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SLF4J Logging in Eclipse Plugins
developing with maven and pure java libraries all the time, i never thought it could be a problem to issue a few log statements when developing an eclipse plugin. but it looks like in the imaginary of an eclipse developer everything is always inside the eclipse environment and nothing is outside the eclipse universe. if you search for the above headline using google, one of the first articles you’ll find is one about the “platform logging facility”. but what about 3rd libraries? they cannot use an eclipse-based logging framework. in my libraries i use the slf4j api and leave it up to the user to decide what logging implementation (log4j, logback, jdk) he or she wants to use. and that’s exactly what i want to do in eclipse. it was hard to figure out exactly how to do it, but here are the pieces of that puzzle. phase 1: development this describes the steps during the development phase of your custom plugin. step 1: get your libaries into a p2 repository everything you want to use in eclipse has to be installed from a p2 repository. but most of the libaries i use are in a maven repository. as far as i know there is no such thing as a main p2 repository similar to the “maven central,” and all libraries i found in p2 repositories were pretty old. so you have to create one by yourself. luckily there is a maven plugin called p2-maven-plugin that converts all your maven jars into a single p2 repository. you can upload the plugin to a folder of your website or simply install it from your local hard drive. for this example you’ll need the following libraries: org.slf4j:slf4j-api:1.6.6 org.slf4j:slf4j-log4j12:1.6.6 log4j:log4j:1.2.17 org.ops4j.pax.logging:pax-logging-api:1.7.0 org.ops4j.pax.logging:pax-logging-service:1.7.0 org.ops4j.pax.confman:pax-confman-propsloader:0.2.2 format “groupid:artifactid:version” is as used for the “p2-maven-plugin.” to skip this step you could also use http://www.fuin.org/p2-repository/ . step 2: install the slf4j api in the eclipse ide select “help / install new software…”. add the p2 repository url and install the “slf4j-api”—you could directly use the folder from step 1 with a file url like this: “file:/pathtoyour/p2-repository/”. add the freshly installed “slf4j.api” to your manifest.mf. start using slf4j logs in your code as usual. phase 2: production this describes the tasks a user of your custom plugin has to complete to start logging with log4j. the following assumes that your custom plugin is already installed. step 1: install the log libraries in the eclipse ide select “help / install new software…”. install the “equinox target components” from the eclipse update site. add the p2 repository url and install the following plugins: apache log4j ops4j pax confman–properties loader ops4j pax logging–api ops4j pax logging–service step 2: configure pax logging set the location for your log configuration in the “eclipse.ini” as “vmarg" … -vmargs -xms40m -xmx512m -dbundles.configuration.location= … create a folder named “services” in the above “config-dir.” create log4j properties named “org.ops4j.pax.logging.properties” in “services.” log4j.rootlogger=info, file log4j.appender.file=org.apache.log4j.fileappender log4j.appender.file.file=/example.log log4j.appender.file.layout=org.apache.log4j.patternlayout log4j.appender.file.layout.conversionpattern=%d{yyyy/mm/dd hh:mm:ss,sss} [%t] %-5p %c %x - %m%n log4j.logger.your.package=debug step 3: activate pax logging open the “console” view. select the “host osgi console.” start the following bundles: start org.eclipse.equinox.cm start org.ops4j.pax.logging.pax-logging-api start org.ops4j.pax.logging.pax-logging-service start org.ops4j.pax.configmanager now you should be able to see your log statements in the configured “example.log” file. step 4: changing the configuration if you want to change the configuration in the “org.ops4j.pax.logging.properties”, simply restart the pax configmanager in the osgi console stop org.ops4j.pax.configmanager start org.ops4j.pax.configmanager happy logging!
January 6, 2013
by Michael Schnell
· 39,385 Views · 1 Like
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Pixar's Randy Nelson on Learning and Working in the Collaborative Age
While lying in bed recovering from an injury a few years ago, I was stumbling around through the myriad of video podcasts I subscribe to and decided to take a look at some of the videos in The George Lucas Educational Foundation Integrated Studies series. That's where I came across this gem featuring Pixar's Randy Nelson who is the Dean of Pixar University. It has had an extremely profound impact on how I think and collaborate. He's giving a short talk entitled Learning and Working in the Collaborative Age at the Apple Education Leadership Summit in April of 2008. Take a look: In his very casual and easy style, Nelson starts off by talking about how PIxar uses improv as a method of collaboration. In that method, two principles have surfaced that have guided Pixar: Accept every offer. You don't know where that offer is going to go. But one thing is for sure: If you don't accept that offer, it's going nowhere! So you have a sure thing on one hand: a dead end. And you have possibility on the other. Make you partner look good. That means that everybody on your team is going to try to make you look good and vice versa. And it's not about judgement or saying "This is pretty good. How can I make it better?". It's about saying "Here's where I'm starting. What can I do with this?". Nelson calls this "plus-ing". I passed this video along to my friend Bert Decker, CEO of Decker Communications, to get his take on this as it is right up his alley. Here's what Bert had to say: "Randy talks about ‘plus-ing’. Sue [Walden ofImprovWorks] calls it “yes, and...” What we mention in our advanced course is two essential rules of improv that you can apply to all communications, (and life for that matter) is: Always positive (yes, and...) Support your partner And of course there’s ‘forward lean’ but that comes even before improv...." Based on those two principles, Pixar looks to find people who are really good at something. And Pixar is really good at being innovative. So, how do you find people who are really good at being innovative? If something has never been done before and it's truly innovative, how do you find the people to do it. According to Nelson "You look for people who have seen failure and figured out how to make something from it. The core skill of innovators is error recovery not failure avoidance. We're looking for resiliency and adaptability." Wow, how many places think like this? I mean really think this way and not just pay the lip service. Not many trust me. It's so great to see a hugely successful organization express this attitude out loud and really mean it. What Pixar has realized is that a great predictor of innovation is mastery of something. It could be mastery of anything. The important thing is the personality that goes along with mastery. It's that sense of "I'm going to get to the top of that mountain" that you can use in your enterprise. It's called depth. Nelson goes on to say that given the fast pace of business these days, there's very little chance that people are going to achieve mastery on the job. You want them to be masters coming in the door. Another predictor of success is breadth. No one-trick ponies. We want to find people with lots of experiences (not necessarily "experience"). People with a breadth of experiences are deeply interested in many things. My favorite quote from Nelson: "We're looking for people who are interested...not interesting." Interested is tough, interesting is easy. Interested is a real skill. If you say "I've got a problem", interested people lean in. They amplify you. They want to know what YOU want to know. The notion of breadth leads to Nelson's third predictor, communication. Another awesome quote, especially for all of you developers and techies out there: "Communication involves translation." If you just emit tech, nobody really hears you. The translation gets pushed to the receiving end of the conversation and gets garbled. Do the translation at the SENDING end so that it doesn't have to be done at the receiving end and the listener can say, "I understand". So, no non-communicative techies! Nelson says that "Communication is not something the emitter can measure." You can't declare yourself as articulate or a good communicator...only your listener can. People who are interested are more likely to view communication as a destination rather than as a source. Nelson postulates that breadth and a broad range of experiences is the thing that fuels that. To me, this notion of communication as a destination not a source is extremely crucial to the success of teams comprised of so many different skillsets and levels of technical expertise. According to Nelson though, the most important predictor of success and innovation is collaboration. But what is collaboration? Real collaboration? It's not cooperation. We've been conditioned to jump to this answer very quickly. We all think "We have to cooperate to get our jobs done. That's collaboration." But, all this really means is we're not getting in each other's way. Nelson says that the things that get done in a cooperative enterprise could, in effect, all be done by one person if we had enough time and resources. He says that there is nothing in a cooperative workplace that job one does that can make job two better. Job one can prevent job two from getting done, but there's nothing job one can do to make job two better. Collaboration is not a synonym for cooperation. So what does collaboration mean if it's not about cooperation? Nelson says that collaboration for Pixar means AMPLIFICATION. It means connecting a group of individuals that are INTERESTED in each other, that bring separate DEPTH to the problem and that bring a BREADTH that gives them interest in the entire solution. And most importantly, it allows them to COMMUNICATE on multiple different levels: verbally, in writing, feeling, acting, pictures. In all of these ways, Nelson says: "They find the most articulate way to get a high fidelity notion across to a broad range of people so they can each pull on the right lever." I absolutely love this definition of collaboration and it's all rooted in a collective vision that everyone understands and can relate to. After listening to Nelson walk through these four points with passion and enthusiasm, it's no wonder why Pixar has been immensely successful in their endeavors. After a little digging and emailing, I found that indeed, Pixar's HR department uses all four of these predictors for the basis of their hires. They don't just look at a candidate's experience or resume. In a 2006 New York Times interview, Nelson said: "The problem with the Hollywood model is that it’s generally the day you wrap production that you realize you’ve finally figured out how to work together," Mr. Nelson said. "We’ve made the leap from an idea-centered business to a people-centered business. Instead of developing ideas, we develop people. Instead of investing in ideas, we invest in people. We’re trying to create a culture of learning, filled with lifelong learners. It’s no trick for talented people to be interesting, but it’s a gift to be interested. We want an organization filled with interested people." The things Nelson describes are intangible, you can't write them down. But when you talk with and work with people who possess these traits, you know who they are right away. And they're the kind of people you want on your team. Give me 10 people like this over 100 people with years of experience and you can do incredible things.
January 5, 2013
by Chris Spagnuolo
· 7,817 Views
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Testing mobile sites on iPhone, iPad and the simulator
This blog post is a part of Mobilizing websites with responsive design and HTML5 tutorial. For all posts please see the Introduction post. iPhone might not be the market leader, but its users are known to be the most picky of phone folk. Thus, always make sure your mobile site works in iPhone. Here are tips for testing your site for iPhone. 1. iPhone / iPad Simulator iPhone/iPad/iOS emulator comes with iOS SDK. The SDK access costs 100 USD per year and the SDK only available on OSX platforms only. You basically must have a Mac to do any iOS development, there is no way around it. There exist “Hackintosh” attempts for running OSX in a virtual machine or non-Apple hardware, but these methods tend to be slow and cumbersome or have various software issues. Mac Mini is the cheapest Mac you can get for this work and is perfectly sufficient. The simulator is good for testing basic mobile sites. If you are relying on animations and Javascript then you need to test on actual device(s) too, because these two are subsystems which seem to differ between the simulator and the actual device mainly because of timing and racing conditions. To get iOS SDK access register yourself at http://developer.apple.com Pro tip: Alt+mouse press does the pinch and zoom gesture in the simulator, so you can test your web page zooming features. There is no fully simulated support for touch gestures, though. iPhone Simulator in action Though Apple assumes you run iPhone simulator through XCode you can also run it separately. Just keep the simulator icon in Dock. 2. iOS devices If you cannot afford iPhone you can always buy iPod Touch which comes with the same Mobile Safari software as iPhone. There practically exist no differences between iPhone and iPod Touch browser experience – only the lack of GPS might cause some issue if you are developing location based services. iPad also has the same WebKit browser engine, but it has different screen resolution and some other slightly differential behavior, so it is not suitable for your mobile site testing needs. But remember that most “mobile” tricks like CSS3 media queries or viewport tag apply on iPads too, so you might accidentally break your site on tables when building mobile version. On the right 2nd gen iPod Touch. It is no longer valid for testing as it did not receive iOS 5 update. If you are buying an used iPod Touch for testing make sure its the latest model. 3. Console Mobile Safari has a simple console for reading log messages on the simulator and iOS devices. You can enable it from the device Settings. 4. Easy screenshots from iOS simulator Below is a link to a screenshot application to take cropped screenshots from iOS simulator. The screenshots in this tutorial where taken using this application. http://www.curioustimes.de/iphonesimulatorcropper/
January 4, 2013
by Mikko Ohtamaa
· 12,869 Views
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Chunk Oriented Processing in Spring Batch
Big Data Sets’ Processing is one of the most important problem in the software world. Spring Batch is a lightweight and robust batch framework to process the data sets. Spring Batch Framework offers ‘TaskletStep Oriented’ and ‘Chunk Oriented’ processing style. In this article, Chunk Oriented Processing Model is explained. Also, TaskletStep Oriented Processing in Spring Batch Article is definitely suggested to investigate how to develop TaskletStep Oriented Processing in Spring Batch. Chunk Oriented Processing Feature has come with Spring Batch v2.0. It refers to reading the data one at a time, and creating ‘chunks’ that will be written out, within a transaction boundary. One item is read from an ItemReader, handed to an ItemProcessor, and written. Once the number of items read equals the commit interval, the entire chunk is written out via the ItemWriter, and then the transaction is committed. Basically, this feature should be used if at least one data item’ s reading and writing is required. Otherwise, TaskletStep Oriented processing can be used if the data item’ s only reading or writing is required. Chunk Oriented Processing model exposes three important interface as ItemReader, ItemProcessor and ItemWriter via org.springframework.batch.item package. ItemReader : This interface is used for providing the data. It reads the data which will be processed. ItemProcessor : This interface is used for item transformation. It processes input object and transforms to output object. ItemWriter : This interface is used for generic output operations. It writes the datas which are transformed by ItemProcessor. For example, the datas can be written to database, memory or outputstream (etc). In this sample application, we will write to database. Let us take a look how to develop Chunk Oriented Processing Model. Used Technologies : JDK 1.7.0_09 Spring 3.1.3 Spring Batch 2.1.9 Hibernate 4.1.8 Tomcat JDBC 7.0.27 MySQL 5.5.8 MySQL Connector 5.1.17 Maven 3.0.4 Step 1 : Create Maven Project A maven project is created as below. (It can be created by using Maven or IDE Plug-in). Step 2: Libraries A new USER Table is created by executing below script: CREATE TABLE ONLINETECHVISION.USER ( id int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, name varchar(45) NOT NULL, surname varchar(45) NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (`id`) ); Step 3: Libraries Firstly, dependencies are added to Maven’ s pom.xml. 3.1.3.RELEASE 2.1.9.RELEASE org.springframework spring-core ${spring.version} org.springframework spring-context ${spring.version} org.springframework spring-tx ${spring.version} org.springframework spring-orm ${spring.version} org.springframework.batch spring-batch-core ${spring-batch.version} org.hibernate hibernate-core 4.1.8.Final org.apache.tomcat tomcat-jdbc 7.0.27 mysql mysql-connector-java 5.1.17 log4j log4j 1.2.16 maven-compiler-plugin(Maven Plugin) is used to compile the project with JDK 1.7 org.apache.maven.plugins maven-compiler-plugin 3.0 1.7 1.7 The following Maven plugin can be used to create runnable-jar, org.apache.maven.plugins maven-shade-plugin 2.0 package shade 1.7 1.7 com.onlinetechvision.exe.Application META-INF/spring.handlers META-INF/spring.schemas Step 4 : Create User Entity User Entity is created. This entity will be stored after processing. package com.onlinetechvision.user; import javax.persistence.Column; import javax.persistence.Entity; import javax.persistence.GeneratedValue; import javax.persistence.GenerationType; import javax.persistence.Id; import javax.persistence.Table; /** * User Entity * * @author onlinetechvision.com * @since 10 Dec 2012 * @version 1.0.0 * */ @Entity @Table(name="USER") public class User { private int id; private String name; private String surname; @Id @GeneratedValue(strategy=GenerationType.AUTO) @Column(name="ID", unique = true, nullable = false) public int getId() { return id; } public void setId(int id) { this.id = id; } @Column(name="NAME", unique = true, nullable = false) public String getName() { return name; } public void setName(String name) { this.name = name; } @Column(name="SURNAME", unique = true, nullable = false) public String getSurname() { return surname; } public void setSurname(String surname) { this.surname = surname; } @Override public String toString() { StringBuffer strBuff = new StringBuffer(); strBuff.append("id : ").append(getId()); strBuff.append(", name : ").append(getName()); strBuff.append(", surname : ").append(getSurname()); return strBuff.toString(); } } Step 5 : Create IUserDAO Interface IUserDAO Interface is created to expose data access functionality. package com.onlinetechvision.user.dao; import java.util.List; import com.onlinetechvision.user.User; /** * User DAO Interface * * @author onlinetechvision.com * @since 10 Dec 2012 * @version 1.0.0 * */ public interface IUserDAO { /** * Adds User * * @param User user */ void addUser(User user); /** * Gets User List * */ List getUsers(); } Step 6 : Create UserDAO IMPL UserDAO Class is created by implementing IUserDAO Interface. package com.onlinetechvision.user.dao; import java.util.List; import org.hibernate.SessionFactory; import com.onlinetechvision.user.User; /** * User DAO * * @author onlinetechvision.com * @since 10 Dec 2012 * @version 1.0.0 * */ public class UserDAO implements IUserDAO { private SessionFactory sessionFactory; /** * Gets Hibernate Session Factory * * @return SessionFactory - Hibernate Session Factory */ public SessionFactory getSessionFactory() { return sessionFactory; } /** * Sets Hibernate Session Factory * * @param SessionFactory - Hibernate Session Factory */ public void setSessionFactory(SessionFactory sessionFactory) { this.sessionFactory = sessionFactory; } /** * Adds User * * @param User user */ @Override public void addUser(User user) { getSessionFactory().getCurrentSession().save(user); } /** * Gets User List * * @return List - User list */ @SuppressWarnings({ "unchecked" }) @Override public List getUsers() { List list = getSessionFactory().getCurrentSession().createQuery("from User").list(); return list; } } Step 7 : Create IUserService Interface IUserService Interface is created for service layer. package com.onlinetechvision.user.service; import java.util.List; import com.onlinetechvision.user.User; /** * * User Service Interface * * @author onlinetechvision.com * @since 10 Dec 2012 * @version 1.0.0 * */ public interface IUserService { /** * Adds User * * @param User user */ void addUser(User user); /** * Gets User List * * @return List - User list */ List getUsers(); } Step 8 : Create UserService IMPL UserService Class is created by implementing IUserService Interface. package com.onlinetechvision.user.service; import java.util.List; import org.springframework.transaction.annotation.Transactional; import com.onlinetechvision.user.User; import com.onlinetechvision.user.dao.IUserDAO; /** * * User Service * * @author onlinetechvision.com * @since 10 Dec 2012 * @version 1.0.0 * */ @Transactional(readOnly = true) public class UserService implements IUserService { IUserDAO userDAO; /** * Adds User * * @param User user */ @Transactional(readOnly = false) @Override public void addUser(User user) { getUserDAO().addUser(user); } /** * Gets User List * */ @Override public List getUsers() { return getUserDAO().getUsers(); } public IUserDAO getUserDAO() { return userDAO; } public void setUserDAO(IUserDAO userDAO) { this.userDAO = userDAO; } } Step 9 : Create TestReader IMPL TestReader Class is created by implementing ItemReader Interface. This class is called in order to read items. When read method returns null, reading operation is completed. The following steps explains with details how to be executed firstJob. The commit-interval value of firstjob is 2 and the following steps are executed : 1) firstTestReader is called to read first item(firstname_0, firstsurname_0) 2) firstTestReader is called again to read second item(firstname_1, firstsurname_1) 3) testProcessor is called to process first item(FIRSTNAME_0, FIRSTSURNAME_0) 4) testProcessor is called to process second item(FIRSTNAME_1, FIRSTSURNAME_1) 5) testWriter is called to write first item(FIRSTNAME_0, FIRSTSURNAME_0) to database 6) testWriter is called to write second item(FIRSTNAME_1, FIRSTSURNAME_1) to database 7) first and second items are committed and the transaction is closed. 8) firstTestReader is called to read third item(firstname_2, firstsurname_2) 9) maxIndex value of firstTestReader is 3. read method returns null and item reading operation is completed. 10) testProcessor is called to process third item(FIRSTNAME_2, FIRSTSURNAME_2) 11) testWriter is called to write first item(FIRSTNAME_2, FIRSTSURNAME_2) to database 12) third item is committed and the transaction is closed. firstStep is completed with COMPLETED status and secondStep is started. secondJob and thirdJob are executed in the same way. package com.onlinetechvision.item; import org.springframework.batch.item.ItemReader; import org.springframework.batch.item.NonTransientResourceException; import org.springframework.batch.item.ParseException; import org.springframework.batch.item.UnexpectedInputException; import com.onlinetechvision.user.User; /** * TestReader Class is created to read items which will be processed * * @author onlinetechvision.com * @since 10 Dec 2012 * @version 1.0.0 * */ public class TestReader implements ItemReader { private int index; private int maxIndex; private String namePrefix; private String surnamePrefix; /** * Reads items one by one * * @return User * * @throws Exception * @throws UnexpectedInputException * @throws ParseException * @throws NonTransientResourceException * */ @Override public User read() throws Exception, UnexpectedInputException, ParseException, NonTransientResourceException { User user = new User(); user.setName(getNamePrefix() + "_" + index); user.setSurname(getSurnamePrefix() + "_" + index); if(index > getMaxIndex()) { return null; } incrementIndex(); return user; } /** * Increments index which defines read-count * * @return int * */ private int incrementIndex() { return index++; } public int getMaxIndex() { return maxIndex; } public void setMaxIndex(int maxIndex) { this.maxIndex = maxIndex; } public String getNamePrefix() { return namePrefix; } public void setNamePrefix(String namePrefix) { this.namePrefix = namePrefix; } public String getSurnamePrefix() { return surnamePrefix; } public void setSurnamePrefix(String surnamePrefix) { this.surnamePrefix = surnamePrefix; } } Step 10 : Create FailedCaseTestReader IMPL FailedCaseTestReader Class is created in order to simulate the failed job status. In this sample application, when thirdJob is processed at fifthStep, failedCaseTestReader is called and exception is thrown so its status will be FAILED. package com.onlinetechvision.item; import org.springframework.batch.item.ItemReader; import org.springframework.batch.item.NonTransientResourceException; import org.springframework.batch.item.ParseException; import org.springframework.batch.item.UnexpectedInputException; import com.onlinetechvision.user.User; /** * FailedCaseTestReader Class is created in order to simulate the failed job status. * * @author onlinetechvision.com * @since 10 Dec 2012 * @version 1.0.0 * */ public class FailedCaseTestReader implements ItemReader { private int index; private int maxIndex; private String namePrefix; private String surnamePrefix; /** * Reads items one by one * * @return User * * @throws Exception * @throws UnexpectedInputException * @throws ParseException * @throws NonTransientResourceException * */ @Override public User read() throws Exception, UnexpectedInputException, ParseException, NonTransientResourceException { User user = new User(); user.setName(getNamePrefix() + "_" + index); user.setSurname(getSurnamePrefix() + "_" + index); if(index >= getMaxIndex()) { throw new Exception("Unexpected Error!"); } incrementIndex(); return user; } /** * Increments index which defines read-count * * @return int * */ private int incrementIndex() { return index++; } public int getMaxIndex() { return maxIndex; } public void setMaxIndex(int maxIndex) { this.maxIndex = maxIndex; } public String getNamePrefix() { return namePrefix; } public void setNamePrefix(String namePrefix) { this.namePrefix = namePrefix; } public String getSurnamePrefix() { return surnamePrefix; } public void setSurnamePrefix(String surnamePrefix) { this.surnamePrefix = surnamePrefix; } } Step 11 : Create TestProcessor IMPL TestProcessor Class is created by implementing ItemProcessor Interface. This class is called to process items. User item is received from TestReader, processed and returned to TestWriter. package com.onlinetechvision.item; import java.util.Locale; import org.springframework.batch.item.ItemProcessor; import com.onlinetechvision.user.User; /** * TestProcessor Class is created to process items. * * @author onlinetechvision.com * @since 10 Dec 2012 * @version 1.0.0 * */ public class TestProcessor implements ItemProcessor { /** * Processes items one by one * * @param User user * @return User * @throws Exception * */ @Override public User process(User user) throws Exception { user.setName(user.getName().toUpperCase(Locale.ENGLISH)); user.setSurname(user.getSurname().toUpperCase(Locale.ENGLISH)); return user; } } Step 12 : Create TestWriter IMPL TestWriter Class is created by implementing ItemWriter Interface. This class is called to write items to DB, memory etc… package com.onlinetechvision.item; import java.util.List; import org.springframework.batch.item.ItemWriter; import com.onlinetechvision.user.User; import com.onlinetechvision.user.service.IUserService; /** * TestWriter Class is created to write items to DB, memory etc... * * @author onlinetechvision.com * @since 10 Dec 2012 * @version 1.0.0 * */ public class TestWriter implements ItemWriter { private IUserService userService; /** * Writes items via list * * @throws Exception * */ @Override public void write(List userList) throws Exception { for(User user : userList) { getUserService().addUser(user); } System.out.println("User List : " + getUserService().getUsers()); } public IUserService getUserService() { return userService; } public void setUserService(IUserService userService) { this.userService = userService; } } Step 13 : Create FailedStepTasklet Class FailedStepTasklet is created by implementing Tasklet Interface. It illustrates business logic in failed step. package com.onlinetechvision.tasklet; import org.apache.log4j.Logger; import org.springframework.batch.core.StepContribution; import org.springframework.batch.core.scope.context.ChunkContext; import org.springframework.batch.core.step.tasklet.Tasklet; import org.springframework.batch.repeat.RepeatStatus; /** * FailedStepTasklet Class illustrates a failed job. * * @author onlinetechvision.com * @since 10 Dec 2012 * @version 1.0.0 * */ public class FailedStepTasklet implements Tasklet { private static final Logger logger = Logger.getLogger(FailedStepTasklet.class); private String taskResult; /** * Executes FailedStepTasklet * * @param StepContribution stepContribution * @param ChunkContext chunkContext * @return RepeatStatus * @throws Exception * */ public RepeatStatus execute(StepContribution stepContribution, ChunkContext chunkContext) throws Exception { logger.debug("Task Result : " + getTaskResult()); throw new Exception("Error occurred!"); } public String getTaskResult() { return taskResult; } public void setTaskResult(String taskResult) { this.taskResult = taskResult; } } Step 14 : Create BatchProcessStarter Class BatchProcessStarter Class is created to launch the jobs. Also, it logs their execution results. package com.onlinetechvision.spring.batch; import org.apache.log4j.Logger; import org.springframework.batch.core.Job; import org.springframework.batch.core.JobExecution; import org.springframework.batch.core.JobParametersBuilder; import org.springframework.batch.core.JobParametersInvalidException; import org.springframework.batch.core.launch.JobLauncher; import org.springframework.batch.core.repository.JobExecutionAlreadyRunningException; import org.springframework.batch.core.repository.JobInstanceAlreadyCompleteException; import org.springframework.batch.core.repository.JobRepository; import org.springframework.batch.core.repository.JobRestartException; /** * BatchProcessStarter Class launches the jobs and logs their execution results. * * @author onlinetechvision.com * @since 10 Dec 2012 * @version 1.0.0 * */ public class BatchProcessStarter { private static final Logger logger = Logger.getLogger(BatchProcessStarter.class); private Job firstJob; private Job secondJob; private Job thirdJob; private JobLauncher jobLauncher; private JobRepository jobRepository; /** * Starts the jobs and logs their execution results. * */ public void start() { JobExecution jobExecution = null; JobParametersBuilder builder = new JobParametersBuilder(); try { getJobLauncher().run(getFirstJob(), builder.toJobParameters()); jobExecution = getJobRepository().getLastJobExecution(getFirstJob().getName(), builder.toJobParameters()); logger.debug(jobExecution.toString()); getJobLauncher().run(getSecondJob(), builder.toJobParameters()); jobExecution = getJobRepository().getLastJobExecution(getSecondJob().getName(), builder.toJobParameters()); logger.debug(jobExecution.toString()); getJobLauncher().run(getThirdJob(), builder.toJobParameters()); jobExecution = getJobRepository().getLastJobExecution(getThirdJob().getName(), builder.toJobParameters()); logger.debug(jobExecution.toString()); } catch (JobExecutionAlreadyRunningException | JobRestartException | JobInstanceAlreadyCompleteException | JobParametersInvalidException e) { logger.error(e); } } public Job getFirstJob() { return firstJob; } public void setFirstJob(Job firstJob) { this.firstJob = firstJob; } public Job getSecondJob() { return secondJob; } public void setSecondJob(Job secondJob) { this.secondJob = secondJob; } public Job getThirdJob() { return thirdJob; } public void setThirdJob(Job thirdJob) { this.thirdJob = thirdJob; } public JobLauncher getJobLauncher() { return jobLauncher; } public void setJobLauncher(JobLauncher jobLauncher) { this.jobLauncher = jobLauncher; } public JobRepository getJobRepository() { return jobRepository; } public void setJobRepository(JobRepository jobRepository) { this.jobRepository = jobRepository; } } Step 15 : Create dataContext.xml jdbc.properties, is created. It defines data-source informations and is read via dataContext.xml jdbc.db.driverClassName=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver jdbc.db.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/onlinetechvision jdbc.db.username=root jdbc.db.password=root jdbc.db.initialSize=10 jdbc.db.minIdle=3 jdbc.db.maxIdle=10 jdbc.db.maxActive=10 jdbc.db.testWhileIdle=true jdbc.db.testOnBorrow=true jdbc.db.testOnReturn=true jdbc.db.initSQL=SELECT 1 FROM DUAL jdbc.db.validationQuery=SELECT 1 FROM DUAL jdbc.db.timeBetweenEvictionRunsMillis=30000 Step 16 : Create dataContext.xml Spring Configuration file, dataContext.xml, is created. It covers dataSource, sessionFactory and transactionManager definitions. com.onlinetechvision.user.User org.hibernate.dialect.MySQLDialect true Step 17 : Create jobContext.xml Spring Configuration file, jobContext.xml, is created. It covers jobRepository, jobLauncher, item reader, item processor, item writer, tasklet and job definitions. Step 18 : Create applicationContext.xml Spring Configuration file, applicationContext.xml, is created. It covers bean definitions. Step 19 : Create Application Class Application Class is created to run the application. package com.onlinetechvision.exe; import org.springframework.context.ApplicationContext; import org.springframework.context.support.ClassPathXmlApplicationContext; import com.onlinetechvision.spring.batch.BatchProcessStarter; /** * Application Class starts the application. * * @author onlinetechvision.com * @since 10 Dec 2012 * @version 1.0.0 * */ public class Application { /** * Starts the application * * @param String[] args * */ public static void main(String[] args) { ApplicationContext appContext = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("applicationContext.xml"); BatchProcessStarter batchProcessStarter = (BatchProcessStarter)appContext.getBean("batchProcessStarter"); batchProcessStarter.start(); } } Step 20 : Build Project After OTV_SpringBatch_Chunk_Oriented_Processing Project is built, OTV_SpringBatch_Chunk_Oriented_Processing-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar will be created. STEP 21 : RUN PROJECT After created OTV_SpringBatch_Chunk_Oriented_Processing-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar file is run, the following database and console output logs will be shown : Database screenshot : First Job’ s console output : 16.12.2012 19:30:41 INFO (SimpleJobLauncher.java:118) - Job: [FlowJob: [name=firstJob]] launched with the following parameters: [{}] 16.12.2012 19:30:41 DEBUG (AbstractJob.java:278) - Job execution starting: JobExecution: id=0, version=0, startTime=null, endTime=null, lastUpdated=Sun Dec 16 19:30:41 GMT 2012, status=STARTING, exitStatus=exitCode=UNKNOWN;exitDescription=, job=[JobInstance: id=0, version=0, JobParameters=[{}], Job=[firstJob]] User List : [id : 181, name : FIRSTNAME_0, surname : FIRSTSURNAME_0, id : 182, name : FIRSTNAME_1, surname : FIRSTSURNAME_1, id : 183, name : FIRSTNAME_2, surname : FIRSTSURNAME_2, id : 184, name : SECONDNAME_0, surname : SECONDSURNAME_0, id : 185, name : SECONDNAME_1, surname : SECONDSURNAME_1, id : 186, name : SECONDNAME_2, surname : SECONDSURNAME_2] 16.12.2012 19:30:42 DEBUG (BatchProcessStarter.java:43) - JobExecution: id=0, version=2, startTime=Sun Dec 16 19:30:41 GMT 2012, endTime=Sun Dec 16 19:30:42 GMT 2012, lastUpdated=Sun Dec 16 19:30:42 GMT 2012, status=COMPLETED, exitStatus=exitCode=COMPLETED;exitDescription=, job=[JobInstance: id=0, version=0, JobParameters=[{}], Job=[firstJob]] Second Job’ s console output : 16.12.2012 19:30:42 INFO (SimpleJobLauncher.java:118) - Job: [FlowJob: [name=secondJob]] launched with the following parameters: [{}] 16.12.2012 19:30:42 DEBUG (AbstractJob.java:278) - Job execution starting: JobExecution: id=1, version=0, startTime=null, endTime=null, lastUpdated=Sun Dec 16 19:30:42 GMT 2012, status=STARTING, exitStatus=exitCode=UNKNOWN;exitDescription=, job=[JobInstance: id=1, version=0, JobParameters=[{}], Job=[secondJob]] User List : [id : 181, name : FIRSTNAME_0, surname : FIRSTSURNAME_0, id : 182, name : FIRSTNAME_1, surname : FIRSTSURNAME_1, id : 183, name : FIRSTNAME_2, surname : FIRSTSURNAME_2, id : 184, name : SECONDNAME_0, surname : SECONDSURNAME_0, id : 185, name : SECONDNAME_1, surname : SECONDSURNAME_1, id : 186, name : SECONDNAME_2, surname : SECONDSURNAME_2, id : 187, name : THIRDNAME_0, surname : THIRDSURNAME_0, id : 188, name : THIRDNAME_1, surname : THIRDSURNAME_1, id : 189, name : THIRDNAME_2, surname : THIRDSURNAME_2, id : 190, name : THIRDNAME_3, surname : THIRDSURNAME_3, id : 191, name : FOURTHNAME_0, surname : FOURTHSURNAME_0, id : 192, name : FOURTHNAME_1, surname : FOURTHSURNAME_1, id : 193, name : FOURTHNAME_2, surname : FOURTHSURNAME_2, id : 194, name : FOURTHNAME_3, surname : FOURTHSURNAME_3] 16.12.2012 19:30:42 DEBUG (BatchProcessStarter.java:47) - JobExecution: id=1, version=2, startTime=Sun Dec 16 19:30:42 GMT 2012, endTime=Sun Dec 16 19:30:42 GMT 2012, lastUpdated=Sun Dec 16 19:30:42 GMT 2012, status=COMPLETED, exitStatus=exitCode=COMPLETED;exitDescription=, job=[JobInstance: id=1, version=0, JobParameters=[{}], Job=[secondJob]] Third Job’ s console output : 16.12.2012 19:30:42 INFO (SimpleJobLauncher.java:118) - Job: [FlowJob: [name=thirdJob]] launched with the following parameters: [{}] 16.12.2012 19:30:42 DEBUG (AbstractJob.java:278) - Job execution starting: JobExecution: id=2, version=0, startTime=null, endTime=null, lastUpdated=Sun Dec 16 19:30:42 GMT 2012, status=STARTING, exitStatus=exitCode=UNKNOWN;exitDescription=, job=[JobInstance: id=2, version=0, JobParameters=[{}], Job=[thirdJob]] 16.12.2012 19:30:42 DEBUG (TransactionTemplate.java:159) - Initiating transaction rollback on application exception org.springframework.batch.repeat.RepeatException: Exception in batch process; nested exception is java.lang.Exception: Unexpected Error! ... 16.12.2012 19:30:43 DEBUG (BatchProcessStarter.java:51) - JobExecution: id=2, version=2, startTime=Sun Dec 16 19:30:42 GMT 2012, endTime=Sun Dec 16 19:30:43 GMT 2012, lastUpdated=Sun Dec 16 19:30:43 GMT 2012, status=FAILED, exitStatus=exitCode=FAILED;exitDescription=, job=[JobInstance: id=2, version=0, JobParameters=[{}], Job=[thirdJob]] Step 22 : Download https://github.com/erenavsarogullari/OTV_SpringBatch_Chunk_Oriented_Processing REFERENCES : Chunk Oriented Processing in Spring Batch
January 3, 2013
by Eren Avsarogullari
· 153,430 Views · 7 Likes
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JAXB - Representing Null and Empty Collections
In this post I will cover how to differentiate between null and empty collections in the XML representation with JAXB (JSR-222). Demo Code The following demo code will be used for all the different versions of the Java model. It simply sets one collection to null, the second to an empty list, and the third to a populated list. package blog.xmlelementwrapper; import java.util.ArrayList; import javax.xml.bind.*; public class Demo { public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { JAXBContext jc = JAXBContext.newInstance(Root.class); Root root = new Root(); root.nullCollection = null; root.emptyCollection = new ArrayList(); root.populatedCollection = new ArrayList(); root.populatedCollection.add("foo"); root.populatedCollection.add("bar"); Marshaller marshaller = jc.createMarshaller(); marshaller.setProperty(Marshaller.JAXB_FORMATTED_OUTPUT, true); marshaller.marshal(root, System.out); } } Mapping #1 - Default JAXB models do not require any annotations (see JAXB - No Annotations Required). First we will look at what the default behaviour is for collection properties. package blog.xmlelementwrapper; import java.util.List; import javax.xml.bind.annotation.*; @XmlRootElement @XmlAccessorType(XmlAccessType.FIELD) public class Root { List nullCollection; List emptyCollection; List populatedCollection; } Examining the output we see that the output corresponding to the nullCollection and emptyCollection fields is the same. This means with the default mapping we can't round trip the instance. For the unmarshal use case the value of the nullCollection and emptyCollection the value of the fields will be whatever the class initialized them to (null in this case). foo bar Mapping #2 - @XmlElementWrapper The @XmlElementWrapper annotation is used to add a grouping element around the contents of a collection. In addition to changing the appearance of the XML representation it also allows us to distinguish between null and empty collections. package blog.xmlelementwrapper; import java.util.List; import javax.xml.bind.annotation.*; @XmlRootElement @XmlAccessorType(XmlAccessType.FIELD) public class Root { @XmlElementWrapper List nullCollection; @XmlElementWrapper List emptyCollection; @XmlElementWrapper List populatedCollection; } The representation for the null collection remains the same, it is absent from the XML document. For an empty collection we see that only the grouping element is marshalled out. Since the representations for null and empty are different we can round trip this use case. foo bar Mapping #3 - @XmlElementWrapper(nillable=true) The nillable property on the @XmlElementWrapper annotation can be used to change the XML representation of null collections. package blog.xmlelementwrapper; import java.util.List; import javax.xml.bind.annotation.*; @XmlRootElement @XmlAccessorType(XmlAccessType.FIELD) public class Root { @XmlElementWrapper(nillable=true) List nullCollection; @XmlElementWrapper(nillable=true) List emptyCollection; @XmlElementWrapper(nillable=true) List populatedCollection; } Now the grouping element is present for all three fields. The xsi:nil attribute is used to indicate that the nullCollection field was null. Like the previous mapping this one can be round tripped. foo bar
January 3, 2013
by Blaise Doughan
· 52,847 Views
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HtmlUnit vs JSoup: HTML Parsing in Java
in continuation of my earlier blog jsoup: nice way to do html parsing in java, in this blog i will compare jsoup with other similar framework, htmlunit . apparently both of them are good html parsing frameworks and both can be used for web application unit testing and web scraping. in this blog, i will explain how htmlunit is better suited for web application unit testing automation and jsoup is better suited for web scraping. typically web application unit testing automation is a way to automate webtesting in junit framework. and web scraping is a way to extract unstructured information from the web to a structured format. i recently tried 2 decent web scraping tools, webharvy and mozenda . for any good html parsing tools to click, they should support either xpath based or css selector based element access. there are lot of blogs comparing each one like, why css locators are the way to go vs xpath , and css selectors and xpath expressions . htmlunit htmlunit is a powerful framework, where you can simulate pretty much anything a browser can do like click events, submit events etc and is ideal for web application automated unit testing. xpath based parsing is simple and most popular and htmlunit is heavily based on this. in one of my application, i wanted to extract information from the web in a structured way. htmlunit worked out very well for me on this. but the problem starts when you try to extract structured data from modern web applications that use jquery and other ajax features and use div tags extensively. htmlunit and other xpath based html parsers will not work with this. there is also a jsoup version that supports xpath based on jaxe n, i tried this as well, guess what? it also was not able to access the data from modern web applications like ebay.com. finally my experience with htmlunit was it was bit buggy or maybe i call it unforgiving unlike a browser, where in if the target web applications have missing javascripts, it will throw exceptions, but we can get around this, but out of the box it will not work. jsoup the latest version of jsoup goes extra length not to support xpath and will very well support css selectors . my experience was it is excellent for extracting structured data from modern web applications. it is also far forgiving if the web application has some missing javascripts. extracting xpath and css selector data in most of the browsers, if you point to an element and right click and click on “inspect element” it can extract the xpath information, i noticed firefox/firebug can also extract css selector path as shown below, htmlunit vs jsoup: extract css path and xpath in firebug i hope this blog helped.
January 3, 2013
by Krishna Prasad
· 39,082 Views · 2 Likes
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Auditing Login Attempts in MySQL
This is a recurring question made by our MySQL Support customers: How can I audit the login attempts in MySQL? Logging all the attempts or just the failed ones is a very important task on some scenarios. Unfortunately there are not too many audit capabilities in MySQL Community so the first option to audit MySQL’s authentication process is to get all the information we need from logs. General Query Log The first option is the General Query Log. Let’s see an example: Enable the log: general_log_file = /var/log/mysql/mysql.log general_log = 1 User correctly authenticated: 121227 8:31:49 38 Connect root@localhost on 38 Query select @@version_comment limit 1 User not correctly authenticated: 121227 8:32:18 39 Connect root@localhost on 39 Connect Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' (using password: YES) The problem of the General Query Log is that it will log everything so it can cause performance degradation and you will have to deal with very large files on high loaded servers. general_log variable is dynamic so a solution could be enabling and disabling the log just when it’s needed. Error log If you only care about failed attempts to login then there is another different and less problematic approach. From 5.5 it’s possible to log access denied messages to the error log. We just need to enable log_warnings with a value greater than 1: log_warnings = 2 Then check the error log: 121227 8:44:21 [Warning] Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' (using password: YES) User Statistics If you are using Percona Server then there is a third option to get information about our users, the User Statistics. As with the previous options we can get the number of connections and failed connections made by a particular user but not the date and time of those attempts. Besides that information we can get other statistics that can be very useful if MySQL is running on a multi-tenant environment or we need to control how resources are used. Let’s seen an example, first we enable User Statistics in my.cnf: 5.5 userstat = 1 5.1 userstat_running = 1 Then we get the information about a particular user: mysql> select * from user_statistics where user='root'\G *************************** 1. row *************************** USER: root TOTAL_CONNECTIONS: 25 CONCURRENT_CONNECTIONS: 0 CONNECTED_TIME: 464 BUSY_TIME: 96 CPU_TIME: 19 BYTES_RECEIVED: 62869617 BYTES_SENT: 14520 BINLOG_BYTES_WRITTEN: 0 ROWS_FETCHED: 783051 ROWS_UPDATED: 1017714 TABLE_ROWS_READ: 1484751 SELECT_COMMANDS: 14 UPDATE_COMMANDS: 103 OTHER_COMMANDS: 3556 COMMIT_TRANSACTIONS: 0 ROLLBACK_TRANSACTIONS: 0 DENIED_CONNECTIONS: 2 LOST_CONNECTIONS: 16 ACCESS_DENIED: 0 EMPTY_QUERIES: 0 TOTAL_SSL_CONNECTIONS: 0 Here we can see that root has done 25 total connections. Two denied connections (bad password) and 16 lost connections (not closed properly). Apart from that information we get the connection time, bytes received and sent, rows accessed, commands executed and so on. Very valuable information. It is important to mention that these tables are stored in INFORMATION_SCHEMA and that means that after a mysqld restart all the information will be lost. So if you really need that information you should copy it to another table or export to a csv for further analysis. Conclusion We don’t have too many audit capabilities in MySQL Community so logging all events and then filter them with custom-made scripts is the best solution we have nowadays. If you are using Percona Server you can get more detailed information about what a particular user is doing. All options can be combined to meet your needs.
January 2, 2013
by Peter Zaitsev
· 18,307 Views
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JAXB's @XmlAnyElement(lax=true) Explained
In a previous post I introduced how the @XmlAnyElement(lax=true) annotation could be used to create a very flexible mapping. In this post I'll dig a bit deeper into how it relates to both the @XmlRootElement and @XmlElementDecl. @XmlAnyElement (Root) The any field is annotated with @XmlAnyElement(lax=true). This means that for that field if an element is associated with a class via @XmlRootElement or @XmlElementDecl then an instance of the corresponding class will be used to populate the field if not the element will be set as an instance of org.w3c.dom.Element. package blog.anyelement; import java.util.List; import javax.xml.bind.annotation.*; @XmlRootElement @XmlAccessorType(XmlAccessType.FIELD) public class Root { @XmlAnyElement(lax = true) protected List createBar(Bar bar) { return new JAXBElement(new QName("bar"), Bar.class, bar); } } Input (input.xml) Below is the input document we'll use for this example. There are 3 elements that correspond to the any property. The first corresponds to the @XmlRootElement annotation on the Foo class. The second corresponds to the @XmlElementDecl annotation for the Bar class and the third does not correspond to any of the domain classes. Hello World A B Demo In the demo code below we will unmarshal the input document, then output the classes of the objects in the resulting any property and then marshal the payload object back to XML. package blog.anyelement; import java.io.File; import javax.xml.bind.*; public class Demo { public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { JAXBContext jc = JAXBContext.newInstance(Root.class, Foo.class, ObjectFactory.class); Unmarshaller unmarshaller = jc.createUnmarshaller(); File xml = new File("src/blog/anyelement/input.xml"); Root payload = (Root) unmarshaller.unmarshal(xml); for(Object o : payload.any) { System.out.println(o.getClass()); } Marshaller marshaller = jc.createMarshaller(); marshaller.setProperty(Marshaller.JAXB_FORMATTED_OUTPUT, true); marshaller.marshal(payload, System.out); } } Output Below is the output from running the demo code. Note the classes corresponding to the objects in the any property. The foo element became an instance of the Foo class. The bar element became an instance of JAXBElement that holds an instance of Bar. The other element became an instance of org.w3c.dom.Element. class blog.anyelement.Foo class javax.xml.bind.JAXBElement class com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.dom.ElementNSImpl Hello World A B
January 2, 2013
by Blaise Doughan
· 51,604 Views · 15 Likes
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How ACID is MongoDB?
Find out how MongoDB ranks with atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability (ACID).
January 1, 2013
by Giorgio Sironi
· 82,177 Views · 5 Likes
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How to Un-install a Plugin From Eclipse / STS?
It is easy to do - a few button clicks (generally) - but the button location is damn unintuitive. So, this is what you have got to do Go to "Help" menu item. Click on "About ..." button (why on earth should I click that when I am trying to un-install a plugin. By the way, the menu item just above "About ..." is "Install New Software ...". Would it have been too much pain to have a "Manage plugins" and / or "Un-install plugins" right underneath it?) A form opens up. At the bottom of it there is button "Installation details". Click that. (Again, why on earth would anyone think "Installation details" would have anything to do with un-installing stuff. I would have expected only a static display of stuff that are already installed.) Another multi tabbed form opens up (Anyone keeping count of the number of windows opened already. This is the 3rd window by now, including the parent editor window) which shows all the installed plugins. If you select any of the installed plugins, a button to "uninstall" becomes available. Click that and you should be able to un-install and after a restart everything should be fine. My interest in software and IT has always been much more than a 9 to 5 job (and I am sure there is a huge population that it holds equally true for). I have always wanted software to be efficient and beautiful apart from doing it's job. However, it took an excellent session on usability (which I joined only with casual curiosity but left with renewed interest in the subject and admiration for David Travis who delivered the course) to get me to start looking at all software with an "user's" perspective. And I was surprised with what I found and how it changed my coding. I have been using Eclipse and STS for years now (nearing a decade now) and I absolutely love these software. However when you start looking at them as a "user" and not only as a developer, there are quite a few usability opportunities of improvement that meets the eye. This article - apart from helping folks looking to un-install plugins in Eclipse - is also intended at folks who design Eclipse - just a humble request to consider this also as a usability improvement.
January 1, 2013
by Partha Bhattacharjee
· 16,337 Views
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Multi-Threaded Application vs. Single Threaded Application
Why would we use a multi threaded application vs. a single threaded application? First we must define multithreading. Multithreading is a feature of an operating system that allows programs to run subcomponents or threads in parallel. Typically most applications only need to use one thread because they do not perform time consuming tasks. The use of multiple threads allows an application to distribute long running tasks so that they can be executed in parallel. This gives the user the perceived appearance that the application is working faster due to the fact that while one thread is waiting on an IO process the remaining tasks can make use of the available CPU. The allows working threads to execute in tandem so that they can be competed sooner. Multithreading Benefits Improved responsiveness — Users usually report improved responsiveness compared to single thread applications. Faster applications — Multiple threads can lead to improved application performance. Prioritization — Threads can be assigned a priority which would allow higher priority tasks to take precedence over lower priority tasks. Single Threading Benefits Programming and debugging —These activities are easier compared to multithreaded applications due to the reduced complexity Less Overhead — Threads add overhead to an application When developing multi-threaded applications, the following must be considered. Deadlocks occur when two threads hold a monitor that the other one requires. In essence each task is blocking the other and both tasks are waiting for the other monitor to be released. This forces an application to hang or deadlock. Resource allocation is used to prevent deadlocks because the system determines if approving the resource request will render the system in an unsafe state. An unsafe state could result in a deadlock. The system only approves requests that will lead to safe states. Thread Synchronization is used when multiple threads use the same instance of an object. The threads accessing the object can then be locked and then synchronized so that each task can interact with the static object on at a time.
December 31, 2012
by Todd Merritt
· 40,703 Views · 1 Like
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UML2 Class Diagram in Java
Learn all about this Unified Modeling Language diagram in Java.
December 31, 2012
by Mainak Goswami
· 200,731 Views · 10 Likes
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Java Thread: retained memory analysis
This article will provide you with a tutorial allowing you to determine how much and where Java heap space is retained from your active application Java threads. A true case study from an Oracle Weblogic 10.0 production environment will be presented in order for you to better understand the analysis process. We will also attempt to demonstrate that excessive garbage collection or Java heap space memory footprint problems are often not caused by true memory leaks but instead due to thread execution patterns and high amount of short lived objects. Background As you may have seen from my past JVM overview article, Java threads are part of the JVM fundamentals. Your Java heap space memory footprint is driven not only by static and long lived objects but also by short lived objects. OutOfMemoryError problems are often wrongly assumed to be due to memory leaks. We often overlook faulty thread execution patterns and short lived objects they “retain” on the Java heap until their executions are completed. In this problematic scenario: Your “expected” application short lived / stateless objects (XML, JSON data payload etc.) become retained by the threads for too long (thread lock contention, huge data payload, slow response time from remote system etc.) Eventually such short lived objects get promoted to the long lived object space e.g. OldGen/tenured space by the garbage collector As a side effect, this is causing the OldGen space to fill up rapidly, increasing the Full GC (major collections) frequency Depending of the severity of the situation this can lead to excessive GC garbage collection, increased JVM paused time and ultimately OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space Your application is now down, you are now puzzled on what is going on Finally, you are thinking to either increase the Java heap or look for memory leaks…are you really on the right track? In the above scenario, you need to look at the thread execution patterns and determine how much memory each of them retain at a given time. OK I get the picture but what about the thread stack size? It is very important to avoid any confusion between thread stack size and Java memory retention. The thread stack size is a special memory space used by the JVM to store each method call. When a thread calls method A, it “pushes” the call onto the stack. If method A calls method B, it gets also pushed onto the stack. Once the method execution completes, the call is “popped” off the stack. The Java objects created as a result of such thread method calls are allocated on the Java heap space. Increasing the thread stack size will definitely not have any effect. Tuning of the thread stack size is normally required when dealing with java.lang.stackoverflowerror or OutOfMemoryError: unable to create new native thread problems. Case study and problem context The following analysis is based on a true production problem we investigated recently. Severe performance degradation was observed from a Weblogic 10.0 production environment following some changes to the user web interface (using Google Web Toolkit and JSON as data payload) Initial analysis did reveal several occurrences of OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space errors along with excessive garbage collection. Java heap dump files were generated automatically (-XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError) following OOM events Analysis of the verbose:gc logs did confirm full depletion of the 32-bit HotSpot JVM OldGen space (1 GB capacity) Thread dump snapshots were also generated before and during the problem The only problem mitigation available at that time was to restart the affected Weblogic server when problem was observed A rollback of the changes was eventually performed which did resolve the situation The team first suspected a memory leak problem from the new code introduced. Thread dump analysis: looking for suspects… The first analysis step we did was to perform an analysis of the generated thread dump data. Thread dump will often show you the culprit threads allocating memory on the Java heap. It will also reveal any hogging or stuck thread attempting to send and receive data payload from a remote system. The first pattern we noticed was a good correlation between OOM events and STUCK threads observed from the Weblogic managed servers (JVM processes). Find below the primary thread pattern found: <10-Dec-2012 1:27:59 o'clock PM EST> <[STUCK] ExecuteThread: '22' for queue: 'weblogic.kernel.Default (self-tuning)' has been busy for "672" seconds working on the request which is more than the configured time of "600" seconds. As you can see, the above thread appears to be STUCK or taking very long time to read and receive the JSON response from the remote server. Once we found that pattern, the next step was to correlate this finding with the JVM heap dump analysis and determine how much memory these stuck threads were taking from the Java heap. Heap dump analysis: retained objects exposed! The Java heap dump analysis was performed using MAT. We will now list the different analysis steps which did allow us to pinpoint the retained memory size and source. 1. Load the HotSpot JVM heap dump 2. Select the HISTOGRAM view and filter by “ExecuteThread” * ExecuteThread is the Java class used by the Weblogic kernel for thread creation & execution * As you can see, this view was quite revealing. We can see a total of 210 Weblogic threads created. The total retained memory footprint from these threads is 806 MB. This is pretty significant for a 32-bit JVM process with 1 GB OldGen space. This view alone is telling us that the core of the problem and memory retention originates from the threads themselves. 3. Deep dive into the thread memory footprint analysis The next step was to deep dive into the thread memory retention. To do this, simply right click over the ExecuteThread class and select: List objects > with outgoing references. As you can see, we were able to correlate STUCK threads from the thread dump analysis with high memory retention from the heap dump analysis. The finding was quite surprising. 3. Thread Java Local variables identification The final analysis step did require us to expand a few thread samples and understand the primary source of memory retention. As you can see, this last analysis step did reveal huge JSON response data payload at the root cause. That pattern was also exposed earlier via the thread dump analysis where we found a few threads taking very long time to read & receive the JSON response; a clear symptom of huge data payload footprint. It is crucial to note that short lived objects created via local method variables will show up in the heap dump analysis. However, some of those will only be visible from their parent threads since they are not referenced by other objects, like in this case. You will also need to analyze the thread stack trace in order to identify the true caller, followed by a code review to confirm the root cause. Following this finding, our delivery team was able to determine that the recent JSON faulty code changes were generating, under some scenarios, huge JSON data payload up to 45 MB+. Given the fact that this environment is using a 32-bit JVM with only 1 GB of OldGen space, you can understand that only a few threads were enough to trigger severe performance degradation. This case study is clearly showing the importance of proper capacity planning and Java heap analysis, including the memory retained from your active application & Java EE container threads. Learning is experience. Everything else is just information I hope this article has helped you understand how you can pinpoint the Java heap memory footprint retained by your active threads by combining thread dump and heap dump analysis. Now, this article will remain just words if you don’t experiment so I highly recommend that you take some time to learn this analysis process yourself for your application(s). Please feel free to post any comment or question.
December 30, 2012
by Pierre - Hugues Charbonneau
· 27,953 Views · 3 Likes
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Google Guava Cache with regular expression patterns
Hi! Merry Christmas everyone :) Quite recently I've seen a nice presentation about Google Guava and we came to the conclusion in our project that it could be really interesting to use the its Cache functionallity. Let us take a look at the regexp Pattern class and its compile function. Quite often in the code we can see that each time a regular expression is being used a programmer is repeatidly calling the aforementioned Pattern.compile() function with the same argument thus compiling the same regular expression over and over again. What could be done however is to cache the result of such compilations - let us take a look at the RegexpUtils utility class: RegexpUtils.java package pl.grzejszczak.marcin.guava.cache.utils; import com.google.common.cache.CacheBuilder; import com.google.common.cache.CacheLoader; import com.google.common.cache.LoadingCache; import java.util.concurrent.ExecutionException; import java.util.regex.Matcher; import java.util.regex.Pattern; import static java.lang.String.format; public final class RegexpUtils { private RegexpUtils() { throw new UnsupportedOperationException("RegexpUtils is a utility class - don't instantiate it!"); } private static final LoadingCache COMPILED_PATTERNS = CacheBuilder.newBuilder().build(new CacheLoader() { @Override public Pattern load(String regexp) throws Exception { return Pattern.compile(regexp); } }); public static Pattern getPattern(String regexp) { try { return COMPILED_PATTERNS.get(regexp); } catch (ExecutionException e) { throw new RuntimeException(format("Error when getting a pattern [%s] from cache", regexp), e); } } public static boolean matches(String stringToCheck, String regexp) { return doGetMatcher(stringToCheck, regexp).matches(); } public static Matcher getMatcher(String stringToCheck, String regexp) { return doGetMatcher(stringToCheck, regexp); } private static Matcher doGetMatcher(String stringToCheck, String regexp) { Pattern pattern = getPattern(regexp); return pattern.matcher(stringToCheck); } } As you can see the Guava's LoadingCache with the CacheBuilder is being used to populate a cache with a new compiled pattern if one is not found. Due to caching the compiled pattern if a compilation has already taken place it will not be repeated ever again (in our case since we dno't have any expiry set). Now a simple test GuavaCache.java package pl.grzejszczak.marcin.guava.cache; import com.google.common.base.Stopwatch; import org.slf4j.Logger; import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory; import pl.grzejszczak.marcin.guava.cache.utils.RegexpUtils; import java.util.regex.Pattern; import static java.lang.String.format; public class GuavaCache { private static final Logger LOGGER = LoggerFactory.getLogger(GuavaCache.class); public static final String STRING_TO_MATCH = "something"; public static void main(String[] args) { runTestForManualCompilationAndOneUsingCache(1); runTestForManualCompilationAndOneUsingCache(10); runTestForManualCompilationAndOneUsingCache(100); runTestForManualCompilationAndOneUsingCache(1000); runTestForManualCompilationAndOneUsingCache(10000); runTestForManualCompilationAndOneUsingCache(100000); runTestForManualCompilationAndOneUsingCache(1000000); } private static void runTestForManualCompilationAndOneUsingCache(int firstNoOfRepetitions) { repeatManualCompilation(firstNoOfRepetitions); repeatCompilationWithCache(firstNoOfRepetitions); } private static void repeatManualCompilation(int noOfRepetitions) { Stopwatch stopwatch = new Stopwatch().start(); compileAndMatchPatternManually(noOfRepetitions); LOGGER.debug(format("Time needed to compile and check regexp expression [%d] ms, no of iterations [%d]", stopwatch.elapsedMillis(), noOfRepetitions)); } private static void repeatCompilationWithCache(int noOfRepetitions) { Stopwatch stopwatch = new Stopwatch().start(); compileAndMatchPatternUsingCache(noOfRepetitions); LOGGER.debug(format("Time needed to compile and check regexp expression using Cache [%d] ms, no of iterations [%d]", stopwatch.elapsedMillis(), noOfRepetitions)); } private static void compileAndMatchPatternManually(int limit) { for (int i = 0; i < limit; i++) { Pattern.compile("something").matcher(STRING_TO_MATCH).matches(); Pattern.compile("something1").matcher(STRING_TO_MATCH).matches(); Pattern.compile("something2").matcher(STRING_TO_MATCH).matches(); Pattern.compile("something3").matcher(STRING_TO_MATCH).matches(); Pattern.compile("something4").matcher(STRING_TO_MATCH).matches(); Pattern.compile("something5").matcher(STRING_TO_MATCH).matches(); Pattern.compile("something6").matcher(STRING_TO_MATCH).matches(); Pattern.compile("something7").matcher(STRING_TO_MATCH).matches(); Pattern.compile("something8").matcher(STRING_TO_MATCH).matches(); Pattern.compile("something9").matcher(STRING_TO_MATCH).matches(); } } private static void compileAndMatchPatternUsingCache(int limit) { for (int i = 0; i < limit; i++) { RegexpUtils.matches(STRING_TO_MATCH, "something"); RegexpUtils.matches(STRING_TO_MATCH, "something1"); RegexpUtils.matches(STRING_TO_MATCH, "something2"); RegexpUtils.matches(STRING_TO_MATCH, "something3"); RegexpUtils.matches(STRING_TO_MATCH, "something4"); RegexpUtils.matches(STRING_TO_MATCH, "something5"); RegexpUtils.matches(STRING_TO_MATCH, "something6"); RegexpUtils.matches(STRING_TO_MATCH, "something7"); RegexpUtils.matches(STRING_TO_MATCH, "something8"); RegexpUtils.matches(STRING_TO_MATCH, "something9"); } } } We are running a series of tests and checking the time of their execution. Note that the results of these tests are not precise due to the fact that the application is not being run in isolation so numerous conditions can affect the time of the execution. We are interested in showing some degree of the problem rather than showing the precise execution time. For a given number of iterations (1,10,100,1000,10000,100000,1000000) we are either compiling 10 regular expressions or using a Guava's cache to retrieve the compiled Pattern and then we match them against a string to match. These are the logs: pl.grzejszczak.marcin.guava.cache.GuavaCache:34 Time needed to compile and check regexp expression [1] ms, no of iterations [1] pl.grzejszczak.marcin.guava.cache.GuavaCache:40 Time needed to compile and check regexp expression using Cache [35] ms, no of iterations [1] pl.grzejszczak.marcin.guava.cache.GuavaCache:34 Time needed to compile and check regexp expression [1] ms, no of iterations [10] pl.grzejszczak.marcin.guava.cache.GuavaCache:40 Time needed to compile and check regexp expression using Cache [0] ms, no of iterations [10] pl.grzejszczak.marcin.guava.cache.GuavaCache:34 Time needed to compile and check regexp expression [8] ms, no of iterations [100] pl.grzejszczak.marcin.guava.cache.GuavaCache:40 Time needed to compile and check regexp expression using Cache [3] ms, no of iterations [100] pl.grzejszczak.marcin.guava.cache.GuavaCache:34 Time needed to compile and check regexp expression [10] ms, no of iterations [1000] pl.grzejszczak.marcin.guava.cache.GuavaCache:40 Time needed to compile and check regexp expression using Cache [10] ms, no of iterations [1000] pl.grzejszczak.marcin.guava.cache.GuavaCache:34 Time needed to compile and check regexp expression [83] ms, no of iterations [10000] pl.grzejszczak.marcin.guava.cache.GuavaCache:40 Time needed to compile and check regexp expression using Cache [33] ms, no of iterations [10000] pl.grzejszczak.marcin.guava.cache.GuavaCache:34 Time needed to compile and check regexp expression [800] ms, no of iterations [100000] pl.grzejszczak.marcin.guava.cache.GuavaCache:40 Time needed to compile and check regexp expression using Cache [279] ms, no of iterations [100000] pl.grzejszczak.marcin.guava.cache.GuavaCache:34 Time needed to compile and check regexp expression [7562] ms, no of iterations [1000000] pl.grzejszczak.marcin.guava.cache.GuavaCache:40 Time needed to compile and check regexp expression using Cache [3067] ms, no of iterations [1000000] You can find the sources over here under the Guava/Cache directory or go to the url https://bitbucket.org/gregorin1987/too-much-coding/src
December 28, 2012
by Marcin Grzejszczak
· 9,372 Views
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Code Coverage Tools Comparison in Sonar
for those that are not familiar with sonar , ( i hope this post will make you at least try it or see it in action at http://nemo.sonarsource.org ) you can take a look at an earlier post i’ve written some time ago. in one sentence sonar is an open source platform that allows you to track and improve the quality of your source code. one of the key aspects when talking about software quality is the test coverage or code coverage which is how much of your source code is tested by unit tests. sonar integrates with the most popular open source code coverage tools ( jacoco , cobetura , emma ) and the well-known commercial clover by attlassian. by default it uses the jacoco (java code coverage) engine and you’ll shortly find out why before we move on, i’d like to give many kudos to evgeny mandrikov . this article is inspired by one of his older post s and its intention is to present a more updated comparison of the supported code coverage tools by sonar and point out some differences regarding their results and the way they work. recently sonar changed its default code coverage tool to jacoco and this post tries to explain the reasons behind that decision. some of the information is borrowed by evgeny’s post and the image is also taken from evgeny’s presentation about jacoco . so thanks a lot evgeny! now let’s go to the meat. for the comparison you’ll see, i’ve used the latest available sonar version 3.3, maven 2.2.1, java 1.6 and all analysis launched in a windows 7 machine (intel core i3-2120 cpu @ 3.30ghz) with 8gb ram. the projects were carefully selected ( a small, medium-sized and a large one – not that large as java code base but large enough to extract some results ). i ran five analysis for each open source code coverage tool ( i excluded the commercial clover from my comparison version ) and another five by disabling the code coverage mechanism. so that’s a total of 60 analysis ). in the following tables you can find some information about the code coverage tools and some basic metrics about the selected projects. pay attention to the date of the latest stable release. emma hasn’t been updated since dinosaurs era and cobertura is almost three years inactive. one might think that this isn’t an issue if they are stable and don’t need any new release. well, the truth is that both of them have bugs that frustrate end-users and there’s no one to fix them. on the other hand jacoco is continuously evolving and improving… the results of the analysis are displayed next. some important notices. emma doesn’t support branch coverage that’s why you’re not seeing any metrics. furthermore there are differences in the results of line and branch coverage, which are more concrete for larger projects. for instance in sonar jira plugin all three tools produce the same results whereas in sonar analysis and commons lang projects you can see that the numbers are not the same. now take a look at a graph that illustrates in a more readable way which tool is the fastest. it seems that emma and jacoco need the same amount of time to compute their metrics… but… as we already mentioned there’s a huge difference. there’s no branch coverage in emma reports. cobertura is always slower than jacoco so again the winner is jacoco. of course you can get even faster results by running a sonar analysis without computing code coverage metrics one last thing: jacoco, as the following figure shows is the only tool that analyses bytecode on-the-fly which is more . cobertura and emma run an offline analysis and use a class loader whereas jacoco has its own java agent for analysis code. this configuration allows jacoco to be very flexible, possible integrated with many other tools and frameworks and can be used with any language in a jvm environment. so, to sum up, if you’re using sonar ( if you don’t , you should ), then it strongly advisable to keep the default code coverage engine ( jacoco) , unless you have really important reasons for that. finally don’t forge to check sonar’s community 2013 unofficial survey and the upcoming book about sonar by manning publications. the release date is in about 3-4 months but you can get an early access version here . as always, feel free to comment or suggest improvements about the article and its content.
December 28, 2012
by Patroklos Papapetrou
· 109,744 Views · 1 Like
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HashMap.get High CPU – Case Study
This article will describe the complete root cause analysis and solution of a HashMap High CPU problem (infinite looping) affecting a Weblogic 10.0 environment running on the Java HotSpot VM 1.5. This case study will again demonstrate this importance of mastering Thread Dump analysis skill and CPU correlation techniques such as Solaris prstat. Environment specifications Java EE server: Oracle Weblogic Portal 10.0 Middleware OS: Solaris 10 Java VM: Java HotSpot VM 1.5 Platform type: Portal application Monitoring and troubleshooting tools JVM Thread Dump (HotSpot format) Solaris prstat (CPU contributors analysis) Problem overview Problem type: High CPUobserved from our Weblogic production environment A high CPU problem was observed from our Solaris physical servers hosting a Weblogic Portal 10 environment. Users also reporting major slowdown of the portal application. Gathering and validation of facts As usual, a Java EE problem investigation requires gathering of technical and non-technical facts so we can either derived other facts and/or conclude on the root cause. Before applying a corrective measure, the facts below were verified in order to conclude on the root cause: What is the client impact? HIGH Recent change of the affected platform? No Any recent traffic increase to the affected platform? Yes How does this high CPU manifest itself? A sudden CPU increase was observed and is not going down; even after load goes down e.g. near zero level. Did an Oracle OSB recycle resolve the problem? Yes, but problem is returning after few hours or few days (unpredictable pattern) - Conclusion #1: The high CPU problem appears to be intermittent vs. pure correlation with load - Conclusion #2: Since high CPU remains after load goes down, this typically indicates either the presence of some infinite looping or heavy processing Threads Solaris CPU analysis using prstat Solaris prstat is a powerful OS command allowing you to obtain the CPU per process but more importantly CPU per Thread within a process. As you can see below from our case study, the CPU utilization was confirmed to go up as high as 100% utilization (saturation level). ## PRSTAT (CPU per Java Thread analysis) prstat -L -p 8223 1 1 PID USERNAME SIZE RSS STATE PRI NICE TIME CPU PROCESS/LWPID 8223 bea10 2809M 2592M sleep 59 0 14:52:59 38.6%java/494 8223 bea10 2809M 2592M sleep 57 0 12:28:05 22.3% java/325 8223 bea10 2809M 2592M sleep 59 0 11:52:02 28.3% java/412 8223 bea10 2809M 2592M sleep 59 0 5:50:00 0.3% java/84 8223 bea10 2809M 2592M sleep 58 0 2:27:20 0.2% java/43 8223 bea10 2809M 2592M sleep 59 0 1:39:42 0.2% java/41287 8223 bea10 2809M 2592M sleep 59 0 4:41:44 0.2% java/30503 8223 bea10 2809M 2592M sleep 59 0 5:58:32 0.2% java/36116 …………………………………………………………………………………… As you can see from above data, 3 Java Threads were found using together close to 100% of the CPU utilization. For our root cause analysis, we did focus on Thread #494 (decimal format) corresponding to 0x1ee (HEXA format). Thread Dump analysis and PRSTAT correlation Once the culprit Threads were identified, the next step was to correlate this data with the Thread Dump data (which was captured exactly at the same time as prstat). A quick search within the generated Thread Dump file did reveal the Thread Stack Trace (Weblogic Stuck Thread #125) for 0x1ee as per below. "[STUCK] ExecuteThread: '125' for queue: 'weblogic.kernel.Default (self-tuning)'" daemon prio=1 tid=0x014c5030 nid=0x1ee runnable [0x536fb000..0x536ffc70] at java.util.HashMap.get(HashMap.java:346) at org.apache.axis.encoding.TypeMappingImpl.getClassForQName(TypeMappingImpl.java:715) at org.apache.axis.encoding.TypeMappingDelegate.getClassForQName(TypeMappingDelegate.java:170) at org.apache.axis.encoding.TypeMappingDelegate.getClassForQName(TypeMappingDelegate.java:160) at org.apache.axis.encoding.TypeMappingImpl.getDeserializer(TypeMappingImpl.java:454) at org.apache.axis.encoding.TypeMappingDelegate.getDeserializer(TypeMappingDelegate.java:108) at org.apache.axis.encoding.TypeMappingDelegate.getDeserializer(TypeMappingDelegate.java:102) at org.apache.axis.encoding.DeserializationContext.getDeserializer(DeserializationContext.java:457) at org.apache.axis.encoding.DeserializationContext.getDeserializerForType(DeserializationContext.java:547) at org.apache.axis.encoding.ser.BeanDeserializer.getDeserializer(BeanDeserializer.java:514) at org.apache.axis.encoding.ser.BeanDeserializer.onStartChild(BeanDeserializer.java:286) at org.apache.axis.encoding.DeserializationContext.startElement(DeserializationContext.java:1035) at org.apache.axis.message.SAX2EventRecorder.replay(SAX2EventRecorder.java:165) at org.apache.axis.message.MessageElement.publishToHandler(MessageElement.java:1141) at org.apache.axis.message.RPCElement.deserialize(RPCElement.java:236) at org.apache.axis.message.RPCElement.getParams(RPCElement.java:384) at org.apache.axis.client.Call.invoke(Call.java:2467) at org.apache.axis.client.Call.invoke(Call.java:2366) at org.apache.axis.client.Call.invoke(Call.java:1812) Thread Dump analysis – HashMap.get() infinite loop condition! As you can see from the above Thread Stack Trace, the Thread is currently stuck in an infinite loop over a java.util.HashMap that originates from the Apache Axis TypeMappingImpl Java class. This finding was quite revealing. The 2 others Threads using high CPU also did reveal infinite looping condition within the same Apache Axis HashMap Object. Root cause: non Thread safe HashMap in Apache Axis 1.4 Additional research did reveal this known defect affecting Apache Axis 1.4; which is the version that our application was using. As you may already know, usage of non Thread safe / non synchronized HashMap under concurrent Threads condition is very dangerous and can easily lead to internal HashMap index corruption and / or infinite looping. This is also a golden rule for any middleware software such as Oracle Weblogic, IBM WAS, Red Hat JBoss which rely heavily on HashMap data structures from various Java EE and caching services. Such best practice is also applicable for any Open Source third party API such as Apache Axis. The most common solution is to use the ConcurrentHashMap data structure which is designed for that type of concurrent Thread execution context. Solution Our team did apply the proposed patch from Apache (synchronize the non Thread safe HashMap) which did resolve the problem. We are also currently looking at upgrading our application to a newer version of Apache Axis. Conclusion I hope this case study has helped you understand how to pinpoint the root cause of high CPU Threads and the importance of proper Thread safe data structure for high concurrent Thread / processing applications. Please don’t hesitate to post any comment or question. Find office supplies promo codes to save money for your department's bottom line, so you can spend more on the latest software.
December 27, 2012
by Pierre - Hugues Charbonneau
· 8,498 Views · 1 Like
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QOTD: Weblogic Threads
This is the first post of a new series that will bring you frequent and short “question of the day” articles. This new format will complement my existing writing and is designed to provide you with fast answers for common problems and questions that I often get from work colleagues, IT clients and readers. Each of these QOTD posts will be archived and you will have access to the entire list via a separate page. I also encourage you to post your feedback, recommendations along with your own complement answer for each question. Now let’s get started with our first question of the day! Question: What is the difference between Oracle Weblogic thread states & attributes (Total, Standby, Active, idle, Hogging, Stuck)? Answer: Weblogic thread state can be a particularly confusing topic for Weblogic administrators and individuals starting to learn and monitor Weblogic threads. The thread monitoring section can be accessed for each managed server Managed server under the Monitoring > Threads tab. As you can see, the thread monitoring tab provides a complete view of each Weblogic thread along with its state. Now let’s review each section and state so you can properly understand how to assess the health. # Summary section Execute Thread Total Count: This is the total number of threads “created” from the Weblogic self-tuning pool and visible from the JVM Thread Dump. This value correspond to the sum of: Active + Standby threads Active Execute Threads: This is the number of threads “eligible” to process a request. When thread demand goes up, Weblogic will start promoting threads from Standby to Active state which will enable them to process future client requests Standby Thread Count: This is the number of threads waiting to be marked “eligible” to process client requests. These threads are created and visible from the JVM Thread Dump but not available yet to process a client request Hogging Thread Count: This is the number of threads taking much more time than the current execution time in average calculated by the Weblogic kernel Execute Thread Idle Count: This is the number of Active threads currently “available” to process a client request In the above snapshots, we have: Total of 43 threads, 29 in Standby state and 14 in Active state Out of the 14 Active threads, we have 1 Hogging thread and 7 Idle threads e.g. 7 threads “available” for request processing Another way to see the situation: we have a total of 7 threads currently “processing” client request with 1 out of 7 in Hogging state (e.g. taking more time than current calculated average) # Thread matrix This matrix gives you a view of each thread along with its current state. There is one more state that you must also understand: STUCK: A stuck thread is identified by Weblogic when it is taking more time than the configured stuck thread time (default is 600 seconds). When facing slowdown conditions, you will normally see Weblogic threads transitioning from the Hogging state followed by STUCK, depending how long these threads remain stuck executing their current request
December 26, 2012
by Pierre - Hugues Charbonneau
· 9,524 Views
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MongoDB and the Concept of Identity in NoSQL Databases
in this article i deal with a different nosql database called mongodb a mature nosql engine born outside the .net world to clarify the concept of id in a typical no sql database. installation of mongo is really simple, just download, uncompress, locate the bin folder, and type this from an administrator console prompt to install mongo as service 1: mongod --install --logpath c:xxxx --dbpath c:yyyy you can find plenty of installation guide on the internet, but with the above install command you create a windows service that will automatically start mongodb on your machine using specified datafolder. now you should download the c# driver to connect from .net code, but if you like using linq you can install fluent mongo directly with nuget. figure 1: install fluent mongo with nuget. fluent mongo is a library that gave little linq capability over standard drivers, but adding a nuget reference to fluentmongo you get automatically a reference to the official drivers. now you are ready to insert your first record in mongodb with the above code. mongoserver server = mongoserver.create(); mongodatabase databasetest = server.getdatabase("test"); var untyped = databasetest.getcollection("untyped"); untyped.save(new bsondocument { { "name", "untyped1" } }); bsondocument seconddocument = bsondocument.parse("{name: 'untyped2', blabla: 'bla bla value'}"); untyped.save(seconddocument); in line1 i create a connection to mongodb server passing no parameter to connect to local mongodb server, then i obtain a reference to a mongodatabase object called “test” with mongoserver::getdatabase() method and finally i get a reference to a collection named “untyped” with the mongngodatabase::getcollection () method. this is quite similar to a sql server or other sql database, you have a server, the server contains several databases, and each database is composed by tables; in the same way mongo is divided into server/database/collection where a collection contains document. mongodb stores data in json format and to insert data inside a collection you can simply create a bsondocument, an object defined by c# driver assembly that is capable to represent a document composed by a series of key-value pair. to initialize a bsondocument you can pass a icollection (line 4) or if you feel more confortable with string json representation, you can user bsondocument.parse() to specify the document directly with a json string. after you inserted the above documents you can use mongovue to see what is contained inside the database. figure 2: use mongovue to see what is inside the database the interesting aspect is that each document has an unique id, even if i did not specified any special property in the code. this is a standard behavior for nosql databases, if you did not specify any id property the database engine will create unique id on his own to idendify the docuemnt. the id is a key factor for mongo and other nosql storage, if you try to store a document directly inside the collection specifying json content you will get an error. untyped.save("{name: 'json', attribute:'attribute content'}"); the mongocollection object contains a save object that accepts a string, but the above call will fail with the error subclass must implement getdocumentid . previous code works because one of the specific functionality that a bsondocument implements is the ability to manage id generation, but plain json does not have this capability. if you need to know the id generated by the database, you can query the bsondocument for its unique id after it was saved in a mongo collection . (remember that the id is not available until you save the document). bsondocument seconddocument = bsondocument.parse("{name: 'untyped2', blabla: 'bla bla value'}"); object id; type idtype; iidgenerator generator; untyped.save(seconddocument); seconddocument.getdocumentid(out id, out idtype, out generator); basically you are asking to your bsondocument to return you the generated id, as well as the type of the id and the generator that mongo used to generate that specific id. the result is represented into this snippet figure 3: the three object that you got with a call to getdocumentid: id, idtype and the generator. as you can see the id is an instance of type mongodb.bson.objectid, based on bsonvalue base class and the generator is an instance of objectidgenerator. this type of id is specific to mongo, and the documentation states that an objectid is a bson objectid is a 12-byte value consisting of a 4-byte timestamp (seconds since epoch), a 3-byte machine id, a 2-byte process id, and a 3-byte counter. note that the timestamp and counter fields must be stored big endian unlike the rest of bson. this is because they are compared byte-by-byte and we want to ensure a mostly increasing order. if you want to have a generator that creates integer id, like identity column in sql server , you will find that it is simply not available out of the box, because an int value is not guarantee to be unique if you use sharding. sharding is a technique that permits to partition data into different physical instances, so each instance should generates ids that are unique across all instances and this prevents the use of a simple int32 id. clearly in .net world a guid is guarantee to be unique and is more .net oriented, so mongo db has a guid id generator, that can be specified with the above snippet of code.. bsondocument thirddocument = bsondocument.parse("{name: 'untyped3', anotherproperty: 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'}"); var id2 = mongodb.bson.serialization.idgenerators.guidgenerator.instance.generateid(untyped, thirddocument); thirddocument.setdocumentid(id2); the key is using the guidgenerator (in the mongodb.bson.serialization.idgenerators namespace) to generate a valid mongoid guid value, then call the setdocumentid method of bsondocument to manually set the id and not relay on automatic id generation. if you look at the db you will find that the document with guid id has really a different id type. figure 4: the document with guid id is represented in a different way in mongovue, but as you can verify there is no problem in having documents with different id types in the same collection. this demonstrates that a no sql database has a concept of document id that is similar to the concept of id of a standard sql server, you can use a native id generation of the engine that generates a valid id during insertion or you can assign your own id to the document, but basically the whole concept of id is more engine-related and has no business meaning, so i strongly discourage to use anything that has a business meaning as id of a document. noone prevents you to insert in the document a property called “myid” or something else that has a business meaning and can be used as logical id and let the engine handle the internal id by itself.
December 26, 2012
by Ricci Gian Maria
· 8,341 Views
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Detecting Communities in Social Graph
In analyzing social network, one common problem is how to detecting communities, such as groups of people who knows or interacting frequently with each other. Community is a subgraph of a graph where the connectivity are unusually dense. In this blog, I will enumerate some common algorithms on finding communities. First of all, community detection can be think of graph partitioning problem. In this case, a single node will belong to no more than one community. In other words, community does not overlap with each other. High Betweenness Edge Removal The intuition is that members within a community are densely connected and have many paths to reach each other. On the other hand, nodes from different communities requires inter-community links to reach each other, and these inter-community links tends to have high betweenness score. Therefore, by removing these high-betweenness links, the graph will be segregated into communities. Algorithm: For each edge, compute the edge-betweenness score Remove the edge with the highest betweenness score Until there are enough segregation However, while this method achieve good result, it is very slow and not work effectively when there are more than couple thousand nodes with dense edges. Hierarchical Clustering This is a very general approach of detecting communities. Some measure of distance (or similarities) is defined and computed between every pair of nodes first. Then classical hierarchical cluster technique can be applied. The distance should be chosen such that it is small between members within a community and big between members of different community. Random Walk Random walk can be used to compute the distance between every pair of nodes node-B and node-C. Lets focus on undirected graph for now. A random walker starts at node-B, throw a dice and has beta probability that it randomly pick a neighbor to visit based on the weight of links, and with 1 - beta probability that it will teleport back to the original node-v. At an infinite number of steps, the probability distribution of landing on node-w will be high if node-B and node-C belongs to the same community. The intuition here is that the random walker tends to be trapped within the community so all nodes that has high probability distribution tends to be within the same community as node-B (where the random walker is started). Notice that the pick of beta is important. If it is too big (close to 1), then the probability after converging is independent of the starting node (ie: the probability distribution only reflect the centrality of each node but not the community of the starting node). If beta is too small (close to zero), then the walker will die down too quick before it fully explore the community's connectivity. There is an analytical solution to this problem. Lets M be the transition matrix before every pair of nodes. V represents the probability distribution of where the random walkers is. The "distance" between node-B and every other nodes is the eigenvector of M. We can repeat the same to find out distance of all pairs of nodes, and then feed the result to a hierarchical clustering algorithm. Label Propagation The basic idea is that nodes observe its neighbors and set its own label to be the majority of its neighbors. Nodes are initially assigned with a unique label. In each round, each node examine the label of all its neighbors are set its own label to be the majority of its neighbors, when there is a tie, the winner is picked randomly. Until there is no more change of label assignments Modularity Optimization Within a community, the probability of 2 nodes having a link should be higher than if the link is just formed randomly within the whole graph. probability of random link = deg(node-B) * deg(node-C) / (N * (N-1)) The actual link = Adjacency matrix[B, C] Define com(B) to be community of node-B, com(C) to be community of node-C So a utility function "Modularity" is created as follows ... sum_over_v_w((actual - random) * delta(com(B), com(C))) Now we examine communities that can be overlapping. ie: A single node can belong to more than one community. Finding Clique Simple community detection usually starts with cliques. Clique is a subgraph whether every node is connected to any other node. In a K-Clique, there are K nodes and K^2 links between them. However, communities has a looser definition, we don't require everyone to know every other people within the community, but we need them to know "enough" (maybe a certain percentage) of other people in the community. K-core is more relaxed definition, it requires the nodes of the K-core to have connectivity to at least K other members. There are some less popular relaxation, K-Clan requires every node to connect with every other members within K steps (path length less than K). K-plex requires the node to connect to (N - K) members in the node where N total number of members within the K-plex. The community is defined as the found K-core, or K-clan, or K-plex. K-Clique Percolation Another popular way of finding community is by rolling across adjacent K-Clique. Two K-Clique is adjacent if they share K-1 nodes. K is a parameter that we need to pick based on how dense we expect the community should have. The algorithm is illustrated in following diagram. K-Clique percolation is a popular way to identify communities which can potentially be overlapping with each other.
December 23, 2012
by Ricky Ho
· 4,953 Views
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XAML Coding Convention
over the past year, i have built my own coding conventions for c#. i also always manage to convince my colleagues to follow my coding convention if they don’t already have one. i’m a real freak about following coding conventions; if i see someone modifying one of my files and not following my conventions, i might have trouble sleeping at night (ok, not that much, but…). with the help of the great visual studio add-on resharper , it’s easy to format code with rules. you only need to press ctrl-e/ctrl-c to format a document. resharper is a must have tool for visual studio. for the past two years, since the release of the windows phone platform, i have been using the xaml language to program my user interfaces. finding coding conventions for c# is pretty easy, but for xaml, it was a bit more of a challenge. my first move was to check the default microsoft projects, but i concluded that even they are a bit messy even for today. here is an example of a windows store grid app project: first of all, there are not any empty lines, and secondly the button has attributes on separate lines, but for the textblock elements, the attributes are on the same lines without any order. with time, i developed my own xaml coding convention that i would like to share. one of the reasons that i developed my own xaml coding convention is i don’t like to use the properties window, because it is hard to have an overview of the properties that are not set to default. my coding convention is resumed in 5 points: 1- put empty lines between elements. don’t be afraid to put empty lines. it makes reading the code easier. my exceptions are the grid.columndefinition and grid.rowdefinitions, because they only have one line attribute. 2- put one attribute per line. 3- order the attributes alphabetically. some will argue that height and width should be side by side or on the adjacent line, but i still prefer the alphabetical order, because it is much easier to read when you know what order your definitions are in. also, if there is an element with many attributes, it is much easier to check whether an attribute is missing. 4- put the attached properties at the beginning and in an alphabetic order. the grid.column / grid.row are the classic examples. 5- definition of styles can be less strict. when i’m creating styles with expression blend, i tend to leave them as-is when they are big. it is more about saving time than anything else. however, when a style is small, i don’t put empty lines and i put the properties in an alphabetic order like this: conclusion it might not be the perfect solution for you, but if you do not have one, my convention is a good start especially if you are sharing code with colleagues. my motto about coding convention is the following: it is better to have a coding convention than not having one! happy coding!
December 22, 2012
by $$anonymous$$
· 5,824 Views
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