The idea is to embed jboss AS7 to my project and add it to version control. Additionally to check the ability of start the server using mvn jboss:devserver (similar to how we run mvn appengine:devserver) So does it makes sense to write my own archtype ?
To my client this reduce lot of complexities so we can create our own jboss configuration to work with and the client's C# developers who will be going to work on java project development. find it easier to setup their local machines to run their changes locally. using similar command mentioned above.(mvn jboss:devserver) I wonder if anyone ever had this idea to work by?
I would probably look into using something like Puppet, instead of checking in all of JBoss.
Puppet uses a custom declarative language to define system configurations. Your puppet script would probably do the following:
Download JBoss from a public server, and unzip it to your desired location
Copy custom configuration files from your version control repo into JBoss
Copy your applications into JBoss
Puppet is a lot more powerful than the simple scenario that I have just described, but this scenario is a start.
With this solution, you would only end up checking in your puppet script and any custom JBoss configuration files you might need. In addition, I believe it would make your JBoss upgrade path a lot simpler, as you would only need to change the version of JBoss in your puppet script, and re-run puppet.
I think the ideal way to deal with situations like this is through packaging. If your client is deploying on some sort of unix server (i include Linux in that), then they are already using a package manager to manage system software on their servers. A package manager has the ability to install software, remove it, upgrade it, and, crucially for you, to install other packages on which some package depends.
You could therefore package JBoss, so that the package manager could install it, then package your application, specifying a dependency on JBoss. When the client installs your application package, JBoss will automatically be installed.
However, this plan only works if you client has a certain degree of infrastructure set up. They need to be using a system with a package manager. They need to have a way of managing package installation (a configuration management tool like Puppet, Chef, Ansible, or something vendor-proprietary is ideal for this). They need to be able to distribute custom packages inside their environment. They need to have either a way of accepting custom packages from you, or of accepting package build scripts and then building packages themselves.
In a server environment of any size, the sysadmins should and probably will have all this infrastructure anyway, because it's fundamental to managing a fleet of servers. But if your client doesn't have it, it may be too much effort to set up.
That said, the absolutely minimal version of this approach would be for you to send them the package files for the application and JBoss by email or SFTP or whatever, and then for the sysadmins to install them manually (eg with yum localinstall). This is not a lot better than having them install JBoss manually, but it's a step in the right direction.
Related
I understand the concept of source version control and how it applies to self-contained projects like a Windows application. But for web development, most files are stored on the web server. This has become a headache for development with many people just copying and renaming files and then pushing files over to production is another mess.
I need some kind of source version control that is relatively not too difficult to learn and must be GUI-based or have a GUI as an option. The people who will use this have little or no knowledge of the command line.
How can I integrate source version control with web server files? What software is available for such an endeavor? And is it possible to have the source version control software administer both the production and development web servers or I may only have two separate source version control installs for each web server and manually push over changes?
The web servers are Windows-based and also use Tomcat for Java/JSP.
Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.
I think you are not clear on the idea of version control. Version control is about managing your code. It is about putting your code in a remote server (may be in a central location) and accessing it using a client tool. This way a number of people can work on different part of the code and than push their work to version control server. It has nothing do with the type of the project.
The project can be a windows application, web server application or any application.
While using version control, in regular intervals or whenever needed you build your code from the version control server and deploy it to the web server which means you are deploying code that is already build (a .war for a web application).
You first deploy to your development server and later deploy the same war to the production server.
You can use SVN server for your version control server and Tortoise SVN as client.
You have to split in mind two different but interacting things - Version Control and Deploy Tools:
VCS has to do with any evolving over time items, which you want to have under control
Deploy just deliver correct object into the correct place at the correct time and convert "set of something" into Product.
Deploy isn't a problem per se (almost any job can be automated), main problem in multiDEV environment (2+) with central STAGE (less with PROD) server is question of communication between Devs and synchronizing of their operations, i.e. - workflow and management:
just imagine 2 (or more) devs, performing diferent unrelated tasks, which want to test latest own (and only own) changes on common STAGING server (because they haven't functional local environment). If 1-st deploy "some WIP" on server, he don't want to have own tests be interrupted and code poisoned by deploying third-party changes. They must to communicate and coordinate actions, it can't be dumb "copy to..." in post-commit hook
And is it possible to have the source version control software administer both the production and development web servers
Yes. But VCS does not "administer" web-servers in common sense, rather it's "communicates" or "take into account"
If i want to deploy one application on different servers like Open Source Glassfish or TomEE. How can I achieve that without having to include different libraries for each application server? As an example if would like to use Jersey as the rest framework and eclipselink as the persistence framework i have to make sure both support these frameworks. But in case of TomEE it's shipped with other implementations like OpenJPA.
Is it possible to ship the dependencies only with the project and not in combination of server libraries + project libraries?
What is a good way to achieve server compatibility?
Any information or link which describes a solution or help me understand why it's done this way would be great.
Thanks in advance
This is more of a application server classloading issue and usually all application servers have a provision for a configuration file which you can put in your application and instruct the server to load the libraries included in the web application instead of the one present in application server. For e.g., Weblogic has a weblogic.xml file which is put in WEB-INF of war application and where you can instruct server to prefer the application packaged libraries. For JBoss there is similar configuration file jboss-deployment-structure.xml. This way it is easier to have a self contained application which contains all dependencies even if the server has equivalent libraries. Also you can upgrade to higher version of libraries than supported by application server otherwise you have to resort to all sort of hacks.
Easy solution I can think of is using ant task to create war file for each servers. You can have at most 2-3 servers in reality like tomcat ee, jboss and glasfish. So create 3 ant tasks for each like tomcatWar, jbossWar and glassfishWar and each ant task makes sure required jars are shipped as well in the war. This is more easy and extendable solution, also easy to understand and modify for new requirements.
I have a Java application (a quite large one with many external .jar dependencies as well as dependencies on images) and I need to package it up so that someone can double click to run, for example. Or something easy like that.
It uses Java Persistence, so it requires a sql connection which is specified in the Persistence.xml file in the Java Project.
How can I package this up? I was thinking:
the installation process should validate that the user has MySQL installed and if not, direct them to install it
the installation process could ask the user to enter credentials for any database and then I could update the Persistence.xml at run time
These were two ideas I had...but I wasn't sure if there was a known solution to this problem. Any help would be much appreciated!
I think you should take a look at embedded database solutions, like H2. Also, you can package your application using maven's shadowing or jar plugin, having the jar-with-dependencies profile activated.
This will nicely rid you of checking for database servers running on the client machine, and also will give you the proper means of bundling the application in one nice JAR, albeit a little large.
Maven is a build ecosystem and toolset especially designed for building Java applications and executing the code -- and generally doing whatever else you can imagine that's possible to do with and to your code.
It has a rich API for developing plugins and many developers have exploited this feature. There are numerous plugins for building -- and launching -- and packaging your application as well as helping you manage your applications dependencies.
Maven's shadowing comes in the form of maven-shade-plugin, available here. What it does is that it helps you create a single JAR file from all your dependencies. Also, there is the maven-jar-plugin which offers a profile jar-with-dependencies. It is also accessible from here.
H2, on the other hand is a full-fledged RDBMS. This is the website: http://www.h2database.com/html/main.html, and here is a tutorial.
You can find information on embedding the database here:
How to embed H2 database into jar file delivered to the client?
Embedding the Java h2 database programmatically
h2 (embedded mode ) database files problem
I would also suggest you use a combination of H2/Hibernate/Spring which is a very easy setup and provides you with really rich features and an easy-to-use API.
I hope this helps you :)
Building a sophisticated installer that checks lots of dependencies, and runs on lots of different platforms (which I assume you want) is complicated.
I suggest that you look at an installer generator; see What is the best installation tool for java?
Another alternative that I've seen in a few products is to write a (non-GUI) installer or configurer in a scripting language like Perl.
I wrote an installer using ANT, but has no GUI. Also, I used Iz Pack (good option), so I think that depends on how smart do you want it to be, if you are supposed to use it, or a non-technical person, etc.
We have a java application hosted on JBoss with a Posgres DB, and we've traditionally been selling it as an appliance (full server with application installed). Now, we need to allow clients to be able to download and install it on their servers. What is the best way to approach this? Ideally, I'd like it to be a one packaged installation file that they can run and it checks for dependencies, deploys the war file, executes the postgres sql to setup the database and start up jboss.
JBoss and Postgres will be installed by the client prior to installation.
The simplest way is to use a bash script for Linux and possible bat/cmd files for Windows, though that is not ideal. Are there any libraries available to accomplish something like this?
install4j can be used to let users install applications. The installation package will contain everything needed (application, JBoss, postgres). Furthermore, it has ant and maven tasks, too, and you can even allow the users to do some basic configuration on-the-fly.
The latest version of JBoss is OSGi based. Have you consider to use this solution ?
If JBoss and Postgres are already preinstalled and configured by users as they wish then it would be very difficult to make a silver-bullet automatic installer that takes into account and correctly handles whatever incompatibilities it can face in real life.
Maybe a detailed install instruction would be enough. Especially for advanced users. For the others - bundle some diagnoctic scripts in case they face problem.
Also consider using liquibase to do automatic database initialization and migration on application's startup. This would greatly simplify the rest of install procedure: just check deps, make datasource and deploy app.
Currently we have a Java Restlet API with dependencies controlled via Maven. When we update the API we run maven assembly:assembly which does the unit tests etc and produces a single jar file. We then upload this to the production server and run it using nohup.
Is there a better or more automated way of doing this? Is this where something like Hudson would come in?
Thanks
My experience goes with webapp-deployment. But same should hold true here. Use Maven, Cargo, Nexus (or Artifactory), Hudson and probably, Jira in conjunction of product release.
Automated release process are more reliable because there is no human factor involved that may forget a step.
We also use Liquibase for database versioning. And, if you are dealing with database changes in your application deployment. You'll realize Liquibase boosts so much confidence while running alter scripts.
I would suggest to go through the following resources
Automated Deployment with Maven - going the whole nine yards If you can, literally follow this pattern.
Maven 2 Effective Implementation -- this book really helped us a lot.
There are several Maven plugins to help deployment. The most general of them is Cargo, but there are also app server specific plugins for some concrete servers like JBoss.
Most companies I have worked for (actually, all) have had some sort of custom in-house built deployment system; even if build was done using a standard framework (like Maven in use at my current company).
Part of this is because there are many aspects that tie closely to company-specific infrastructure, capacity management and monitoring systems; and so even though there are open-source systems, there is usually something that needs to be tweaked.
It sounds like you are running your app on its own--it isn't part of any application server. If you aren't using an application server, there are probably some ways to get cargo and maven to deploy it for you, but you may be better off just using some shell scripts to deploy and run the application.
However, as your application grows, you may find a need for an application server like Jetty, JBoss, Glassfish, Tomcat, etc. When this happens, take a look at the cargo plugin for Maven because it will allow you to do something like:
mvn cargo:redeploy
That will package up your application, send it to the server and restart the app. If you want Hudson to do this for you automatically you can add it as a target to build.
Cargo can save you a lot of time when you have to frequently update an application server.