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.

JBoss AS7.1 on RHEL6

Today I got JBoss AS 7.1.0.CR1 fresh out of oven. The GA release is expected in next month. Full JavaEE certification is planned for this release. The following tutorial demonstrates how to set up JBoss AS7.1 on RHEL6.

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.

Introduction to Hibernate Search Framework

Enterprise Search is becoming one of the common requirements of any consumer web application that we build these days. So I thought of learning some stuff in this domain. If you think about open source frameworks providing enterprise search functionality, probably Lucene is the one and only answer that comes to your mind. Lucene is a fully featured full text search engine library. Some other platforms and frameworks are developed that leverages core search functionality of Lucene.

Solr is one of such platforms that provide cool features like token highlighting, faceted search and many many more. Solr runs as a standalone search server and can be integrated into the applications using HTTP/XML API. Solr is typically used (or suggested to be used) when the underlying data that you are trying to index doesn’t change often.

Hibernate Search is a framework built on top of Lucene and Hibernate Core. In the following blog post, I would explain how to integrate Hibernate Search into your application.

Using Spring Integration with Twitter4J to Email Tweets

Recently I was playing around with Spring Integration. To understand any new framework one cannot just rely on documentation. So I created a demo application to try out different features of the framework. Since my main motivation was to understand Spring Integration framework, I wanted to spend minimal efforts in input data generation. So I decided to work with Twitter messages.

Most of you must be familiar with Twitter. Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent messages. There are different clients available to use Twitter. In the sample application, I first read the friends timeline. Then based on the source/client used for tweeting, the tweets are routed to different channels. The tweets originated from “web” are simply logged, while the tweets originated from “Dzone.com” are dispatched using a mail sender. The basic flow of the application is depicted in the following diagram.