I've used this handy Eclipse plugin for years. But very few of my colleagues were aware of it. This fact surprises me and therefore I would like to highlight it. It is very handy for generation of UML class diagrams from your code. It is also invaluable for analyzing of existing design. One of the top UML tools is Enterprise Architect. But I was never happy with Enterprise Architect usability. I find it much easier to sketch class structure in Java and generate UML class diagrams by ObjectAid. Advantage of this approach is that you have basic skeleton of the module. You can check-it in, so that team can start working on implementation. Have to mention that it’s commercial product, but Class Diagram version is free. For my UML class diagrams needs (design analyze, generating UML diagrams for documentation, modules design sketching) it was enough so far. They provide also paid Sequence diagram and Diagram Add-On versions. To be honest I have never tried these. For sequence diagrams I was using only Enterprise Architect so far. I would be definitely pushing towards buying ObjectAid licenses if we wouldn’t have Enterprise Architect licenses already. There’s no point for me to provide detailed description of it, because ObjectAid site contains short and explanatory overview. I suggest to start with One-Minute Introduction. Everyone understand how inaccurate can UML class diagrams become. Keeping them up to date manually doesn’t make sense at all. ObjectAid fills this gap, because you can maintain your class diagrams up to date. But I had problems in the past when diagrams couldn’t handle renaming or moving of Java classes. Not sure if this is still problem of recent versions, because my diagrams are short lived. I can easily generate new diagram by just dragging appropriate classes into Class diagram editor. This is beauty of ObjectAid plugin. Links: ObjectAid site Installation instructions One-Minute Introduction

Cloudfoundry's java buildpack is supporting some popular jvm based applications. This article is oriented to the audiences already with experience of cloudfoundry/heroku buildpack who want to have more understanding of how buildpack and cloudfoundry works internally. cf push app -p app.war -b build-pack-url The above command demonstrates the usage of pushing a war file to cloudfoundry by using a custom buildpack (E.g. https://github.com/cloudfoundry/java-buildpack). However, what exactly happens inside, or how cloudfoundry bootstrap the war file with tomcat? There are three contracts phase that bridge communication between buildpack and cloudfoundry. The three phases are detect, compile and release, which are three ruby shell scripts: Java buildpack has multiple sub components, while each of them has all of these three phases (E.g. tomcat is one of the sub components, while it contained another layer of sub components). Detect Phase: detect phase is to check whether a particular buildpack/component applies to the deployed application. Take the war file example, tomcat applies only when https://github.com/cloudfoundry/java-buildpack/blob/master/lib/java_buildpack/container/tomcat.rb is true: def supports? web_inf? && !JavaBuildpack::Util::JavaMainUtils.main_class(@application) end The above code means, the tomcat applies when the application has a WEB-INF folder andthisisnot a main class bootstrapped application. Compile Phase: Compile phase would be the major/comprehensive work for a customized buildpack, while it is trying to build a file system on a lxc container. Take the example of our war application and tomcat example. In https://github.com/cloudfoundry/java-buildpack/blob/master/lib/java_buildpack/container/tomcat/tomcat_instance.rb def compile download(@version, @uri) { |file| expand file } link_to(@application.root.children, root) @droplet.additional_libraries << tomcat_datasource_jar if tomcat_datasource_jar.exist? @droplet.additional_libraries.link_to web_inf_lib end def expand(file) with_timing "Expanding Tomcat to #{@droplet.sandbox.relative_path_from(@droplet.root)}" do FileUtils.mkdir_p @droplet.sandbox shell "tar xzf #{file.path} -C #{@droplet.sandbox} --strip 1 --exclude webapps 2>&1" @droplet.copy_resources end The above code is all about preparing the tomcat and link the application files, so the application files will be available for the tomcat classpath. Before going to the code, we have to understand the working directory when the above code executes: . => working directory .app => @application, contains the extracted war archive .buildpack/tomcat => @droplet.sandbox .buildpack/jdk .buildpack/other needed components Inside compile method: download method will download tomcat binary file (specified here: https://github.com/cloudfoundry/java-buildpack/blob/master/config/tomcat.yml), and then extract the archive file to @droplet.sandbox directory. Then copy the resources folder's files to https://github.com/cloudfoundry/java-buildpack/tree/master/resources/tomcat/conf to @droplet.sandbox/conf Symlink the @droplet.sandbox/webapps/ROOT to .app/ Symlink additional libraries (comes from other component rather than application) to the WEB-INF/lib Note: All the symlinks use relative path, since when the container deployed to DEA, the absolute paths would be different. RELEASE PHASE: Release phase is to setup instructions of how to start tomcat. Look at the code in :https://github.com/cloudfoundry/java-buildpack/blob/master/lib/java_buildpack/container/tomcat.rb def command @droplet.java_opts.add_system_property 'http.port', '$PORT' [ @droplet.java_home.as_env_var, @droplet.java_opts.as_env_var, "$PWD/#{(@droplet.sandbox + 'bin/catalina.sh').relative_path_from(@droplet.root)}", 'run' ].flatten.compact.join(' ') end The above code does: Add java system properties http.port (referenced in tomcat server.xml) with environment properties ($PORT), this is the port on the DEA bridging to the lxc container already setup when the container was provisioned. instruction of how to run the tomcat Eg. "./bin/catalina.sh run"

Cyclop is a web-based tool for querying Cassandra databases with features like syntax highlighting and query completion.

It's not always immediate why and in which part of the program is Hibernate generating a given SQL query, especially if we are dealing with code that we did not write ourselves. This post will go over how to configure Hibernate query logging, and use that together with other tricks to find out why and where in the program a given query is being executed. What does the Hibernate query log look like Hibernate has built-in query logging that looks like this: select /* load your.package.Employee */ this_.code, ... from employee this_ where this_.employee_id=? TRACE 12-04-2014@16:06:02 BasicBinder - binding parameter [1] as [NUMBER] - 1000 Why can't Hibernate log the actual query ? Notice that what is logged by Hibernate is the prepared statement sent by Hibernate to the JDBC driver plus it's parameters. The prepared statement has ? in the place of the query parameters, and the parameter values themselves are logged just bellow the prepared statement. This is not the same as the actual query sent to the database, as there is no way for Hibernate to log the actual query. The reason for this is that Hibernate only knows about the prepared statements and the parameters that it sends to the JDBC driver, and it's the driver that will build the actual queries and then send them to the database. In order to produce a log with the real queries, a tool like log4jdbc is needed, which will be the subject of another post. How to find out the origin of the query The logged query above contains a comment that allows to identify in most cases the origin of the query: if the query is due to a load by ID the comment is /* load your.entity.Name */, if it's a named query then the comment will contain the name of the query. If it's a one to many lazy initialization the comment will contain the name of the class and the property that triggered it, etc. In many cases the query comment created by is enough to identify the origin of the query. Setting up the Hibernate query log In order to obtain a query log, the following flags need to be set in the configuration of the session factory: ... true true true The example above is for Spring configuration of an entity manager factory. This is the meaning of the flags: show_sql enables query logging format_sql pretty prints the SQL use_sql_comments adds an explanatory comment In order to log the query parameters, the following log4j or equivalent configuration is needed: If everything else fails If the query comment added by the option use_sql_comments is not sufficient, then we can start by identifying the entity returned by the query based on the table names involved, and put a breakpoint in the constructor of the returned entity. If the entity does not have a constructor, then we can create one and put the breakpoint in the call to super(): @Entity public class Employee { public Employee() { super(); // put the breakpoint here } ... } When the breakpoint is hit, go to the IDE debug view containing the stack call of the program and go through it from top to bottom. The place where the query was made in the program will be there in the call stack.

Take another look at @OneToOne with a shared primary key.

In a previous post, we had shared a small function that generated random string in Java. It turns out that similar functionality is available from a class in the extremely useful apache commons lang library. If you are using maven, download the jar using the following dependency: commons-lang commons-lang 20030203.000129 The class we are interested in is RandomStringUtils. Listed below are some functions you may find useful. Generate and print a random string of length 5 from all characters available System.out.println(RandomStringUtils.random(5)); Generate and print random string of length 10 from upper and lower case alphabets System.out.println(RandomStringUtils.randomAlphabetic(10)); Generate and print a random number of length 12 System.out.println(RandomStringUtils.randomNumeric(12)); Generate and print a random string of length 5 using only a, b, c and d characters System.out.println(RandomStringUtils.random(10,new char[]{'a','b','c','d'}));

this post was originally written by muhammad irfan here on the percona mysql support team, we often see issues where a customer is complaining about replication delays – and many times the problem ends up being tied to mysql replication slave lag. this of course is nothing new for mysql users and we’ve had a few posts here on the mysql performance blog on this topic over the years (two particularly popular post in the past were: “ reasons for mysql replication lag ” and “ managing slave lag with mysql replication ,” both by percona ceo peter zaitsev) . in today’s post, however, i will share some new ways of identifying delays in replication – including possible causes of lagging slaves – and how to cure this problem. how to identify replication delay mysql replication works with two threads, io_thread & sql_thread. io_thread connects to a master, reads binary log events from the master as they come in and just copies them over to a local log file called relaylog . on the other hand, sql_thread reads events from a relay log stored locally on the replication slave (the file that was written by io thread) and then applies them as fast as possible. whenever replication delays, it’s important to discover first whether it’s delaying on slave io_thread or slave sql_thread. normally, i/o thread would not cause a huge replication delay as it is just reading the binary logs from the master. however, it depends on the network connectivity, network latency… how fast is that between the servers. the slave i/o thread could be slow because of high bandwidth usage. usually, when the slave io_thread is able to read binary logs quickly enough it copies and piles up the relay logs on the slave – which is one indication that the slave io_thread is not the culprit of slave lag. on the other hand, when the slave sql_thread is the source of replication delays it is probably because of queries coming from the replication stream are taking too long to execute on the slave. this is sometimes because of different hardware between master/slave, different schema indexes, workload. moreover, the slave oltp workload sometimes causes replication delays because of locking. for instance, if a long-running read against a myisam table blocks the sql thread, or any transaction against an innodb table creates an ix lock and blocks ddl in the sql thread. also, take into account that slave is single threaded prior to mysql 5.6, which would be another reason for delays on the slave sql_thread. let me show you via master status/slave status example to identify either slave is lagging on slave io_thread or slave sql_thread. mysql-master> show master status; +------------------+--------------+------------------+------------------------------------------------------------------+ | file | position | binlog_do_db | binlog_ignore_db | executed_gtid_set | +------------------+--------------+------------------+------------------------------------------------------------------+ | mysql-bin.018196 | 15818564 | | bb11b389-d2a7-11e3-b82b-5cf3fcfc8f58:1-2331947 | +------------------+--------------+------------------+------------------------------------------------------------------+ mysql-slave> show slave status\g *************************** 1. row *************************** slave_io_state: queueing master event to the relay log master_host: master.example.com master_user: repl master_port: 3306 connect_retry: 60 master_log_file: mysql-bin.018192 read_master_log_pos: 10050480 relay_log_file: mysql-relay-bin.001796 relay_log_pos: 157090 relay_master_log_file: mysql-bin.018192 slave_io_running: yes slave_sql_running: yes replicate_do_db: replicate_ignore_db: replicate_do_table: replicate_ignore_table: replicate_wild_do_table: replicate_wild_ignore_table: last_errno: 0 last_error: skip_counter: 0 exec_master_log_pos: 5395871 relay_log_space: 10056139 until_condition: none until_log_file: until_log_pos: 0 master_ssl_allowed: no master_ssl_ca_file: master_ssl_ca_path: master_ssl_cert: master_ssl_cipher: master_ssl_key: seconds_behind_master: 230775 master_ssl_verify_server_cert: no last_io_errno: 0 last_io_error: last_sql_errno: 0 last_sql_error: replicate_ignore_server_ids: master_server_id: 2 master_uuid: bb11b389-d2a7-11e3-b82b-5cf3fcfc8f58:2-973166 master_info_file: /var/lib/mysql/i1/data/master.info sql_delay: 0 sql_remaining_delay: null slave_sql_running_state: reading event from the relay log master_retry_count: 86400 master_bind: last_io_error_timestamp: last_sql_error_timestamp: master_ssl_crl: master_ssl_crlpath: retrieved_gtid_set: bb11b389-d2a7-11e3-b82b-5cf3fcfc8f58:2-973166 executed_gtid_set: bb11b389-d2a7-11e3-b82b-5cf3fcfc8f58:2-973166, ea75c885-c2c5-11e3-b8ee-5cf3fcfc9640:1-1370 auto_position: 1 this clearly suggests that the slave io_thread is lagging and obviously because of that the slave sql_thread is lagging, too, and it yields replication delays. as you can see the master log file is mysql-bin.018196 (file parameter from master status) and slave io_thread is on mysql-bin.018192 ( master_log_file from slave status ) which indicates slave io_thread is reading from that file, while on master it’s writing on mysql-bin.018196 , so the slave io_thread is behind by 4 binlogs. meanwhile, the slave sql_thread is reading from same file i.e. mysql-bin.01819 2 (relay_master_log_file from slave status) this indicates that the slave sql_thread is applying events fast enough, but it’s lagging too, which can be observed from the difference between read_master_log_pos & exec_master_log_pos from show slave status output. you can calculate slave sql_thread lag from read_master_log_pos – exec_master_log_pos in general as long as master_log_file parameter output from show slave status and relay_master_log_file parameter from show slave status output are the same. this will give you rough idea how fast slave sql_thread is applying events. as i mentioned above, the slave io_thread is lagging as in this example then off course slave sql_thread is behind too. you can read detailed description of show slave status output fields here. also, the seconds_behind_master parameter shows a huge delay in seconds. however, this can be misleading, because it only measures the difference between the timestamps of the relay log most recently executed, versus the relay log entry most recently downloaded by the io_thread. if there are more binlogs on the master, the slave doesn’t figure them into the calculation of seconds_behind_master. you can get a more accurate measure of slave lag using pt-heartbeat from percona toolkit. so, we learned how to check replication delays – either it’s slave io_thread or slave sql_thread. now, let me provide some tips and suggestions for what exactly causing this delay. tips and suggestions what causing replication delay & possible fixes usually, the slave io_thread is behind because of slow network between master/slave. most of the time, enabling slave_compressed_protocol helps to mitigate slave io_thread lag. one other suggestion is to disable binary logging on slave as it’s io intensive too unless you required it for point in time recovery. to minimize slave sql_thread lag, focus on query optimization. my recommendation is to enable the configuration option log_slow_slave_statements so that the queries executed by slave that take more than long_query_time will be logged to the slow log. to gather more information about query performance, i would also recommend setting the configuration option log_slow_verbosity to “full”. this way we can see if there are queries executed by slave sql_thread that are taking long time to complete. you can follow my previous post about how to enable slow query log for specific time period with mentioned options here . and as a reminder, log_slow_slave_statements as variable were first introduced in percona server 5.1 which is now part of vanilla mysql from version 5.6.11 in upstream version of mysql server log_slow_slave_statements were introduced as command line option. details can be found here while log_slow_verbosity is percona server specific feature. one another reason for delay on slave sql_thread if you use row based binlog format is that if your any database table missing primary key or unique key then it will scan all rows of the table for dml on slave and causes replication delays so make sure all your tables should have primary key or unique key. check this bug report for details http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=53375 you can use below query on slave to identify which of database tables missing primary or unique key. mysql> select t.table_schema,t.table_name,engine from information_schema.tables t inner join information_schema .columns c on t.table_schema=c.table_schema and t.table_name=c.table_name group by t.table_schema,t.table_name having sum(if(column_key in ('pri','uni'), 1,0)) =0; one improvement is made for this case in mysql 5.6, where in memory hash is used slave_rows_search_algorithms comes to the rescue. note that seconds_behind_master is not updated while we read huge rbr event, so, “lagging” may be related to just that – we had not completed reading of the event. for example, in row based replication huge transactions may cause delay on slave side e.g. if you have 10 million rows table and you do “delete from table where id < 5000000″ 5m rows will be sent to slave, each row separately which will be painfully slow. so, if you have to delete oldest rows time to time from huge table using partitioning might be good alternative for this for some kind of workloads where instead using delete use drop old partition may be good and only statement is replicated because it will be ddl operation. to explain it better, let suppose you have partition1 holding rows of id’s from 1 to 1000000 , partition2 – id’s from 1000001 to 2000000 and so on so instead of deleting via statement “delete from table where id<=1000000;” you can do “alter table drop partition1;” instead. for alter partitioning operations check manual – check this wonderful post too from my colleague roman explaining possible grounds for replication delays here pt-stalk is one of finest tool from percona toolkit which collects diagnostics data when problems occur. you can setup pt-stalk as follows so whenever there is a slave lag it can log diagnostic information which we can be later analyze to check to see what exactly causing the lag. here is how you can setup pt-stalk so that it captures diagnostic data when there is slave lag: ------- pt-plug.sh contents #!/bin/bash trg_plugin() { mysqladmin $ext_argv ping &> /dev/null mysqld_alive=$? if [[ $mysqld_alive == 0 ]] then seconds_behind_master=$(mysql $ext_argv -e "show slave status" --vertical | grep seconds_behind_master | awk '{print $2}') echo $seconds_behind_master else echo 1 fi } # uncomment below to test that trg_plugin function works as expected #trg_plugin ------- -- that's the pt-plug.sh file you would need to create and then use it as below with pt-stalk: $ /usr/bin/pt-stalk --function=/root/pt-plug.sh --variable=seconds_behind_master --threshold=300 --cycles=60 [email protected] --log=/root/pt-stalk.log --pid=/root/pt-stalk.pid --daemonize you can adjust the threshold, currently its 300 seconds, combining that with –cycles, it means that if seconds_behind_master value is >= 300 for 60 seconds or more then pt-stalk will start capturing data. adding –notify-by-email option will notify via email when pt-stalk captures data. you can adjust the pt-stalk thresholds accordingly so that’s how it triggers to collect diagnostic data during problem. conclusion a lagging slave is a tricky problem but a common issue in mysql replication. i’ve tried to cover most aspects of replication delays in this post. please share in the comments section if you know of any other reasons for replication delay.

This post will go through how to setup the Hibernate Second-Level and Query caches, how they work and what are their most common pitfalls.

The Open Session in View (OSIV) pattern gives rise to different opinions in the Java development community. Let's go over OSIV and some of the pros and cons of this pattern. The problem The problem that OSIV solves is a mismatch between the Hibernate concept of session and it's lifecycle and the way that many server-side view technologies work. In a typical Java frontend application the service layer starts by querying some of the data needed to build the view. The remaining data needed can be lazy-loaded later, with the condition that the Hibernate session remains open - and there lies the problem. Between the moment that the service layer method finishes it's execution and the moment that the view is rendered, Hibernate has already committed the transaction and closed the session. When the view tries to lazy load the extra data that it needs, if finds the Hibernate session closed, causing a LazyInitializationException. The OSIV solution OSIV tackles this problem by ensuring that the Hibernate session is kept open all the way up to the rendering of the view - hence the name of the pattern. Because the session is kept open, no more LazyInitializationExceptions occur. The session or entity manager is kept open by means of a filter that is added to the request processing chain. In the case of JPA the OpenEntityManagerInViewFilter will create an entity manager at the beginning of the request, and then bind it to the request thread. The service layer will then be executed and the business transaction committed or rolled back, but the transaction manager will not remove the entity manager from the thread after the commit. When the view rendering starts, the transaction manager will then check if there is already an entity manager binded to the thread, and if so use it instead of creating a new one. After the request is processed, the filter will then unbind the entity manager from the thread. The end result is that the same entity manager used to commit the business transaction was kept around in the request thread, allowing the view rendering code to lazy load the needed data. Going back to the original problem Let's step back a moment and go back to the initial problem: the LazyInitializationException. Is this exception really a problem? This exception can also be seen as a warning sign of a wrongly written query in the service layer. When building a view and it's backing services, the developer knows upfront what data is needed, and can make sure that the needed data is loaded before the rendering starts. Several relation types such as one-to-many use lazy-loading by default, but that default setting can be overridden if needed at query time using the following syntax: select p FROM Person p left join fetch p.invoices This means that the lazy loading can be turned off on a case by case basis depending on the data needed by the view. OSIV in projects I've worked In projects I have worked that used OSIV, we could see via query logging that the database was getting hit with a high number of SQL queries, sometimes to the point that developers had to turn off the Hibernate SQL logging. The performance of these application was impacted, but it was kept manageable using second-level caches, and due to the fact that these where intranet-based applications with a limited number of users. Pros of OSIV The main advantage of OSIV is that it makes working with ORM and the database more transparent: Less queries need to be manually written Less awareness is required about the Hibernate session and how to solve LazyInitializationExceptions. Cons of OSIV OSIV seems to be easy to misuse and can accidentally introduce N+1 performance problems in the application. On projects I've worked OSIV did not work out well in the long-term. The alternative of writing custom queries that eager fetch data depending on the use case is manageable and turned out well in other projects I've worked. Alternatives to OSIV Besides the application-level solution of writing custom queries to pre-fetch the needed data, there are other framework-level aproaches to OSIV. The Seam Framework was built by some of the same developers as Hibernate , and solves the problem by introducing the notion of conversation. Can you let me know in the comments bellow your thoughts and experiences with OSIV, thanks for reading.

System Requirements: Eclipse Kepler Service Release 2 JDK 1.5 or above Installed Google App Engine SDK on eclipse – this is required for second version of this example. Create a google spreadsheet – login to your google account and create a new spreadsheet, if you want to read existing one then put that url in SPREADSHEET_URL. Once you create a new spreadsheet our url will be like – https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1L8xtAJfOObsXL-XemliUV10wkDHQNxjn6jKS4XwzYZ8/ but don’t put this url in SPREADSHEET_URL, Use the below url simply change the bold part. public static final String SPREADSHEET_URL = “https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/spreadsheets/1L8xtAJfOObsXL-XemliUV10wkDHQNxjn6jKS4XwzYZ8“; // Fill in google spreadsheet URI package org.gopaldas.readsps; import java.io.IOException; import java.net.URL; import com.google.gdata.client.spreadsheet.SpreadsheetService; import com.google.gdata.data.spreadsheet.ListEntry; import com.google.gdata.data.spreadsheet.ListFeed; import com.google.gdata.data.spreadsheet.SpreadsheetEntry; import com.google.gdata.data.spreadsheet.WorksheetEntry; import com.google.gdata.util.ServiceException; public class ReadSpreadsheet { public static final String GOOGLE_ACCOUNT_USERNAME = "[email protected]"; // Fill in google account username public static final String GOOGLE_ACCOUNT_PASSWORD = "xxxx"; // Fill in google account password public static final String SPREADSHEET_URL = "https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/spreadsheets/1L8xtAJfOObsXL-XemliUV10wkDHQNxjn6jKS4XwzYZ8"; //Fill in google spreadsheet URI public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException, ServiceException { /** Our view of Google Spreadsheets as an authenticated Google user. */ SpreadsheetService service = new SpreadsheetService("Print Google Spreadsheet Demo"); // Login and prompt the user to pick a sheet to use. service.setUserCredentials(GOOGLE_ACCOUNT_USERNAME, GOOGLE_ACCOUNT_PASSWORD); // Load sheet URL metafeedUrl = new URL(SPREADSHEET_URL); SpreadsheetEntry spreadsheet = service.getEntry(metafeedUrl, SpreadsheetEntry.class); URL listFeedUrl = ((WorksheetEntry) spreadsheet.getWorksheets().get(0)).getListFeedUrl(); // Print entries ListFeed feed = (ListFeed) service.getFeed(listFeedUrl, ListFeed.class); for(ListEntry entry : feed.getEntries()) { System.out.println("new row"); for(String tag : entry.getCustomElements().getTags()) { System.out.println(" "+tag + ": " + entry.getCustomElements().getValue(tag)); } } } }

wanted to go through some of the basic tenets, the technical terminology related to java ee. for many people, java ee/j2ee still mean servlets, jsps or maybe struts at best. no offence or pun intended! this is not a java ee 'bible' by any means. i am not capable enough of writing such a thing! so let us line up the 'keywords' related to java ee and then look at them one by one java ee java ee apis (specifications) containers services multitiered applications components let's try to elaborate on the above mentioned points. ok. so what is java ee? 'ee' stands for enterprise edition. that essentially makes java ee - java enterprise edition. if i had to summarize java ee in a couple of sentences, it would go something like this "java ee is a platform which defines 'standard specifications/apis' which are then implemented by vendors and used for development of enterprise (distributed, 'multi-tired', robust) 'applications'. these applications are composed of modules or 'components' which use java ee 'containers' as their run-time infrastructure." what is this 'standardized platform' based upon? what does it constitute? the platform revolves around 'standard' specifications or apis . think of these as contracts defined by a standard body e.g. enterprise java beans (ejb), java persistence api (jpa), java message service (jms) etc. these contracts/specifications/apis are implemented by different vendors e.g. glassfish, oracle weblogic, apache tomee etc alright. what about containers? containers can be visualized as 'virtual/logical partitions' . each container supports a subset of the apis/specifications defined by the java ee platform they provide run-time 'services' to the 'applications' which they host the java ee specification lists 4 types of containers ejb container web container application client container applet container java ee containers i am not going to dwell into details of these containers in this post. services?? well, 'services' are nothing but a result of the vendor implementations of the standard 'specifications' (mentioned above). examples of specifications are - jersey for jax-rs (restful services), tyrus (web sockets), eclipselink (jpa), weld (cdi) etc. the 'container' is the interface between the deployed application ('service' consumer) and the application server. here is a list of 'services' which are rendered by the 'container' to the underlying 'components' (this is not an exhaustive list) persistence - offered by the java persistence api (jpa) which drives object relational mapping (orm) and an abstraction for the database operations. messaging - the java message service (jms) provides asynchronous messaging between disparate parts of your applications. contexts & dependency injection - cdi provides loosely coupled and type safe injection of resources. web services - jaxrs and jaxws provide support for rest and soap style services respectively transaction - provided by the java transaction api (jta) implementation what is a typical java ee 'application'? what does it comprise of? applications are composed of different ' components ' which in turn are supported by their corresponding ' container ' supported 'component' types are: enterprise applications - make use of the specifications like ejb, jms, jpa etc and are executed within an ejb container web applications - they leverage the servlet api, jsp, jsf etc and are supported by a web container application client - executed in client side. they need an application client container which has a set of supported libraries and executes in a java se environment. applets - these are gui applications which execute in a web browser. how are java ee applications structured? as far as java ee 'application' architecture is concerned, they generally tend follow the n-tier model consisting of client tier, server tier and of course the database (back end) tier client tier - consists of web browsers or gui (swing, java fx) based clients. web browsers tend to talk to the 'web components' on the server tier while the gui clients interact directly with the 'business' layer within the server tier server tier - this tier comprises of the dynamic web components (jsp, jsf, servlets) and the business layer driven by ejbs, jms, jpa, jta specifications. database tier - contains 'enterprise information systems' backed by databases or even legacy data repositories. generic 3-tier java ee application architecture java ee - bare bones, basics.... as quickly and briefly as i possibly could. that's all for now! :-) stay tuned for more java ee content, specifically around the latest and greatest version of the java ee platform --> java ee 7 happy reading!

splunk vs. sumo logic vs. logstash vs. graylog vs. loggly vs. papertrails vs. splunk>storm splunk, sumo logic, logstash, graylog, loggly, papertrails - did i miss someone? i’m pretty sure i did. logs are like fossil fuels - we’ve been wanting to get rid of them for the past 20 years, but we’re not quite there yet. well, if that's the case i want a bmw! to deal with the growth of log data a host of log management & analysis tools have been built over the last few years to help developers and operations make sense of the growing data. i thought it’d be interesting to look at our options and what are each tools’ selling point, from a developer’s standpoint . splunk as the biggest tool in this space, i decided to put splunk in a category of its own. that’s not to say it’s the best tool for what you need, but more to give credit to a product who essentially created a new category. pros splunk is probably the most feature rich solution in the space. it’s got hundreds of apps (i counted 537 ) to make sense of almost every format of log data, from security to business analytics to infrastructure monitoring. splunk’s search and charting tools are feature rich to the point that there’s probably no set of data you can’t get to through its ui or apis. cons splunk has two major cons. the first, that is more subjective, is that it’s an on-premise solution which means that setup costs in terms of money and complexity are high. to deploy in a high-scale environment you will need to install and configure a dedicated cluster. as a developer, it’s usually something you can't or don’t want to do as your first choice. splunk’s second con is that it’s expensive. to support a real-world application you’re looking at tens of thousands of dollars, which most likely means you’ll need sign offs from high-ups in your organization, and the process is going to be slow. if you’ve got a new app and you want something fast that you can quickly spin up and ramp as things progress - keep reading. some more enterprise log analyzers can be found here . saas log analyzers sumo logic sumo was founded as a saas version of splunk, going so far as to imitate some of splunk’s features and visuals early on. having said that, sl has developed to a full fledged enterprise class log management solution. pros sl is chock-full of features to reduce, search and chart mass amounts of data. out of all the saas log analyzers, it’s probably the most feature rich. also, being a saas offering it inherently means setup and ongoing operation are easier. one of sumo logic’s main points of attraction is the ability to establish baselines and to actively notify you when key metrics change after an event such as a new version rollout or a breach attempt. cons this one is shared across all saas log analyzers, which is you need to get the data to the service to actually do something with it. this means that you’ll be looking at possible gbs (or more) uploaded from your servers. this can create issues on multiple fronts - as a developer, if you're logging sensitive or pii you need to make sure it’s redacted. there may be a lag between the time data is logged and the time it’s visible to to the service. there’s additional overhead on your machines transmitting gbs of data, which really depends on your logging throughput. sumo’s pricing is also not transparent , which means you might be looking at a buying process which is more complex than swiping your team’s credit card to get going. loggly loggly is also a robust log analyzer, focusing on simplicity and ease of use for a devops audience. pros whereas sumo logic has a strong enterprise and security focus, loggly is geared more towards helping devops find and fix operational problems. this makes it very developer-friendly. things like creating custom performance and devops dashboards are super-easy to do. pricing is also transparent, which makes start of use easier. cons don't expect loggly to scale into a full blown infrastructure, security or analytics solution. if you need forensics or infrastructure monitoring you’re in the wrong place. this is a tools mainly for devops to parse data coming from your app servers. anything beyond that you’ll have to build yourself. papertrails papertrails is a simple way to look and search through logs from multiple machines, in one consolidated easy-to-use interface. think of it like tailing your log in the cloud, and you won't be too far off. pros pt is what it is. a simple way to look at log files from multiple machines in a singular view in the cloud. the ux itself is very similar to looking at a log on your machine, and so are the search commands. it aims to do something simple and useful, and does it elegantly. it’s also very affordable . cons pt is mostly text based. looking for any advanced integrations, predictive or reporting capabilities? you're barking up the wrong tree. splunk>storm this is splunk’s little (some may say step) saas brother. it’s a pretty similar offering that’s hosted on splunk’s servers. pros storm lets you experiment with splunk without having to install the actual software on-premise, and contains much of the features available in the full version. cons this isn't really a commercial offering, and you're limited in the amount of data you can send. it seems to be more of an online limited version of splunk meant to help people test out the product without having to deploy first. a new service called splunk cloud is aimed at providing a full-blown splunk saas experience. open source analyzers logstash logstash is an open source tool for collecting and managing log files. it’s part of an open-source stack which includes elasticsearch for indexing and searching through data and kibana for charting and visualizing data. together they form a powerful log management solution. pros being an open-source solution means you're inherently getting a lot of a control and a very good price. logstash uses three mature and powerful components, all heavily maintained, to create a very robust and extensible package. for an open-source solution it’s also very easy to install and start using. we use logstash and love it. cons as logstash is essentially a stack, it means you're dealing with three different products. that means that extensibility also becomes complex. logstash filters are written in ruby, kibana is pure javascript and elasticsearch has its own rest api as well as json templates. when you move to production, you’ll also need to separate the three into different machines, which adds to the complexity. graylog2 a fairly new player in the space, gl2 is an open-source log analyzer backed by mongodb as well as elasticsearch (similar to logstash) for storing and searching through log errors. it’s mainly focused on helping developers detect and fix errors in their apps. also in this category you can find fluentd and kafka whose one of its main use-cases is also storing log data. phew, so many choices! takipi for logs while this post is not about takipi, i thought there’s one feature it has which you might find relevant to all of this. the biggest disadvantage in all log analyzers and log files in general, is that the right data has to be put there by you first. from a dev perspective, it means that if an exception isn’t logged, or the variable data you need to understand why it happened isn't there, no log file or analyzer in the world can help you. production debugging sucks. one of the things we’ve added to takipi is the ability to jump into a recorded debugging session straight from a log file error. this means that for every log error you can see the actual source code and variable values at the moment of error. you can learn more about it here . this is one post where i would love to hear from you guys about your experiences with some of the tools mentioned (and some that i didn’t). i’m sure there are things you would disagree with or would like to correct me on - so go ahead, the comment section is below and i would love to hear from you. originally posted on takipi blog

Michael recently wrote a blog post showing how to create a time tree representing time down to the second using Neo4j’s Cypher query language, something I built on top of for a side project I’m working on. The domain I want to model is RSVPs to meetup invites – I want to understand how much in advance people respond and how likely they are to drop out at a later stage. For this problem I only need to measure time down to the day so my task is a bit easier than Michael’s. After a bit of fiddling around with leap years, I believe the following query will create a time tree representing all the days from 2011 – 2014, which covers the time the London Neo4j meetup has been running: WITH range(2011, 2014) AS years, range(1,12) as months FOREACH(year IN years | MERGE (y:Year {year: year}) FOREACH(month IN months | CREATE (m:Month {month: month}) MERGE (y)-[:HAS_MONTH]->(m) FOREACH(day IN (CASE WHEN month IN [1,3,5,7,8,10,12] THEN range(1,31) WHEN month = 2 THEN CASE WHEN year % 4 <> 0 THEN range(1,28) WHEN year % 100 <> 0 THEN range(1,29) WHEN year % 400 <> 0 THEN range(1,29) ELSE range(1,28) END ELSE range(1,30) END) | CREATE (d:Day {day: day}) MERGE (m)-[:HAS_DAY]->(d)))) The next step is to link adjacent days together so that we can easily traverse between adjacent days without needing to go back up and down the tree. For example we should have something like this: (jan31)-[:NEXT]->(feb1)-[:NEXT]->(feb2) We can build this by first collecting all the ‘day’ nodes in date order like so: MATCH (year:Year)-[:HAS_MONTH]->(month)-[:HAS_DAY]->(day) WITH year,month,day ORDER BY year.year, month.month, day.day WITH collect(day) as days RETURN days And then iterating over adjacent nodes to create the ‘NEXT’ relationship: MATCH (year:Year)-[:HAS_MONTH]->(month)-[:HAS_DAY]->(day) WITH year,month,day ORDER BY year.year, month.month, day.day WITH collect(day) as days FOREACH(i in RANGE(0, length(days)-2) | FOREACH(day1 in [days[i]] | FOREACH(day2 in [days[i+1]] | CREATE UNIQUE (day1)-[:NEXT]->(day2)))) Now if we want to find the previous 5 days from the 1st February 2014 we could write the following query: MATCH (y:Year {year: 2014})-[:HAS_MONTH]->(m:Month {month: 2})-[:HAS_DAY]->(:Day {day: 1})<-[:NEXT*0..5]-(day) RETURN y,m,day If we want to we can create the time tree and then connect the day nodes all in one query by using ‘WITH *’ like so: WITH range(2011, 2014) AS years, range(1,12) as months FOREACH(year IN years | MERGE (y:Year {year: year}) FOREACH(month IN months | CREATE (m:Month {month: month}) MERGE (y)-[:HAS_MONTH]->(m) FOREACH(day IN (CASE WHEN month IN [1,3,5,7,8,10,12] THEN range(1,31) WHEN month = 2 THEN CASE WHEN year % 4 <> 0 THEN range(1,28) WHEN year % 100 <> 0 THEN range(1,29) WHEN year % 400 <> 0 THEN range(1,29) ELSE range(1,28) END ELSE range(1,30) END) | CREATE (d:Day {day: day}) MERGE (m)-[:HAS_DAY]->(d)))) WITH * MATCH (year:Year)-[:HAS_MONTH]->(month)-[:HAS_DAY]->(day) WITH year,month,day ORDER BY year.year, month.month, day.day WITH collect(day) as days FOREACH(i in RANGE(0, length(days)-2) | FOREACH(day1 in [days[i]] | FOREACH(day2 in [days[i+1]] | CREATE UNIQUE (day1)-[:NEXT]->(day2)))) Now I need to connect the RSVP events to the tree!

I was playing around with Neo4j’s Cypher last weekend and found myself accidentally running some queries against an earlier version of the Neo4j 2.0 series (2.0.0). My first query started with a map and I wanted to create a person from an identifier inside the map: WITH {person: {id: 1} AS params MERGE (p:Person {id: params.person.id}) RETURN p When I ran the query I got this error: ==> SyntaxException: Type mismatch: expected Map but was Boolean, Number, String or Collection (line 1, column 62) ==> "WITH {person: {id: 1} AS params MERGE (p:Person {id: params.person.id}) RETURN p" If we try the same query in 2.0.1 it works as we’d expect: ==> +---------------+ ==> | p | ==> +---------------+ ==> | Node[1]{id:} | ==> +---------------+ ==> 1 row ==> Nodes created: 1 ==> Properties set: 1 ==> Labels added: 1 ==> 47 ms My next query was the following which links topics of interest to a person: WITH {topics: [{name: "Java"}, {name: "Neo4j"}]} AS params MERGE (p:Person {id: 2}) FOREACH(t IN params.topics | MERGE (topic:Topic {name: t.name}) MERGE (p)-[:INTERESTED_IN]->(topic) ) RETURN p In 2.0.0 that query fails like so: ==> InternalException: Query not prepared correctly! but if we try it in 2.0.1 we’ll see that it works as well: ==> +---------------+ ==> | p | ==> +---------------+ ==> | Node[4]{id:2} | ==> +---------------+ ==> 1 row ==> Nodes created: 1 ==> Relationships created: 2 ==> Properties set: 1 ==> Labels added: 1 ==> 53 ms So if you’re seeing either of those errors, then get yourself upgraded to 2.0.1 as well!

See how HashMap performance has been improved with new features of Java 8.

Recently needed to update the last inserted row of a table but didn't have anyway in knowing what the highest ID in the table was. I can easily do this by using the max() function to select the highest ID in the table. SELECT MAX(id) FROM table; Then I can use the result of this query in the UPDATE query to edit the record with the highest ID. But this is quite a easy query so I should be able to do this in one query by using a nested select query on the UPDATE. UPDATE table SET name='test_name' WHERE id = (SELECT max(id) FROM table) But the problem with this is that the MAX() function doesn't work inside a nested select so had to find another way of doing this. I found out that you can use an ORDER BY and a LIMIT in an UPDATE query therefore I can use a combination of these in the UPDATE query to make sure I only update the record with the highest ID, by doing a descendant order on the ID and limiting the return to only 1 record. UPDATE table SET name='test_name' ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 1;

Facts and Terminology As you probably know, Java uses UTF-16 to represent Strings. In order to understand the confusion about String.length(), you need to be familiar with some Encoding/Unicode terms. Code Point: A unique integer value which represents a character in the code space. Code Unit: A bit sequence used to encode characters (Code Points). One or more Code Units may be required to represent a Code Point. UTF-16 Unicode Code Points are logically divided into 17 planes. The first plane, the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) contains the “classic” characters (from U+0000 to U+FFFF). The other planes contain the supplementary characters (from U+10000 to U+10FFFF). Characters (Code Points) from the first plane are encoded in one 16-bit Code Unit with the same value. Supplementary characters (Code Points) are encoded in two Code Units (encoding-specific, see Wiki for the explanation). Example Character: A Unicode Code Point: U+0041 UTF-16 Code Unit(s): 0041 Character: Mathematical double-struck capital A Unicode Code Point: U+1D538 UTF-16 Code Unit(s): D835 DD38 As you can see here, there are characters which are encoded in two Code Units. String.length() Let’s take a look at the Javadoc of the length() method: public int length() Returns the length of this string. The length is equal to the number of Unicode code units in the string. So if you have one supplementary character which consists of two code units, the length of that single character is two. // Mathematical double-struck capital A String str = "\uD835\uDD38"; System.out.println(str); System.out.println(str.length()); //prints 2 Which is correct according to the documentation, but maybe it’s not expected. ~Solution You need to count the code points not the code units: String str = "\uD835\uDD38"; System.out.println(str); System.out.println(str.codePointCount(0, str.length())); See: codePointCount(int beginIndex, int endIndex) References/Sources The Java Language Specification Unicode Glossary: Code Point Wiki: Code Point Unicode Glossary: Code Unit Wiki: Code Unit Wiki: Unicode Wiki: UTF-16 Supplementary Characters in the Java Platform Wiki: Unicode Planes

There are many instances where we will have to write custom queries with hibernate. I always hated writing custom queries due to following reasons Hibernate returns List of Object arrays (List getSalaryByDepartment() { Session session = HibernateUtil.getSessionFactory().openSession(); try { List salaryByDepartments = new ArrayList(); for (Object object : contactList) { Object[] result = (Object[]) object; SalaryByDepartment salaryByDepartment = new SalaryByDepartment(); salaryByDepartment.setDeptId((Integer) result[0]); salaryByDepartment.setDepartmentName((String) result[1]); salaryByDepartment.setSalary((Double) result[2]); salaryByDepartments.add(salaryByDepartment); } return salaryByDepartments; } catch (HibernateException e) { e.printStackTrace(); return null; } finally { session.close(); } } There is a better mechanism for writing the custom queries called 'select new' but it is not widely used for some reason. It might be an overkill to write all custom queries using this mechanism, but is good for queries which return more than 2 columns. public List getNewSalaryByDepartment() { Session session = HibernateUtil.getSessionFactory().openSession(); try { List salaryByDept = session.createQuery("select " + "new hsqldb.results.SalaryByDepartment(department.id, department.departmentName, sum(employee.salary)) " + "from Employee employee, Department department " + "where employee.department.id = department.id group by department.id") .list(); return salaryByDept; } catch (HibernateException e) { e.printStackTrace(); return null; } finally { session.close(); } }

After reading the interesting blog post of my colleague Rik van Bruggen on “Media, Politics and Graphs” I thought it would be really cool to render it as a GrapGist. Especially, as he already shared all the queries as a GitHub Gist. Unfortunately the dataset was a bit large for a sensible GraphGist representation, so I thought about means of extracting a smaller sample of his raw data that he made available (see his blog post for the link). Considering my last blog post on creating data from sampling a cross product, this should be much easier. We know we want to have all nodes with the labels PARTY, SHOW and GENDER in our graph as well as a sample of GUEST nodes with their relationships. The first part is easy: MATCH (n) WHERE n:PARTY OR n:SHOW OR n:GENDER RETURN n; The second part uses something that was not helpful in my last exploration, namely that random sampling when applied directly to a match, is used to filter the first node-pattern in the match and then still traverse all relationships/paths emanating from that node. MATCH(n:GUEST)-[r]->() WHERE rand() < 0.1 RETURN n,r; The number you compare rand() to is the percentage you want to get back, in this example 10%. Now I have two nice queries, that can get me the data, how can I bring them together? With UNION ALL MATCH (n) WHERE n:PARTY OR n:SHOW OR n:GENDER RETURN n, null as r UNION ALL MATCH(n:GUEST)-[r]->() WHERE rand() < 0.1 RETURN n,r; And where do I get the Cypher statements from, that I can use to populate my GraphGist database setup? Fortunately my dump command made it into the Neo4j-Shell, so that we can just run it on the command-line and redirect the output into a file: bin/neo4j-shell -path talkshow/graph.db \ -c 'dump MATCH (n) WHERE n:PARTY OR n:SHOW OR n:GENDER RETURN n, null as r UNION ALL MATCH(n:GUEST)-[r]->() WHERE rand() < 0.1 RETURN n,r;' \ > talkshow/sample.cql Don’t forget the semicolon at the end! Looking at sample.cql we see something like: begin create (_0:`SHOW` {`Modularity Name`:"B&vD", `id`:"B&vD", `label`:"B&vD", `modularity_class`:3, `weighted outdegree`:0.000000}) create (_1:`SHOW` {`Modularity Name`:"P&W", `id`:"P&W", `label`:"P&W", `modularity_class`:4, `weighted outdegree`:0.000000}) create (_2:`SHOW` {`Modularity Name`:"DWDD", `id`:"DWDD", `label`:"DWDD", `modularity_class`:5, `weighted outdegree`:0.000000}) ... ... create _509-[:`VISITED` {`quantity`:1}]->_5 create _509-[:`VISITED` {`quantity`:1}]->_2 create _509-[:`VISITED` {`quantity`:1}]->_1 create _509-[:`VISITED` {`quantity`:1}]->_0 ; commit Which we can now use to populate our database for our GraphGist, and here it is in all its beauty – GraphGist: “Media, Politics and Graphs”. But actually I chose not to use Rik’s GitHub Gist with the queries, but to copy the nice text and pictures from his blog post into the GraphGist. You might notice that some of the parties go without connections. That would need some tweaking of the sampling which I leave as exercise for you. Have fun Michael

If you need to compare the java.io.file.Path object, be aware that Path.endsWith(String) will ONLY match another sub-element of Path object in your original path, not the path name string portion! If you want to match the string name portion, you would need to call the Path.toString() first. For example // Match all jar files. Files.walk(dir).forEach(path -> { if (path.toString().endsWith(".jar")) System.out.println(path); }); With out the "toString()" you will spend many fruitless hours wonder why your program didn't work.