Surefire/Failsafe maven plugin and SSL

I was puzzled today by an interesting feature introduced by the "surefire" and "failsafe" maven plugins (used for unit/integration test my components). These were introduced with their 2.1 release.  As I had components calling web services using 2-way SSL for authentication, I noticed that my test cases where failing when using maven via command line (mvn clean install). They worked on the IDE (Eclipse/STS) fine, but were not working on the command line. I saw the following error:

PKIX path building failed: ... unable to find valid certification path to requested target

 So it was clear that maven was not passing the SSL system properties from my .mavenrc file:

	MAVEN_OPTS="-Djavax.net.ssl.keyStore=<YOU KEYSTORE FILE> \
	-Djavax.net.ssl.keyStorePassword=<YOUR KEYSTORE PASSWORD> \
	-Djavax.net.ssl.keyStoreType=JKS \
	-Djavax.net.ssl.trustStore=<YOUR TRUSTSTORE FILE> \
	-Djavax.net.ssl.trustStorePassword=<YOUR TRUSTSTORE PASSWORD> \
	-Djavax.net.ssl.trustStoreType=JKS"

view raw .mavenrc hosted with ❤ by GitHub

This is what I discovered as I read more the documentation.

2-Way SSL in JBoss 7.1.1

As I tried to setup 2-way SSL in JBOSS 7.1.1, the documentation kept on referring to 1-way SSL (even though it was not clearly stated so). I was looking for a simple configuration that will enable a certificate to be used as authentication and to be used in a 2-way SSL protocol. Given that the documentation was not properly describing how to do this, I found a post pointing to check XSD documents to see what other configuration options are available in JBOSS. As I was simply trying to configure in "standalone" mode, this is what I did:

Monitoring Weblogic remotely using JMX

It has been a while since I had to use Weblogic for deployment. Furthermore, I wanted to monitor my application using MBeans. As I tried to do this, I encountered many problems (e.g. unknown host name,  ClassNotFoundException, ssh problems, etc). These are my notes about what I had in front of me and how I solved them.

STS and XSD

It has been a while since I used SpringSource Tool Suite. This has been a terrible mistake on my side as I was forced to use other IDEs. As I was finally giving a choice to re-start using it, I came across an issue that I thought will write about. I'm sure most people already know about this: XSD (for the Spring beans) are no longer included in the distribution. This means that if you are using STS from version 2.7.0 and above, you have to include the proper jar (including the XSD inside the jar) into the classpath. I think this is a good move on SpringSource as I can see why it would make sense for the IDE to help you resolve based on your classpath (i.e. what you are building).