and I want to to check that the method publish has been called exactly once but I don’t care with which arguments. So here you go: val book = mock[Book] book expects 'publish withArgs (*) once Selenium We want to open our application in the browser check the title is “Aweseome Books” and then click on the link to explore books. With the Selenium DSL this is expressed like that: go to "http://localhost/book_app/index.html") pageTitle should be ("Awesome Books") click on linkText("Explore ...”) 3. Powerful Matchers Who needs assertions when you can have matchers? When I started out with ScalaTest I used a lot of assertions because thats what I knew. When I discovered matchers I started to use those as they are much more powerful and have a great syntax which allows you to write your test code very close to the what you actually want to express. I will give just a few examples to give you a first impression of just what you can do with matchers: Array(3,2,1) should have size 3// check the size of an array string should include regex "wo.ld"// check string against regular expression temp should be a 'file // check that temp is a file 4. Tag support JUnit has categories and ScalaTest has tags. You can tag your tests as you like and the execute only tests with certain tags or do other stuff with the tags. And that’s how you tag a test as “DbTest” and “SlowTest”: it must "save the book correctly"taggedAs(SlowTest, DbTest) in { // call to database } 5. JavaBean-style checking of object properties Say you have a book object with properties such as title and authors. Then you write a test where you want to verify the title is “Ruling the Universe” and it was published in 2012. In JUnit you write assertions like assertEquals(“Ruling the Universe”, book.getTitle()) and you need another assertion for the publication year. ScalaTest allows for JavaBean-style checking of object properties. So in ScalaTest you can declare the expected values for properties of an object. Instead of the assertions you write the property title of the book should be “Ruling the Universe” and the property publicationYear should be 2012. And thats how this looks in ScalaTest: book should have ( ‘title ("Ruling the Universe"), ‘author (List("Zaphod", "Ford")), ‘publicationYear (2012) ) Are you willing to give ScalaTest a try? You should. I like it more and more with every test I write and maybe you will too!

Sometimes we want to use Hibernate native SQL in our code. For example we might need to invoke a selectable stored procedure, we cannot invoke in another way. To invoke a native SQL query we use the method createSQLQuery() which is available from the Hibernate session object. In our Grails code we must then first get access to the current Hibernate session. Luckily we only have to inject the sessionFactory bean in our Grails service or controller. To get the current session we invoke the getCurrentSession() method and we are ready to execute a native SQL query. The query itself is defined as a String value and we can use placeholders for variables, just like with other Hibernate queries. In the following sample we create a new Grails service and use a Hibernate native SQL query to execute a selectable stored procedure with the nameorganisation_breadcrumbs. This stored procedure takes one argument startId and will return a list of results with an id, name and level column. // File: grails-app/services/com/mrhaki/grails/OrganisationService.groovy package com.mrhaki.grails import com.mrhaki.grails.Organisation class OrganisationService { // Auto inject SessionFactory we can use // to get the current Hibernate session. def sessionFactory List breadcrumbs(final Long startOrganisationId) { // Get the current Hiberante session. final session = sessionFactory.currentSession // Query string with :startId as parameter placeholder. final String query = 'select id, name, level from organisation_breadcrumbs(:startId) order by level desc' // Create native SQL query. final sqlQuery = session.createSQLQuery(query) // Use Groovy with() method to invoke multiple methods // on the sqlQuery object. final results = sqlQuery.with { // Set domain class as entity. // Properties in domain class id, name, level will // be automatically filled. addEntity(Organisation) // Set value for parameter startId. setLong('startId', startOrganisationId) // Get all results. list() } results } } In the sample code we use the addEntity() method to map the query results to the domain class Organisation. To transform the results from a query to other objects we can use the setResultTransformer() method. Hibernate (and therefore Grails if we use the Hibernate plugin) already has a set of transformers we can use. For example with the org.hibernate.transform.AliasToEntityMapResultTransformer each result row is transformed into a Map where the column aliases are the keys of the map. // File: grails-app/services/com/mrhaki/grails/OrganisationService.groovy package com.mrhaki.grails import org.hibernate.transform.AliasToEntityMapResultTransformer class OrganisationService { def sessionFactory List> breadcrumbs(final Long startOrganisationId) { final session = sessionFactory.currentSession final String query = 'select id, name, level from organisation_breadcrumbs(:startId) order by level desc' final sqlQuery = session.createSQLQuery(query) final results = sqlQuery.with { // Assign result transformer. // This transformer will map columns to keys in a map for each row. resultTransformer = AliasToEntityMapResultTransformer.INSTANCE setLong('startId', startOrganisationId) list() } results } } Finally we can execute a native SQL query and handle the raw results ourselves using the Groovy Collection API enhancements. The result of thelist() method is a List of Object[] objects. In the following sample we use Groovy syntax to handle the results: // File: grails-app/services/com/mrhaki/grails/OrganisationService.groovy package com.mrhaki.grails class OrganisationService { def sessionFactory List> breadcrumbs(final Long startOrganisationId) { final session = sessionFactory.currentSession final String query = 'select id, name, level from organisation_breadcrumbs(:startId) order by level desc' final sqlQuery = session.createSQLQuery(query) final queryResults = sqlQuery.with { setLong('startId', startOrganisationId) list() } // Transform resulting rows to a map with key organisationName. final results = queryResults.collect { resultRow -> [organisationName: resultRow[1]] } // Or to only get a list of names. //final List names = queryResults.collect { it[1] } results } } Code written with Grails 2.3.7.

IntelliJ IDEA 13 added the Terminal tool window to the IDE. We can open a terminal window with Tools | Open Terminal.... To change the font of the terminal we must open the preferences and select IDE Settings | Editor | Colors & Fonts | Console Font. Here we can choose a font and change the font size:

As businesses accelerate their move toward making B2E applications available to employees on mobile devices, the subject of mobile application security is getting more attention. Mobile Device Management (MDM) solutions are being deployed in the largest enterprises - but there are still application-level security issues that are important to consider. Furthermore, medium size businesses are moving to mobilize their applications prior to having a formalized MDM solution or policy in place. A key element of a mobile app strategy is whether to go Native, Hybrid, or pure HTML5. As an early proponent of HTML5 platforms, Gizmox has been thinking about the security angle of HTML5 applications for a long time. In a recent webinar, we discussed 4 ways that HTML5 - done right - can be more secure than native apps. 1. Applications should leverage HTML5's basic security model HTML5 represents a revolutionary step for HTML-based browsers as the first truly cross-platform technology for rich, interactive applications. It has earned endorsements by all the major IT vendors (e.g. Google, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, etc...). Security of applications and websites has been a consideration from the start of HTML5 development. The first element of the security model is that HTML5 applications live within the secure shell of the browser sandbox. Application code is to a large degree insulated from the device. The browser's interaction with the device and any other application on the device is highly limited. This makes it difficult for HTML5 application code to influence other applications/data on the device or for other applications to interact with the application running on the browser. The second element is that, built correctly, HTML5 thin clients are "secure by design." Application logic running on the server insultates sensitive intellectual property from the client. Proper design strategies would include minimal or no data caching; keeping tokens, passwords, credentials, and security profiles on the server; minimizing logic on the client - focusing on pure UI interaction with the server. Finally, HTML5 apps should be architected to ensure that no data is left behind in cache. 2. HTML5 apps can be containerized within secure browsers Secure browsers are just one element of MDM that can be deployed on their own to enhance application security. HTML5 application security can be extended with the use of secure browsers that restrict access to enterprise-approved URLs, prevent cross-site scripting, and integrate with company VPNs. Furthermore, secure browsers further harden the interaction between HTML5 applications and the device, the device OS and other applciations on the device. 3. Integration with Mobile Device Management MDM solutions play a variety of security roles including application inventory management (i.e. who gets access to what on which device), application distribution (i.e. through enterprise app store), implementation of security standards (e.g. passwords, encryption, VPN, authentication, etc...), and implemetation of enterprise access control policies. While MDM was in part conceived to enable secure distribution and control of native applications, HTML5 apps can be managed and further secured as well. While full MDM solutions are not required for HTML5 security, HTML5 apps can be integrated into a broader mobile security strategy that incorporates MDM. 4. HTML5 was conceived for the BYOD world The complexity of managing security for native apps gets multiplied as application variants are created for different mobile device form factors and operating systems. With cross-platform HTML5 applications that run on any desktop, tablet, or smartphone, security strategy is implemented and controlled centrally. Updates and security fixes are implemented on the server and there are no concerns with users not applying updates to the apps on their devices. There are many reasons to evaluate HTML5 as the platform for mobile business applications. Security of HTML5 apps (built with good practices and leveraging a full platform like Visual WebGui) is a particularly compelling reason to consider. Check out this slide share from recent webinar on HTML5 security strategies. Security strategies for html5 enterprise mobile apps from Gizmox

Digital signing is a widely used mechanism to make digital contents authentic. By producing a digital signature for some content, we can let another party capable of validating that content. It can provide a guarantee that, is not altered after we signed it, with this validation. With this sample I am to share how to generate the a signature for SOAP envelope. But of course this is valid for any other content signing as well. Here, I will sign The SOAP envelope itself An attachment Place the signature inside SOAP header With the placement of signature inside the SOAP header which is also signed by the signature, this becomes a demonstration of enveloped signature. I am using Apache Santuario library for signing. Following is the code segment I used. I have shared the complete sample here to to be downloaded. public static void main(String unused[]) throws Exception { String keystoreType = "JKS"; String keystoreFile = "src/main/resources/PushpalankaKeystore.jks"; String keystorePass = "pushpalanka"; String privateKeyAlias = "pushpalanka"; String privateKeyPass = "pushpalanka"; String certificateAlias = "pushpalanka"; File signatureFile = new File("src/main/resources/signature.xml"); Element element = null; String BaseURI = signatureFile.toURI().toURL().toString(); //SOAP envelope to be signed File attachmentFile = new File("src/main/resources/sample.xml"); //get the private key used to sign, from the keystore KeyStore ks = KeyStore.getInstance(keystoreType); FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream(keystoreFile); ks.load(fis, keystorePass.toCharArray()); PrivateKey privateKey = (PrivateKey) ks.getKey(privateKeyAlias, privateKeyPass.toCharArray()); //create basic structure of signature javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory dbf = javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance(); dbf.setNamespaceAware(true); DocumentBuilderFactory dbFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance(); DocumentBuilder dBuilder = dbFactory.newDocumentBuilder(); Document doc = dBuilder.parse(attachmentFile); XMLSignature sig = new XMLSignature(doc, BaseURI, XMLSignature.ALGO_ID_SIGNATURE_RSA_SHA1); //optional, but better element = doc.getDocumentElement(); element.normalize(); element.getElementsByTagName("soap:Header").item(0).appendChild(sig.getElement()); { Transforms transforms = new Transforms(doc); transforms.addTransform(Transforms.TRANSFORM_C14N_OMIT_COMMENTS); //Sign the content of SOAP Envelope sig.addDocument("", transforms, Constants.ALGO_ID_DIGEST_SHA1); //Adding the attachment to be signed sig.addDocument("../resources/attachment.xml", transforms, Constants.ALGO_ID_DIGEST_SHA1); } //Signing procedure { X509Certificate cert = (X509Certificate) ks.getCertificate(certificateAlias); sig.addKeyInfo(cert); sig.addKeyInfo(cert.getPublicKey()); sig.sign(privateKey); } //write signature to file FileOutputStream f = new FileOutputStream(signatureFile); XMLUtils.outputDOMc14nWithComments(doc, f); f.close(); } At first it reads in the private key which is to be used in signing. To create a key pair for your own, this post will be helpful. Then it has created the signature and added the SOAP message and the attachment as the documents to be signed. Finally it performs signing and write the signed document to a file. The signed SOAP message looks as follows. FUN PARTY uri:www.pjxml.org/socialService/Ping FUN PARTY FUN 59c64t0087fg3kfs000003n9 uri:www.pjxml.org/socialService/ Ping FUN 59c64t0087fg3kfs000003n9 2013-10-22T17:12:20 uri:www.pjxml.org/socialService/ Ping 9RXY9kp/Klx36gd4BULvST4qffI= 3JcccO8+0bCUUR3EJxGJKJ+Wrbc= d0hBQLIvZ4fwUZlrsDLDZojvwK2DVaznrvSoA/JTjnS7XZ5oMplN9 THX4xzZap3+WhXwI2xMr3GKO................x7u+PQz1UepcbKY3BsO8jB3dxWN6r+F4qTyWa+xwOFxqLj546WX35f8zT4GLdiJI5oiYeo1YPLFFqTrwg== MIIDjTCCAnWgAwIBAgIEeotzFjANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQsFADB3MQswCQYDVQQGEwJMSzEQMA4GA1UE...............qXfD/eY+XeIDyMQocRqTpcJIm8OneZ8vbMNQrxsRInxq+DsG+C92b k5y0amGgOQ2O/St0Kc2/xye80tX2fDEKs2YOlM/zCknL8VgK0CbAKVAwvJoycQL9mGRkPDmbitHe............StGofmsoKURzo8hofYEn41rGsq5wCuqJhhHYGDrPpFcuJiuI3SeXgcMtBnMwsIaKv2uHaPRbNX31WEuabuv6Q== AQAB 1.90 In a next post lets see how to verify this signature, so that we can guarantee signed documents are not changed. Cheers!

a short "how-to" based on an issue one of my work mates recently faced when trying to automate the creation of an msi package on jenkins. normally, visual studio solutions can be build on jenkins by using the appropriate msbuild plugin . apparently though, for visual studio setup projects, msbuild cannot be used and one has to switch to using visual studio itself to execute the build. so the first approach was to use devenv.exe as follows devenv.exe visualstudiosolution.sln /build "release" while this works, the problem is that it is an "async call", meaning that the compilation goes on in the background while the console from which the build is executed, immediately returns. obviously this isn't suited for being used on jenkins. searching around for a while, it turned out that you have to use devenv.com instead of devenv.exe : "c:\program files (x86)\microsoft visual studio 10.0\common7\ide\devenv.com"visualstudiosolution.sln /build "release" once you got that, integrating everything into jenkins is quite straightforward: (obviously you may also simply set an environment variable pointing to devenv.com on your build server rather than indicating the entire path)

Java EE in general and Context and Dependency Injection has been part of the Vaadin ecosystem since ages. Recently, Spring Vaadin is a joint effort of the Vaadin and the Spring teams to bring the Spring framework into the Vaadin ecosystem, lead by Petter Holmström for Vaadin and Josh Long for Pivotal. Integration is based on the Spring Boot project - and its sub-modules, that aims to ease creating new Spring web projects. This article assumes the reader is familiar enough with Spring Boot. If not the case, please take some time to get to understand basic notions about the library. Note that at the time of this writing, there's no release for Spring Vaadin. You'll need to clone the project and build it yourself. The first step is to create the UI. In order to display usage of Spring's Dependency Injection, it should use a service dependency. Let's injection the UI through Constructor Injection to favor immutability. The only addition to a standard UI is to annotate it with org.vaadin.spring.@VaadinUI. @VaadinUI public class VaadinSpringExampleUi extends UI { private HelloService helloService; public VaadinSpringExampleUi(HelloService helloService) { this.helloService = helloService; } @Override protected void init(VaadinRequest vaadinRequest) { String hello = helloService.sayHello(); setContent(new Label(hello)); } } The second step is standard Spring Java configuration. Let's create two configuration classes, one for the main context and the other for the web one. Two thing of note: The method instantiating the previous UI has to be annotated with org.vaadin.spring.@UIScope in addition to standard Spring org.springframework.context.annotation.@Bean to bind the bean lifecycle to the new scope provided by the Spring Vaadin library. At the time of this writing, a RequestContextListener bean must be provided. In order to be compliant with future versions of the library, it's a good practice to annotate the instantiating method with @ConditionalOnMissingBean(RequestContextListener.class). @Configuration public class MainConfig { @Bean public HelloService helloService() { return new HelloService(); } } @Configuration public class WebConfig extends MainConfig { @Bean @ConditionalOnMissingBean(RequestContextListener.class) public RequestContextListener requestContextListener() { return new RequestContextListener(); } @Bean @UIScope public VaadinSpringExampleUi exampleUi() { return new VaadinSpringExampleUi(helloService()); } } The final step is to create a dedicated WebApplicationInitializer. Spring Boot already offers a concrete implementation, we just need to reference our previous configuration classes as well as those provided by Spring Vaadin, namely VaadinAutoConfiguration and VaadinConfiguration. public class ApplicationInitializer extends SpringBootServletInitializer { @Override protected SpringApplicationBuilder configure(SpringApplicationBuilder application) { return application.showBanner(false) .sources(MainConfig.class) .sources(VaadinAutoConfiguration.class, VaadinConfiguration.class) .sources(WebConfig.class); } } At this point, we demonstrated a working Spring Vaadin sample application. Code for this article can be browsed and forked on Github.

Spring Data modules provides various modules to work with various types of datasources like RDBMS, NOSQL stores etc in unified way. In my previous article SpringMVC4 + Spring Data JPA + SpringSecurity configuration using JavaConfig I have explained how to configure Spring Data JPA using JavaConfig. Now in this post let us see how we can use Spring Data JPA repositories and export JPA entities as REST endpoints using Spring Data REST. First let us configure spring-data-jpa and spring-data-rest-webmvc dependencies in our pom.xml. org.springframework.data spring-data-jpa 1.5.0.RELEASE org.springframework.data spring-data-rest-webmvc 2.0.0.RELEASE Make sure you have latest released versions configured correctly, otherwise you will encounter the following error: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.springframework.data.mapping.SimplePropertyHandler Create JPA entities. @Entity @Table(name = "USERS") public class User implements Serializable { private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L; @Id @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY) @Column(name = "user_id") private Integer id; @Column(name = "username", nullable = false, unique = true, length = 50) private String userName; @Column(name = "password", nullable = false, length = 50) private String password; @Column(name = "firstname", nullable = false, length = 50) private String firstName; @Column(name = "lastname", length = 50) private String lastName; @Column(name = "email", nullable = false, unique = true, length = 50) private String email; @Temporal(TemporalType.DATE) private Date dob; private boolean enabled=true; @OneToMany(fetch=FetchType.EAGER, cascade=CascadeType.ALL) @JoinColumn(name="user_id") private Set roles = new HashSet<>(); @OneToMany(mappedBy = "user") private List contacts = new ArrayList<>(); //setters and getters } @Entity @Table(name = "ROLES") public class Role implements Serializable { private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L; @Id @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY) @Column(name = "role_id") private Integer id; @Column(name="role_name",nullable=false) private String roleName; //setters and getters } @Entity @Table(name = "CONTACTS") public class Contact implements Serializable { private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L; @Id @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY) @Column(name = "contact_id") private Integer id; @Column(name = "firstname", nullable = false, length = 50) private String firstName; @Column(name = "lastname", length = 50) private String lastName; @Column(name = "email", nullable = false, unique = true, length = 50) private String email; @Temporal(TemporalType.DATE) private Date dob; @ManyToOne @JoinColumn(name = "user_id") private User user; //setters and getters } Configure DispatcherServlet using AbstractAnnotationConfigDispatcherServletInitializer. Observe that we have added RepositoryRestMvcConfiguration.class to getServletConfigClasses() method. RepositoryRestMvcConfiguration is the one which does the heavy lifting of looking for Spring Data Repositories and exporting them as REST endpoints. package com.sivalabs.springdatarest.web.config; import javax.servlet.Filter; import org.springframework.data.rest.webmvc.config.RepositoryRestMvcConfiguration; import org.springframework.orm.jpa.support.OpenEntityManagerInViewFilter; import org.springframework.web.servlet.support.AbstractAnnotationConfigDispatcherServletInitializer; import com.sivalabs.springdatarest.config.AppConfig; public class SpringWebAppInitializer extends AbstractAnnotationConfigDispatcherServletInitializer { @Override protected Class[] getRootConfigClasses() { return new Class[] { AppConfig.class}; } @Override protected Class[] getServletConfigClasses() { return new Class[] { WebMvcConfig.class, RepositoryRestMvcConfiguration.class }; } @Override protected String[] getServletMappings() { return new String[] { "/rest/*" }; } @Override protected Filter[] getServletFilters() { return new Filter[]{ new OpenEntityManagerInViewFilter() }; } } Create Spring Data JPA repositories for JPA entities. public interface UserRepository extends JpaRepository { } public interface RoleRepository extends JpaRepository { } public interface ContactRepository extends JpaRepository { } That's it. Spring Data REST will take care of rest of the things. You can use spring Rest Shell https://github.com/spring-projects/rest-shell or Chrome's Postman Addon to test the exported REST services. D:\rest-shell-1.2.1.RELEASE\bin>rest-shell http://localhost:8080:> Now we can change the baseUri using baseUri command as follows: http://localhost:8080:>baseUri http://localhost:8080/spring-data-rest-demo/rest/ http://localhost:8080/spring-data-rest-demo/rest/> http://localhost:8080/spring-data-rest-demo/rest/>list rel href ====================================================================================== users http://localhost:8080/spring-data-rest-demo/rest/users{?page,size,sort} roles http://localhost:8080/spring-data-rest-demo/rest/roles{?page,size,sort} contacts http://localhost:8080/spring-data-rest-demo/rest/contacts{?page,size,sort} Note: It seems there is an issue with rest-shell when the DispatcherServlet url mapped to "/" and issue list command it responds with "No resources found". http://localhost:8080/spring-data-rest-demo/rest/>get users/ { "_links": { "self": { "href": "http://localhost:8080/spring-data-rest-demo/rest/users/{?page,size,sort}", "templated": true }, "search": { "href": "http://localhost:8080/spring-data-rest-demo/rest/users/search" } }, "_embedded": { "users": [ { "userName": "admin", "password": "admin", "firstName": "Administrator", "lastName": null, "email": "[email protected]", "dob": null, "enabled": true, "_links": { "self": { "href": "http://localhost:8080/spring-data-rest-demo/rest/users/1" }, "roles": { "href": "http://localhost:8080/spring-data-rest-demo/rest/users/1/roles" }, "contacts": { "href": "http://localhost:8080/spring-data-rest-demo/rest/users/1/contacts" } } }, { "userName": "siva", "password": "siva", "firstName": "Siva", "lastName": null, "email": "[email protected]", "dob": null, "enabled": true, "_links": { "self": { "href": "http://localhost:8080/spring-data-rest-demo/rest/users/2" }, "roles": { "href": "http://localhost:8080/spring-data-rest-demo/rest/users/2/roles" }, "contacts": { "href": "http://localhost:8080/spring-data-rest-demo/rest/users/2/contacts" } } } ] }, "page": { "size": 20, "totalElements": 2, "totalPages": 1, "number": 0 } } You can find the source code at https://github.com/sivaprasadreddy/sivalabs-blog-samples-code/tree/master/spring-data-rest-demo For more Info on Spring Rest Shell: https://github.com/spring-projects/rest-shell

We all know what XML is right? Just in case not, no problem here is what it is all about. 5 Now, what the computer really needs is the number five and some context around it. In XML you (human and computer) can see how it represents context to five. Now lets say instead you have a business XML document like FPML 32.00 150000 1.00 EUR 405000 2001-07-17Z NONE EUR 2.70 ISDA2002 ISDA2002Equity TODO GBEN Party A Party B That is a lot of extra unnecessary data points. Now lets look at this using Apache Avro. With Avro, the context and the values are separated. This means the schema/structure of what the information is does not get stored or streamed over and over and over and over (and over) again. The Avro schema is hashed. So the data structure only holds the value and the computer understands the fingerprint (the hash) of the schema and can retrieve the schema using the fingerprint. 0x d7a8fbb307d7809469ca9abcb0082e4f8d5651e46d3cdb762d02d0bf37c9e592 This type of implementation is pretty typical in the data space. When you do this you can reduce your data between 20%-80%. When I tell folks this they immediately ask, “why such a large gap of unknowns”. The answer is because not every XML is created the same. But that is the problem because you are duplicating the information the computer needs to understand the data. XML is nice for humans to read, sure … but that is not optimized for the computer. Here is a converter we are working on https://github.com/stealthly/xml-avro to help get folks off of XML and onto lower cost, open source systems. This allows you to keep parts of your systems (specifically the domain business code) using the XML and not having to be changed (risk mitigation) but store and stream the data with less overhead (optimize budget).

Here is a short snippet of Ansible playbook that installs R and any required packages to any nodes of the cluster: - name: Making sure R is installed apt: pkg=r-base state=installed - name: adding a few R packages command: /usr/bin/Rscript --slave --no-save --no-restore-history -e "if (! ('{{item}' %in% installed.packages()[,'Package'])) install.packages(pkgs={{item}, repos=c('http://www.freestatistics.org/cran/'))" with_items: - rjson - rPython - plyr - psych - reshape2 You should replace the repos with one chosen from the list of Cran mirrors. Note that the command above installs each package only if it is not already present, but messes up the “changed” status of Ansible’s PLAY RECAP by incorrectly reporting a change per R package at every run. Find more big data technical posts on my blog.

Every once in a while, I run into an interesting problem related to connections and pooling with ActiveMQ, and today I’d like to discuss something that is not always very clear and could potentially cause you to drink heavily when using ActiveMQ and Camel JMS. Not to say that you won’t want to drink heavily when using ActiveMQ and Camel anyway… in celebration of how delightful integration and messaging become when using them of course. So first up. Connection pooling. Sure, you’ve always heard to pool your connections. What does that really mean, and why do you want to do it? Opening up a connection to an ActiveMQ broker is a relativley expensive operation when compared to other actions like creating a session or consumer. So when sending or receiving messages and generally interacting with the broker, you’d like to reuse existing connections if possible. What you don’t want to do is rely on a JMS library (like Spring JmsTemplate for example) that opens and closes connections for each send or receive of a message… unless you can pool/cache your connections. So if we can agree that pooling connections is a good idea, take a look at an example config: You may even want to use Apache Camel and its wonderful camel-jms component because doing otherwise would just be silly. So maybe you want to set up a JMS config similar to so: This config basically means for consumers, set up 15 concurrent consumers, use transactions (local), use PERSISTENT messages for producers, set a timeout for 10000 for request-reply etc, etc. Huge note: If you want a more thorough taste of the configs for the jms component, especially around caching consumers, transactions and more, please take a look at Torsten’s excellent blog on Camel JMS with transactions – lesson learned. Maybe you should also spend some time poking around his blog as he’s got lots of good Camel/ActiveMQ stuff too Awesome so far. We have a connection pool of 10 connections, we will expect 10 sessions per connection (for a total of 100 sessions if we needed that…), and 15 concurrent consumers. We should be able to deal with some serious load, right? Take a look at this route here. It’s simple enough, exposes the activemq component (which will use the jmsConfig from above, so 15 concurrent consumers) and just does some logging: from("activemq:test.queue") .routeId("test.queue.routeId") .to("log:org.apache.camel.blog?groupSize=100"); Try and run this. You will find your consumers blocked up right away and stack traces will show this beauty: "Camel (camel-1) thread #1 - JmsConsumer[test.queue]" daemon prio=5 tid=7f81eb4bc000 nid=0x10abbb000 in Object.wait() [10abba000] java.lang.Thread.State: WAITING (on object monitor) at java.lang.Object.wait(Native Method) - waiting on <7f40e9070> (a org.apache.commons.pool.impl.GenericKeyedObjectPool$Latch) at java.lang.Object.wait(Object.java:485) at org.apache.commons.pool.impl.GenericKeyedObjectPool.borrowObject(GenericKeyedObjectPool.java:1151) - locked <7f40e9070> (a org.apache.commons.pool.impl.GenericKeyedObjectPool$Latch) at org.apache.activemq.pool.ConnectionPool.createSession(ConnectionPool.java:146) at org.apache.activemq.pool.PooledConnection.createSession(PooledConnection.java:173) at org.springframework.jms.support.JmsAccessor.createSession(JmsAccessor.java:196) .... How can that possibly be? We have connection pooling… we have sessions per connection set to 10 per connection, so how are we all blocked up on creating new sessions? The answer is you’re exhausting the number of sessions, as you can expect by the stack trace. But how? And how much do I need to drink to resolve this? Well hold on now. Grab a beer and hear me out. First understand this. ActiveMQ’s pooling implementation uses commons-pool and the maxActiveSessionsPerConnection attribute is actually mapped to the maxActive property of the underlying pool. From the docs this means: maxActive controls the maximum number of objects (per key) that can allocated by the pool (checked out to client threads, or idle in the pool) at one time. The key here is “key” (literally… the ‘per key’ clause of the documentation). So in the ActiveMQ implementation the key is an object that represents 1) whether the session mode is transacted and 2) what the acknowledgement mode is () as seen here. So in plain terms, you’ll end up with a “maxActive” sessions for each key that’s used on that connection.. so if you have clients that use transactions, no transactions, client-ack, auto-ack, transacted-session, dups-okay, etc you can start to see that you’d end up with “maxActive” sessions for each permutation. So if you have maxActiveSesssionsPerConnection set to 10, you could really end up with 10 x 2 x 4 == 80 sessions. This is something to tuck away in the back of your mind. The second key here is that when the camel-jms component sets up consumers, it ends up sharing a single connection among all the consumers specified by the concurrentConsumers session. This is an interesting point, because camel-jms uses the underlying Spring framework’s DefaultMessageListenerContainer and unfortunately this restriction comes from that library. So if you have 15 concurrent consumers, they will all share a single connection (even if pooling… it will grab one connection from the pool and hold it). So if you have 15 consumers that each share a connection, each share a transacted mode, each share an ack mode, then you end up trying to create 15 sessions for that one connection. And you end up with the above. So my rule of thumb for avoiding these scenarios: Understand exactly what each of your producers and consumers are doing, what their TX and ACK modes are Always tune the max sessions param when you NEED to (too many session threads? i dunno..) but always do concurrentConsumers+1 as the value AT LEAST If producers and consumers are producing/consuming the same destination SPLIT UP THE CONNECTION POOL: one pool for consumers, one pool for producers Dunno how valuable this info will be, but I wanted to jot it down for myself. If someone else finds it valuable, or has questions, let me know in the comments.

NoSQL has been a hot topic a pretty long time (well, it's not only a buzz anymore). However, when should we really use it instead of an RDBMS?

A while back, I wrote an article showing how to Live Migrate Your VMs in One Line of Powershell between non-clustered Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V hosts using Shared Nothing Live Migration. Since then, I’ve been asked a few times for how this type of parallel Live Migration would be performed for highly available virtual machines between Hyper-V hosts within a cluster. In this article, we’ll walk through the steps of doing exactly that … via Windows PowerShell on Windows Server 2012 or 2012 R2 or our FREE Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 bare-metal, enterprise-grade hypervisor in a clustered configuration. Wait! Do I need PowerShell to Live Migrate multiple VMs within a Cluster? Well, actually … No. You could certainly use the Failover Cluster Manager GUI tool to select multiple highly available virtual machines, right-click and select Move | Live Migration … Failover Cluster Manager – Performing Multi-VM Live Migration But, you may wish to script this process for other reasons … perhaps to efficiently drain all VM’s from a host as part of a maintenance script that will be performing other tasks. Can I use the same PowerShell cmdlets for Live Migrating within a Cluster? Well, actually … No again. When VMs are made highly available resources within a cluster, they’re managed as cluster group resources instead of being standalone VM resources. As a result, we have a different set of Cluster-aware PowerShell cmdlets that we use when managing these cluster groups. To perform a scripted multi-VM Live Migration, we’ll be leveraging three of these cmdlets: Get-ClusterNode, Get-ClusterGroup and Move-ClusterVirtualMachineRole Now, let’s see that one line of PowerShell! Before getting to the point of actually performing the multi-VM Live Migration in a single PowerShell command line, we first need to setup a few variables to handle the "what" and "where" of moving these VMs. First, let’s specify the name of the cluster with which we’ll be working. We’ll store it in a $clusterName variable. $clusterName = read-host -Prompt "Cluster name" Next, we’ll need to select the cluster node to which we’ll be Live Migrating the VMs. Lets use the Get-ClusterNode and Out-GridView cmdlets together to prompt for the cluster node and store the value in a $targetClusterNode variable. $targetClusterNode = Get-ClusterNode -Cluster $clusterName | Out-GridView -Title "Select Target Cluster Node" ` -OutputMode Single And then, we’ll need to create a list of all the VMs currently running in the cluster. We can use the Get-ClusterGroup cmdlet to retrieve this list. Below, we have an example where we are combining this cmdlet with a Where-Object cmdlet to return only the virtual machine cluster groups that are running on any node except the selected target cluster node. After all, it really doesn’t make any sense to Live Migrate a VM to the same node on which it’s currently running! $haVMs = Get-ClusterGroup -Cluster $clusterName | Where-Object {($_.GroupType -eq "VirtualMachine") ` -and ($_.OwnerNode -ne $targetClusterNode.Name)} We’ve stored the resulting list of VMs in a $haVMs variable. Ready to Live Migrate! OK … Now we have all of our variables defined for the cluster, the target cluster node and the list of VMs from which to choose. Here’s our single line of PowerShell to do the magic … $haVMs | Out-GridView -Title "Select VMs to Move" –PassThru | Move-ClusterVirtualMachineRole -MigrationType Live ` -Node $targetClusterNode.Name -Wait 0 Proceed with care: Keep in mind that your target cluster node will need to have sufficient available resources to run the VM's that you select for Live Migration. Of course, it's best to initially test tasks like this in your lab environment first. Here’s what is happening in this single PowerShell command line: We’re passing the list of VMs stored in the $haVMs variable to the Out-GridView cmdlet. Out-GridView prompts for which VMs to Live Migrate and then passes the selected VMs down the PowerShell object pipeline to the Move-ClusterVirtualMachineRole cmdlet. This cmdlet initiates the Live Migration for each selected VM, and because it’s using a –Wait 0 parameter, it initiates each Live Migration one-after-another without waiting for the prior task to finish. As a result, all of the selected VMs will Live Migrate in parallel, up to the maximum number of concurrent Live Migrations that you’ve configured on these cluster nodes. The VMs selected beyond this maximum will simply queue up and wait their turn. Unlike some competing hypervisors, Hyper-V doesn't impose an artificial hard-coded limit on how many VMs for you can Live Migrate concurrently. Instead, it's up to you to set the maximum to a sensible value based on your hardware and network capacity. Do you have your own PowerShell automation ideas for Hyper-V? Feel free to share your ideas in the Comments section below. See you in the Clouds! - Keith

If you used earlier versions of Neo4j via its Java API with Java 6 you probably have code similar to the following to ensure write operations happen within a transaction: public class StylesOfTx { public static void main( String[] args ) throws IOException { String path = "/tmp/tx-style-test"; FileUtils.deleteRecursively(new File(path)); GraphDatabaseService db = new GraphDatabaseFactory().newEmbeddedDatabase( path ); Transaction tx = db.beginTx(); try { db.createNode(); tx.success(); } finally { tx.close(); } } } In Neo4j 2.0 Transaction started extending AutoCloseable which meant that you could use ‘try with resources’ and the ‘close’ method would be automatically called when the block finished: public class StylesOfTx { public static void main( String[] args ) throws IOException { String path = "/tmp/tx-style-test"; FileUtils.deleteRecursively(new File(path)); GraphDatabaseService db = new GraphDatabaseFactory().newEmbeddedDatabase( path ); try ( Transaction tx = db.beginTx() ) { Node node = db.createNode(); tx.success(); } } } This works quite well although it’s still possible to have transactions hanging around in an application when people don’t use this syntax – the old style is still permissible. In Venkat Subramaniam’s Java 8 book he suggests an alternative approach where we use a lambda based approach: public class StylesOfTx { public static void main( String[] args ) throws IOException { String path = "/tmp/tx-style-test"; FileUtils.deleteRecursively(new File(path)); GraphDatabaseService db = new GraphDatabaseFactory().newEmbeddedDatabase( path ); Db.withinTransaction(db, neo4jDb -> { Node node = neo4jDb.createNode(); }); } static class Db { public static void withinTransaction(GraphDatabaseService db, Consumer fn) { try ( Transaction tx = db.beginTx() ) { fn.accept(db); tx.success(); } } } } The ‘withinTransaction’ function would actually go on GraphDatabaseService or similar rather than being on that Db class but it was easier to put it on there for this example. A disadvantage of this style is that you don’t have explicit control over the transaction for handling the failure case – it’s assumed that if ‘tx.success()’ isn’t called then the transaction failed and it’s rolled back. I’m not sure what % of use cases actually need such fine grained control though. Brian Hurt refers to this as the ‘hole in the middle pattern‘ and I imagine we’ll start seeing more code of this ilk once Java 8 is released and becomes more widely used.

Learn to parse CSV (Comma Separated Values) files with Python examples using the csv module's reader function and DictReader class.

Sometimes you just want to create a quick web project in IntelliJ IDEA, and you would use their wizard and with web or Java EE module as starter project. But these projects will not have Ant nor Maven script generated for you automatically, and the IDEA Build would only compile your classes. So if you want an war file generated, try the following: 1) Menu: File > Project Structure > Artifacts 2) Click the green + icon and create a "Web Application: Archive", then OK 3) Menu: Build > Build Artifacts ... > Web: war By default it should generate it under your /out/artifacts/web_war.war Note that IntelliJ also allows you to setup "Web Application: Exploded" artifact, which great for development that run and deploy to an application server within your IDE.

Last week Alistair and I were working on an internal application and we needed to make a HTTPS request directly to an AWS machine using a certificate signed to a different host. We use jersey-client so our code looked something like this: Client client = Client.create(); client.resource("https://some-aws-host.compute-1.amazonaws.com").post(); // and so on When we ran this we predictably ran into trouble: com.sun.jersey.api.client.ClientHandlerException: javax.net.ssl.SSLHandshakeException: java.security.cert.CertificateException: No subject alternative DNS name matching some-aws-host.compute-1.amazonaws.com found. at com.sun.jersey.client.urlconnection.URLConnectionClientHandler.handle(URLConnectionClientHandler.java:149) at com.sun.jersey.api.client.Client.handle(Client.java:648) at com.sun.jersey.api.client.WebResource.handle(WebResource.java:670) at com.sun.jersey.api.client.WebResource.post(WebResource.java:241) at com.neotechnology.testlab.manager.bootstrap.ManagerAdmin.takeBackup(ManagerAdmin.java:33) at com.neotechnology.testlab.manager.bootstrap.ManagerAdminTest.foo(ManagerAdminTest.java:11) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:57) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43) at org.junit.runners.model.FrameworkMethod$1.runReflectiveCall(FrameworkMethod.java:45) at org.junit.internal.runners.model.ReflectiveCallable.run(ReflectiveCallable.java:15) at org.junit.runners.model.FrameworkMethod.invokeExplosively(FrameworkMethod.java:42) at org.junit.internal.runners.statements.InvokeMethod.evaluate(InvokeMethod.java:20) at org.junit.runners.ParentRunner.runLeaf(ParentRunner.java:263) at org.junit.runners.BlockJUnit4ClassRunner.runChild(BlockJUnit4ClassRunner.java:68) at org.junit.runners.BlockJUnit4ClassRunner.runChild(BlockJUnit4ClassRunner.java:47) at org.junit.runners.ParentRunner$3.run(ParentRunner.java:231) at org.junit.runners.ParentRunner$1.schedule(ParentRunner.java:60) at org.junit.runners.ParentRunner.runChildren(ParentRunner.java:229) at org.junit.runners.ParentRunner.access$000(ParentRunner.java:50) at org.junit.runners.ParentRunner$2.evaluate(ParentRunner.java:222) at org.junit.runners.ParentRunner.run(ParentRunner.java:300) at org.junit.runner.JUnitCore.run(JUnitCore.java:157) at com.intellij.junit4.JUnit4IdeaTestRunner.startRunnerWithArgs(JUnit4IdeaTestRunner.java:74) at com.intellij.rt.execution.junit.JUnitStarter.prepareStreamsAndStart(JUnitStarter.java:202) at com.intellij.rt.execution.junit.JUnitStarter.main(JUnitStarter.java:65) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:57) at com.intellij.rt.execution.application.AppMain.main(AppMain.java:120) Caused by: javax.net.ssl.SSLHandshakeException: java.security.cert.CertificateException: No subject alternative DNS name matching some-aws-host.compute-1.amazonaws.com found. at sun.security.ssl.Alerts.getSSLException(Alerts.java:192) at sun.security.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.fatal(SSLSocketImpl.java:1884) at sun.security.ssl.Handshaker.fatalSE(Handshaker.java:276) at sun.security.ssl.Handshaker.fatalSE(Handshaker.java:270) at sun.security.ssl.ClientHandshaker.serverCertificate(ClientHandshaker.java:1341) at sun.security.ssl.ClientHandshaker.processMessage(ClientHandshaker.java:153) at sun.security.ssl.Handshaker.processLoop(Handshaker.java:868) at sun.security.ssl.Handshaker.process_record(Handshaker.java:804) at sun.security.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.readRecord(SSLSocketImpl.java:1016) at sun.security.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.performInitialHandshake(SSLSocketImpl.java:1312) at sun.security.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.startHandshake(SSLSocketImpl.java:1339) at sun.security.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.startHandshake(SSLSocketImpl.java:1323) at sun.net.www.protocol.https.HttpsClient.afterConnect(HttpsClient.java:563) at sun.net.www.protocol.https.AbstractDelegateHttpsURLConnection.connect(AbstractDelegateHttpsURLConnection.java:185) at sun.net.www.protocol.http.HttpURLConnection.getInputStream(HttpURLConnection.java:1300) at java.net.HttpURLConnection.getResponseCode(HttpURLConnection.java:468) at sun.net.www.protocol.https.HttpsURLConnectionImpl.getResponseCode(HttpsURLConnectionImpl.java:338) at com.sun.jersey.client.urlconnection.URLConnectionClientHandler._invoke(URLConnectionClientHandler.java:240) at com.sun.jersey.client.urlconnection.URLConnectionClientHandler.handle(URLConnectionClientHandler.java:147) ... 31 more Caused by: java.security.cert.CertificateException: No subject alternative DNS name matching some-aws-host.compute-1.amazonaws.com found. at sun.security.util.HostnameChecker.matchDNS(HostnameChecker.java:191) at sun.security.util.HostnameChecker.match(HostnameChecker.java:93) at sun.security.ssl.X509TrustManagerImpl.checkIdentity(X509TrustManagerImpl.java:347) at sun.security.ssl.X509TrustManagerImpl.checkTrusted(X509TrustManagerImpl.java:203) at sun.security.ssl.X509TrustManagerImpl.checkServerTrusted(X509TrustManagerImpl.java:126) at sun.security.ssl.ClientHandshaker.serverCertificate(ClientHandshaker.java:1323) ... 45 more We figured that we needed to get our client to ignore the certificate and came across this Stack Overflow thread which had some suggestions on how to do this. None of the suggestions worked on their own but we ended up with a combination of a couple of the suggestions which did the trick: public Client hostIgnoringClient() { try { SSLContext sslcontext = SSLContext.getInstance( "TLS" ); sslcontext.init( null, null, null ); DefaultClientConfig config = new DefaultClientConfig(); Map properties = config.getProperties(); HTTPSProperties httpsProperties = new HTTPSProperties( new HostnameVerifier() { @Override public boolean verify( String s, SSLSession sslSession ) { return true; } }, sslcontext ); properties.put( HTTPSProperties.PROPERTY_HTTPS_PROPERTIES, httpsProperties ); config.getClasses().add( JacksonJsonProvider.class ); return Client.create( config ); } catch ( KeyManagementException | NoSuchAlgorithmException e ) { throw new RuntimeException( e ); } } You’re welcome Future Mark.

Sometimes it is useful to “backcast” a time series — that is, forecast in reverse time. Although there are no in-built R functions to do this, it is very easy to implement. Suppose x is our time series and we want to backcast for periods. Here is some code that should work for most univariate time series. The example is non-seasonal, but the code will also work with seasonal data. library(forecast) x <- WWWusage h <- 20 f <- frequency(x) # Reverse time revx <- ts(rev(x), frequency=f) # Forecast fc <- forecast(auto.arima(revx), h) plot(fc) # Reverse time again fc$mean <- ts(rev(fc$mean),end=tsp(x)[1] - 1/f, frequency=f) fc$upper <- fc$upper[h:1,] fc$lower <- fc$lower[h:1,] fc$x <- x # Plot result plot(fc, xlim=c(tsp(x)[1]-h/f, tsp(x)[2]))

What is It Query by example is an alternative querying technique supported by the main JPA vendors but not by the JPA specification itself. QBE returns a result set depending on the properties that were set on an instance of the queried class. So if I create an Address entity and fill in the city field then the query will select all the Address entities having the same city field as the given Address entity. The typical use case of QBE is evaluating a search form where the user can fill in any search fields and gets the results based on the given search fields. In this case QBE can reduce code size significantly. When to Use · Using many fields of an entity in a query · User selects which fields of an Entity to use in a query · We are refactoring the entities frequently and don’t want to worry about breaking the queries that rely on them Limitations · QBE is not available in JPA 1.0 or 2.0 · Version properties, identifiers and associations are ignored · The query object should be annotated with @Entity Test Data I used the following entities to test the QBE feature of Hibernate: · Address (long id, String city, String street, String countryISO2Code, AddressType addressType) · AddressType (Integer type, String description) Imports The examples will refer to the following classes: import org.hibernate.Criteria; import org.hibernate.Session; import org.hibernate.criterion.Example; import org.hibernate.criterion.Restrictions; import org.junit.Test; import java.util.List; Utility Methods I also made two utility methods to present a list of the two entity types: private void listAddresses(List addresses) { for (Address address : addresses) { System.out.println(address.getId() + ", " + address.getCountryISO2Code() + ", " + address.getCity() + ", " + address.getStreet() + ", " + address.getAddressType().getType() + ", " + address.getAddressType().getDescription()); } } private void listAddressTypes(List addressTypes) { for (AddressType addressType : addressTypes) { System.out.println(addressType.getType() + ", " + addressType.getDescription()); } } Example 1: Equals This example code returns the Address entities matching the given CountryISO2Code and City. Method: @Test public void testEquals() throws Exception { Session session = (Session) entityManager.getDelegate(); Address address = new Address(); address.setCountryISO2Code("US"); address.setCity("CHICAGO"); Example addressExample = Example.create(address); Criteria criteria = session.createCriteria(Address.class).add(addressExample); listAddresses(criteria.list()); } Result: 75, US, CHICAGO, Los Angeles Way2, 6, Customer 170, US, CHICAGO, Jackson Blvd 33a, 4, Delivery 63, US, CHICAGO, Main Avenue 1, 5, Bill to 37, US, CHICAGO, Jackson Blvd 33a, 4, Delivery 36, US, CHICAGO, Jackson Blvd 33a, 4, Delivery Example 2: Id Limitation This example presents that id fields in the query object are ignored. Method: @Test public void testIdLimitation() throws Exception { Session session = (Session) entityManager.getDelegate(); Address address = new Address(); address.setCountryISO2Code("US"); address.setCity("CHICAGO"); address.setId(100); // setting id is ignored Example addressExample = Example.create(address); Criteria criteria = session.createCriteria(Address.class).add(addressExample); listAddresses(criteria.list()); } Result: 75, US, CHICAGO, Los Angeles Way2, 6, Customer 170, US, CHICAGO, Jackson Blvd 33a, 4, Delivery 63, US, CHICAGO, Main Avenue 1, 5, Bill to 37, US, CHICAGO, Jackson Blvd 33a, 4, Delivery 36, US, CHICAGO, Jackson Blvd 33a, 4, Delivery Example 3: Association Limitation Associations of the query object are ignored, too. Method: @Test public void testAssociationLimitation() throws Exception { Session session = (Session) entityManager.getDelegate(); Address address = new Address(); address.setCountryISO2Code("US"); address.setCity("CHICAGO"); AddressType addressType = new AddressType(); addressType.setType(5); address.setAddressType(addressType); // setting an association is ignored Example addressExample = Example.create(address); Criteria criteria = session.createCriteria(Address.class).add(addressExample); listAddresses(criteria.list()); } Result: 75, US, CHICAGO, Los Angeles Way2, 6, Customer 170, US, CHICAGO, Jackson Blvd 33a, 4, Delivery 63, US, CHICAGO, Main Avenue 1, 5, Bill to 37, US, CHICAGO, Jackson Blvd 33a, 4, Delivery 36, US, CHICAGO, Jackson Blvd 33a, 4, Delivery Example 4: Like QBE supports like in the query object if we enable it with Example.enableLike(). Method: @Test public void testLike() throws Exception { Session session = (Session) entityManager.getDelegate(); Address address = new Address(); address.setCountryISO2Code("US"); address.setCity("AT%"); Example addressExample = Example.create(address).enableLike(); Criteria criteria = session.createCriteria(Address.class).add(addressExample); listAddresses(criteria.list()); } Result: 83, US, ATLANTA, null, 6, Customer 184, US, ATLANTA, null, 1, Shipper 25, US, ATLANTA, null, 1, Shipper Example 5: ExcludeProperty We can exclude a property with Example.excludeProperty(String propertyName). Method: @Test public void testExcludeProperty() throws Exception { Session session = (Session) entityManager.getDelegate(); Address address = new Address(); address.setCountryISO2Code("US"); address.setCity("AT%"); Example addressExample = Example.create(address).enableLike() .excludeProperty("countryISO2Code"); // countryISO2Code is a property of Address Criteria criteria = session.createCriteria(Address.class).add(addressExample); listAddresses(criteria.list()); } Result: 154, GR, ATHENS, BETA ALPHA Street 5, 2, Consignee 83, US, ATLANTA, null, 6, Customer 25, US, ATLANTA, null, 1, Shipper 184, US, ATLANTA, null, 1, Shipper Example 6: IgnoreCase Case-insensitive search is supported by Example.ignoreCase(). Method: @Test public void testIgnoreCase() throws Exception { Session session = (Session) entityManager.getDelegate(); AddressType addressType = new AddressType(); addressType.setDescription("customer"); Example addressTypeExample = Example.create(addressType).ignoreCase(); Criteria criteria = session.createCriteria(AddressType.class) .add(addressTypeExample); listAddressTypes(criteria.list()); } Result: 6, Customer Example 7: ExcludeZeroes We can ignore 0 values of the query object by Example.excludeZeroes(). Method: @Test public void testExcludeZeroes() throws Exception { Session session = (Session) entityManager.getDelegate(); AddressType addressType = new AddressType(); addressType.setType(0); addressType.setDescription("Customer"); Example addressTypeExample = Example.create(addressType) .excludeZeroes(); Criteria criteria = session.createCriteria(AddressType.class) .add(addressTypeExample); listAddressTypes(criteria.list()); } Result: 6, Customer Example 8: Combining with Criteria QBE can be combined with criteria query. In this example we add further restriction to the query object using criteria query. Method: @Test public void testCombiningWithCriteria() throws Exception { Session session = (Session) entityManager.getDelegate(); AddressType addressType = new AddressType(); addressType.setDescription("Customer"); Example addressTypeExample = Example.create(addressType); Criteria criteria = session .createCriteria(AddressType.class).add(addressTypeExample) .add(Restrictions.eq("type", 6)); listAddressTypes(criteria.list()); } Result: 6, Customer Example 9: Association With criteria query we can filter both sides of an association, using two query objects. Method: @Test public void testAssociation() throws Exception { Session session = (Session) entityManager.getDelegate(); Address address = new Address(); address.setCountryISO2Code("US"); AddressType addressType = new AddressType(); addressType.setType(6); Example addressExample = Example.create(address); Example addressTypeExample = Example.create(addressType); Criteria criteria = session.createCriteria(Address.class).add(addressExample) .createCriteria("addressType").add(addressTypeExample); // addressType is a property of Address listAddresses(criteria.list()); } Result: 84, US, BOSTON, null, 6, Customer 83, US, ATLANTA, null, 6, Customer 82, US, SAN FRANCISCO, null, 6, Customer 75, US, CHICAGO, Los Angeles Way2, 6, Customer EclipseLink EclipseLink QBE uses QueryByExamplePolicy, ReadObjectQuery and JpaHelper: QueryByExamplePolicy qbePolicy =newQueryByExamplePolicy(); qbePolicy.excludeDefaultPrimitiveValues(); Address address =newAddress(); address.setCity("CHICAGO"); ReadObjectQuery roq =newReadObjectQuery(address, qbePolicy); Query query =JpaHelper.createQuery(roq, entityManager); OpenJPA OpenJPA uses OpenJPAQueryBuilder: CriteriaQuery cq = openJPAQueryBuilder.createQuery(Address.class); Address address =newAddress(); address.setCity("CHICAGO"); cq.where(openJPAQueryBuilder.qbe(cq.from(Address.class), address); References Hibernate: · Srinivas Guruzu and Gary Mak: Hibernate Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (Apress) · http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/core/3.3/reference/en/html/querycriteria.html#querycriteria-examples · http://www.java2s.com/Code/Java/Hibernate/CriteriaQBEQueryByExampleCriteria.htm · http://www.dzone.com/snippets/hibernate-query-example · http://gal-levinsky.blogspot.de/2012/01/qbe-pattern.html Hibernate associations: · http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9309884/query-by-example-on-associations · http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8236596/hibernate-query-by-example-equivalent-of-association-criteria-query JPA: · http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2880209/jpa-findbyexample EclipseLink: · http://www.coderanch.com/t/486528/ORM/databases/findByExample-JPA-book OpenJPA: · http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-typesafejpa/#N10C18

Within this post we will have a deeper look into the new Date/Time API we get with Java 8 (JSR 310). Please note that this post is mainly driven by code examples that show the new API functionality. I think the examples are self-explanatory so I did not spent much time writing text around them :-) Let's get started! Working with Date and Time Objects All classes of the Java 8 Date/Time API are located within the java.time package. The first class we want to look at is java.time.LocalDate. A LocalDate represents a year-month-day date without time. We start with creating new LocalDate instances: // the current date LocalDate currentDate = LocalDate.now(); // 2014-02-10 LocalDate tenthFeb2014 = LocalDate.of(2014, Month.FEBRUARY, 10); // months values start at 1 (2014-08-01) LocalDate firstAug2014 = LocalDate.of(2014, 8, 1); // the 65th day of 2010 (2010-03-06) LocalDate sixtyFifthDayOf2010 = LocalDate.ofYearDay(2010, 65); LocalTime and LocalDateTime are the next classes we look at. Both work similar to LocalDate. ALocalTime works with time (without dates) while LocalDateTime combines date and time in one class: LocalTime currentTime = LocalTime.now(); // current time LocalTime midday = LocalTime.of(12, 0); // 12:00 LocalTime afterMidday = LocalTime.of(13, 30, 15); // 13:30:15 // 12345th second of day (03:25:45) LocalTime fromSecondsOfDay = LocalTime.ofSecondOfDay(12345); // dates with times, e.g. 2014-02-18 19:08:37.950 LocalDateTime currentDateTime = LocalDateTime.now(); // 2014-10-02 12:30 LocalDateTime secondAug2014 = LocalDateTime.of(2014, 10, 2, 12, 30); // 2014-12-24 12:00 LocalDateTime christmas2014 = LocalDateTime.of(2014, Month.DECEMBER, 24, 12, 0); By default LocalDate/Time classes will use the system clock in the default time zone. We can change this by providing a time zone or an alternative Clock implementation: // current (local) time in Los Angeles LocalTime currentTimeInLosAngeles = LocalTime.now(ZoneId.of("America/Los_Angeles")); // current time in UTC time zone LocalTime nowInUtc = LocalTime.now(Clock.systemUTC()); From LocalDate/Time objects we can get all sorts of useful information we might need. Some examples: LocalDate date = LocalDate.of(2014, 2, 15); // 2014-06-15 boolean isBefore = LocalDate.now().isBefore(date); // false // information about the month Month february = date.getMonth(); // FEBRUARY int februaryIntValue = february.getValue(); // 2 int minLength = february.minLength(); // 28 int maxLength = february.maxLength(); // 29 Month firstMonthOfQuarter = february.firstMonthOfQuarter(); // JANUARY // information about the year int year = date.getYear(); // 2014 int dayOfYear = date.getDayOfYear(); // 46 int lengthOfYear = date.lengthOfYear(); // 365 boolean isLeapYear = date.isLeapYear(); // false DayOfWeek dayOfWeek = date.getDayOfWeek(); int dayOfWeekIntValue = dayOfWeek.getValue(); // 6 String dayOfWeekName = dayOfWeek.name(); // SATURDAY int dayOfMonth = date.getDayOfMonth(); // 15 LocalDateTime startOfDay = date.atStartOfDay(); // 2014-02-15 00:00 // time information LocalTime time = LocalTime.of(15, 30); // 15:30:00 int hour = time.getHour(); // 15 int second = time.getSecond(); // 0 int minute = time.getMinute(); // 30 int secondOfDay = time.toSecondOfDay(); // 55800 Some information can be obtained without providing a specific date. For example, we can use the Year class if we need information about a specific year: Year currentYear = Year.now(); Year twoThousand = Year.of(2000); boolean isLeap = currentYear.isLeap(); // false int length = currentYear.length(); // 365 // sixtyFourth day of 2014 (2014-03-05) LocalDate date = Year.of(2014).atDay(64); We can use the plus and minus methods to add or subtract specific amounts of time. Note that these methods always return a new instance (Java 8 date/time classes are immutable). LocalDate tomorrow = LocalDate.now().plusDays(1); // before 5 houres and 30 minutes LocalDateTime dateTime = LocalDateTime.now().minusHours(5).minusMinutes(30); TemporalAdjusters are another nice way for date manipulation. TemporalAdjuster is a single method interface that is used to separate the process of adjustment from actual date/time objects. A set of common TemporalAdjusters can be accessed using static methods of the TemporalAdjusters class. LocalDate date = LocalDate.of(2014, Month.FEBRUARY, 25); // 2014-02-25 // first day of february 2014 (2014-02-01) LocalDate firstDayOfMonth = date.with(TemporalAdjusters.firstDayOfMonth()); // last day of february 2014 (2014-02-28) LocalDate lastDayOfMonth = date.with(TemporalAdjusters.lastDayOfMonth()); Static imports make this more fluent to read: import static java.time.temporal.TemporalAdjusters.*; ... // last day of 2014 (2014-12-31) LocalDate lastDayOfYear = date.with(lastDayOfYear()); // first day of next month (2014-03-01) LocalDate firstDayOfNextMonth = date.with(firstDayOfNextMonth()); // next sunday (2014-03-02) LocalDate nextSunday = date.with(next(DayOfWeek.SUNDAY)); Time Zones Working with time zones is another big topic that is simplified by the new API. The LocalDate/Time classes we have seen so far do not contain information about a time zone. If we want to work with a date/time in a certain time zone we can use ZonedDateTime or OffsetDateTime: ZoneId losAngeles = ZoneId.of("America/Los_Angeles"); ZoneId berlin = ZoneId.of("Europe/Berlin"); // 2014-02-20 12:00 LocalDateTime dateTime = LocalDateTime.of(2014, 02, 20, 12, 0); // 2014-02-20 12:00, Europe/Berlin (+01:00) ZonedDateTime berlinDateTime = ZonedDateTime.of(dateTime, berlin); // 2014-02-20 03:00, America/Los_Angeles (-08:00) ZonedDateTime losAngelesDateTime = berlinDateTime.withZoneSameInstant(losAngeles); int offsetInSeconds = losAngelesDateTime.getOffset().getTotalSeconds(); // -28800 // a collection of all available zones Set allZoneIds = ZoneId.getAvailableZoneIds(); // using offsets LocalDateTime date = LocalDateTime.of(2013, Month.JULY, 20, 3, 30); ZoneOffset offset = ZoneOffset.of("+05:00"); // 2013-07-20 03:30 +05:00 OffsetDateTime plusFive = OffsetDateTime.of(date, offset); // 2013-07-19 20:30 -02:00 OffsetDateTime minusTwo = plusFive.withOffsetSameInstant(ZoneOffset.ofHours(-2)); Timestamps Classes like LocalDate and ZonedDateTime provide a human view on time. However, often we need to work with time viewed from a machine perspective. For this we can use the Instant class which represents timestamps. An Instant counts the time beginning from the first second of January 1, 1970 (1970-01-01 00:00:00) also called the EPOCH. Instant values can be negative if they occured before the epoch. They followISO 8601 the standard for representing date and time. // current time Instant now = Instant.now(); // from unix timestamp, 2010-01-01 12:00:00 Instant fromUnixTimestamp = Instant.ofEpochSecond(1262347200); // same time in millis Instant fromEpochMilli = Instant.ofEpochMilli(1262347200000l); // parsing from ISO 8601 Instant fromIso8601 = Instant.parse("2010-01-01T12:00:00Z"); // toString() returns ISO 8601 format, e.g. 2014-02-15T01:02:03Z String toIso8601 = now.toString(); // as unix timestamp long toUnixTimestamp = now.getEpochSecond(); // in millis long toEpochMillis = now.toEpochMilli(); // plus/minus methods are available too Instant nowPlusTenSeconds = now.plusSeconds(10); Periods and Durations Period and Duration are two other important classes. Like the names suggest they represent a quantity or amount of time. A Period uses date based values (years, months, days) while a Duration uses seconds or nanoseconds to define an amount of time. Duration is most suitable when working with Instants and machine time. Periods and Durations can contain negative values if the end point occurs before the starting point. // periods LocalDate firstDate = LocalDate.of(2010, 5, 17); // 2010-05-17 LocalDate secondDate = LocalDate.of(2015, 3, 7); // 2015-03-07 Period period = Period.between(firstDate, secondDate); int days = period.getDays(); // 18 int months = period.getMonths(); // 9 int years = period.getYears(); // 4 boolean isNegative = period.isNegative(); // false Period twoMonthsAndFiveDays = Period.ofMonths(2).plusDays(5); LocalDate sixthOfJanuary = LocalDate.of(2014, 1, 6); // add two months and five days to 2014-01-06, result is 2014-03-11 LocalDate eleventhOfMarch = sixthOfJanuary.plus(twoMonthsAndFiveDays); // durations Instant firstInstant= Instant.ofEpochSecond( 1294881180 ); // 2011-01-13 01:13 Instant secondInstant = Instant.ofEpochSecond(1294708260); // 2011-01-11 01:11 Duration between = Duration.between(firstInstant, secondInstant); // negative because firstInstant is after secondInstant (-172920) long seconds = between.getSeconds(); // get absolute result in minutes (2882) long absoluteResult = between.abs().toMinutes(); // two hours in seconds (7200) long twoHoursInSeconds = Duration.ofHours(2).getSeconds(); Formatting and Parsing Formatting and parsing is another big topic when working with dates and times. In Java 8 this can be accomplished by using the format() and parse() methods: // 2014-04-01 10:45 LocalDateTime dateTime = LocalDateTime.of(2014, Month.APRIL, 1, 10, 45); // format as basic ISO date format (20140220) String asBasicIsoDate = dateTime.format(DateTimeFormatter.BASIC_ISO_DATE); // format as ISO week date (2014-W08-4) String asIsoWeekDate = dateTime.format(DateTimeFormatter.ISO_WEEK_DATE); // format ISO date time (2014-02-20T20:04:05.867) String asIsoDateTime = dateTime.format(DateTimeFormatter.ISO_DATE_TIME); // using a custom pattern (01/04/2014) String asCustomPattern = dateTime.format(DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("dd/MM/yyyy")); // french date formatting (1. avril 2014) String frenchDate = dateTime.format(DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("d. MMMM yyyy", new Locale("fr"))); // using short german date/time formatting (01.04.14 10:45) DateTimeFormatter formatter = DateTimeFormatter.ofLocalizedDateTime(FormatStyle.SHORT) .withLocale(new Locale("de")); String germanDateTime = dateTime.format(formatter); // parsing date strings LocalDate fromIsoDate = LocalDate.parse("2014-01-20"); LocalDate fromIsoWeekDate = LocalDate.parse("2014-W14-2", DateTimeFormatter.ISO_WEEK_DATE); LocalDate fromCustomPattern = LocalDate.parse("20.01.2014", DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("dd.MM.yyyy")); Conversion Of course we do not always have objects of the type we need. Therefore, we need an option to convert different date/time related objects between each other. The following examples show some of the possible conversion options: // LocalDate/LocalTime <-> LocalDateTime LocalDate date = LocalDate.now(); LocalTime time = LocalTime.now(); LocalDateTime dateTimeFromDateAndTime = LocalDateTime.of(date, time); LocalDate dateFromDateTime = LocalDateTime.now().toLocalDate(); LocalTime timeFromDateTime = LocalDateTime.now().toLocalTime(); // Instant <-> LocalDateTime Instant instant = Instant.now(); LocalDateTime dateTimeFromInstant = LocalDateTime.ofInstant(instant, ZoneId.of("America/Los_Angeles")); Instant instantFromDateTime = LocalDateTime.now().toInstant(ZoneOffset.ofHours(-2)); // convert old date/calendar/timezone classes Instant instantFromDate = new Date().toInstant(); Instant instantFromCalendar = Calendar.getInstance().toInstant(); ZoneId zoneId = TimeZone.getDefault().toZoneId(); ZonedDateTime zonedDateTimeFromGregorianCalendar = new GregorianCalendar().toZonedDateTime(); // convert to old classes Date dateFromInstant = Date.from(Instant.now()); TimeZone timeZone = TimeZone.getTimeZone(ZoneId.of("America/Los_Angeles")); GregorianCalendar gregorianCalendar = GregorianCalendar.from(ZonedDateTime.now()); Conclusion With Java 8 we get a very rich API for working with date and time located in the java.time package. The API can completely replace old classes like java.util.Date or java.util.Calendar with newer, more flexible classes. Due to mostly immutable classes the new API helps in building thread safe systems. The source of the examples can be found on GitHub.