Monitoring big, distributed Java landscapes helps tremendously to keep complex applications under control. But many administrators spare the effort to set up monitoring: No time. Now a timesaving solution is in sight.
„We are maxed out anyway. We need a solution that helps to make our work more effective and not something that if we are lucky saves about as much time as it needs to set it up and maintain it“.
I hear statements like those again and again from IT administrators. With the effect that APM solutions are mainly used for firefighting by experts.
So, what is needed? A solution which allows to monitor a large number of applications with a minimum of configuration effort and identifies the root cause of problems quickly.
Indeed I found and tested a tool which fulfills those requirements. (read more…)
When developing a site in JSF many people like to use the Richfaces Framework. It is a pretty solid framework that comes wit a lot of functionality and nice components. It also comes with an Ajax framework called Ajax4JSF (also called a4j). When deploying this site then facing the Internet to production, many people start finding out that their applications eat a lot of memory, leading to unresponsive systems or OutOfMemoryError crashes. This is due to a design issue in JSF / A4J and cannot be easily fixed, but worked around. But lets start with an analysis of whats wrong with our otherwise nice application.
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Review: We had to estimate a PDF generation task during our last sprint planning meeting. We received a rough layout template from our costumer and the service classes to provide the required data were also already present. Nevertheless, we estimated the associated tickets amazingly high. No developer in the team had experience with iText before. However, everyone had heard scary stories from other developers about iText. A qoute floated in our ears: “If you work with iText, sooner or later you have to read the specification of the pdf format.”
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In my last blog entry the old Spring Batch Version 1.x was used explaining a real-life example. My experiences have shown that this version is very often used in projects. In this post I want to give a brief overview of the changes and show that the migration to the new version 2.1 is not that expensive and additionally has many advantages.
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In times of business process engines, ESBs and SOAs you might think that the good old batch processing is forgotten. But insurance companies and banks have large amounts of data to be moved and here the batch is still the first option to choose. For some customers we have implemented Java-based batch processes and have made good experiences. In many projects we found complex and individual implementations. So, let’s have a look at some standard technology. It’s worth it.
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I recently cleaned up some old code and during this adventure, I came across a couple of lines that looked kind of ugly and potentially broken to me. As we refactored this code, we found out that it was not only bad code, but depending on the situation it could also swallow an exception. In this article, I’ll tell you what the problem was and how we resolved it.
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