The Lean Startups movement has produced several important and successful techniques that can yield benefits to all types of organizations. One of these is continuous deployment — a process in which all code written for an application is immediately deployed into production. The result is a dramatic reduction in the development cycle time and the freeing of individual initiative. You can read about it here as described by Eric Ries.
Implementing the continuous deployment methodology can be difficult if you are developing Java EE applications, which come with inherent delays associated with the complexity of deployment and restart times for most Java EE servers. However, if you are using a lightweight, efficient application server such as Apache Tomcat, you have an advantage.
Mule community member, author, and consultant Eugene Ciurana recently discussed a technique for extending or modifying the run-time code in Mule without stopping the server, greatly reducing development time for Mule apps.
Are you frustrated with how hard it is to build and manage your web applications? Are you looking for a way to automate your webapp release and deployment processes? And for a way to easily manage upgrades and rollbacks to groups of Tomcat servers?
For those of you who are using Apache Tomcat in QA, staging, or production, I have no doubt that periodically you end up in the situation where you need to configure Tomcat’s server.xml, catalina.properties, logging.properties, and/or other Tomcat configuration files so that your webapps run the way you need them to run. Even though Tomcat allows us to configure the webapp’s <Context> in a separate file from server.xml, and even though Tomcat allows context.xml in the webapp’s META-INF directory that can be bundled as part of the webapp, that’s almost never enough to configure everything that the webapp needs. The <Context> tag by itself is just not self-contained to the point where you don’t also have to configure other important things in Tomcat’s server.xml to go along with your webapp’s <Context> configuration. (more…)
Scheduling is great, it really is. It’s also very useful for application integration since we often have to repeat tasks of over time interval or schedule tasks for a date in the future. Mule has had scheduling support since version 1.1 with the Quartz connector, now with iBeans scheduling just got easier. iBeans offers a annotations-based API for performing common integration tasks such as sending email, subscribing to a JMS queue or polling an ATOM feed. (more…)
JSON, short for JavaScript Object Notation, is a lightweight data interchange format. It is a text-based, human-readable format for representing simple data structures and associative arrays (called objects).
Many REST services use JSON as the preferred data format (including Tcat Server’s REST API). JSON provides a much simpler model for data representation and is widely used in AJAX programing.
iBeans support binding JSON data to objects and marshaling Java objects to JSON using the excellent Jackson Framework. (more…)
Most websites offer RSS or ATOM feeds for news or updates, and iBeans makes it easy to consume these feeds. In this example, I will create a simple object that will read new entries from my blog and publish a summary of them on Twitter. Note that the example assumes that you have iBeans installed. (more…)
This screen cast takes you through all the steps necessary to download and set up iBeans, Tomcat and Eclipse. Then there is a walk-through of how to create a simple echo example (using AJAX) and test/debug the application on Tomcat. Yes, this is 11 minutes but it does walk through all the steps and provides a lot of additional detail. Grab yourself a beverage and take the the tour!
I just finished an iBeans screen cast that provides an overview of iBeans and provides a detailed tour of one of the examples that ships with the latest distribution. The example demonstrates how to schedule a task and perform bi-directional AJAX communication with the browser to plot geo-coordinates onto a map. This is the first in a series of screen casts for iBeans, the next one will demonstrate how to create an iBeans project in Eclipse. Stay tuned! (more…)
