Real PaaS: CloudFoundry

During the last few years in Software Development, I have found myself doing very repetitive tasks regarding deployment of applications. Among them, these are:

• Provisioning of Hardware (or VM)
• Install Application Runtime (Java, Rails, Node, etc)
• Deploying of Binaries (War file, Processes, etc)
• Load Balancer Configuration
• Security Configuration (SSL, Documents, etc)
• Ensure Service Connectivity to external systems (databases, enterprise logs, auditing, etc)
• Update Firewall policies and documentation.

I have scripted most of these in many ways (particularly using Bash,  Puppet, Monit, etc). Most of these are not only done by me, but also prevent me from doing actual real work (developing solutions). If you find yourself in this situation, I'd like to introduce you to CloudFoundry, a PaaS project I have been following for some time. I'll plan on adding more entries on these concepts soon so that I can try to document my learning about this great platform.

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.

Developing on Windows and jps

  In the last few months, I have been forced to develop using a Windows environment. I must admit I miss most of my linux/unix command prompt usage, among which is the "jps" tool.  For those of you not familiar with it, jps is a "process status" tool and is part of the jdk.  According to the documentation, this is an unsupported tool and comes with no guarantee, however I've found it to be a simple tool that can come in handy in certain situations as the one I'm about to describe.

  During my initial maven build, the test phase was throwing exceptions due an incorrect configuration.  As I tried to delete the target directory, windows reported the folder was in use.  Cygwin's "ps" command didn't reveal much.  Window's "Task Manager" wasn't really saying much either.  This is where "jps" brought light.  Jps reported the SurefireBoot.jar still hanging in there (apparently due to some unrelease resource). Unfortunately, the problem became even more serious as the reported PID was not that simple to kill (using Cygwin's kill command).