Delays

Sorry for the delay, I've been stuck inside a proxy for the past 2 months and unable to access the blog.

From now on I'll be able to update this with more information, and be a little more active.

Next week I'll try and add the basis for our project.

Step One: Getting to know Tomcat and JBoss

Hello,

Like I've said in my first post, I'd like to list some problems that can happen when you are migrating from a Tomcat environment to a JBoss JEE environment.

But first, instead of going through all the problems you might have, I've decided that it would be best to work by example, so I will describe a simple Spring/JPA application that you can deploy in Tomcat.

Later we will describe a migration path from Tomcat 6 to JBoss AS 5.

The application will be a JSF application, using Spring as the IoC Container with annotations, component scanning, for persistence layer we will use Hibernate. For this example, we will not use the latest libraries, otherwise we would not actually have a lot of incompatibility, whereas the idea is to actually solve the issues.

Firstly we need to understand Tomcat, it is a Servlet 2.5 container, so it has no EJB3 support, JPA, JTA, ans so forth, it's a bare server, it is used a lot by developers because, since it is bare, we can debug and develop with greater speed than when using a full JEE compliant environment. Unfortunately, because it is not a JEE compliant container, developers that release production builds on Tomcat have to supplement the absence of the JEE container using third party libraries and frameworks, like Spring for IoC and Dependency Injection, Hibernate for JPA support, MyFaces and Richfaces for JSF support, JoTM for JTA, and so forth.

So, in one hand we have some freedom to use what we want with Tomcat, and on the other hand we need to have experience with a lot of things to guarantee a production level application.

When we go to JBoss, we have a much more restrictive environment (since 5.x) where we have strong enforcing of the specifications, and out of the box support for a lot of things that we would otherwise need. Unfortunately due to this restrictive nature, applications made to run with third party libraries tend to turn into a big headache when you want to migrate from one environment to the other, without changing a single line of code.

So, next post I'll start big introducing a simple project, that will be our "legacy" Tomcat project, and with each step we will advance, until we finally achieve a complete migration.

Until the next post!

Introductions are in order...

So, like the title says, introductions are in order...

My name is Fabio and I've been a software developer / analyst / enthusiast for some 8 - 10 years now, and regrettably I've failed to add much contribution to the community during this time.

So I've decided to change that, and try and give my two cents back to the community who's helped me every time I had questions and was stuck with bugs/problems of my own.

You might say, who's he to say he can contribute, well, all I can say is that I've had my slice of experience, and any contribution, regardless of size, should be good enough, because in the end, 0.1 is always bigger than 0 :D

Anyways, what I am to do is try to add some problems and solutions, much like what other tech blogs do, and hopefully be able to help out anyone who's stuck on the same problem.

My goal is not world domination of information, but I just feel that I can contribute with something.

So going forward, right now I am working in two projects, one is defining migration paths from Tomcat 6 to JBoss AS 5, and the other is a commercial C# .net GIS system.

Now you ask Java and C# .net? Well, like I've said in my info, I've always liked R&D, so I'll at least try working with a technology first.

So based on what I am working recently I expect to have some posts about migration paths, and try to centralize some of the roadblocks I've hit, and the solutions I've found. And also I can share some of what has been like for me to design and work in a C# .net solution, from a Java Developer perspective.

So, nice to know you, and hope my posts can help any of you in the future.