2 Speed Architecture

In today’s ever-changing world of customer-facing applications, traditional IT methodologies and frameworks just don’t cut it anymore.  Find out how you can change that by reading my article on Bi-Modal IT, also known as 2 Speed Architecture, here.

It's all about exit speed

I just got back from a 1 day M-School training at the BMW Performance Center in South Carolina.  It's a fun experience and one I highly recommend.  Not only do you get to drive some really fast, top-of-the-line cars, but you get a little training as well. And for anyone struggling with Java assignments like I once did, don't hesitate to seek assistance with Do my Java Assignment for me to ensure you stay on track with your studies.

We got to do some laps on a couple of different tracks, and the point that was emphasized over and over again, was that it wasn't about how fast you go in to a corner, it's about how fast you can exit the corner.  You need to put on the brakes, take the corner, and then put the pedal to the floor.  It reminds me a lot about building software applications. 

In some of the modernization projects we do, customers are anxious to get to the development phase.  They often skimp on the upfront work, figuring that the requirements are already there, the design is basic, testing is just a matter of comparing two versions of the same thing, etc., etc.  These are not the projects that go smoothly. 

You need to do the prep work, the design, the test creation, the extra requirements gathering for areas that are changing.  If you do all of that, you can exit the corner at top speed and get through the rest of the project much more quickly.

The importance of naming your cookies

Cookies are old hat for many of us, in use in all types of applications.  What you might not realize is that many Java frameworks, including ADF will by default use the same cookie name for the session identification.  This is all well and good if only one such application is using that domain, but if multiple ADF applications are sharing the same domain, they can clobber each other's sessions.

Once client encountered this when a user started reporting their application session timing out after what seemed to be really short periods of time.  It turned out to be two ADF applications that were using the default names for their cookies (JSESSIONID). 

Thankfully, in Weblogic, this is easy to fix.  In JDeveloper, you can open the weblogic.xml file in your ViewController project and click on the session section on the left hand side.  Open the Cookies panel and provide a Cookie Name, save this file and you are all set.

The source would look like this:

<session-descriptor>

   <cookie-name>mycookie</cookie-name>

</session-descriptor>

That's all there is to it.

BTW, we encountered this again when deploying a couple older ADF applications in a clustered environment.  If we used the apache weblogic plugin to do load balancing we were encountering some strange issues.  It turns out that unless you supply a cookie name for the plugin, it also uses JSESSIONID and one of the older applications that hadn't been udated with a cookie name was overwriting it, causing our session to be lost and our browser could no longer reach the application.  It kept receiving timeout notices.  Adding a cookie name in the configuration fixed the problem.

Lesson learned: never underestimate the value of naming your cookies!

Deploying Tomcat on Amazon's EC2 Cloud Service

Now that Oracle's released it's JaaS offering, it's time I started posting about different cloud options available to you Java developers out there.  Seeing as Amazon's services have been around as long as anybody's and are very robust at this point, it seems like a good starting point.

This article will be a quick guide to deploying Tomcat on Amazon's cloud.  It's fairly quick and it's also very cheap, even free to follow along and try this on your own if you are interested.  Simply sign up for an account here and don't go over the hours limit, considering you get 750 free hours a month, you should be able to complete this tutorial in plenty of time to avoid hitting the limit.  If you do use an Ubuntu Server image as shown in this tutorial it will cost you something.  It cost me about 26 cents to run through this, take my screenshots, and everything else for this post.  Just make sure you stop your instance after you are done with it.

The first thing you need to do after activating your account is to create an AWS instance.  For the purposes of this tutorial we are going to create a VM of an Ubuntu Server, but any Linux environment will probably follow the same procedure very closely.  The Amazon Linux instances should be available for free.

Amazon Elastic Cloud (EC2) instances can be created inside a Virtual Private Cloud or without a Virtual Private Cloud.  For a production instance you would want to use a VPC for security, for this exercise we are not going to use one.

1. Create Security Group

Once you log in to the AWS management console, the first thing we will want to do is create a Security Group.  From the AWS Management Console, click on the EC2 link which will take you to the EC2 Dashboard.  From there, click on Security Groups from the left navigation pane and then click on the Create Security Group button.

In the dialog that pops up, provide a Name, a Description, and choose No VPC.  Then click on "Yes, Create".

The security group will be created without any rules.  To create the rules you want to add to it, select it from the table of groups you are provided with.  The dialog to add rules will appear in the bottom half of the page.

 In our case we are only going to open port 80.  To do that, choose HTTP under the Create a new rule in the Inbound tab, then provide 0.0.0.0/0 (to allow port 80 access from any IP address) as the source and click on "Add Rule".

Then click "Apply Rule Changes".

2.  Create an Instance

Now that we have a security group, we can create our instance.  To do that click on the Instances link in the left navigation panel of the EC2 Dashboard.  This will bring up a dialog to enable the Quickstart Wizard which is what we will use for this exercise.

We will need a Key Pair in order to connect to the instance we create.  If you do not see a Key Pair listed under "Select Existing", choose "Create New", create one, and download it.  Click the Click Launch Wizard radio button, and then choose "Ubuntu Server 13.04" and provide a name.  Then click the "Continue" button.

On the next page of the dialog, click the "Edit Details" button, then on the Security Settings radio button.  This will open a multi-select box where we can pick the security groups, including the one we just created.  Highlight "quicklaunch-1" (for ssh) and "web-security-group" (assuming that's what you named it, for http) and then click "Save details".

After saving the details, click "Launch" to create the instance.  It will take a few minutes to initalize.  In the table of instances we should see our newly created instance.  When its state changes from pending to running, we should be able to move on to the next step.

3.  Installing Tomcat

Now that we have a running instance, let's log into it and deploy tomcat.  Check the box to the left of the row in the table of instances that contains the instance we created.  The click on "Actions" and then "Connect" from the dropdown.

You will need to provide the private key file in order to connect, it should have been downloaded when you created the Key Pair.  Make sure you don't lose this file.  In the dialog that pops up, fill in the path to the private key and then click "Launch SSH Client".

After connecting, we need to install Tomcat.  To do that, issue the following command from the ssh terminal.

sudo apt-get install tomcat7

If you are using the Amazon instance use yum. (sudo yum install tomcat7)  If you use yum to install, you will have to add the webapps package to see anything. (sudo yum install tomcat7-webapps)

Tomcat should install fairly quickly, just take all the defaults for any inputs it requires.

Next, start Tomcat.

sudo /etc/init.d/tomcat7 start

Since Tomcat runs on port 8080 and we would need to run Tomcat as root in order to bind it to port 80, we will redirect port 80 to port 8080 instead by issuing the following command.

sudo iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-port 8080

We should now be able to access Tomcat using the public dns address for our instance.  This is the same server you ssh'd into and you can also find the public dns name under the details of your instance on the EC2 Dashboard page at the bottom of the details pane.

4. Installing the Tomcat Management Webapp

If you want to install the Tomcat Management Webapp issue the following command.

sudo apt-get install tomcat7-admin

In Amazon Linux use yum again (sudo yum install tomcat7-admin-webapps).

You will also have to modify the tomcat-users.xml file in the conf directory.

cd /usr/share/tomcat7/conf

sudo vi tomcat-users.xml

Add a role for the manager-gui and a user that has the role assigned.  Please note that all roles and users are commented out in the orignal file.  A different user name that "tomcat" would probably be safer, but for me, this instance is going away as soon as I am done with the tutorial.

After you have saved those changes, restart Tomcat.

sudo /etc/init.d/tomcat7 restart

And that's it, you've successfully deployed Tomcat in the cloud!

Now don't forget to stop that instance from running when you are done with it.

Oracle's Java as a Service

I've been in San Francisco at Oracle Open World 2013 for the past few days.  It's been a great conference so far with some interesting sessions, some America's Cup racing, and lots of exhibitors to see.

One of the most interesting items to be announced by Oracle at Open World this year was their new Cloud offerings.  They've been talking a lot about the cloud for the past couple of years but it seems this year they are finally releasing some interesting products based on the cloud.

Not only do they now have an Infrastructure as a Service offering, much like Amzaon's EC2 or Microsoft Azure, but they now have a Database as a Service offering and a Java as a Service offering.

This being a Java-focused blog, the Java as a Service product is what I found most interesting and I was actually able to attend a Hands-On-Lab that demonstrated the service.  The usage is very simple, it basically exposes a managed Weblogic Server for you to deploy to.  If you want to have fine-grained control over the environment, this isn't for you, as the only control you have is what you can accomplish via the Weblogic Management Console and the interface to the JaaS itself.

As far as being able to quickly get a application up there and running, it couldn't be simpler however.  The lab demonstrated 3 different ways to do it, one with an IDE plugin (we used Eclipse, I believe there are others), one via the command line, and one via Maven.  You can also deploy and undeploy using the Weblogic console itself.

Most likely you will need more than a JaaS instance if you wanted to do anything worthwhile, for instance you will probably want a database for your application and you will need to use their DBaaS for that, but it does let you easily deploy and run Java applications (including ADF applications!) to the cloud.

Check it out here!