JavaEE – Centralized Configuration Management

When it comes to application configuration; there is no golden solution – it typically depends on your development and deployment environment.
A Configuration JSR was proposed but it is not part of JavaEE yet – http://javaeeconfig.blogspot.nl/2014/05/java-ee-config-feature-details.html.

If you are using JBossAS/WildFly; then this post is a good starting point https://community.jboss.org/wiki/HowToPutAnExternalFileInTheClasspath

Following approaches are typically used for application specific configuration management.

Patch User Defined WildFly Modules in Domain Mode

WildFly 8 added support for patching application server. This is an interesting feature and I wanted to play around a bit. But unfortunately I could not find any official documentation explaining how to generate a patch. With some effort, I could finally patch user defined static module. In the following blog post I would like to share the details.

Monitoring WildFly Metrics

Recently I worked on a Nagios plugin for WildFly/JBossAS resource monitoring. The plugin is written in Python and uses HTTP-JSON based API (JBossAS REST Management API) to collect server statistics. The plugin currently supports standalone mode.
Other available plugins need additional SAR or WAR to be installed on the application server. Typically in Enterprise setups; it is sometimes not allowed to perform any additional installations on the target system. The main advantage of this plugin is it leverages the REST API of JBossAS. This allows us to monitor the application server without any additional configurations and installations.

Database Change Management with Liquibase

I still remember those good old days when the database configuration used to begin in the project with three holy scripts create.sql, data.sql and drop.sql. Every time you make a change to object model (which you do during early phase of projects), the data model needs to be adapted. As soon as the project grows, the mess begins. Additional update scripts are added for every release and someone needs to maintain those changes also in the three holy scripts. This is quite a cumbersome and error prone job. On top of that if you need ability to rollback a release, then complexity of the scripts only increases.

Blob Storage with GridFS

Slides of my talk at NoSQL Matters Cologne 2013.

Things to know about MongoDB

I’ve been playing around with MongoDB for a while now. The more I work with it, the more I believe in the power and in fact the necessity of polyglot persistence. Just like unit testing tools, knowledge of different persistent stores is also a power tool which every developer should have.

The following blog post is to share some experiences and information about MongoDB and it’s capabilities.