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The Limited Usefulness of AsyncContext.start()
Some time ago I came across What's the purpose of AsyncContext.start(...) in Servlet 3.0? question. Quoting the Javadoc of aforementioned method: Causes the container to dispatch a thread, possibly from a managed thread pool, to run the specified Runnable. To remind all of you, AsyncContext is a standard way defined in Servlet 3.0 specification to handle HTTP requests asynchronously. Basically HTTP request is no longer tied to an HTTP thread, allowing us to handle it later, possibly using fewer threads. It turned out that the specification provides an API to handle asynchronous threads in a different thread pool out of the box. First we will see how this feature is completely broken and useless in Tomcat and Jetty - and then we will discuss why the usefulness of it is questionable in general. Our test servlet will simply sleep for given amount of time. This is a scalability killer in normal circumstances because even though sleeping servlet is not consuming CPU, but sleeping HTTP thread tied to that particular request consumes memory - and no other incoming request can use that thread. In our test setup I limited the number of HTTP worker threads to 10 which means only 10 concurrent requests are completely blocking the application (it is unresponsive from the outside) even though the application itself is almost completely idle. So clearly sleeping is an enemy of scalability. @WebServlet(urlPatterns = Array("/*")) class SlowServlet extends HttpServlet with Logging { protected override def doGet(req: HttpServletRequest, resp: HttpServletResponse) { logger.info("Request received") val sleepParam = Option(req.getParameter("sleep")) map {_.toLong} TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS.sleep(sleepParam getOrElse 10) logger.info("Request done") } } Benchmarking this code reveals that the average response times are close to sleep parameter as long as the number of concurrent connections is below the number of HTTP threads. Unsurprisingly the response times begin to grow the moment we exceed the HTTP threads count. Eleventh connection has to wait for any other request to finish and release worker thread. When the concurrency level exceeds 100, Tomcat begins to drop connections - too many clients are already queued. So what about the the fancy AsyncContext.start() method (do not confuse with ServletRequest.startAsync())? According to the JavaDoc I can submit any Runnable and the container will use some managed thread pool to handle it. This will help partially as I no longer block HTTP worker threads (but still another thread somewhere in the servlet container is used). Quickly switching to asynchronous servlet: @WebServlet(urlPatterns = Array("/*"), asyncSupported = true) class SlowServlet extends HttpServlet with Logging { protected override def doGet(req: HttpServletRequest, resp: HttpServletResponse) { logger.info("Request received") val asyncContext = req.startAsync() asyncContext.setTimeout(TimeUnit.MINUTES.toMillis(10)) asyncContext.start(new Runnable() { def run() { logger.info("Handling request") val sleepParam = Option(req.getParameter("sleep")) map {_.toLong} TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS.sleep(sleepParam getOrElse 10) logger.info("Request done") asyncContext.complete() } }) } } We are first enabling the asynchronous processing and then simply moving sleep() into a Runnable and hopefully a different thread pool, releasing the HTTP thread pool. Quick stress test reveals slightly unexpected results (here: response times vs. number of concurrent connections): Guess what, the response times are exactly the same as with no asynchronous support at all (!) After closer examination I discovered that when AsyncContext.start() is called Tomcat submits given task back to... HTTP worker thread pool, the same one that is used for all HTTP requests! This basically means that we have released one HTTP thread just to utilize another one milliseconds later (maybe even the same one). There is absolutely no benefit of calling AsyncContext.start() in Tomcat. I have no idea whether this is a bug or a feature. On one hand this is clearly not what the API designers intended. The servlet container was suppose to manage separate, independent thread pool so that HTTP worker thread pool is still usable. I mean, the whole point of asynchronous processing is to escape the HTTP pool. Tomcat pretends to delegate our work to another thread, while it still uses the original worker thread pool. So why I consider this to be a feature? Because Jetty is "broken" in exactly same way... No matter whether this works as designed or is only a poor API implementation, using AsyncContext.start() in Tomcat and Jetty is pointless and only unnecessarily complicates the code. It won't give you anything, the application works exactly the same under high load as if there was no asynchronous logic at all. But what about using this API feature on correct implementations like IBM WAS? It is better, but still the API as is doesn't give us much in terms of scalability. To explain again: the whole point of asynchronous processing is the ability to decouple HTTP request from an underlying thread, preferably by handling several connections using the same thread. AsyncContext.start() will run the provided Runnable in a separate thread pool. Your application is still responsive and can handle ordinary requests while long-running request that you decided to handle asynchronously are processed in a separate thread pool. It is better, unfortunately the thread pool and thread per connection idiom is still a bottle-neck. For the JVM it doesn't matter what type of threads are started - they still occupy memory. So we are no longer blocking HTTP worker threads, but our application is not more scalable in terms of concurrent long-running tasks we can support. In this simple and unrealistic example with sleeping servlet we can actually support thousand of concurrent (waiting) connections using Servlet 3.0 asynchronous support with only one extra thread - and without AsyncContext.start(). Do you know how? Hint: ScheduledExecutorService. Postscriptum: Scala goodness I almost forgot. Even though examples were written in Scala, I haven't used any cool language features yet. Here is one: implicit conversions. Make this available in your scope: implicit def blockToRunnable[T](block: => T) = new Runnable { def run() { block } } And suddenly you can use code block instead of instantiating Runnable manually and explicitly: asyncContext start { logger.info("Handling request") val sleepParam = Option(req.getParameter("sleep")) map { _.toLong} TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS.sleep(sleepParam getOrElse 10) logger.info("Request done") asyncContext.complete() } Sweet!
May 22, 2012
by Tomasz Nurkiewicz
· 17,580 Views · 1 Like
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Spring Integration: Splitter-Aggregator
Within Spring Integration, one form of EIP scatter-gather is provided by the splitter and aggregator constructs.
May 18, 2012
by Matt Vickery
· 47,673 Views · 2 Likes
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Taking Browser Screenshots With No Display (Selenium/Xvfb)
In my last two blog posts, I showed examples of using Selenium WebDriver to capture screenshots, and running in a headless (no X-server) mode. This example combines the two solutions to capture screenshots inside a virtual display. To achieve this, I use a combination of Selenium WebDriver and pyvirtualdisplay (which uses xvfb) to run a browser in a virtual display and capture screenshots. the setup you need is: Selenium 2 Python bindings: PyPI pyvirtualdisplay Python package (depends on xvfb): PyPI On Debian/Ubuntu Linux systems, you can install everything with: $ sudo apt-get install python-pip xvfb xserver-xephyr $ sudo pip install selenium once you have it setup, the following code example should work: #!/usr/bin/env python from pyvirtualdisplay import Display from selenium import webdriver display = Display(visible=0, size=(800, 600)) display.start() browser = webdriver.Firefox() browser.get('http://www.google.com') browser.save_screenshot('screenie.png') browser.quit() display.stop() this will: launch a virtual display launch Firefox browser inside the virtual display navigate to google.com capture and save a screenshot close the browser stop the virtual display
May 16, 2012
by Corey Goldberg
· 25,511 Views
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Virtualization in WPF with VirtualizingStackPanel
First blogged about this on my previous blog site here: http://consultingblogs.emc.com/merrickchaffer/archive/2011/02/14/virtualization-in-wpf-with-virtualizingstackpanel.aspx However, having come across this again today on a project, I thought it was important enough to re-blog! Finally managed to figure out how to get virtualization to actually behave itself in a listbox wpf control. Turns out that in order for Virtualization to work, you need three things satisfied. Use a control that supports virtualization (e.g. list box or list view). (see Controls That Implement Performance Features section at bottom of this page for more info http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc716879.aspx#Controls ) Ensure that the ScrollViewer.CanContentScroll attached property is set to True on the containing list box / list view control. Ensure that either the list box has a height set, or that it is contained within a parent Grid row, where that row definition has a height set (Height="*" will do if you want it to occupy the Client window height). Note: Do not use height=”Auto” as this will not work, as this instructs WPF to simply size the row to the height needed to fit all the items of the list box in, hence you do not get the vertical scroll bar appearing. Ensure that there is no wrapping ScrollViewer control around the list box, as this will prevent virtualization from occuring. Ensure that you use a VirtualizingStackPanel in the ItemsPanelTemplate for the ListBox.ItemsPanel Example
May 14, 2012
by Merrick Chaffer
· 28,323 Views
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Functional Programming on the JVM
Introduction In recent times, many programming languages that run on JVM have emerged. Many of these languages support the concept of writing code in a functional style. Programmers have started realizing the benefits of functional programming and are beginning to rediscover the powerful style of this programming paradigm. The emergence of multiple languages on JVM have only helped to reignite the strong interest in this paradigm. Java at its core is an imperative programming language. However in recent past many new languages like Scala, Clojure, Groovy etc. have become popular which supports functional programming style and yet run on JVM. However none of these languages can be considered as pure functional language since all of them allow Java code to be called from within them and Java on its own is not a functional language. Still they have different degree of support for writing code in functional style and have their own benefits. Functional programming requires different kind of thinking and has its own advantages as compared to imperative programming. It seems that Java has also realized functional programming advantages and is slowly inching towards it. First sign of this can be seen in the form of Lambda Expressions that will be supported in Java 8. Although it's too early to comment on this as the draft for Java 8 is still under review and is expected to be released next year, but it does show that Java has plans of supporting functional programming style going forward. In this article we will first discuss what functional programming is and how it is different from imperative programming. Later we will see where does each of the above mentioned Java based programming languages i.e. Scala, Clojure and Groovy fits in the world of functional programming and what each of them has to offer. And at the last we will sneak-peak into Java 8's lambda expressions. Why Functional Programming? Computers of current era are shipped with multicore processors. Going forward the number of processors in a machine is only going to increase. The code we write today and tomorrow will probably never run on a single processor system. In order to get best out of this, software must be designed to make more and more use of concurrency and hence keep all available processors busy. Java does provide concurrency concepts like threads, synchronization, locks etc. to execute code in parallel. But shared memory multi-threading approach in Java causes more trouble than solving the problem. Java based functional programming languages like Scala, Clojure, Groovy etc. looks into these problems with a different angle and provides less complex and less error-prone solutions as compared to imperative programming. They provide immutability concepts out of the box and hence eliminate need of synchronization and associated risk of deadlocks or livelocks. Concepts like Actors, Agents and DataFlow variables provide high level concurrency abstraction and makes very easy to write concurrent programs. What is Functional Programming? Functional Programming is a concept which treats functions as first class citizens. At the core of functional programming is immutability. It emphasizes on application of functions in contrast to imperative programming style which emphasizes on change in state. Functional programming has no side effects whereas programming in imperative style can result in side-effects. Let's elaborate more on each of these characteristics to understand the concept behind functional programming. Immutable state - The state of an object doesn't change and hence need not be protected or synchronized. That might sound a bit awkward at first, since if nothing changes, one might think that we are not writing a useful program. However that's not what immutable state means. In functional programming, change in state occurs via series of transformations which keeps the object immutable and yet achieves change in state. Functions as first class citizens - There was a major shift in the way programs were written when Object oriented concepts came into picture. Everything was conceptualized as object and any action to be performed was treated as method call on objects. Hence there is a series of method calls executed on objects to get the desired work done. In functional programming world, it's more about thinking in terms of communication chain between functions than method calls on objects. This makes functions as first class citizens of functional programming since everything is modelled around functions. Higher-order functions - Functions in functional programming are higher order functions since following actions can be performed with them. 1. Functions can be passed within functions as arguments. 2. Functions can be created within functions just as objects can be created in functions 3. Functions can be returned from functions Functions with no side-effects - In functional programming, function execution has no side-effects. In other words a function code will always return same result for same argument when called multiple times. It doesn't change anything outside its boundaries and is also not affected by any external change outside it's boundary. It doesn't change input value and can only produce new output. However once the output has been produced and returned by function, it also becomes immutable and cannot be modified by any other function. In other words, they support referential transparency i.e. if a function takes an input and returns some output, multiple invocation of that function at different point of time will always return same output as long as input remains same. This is one of the main motivations behind using functional language as it makes easy to understand and predict behaviour of program. Characteristics like immutability and no side-effects are extremely helpful while writing multi-threaded code and developers need not to worry for synchronizing the state. Hence functional code is very easy to distribute across multiple cores as they don't have any side effects. JVM based Functional Programming Languages There are many JVM based languages which supports functional programming paradigm. However I intend to limit discussion around following. Scala Clojure Groovy Lambda Expressions in Java 8 Lambda Expressions is not a programming language but a feature that will be supported in Java8. The reason for including it in this article is to emphasize on the fact that going forward Java will also support writing code in functional style. Scala Scala is a statically typed multi-paradigm programming language designed to integrate features of object oriented programming and functional programming. Since it is static, one cannot change class definition at run time i.e. one cannot add new methods or variables at run-time. However Scala does provide functional programming concepts i.e. immutability, higher-order functions, nested functions etc. Apart from supporting Java's concurrency model, it also provides concept of Actor model out of the box for event based asynchronous message passing between objects. The code written in Scala gets compiled into very efficient bytecode which can then be executed on JVM. Creating immutable list in Scala is very simple and doesn't require any extra effort. "val" keyword does the trick. val numbers = List(1,2,3,4) Functions can be passed as arguments. Let's see this with an example. Suppose we have a list of 10 numbers and we want to calculate sum of all the numbers in list. val numbers = List(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10) val total = numbers.foldLeft(0){(a,b) => a+b } As can be seen in above example, we are passing a function to add two variables "a" and "b" to another function "foldLeft" which is provided by Scala library on collections. We have also not used any iteration logic and temporary variable to calculate the sum. "foldLeft" method eliminates the need to maintain state in temporary variable which would have otherwise be required if we were to write this code in pure Java way (as mentioned below). int total = 0; for(int number in numbers){ total+=number; } Scala function can easily be executed in parallel without any need for synchronization since it does not mutate state. This was just a small example to showcase the power of Scala as functional programming language. There are whole lot of features available in Scala to write code in functional style. Clojure Clojure is a dynamic language with an excellent support for writing code in functional style. It is a dialect of "lisp" programming language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is predominantly a functional programming language, and features a rich set of immutable, persistent data structures. When mutable state is needed, Clojure offers a software transactional memory system and reactive Agent system that ensure clean, correct multithreaded designs. Apart from this since Clojure is a dynamic language, it allows to modify class definition at run time by adding new methods or modifying existing one at run time. This makes it different from Scala which is a statically typed language. Immutability is in the root of Clojure. To create immutable list just following needs to be done. By default list in Clojure is immutable, so does not require any extra effort. (def numbers (list 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10)) To add numbers without maintaining state, reduce function can be used as mentioned below (reduce + 0 '(1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10)) As can be seen, adding list of numbers just requires one line of code without mutating any state. This is the beauty about functional programming languages and plays an important role for parallel execution. Groovy Groovy is again a dynamic language with some support for functional programming. Amongst the 3 languages, Groovy can be considered weakest in terms of functional programming features. However because of it's dynamic nature and close resemblance to Java, it has been widely accepted and considered good alternative to Java. Groovy does not provide immutable objects out of the box but has excellent support for higher order functions. Immutable objects can be created with annotation @Immutation, but it's far less flexible than immutablity support in Scala and Clojure. In Groovy functions can be passed around just as any other variable in the form of Closures. The same example in Groovy can be written as follows def numbers = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10] def total = numbers.inject(0){a,b -> a+b } However the point to be noted is that variables "numbers" and "total" are not immutable and can be modified at any point of time. Hence writing multithreaded code can be a bit challenging. But Groovy does provide the concept of Actors, Agents and DataFlow variables via library called GPars(Groovy Parallel System) which reduces the challenges associated with multithreaded code to a greater extent. Java8 Lambda Expression Java has finally realized the power of writing code in functional style and is going to support the concept of closures starting from Java8. JSR 335 - Lambda Expressions for the JavaTM Programming Language aims to support programming in a multicore environment by adding closures and related features to the Java language. So it will finally be possible to pass around functions similar to variables in pure Java code. Currently if someone wants to try out and play around lambda expressions, Project Lambda of OpenJDK provides prototype implementation of JSR-335. Following code snippet should run fine with OpenJDK Project Lambda compiler. ExecutorService executor = Executors.newCachedThreadPool(); executor.submit(() -> {System.out.println("I am running")}) As can be seen above, a closure(function) has been passed to executor's submit method. It does not take any argument and hence empty brackets () have been placed. This function just prints "I am running" when executed. Just as we can pass functions to function, it will also be possible to create closure within functions and return closure from function. I would recommend to try out OpenJDK to get a feel of lambda expressions which is going to be part of Java8 Conclusion So this was all about functional programming, it's concepts, benefits and options available on JVM to write function code. Functional programming requires a different mind-set and can be very useful if used correctly. Functional Programming along with Object Oriented Programming can be a jewel in crown. As discussed there are various options available to write code in functional style that can be executed on JVM. Choice depends on various factors and there is no one language that can be considered best in all aspects. However one thing is for sure, going forward we are going to see more and more usage of functional programming.
May 14, 2012
by Gagan Agrawal
· 29,432 Views
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Basic REST service in Apache CXF vs. Camel-CXF
This article demonstrates how to create/test a basic REST service in CXF vs. Camel-CXF. Given the range of configuration and deployment options, I'm focusing on building a basic OSGi bundle that can be deployed in Fuse 4.2 (ServiceMix)...basic knowledge of Maven, ServiceMix and Camel are assumed. Apache CXF For more details, see http://cxf.apache.org/docs/jax-rs.html. Here is an overview of the steps to get a basic example running... 1. add dependencies to your pom.xml org.apache.cxf cxf-rt-frontend-jaxrs 2.3.0 2. setup the bundle-context.xml file 3. create a service bean class @Path("/example") public class ExampleBean { @GET @Path("/") public String ping() throws Exception { return "SUCCESS"; } } 4. deploy and test build the bundle using "mvn install" start servicemix deploy the bundle open a browser to "http://localhost:9000/example" (should see "SUCCESS") Camel-CXF For details, see http://camel.apache.org/cxfrs.html. Here is an overview of the steps to get a basic example running... 1. add dependencies to your pom.xml org.apache.camel camel-core ${camel.version} org.apache.camel camel-cxf ${camel.version} 2. setup the bundle-context.xml file com.example 3. create a RouteBuilder class public class ExampleRouter extends RouteBuilder { @Override public void configure() throws Exception { from("cxfrs://http://localhost:9000?resourceClasses=" + ExampleResource.class.getName()) .process(new Processor() { public void process(Exchange exchange) throws Exception { //custom processing here } }) .setBody(constant("SUCCESS")); } } 4. create a REST Resource class @Path("/example") public class ExampleResource { @GET public void ping() { //strangely, this method is not called, only serves to configure the endpoint } } 5. deploy and test build bundle using "mvn install" start servicemix deploy the bundle open a browser to "http://localhost:9000/example" (should see "SUCCESS") Unit Testing To perform basic unit testing for either of these approaches, use the Apache HttpClient APIs by first adding this dependency to your pom.xml... org.apache.httpcomponents httpclient 4.0.1 Then, you can use these APIs to create a basic test to validate the REST services created above... String url = "http://localhost:9000/example"; HttpGet httpGet = new HttpGet(url); HttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient(); HttpResponse response = httpclient.execute(httpGet); String responseMessage = EntityUtils.toString(response.getEntity()); assertEquals("SUCCESS", responseMessage); assertEquals(200, response.getStatusLine().getStatusCode()); Summary Overall, the approaches are very similar, but you can use various combinations of Spring XML and Java APIs to set this up. I focused on a common approach to demonstrate the basics of each approach side-by-side. That being said, if you have requirements for complex REST services (security, interceptors, filters, etc), I recommend grabbing a copy of Apache CXF Web Service Development and following some of the more complex examples on the Apache CXF, Camel-CXFRS pages. In practice, I've generally used Camel-CXF because it gives you the flexibility of integrating with other Camel components and allows you to leverage the rich routing features of Camel. I hope to cover more complex scenarios in future posts...
May 14, 2012
by Ben O'Day
· 33,598 Views · 2 Likes
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EasyNetQ, a simple .NET API for RabbitMQ
After pondering the results of our message queue shootout, we decided to run with Rabbit MQ. Rabbit ticks all of the boxes, it’s supported (by Spring Source and then VMware ultimately), scales and has the features and performance we need. The RabbitMQ.Client provided by Spring Source is a thin wrapper that quite faithfully exposes the AMQP protocol, so it expects messages as byte arrays. For the shootout tests spraying byte arrays around was fine, but in the real world, we want our messages to be .NET types. I also wanted to provide developers with a very simple API that abstracted away the Exchange/Binding/Queue model of AMQP and instead provides a simple publish/subscribe and request/response model. My inspiration was the excellent work done by Dru Sellers and Chris Patterson with MassTransit (the new V2.0 beta is just out). The code is on GitHub here: https://github.com/mikehadlow/EasyNetQ The API centres around an IBus interface that looks like this: /// /// Provides a simple Publish/Subscribe and Request/Response API for a message bus. /// public interface IBus : IDisposable { /// /// Publishes a message. /// /// The message type /// The message to publish void Publish(T message); /// /// Subscribes to a stream of messages that match a .NET type. /// /// The type to subscribe to /// /// A unique identifier for the subscription. Two subscriptions with the same subscriptionId /// and type will get messages delivered in turn. This is useful if you want multiple subscribers /// to load balance a subscription in a round-robin fashion. /// /// /// The action to run when a message arrives. /// void Subscribe(string subscriptionId, Action onMessage); /// /// Makes an RPC style asynchronous request. /// /// The request type. /// The response type. /// The request message. /// The action to run when the response is received. void Request(TRequest request, Action onResponse); /// /// Responds to an RPC request. /// /// The request type. /// The response type. /// /// A function to run when the request is received. It should return the response. /// void Respond(Func responder); } To create a bus, just use a RabbitHutch, sorry I couldn’t resist it :) var bus = RabbitHutch.CreateRabbitBus("localhost"); You can just pass in the name of the server to use the default Rabbit virtual host ‘/’, or you can specify a named virtual host like this: var bus = RabbitHutch.CreateRabbitBus("localhost/myVirtualHost"); The first messaging pattern I wanted to support was publish/subscribe. Once you’ve got a bus instance, you can publish a message like this: var message = new MyMessage {Text = "Hello!"}; bus.Publish(message); This publishes the message to an exchange named by the message type. You subscribe to a message like this: bus.Subscribe("test", message => Console.WriteLine(message.Text)); This creates a queue named ‘test_’ and binds it to the message type’s exchange. When a message is received it is passed to the Action delegate. If there are more than one subscribers to the same message type named ‘test’, Rabbit will hand out the messages in a round-robin fashion, so you get simple load balancing out of the box. Subscribers to the same message type, but with different names will each get a copy of the message, as you’d expect. The second messaging pattern is an asynchronous RPC. You can call a remote service like this: var request = new TestRequestMessage {Text = "Hello from the client! "}; bus.Request(request, response => Console.WriteLine("Got response: '{0}'", response.Text)); This first creates a new temporary queue for the TestResponseMessage. It then publishes the TestRequestMessage with a return address to the temporary queue. When the TestResponseMessage is received, it passes it to the Action delegate. RabbitMQ happily creates temporary queues and provides a return address header, so this was very easy to implement. To write an RPC server. Simple use the Respond method like this: bus.Respond(request => new TestResponseMessage { Text = request.Text + " all done!" }); This creates a subscription for the TestRequestMessage. When a message is received, the Func delegate is passed the request and returns the response. The response message is then published to the temporary client queue. Once again, scaling RPC servers is simply a question of running up new instances. Rabbit will automatically distribute messages to them. The features of AMQP (and Rabbit) make creating this kind of API a breeze. Check it out and let me know what you think.
May 13, 2012
by Mike Hadlow
· 11,304 Views
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Eclipse Global Preferences
rate this eclipse is good, but like any other tool: it gets better after i have it customized for my special needs. eclipse stores a lot of settings in the workspace, see my article about copy my workspace settings . but is there a way to apply some settings to every workspace? at least to the new ones? because importing/exporting the settings can get really tedious as i have many workspace. and indeed, there are global settings in eclipse. and i want to have them changed… warning: changing eclipse global preferences might break an eclipse installation. so better have a backup of the changed files at hand! i’m using here the eclipse based codewarrior for mcu10.2 , but things are pretty much the same for any eclipse based product (see the documentation in defining your own global preferences ). question: where are the global preferences stored? the first thing to check is the eclipse\configuration\.settings folder: here some plugins store their global preferences. for example: the recent workspace settings are in org.eclipse.ui.ide.prefs. #fri apr 06 16:46:14 cest 2012 recent_workspaces_protocol=3 max_recent_workspaces=10 show_workspace_selection_dialog=true eclipse.preferences.version=1 recent_workspaces=c\:\\tmp\\wsp_test\nc\:\\tmp\\wsp_10.2 but what about all the other settings? looking at the codewarrior installation, inside the eclipse folder, i find the cwide.ini file. cwide.ini file this file defines the eclipse startup options for launching the ide (cwide.exe for codewarrior). the interesting part is this line: -declipse.plugincustomization=cwide.properties this tells eclipse to use the cwide.properties as a default configuration file. if i inspect that file, it has the following content: org.eclipse.debug.ui/org.eclipse.debug.ui.switch_perspective_on_suspend=always org.eclipse.debug.ui/org.eclipse.debug.ui.switch_to_perspective=always org.eclipse.ui.editors/spellingengine=org.eclipse.cdt.internal.ui.text.spelling.cspellingengine ok, that gives me an idea how settings could look like. but the question is: how to know the settings and syntax? what works (most of the time) is following approach: launch eclipse with a new workspace export the settings using file > export > general > preferences to a file change the setting in window > preferences export the settings using file > export > general > preferences to a different file compare/inspect the exported information and find the settings apply the settings to the cwide.properties file, without the /instance/ part restart the ide and check if it works with a new workspace the last check is necessary as not all settings might work that way, see this forum post . this is maybe best illustrated with an example. i have configured my workspace to use 2 for tab width and to insert spaces for tabs: changed preferences for tabs if i compare the two exported .epf files, this gives me: diffing eclipse preference files that means the two following lines are configuring what i have changed: /instance/org.eclipse.ui.editors/tabwidth=2 /instance/org.eclipse.ui.editors/spacesfortabs=true for the cwide.properties file i need to cut off the /instance/ part, so i have this added to the cwide.properties : # set tab width to 2 org.eclipse.ui.editors/tabwidth=2 # using spaces for tabs org.eclipse.ui.editors/spacesfortabs=true note: preferences are applied in following order: global preferences, then local (workspace) preferences this does not overwrite an existing setting of my workspace. as i can see from above diff, my initial workspace settings do not have any settings for tabwidth and spacesfortabs. creating a new workspace use and apply my new settings. but once i have the them, they will not be overwritten with new global ones. which makes sense: the local settings are winning. note: post a comment if you know an elegant way how to enforce/overwrite workspace settings with global ones.
May 12, 2012
by Erich Styger
· 18,673 Views · 1 Like
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TeamCity Build Dependencies
The subject of build dependencies is neither a trivial nor a minor one. Various build tools approach this subject from different perspectives contributing various solutions, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Maven and Gradle users who are familiar with release and snapshot dependencies may not know about TeamCity snapshot dependencies or assume they’re somehow related to Maven (which isn’t true). TeamCity users who are familiar with artifact and snapshot dependencies may not know that adding an Artifactory plugin allows them to use artifact and build dependencies as well, on top of those provided by TeamCity. Some of the names mentioned above seem not to be established enough while others may require a discussion about their usage patterns. Having this in mind I’ve decided to explore each solution in its own blog post, setting a goal of providing enough information so that people can choose what works best. The first post explored Maven snapshot and release dependencies. This is the second post, which covers artifact and snapshot dependencies provided by TeamCity and the third and final part will cover the artifact and build dependencies provided by TeamCity Artifactory plugin. Non-Maven Dependencies While Maven-based dependencies management and artifact repositories are very common and widespread in Java, there are cases where you may still find them insufficient or inadequate for your needs. For starters, you may not be developing in Java or perhaps your build tool is not providing built-in integration with Maven repositories, as is the case with Ant (or its Gant and NAnt spin-offs), SCons, Rake or MSBuild. Secondly, snapshot Maven dependencies provide their own set of challenges covered in the previous blog post, making it harder to ensure correct snapshot dependency is used in a chain of builds. In order to address these scenarios, TeamCity provides two ways to connect dependent build configurations and their outcomes: artifact and snapshot dependencies. TeamCity Artifact Dependencies The idea of artifact dependencies in TeamCity is very simple: download the artifacts produced by an other build before the current one begins. After the artifacts are downloaded to the folder specified (checkout directory by default), your build script can use them to achieve its goals. You can find configuration details in TeamCity documentation. Naturally, this scheme is not suitable for build tools with automatic dependencies management, but it works well with build or shell scripts accepting and expecting local paths, relative to the checkout directory. Note that the copying works not only for the produced build binaries, but for any kind of binary or text files, like the TeamCity coverage report as demonstrated on the screenshot above. There is one important detail about specifying artifact dependencies and that is “Get artifacts from” configuration where you specify what type of build should files be taken from. Possible values of this field are “last successful”, “finished”, “pinned”, or “tagged build”, as well as the build number or “Build from the same chain”. While most values should be trivial to understand with “Last successful build” being the default and generally suitable option, the definition of “same chain” build is directly related to TeamCity snapshot dependencies. TeamCity Snapshot Dependencies Imagine a monolithic multi-step build process (build, test, package, deploy) which you decide to split into multiple smaller builds, invoked sequentially, forming a chain of executions. Doing so allows one to configure or trigger every chain step separately and run certain steps in parallel in order to speedup the process (like executing tests or building independent components). Most of all, it makes the overall maintenance significantly easier. However, while doing so you need to ensure every chain step uses the same consistent set of sources pulled from VCS even if newer commits are made all the while chain steps are running. That’s what TeamCity snapshot dependencies are for: they connect several build configurations into a single chain of execution, called build chain, with every step using the same set of sources, regardless of VCS updates. Note that the TeamCity use of the term “snapshot dependencies” may confuse people familiar with Maven snapshot dependencies which are two unrelated concepts. Snapshot dependencies are configured similarly to artifact dependencies. You can find configuration details in TeamCity documentation. Using Artifact and Snapshot Dependencies Together When applicable, it is recommended to define both kinds of dependencies between build configurations, as this ensures not only a consistent set of sources used throughout a chain steps but also a consistent flow of artifacts produced. Now the definition of “Build from the same chain” in artifact dependency mentioned above becomes clear, as this is the only meaningful option in this scenario. In a way, you can think of build chain steps running in isolation from VCS updates after the first sources’ “snapshot” is taken. Chain artifacts are either re-created from the same sources or passed through chain steps with artifact dependencies. This makes chain steps consistent, reproducible and always up-to-date (when applied to using chain artifacts), something that can’t be easily achieved with Maven snapshot dependencies. Build Chains Visibility in TeamCity 7.0 TeamCity 7.0 took the notion of build chains to a whole new level by providing build chains a new UI, making chain steps visible and re-runnable. Once you have snapshot dependencies defined, a new “Build Chains” tab appears in project reports, providing a visual representation of all related build chains and a way to re-run any chain step manually, using the same set of sources pulled originally. Build Chain Triggering Having build configurations connected with snapshot dependencies and, therefore, their builds grouped into build chains not only makes them more consistent regarding the sources used, it also impacts the way builds are added to the build queue: after a certain chain step is triggered, the default behavior is to add all preceding chain steps as well, keeping their respective order, in addition to the one that was triggered initially. Let me repeat it for more clarity: triggering certain chain configuration adds preceding (those to the left of it) and not subsequent (to the right of it) configurations to the build queue, although it may seem counterintuitive at first. The idea is to mark the location where chain execution stops, which is exactly the configuration that was triggered initially; it becomes the last execution step. To trigger subsequent chain steps upon VCS changes found in a chain configuration, you can add a VCS trigger with the “Trigger on changes in snapshot dependencies” option to the configuration that would be the last execution step. This configuration is then triggered whenever any of the preceding chain steps is updated, which schedules the whole chain for execution. Having this behavior in mind, you therefore need to decide which configurations are triggered automatically and which should be run manually. Usually, earlier chain steps having no impact on external environment can be triggered automatically by VCS trigger but final chain steps, potentially modifying external systems, are invoked manually after a human verification of the previous chain results. The process of running the final chain steps manually is usually referred to as “promoting” previously finished builds. Sample Build Chain: Compile, Test, Deploy Imagine three sample build configurations, "Compile", "Test" and "Deploy" connected into a build chain: "Deploy" is snapshot dependent on "Test" which is snapshot dependent on "Compile". In this sample scenario the "Compile" and "Test" configurations are triggered automatically while "Deploy" is triggered manually, following the recommendations given above. VCS changes in "Compile" configuration only trigger an execution of this chain step, while VCS changes in "Test" configuration trigger "Compile" and "Test" execution (in that order). Once a "Compile" configuration is added to the builds queue, its sources’ timestamp is recorded on the server to be used in all subsequent chain steps. If any of the chain steps is connected to a different VCS root, its sources are also pulled according to the same timestamp. Promoting Finished Builds As soon as the automatic chain execution stops (after running "Test"), you can continue it by clicking the corresponding “Run” button on the "Deploy" configuration that was not triggered (see the build chain screenshot above). Alternatively, it is possible to promote a finished "Test" build through its “Build Actions” and invoke configurations which are snapshot dependent on it – "Deploy" configuration in this case. Summary This article has provided an overview of TeamCity artifact and snapshot dependencies, build chains, how their steps are triggered and how finished builds are promoted. I hope you now have a good understanding of how it works and of when it is appropriate (or not) to use TeamCity build dependencies in addition to those provided by build tools such as Maven. Please, refer to the TeamCity documentation for more information about this subject: Dependent Build Build Chain The final blog post in the series will uncover how you can use the TeamCity Artifactory plugin in order to achieve a behavior which is similar to build chains for projects with Maven-based dependency management. Stay tuned!
May 11, 2012
by Evgeny Goldin
· 19,551 Views · 2 Likes
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What the Heck is a Utility Tree?
i recently answered this question in stackoverflow : what is an utility tree and what is it’s purpose in case of architecture tradeoff analysis method(atam)? i did answer the question there but here’s a better explanation with lots of examples based on the initial version for chapter 1 of soa patterns (which didn’t make it into the final version of the book). there are two types of requirements for software projects: functional and non-functional requirements. functional requirements are the requirements for what the solution must do (which are usually expressed as use cases or stories). the functional requirements are what the users (or systems) that interact with the system do with the system (fill in an order, update customer details, authorize a loan etc.). non-functional requirements are attributes the system is expected to have or manifest. these usually include requirements in areas such as performance, security, availability etc. a better name for non-functional requirements is “quality attributes” . below are some formal definitions from ieee standad 1061 “standard for a software quality metrics methodology” for quality attributes and related terms: quality attribute a characteristic of software, or a generic term applying to quality factors, quality subfactors, or metric values. quality factor a management-oriented attribute of software that contributes to its quality. quality subfactor a decomposition of a quality factor or quality subfactor to its technical components. metric value a metric output or an element that is from the range of a metric. software quality metric a function whose inputs are software data and whose output is a single numerical value that can beinterpreted as the degree to which software possesses a given attribute that affects its quality. most of the requirements that drive the design of a software architecture comes from system’s quality attributes. the reason for this is that that the effect of quality attributes is usually system-wide (e.g. you wouldn’t want your system to have good performance only in the ui – you want the system to perform well no matter what) – which is exactly what software architecture is concerned with. note however, that few requirements might still come from functional requirements) [1] . the question is how do we find out what those requirements are? the answer to that is also in the software architecture definition. the source for quality attributes are the stakeholders. so what or who are these “stakeholders”? well, a stakeholder is just about anyone who has a vested interest in the project. a typical system has a lot of stakeholders starting from the (obvious) customer, the end-users (those people in the customer organization/dept that will actually use the software) and going to the operations personnel (it – those who will have to keep the solution running), the development team, testers, maintainers, management. in some systems the stakeholders can even be the shareholders or even the general public (imagine for example, that you build a new dispatch system for a 911 center). one of the architect’s roles is to analyze the quality attributes and define an architecture that will enable delivering all the functional requirements while supporting the quality attributes. as can be expected ,sometimes quality attributes are in conflict with each other – the most obvious examples are performance vs. security or flexibility vs. simplicity and the architect’s role is to strike a balance between the different quality attributes (and the stakeholders) to make sure the overall quality of the system is maximized. contextual solutions (e.g. patterns) can be devised to solve specific quality attributes need. however saying that a system needs to have “good performance” or that it needs to be “testable” doesn’t really help us know what to do. in order for us to be able to discern which patterns apply to specific quality attribute , we need a better understanding of quality attributes besides the formal definition, something that is more concrete. the way to get that concrete understanding of the effect of quality attributes is to use scenarios. scenarios are short, “user story”-like proses that demonstrate how a quality attribute is manifested in the system using a functional situation quality attributes scenarios originated as a way to evaluate software architecture. the software engineering institute developed several evaluation methodologies, like architecture tradeoff analysis method (clements, kazman and klein, 2002) that heavily build on scenarios to contrast and compare how the different quality attributes are met by candidate architectures. atam (and similar evaluation methods like laaam which is part of msf 4.0) suggest building a “utility tree” which represent the overall usefulness of the system. the scenarios serve as the leafs of the utility tree and the architecture is evaluated by considering how the architecture makes the scenarios possible. i found that using scenarios and the utility tree approach early in the design of the architecture (see writings about saf ) can greatly enhance the quality of the architecture that is produced. when you examine the scenarios you can also prioritize them and better balance conflicting attributes. the scenarios can be used as an input to make sure the quality attributes are actually met. furthermore you can use the scenarios to help identify the strategies or patterns applicable to make the scenarios possible (and thus ensure the quality attributes are met) within the system. we usually group scenarios into a “utility tree” which is a representation of the total usefulness (“utility”) of a system . as you can see in the diagram below we have the key quality attributes (performance, security etc.). each of the quality attributes has sub categories (e.g. performance is broken into latency, data loss etc.). each sub category is demonstrated by a scenario that we expect the system to manifest. the tree representation helps get the whole picture but the important bits here are the scenarios so let’s explore them some more. scenarios are expressed as statements that have 3 parts: a stimulus , a context and a response . the stimulus is the action taken (by the system / user/ other system / any other person); response is how the system is expected to behave when the stimulus occur, and the context specifies the environment or conditions under which we expect the to get the response. for example in the following scenario: “when you perform a database operation , under normal condition, it should take less than 100 miliseconds.” “under normal condition” is the context “when you perform a database operation” is the stimulus “it should take less than 100 millisecond” is the response expected from the system. here are a couple of additional examples for quality attribute scenarios: performance –>latency -> under normal conditions a client consuming multiple services should have latency less than 5 seconds. security->authentications -> under all conditions, any call to a service should be authenticated using x.509 certificate you can also check out this document for a few more scenario examples from a system i worked on in the past [1] design has the ratios reversed i.e. most of the requirements for design come from functional requirements and a few requirements might come from the quality attributes. illustration by epsos.de
May 9, 2012
by Arnon Rotem-gal-oz
· 19,480 Views
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Apache Camel Tutorial—EIP, Routes, Components, Testing, and More
Learn how Apache Camel implements the EIPs and offers a standardized, internal domain-specific language (DSL) to integrate applications.
May 7, 2012
by Kai Wähner DZone Core CORE
· 135,340 Views · 4 Likes
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Protect a REST Service Using HMAC (Play 2.0)
HMCA is a great tool for protecting a REST service. Read why.
May 7, 2012
by Jos Dirksen
· 32,343 Views
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Java Thread Deadlock: A Case Study
This article will describe the complete root cause analysis of a recent Java deadlock problem observed from a Weblogic 11g production system running on the IBM JVM 1.6.This case study will also demonstrate the importance of mastering Thread Dump analysis skills; including for the IBM JVM Thread Dump format. Environment specification Java EE server: Oracle Weblogic Server 11g & Spring 2.0 OS: AIX 5.3 Java VM: IBM JRE 1.6.0 Platform type: Portal & ordering application Monitoring and troubleshooting tools JVM Thread Dump (IBM JVM format) Compuware Server Vantage (Weblogic JMX monitoring & alerting) Problem overview A major stuck Threads problem was observed & reported from Compuware Server Vantage and affecting 2 of our Weblogic 11g production managed servers causing application impact and timeout conditions from our end users. 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? MEDIUM (only 2 managed servers / JVM affected out of 16) · Recent change of the affected platform? Yes (new JMS related asynchronous component) · Any recent traffic increase to the affected platform? No · How does this problem manifest itself? A sudden increase of Threads was observed leading to rapid Thread depletion · Did a Weblogic managed server restart resolve the problem? Yes, but problem is returning after few hours (unpredictable & intermittent pattern) - Conclusion #1: The problem is related to an intermittent stuck Threads behaviour affecting only a few Weblogic managed servers at the time - Conclusion #2: Since problem is intermittent, a global root cause such as a non-responsive downstream system is not likely Thread Dump analysis – first pass The first thing to do when dealing with stuck Thread problems is to generate a JVM Thread Dump. This is a golden rule regardless of your environment specifications & problem context. A JVM Thread Dump snapshot provides you with crucial information about the active Threads and what type of processing / tasks they are performing at that time. Now back to our case study, an IBM JVM Thread Dump (javacore.xyz format) was generated which did reveal the following Java Thread deadlock condition below: 1LKDEADLOCK Deadlock detected !!! NULL --------------------- NULL 2LKDEADLOCKTHR Thread "[STUCK] ExecuteThread: '8' for queue: 'weblogic.kernel.Default (self-tuning)'" (0x000000012CC08B00) 3LKDEADLOCKWTR is waiting for: 4LKDEADLOCKMON sys_mon_t:0x0000000126171DF8 infl_mon_t: 0x0000000126171E38: 4LKDEADLOCKOBJ weblogic/jms/frontend/FESession@0x07000000198048C0/0x07000000198048D8: 3LKDEADLOCKOWN which is owned by: 2LKDEADLOCKTHR Thread "[STUCK] ExecuteThread: '10' for queue: 'weblogic.kernel.Default (self-tuning)'" (0x000000012E560500) 3LKDEADLOCKWTR which is waiting for: 4LKDEADLOCKMON sys_mon_t:0x000000012884CD60 infl_mon_t: 0x000000012884CDA0: 4LKDEADLOCKOBJ weblogic/jms/frontend/FEConnection@0x0700000019822F08/0x0700000019822F20: 3LKDEADLOCKOWN which is owned by: 2LKDEADLOCKTHR Thread "[STUCK] ExecuteThread: '8' for queue: 'weblogic.kernel.Default (self-tuning)'" (0x000000012CC08B00) This deadlock situation can be translated as per below: - Weblogic Thread #8 is waiting to acquire an Object monitor lock owned by Weblogic Thread #10 - Weblogic Thread #10 is waiting to acquire an Object monitor lock owned by Weblogic Thread #8 Conclusion: both Weblogic Threads #8 & #10 are waiting on each other; forever! Now before going any deeper in this root cause analysis, let me provide you a high level overview on Java Thread deadlocks. Java Thread deadlock overview Most of you are probably familiar with Java Thread deadlock principles but did you really experience a true deadlock problem? From my experience, true Java deadlocks are rare and I have only seen ~5 occurrences over the last 10 years. The reason is that most stuck Threads related problems are due to Thread hanging conditions (waiting on remote IO call etc.) but not involved in a true deadlock condition with other Thread(s). A Java Thread deadlock is a situation for example where Thread A is waiting to acquire an Object monitor lock held by Thread B which is itself waiting to acquire an Object monitor lock held by Thread A. Both these Threads will wait for each other forever. This situation can be visualized as per below diagram: Thread deadlock is confirmed…now what can you do? Once the deadlock is confirmed (most JVM Thread Dump implementations will highlight it for you), the next step is to perform a deeper dive analysis by reviewing each Thread involved in the deadlock situation along with their current task & wait condition.Find below the partial Thread Stack Trace from our problem case for each Thread involved in the deadlock condition: ** Please note that the real application Java package name was renamed for confidentiality purposes ** Weblogic Thread #8 "[STUCK] ExecuteThread: '8' for queue: 'weblogic.kernel.Default (self-tuning)'" J9VMThread:0x000000012CC08B00, j9thread_t:0x00000001299E5100, java/lang/Thread:0x070000001D72EE00, state:B, prio=1 (native thread ID:0x111200F, native priority:0x1, native policy:UNKNOWN) Java callstack: at weblogic/jms/frontend/FEConnection.stop(FEConnection.java:671(Compiled Code)) at weblogic/jms/frontend/FEConnection.invoke(FEConnection.java:1685(Compiled Code)) at weblogic/messaging/dispatcher/Request.wrappedFiniteStateMachine(Request.java:961(Compiled Code)) at weblogic/messaging/dispatcher/DispatcherImpl.syncRequest(DispatcherImpl.java:184(Compiled Code)) at weblogic/messaging/dispatcher/DispatcherImpl.dispatchSync(DispatcherImpl.java:212(Compiled Code)) at weblogic/jms/dispatcher/DispatcherAdapter.dispatchSync(DispatcherAdapter.java:43(Compiled Code)) at weblogic/jms/client/JMSConnection.stop(JMSConnection.java:863(Compiled Code)) at weblogic/jms/client/WLConnectionImpl.stop(WLConnectionImpl.java:843) at org/springframework/jms/connection/SingleConnectionFactory.closeConnection(SingleConnectionFactory.java:342) at org/springframework/jms/connection/SingleConnectionFactory.resetConnection(SingleConnectionFactory.java:296) at org/app/JMSReceiver.receive() …………………………………………………………………… Weblogic Thread #10 "[STUCK] ExecuteThread: '10' for queue: 'weblogic.kernel.Default (self-tuning)'" J9VMThread:0x000000012E560500, j9thread_t:0x000000012E35BCE0, java/lang/Thread:0x070000001ECA9200, state:B, prio=1 (native thread ID:0x4FA027, native priority:0x1, native policy:UNKNOWN) Java callstack: at weblogic/jms/frontend/FEConnection.getPeerVersion(FEConnection.java:1381(Compiled Code)) at weblogic/jms/frontend/FESession.setUpBackEndSession(FESession.java:755(Compiled Code)) at weblogic/jms/frontend/FESession.consumerCreate(FESession.java:1025(Compiled Code)) at weblogic/jms/frontend/FESession.invoke(FESession.java:2995(Compiled Code)) at weblogic/messaging/dispatcher/Request.wrappedFiniteStateMachine(Request.java:961(Compiled Code)) at weblogic/messaging/dispatcher/DispatcherImpl.syncRequest(DispatcherImpl.java:184(Compiled Code)) at weblogic/messaging/dispatcher/DispatcherImpl.dispatchSync(DispatcherImpl.java:212(Compiled Code)) at weblogic/jms/dispatcher/DispatcherAdapter.dispatchSync(DispatcherAdapter.java:43(Compiled Code)) at weblogic/jms/client/JMSSession.consumerCreate(JMSSession.java:2982(Compiled Code)) at weblogic/jms/client/JMSSession.setupConsumer(JMSSession.java:2749(Compiled Code)) at weblogic/jms/client/JMSSession.createConsumer(JMSSession.java:2691(Compiled Code)) at weblogic/jms/client/JMSSession.createReceiver(JMSSession.java:2596(Compiled Code)) at weblogic/jms/client/WLSessionImpl.createReceiver(WLSessionImpl.java:991(Compiled Code)) at org/springframework/jms/core/JmsTemplate102.createConsumer(JmsTemplate102.java:204(Compiled Code)) at org/springframework/jms/core/JmsTemplate.doReceive(JmsTemplate.java:676(Compiled Code)) at org/springframework/jms/core/JmsTemplate$10.doInJms(JmsTemplate.java:652(Compiled Code)) at org/springframework/jms/core/JmsTemplate.execute(JmsTemplate.java:412(Compiled Code)) at org/springframework/jms/core/JmsTemplate.receiveSelected(JmsTemplate.java:650(Compiled Code)) at org/springframework/jms/core/JmsTemplate.receiveSelected(JmsTemplate.java:641(Compiled Code)) at org/app/JMSReceiver.receive() …………………………………………………………… As you can see in the above Thread Strack Traces, such deadlock did originate from our application code which is using the Spring framework API for the JMS consumer implementation (very useful when not using MDB’s). The Stack Traces are quite interesting and revealing that both Threads are in a race condition against the same Weblogic JMS consumer session / connection and leading to a deadlock situation: - Weblogic Thread #8 is attempting to reset and close the current JMS connection - Weblogic Thread #10 is attempting to use the same JMS Connection / Session in order to create a new JMS consumer - Thread deadlock is triggered! Root cause: non Thread safe Spring JMS SingleConnectionFactory implementation A code review and a quick research from Spring JIRA bug database did reveal the following Thread safe defect below with a perfect correlation with the above analysis: # SingleConnectionFactory's resetConnection is causing deadlocks with underlying OracleAQ's JMS connection https://jira.springsource.org/browse/SPR-5987 A patch for Spring SingleConnectionFactory was released back in 2009 which did involve adding proper synchronized{} block in order to prevent Thread deadlock in the event of a JMS Connection reset operation: synchronized (connectionMonitor) { //if condition added to avoid possible deadlocks when trying to reset the target connection if (!started) { this.target.start(); started = true; } } Solution Our team is currently planning to integrate this Spring patch in to our production environment shortly. The initial tests performed in our test environment are positive. Conclusion I hope this case study has helped understand a real-life Java Thread deadlock problem and how proper Thread Dump analysis skills can allow you to quickly pinpoint the root cause of stuck Thread related problems at the code level. Please don’t hesitate to post any comment or question.
May 6, 2012
by Pierre - Hugues Charbonneau
· 14,942 Views
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6 Types of Monitoring
When you manage and develop infrastructure, you'll work with tests and monitoring solutions that ensure the quality of your end product (code or infrastructure). For code quality, you can have unit tests, functional tests, and integration tests etc. Similarly, you might have system monitoring, dependancy monnitoring, application monitoring, BAM, CEP, etc. In this post I'll narrate few of them: System monitoring : Watches CPU load, free memory (RAM), disk space etc. SNMP based hardware monitoring, etc. Dependency monitoring : Checks web server processes, web server states , %CPU consumption, RSS, etc. Integration : Tracks third party or other integration points whether they are available or not. BAM : Business activity monitoring. Records KPI or key performance indicators, which will in turn define the state of your business (quantitatively). This could include sucessful transactions per day or month. Process instrumentation or tracing : Includes kprobes, system tap, or other tracing like methodologies like DTrace, which lets you monitor at the individual method level. These are predominantly used for language or other interpreter optimizations. Complex event processing : Though not directly related, some of these monitoring solutions can or should use some form of complex event processing to deduce meaningful information. This is only important (or even significant) if the volume of data is large. Depending upon your problem you should employ one of more of these solutions. There are plenty of open source solutions/tooling available for all of them. BAM is kinda tricky, not BAM in itself, but defining the KPI part is bit trippy.
May 5, 2012
by Ranjib Dey
· 56,104 Views
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Spring Integration - Payload Storage via Claim-check
Continuing on the theme of temporary storage for transient messages used within Spring Integration flows, the claim-check model offers configurable storage for message payloads. The advantage in using this Enterprise Integration pattern, compared against header enrichment, is that objects don't have to be packed into the header using a Header Enrichment technique. They can be stored in a local Java Map, an IMDB, cache or anything else that be used to hold data. Several advantages using this approach are evident. Firstly, performance and efficiency. When using header enrichment, if message payloads need to be managed outside of the JVM that generates the enriched message header, the object will not be available unless it's serialised and transported around the distributed application. This could be costly in terms of performance and transport efficiency. The key factor here is the frequency of remote dispatch and the size of the header object. In specific circumstances the claim-check pattern may offer an advantage here, objects can be serialised and/or transformed into a storage specific format and stored internally in memory or externally in a data store. Secondly, accessibility. It's conceivable that message payloads undergoing claim-check processing may need to be accessed by third party applications that are unable to receive Spring Integration messages. The claim-check pattern allows this type of processing to take place. Thirdly, resiliency is offered. A data store can be chosen that guarantees persistence for messages in order that they can be recovered following failure. The following code details how the claim-check pattern can be used: The gateway used is specified as the following Java class: package com.l8mdv.sample; import org.springframework.integration.Message; import org.springframework.integration.annotation.Gateway; public interface ClaimCheckGateway { public static final String CLAIM_CHECK_ID = "CLAIM_CHECK_ID"; @Gateway (requestChannel = "claim-check-in-channel") public Message send(Message message); } Lastly, this can all be tested by using the following JUnit test case: package com.l8mdv.sample; import org.junit.Assert; import org.junit.Test; import org.junit.runner.RunWith; import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired; import org.springframework.integration.Message; import org.springframework.integration.support.MessageBuilder; import org.springframework.test.context.ContextConfiguration; import org.springframework.test.context.junit4.SpringJUnit4ClassRunner; import static com.l8mdv.sample.ClaimCheckGateway.CLAIM_CHECK_ID; @RunWith(SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.class) @ContextConfiguration( locations = {"classpath:META-INF/spring/claim-check.xml"} ) public class ClaimCheckIntegrationTest { @Autowired ClaimCheckGateway claimCheckGateway; @Test public void locatePayloadInHeader() { String payload = "Sample test message."; Message message = MessageBuilder.withPayload(payload).build(); Message response = claimCheckGateway.send(message); Assert.assertTrue(response.getPayload().equals(payload)); Assert.assertTrue(response.getHeaders().get(CLAIM_CHECK_ID) != null); } }
May 4, 2012
by Matt Vickery
· 14,055 Views
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10 Best Eclipse Shortcuts
Looking for the best Eclipse shortcuts? Here are the top 10.
April 28, 2012
by Erich Styger
· 126,707 Views
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Managing and Monitoring Drupal Sites on Windows Azure
A few weeks ago, I co-authored an article (with my colleague Rama Ramani) about how the Screen Actors Guild Awards website migrated its Drupal deployment from LAMP to Windows Azure: Azure Real World: Migrating a Drupal Site from LAMP to Windows Azure. Since then, Rama and another colleague, Jason Roth, have been working on writing up how the SAG Awards website was managed and monitored in Windows Azure. The article below is the fruit of their work…a very interesting/educational read. Overview Drupal is an open source content management system that runs on PHP. Windows Azure offers a flexible platform for hosting, managing, and scaling Drupal deployments. This paper focuses on an approach to host Drupal sites on Windows Azure, based on learning from a BPD Customer Programs Design Win engagement with the Screen Actors Guild Awards Drupal website. This paper covers guidelines and best practices for managing an existing Drupal web site in Windows Azure. For more information on how to migrate Drupal applications to Windows Azure, see Azure Real World: Migrating a Drupal Site from LAMP to Windows Azure. The target audience for this paper is Drupal administrators who have some exposure to Windows Azure. More detailed pointers to Windows Azure content is provided throughout the paper as links. Drupal Application Architecture on Windows Azure Before reviewing the management and monitoring guidelines, it is important to understand the architecture of a typical Drupal deployment on Windows Azure. First, the following diagram displays the basic architecture of Drupal running on Windows and IIS7. In the Windows Server scenario, you could have one or more machines hosting the web site in a farm. Those machines would either persist the site content to the file system or point to other network shares. For Windows Azure, the basic architecture is the same, but there are some differences. In Windows Azure the site is hosted on a web role. A web role instance is hosted on a Windows Server 2008 virtual machine within the Windows Azure datacenter. Like the web farm, you can have multiple instances running the site. But there is no persistence guarantee for the data on the file system. Because of this, much of the shared site content should be stored in Windows Azure Blob storage. This allows them to be highly available and durable. Usually, a large portion of the site caters to static content which lends well to caching. And caching can be applied in a set of places – browser level caching, CDN to cache content in the edge closer to the browser clients, caching in Azure to reduce the load on backend, etc. Finally, the database can be located in SQL Azure. The following diagram shows these differences. For monitoring and management, we will look at Drupal on Windows Azure from three perspectives: Availability: Ensure the web site does not go down and that all tiers are setup correctly. Apply best practices to ensure that the site is deployed across data centers and perform backup operations regularly. Scalability: Correctly handle changes in user load. Understand the performance characteristics of the site. Manageability: Correctly handle updates. Make code and site changes with no downtime when possible. Although some management tasks span one or more of these categories, it is still helpful to discuss Drupal management on Windows Azure within these focus areas. Availability One main goal is that the Drupal site remains running and accessible to all end-users. This involves monitoring both the site and the SQL Azure database that the site depends on. In this section, we will briefly look at monitoring and backup tasks. Other crossover areas that affect availability will be discussed in the next section on scalability. Monitoring With any application, monitoring plays an important role with managing availability. Monitoring data can reveal whether users are successfully using the site or whether computing resources are meeting the demand. Other data reveals error counts and possibly points to issues in a specific tier of the deployment. There are several monitoring tools that can be used. The Windows Azure Management Portal. Windows Azure diagnostic data. Custom monitoring scripts. System Center Operations Manager. Third party tools such as Azure Diagnostics Manager and Azure Storage Explorer. The Windows Azure Management Portal can be used to ensure that your deployments are successful and running. You can also use the portal to manage features such as Remote Desktop so that you can directly connect to machines that are running the Drupal site. Windows Azure diagnostics allows you to collect performance counters and logs off of the web role instances that are running the Drupal site. Although there are many options for configuring diagnostics in Azure, the best solution with Drupal is to use a diagnostics configuration file. The following configuration file demonstrates some basic performance counters that can monitor resources such as memory, processor utilization, and network bandwidth. For more information about setting up diagnostic configuration files, see How to Use the Windows Azure Diagnostics Configuration File. This information is stored locally on each role instance and then transferred to Windows Azure storage per a defined schedule or on-demand. See Getting Started with Storing and Viewing Diagnostic Data in Windows Azure Storage. Various monitoring tools, such as Azure Diagnostics Manager, help you to more easily analyze diagnostic data. Monitoring the performance of the machines hosting the Drupal site is only part of the story. In order to plan properly for both availability and scalability, you should also monitor site traffic, including user load patterns and trends. Standard and custom diagnostic data could contribute to this, but there are also third-party tools that monitor web traffic. For example, if you know that spikes occur in your application during certain days of the week, you could make changes to the application to handle the additional load and increase the availability of the Drupal solution. Backup Tasks To remain highly available, it is important to backup your data as a defense-in-depth strategy for disaster recovery. This is true even though SQL Azure and Windows Azure Storage both implement redundancy to prevent data loss. One obvious reason is that these services cannot prevent administrator error if data is accidentally deleted or incorrectly changed. SQL Azure does not currently have a formal backup technology, although there are many third-party tools and solutions that provide this capability. Usually the database size for a Drupal site is relatively small. In the case of SAG Awards, it was only ~100-150 MB. So performing an entire backup using any strategy was relatively fast. If your database is much larger, you might have to test various backup strategies to find the one that works best. Apart from third-party SQL Azure backup solutions, there are several strategies for obtaining a backup of your data: · Use the Drush tool and the portabledb-export command. · Periodically copy the database using the CREATE DATABASE Transact-SQL command. · Use Data-tier applications (DAC) to assist with backup and restore of the database. SQL Azure backup and data security techniques are described in more detail in the topic, Business Continuity in SQL Azure. Note that bandwidth costs accrue with any backup operation that transfers information outside of the Windows Azure datacenter. To reduce costs, you can copy the database to a database within the same datacenter. Or you can export the data-tier applications to blob storage in the same datacenter. Another potential backup task involves the files in Blob storage. If you keep a master copy of all media files uploaded to Blob storage, then you already have an on-premises backup of those files. However, if multiple administrators are loading files into Blob storage for use on the Drupal site, it is a good idea to enumerate the storage account and to download any new files to a central location. The following PHP script demonstrates how this can be done by backing up all files in Blob storage after a specified modification date. setProxy(true, 'YOUR_PROXY_IF_NEEDED', 80); $blobs = (array)$blobObj->listBlobs(AZURE_STORAGE_CONTAINER, '', '', 35000); backupBlobs($blobs, $blobObj); function backupBlobs($blobs, $blobObj) { foreach ($blobs as $blob) { if (strtotime($blob->lastmodified) >= DEFAULT_BACKUP_FROM_DATE && strtotime($blob->lastmodified) <= DEFAULT_BACKUP_TO_DATE) { $path = pathinfo($blob->name); if ($path['basename'] != '$$$.$$$') { $dir = $path['dirname']; $oldDir = getcwd(); if (handleDirectory($dir)) { chdir($dir); $blobObj->getBlob( AZURE_STORAGE_CONTAINER, $blob->name, $path['basename'] ); chdir($oldDir); } } } } } function handleDirectory($dir) { if (!checkDirExists($dir)) { return mkdir($dir, 0755, true); } return true; } function checkDirExists($dir) { if(file_exists($dir) && is_dir($dir)) { return true; } return false; } ?> This script has a dependency on the Windows Azure SDK for PHP. Also note there are several parameters that you must modify such as the storage account, secret, and backup location. As with SQL Azure, bandwidth and transaction charges apply to a backup script like this. Scalability Drupal sites on Windows Azure can scale as load increased through typical strategies of scale-up, scale-out, and caching. The following sections describe the specifics of how these strategies are implemented in Windows Azure. Typically you make scalability decisions based on monitoring and capacity planning. Monitoring can be done in staging during testing or in production with real-time load. Capacity planning factors in projections for changes in user demand. Scale Up When you configure your web role prior to deployment, you have the option of specifying the Virtual Machine (VM) size, such as Small or ExtraLarge. Each size tier adds additional memory, processing power, and network bandwidth to each instance of your web role. For cost efficiency and smaller units of scale, you can test your application under expected load to find the smallest virtual machine size that meets your requirements. The workload usually in most popular Drupal websites can be separated out into a limited set of Drupal admins making content changes and a large user base who perform mostly read-only workload. End users can be allowed to make ‘writes’, such as uploading blogs or posting in forums, but those changes are not ‘content changes’. Drupal admins are setup to operate without caching so that the writes are made directly to SQL Azure or the corresponding backend database. This workload performs well with Large or ExtraLarge VM sizes. Also, note that the VM size is closely tied to all hardware resources, so if there are many content-rich pages that are streaming content, then the VM size requirements are higher. To make changes to the Virtual Machine size setting, you must change the vmsize attribute of the WebRole element in the service definition file, ServiceDefinition.csdef. A virtual machine size change requires existing applications to be redeployed. Scale Out In addition to the size of each web role instance, you can increase or decrease the number of instances that are running the Drupal site. This spreads the web requests across more servers, enabling the site to handle more users. To change the number of running instances of your web role, see How to Scale Applications by Increasing or Decreasing the Number of Role Instances. Note that some configuration changes can cause your existing web role instances to recycle. You can choose to handle this situation by applying the configuration change and continue running. This is done by handling the RoleEnvironment.Changing event. For more information see, How to Use the RoleEnvironment.Changing Event. A common question for any Windows Azure solution is whether there is some type of built-in automatic scaling. Windows Azure does not provide a service that provides auto-scaling. However, it is possible to create a custom solution that scales Azure services using the Service Management API. For an example of this approach, see An Auto-Scaling Module for PHP Applications in Windows Azure. Caching Caching is an important strategy for scaling Drupal applications on Windows Azure. One reason for this is that SQL Azure implements throttling mechanisms to regulate the load on any one database in the cloud. Code that uses SQL Azure should have robust error handling and retry logic to account for this. For more information, see Error Messages (SQL Azure Database). Because of the potential for load-related throttling as well as for general performance improvement, it is strongly recommended to use caching. Although Windows Azure provides a Caching service, this service does not currently have interoperability with PHP. Because of this, the best solution for caching in Drupal is to use a module that uses an open-source caching technology, such as Memcached. Outside of a specific Drupal module, you can also configure Memcached to work in PHP for Windows Azure. For more information, see Running Memcached on Windows Azure for PHP. Here is also an example of how to get Memcached working in Windows Azure using a plugin: Windows Azure Memcached plugin. In a future paper, we hope to cover this architecture in more detail. For now, here are several design and management considerations related to caching. Area Consideration Design and Implementation For a technology like Memcached, will the cache be collocated (spread across all web role instances)? Or will you attempt to setup a dedicated cache ring with worker roles that only run Memcached? Configuration What memory is required and how will items in the cache be invalidated? Performance and Monitoring What mechanisms will be used to detect the performance and overall health of the cache? For ease of use and cost savings, collocation of the cache across the web role instances of the Drupal site works best. However, this assumes that there is available reserve memory on each instance to apply toward caching. It is possible to increase the virtual machine size setting to increase the amount of available memory on each machine. It is also possible to add additional web role instances to add to the overall memory of the cache while at the same time improving the ability of the web site to respond to load. It is possible to create a dedicated cache cluster in the cloud, but the steps for this are beyond the scope of this paper[RR1] . For Windows Azure Blob storage, there is also a caching feature built into the service called the Content Delivery Network (CDN). CDN provides high-bandwidth access to files in Blob storage by caching copies of the files in edge nodes around the world. Even within a single geographic region, you could see performance improvements as there are many more edge nodes than Windows Azure datacenters. For more information, see Delivering High-Bandwidth Content with the Windows Azure CDN. Manageability It is important to note that each hosted service has a Staging environment and a Production environment. This can be used to manage deployments, because you can load and test and application in staging before performing a VIP swap with production. From a manageability standpoint, Drupal has an advantage on Windows Azure in the way that site content is stored. Because the data necessary to serve pages is stored in the database and blob storage, there is no need to redeploy the application to change the content of the site. Another best practice is to use a separate storage account for diagnostic data than the one that is used for the application itself. This can improve performance and also helps to separate the cost of diagnostic monitoring from the cost of the running application. As mentioned previously, there are several tools that can assist with managing Windows Azure applications. The following table summarizes a few of these choices. Tool Description Windows Azure Management Portal The web interface of the Windows Azure management portal shows deployments, instance counts and properties, and supports many different common management and monitoring tasks. Azure Diagnostics Managerq[RR2] [JR3] A Red Gate Software product that provides advanced monitoring and management of diagnostic data. This tool can be very useful for easily analyzing the performance of the Drupal site to determine appropriate scaling decisions. Azure Storage Explorer A tool created by Neudesic for viewing Windows Azure storage account. This can be useful for viewing both diagnostic data and the files in Blob storage.
April 25, 2012
by Brian Swan
· 8,784 Views
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Bridging between JMS and RabbitMQ (AMQP) using Spring Integration
An old customer recently asked me if I had a solution for how to integrate between their existing JMS infrastructure on Websphere MQ with RabbitMQ. Although I know that RabbitMQ has the shovel plugin which can bridge between Rabbit instances I've yet not found a good plugin for JMS <-> AMQP forwarding. The first thing that came to my mind was to utilize a Spring Integration mediation as SI has excellent support for both JMS and Rabbit. Curious as I am I started a PoC and this is the result. It takes messages of a JMS queue and forwards to an AMQP exchange that is bound to a queue the consumer application is supposed to listen to. I used an external HornetQ instance in JBoss 6.1 as the JMS Provider, but I am 100% secure that the same setup would work for Websphere MQ as they both implement JMS. Be aware that I've done no performance tweaking or QoS setup yet as this is just a proof-of-concept. For a real setup you'd probably have to think about delivery guarantees versus performance and etc... The code will be available at a GitHub repository near you soon.. SpringContext in XML: org.jnp.interfaces.NamingContextFactory jnp://localhost:1099 org.jnp.interfaces:org.jboss.naming ConnectionFactory Maven POM: 4.0.0 org.rl si.jmstorabbit 0.0.1-SNAPSHOT jar si.jmstorabbit http://maven.apache.org UTF-8 2.2.5.Final 2.1.0.RELEASE springsource-release http://repository.springsource.com/maven/bundles/release false springsource-external http://repository.springsource.com/maven/bundles/external false org.springframework.integration spring-integration-core ${spring.integration.version} org.springframework.integration spring-integration-file ${spring.integration.version} org.springframework.integration spring-integration-amqp ${spring.integration.version} org.springframework.integration spring-integration-jms ${spring.integration.version} junit junit 3.8.1 test org.springframework spring-context 3.0.7.RELEASE jboss jnp-client 4.2.2.GA org.hornetq hornetq-core-client ${hornet.version} org.hornetq hornetq-jms-client ${hornet.version} org.hornetq hornetq-jms ${hornet.version} jboss jboss-common-client 3.2.3 org.jboss.netty netty 3.2.7.Final javax.jms jms 1.1
April 24, 2012
by Billy Sjöberg
· 30,139 Views
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Amazon EMR Tutorial: Running a Hadoop MapReduce Job Using Custom JAR
See original post at https://muhammadkhojaye.blogspot.com/2012/04/how-to-run-amazon-elastic-mapreduce-job.html Introduction Amazon EMR is a web service which can be used to easily and efficiently process enormous amounts of data. It uses a hosted Hadoop framework running on the web-scale infrastructure of Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3. Amazon EMR removes most of the cumbersome details of Hadoop while taking care of provisioning of Hadoop, running the job flow, terminating the job flow, moving the data between Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3, and optimizing Hadoop. In this tutorial, we will use a developed WordCount Java example using Hadoop and thereafter, we execute our program on Amazon Elastic MapReduce. Prerequisites You must have valid AWS account credentials. You should also have a general familiarity with using the Eclipse IDE before you begin. The reader can also use any other IDE of their choice. Step 1 – Develop MapReduce WordCount Java Program In this section, we are first going to develop a WordCount application. A WordCount program will determine how many times different words appear in a set of files. In Eclipse (or whatever the IDE you are using), Create simple Java Project with the name "WordCount". Create a java class name Map and override the map method as follow, public class Map extends Mapper { private final static IntWritable one = new IntWritable(1); private Text word = new Text(); @Override public void map(LongWritable key, Text value, Context context) throws IOException, InterruptedException { String line = value.toString(); StringTokenizer tokenizer = new StringTokenizer(line); while (tokenizer.hasMoreTokens()) { word.set(tokenizer.nextToken()); context.write(word, one); } } } Create a java class named Reduce and override the reduce method as shown below, public class Reduce extends Reducer { @Override protected void reduce(Text key, java.lang.Iterable values, org.apache.hadoop.mapreduce.Reducer.Context context) throws IOException, InterruptedException { int sum = 0; for (IntWritable value : values) { sum += value.get(); } context.write(key, new IntWritable(sum)); } } Create a java class named WordCount and defined the main method as below, public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { Configuration conf = new Configuration(); Job job = new Job(conf, "wordcount"); job.setJarByClass(WordCount.class); job.setOutputKeyClass(Text.class); job.setOutputValueClass(IntWritable.class); job.setMapperClass(Map.class); job.setReducerClass(Reduce.class); job.setInputFormatClass(TextInputFormat.class); job.setOutputFormatClass(TextOutputFormat.class); FileInputFormat.addInputPath(job, new Path(args[0])); FileOutputFormat.setOutputPath(job, new Path(args[1])); job.waitForCompletion(true); } Export the WordCount program in a jar using eclipse and save it to some location on disk. Make sure that you have provided the Main Class (WordCount.jar) during extraction ofu8u the jar file as shown below. Our jar is ready!!! Step 2 – Upload the WordCount JAR and Input Files to Amazon S3 Now we are going to upload the WordCount jar to Amazon S3. First, go to the following URL: https://console.aws.amazon.com/s3/home Next, click “Create Bucket”, give your bucket a name, and click the “Create” button. Select your new S3 bucket in the left-hand pane. Upload the WordCount JAR and sample input file for counting the words. Step 3 – Running an Elastic MapReduce job Now that the JAR is uploaded into S3, all we need to do is to create a new Job flow. let's execute the steps below. (I encourage readers to check out the following link for details regarding each step, How to Create a Job Flow Using a Custom JAR ) Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the Amazon Elastic MapReduce console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/elasticmapreduce/ Click Create New Job Flow. In the DEFINE JOB FLOW page, enter the following details, a) Job Flow Name = WordCountJob b) Select Run your own applications) Select Custom JAR in the drop-down list) Click Continue In the SPECIFY PARAMETERS page, enter values in the boxes using the following table as a guide, and then click Continue.JAR Location = bucketName/jarFileLocationJAR Arguments =s3n://bucketName/inputFileLocations3n://bucketName/outputpath Please note that the output path must be unique each time we execute the job. The Hadoop always create a folder with the same name specified here. After executing the job, just wait and monitor your job that runs through the Hadoop flow. You can also look for errors by using the Debug button. The job should be complete within 10 to 15 minutes (can also depend on the size of the input). After completing the job, You can view results in the S3 Browser panel. You can also download the files from S3 and can analyze the outcome of the job. Amazon Elastic MapReduce Resources Amazon Elastic MapReduce Documentation,http://aws.amazon.com/documentation/elasticmapreduce/ Amazon Elastic MapReduce Getting Started Guide,http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/ElasticMapReduce/latest/GettingStartedGuide/ Amazon Elastic MapReduce Developer Guide,http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/ElasticMapReduce/latest/DeveloperGuide/ Apache Hadoop,http://hadoop.apache.org/ See more at https://muhammadkhojaye.blogspot.com/2012/04/how-to-run-amazon-elastic-mapreduce-job.html
April 23, 2012
by Muhammad Ali Khojaye
· 59,074 Views
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Tutorial: Working with Node.js and Redis (Expire and TTL)
In my previous post I showed you how to install and use Redis with Node.js. Today I’m going to take that a step further and walk through some of the things you can do with node_redis using Redis’s TTL and EXPIRE commands. Note: If you haven’t gone through my previous article make sure to do that now as I’ll assume you have Node.js and Redis up and running. Create a new folder and put a new text file in it called: app.js Inside the app.js file we will add some simple code to set a value that doesn’t have a time to live (or expiration on it): var redis = require("redis") , client = redis.createClient(); client.on("error", function (err) { console.log("Error " + err); }); client.on("connect", runSample); function runSample() { // Set a value client.set("string key", "Hello World", function (err, reply) { console.log(reply.toString()); }); // Get a value client.get("string key", function (err, reply) { console.log(reply.toString()); }); } When we connect to Redis and everything is ready the runSample function is called which in turn sets a value and then reads it back. Expected output: OK Hello World Lets set a timeout on a value using the EXPIRE command and see what happens. Replace the original code with this: var redis = require('redis') , client = redis.createClient(); client.on('error', function (err) { console.log('Error ' + err); }); client.on('connect', runSample); function runSample() { // Set a value with an expiration client.set('string key', 'Hello World', redis.print); // Expire in 3 seconds client.expire('string key', 3); // This timer is only to demo the TTL // Runs every second until the timeout // occurs on the value var myTimer = setInterval(function() { client.get('string key', function (err, reply) { if(reply) { console.log('I live: ' + reply.toString()); } else { clearTimeout(myTimer); console.log('I expired'); client.quit(); } }); }, 1000); } Note: Be aware that the timer I use is just to demo the EXPIRE, you should be very careful about using timers in production Nodejs projects. Run the program. Expected results: Reply: OK I live: Hello World I live: Hello World I live: Hello World I expired Now we will check to see how much time a value has left before it expires: var redis = require('redis') , client = redis.createClient(); client.on('error', function (err) { console.log('Error ' + err); }); client.on('connect', runSample); function runSample() { // Set a value client.set('string key', 'Hello World', redis.print); // Expire in 3 seconds client.expire('string key', 3); // This timer is only to demo the TTL // Runs every second until the timeout // occurs on the value var myTimer = setInterval(function() { client.get('string key', function (err, reply) { if(reply) { console.log('I live: ' + reply.toString()); client.ttl('string key', writeTTL); } else { clearTimeout(myTimer); console.log('I expired'); client.quit(); } }); }, 1000); } function writeTTL(err, data) { console.log('I live for this long yet: ' + data); } Run the program. Expected results: Reply: OK I live: Hello World I live for this long yet: 2 I live: Hello World I live for this long yet: 1 I live: Hello World I live for this long yet: 0 I expired
April 21, 2012
by Chad Lung
· 50,192 Views
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