Spring WAR configuration for Development, QA, and Production

Configuring applications with Spring

This is an excellent article on how to configure a Spring web application. The main point that I would like to echo is that it's important to have your build procedure create the same exact artifact for each of your environments and just externalize the configuration where necessary. This is a point often missed by developers and operations staff.

Tips on Evaluating UI Wireframes

I received this while working with a design firm, Rolling Orange. It's an excellent concise description of how to react to an initial set of wireframes. People often skimp on this step and that's a big problem that will come back to haunt you. This description makes that clear and more importantly gives people a guide to interpret and analyze the wireframes.

Elaboration Phase: Concept & Design: Wireframes

ABOUT THIS MILESTONE
This is the first draft of the wireframes for the new site. This represents our initial recommendations for navigation, functionality, and content, based on the findings of our Research and Strategy phase. The purpose of these wireframes is to create a site structure, functionality, and messaging platform that will serve as the foundation of your site. We will address visual design ("look and feel") only after we have approved wireframes.

WHAT SHOULD I EVALUATE?
- Look at this phase as an opportunity‚ now is the time to make it right.
- This draft is a starting point, so it's flexible and we expect it will evolve. Now is the time to suggest changes and explore new solutions.
- Does the architecture reflect the recommendations made in the Research & Strategy phase?
- Does the navigation and architecture address the functional needs of the audience per the Persona document?
- Is the proposed design "buildable" based on your understanding of supporting technologies and systems?
- Can your organization sufficiently manage and sustain the proposed design?
- Did we miss anything?

WHAT'S NEXT?
We will refine these wireframes based on your feedback.

PROJECT TIP
Think like your customer! Think about user goals and their frame of mind (“I’m researching, I’m applying, I’m managing”). Pretend you don’t know any of this—would you understand it as a first-time reader? Think simple—include just what users need and no more. If it’s “nice to have,” cut it.

TCP Window Scaling with Solaris and Linux

We've been having an annoying problem in which we can not insert large blobs to our Oracle 11g database. The solution was found by one of our security engineers. We needed to turn the tcp window scaling off. To temporarily test this out you can run this command as root:

bash-3.00# ndd -set /dev/tcp tcp_wscale_always 0

The original value for this tunable option was '1'. Interesting, running this command on the Linux (Oracle 11g) side had no effect. Running it on the Solaris (Tomcat Application Server) side solved the problem.

Fyi...to view the current setting of this property, you can run:

$ /usr/sbin/ndd -get /dev/tcp tcp_wscale_always

A value of 0 is off. A value of 1 is on. I'm able to run this command as myself. I don't need to be root.

Cygwin 1.7 Upgrade

I'm a big fan of Cygwin and have used it for years. Without it, it's possible for me to be productive on Windows. The latest version of Cygwin is 1.7. This version changed a few things for.

The first was one they warned about, how Cygwin stores mount points. These are no longer stored in the Windows registry, but are instead read from /etc/fstab. Cygwin comes with a script who's purpose appears to be to create this file for you, but when I ran it nothing happened. So I was left creating my own /etc/fstab. Here's what mine looks like:

C:/cygwin/bin /bin ntfs binary,user 0 0
C:/cygwin/etc /etc ntfs binary,user 0 0
C:/cygwin/home /home ntfs binary,user 0 0
C:/cygwin/var /var ntfs binary,user 0 0
C: /c ntfs binary,user 0 0
C:/Documents\040and\040Settings/don/Application\040Data /n ntfs binary,user 0 0
C:/Documents\040and\040Settings/don/My\040Documents /m ntfs binary,user 0 0
W: /w ntfs binary,user 0 0
Y: /y webdrive binary,user 0

The second issue I ran into was that I didn't have /bin or /usr/bin in my PATH. The previous versions of bash/cygwin did this for me. I actually had a line in my .profile commented out that would have done this. I simply put it back in and was good to go.

So far these are the only issues I've had with the upgrade and they were relatively easy to fix.

Calculating size of Oracle Database

select decode(least(sum(bytes), 1000000000),
1000000000, ROUND(sum(bytes)/1000000000) || 'GB',
ROUND(sum(bytes)/1000000) || 'MB') as database_size
from dba_segments;

The above query has the nice effect of displaying the size of the database in a human readable format.

DATABASE_SIZE
------------------------------------------
151GB

1 rows selected

Hudson v1.347 Kills Background Processes :(

I recently upgraded out Hudson instance after not touching it for quite a while. This quickly broke the set up we have in which Hudson stops and starts our Tomcat servers after a successful build to deploy the new code. The problem seems a change in the Hudson code that kills any background processes that a Hudson job leaves around. There's documentation about this issue at:

http://issues.hudson-ci.org/browse/HUDSON-2729
http://hudson.gotdns.com/wiki/display/HUDSON/Spawning+processes+from+build

We use the following shell script to stop and start Tomcat servers. The key part of the script is the setting of the environmental variable BUILD_ID=dontKillMe which overrides the default environmental variable setting Hudson gave the variable and thus prevents it from killing the background processes.

#!/bin/bash
#.Name
# startTomcat.sh
#.What
# Starts a tomcat container. This script handles some nuances of Hudson
# in which it kills background processes that you want to have stay alive
# after a build job (e.g. Restart Tomcat) finishes.
#
#.See
# http://issues.hudson-ci.org/browse/HUDSON-2729
# http://hudson.gotdns.com/wiki/display/HUDSON/Spawning+processes+from+build

exec 2>&1;

BUILD_ID=dontKillMe; export BUILD_ID;

if [ $# -ne 1 ]
then
echo "Usage: $0 full_path_to_tomcat_directory"
exit 1
fi

if [ ! -d ${1} ]
then
echo "Not a directory: ${1}"
exit 2
fi

echo $0 starting $(date)
set -x

pwd

cd $1

if [ $? -ne 0 ]
then
echo "Directory not found or has wrong permissions: $1"
exit 3
fi

pwd

./tomcat.sh stop

sleep 5

./tomcat.sh start >> ${1}/logs/start.log 2>&1

echo $0 completed $(date)

exit 0

Oracle SQL Schema and Text Index Size

I recently had to determine the size of my schema and the size of the text indexes used in that schema. These SQL statements got me the results:

SQL> select sum(bytes) from dba_segments where owner='SCHEMA_NAME' and SEGMENT_NAME like '%$%';

SUM(BYTES)
----------
6663307264

SQL> select sum(bytes) from dba_segments where owner='SCHEMA_NAME';

SUM(BYTES)
----------
9464446976