One of the useful gems that made it into C++11 Standard Template Libraries (STD) is call_once, this nifty little method makes sure that specific code is called only once (duh) and it follows these 3 rules: Exactly one execution of exactly one of the functions (passed as f to the invocations in the group) is performed. It is undefined which function will be selected for execution. The selected function runs in the same thread as thecall_once invocation it was passed to. No invocation in the group returns before the abovementioned execution of the selected function is completed successfully, that is, doesn't exit via an exception. If the selected function exits via exception, it is propagated to the caller. Another function is then selected and executed. I needed something similar – I had a method that should only be called once (initialize) and I wanted to implement something similar to the call_once I’ve been using for my C++ development. My first object was to try and make it as preferment as possible and so I’ve looked for a solution that does not involve locks: public static class Call { public static void Once(OnceFlag flag, Action action) { if (flag.CheckIfNotCalledAndSet) { action.Invoke(); } } } since I was trying to mimic the C++ code I wrote two objects Call (above) and OnceFlag which has all of the magic inside using Interlocked: public class OnceFlag { private const int NotCalled = 0; private const int Called = 1; private int _state = NotCalled; internal bool CheckIfCalledAndSet { get { var prev = Interlocked.Exchange(ref _state, Called); return prev == NotCalled; } } internal void Reset() { Interlocked.Exchange(ref _state, NotCalled); } } I’m using Interlocked as a thread-safe way to check & set the value making sure that only once it would return true – try it: class Program { static OnceFlag _flag = new OnceFlag(); static void Main(string[] args) { var t1 = new Thread(() => DoOnce(1)); var t2 = new Thread(() => DoOnce(2)); var t3 = new Thread(() => DoOnce(3)); var t4 = new Thread(() => DoOnce(4)); t1.Start(); t2.Start(); t3.Start(); t4.Start(); t1.Join(); t2.Join(); t3.Join(); t4.Join(); } private static void DoOnce(int index) { Call.Once(_flag, () => Console.WriteLine("Callled (" + index + ")")); } } It’s very simple solution unfortunately not entirely correct – the method used will only be called once, but requirements 2 & 3 were not implemented. Luckily for me I didn’t need to make sure that exception enable another call to pass through nor did I need to block other calls until the first call finishes. But I wanted to try and write a proper implementation, unfortunately not as preferment due to the use of locks: public static void Once(OnceFlagSimple flag, Action action) { lock (flag) { if (flag.CheckIfNotCalled) { action.Invoke(); flag.Set(); } } } But it works, and since I’m already using lock I can split the check and Set methods and use a bool value inside the flag instead of Interlocked. All other threads are blocked due to lock until first finish running – check! In case of exception other method can execute the once block – check! If exited properly the block would only execute once – check! But not very good performance due to locking even after the first time run. I’m still looking for a better way to implement call_once – it’s a good exercise in threading and I might find a cool new ways to use the classes under Threading or Task namespaces. please let me know if you have a better implementation – that’s what the comments are for…

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.

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.

JDave, Concordion, Easyb, JBehave, Cucumber are all compared here briefly for your convenience.

it's very important to learn hadoop by practice. one of the learning curves is how to write the first map reduce app and debug in favorite ide, eclipse. do we need any eclipse plugins? no, we do not. we can do hadoop development without map reduce plugins this tutorial will show you how to set up eclipse and run your map reduce project and mapreduce job right from your ide. before you read further, you should have setup hadoop single node cluster and your machine. you can download the eclipse project from github . use case: we will explore the weather data to find maximum temperature from tom white’s book hadoop: definitive guide (3rd edition) chapter 2 and run it using toolrunner i am using linux mint 15 on virtualbox vm instance. in addition, you should have hadoop (mrv1 am using 1.2.1) single node cluster installed and running, if you have not done so, would strongly recommend you do it from here download eclipse ide, as of writing this, latest version of eclipse is kepler 1. create new java project 2. add dependencies jars right click on project properties and select java build path add all jars from $hadoop_home/lib and $hadoop_home (where hadoop core and tools jar lives) 3. create mapper package com.letsdobigdata; import java.io.ioexception; import org.apache.hadoop.io.intwritable; import org.apache.hadoop.io.longwritable; import org.apache.hadoop.io.text; import org.apache.hadoop.mapreduce.mapper; public class maxtemperaturemapper extends mapper { private static final int missing = 9999; @override public void map(longwritable key, text value, context context) throws ioexception, interruptedexception { string line = value.tostring(); string year = line.substring(15, 19); int airtemperature; if (line.charat(87) == '+') { // parseint doesn't like leading plus // signs airtemperature = integer.parseint(line.substring(88, 92)); } else { airtemperature = integer.parseint(line.substring(87, 92)); } string quality = line.substring(92, 93); if (airtemperature != missing && quality.matches("[01459]")) { context.write(new text(year), new intwritable(airtemperature)); } } } 4. create reducer package com.letsdobigdata; import java.io.ioexception; import org.apache.hadoop.io.intwritable; import org.apache.hadoop.io.text; import org.apache.hadoop.mapreduce.reducer; public class maxtemperaturereducer extends reducer { @override public void reduce(text key, iterable values, context context) throws ioexception, interruptedexception { int maxvalue = integer.min_value; for (intwritable value : values) { maxvalue = math.max(maxvalue, value.get()); } context.write(key, new intwritable(maxvalue)); } } 5. create driver for mapreduce job map reduce job is executed by useful hadoop utility class toolrunner package com.letsdobigdata; import org.apache.hadoop.conf.configured; import org.apache.hadoop.fs.path; import org.apache.hadoop.io.intwritable; import org.apache.hadoop.io.text; import org.apache.hadoop.mapreduce.job; import org.apache.hadoop.mapreduce.lib.input.fileinputformat; import org.apache.hadoop.mapreduce.lib.output.fileoutputformat; import org.apache.hadoop.util.tool; import org.apache.hadoop.util.toolrunner; /*this class is responsible for running map reduce job*/ public class maxtemperaturedriver extends configured implements tool{ public int run(string[] args) throws exception { if(args.length !=2) { system.err.println("usage: maxtemperaturedriver "); system.exit(-1); } job job = new job(); job.setjarbyclass(maxtemperaturedriver.class); job.setjobname("max temperature"); fileinputformat.addinputpath(job, new path(args[0])); fileoutputformat.setoutputpath(job,new path(args[1])); job.setmapperclass(maxtemperaturemapper.class); job.setreducerclass(maxtemperaturereducer.class); job.setoutputkeyclass(text.class); job.setoutputvalueclass(intwritable.class); system.exit(job.waitforcompletion(true) ? 0:1); boolean success = job.waitforcompletion(true); return success ? 0 : 1; } public static void main(string[] args) throws exception { maxtemperaturedriver driver = new maxtemperaturedriver(); int exitcode = toolrunner.run(driver, args); system.exit(exitcode); } } 6. supply input and output we need to supply input file that will be used during map phase and the final output will be generated in output directory by reduct task. edit run configuration and supply command line arguments. sample.txt reside in the project root. your project explorer should contain following ] 7. map reduce job execution 8. final output if you managed to come this far, once the job is complete, it will create output directory with _success and part_nnnnn , double click to view it in eclipse editor and you will see we have supplied 5 rows of weather data (downloaded from ncdc weather) and we wanted to find out the maximum temperature in a given year from input file and the output will contain 2 rows with max temperature in (centigrade) for each supplied year 1949 111 (11.1 c) 1950 22 (2.2 c) make sure you delete the output directory next time running your application else you will get an error from hadoop saying directory already exists. happy hadooping!

Earlier this month, I was delivering a proof of concept around Mule that required the use of the schema validation filter. The use case was pretty simple. XML messages comes in through a SOAP request, and some fields in the incoming message had to be validated against a bunch of XML schemas. Well this is the perfect use case scenario for the Schema Validator that is provided out of the box with Mule. Its an element you can drop from Mule Studio palette straight into your flow. schema-validator Configuration of this element is a bit tricky. This accepts a comma separated list of schemas to validate the payload against. Fair enough, but you immediately face the first problem. How to come up with a URL that works both in Mule Studio and in Mule standalone if your schemas are part of the classpath? Usually in Spring, you do this by pre-pending your URL with “classpath:”. Unfortunately this does not work with this filter. We solved the issue by placing the schemas under the src/main/resources folder in Mule Studio. From the schema validation filter, we referred to them using the ${app.home} variable: The second issue that immediately comes up is that any xs:imports or xs:includes in your schemas are happily ignored by the schema validator. The schema validator will fail on startup with an exception that looks similar to the following (exception detail removed for simplicity). Caused by: org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException: Error creating bean with name 'schemaValidator': Invocation of init method failed; nested exception is org.mule.api.lifecycle.InitialisationException: src-resolve: Cannot resolve the name 'xxxyyy' to a(n) 'type definition' component. ... Caused by: org.mule.api.lifecycle.InitialisationException: src-resolve: Cannot resolve the name 'xxxyyy' to a(n) 'type definition' component. ... Caused by: org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: src-resolve: Cannot resolve the name 'xxxyyy' to a(n) 'type definition' component. ... This is due to the class; javax.xml.validation.SchemaFactory. Mule’s schema validation filter uses this class to build the schemas to be able to validate against. This factory class ignores any XSD ‘includes’ and ‘imports’. (See here for more information.) Luckily there is a solution. Mule’s schema validation filter allows you to configure a custom resource resolver. This is the class that is used to load external resources, like XSD ‘includes’ and ‘imports’. We have written a very simple resource resolver that loads the external resources from the classpath: package com.ricston.xml; import java.io.IOException; import java.io.InputStream; import org.apache.xerces.dom.DOMInputImpl; import org.mule.util.IOUtils; import org.w3c.dom.ls.LSInput; import org.w3c.dom.ls.LSResourceResolver; public class ClasspathResourceResolver implements LSResourceResolver { @Override public LSInput resolveResource(String type, String namespaceURI, String publicId, String systemId, String baseURI) { try { InputStream resource = IOUtils.getResourceAsStream(systemId, getClass()); return new DOMInputImpl(publicId, systemId, baseURI, resource, null); } catch (IOException e) { e.printStackTrace(); return null; } } } As you can see, it is extremely simple. Just 2 lines of Java code. The idea here is that we are loading the external resource passed in by the SchemaFactory by using the Mule IOUtils library. Once loaded, we have to pass back an instance of org.w3c.dom.ls.LSInput. We used org.apache.xerces.dom.DOMInputImpl to help us with that. The last step is now to configure the schema validation filter to use our custom resource resolver: Of course you can code your custom resource loader to load resources from absolute paths, relative paths, or any other method that you would like to implement. It’s simple enough to take our ClasspathResourceResolver and convert it to meet your needs. Another issue that I found with this filter is the way it handles the errors. If you supply it with an XML that does not match any schema, it silently blocks your message. There won’t be anything displayed in the logs by default. To see the errors, you need to configure the SchemaValidationFilter class to log to debug level through log4j: log4j.logger.org.mule.module.xml.filters.SchemaValidationFilter=DEBUG We are going to conclude this blog post by saying that the out of the box schema validation filter of Mule is quite useful for obvious reasons, but to exploit its full potential does require a bit of configuration work.

This article presents the usage of sripted data set in the eclipse's BIRT.

Using Apache Commons Configuration to configure long-running applications.

This morning an interesting topic was posted to the Apache ServiceMix user forum, asking the question: To ServiceMix or not ServiceMix. In my mind the short answer is: NO Guillaume Nodet one of the key architects and long time committer on Apache ServiceMix already had his mind set 3 years ago when he wrong this blog post - Thoughts about ServiceMix. What has happened on the ServiceMix project was that the ServiceMix kernel was pulled out of ServiceMix into its own project - Apache Karaf. That happened in spring 2009, which Guillaume also blogged about. So is all that bad? No its IMHO all great. In fact having the kernel as a separate project, and Camel and CXF as the integration and WS/RS frameworks, would allow the ServiceMix team to focus on building the ESB that truly had value-add. But that did not happen. ServiceMix did not create a cross product security model, web console, audit and trace tooling, clustering, governance, service registry, and much more that people were looking for in an ESB (or related to a SOA suite). There were only small pieces of it, but never really baked well into the project. That said its not too late. I think the ServiceMix project is dying, but if a lot of people in the community step up, and contribute and work on these things, then it can bring value to some users. But I seriously doubt this will happen. PS: 6 years ago I was working as a consultant and looked at the next integration platform for a major Danish organization, and we looked at ServiceMix back then and dismissed it due its JBI nature, and the new OSGi based architecture was only just started. And frankly it has taken a long long time to mature Apache Karaf / Felix / Aries and the other pieces in OSGi to what they are today to offer a stable and sound platform for users to build their integration applications. That was not the case 4-6 years ago. Okay No to ServiceMix - what are my options then? So what should use you instead of ServiceMix? Well in my mind you have at least these two options. 1) Use Apache Karaf and add the pieces you need, such as Camel, CXF, ActiveMQ and build your own ESB. These individual projects have regular releases, and you can upgrade as you need. The ServiceMix project only has the JBI components in additional, that you should NOT use. Only legacy users that got on the old ServiceMix 3.x wagon may need to use this in a graceful upgrade from JBI to Karaf based containers. 2) Take a look at fabric8. IMHO fabric8 is all that value-add the ServiceMix project did not create, and a lot more. James Strachan, just blogged today about some of his thoughts on fabric8, JBoss Fuse, and Karaf. I encourage you to take a read. For example he talks about how fabric becomes poly container, so you have a much wider choice of which containers/JVM to run your integration applications. OSGi is no longer a requirement. (IMHO that is very very existing and potentially a changer). I encourage you to check out fabric8 web-site, and also read the overview and motivation sections of the documentation. And then check out some of the videos. After the upcoming JBoss Fuse 6.1 release, the Fuse team at Red Hat will have more time and focus to bring the documentation at fabric8 up to date covering all the functionality we have (there is a lot more), and as well bring out a 1.0 community released using pure community releases. This gives end users a 100% free to use out of the box release. And users looking for a commercial release can then use JBoss Fuse. Best of both worlds. Summary Okay back to the question - to ServiceMix or not. Then NO. Innovation happens outside ServiceMix, and also more and more outside Apache. If you have thoughts then you can share those in comments to this blog, or better yet, get involved in the discussion forum at the ServiceMix user forum. PPS: The thoughts on this blog is mine alone, and are not any official words from my employer.

Renaming domain names is not supported by Glassfish application server. There is no toolkit or any command available by Glassfish to perform domain name rename. You can choose your desired domain name when you install glassfish 3.x, but Glassfish 4 doesn’t let you choose your desired domain name (auto selecting domain1 for domain name). Without diving into domain configuration files or messing with domain XML files, the rename operation can be done quickly and cleanly. In case another name is required for currently operating Glassfish domain, follow these simple steps: Steps are so easy and simple: 1. Execute asadmin utility of your Glassfish distribution. 2. Stop your domain if it’s running by issuing stop-domain command. 3. Run backup-domain . 4. After executing the backup domain command, your backed up domain is located under glassfish_ home/domains//backups directory a .zip file. 5. Copy the generated .zip backup file to other location. 6. Now delete your existing domain by issuing delete-domain command. Don’t worry you have already backed up your domain settings, remember? 7. Open your backup file, normally packaged as a zip file. Open the backup.properties file and change the domain.name property to your desired name. 8. Save the file and make sure that the modification is applied to your zip file too. 9. Bring up asadmin utility up and issue the following command restore-domain domain1 --filename --force 10. Execute list-domains command to see your domain with its new name. That's it. Your domain name is changed and your settings are restored as well.

In this post I would like to describe how to build a fat JAR using NetBeans IDE.

gaurav gupta is a senior software engineer working on the bpmn workflow engine. he's created several plugins for netbeans ide, notably the js css minify compress plugin ( here ) and the jbpmn plugin, which is the topic of this interview. the plugin provides netbeans ide tools for working with business process modeling notation (bpmn). the plugin can be accessed here, including for netbeans ide 7.4 and 8.0 beta, together with screencasts and tutorials: http://plugins.netbeans.org/plugin/50735/jbpmn hi, gaurav, why did you create the bpmn plugin? business process modeling notation is an increasingly important standard for process modelling and has enjoyed high levels of adoption, so the specific intent of the jbpmn plugin is to create a bpmn modeler that supports the complete bpmn specification and can be integrated by multiple bpmn engine vendors into netbeans ide. as a result, different bpmn engine vendors will not need to create separate bpmn modelers for netbeans ide. another reason i created this plugin was to bring the netbeans community closer to the bpm community because bpmn has become the de-facto standard for business process modeling. also, when we talk about "netbeans vs eclipse", the basic conclusion is that netbeans is much more intuitive and easy to use, while eclipse has a wider range of third-party plugins support from more companies. in that context, i have taken this initiative to create the bpm plugin to help the netbeans community. what would you consider to be the best features of the bpmn plugin? the jbpmn nb modeler is a graphical modelling tool which allows the creation and editing of bpmn process diagrams. it provides debugging supports for jbpm 5.0. it is bpmn engine vendor neutral, can be used by any vendor or generated xml, and can run on any bpmn engine which adopts the bpmn 2.0 standard. here's another screenshot: what are the future development plans for this plugin? to cover the complete bpmn ssecification with user friendly gui and properties support. jbpmn currently supports only the bpmn process model, it will also support the bpmn conversation model. it will also provide support to extends the modeller with your own palette elements, properties, and generated xml tags. it will provides debugging supports for jbpm 6.0, activities, and also extensions so that any bpmn engine vendor can integrate debugging functionality within jbpmn. it will also provide a netbeans modeler platform api, which any business modeller can use to easily build solutions such as a bpmn conversation model.

Companies which use Checkstyle usually extend current set of checks by their own or modify existing ones to satisfy their needs. And there are lots of ready-to-use solutions which help to use Checkstyle in a number of ways: Maven Checkstyle Plugin, Intellij IDEA Checkstyle Plugin and Eclipse Checkstyle Plugin. There is a specific IDE environment which is different between the same company departments or even between team members. Integration of custom checks to all of them is not that simple. There is Sonar Checkstyle Plugin which could help integrate checks and let to show validation results to all of its users, no matter what IDE they use. In this article I'll provide an example about Checkstyle usage in Sonar which is a cross IDE solution for different platforms and environment. The example will be shown on sevntu.checkstyle project which contains a number of additional (non-standard) checks for Checkstyle. Here are some of the valuable checks to my opinion (7 out of 32): AvoidNotShortCircuitOperatorsForBooleanCheck – forces user not to use ShortCircuit operators ("|", "&" for boolean calculations). CustomDeclarationOrderCheck – adjusts class structure to make it more predictable. VariableDeclarationUsageDistanceCheck – checks distance between declaration of variable and its first usage of it. EitherLogOrThrowException – notifies about either log the exception, or throw it, but never do both. AvoidHidingCauseExceptionCheck – checks for hiding the cause of exception by throwing a new exception. ConfusingConditionCheck – prevents negation within an "if" expression if "else" is present. ReturnNullInsteadOfBoolean – notifies about returning null instead of boolean. There is an extension for Sonar's Checkstyle plugin which allows to use non-standard checks within Sonar. Let's dive a bit into the process of integration. Each check is represented as a separate rule in Sonar. After creating a new check we have to add a new rule in order so Sonar could understand and use this new check. To accomplish this we use checkstyle-extensions.xml configuration file in sevntu-checkstyle-sonar-plugin project. For instance, here is a rule for ReturnNullInsteadOfBoolean: com.github.sevntu.checkstyle.checks.coding.ReturnNullInsteadOfBoolean Returning Null Instead of Boolean Method declares to return Boolean, but returns null. Checker/TreeWalker/com.github.sevntu.checkstyle.checks.coding.ReturnNullInsteadOfBoolean To make Sonar know about a new check we have to complete the following steps: # build the project $ cd sevntu-checkstyle-sonar-plugin $ mvn clean install # copy the resulted jar file into Sonar $ cp target/sevntu-checkstyle-sonar-plugin-x.x.x.jar [SONAR_HOME]/extensions/plugins/ # restart Sonar $ [SONAR_HOME]/bin/linux-x86-64/sonar.sh restart The only thing is left is that we have to create a new profile in Sonar's “Quality Profiles” tab. We have already created a default Checkstyle configuration which contains all the non-standard checks from “sevntu.checkstyle” project. So, we can just import this configuration when creating a new profile and that's it: Now we can configure and use non-standard Checkstyle checks in addition to the standard ones within Sonar: This project is a good example of how you can integrate your custom checks into a static stage of code analysis, and make it user friendly, accessible for all members in your team and not get involved in a war of “which IDE is the best and more functional for static code analysis”. Useful links: Install Sonar and analyze a project How to integrate sevntu checks into SonarQubeTM (developer's guide) How to integrate sevntu checks into SonarQubeTM (user's guide) Mail-list for QnA

Get started with Spring IDE and the Spring Tool Suite – a set of plugins to simplify the development of Spring-based applications in Eclipse.

This Document tries to help you install Sonar, analyze your project with your Sonar installation, integrate with Eclipse, clean up violations dynamically, and practice better coding. Table of Contents Sonar Installation Download Sonar Unzip and Install Run Sonar Sonar Console Access your Sonar installation Generate Sonar Report Update your POM with SONAR configurations Example Access your project in Sonar Integrate SONAR with Eclipse Eclipse Sonar Plug-In Installation Eclipse Integration (To install this plugin in the Eclipse IDE) - With Eclipse Market Place Eclipse Integration (To install this plugin in the Eclipse IDE) - With Eclipse Software Update Configure Sonar in your Eclipse Link your project for the first time Analyze and clean up the code violations Run Sonar Analysis in Local Sonar Installation Download Sonar Download the sonar here http://dist.sonar.codehaus.org/sonar-3.5.1.zip and unzip the download to your favorite folder Unzip and Install After Unzip you will see folder structure would look something like as follows.. Figure 1 – Sonar Dir Structure Run Sonar Depends on your OS, you need to run the executable , for an instance if you are running linux-x86 and 64 bit, then you need to run start.sh Figure 2 – Run Sonar Sonar Console After you start the sonar you will see some info as follows after you run the sonar Figure 3 - Sonar Console Access your Sonar installation Now you can browse your sonar installation http:localhost:9000 Generate Sonar Report Update your POM with SONAR configurations After we have the sonar installed, we can generate the reports for any maven project, by adding the following lines in your project pom.xml (sonar hosts in your properties section) Figure 4 - POM XML for Sonar Generation Example Let’s take an example of project-common; do the following steps · Checkout the latest code from repository to your work space · Do mvn clean install · Modify your pom.xml (pom.xml) to have the following under properties section · http://localhost:9000/ · Save the file · Do mvn sonar:sonar in your command / terminal · You will see some messages as following. Figure 5 - Sonar report Generation - I Note: And after few minutes (depends on the size of the modules the sonar report would even take longer) Figure 6 - Sonar Report Generation - II Finally you would see the following that indicates the sonar reporting is completed.. Figure 7 - Sonar Report Generation Successful Access your project in Sonar Now go to you http://localhost:9000 you would see the project report that you ran for Figure 8 - Sonar Project Report at your Local Integrate SONAR with Eclipse Eclipse Sonar Plug-In Installation Eclipse Integration (To install this plugin in the Eclipse IDE) - With Eclipse Market Place Figure 9 - Sonar Eclipse Plug-in Install (Market Place) Figure 10 - Sonar Eclipse Plug-in Install (Market Place) II Eclipse Integration (To install this plugin in the Eclipse IDE) - With Eclipse Software Update Go to Help > Install New Software... This should display the Install dialog box. Paste the Update Site URL (http://dist.sonar-ide.codehaus.org/eclipse/) into the field Work with and press Enter. This should display the list of available plugins and components: Figure 11- Sonar Eclipse Plug-in Install (With Install New Software Menu) Choose Sonar Java, follow the steps and install the plugin Note: Please make sure the project that you want to associate with sonar has already analyzed in your sonar installation Configure Sonar in your Eclipse Configure your local/remote sonar in your Eclipse Go to Window > Preferences > Sonar > Servers. Sonar Eclipse is pre-configured to access a local Sonar server listening on http://localhost:9000/. You can edit this server, delete it or add a new one. Figure 12 - Configure Sonar Server in Eclipse Link your project for the first time Once the Sonar server is defined, the next step is to link your Eclipse projects with projects defined and analyzed on this Sonar server. To do so, right-click on the project in the Project Explorer, and then Configure > Associate with Sonar...: Figure 13 - Configure / Associate your Eclipse Project with Sonar In the Sonar project text field, start typing the name of the project and select it in the list box: Figure 14 - Associate your Eclipse Project with Sonar II Click Finish. Your project is now associated to one analyzed on your Sonar server. Analyze and clean up the code violations Do local analysis and clean the violations Figure 15 - Configure Modules Figure 16 - configure sonar modules from Eclipse Note Please make sure you have started your local sonar server (as described in Run sonar section) otherwise you would not able to see the right sonar project that you intend to configure Run Sonar Analysis in Local Figure 17.a – Set Sonar Analysis on Local Mode Figure 17:b - Run Sonar Analysis on Local Figure 18 - sonar violation analysis console Figure 19 - Sonar violation analysis console II Figure 20 - Sonar violations Markers

This is the first in a series of posts on the new “Red Deer” (https://github.com/jboss-reddeer/reddeer) open source testing framework for Eclipse. In this post, we’ll introduce Red Deer, and take a look at the some of the advantages that it offers by building a sample test program from scratch. Some of the features that Red Deer automated offers are: An easy to use, high-level API for testing standard Eclipse components Support for creating custom extensions for your own applications A requirements validation mechanism to assist you in configuring complex tests Eclipse Tooling to Assist in Creating new Projects A record and playback tool to enable you to quickly create automated tests An integration with Selenium for testing web based applications Support for running tests in a Jenkins CI environment Note that as of this writing, Red Deer is in an incubation stage. The current release is at level 0.5. The target date for the 1.0 release of Red Deer is late 2014. But, as a community-based, open source project, now is a great time to try Red Deer and make suggestions or even contribute code! A Look at Red Deer’s Architecture The Red Deer project itself is comprised of utilities and the API that supports the development and execution of automated tests. The API (the parts of the above diagram that are enclosed in dashed line boxes) can be thought of as having three layers: The top layer consists of extensions to Red Deer’s abstract classes or implementations for Eclipse components such as Views, Editors, Wizards, or Shells. For example, if you are writing tests for a feature that uses a custom Eclipse View, you can extend Red Deer’s View class by adding support for the specific functions of the feature. The advantage that this API layer gives you is that your test programs do not have to focus on manipulating the individual UI elements directly to perform operations. Your programs can instead instantiate an instance of an Eclipse component such as a View, and then use that instance’s methods to perform operations on the View. This layer of abstraction makes your test programs easier to write, understand, and maintain. The middle layer consists of the Red Deer implementations for SWT UI elements such as: Button, Combo, Label, Menu, Shell, TabItem, Table, ToolBar, Tree. This API layer supports the API’s higher level by providing the building blocks for the API’s Views, Editors, Shells, and WIzards. This middle layer of the API also provides Red Deer packages that enable your tests to enforce requirements, so that necessary setup tasks are performed before a test is run. The bottom layer consists of Red Deer packages that support the execution of tests such as: Conditions, Matchers, Widgets, Workbench, and Red Deer extensions to JUnit. What Makes Red Deer different from other Tools? A Layer of Abstraction The top-most layer of the API enables you to instantiate Eclipse UI elements as objects, and then manipulate them through their methods. The resulting code is easier to read and maintain, instead of being brittle and subject to failures when the UI changes. For example, for a test that has to open a view and press a button, without Red Deer, the test would have to navigate the top level menu, find the view menu, then the view type in that menu, then find the view open dialog, then locate the “OK” button, etc. Your test would have to spend a lot of time navigating through the UI elements before it could even begin to perform the test’s steps. With Red Deer, the code to open a view (in this case, the servers view) is simply: ServersView view = new ServersView(); view.open(); Furthermore, within that ServersView, your test program can perform operations on the View through methods which are defined in the view (and are incidentally also well debugged by the Red Deer team), instead of having to explicitly locate and manipulate the UI elements directly. For example, to obtain a list of all the servers, instead of locating the UI tree that contains the server list, and extracting that list of servers into an array, your Red Deer program can simply call the “getServers()” method. Likewise, the code to open a PackageExplorer, and then select a project within that PackageExplorer is as follows: PackageExplorer packageExplorer = new PackageExplorer(); packageExplorer.open(); packageExplorer.getProject("myTestProject").select(); And, the code to retrieve all the projects within that PackageExplorer is simply: packageExplorer.getProjects(); The result are that your tests are easier to write and maintain and you can focus on testing your application’s logic instead of writing brittle code to navigate through the application. Installing Red Deer The only prerequisites to using Red Deer are Eclipse and Java. In this post, we’ll use Eclipse Kepler and OpenJDK 1.7, running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6. To install Red Deer 0.4 (this is the latest stable milestone version as of this writing) follow these steps: Open up Eclipse Navigate to: Help->Install New Software Define a new download site using the Red Deer update site URL: http://download.jboss.org/jbosstools/updates/stable/kepler/core/reddeer/0.4.0/ Select Red Deer, click on the Finish button and Red Deer will install Now that you have Red Deer installed, let’s move onto building a new Red Deer test. Building your First Red Deer Test To create a new Red Deer test project, you make use of the Red Deer UI tooling and select New->Project->Other->Red Deer Test: Before we move on, let’s take a look at the WEB-INF/MANIFEST.MF file that is created in the project: Manifest-Version: 1.0 Bundle-ManifestVersion: 2 Bundle-Name: com.example.reddeer.sample Bundle-SymbolicName: com.example.reddeer.sample;singleton:=true Bundle-Version: 1.0.0.qualifier Bundle-ActivationPolicy: lazy Bundle-Vendor: Sample Co Bundle-RequiredExecutionEnvironment: JavaSE-1.6 Require-Bundle: org.junit, org.jboss.reddeer.junit, org.jboss.reddeer.swt, org.jboss.reddeer.eclipse The line we’re interested in is the final line in the file. These are the bundles that are required by Red Deer. After the empty project is created by the wizard, you can define a package and create a test class. Here's the code for a minimal functional test. The test will verify that the eclipse configuration is not empty. package com.example.reddeer.sample; import static org.junit.Assert.assertFalse; import java.util.List; import org.jboss.reddeer.swt.api.TreeItem; import org.jboss.reddeer.swt.impl.button.PushButton; import org.jboss.reddeer.swt.impl.menu.ShellMenu; import org.jboss.reddeer.swt.impl.tree.DefaultTree; import org.junit.Test; import org.junit.runner.RunWith; import org.jboss.reddeer.junit.runner.RedDeerSuite; @RunWith(RedDeerSuite.class) public class SimpleTest { @Test public void TestIt() { new ShellMenu("Help", "About Eclipse Platform").select(); new PushButton("Installation Details").click(); DefaultTree ConfigTree = new DefaultTree(); List ConfigItems = ConfigTree.getAllItems(); assertFalse ("The list is empty!", ConfigItems.isEmpty()); for (TreeItem item : ConfigItems) { System.out.println ("Found: " + item.getText()); } } } After you save the test's source file, you can run the test. To run the test, select the Run As->Red Deer Test option: And - there's the green bar! Simplifying Tests with Requirements Red Deer requirements enable you to define actions that you want happen before a test is executed. The advantage to using requirements is that you define the actions with annotations instead of using a @BeforeClass method. The result is that your test code is easier to read and maintain. The biggest difference between a Red Deer requirement and the the @BeforeClass annotation from the JUnit framework is that if a requirement cannot be fulfilled the test is not executed. Like everything else in Red Deer, you can make use of predefined requirements, or you can extend the feature by adding your own custom requirements. These custom requirements can be made complex and for convenience can be stored in external properties files. (We’ll take a look at defining custom requirements in a later post in this series when we examine how to create and contribute extensions to Red Deer.) The current milestone release of Red Deer provides predefined requirements that enable you to clean out your current workspace and open a perspective. Let’s add these to our example. To do this, we need to add these import statements: import org.jboss.reddeer.eclipse.ui.perspectives.JavaBrowsingPerspective; import org.jboss.reddeer.requirements.cleanworkspace.CleanWorkspaceRequirement.CleanWorkspace; import org.jboss.reddeer.requirements.openperspective.OpenPerspectiveRequirement.OpenPerspective; And these annotations: @CleanWorkspace @OpenPerspective(JavaBrowsingPerspective.class) And, we also have to a reference to org.jboss.reddeer.requirements to the required bundle list in our example’s MANIFEST.MF file: Require-Bundle: org.junit, org.jboss.reddeer.junit, org.jboss.reddeer.swt, org.jboss.reddeer.eclipse, org.jboss.reddeer.requirements When we’re done, our example looks like this: package com.example.reddeer.sample; import static org.junit.Assert.assertFalse; import java.util.List; import org.jboss.reddeer.swt.api.TreeItem; import org.jboss.reddeer.swt.impl.button.PushButton; import org.jboss.reddeer.swt.impl.menu.ShellMenu; import org.jboss.reddeer.swt.impl.tree.DefaultTree; import org.junit.Test; import org.junit.runner.RunWith; import org.jboss.reddeer.junit.runner.RedDeerSuite; import org.jboss.reddeer.eclipse.ui.perspectives.JavaBrowsingPerspective; import org.jboss.reddeer.requirements.cleanworkspace.CleanWorkspaceRequirement.CleanWorkspace; import org.jboss.reddeer.requirements.openperspective.OpenPerspectiveRequirement.OpenPerspective; @RunWith(RedDeerSuite.class) @CleanWorkspace @OpenPerspective(JavaBrowsingPerspective.class) public class SimpleTest { @Test public void TestIt() { new ShellMenu("Help", "About Eclipse Platform").select(); new PushButton("Installation Details").click(); DefaultTree ConfigTree = new DefaultTree(); List ConfigItems = ConfigTree.getAllItems(); assertFalse ("The list is empty!", ConfigItems.isEmpty()); for (TreeItem item : ConfigItems) { System.out.println ("Found: " + item.getText()); } } } Notice how we were able to add those functions to the test code, while only adding a very small amount of actual new code? Yes, it can pay to be a lazy programmer. ;-) What’s Next? What’s next for Red Deer is its continued development as it progresses through its incubation stage until its 1.0 release. What’s next for this series of posts will be discussions about: The Red Deer Recorder - To enable you to capture manual actions and convert them into test programs How you can Extend Red Deer - To provide test coverage for your plugins’ specific functions. And How you can Contribute these extensions to the Red Deer project. How you can Define Complex Requirements - To enable you to perform setup tasks for your tests. Red Deer’s Integration with Selenium - To enable you to test web interfaces provided by your plugins. Running Red Deer tests with Jenkins - To enable you to take advantage of Jenkins’ Continuous Integration (CI) test framework. Author’s Acknowledgements I’d like to thank all the contributors to Red Deer for their vision and contributions. It’s a new project, but it is growing fast! The contributors (in alphabetic order) are: Stefan Bunciak, Radim Hopp, Jaroslav Jankovic, Lucia Jelinkova, Marian Labuda, Martin Malina, Jan Niederman, Vlado Pakan, Jiri Peterka, Andrej Podhradsky, Milos Prchlik, Radoslav Rabara, Petr Suchy, and Rastislav Wagner.

this post is not about variables in my application code (which i debug). it is about using variables in eclipse for building projects. eclipse variables allow me to make my projects ‘position independent’ whenever i cannot use a path relative to my projects or workspace. eclipse variables which variables are used where in eclipse might be sometimes not very clear. depending in which context variables are used, not everything might be available. this link for example gives a list of variables which can be used to invoke an external tool. build variables eclipse comes with many built-in variables, especially for the build system. if i want to see what variables are already defined, i can show them in the project properties, under c/c++ build > build variables with enabled option ‘show system variables’: system build variables with the ‘add…’ button i can define and add my own variables, available for that project: define a new build variable if above operation is done on a project, then the setting is for the project only. if i want to add a variable for the workspace, i can do this using the menu window > preferences : workspace build variables global system variables eclipse automatically includes the system (e.g. windows) environment variables. many dialogs have the ‘variables…’ button where i can use my variables, including the variables defined on system level: system variables system variables: one way or the other so if i want to have a variable for every workspace, one way is to define it at the system level. however, this is not a good way as this clutter the variables for every application. batch file a solution to this to create my custom batch file where i define my variables, and at the end of this batch file i launch eclipse. that way the extra variables are only for this eclipse session. cwide-env file another very nice way codewarrior eclipse offers is using the cwide-env file located in the eclipse sub-folder of the installation: cwide-env file i can define variables here, or extend existing ones: -add : add string to the variable at the end -prepend : add string to the variable at the beginning that way i can easily manipulate existing system variables or create new ones which then are used by eclipse. summary variables in eclipse help me to define paths to source files and folders outside of a project or workspace. with variables i avoid using absolute paths which would make porting projects from one machine to another difficult. i can define variables for projects, for the workspace or use system variables. with codewarrior i have a cwide-env file which is used to extend the system variables. happy variabling

Since Entity Framework now has a very nice support of performing all its actions asynchronously, the methods in the repositories in our projects will turn into asynchronous methods soon and so will be the code depending on it. Tom Fitzmacken did a nice job by putting together a tutorial on unit testing Web API 2 Controllers on official ASP.NET site. The tutorial discusses on testing synchronous action methods. The same techniques can be applied to test asynchronous action actions as well. In this post, we will see how easy it is to test asynchronous Web API action methods using MS Test. I created a simple repository interface with just one method in it. The implementation class uses Entity Framework to get a list of contacts from the database. public interface IRepository { Task> GetAllContactsAsync(); } public class Repository : IRepository { ContactsContext context = new ContactsContext(); public async Task> GetAllContactsAsync() { return await context.Contacts.ToArrayAsync(); } } Following is the ASP.NET Web API controller that uses the above repository: public class ContactsController : ApiController { IRepository repository; public ContactsController() : this(new Repository()) { } public ContactsController(IRepository _repository) { repository = _repository; } [Route("api/contacts/plain")] public async Task> GetContactsListAsync() { IEnumerable contacts; try { contacts = await repository.GetAllContactsAsync(); } catch (Exception) { throw; } return contacts; } [Route("api/contacts/httpresult")] public async Task GetContactsHttpActionResultAsync() { IEnumerable contacts; try { contacts = await repository.GetAllContactsAsync(); } catch (Exception ex) { return InternalServerError(ex); } return Ok(contacts); } } As we see, the controller has two action methods performing the same task, but the way they return the results is different. Since both of the action methods respond to HTTP GET method, I used attribute routing to distinguish them. I used poor man’s dependency injection to instantiate the repository; it can be easily replaced using an IoC container. Before writing unit tests for the above action methods, we need to create a mock repository. public class MockRepository:IRepository { List contacts; public bool FailGet { get; set; } public MockRepository() { contacts = new List() { new Contact(){Id=1, Title="Title1", PhoneNumber="1992637281", CustomerId=1}, new Contact(){Id=2, Title="Title2", PhoneNumber="9172735171", SupplierId=2}, new Contact(){Id=3, Title="Title3", PhoneNumber="8361910353", CustomerId=2}, new Contact(){Id=4, Title="Title4", PhoneNumber="7801274518", SupplierId=3} }; } public async Task> GetAllContactsAsync() { if (FailGet) { throw new InvalidOperationException(); } await Task.Delay(1000); return contacts; } } The property FailGet in the above class is used to force the mock to throw an exception. This is done just to cover more test cases. In the test class, we need a TestInitialize method to arrange the objects needed for unit testing. [TestClass] public class ContactsControllerTests { MockRepository repository; ContactsController contactsApi; [TestInitialize] public void InitializeForTests() { repository = new MockRepository(); contactsApi = new ContactsController(repository); } } Let us test the GetContactsListAsync method first. Testing this method seems to be straight forward, as it returns either a plain generic list or throws an exception. But the test method can’t just return void like other tests, as the method is asynchronous. To test an asynchronous method, the test method should also be made asynchronous and return a Task. Following test checks if the controller action returns a collection of length 4: [TestMethod] public async Task GetContacts_Should_Return_List_Of_Contacts() { var contacts = await contactsApi.GetContactsListAsync(); Assert.AreEqual(contacts.Count(), 4); } If the repository encounters an exception, the exception is re-thrown from the GetContactsListAsync method as well. This case can be checked using the ExpectedException attribute. [TestMethod] [ExpectedException(typeof(InvalidOperationException))] public async Task GetContacts_Should_Throw_Exception() { repository.FailGet = true; var contacts = await contactsApi.GetContactsListAsync(); } Now let’s test the GetContactsHttpActionResultAsync method. Though this method does the same thing as the previous method, it doesn’t return the plain .NET objects. To test this method, we need to extract the result from the IHttpActionResult object obtained from the action method. Following test checks if the action result contains a collection when the repository is able to fetch results. Return type of Ok() method used above is OkNegotiatedContentResult. IHttpActionresult has to be converted to this type to check for the result obtained: [TestMethod] public async Task GetContactsHttpActionResult_Should_Return_HttpResult_With_Contacts() { var contactsResult = await contactsApi.GetContactsHttpActionResultAsync() as OkNegotiatedContentResult>; Assert.AreEqual(contactsResult.Content.Count(), 4); } Similarly, in case of error, we are calling InternalServerError() method to return the exception for us. We need to convert the result to ExceptionResult type to be able to check the type of exception thrown. It is shown below: [TestMethod] public async Task GetContactsHttpActionResult_Should_Return_HttpResult_With_Exception() { repository.FailGet = true; var contactsResult = await contactsApi.GetContactsHttpActionResultAsync() as ExceptionResult; Assert.IsInstanceOfType(contactsResult.Exception,typeof(InvalidOperationException)); } Happy coding!

Editor's note: Be sure to check out part 2 as well. This is the fourth of an introductory series of blogs on Apache HBase. In the third part, we saw a high level view of HBase architecture . In this part, we'll use the HBase Java API to create tables, insert new data, and retrieve data by row key. We'll also see how to setup a basic table scan which restricts the columns retrieved and also uses a filter to page the results. Having just learned about HBase high-level architecture, now let's look at the Java client API since it is the way your applications interact with HBase. As mentioned earlier you can also interact with HBase via several flavors of RPC technologies like Apache Thrift plus a REST gateway, but we're going to concentrate on the native Java API. The client APIs provide both DDL (data definition language) and DML (data manipulation language) semantics very much like what you find in SQL for relational databases. Suppose we are going to store information about people in HBase, and we want to start by creating a new table. The following listing shows how to create a new table using the HBaseAdmin class. Configuration conf = HBaseConfiguration.create(); HBaseAdmin admin = new HBaseAdmin(conf); HTableDescriptor tableDescriptor = new HTableDescriptor(TableName.valueOf("people")); tableDescriptor.addFamily(new HColumnDescriptor("personal")); tableDescriptor.addFamily(new HColumnDescriptor("contactinfo")); tableDescriptor.addFamily(new HColumnDescriptor("creditcard")); admin.createTable(tableDescriptor); The people table defined in preceding listing contains three column families: personal, contactinfo, and creditcard. To create a table you create an HTableDescriptor and add one or more column families by adding HColumnDescriptor objects. You then call createTable to create the table. Now we have a table, so let's add some data. The next listing shows how to use the Put class to insert data on John Doe, specifically his name and email address (omitting proper error handling for brevity). Configuration conf = HBaseConfiguration.create(); HTable table = new HTable(conf, "people"); Put put = new Put(Bytes.toBytes("doe-john-m-12345")); put.add(Bytes.toBytes("personal"), Bytes.toBytes("givenName"), Bytes.toBytes("John")); put.add(Bytes.toBytes("personal"), Bytes.toBytes("mi"), Bytes.toBytes("M")); put.add(Bytes.toBytes("personal"), Bytes.toBytes("surame"), Bytes.toBytes("Doe")); put.add(Bytes.toBytes("contactinfo"), Bytes.toBytes("email"), Bytes.toBytes("[email protected]")); table.put(put); table.flushCommits(); table.close(); In the above listing we instantiate a Put providing the unique row key to the constructor. We then add values, which must include the column family, column qualifier, and the value all as byte arrays. As you probably noticed, the HBase API's utility Bytes class is used a lot; it provides methods to convert to and from byte[] for primitive types and strings. (Adding a static import for the toBytes() method would cut out a lot of boilerplate code.) We then put the data into the table, flush the commits to ensure locally buffered changes take effect, and finally close the table. Updating data is also done via the Put class in exactly the same manner as just shown in the prior listing. Unlike relational databases in which updates must update entire rows even if only one column changed, if you only need to update a single column then that's all you specify in the Put and HBase will only update that column. There is also a checkAndPut operation which is essentially a form of optimistic concurrency control - the operation will only put the new data if the current values are what the client says they should be. Retrieving the row we just created is accomplished using the Get class, as shown in the next listing. (From this point forward, listings will omit the boilerplate code to create a configuration, instantiate the HTable, and the flush and close calls.) Get get = new Get(Bytes.toBytes("doe-john-m-12345")); get.addFamily(Bytes.toBytes("personal")); get.setMaxVersions(3); Result result = table.get(get); The code in the previous listing instantiates a Get instance supplying the row key we want to find. Next we use addFamily to instruct HBase that we only need data from the personal column family, which also cuts down the amount of work HBase must do when reading information from disk. We also specify that we'd like up to three versions of each column in our result, perhaps so we can list historical values of each column. Finally, calling get returns a Result instance which can then be used to inspect all the column values returned. In many cases you need to find more than one row. HBase lets you do this by scanning rows, as shown in the second part which showed using a scan in the HBase shell session. The corresponding class is the Scan class. You can specify various options, such as the start and ending row key to scan, which columns and column families to include and the maximum versions to retrieve. You can also add filters, which allow you to implement custom filtering logic to further restrict which rows and columns are returned. A common use case for filters is pagination. For example, we might want to scan through all people whose last name is Smith one page (e.g. 25 people) at a time. The next listing shows how to perform a basic scan. Scan scan = new Scan(Bytes.toBytes("smith-")); scan.addColumn(Bytes.toBytes("personal"), Bytes.toBytes("givenName")); scan.addColumn(Bytes.toBytes("contactinfo"), Bytes.toBytes("email")); scan.setFilter(new PageFilter(25)); ResultScanner scanner = table.getScanner(scan); for (Result result : scanner) { // ... } In the above listing we create a new Scan that starts from the row key smith- and we then use addColumn to restrict the columns returned (thus reducing the amount of disk transfer HBase must perform) to personal:givenName and contactinfo:email. A PageFilter is set on the scan to limit the number of rows scanned to 25. (An alternative to using the page filter would be to specify a stop row key when constructing the Scan.) We then get a ResultScanner for the Scan just created, and loop through the results performing whatever actions are necessary. Since the only method in HBase to retrieve multiple rows of data is scanning by sorted row keys, how you design the row key values is very important. We'll come back to this topic later. You can also delete data in HBase using the Delete class, analogous to the Put class to delete all columns in a row (thus deleting the row itself), delete column families, delete columns, or some combination of those. Connection Handling In the above examples not much attention was paid to connection handling and RPCs (remote procedure calls). HBase provides the HConnection class which provides functionality similar to connection pool classes to share connections, for example you use the getTable() method to get a reference to an HTable instance. There is also an HConnectionManager class which is how you get instances of HConnection. Similar to avoiding network round trips in web applications, effectively managing the number of RPCs and amount of data returned when using HBase is important, and something to consider when writing HBase applications. Conclusion to Part 4 In this part we used the HBase Java API to create a people table, insert a new person, and find the newly inserted person information. We also used the Scan class to scan the people table for people with last name "Smith" and showed how to restrict the data retrieved and finally how to use a filter to limit the number of results. In the next part, we'll learn how to deal with the absence of SQL and relations when modeling schemas in HBase. References HBase web site, http://hbase.apache.org/ HBase wiki, http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/Hbase HBase Reference Guide http://hbase.apache.org/book/book.html HBase: The Definitive Guide, http://bit.ly/hbase-definitive-guide Google Bigtable Paper, http://labs.google.com/papers/bigtable.html Hadoop web site, http://hadoop.apache.org/ Hadoop: The Definitive Guide, http://bit.ly/hadoop-definitive-guide Fallacies of Distributed Computing, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_Distributed_Computing HBase lightning talk slides, http://www.slideshare.net/scottleber/hbase-lightningtalk Sample code, https://github.com/sleberknight/basic-hbase-examples

Sometimes, you need your jobs to be persisted to a database. Existing solutions such as Gearman only used relational or file-based persistence, so they were a no-go for us and we went with MongoDB. Fast-forward a few months, and we have some problems with the database load. However, it's not that workers are pestering it too much: the problem was related to locks. MongoDB locking model As of 2.4, MongoDB holds write locks on an entire database for each write operation. Since atomicity is guaranteed only on a single document, this isn't usually a problem because even if you are inserting thousands of documents you are doing so in thousands of different operations that can be interleaved with queries and other inserts with a fair policy. This sometimes results in count() queries being inconsistent as documents are moved and indexes are asynchronously updated. However, write corruption is inexistent as documents are a very cohesive entity. However, atomic operations over a single document still lock the whole database, as in the case of findAndModify(), which looks for a document matching a certain query and updates it with a $set operation before returning it; all in a single shot and with the guarantee no other process will be able to perform the same operation of reading and writing at the same time. You can see this operation is ideal for implementing workers based on a pull model, each asking the database for a new job to do and locking it with '$set: {locked: true}'. However, after the number of workers increases a little bit, locks become a problem. Lock duration We cleaned up the working space collection of our MongoDB database by keeping in it only the unfinished jobs, and moving all the rest (completed or failed) to a different collection for archival. As the load increases due to new contracts, we saw the locking time increase as well: the application and the workers were insisting on the same database. The first of the problems was that after reducing the specs of our primary server, we started seeing timeouts of unrelated code even if the CPU and IO usage were low. The locks taken by workers to pick jobs were starting to take seconds or tens of seconds. Moreover, the MongoDB server started filling the logs with: Fri Dec 6 00:01:07 [conn280998] warning: ClientCursor::yield can't unlock b/c of recursive lock... I'm a user, not MongoDB guru but that seems not very good, especially given hundreds of these messages were written every day (although the queues continued to work correctly.) We did not find any explanation for these messages in the documentation, but I suppose they mean some operations are taking so long that they have to yield to make room for others, but in the case of atomic operations they can't to preserve consistency. An easy solution Since MongoDB does not have collection-wide locks yet, we decided to move the job pool and the completed job collections to a different database. In this way, we had a main database with the usual collections and one containing just these two, named with a '_queue' suffix. Note that we're still writing to the same database server: there is still the same number of connections being created by each process. This solution preallocates more space given two databases are involved, but as you know space is cheap nowadays. Both insertion of jobs and worker reads must take place on the same database. Here is where we discovered cohesion pays: if you have this information in a single place it is very easy to change configuration. If you have a singleton database, because "we should only have one database in this application, it will never change" this feature would cost you a lot. Fortunately, in our case it was about 10 lines of code, including the refactoring on the Factory Methods that created MongoDB database objects. Long term This solution is not for the long term, as we know the numbers of machines and their workers pool will increase in the future; a sufficiently high number of workers will saturate the connections available on the MongoDB server and lock the common collection until a pick of a job takes dozens of seconds. The design towards which we are moving includes one "foreman" to each machine, and many workers under his control; only the foreman polls the database and may lock the common collection. Distributing the job pool is not what we want for ease of retrieval of a job in case something goes bad (ever done a query on multiple databases?). Also, we don't want a push solution as it will involve the registration of workers or foremen to a central point of failure that assignes them their jobs. Since most of our servers are shutdown and rebooted according to the user load, we prefer a dynamic solution where a server can start picking jobs whenever it wants and stop without notifying remote machines.