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18th June 2018 | Featured post, Legacy, Migration, Software Quality, Software Technologies | 1 Comment
Writing a software is a incredible difficult task. When the time has come for the software to know the retirement : should we rewrite it ? or have an progressive approach ?
16th March 2018 | Architecture, Cleancode, Featured post, Legacy, Migration, Refactoring, Software Engineering, Software Technologies | 1 Comment
Here is a small checklist about how to migrate a legacy migration and to ensure its success.
This article is part of my work to explain my knowledge about Software migration in the company Byoskill.
4th March 2018 | Cleancode, Featured post, Lifestyle, Trends | No Comments
To be or not to be (happy), that’s the question. In this article, I expose some thoughts about what could make a software developer happy in his work. I wrote this article with several targeted audience in mind : Junior developers, Senior Techleads and H&R resources.
31st January 2018 | Cleancode, Code Quality, Libraries, Opensource, Programming, Software Engineering, Software Quality, Software Technologies, SQA, State of the art, Testing | 3 Comments
30th January 2018 | CMS, State of the art, Technologies | 1 Comment
I have received several requests after my first article dealing with CMS, Headless CMS (KeyStoneJS) and the rather gloomy conclusion.
This article is giving a feedback of my next experiences.
23rd December 2017 | Cleancode, Framework, Programming, Software Engineering, Software Technologies | No Comments
23rd December 2017 | Business Intelligence, Libraries, Opensource, State of the art | 1 Comment
A Dashboard can be a very efficient communication tool for a team, between managers and business units. It enables an organization around a vision to share common goals. It can also be useful to identify weaknesses in processes and adapt your strategy according to them.
23rd December 2017 | Digest, DZone, State of the art | No Comments
This is my first post that offers a digest from a selection of DZone’s articles. I will pick DZone’s article based on my interests.
This week the subjects are : BDD Testing, Bad code, Database Connection Pooling, Kotlin, Enterprise Architecture
A few benefits you get by doing BDD : This article is an introduction to the Behaviour Driven Development practice. It’s interesting because we are regularly meeting teams, developers, architectures (pick your favorite one) that are confusing technical details and functionalities. As a result, the design, the tests and the architecture hides the user behaviour (the use cases ?) under a pile of technical stones. This article is a nice introduction. I recommend to go further these articles : * Your boss won’t appreciate tdd, try BDD * BDD Programming Frameworks * Java Framework JBehave.
Bad code, how my code…
Gumption Traps: Bad Code : an article about the bad code and how to deal with it.
{% blockquote Grzegorz Ziemoński%} The first step to avoid the bad code trap is to stop producing such code yourself. When faced with existing bad code,one must work smart to maintain motivation. {% endblockquote %}
This is a good introduction sentence. This week, I had a meeting with a skilled and amazing team. The meeting’s goal was to find a way to find the technical debt. The very technical debt that is ruining the application and undermining the team’s motivation. What I found interesting and refreshing in this article, is the pragmatic tone and the advice.
{% blockquote Grzegorz Ziemoński%} To avoid bad code, try to minimize the amount of newly produced bad code. {% endblockquote %}
How to avoid the depress linked to the bad code ? First of all, I want to say that developers are not receiving enough training on how to improve the code. Usually university / college courses are dedicated about How to use a framework. Therefore, few of them are able to qualify what is a bad code, what are its characteristics and de facto the ways to improve it. To avoid bad code, I try to demonstrate the personal benefits for the developers to improve their skills. Quality is not only a question of money (how much the customer is paying) but rather how much your company is paying attention to your training and personal development.
A lot of developers are overwhelmed under the technical debts without the appropriate tools (mind, technics, theory) to handle it. I try to give them gumptions about the benefits to be a better developer and how to handle the weakness of a sick application. To save a software rather than practicing euthanasia 🙂
When we are discussing about Database connection pooling, most of my colleagues are relying on the good old Tomcat dbcp. However there is a niche, really funny and interesting, the guys that a competing for the best DBCP. And HikariCP is clearly a step ahead of everyone.
The article Database Connection Pooling in Java With HikariCP is presenting how to use a custom DBCP in your software.
Hikari Performance
I think it would have been great to present the differences with the standard DBCP and further debate on the advantages/disadvantages of the solutions. A good idea for a newt article 🙂
Java Futures and Kotlin Coroutines An interesting article about how Java Futures and Kotlin co-routines can coexists. Honestly I am a little bit disappointed and thought that Kotlin would make things easier like in Node.JS
Another article about Code Quality and we could be dubious whether exists an answer to that question : Are Code Rules Meant to Be Broken.
I won’t enter too much in the details, the author’s point of view seems to be Code Rules are good if they are respected. If they are broken, it implies that the Code rules need to evolve 🙂 What do you think about it ?
This article is interesting since it presents a feedback session on using Kotlin in a Android project.
The following big PLUS to use Kotlin are :
Quality Code Is Loosely Coupled
This article is explaining one of the most dangerous side of coding : Coupling. Must to read article despite the lack of schemas.
This article is a great introduction on code assessment. These five habits are indeed things to track in your software code as a sign of decay and code sickness.
The habits are : – Write (Useful) Unit Tests – Keep Coupling to a Minimum – Be Mindful of the Principle of Least Astonishment – Minimize Cyclomatic Complexity – Get Names Right
This article is really useful in the context of Digital Transformation to assess which softwares you should keep and throw.
Example of excuses : – I didn’t know that code existed. – I don’t know what that code does. – I don’t know how to use that code. – That code is not packaged in a reusable manner.
…
An interesting article and example on how to improve your own code using different skills. I really recommend to read this article and the next future ones : Test proven design.
23rd December 2017 | Legacy, Migration, State of the art, Technologies, Web | No Comments
This article is part of my working notes on the subject of "How to migrate Web applications running on JBoss AS 5 to the version 7".
I will go straight to the details though here is some lines about JBoss Server.
From Wikipedia : JBoss Application Server(Now called Wildfly) is an application server authored by JBoss, now developed by Red Hat. WildFly is written in Java, and implements the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) specification. It runs on multiple platforms.
On 20 November 2014, JBoss Application Server was renamed Wildfly.
The product history according Wikipedia is :
The JBoss AS community project has been renamed to the WildFly community project wildfly.org
According this JBoss 5 to 7 in 11 steps, the benefits are :
Processing time decreased by 25% without any code change. Development speed increased in my opinion (it is really hard to measure it) by 50% and we are much more productive (faster server restarts). Memory footprint lowered from 1GB to 512MB. Finally automatic application redeployment finally works! However there is always a price to pay – the migration took us 4 weeks (2 sprints).
Thanks to the presentation from Roberto Cortez, we have a clear picture of the migration.
JBOSS 5 Architecture
JBOSS 7 Architecture
When the PAAS or the Web application server have to be upgraded, several regressions may happen. The team has to pay attention to :
Server functionalities and integration : between the versions, some functionalities and integrations provided by the server may have evolved, be fixed or simply disappeared.
Server configuration : The way the server has been configured, using scripts, GUI, may have changed, forcing the team to change their configuration files and finding the corresponding new way of doing it.
Server deployment configuration : Your deployment model configuration may have to be upgraded : single node, clustered mode, disaster recovery, high availability, reverse-proxying may behave differently in the new versions.
Application deployment configuration : the way to deploy your web applications may have changed in the new versions (GUI mode to script mode…)
Server API Regressions : usually Web Application servers are implementing a specific JEE API version, Servlet API and so on. These API may have changed causing regressions in your applications.
Application regressions : JBoss is including many components extending the JEE with BPM, Persistence, implementation. It is really important to track your dependencies (using Tattletale or mvn dependencies:tree) and interview your team about possible hacks and fixes to overcome the limits of JEE 5. This kind of workaround is difficult to migrate.
Training and risk management : This kind of migration contains its part of risks and changes. Both can create frictions inside your team of between the IT Team and your Dev teams. To ease the migration, don’t forget to dedicate some time to your teams into training to learn the new features of JAS 7. You will also have to adapt your project management to freeze for a while the features until the migration has been done.
This section is providing a checklist to help developers and managers to evaluate the migration risk of their applications.
Here is a list of common issues during the migration of applications with JBOSS AS.
4.2. Debug Migration Issues 4.2.1. Debug and Resolve Migration Issues 4.2.2. Debug and Resolve ClassNotFoundExceptions and NoClassDefFoundErrors 4.2.3. Find the JBoss Module Dependency 4.2.4. Find the JAR in the Previous Install 4.2.5. Debug and Resolve ClassCastExceptions 4.2.6. Debug and Resolve DuplicateServiceExceptions 4.2.7. Debug and Resolve JBoss Seam Debug Page Errors
There is a deadlock when using EJB remoting over SSL. This deadlock is present even in EAP 6.2. We’re now at the point when we have quite a patch set of features backported from WildFly to AS 7.
JMS : JBoss Messaging server has been deprecated and the compatibility with a JBOSS AS 5 server is really tough to maintain. Some solutions exists as explained below in the article.
Here is a summary of the evolutions between the JBoss AS version 5 and the version 6.
Here is the compiled list of modifications including the minor version fixes.
In JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5, the class loading architecture was hierarchical. In JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6, class loading is based on JBoss Modules. This offers true application isolation, hides server implementation classes, and only loads the classes your application needs. Class loading is concurrent for better performance. Applications written for JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5 must be modified to specify module dependencies and in some cases, repackage archives.
[Server functionality, Server deployment configuration] Domain Management : In JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6, the server can be run as a standalone server or in a managed domain.
[Application Deployment] Deployment Configuration : Standalone Servers and Managed Domains : Boss Enterprise Application Platform 5 used profile based deployment configuration. These profiles were located in the EAP_HOME/server/ directory. Applications often contained multiple configuration files for security, database, resource adapter, and other configurations. In JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6, deployment configuration is done using one file. JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5 configuration files must be migrated to the new single configuration file.
[Server functionality, Application deployment configuration] Ordering of deployments : Application Platform 5 applications that consist of multiple modules deployed as EARs and use legacy JNDI lookups instead of CDI injection or resource-ref entries may require configuration changes.
[Server functionality, Application deployment configuration] Directory Structure and Scripts : As previously mentioned, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 no longer uses profile based deployment configuration, so there is no EAP_HOME/server/ directory.
[Server application, Application deployment configuration, Application regression JNDI Lookups JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 now uses standardized portable JNDI namespaces.
[Server functionality, Server configuration, Application configuration, Application code] : Changing logging dependencies
[Server API, Application configuration regressions] Resource adapter configuration : In previous versions of the application server, the resource adapter configuration was defined in a file with a suffix of *-ds.xml. In JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6, a resource adapter is configured in the server configuration file.
[Server libraries] Technologies upgrade : JDK 6, JSF 2, Bean Validation (JSR-303), CDI, EJB 3 (1.1.13)
VFS Library update
[Server functionalities] new server functionalities : Mod_cluster, JBoss Embedded AS
[Application deployment] The legacy pooled invoker has been removed. Applications using the pooled invoker should switch to the JBoss Remoting-based unified invoker, which has been the default detached invoker since 4.2.
Here is the compiled list of modifications including the minor version fixes.
Unlike previous releases, with AS 7.1, remote access requires secure authentication by default. This includes both managment (native, jmx, etc) and various remote application protocols (ejb, jndi, jms, etc); Added SSL support for the Remoting interfaces.
[Application configuration deployment] Management API improvements : All configuration attributes are updatable via the CLI. Direct edits to the XML are not necessary.
[Server functionality] Various Administration Console Improvements and Management changes
[Server API] Remote Connectivity Added support for remote EJB, JNDI and JMX invocation over JBoss Remoting 3, IIOP, Remote JMS. Three modes for accessing remote EE components using JNDI (Client, Traditional Remote, and Delegated).
[Server deployment model] Clustering Enhancements : Standalone Servers and Managed Domains : Numerours fixes in HTTP Session Replication, Clustered Web SSO, EJB Stateful Session Bean Replication, EJB load-balancing and failove, JPA XPC propagation
[Server functionality] CLI Regressions jboss-admin.sh renamed to jboss-cli.sh, data-source add" "--pool-name" argument seems to have changed to "–name".
[Server libraries] Technologies upgrade :
Upgrade Google Guava to 11.0.2
[Server functionalities] new server functionalities : Mod_cluster, JBoss Embedded AS
[Application deployment] The legacy pooled invoker has been removed. Applications using the pooled invoker should switch to the JBoss Remoting-based unified invoker, which has been the default detached invoker since 4.2.
[Server functionalities] new server functionalities : Mod_cluster, JBoss Embedded AS
[Application deployment] The legacy pooled invoker has been removed. Applications using the pooled invoker should switch to the JBoss Remoting-based unified invoker, which has been the default detached invoker since 4.2.
According link, we thought it would be really hard to connect with JMS server based on JBoss 5. It turned out that you have 2 options and both work fine:
Repackaging Dependencies and fix the EAR Layout: link
Install and configure the JDBC Driver link
Update the Resource Adapter Configuration
Configure the datasource for Hibernate and JPA : If your application uses JPA and currently bundles the Hibernate JARs, you may want to use the Hibernate that is included with JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6.
In WildFly 8, a resource adapter is configured in the server configuration file. If you are running in domain mode, the configuration file is the domain/configuration/domain.xml file. If you are running in standalone mode, you will configure the resource adapter in the standalone/configuration/standalone.xml file.
More details there How to migrate from AS5 or AS6 to Wildfly
Here is the list of tasks implying some rewriting inside your application code.
Migration JEE 5 to JEE 6
Upgrade to JPA 2.0
Update your SOAP Implementations using JBossWS-CXF
Upgrade Hibernate from 3 to 4
Replacing JBOSS Cache by Infinispan Cache
Configure JAX-RS / Resteasy changes
Fix Hibernate’s sequencer
Replace JBOSS AOP Interceptors : JBoss AOP was used by the EJB container. However, in AS 7, the EJB container uses a new mechanism. If your application uses JBoss AOP, you need modify your application code as follows.
Migrating JNDI : Migrating JNDI namespaces
Update the datasources : link
Rewriting of your RMI Code : oss 5 and 7 are totally different and this kind of communication will not work.
Using CDI instead of plain old Singletons
Here is a list of useful tools to assist you in your migration.
IronJacamar : to update your datasource configuration
Tattletale : to find the application dependencies
Gilder : An application for migrating the configuration of JBoss AS 5-based servers to JBoss AS 7-based servers.
Tools and tooling to migrate to JBOSSS 6 : Link
Upgrades to newer versions of WildFly or JBoss EAP may be handled using the JBoss Windup migration tool. JBoss Windup migration tool
23rd December 2017 | Application Lifecycle Management, Software, Software Technologies, Technologies | 3 Comments
Thanks to its popularity, Docker has disrupted many companies and blurred the silos between Developers and Operations. In this article, based partially on my own experiences.