Just recently I deployed CXF enabled application on websphere 7 and came across many issues. The issues were not with respect to configuration problems but were mostly related to the classes used internally by CXF (version 2.1, I guess) framework. Surpizingly these issues dont pop-up on JBoss server (Its like saying, hey look my code works on my machine, I dont know what went wrong with yours, it simply doesn’t kick. Heard that a lot in college days 
CXF on IBM WebSphere 7 – Deployment Pitfalls
Guvnor 5.3.0 on Jboss-as-7 deployment
Thought of getting more familiar with JBoss Drools and its web based Guvnor interface, so I downloaded Guvnor 5.3.0 (approx 360mb package) from Jboss.org. After opening the zip file, I found there are 4 war files available for getting started with Guvnor interface. The files are for following server
1. Tomcat 6
2. Jboss 5
3. Jboss 6
4. Jboss 7
I selected Jboss 7 version war file and tried to deploy on Jboss 7.0.2 Final server. Pufff… it just failed silently and gave error
18:55:33,061 ERROR [org.jboss.as.deployment] (DeploymentScanner-threads - 1) Did not receive a response to the deployment operation within the allowed timeout period [60 seconds]. Check the server configurationfile and the server logs to find more about the status of the deployment.
Depolyment Goof up
No, this isn’t about how to handle deployment goof ups or X things to remember before deployment. Got interested in JBoss drools and thought of downloading its components and here is what I saw.
Deployment Goof ups
Flex – Tab Orientation – Vertical
I was looking for a way to change the default orientation of Tabs displayed in TabNavigator and couldn’t find one. So I thought of looking into the code of mx.containers.TabNavigator to see if it provides any hook to extend the functionality and luckily, I found its possible to change the orientation.
Windows 7 – Your own Desktop gadget
The fancy UI of Windows 7 has been around for a while now and its goodies makes it fun to work with. While there are lot of goodies you can play with, gadgets seems to be most useful component. Be it checking your system status, a world clock or weather update gadget, all of them are quite handy and useful. But have you ever thought of developing your own gadget, may be useful to track information from various sites (RSS feed). Well its not so difficult to develop one, if you know little bit about HTML and JavaScript. Yes that is all you need to create your gadget, no compilation, no special IDE, no need to learn any cryptic programming language. Just get started with Simple Text Editor and thats all you need as tool to develop one. (Well, to make it fancy you will need graphics.)
Load balancer with Apache HTTP Server 2.2 and Apache Tomcat 6
While application gets complex and start serving concurrent users, there is always need to make maximum use of available hardware and ensure every request is served within reasonable time. While its possible to increase heap size (using Xmx, Xms options), the option is discouraged as it ends up introducing unnecessary GC pauses in JVM and instead of improving application performance it will lead to serious bottlenecks. The other option would be distribute the user requests over cluster of servers and thereby ensuring the load is evenly distributed against many servers. The option will also enable maximum availability of application and will serve more requests than bombarding one server. Also the underlying OS places constraints on the resources consumed by an individual process and hence it is always recommended to distribute the job across multiple processes.
Tab based browser – session handling – Part II
In my previous article, I talked about the conceptual implementation of how one can make sure the application will work in tab based browsers. While the thoughtprocess is more at abstract level and is not attached with any real artifacts, I thought of giving it a try to check, how feasible is to implement the solution. After spending couple of hours (mostly in writing testing code), I could come up with a sample which works in any tab based browsers.
Though the example isn’t developed considering all the pitfalls it may face, it will give one a headstart to develop solution on their own. The solution doesn’t use any third party frameworks and purely relies on what is offerred in JEE. (I used Tomcat 6.0, Eclipse 3.7 and Java 1.6)
Flash Builder Extension – Live Preview of Flex Components
There is no doubt Flash Builder is one of those IDE, built on top of Eclipse helps you to stop worrying about design time issues and gives a nice editor to paint your application screen. Over last few years, Flash Builder has got rich in functionality and now it provides so many utilities that aid developers to build applications quickly. Though this article is not meant for details about the features like Web Service binding, Integration with Server Side Technology like BlazeDS, ColdFusion, Managing DataGrid and DataGrid columns etc., one must have a look at it before spending effort on coding it manually. Well the Aim of this article is not about giving details about what utilities Flash Builder offers to ease development, but one of the strong feature meant for designers/developers which is quite not so popular. – Design View Extensibility Kit for Flex X.X. (yes the version is marked as X.X, because it has been there for long time.:)
M2Eclipse, Maven, Eclipse WTP and Managing Java Web Project with dependencies
In last article, I talked about using Eclipse plug-in provided by Maven and using it to manage the Java project dependencies. As discussed, it is quite handy and a organized way to manage the dependencies not only at the build time but while developing applications as well. [Remember developers don't have to play treasure hunt to find out which version of Jar works with which release.]
While the application can manage the dependencies well for non-web applications, the Eclipse WTP plug-in simply fails to recognise Maven powered web applications (Note that you can build web application using “war” packaging on command line, but Eclipse WTP simply ignores such project.)
M2Eclipse, Maven, Eclipse and Managing Java Project with dependencies
Using Version Control System (henceforth VCS) has now become an essential part of the development life-cycle. One cannot visualize life when it comes to managing project/product releases without having well established VCS. As per my experience (and since got chance to work with only VSS and SVN, I feel SVN is the better choice – simple, easy and most important free!!!).