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code quality / eclipse / java — No Comments
7
Mar 10

Think About Code Quality

code-qualityRecently one of my friends from work asked me to help him improve the process around code quality and developer productivity. So I compiled my thoughts and e-mailed to him, but then I realized that it may be very helpful for others who are involved in software industry. Are you? Then keep reading.. :)

Although tools and frameworks listed here are JVM-based language focused, the approach can be definitely reused with any other environment / language / technology. So without further ado, here it goes:

The center of the code quality monitoring can be either Continuous Integration ( e.g. Cruise Control: http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net/ ) or Sonar ( http://sonar.codehaus.org/ ). Sometimes both.

Continuous Integration should be setup to “Intergarte Continuously” :) which means every time something is checked in, force a build. That is the whole purpose of “Continuous Integration”, and that is why I am really against the way Cruise Control is used on some client sites [builds on demand by pressing a build button.. grrr, back to 1990-ties].

So given that “Continuous Integration” is not misused, it will be plugged in with PMD ( http://pmd.sourceforge.net/ ) / Findbugs ( http://findbugs.sourceforge.net/ ), Checkstyle ( http://checkstyle.sourceforge.net/ ) and Test Coverage ( e.g. Cobertura: http://cobertura.sourceforge.net/ ) tools that will generate reports, and reflect the only true state of the code that is checked into the repository.

Now, as to a developer corner..

RAD is nothing more than just an Eclipse with lots of bloated (mostly unused IBM plugins). But being Eclipse it is very pluginable by nature. This means that PMD / Checkstyle / Cobertura reports can be available to developers prior checking in the code. PMD / Checkstyle at compile time, Cobertura at (test) run time. If possible, try to use something like Spring Tool Suite: http://www.springsource.com/products/sts, which is also an Eclipse, but much lighter (compare to RAD), faster and smarter “pluged-in”.

As far as testing. JUnit (http://www.junit.org/) should be aimed to cover two different separate layers of testing: Component/Unit Testing and Integration Testing. Component tests should be aimed to test exclusively content of the component with all of its dependencies mocked out ( http://mockito.org/ ). Where as Integration tests should test how well components integrate together, with all the test data staged ( in case DB is used: http://www.dbunit.org/ )

As for the test coverage, 85% to 90% is a good goal to aim for. Do not sign off, until this level of coverage is reached no matter how close your dead lines are, since if you do, that will increase amount of defects ten fold, that is just a law :)

If developers work on code that is / can be deployed to an Application Server, such as Tomcat, JBoss, Geronimo ( if you’re unlucky, Websphere :) ), consider getting JRebel ( http://www.zeroturnaround.com/jrebel/ ), it’ll boost developers productivity by.. let’s just say “a lot” :)

This is how I see it, and this really works for me, and projects around me.

apache / eclipse / spring — No Comments
28
Oct 09

Spring Insight in Action – 5 Minutes From Scratch

Spring Source Logo

“Spring Insight gives deep visibility into your application’s real activity on a request-by-request basis. For any request you can see all the JDBC queries it made, how much time it took to render, or timings for any of your major Spring beans.” – said Jon Travis in his article on a Spring blog.

That is such a great idea I though, and watched Jon’s screencast.

What actually surprised me is how simple and quick it is to try the Spring Insight in action. Here are these 3 simple steps:

Step 1. Download Spring Tool Suite

I like to think about Spring Tool Suite as an Eclipse on Spring rocks (Spring IDE, Spring Interactive Tutorials, Exception Resolution, and much more). And now ( since version 2.2 ), it comes with tc Server Developer Edition that includes Spring Insight, so the easiest way to try out Spring Insight is to download Spring Tool Suite, since it comes with it: http://www.springsource.com/products/springsource-tool-suite-download

Note that “tc Development Edition” can be downloaded and run on its own, Spring Tool Suite (STS) gives us something extra: “ready to go” sample applications that we can deploy to tc Server – all in one.

Step 2. Import a sample web application

About those sample applications… Now as you have STS unpacked/unzipped, you can run it and go to “File” –> “Import” –> “Spring Tool Suite” –> “Sample Projects”. You should see three sample applications “Hotel Booking”, “PetClinic” and “SpringTravel”. I chose “PetClinic”, but it does not really matter, we can use any sample application to play with Spring Insight.

Once you click “Ok”, STS will ask you if that is ok to download 20+ MB of JARs, you, of course, having a huge HD, would say yes, and.. here you go 1 minute later you have yourself a fully functional ready to deploy web app!

Step 3. Deploy a web application to tc Server Developer Edition

Now right click on PetClinic app, -> Run on server -> Choose Spring tc Server (it is not going to say anything about Insight, but it’s there :) ).

At this point STS will ask you to browse to the location of your tc server, it should be under the directory you installed STS, e.g in my case it was: “/opt/springsource/tc-server-6.0.20.C”

After you click “Finish”, you should see “INFO: Deploying web application archive insight.war” as one of your deployment messages in STS console.

After another minute, once your app (PetClinic in my case) is deployed, go to http://localhost:8080/insight and you should be good to go:

Spring Insight

Insight Away!

eclipse / howto / java / linux / software / sun / technology — 3 Comments
15
Sep 08

Reset Lost Password in Sun Application Server

Sun Application Server Password ResetHappens to the best of us, less with system admins more with developers. But we are all human, and believe it or not we DO forget and loose passwords at least once every so often. Some time ago I wrote a tutorial on how to reset lost root password in mysql, and here is another similar tutorial on how to reset the lost domain password but this time for Sun Application Server.

Before going any further with this article, please first check “.asadminprefs” file:

cat /home/toly/.asadminprefs
 
AS_ADMIN_USER=admin
AS_ADMIN_PASSWORD=YourSecretPasswordInTextHere!

the admin password could be there

If it is not there, there are two ways to reset it:

  • Reinstall or recreate the affected domain.
  • Create a new dummy domain and copy its security key file over to the real domain to substitute the password.

Below is an explanation for the second approach (in case when “reinstall or recreate affected domain” is not an option):

Given:

 >   Sun App server is installed in                 "/opt/SUNWappserver"
 >   Domain to which the password is lost:   "domain1"

Step 1. Creating a new dummy domain

/opt/SUNWappserver/bin/asadmin create-domain --adminport 7070 --adminuser admin --instanceport 7071 dummy-domain
 
Please enter the admin password>password
Please enter the admin password again>password
Please enter the master password>password
Please enter the master password again>password
 
Domain dummy-domain created.

Step 2. Copy dummy-domain’s “admin-keyfile” to domain1’s “admin-keyfile”

cp /opt/SUNWappserver/domains/dummy-domain/config/admin-keyfile  /opt/SUNWappserver/domains/domain1/config/admin-keyfile

now the password for domain1 is “password” – DONE :)

Step 3. Deleting the dummy domain

/opt/SUNWappserver/bin/asadmin delete-domain dummy-domain
Domain dummy-domain deleted.

NOTES:

The above is true for Sun’s Application Server 8.x and later.

For Sun’s Application Server 9.x check out “change-admin-password“