Archive Log files Using Spring Data MongoDB

MongoDB was on my ToDo list for a while. Finally I decided to stop procrastinating and give it a spin. Since simple hello-world app is no fun, I was thinking of some real life use cases of NoSQL database. One simple use case which I could think of was to create a centralised log store. MongoDB already has a Log4j appender using which application logs can be directly written to MongoDB. But archiving the existing logs in MongoDB is something which is not available out of the box. Also sometimes it’s convenient to write application logs to regular log files but use a store like MongoDB for archival purpose.

Being a big fan of Spring Framework, I decided to use SpringData MongoDB module. Now I don’t have to worry about writing all the boilerplate code to deal with MongoDB. Also I use Spring Integration for file polling mechanism. The following blog post elaborates how I use spring-data-mongodb along with spring-integration framework to archive log4j log files in a mongodb store.

Activiti 5 with Spring Integration 2.0 Mail Adapter

Activiti is an open source BPM and workflow system. The first GA release is expected to be out next month i.e. Dec 2010. The roadmap of activiti looks very promising and also involvement of companies like SpringSource and MuleSoft can make it even more interesting. There are couple of good articles and tutorials available on the wiki to help you get started with activiti. To get a feel of the framework, instead of developing a simple hello world app, I thought of integrating activiti with Spring Integration. SpringSource team is working on this integration module and once that is in place some of the boilerplate code from my prototype would be cleaned up. The following blog post demonstrates the use of spring integration mail module with activiti.

jBPM4.4 with Spring3

I’m working on a jBPM prototype since last couple of days. The integration with Spring wasn’t a smooth ride. In my previous projects, I used jBPM3.2. But it seems jBPM4 is pretty much a rewrite. There are couple of few nice additions like service API’ for task and process management, support for java task and many more. And there are few changes which I didn’t like. Till 4.2 the support for JPA was provided, which is taken off starting 4.3 release. Yes definitely you can write some wrappers and still achieve it. But!! Between 4.3 and 4.4 also there are some major API changes. So the whole point is to get the app running, I had to digg into mailing lists and source code. Now that it works, I thought I would write a short blog about it.