Month: September 2009

IT Service Management and Tomcat

Posted on | by Sateesh Narahari | Leave a Comment on IT Service Management and Tomcat
Reading Time: 5 minutes

If you work in IT, you probably heard about IT service management (ITSM) or Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). ITIL is a set of best practices to improve IT effectiveness and quality, and it has gained wider adoption over the last several years. ITSM is at the heart of ITIL and aims to improve availability of IT services while reducing the cost of repeatable IT processes.

ITIL consists of several areas: Service Desk, Incident Management, Problem Management, Configuration Management, Release Management, Change Management, Availability Management, Service Level Management, Capacity Management, Financial Management, and IT Service Continuity Management.

In this blog post, I will explore couple of areas and how you can use Tcat Server to gather supporting data for these process areas.

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Finding bad code

Posted on | by Sateesh Narahari | 2 Comments on Finding bad code
Reading Time: 5 minutes

Several years ago, I moved into Product Management, and progressively my time writing code has diminished. Hanging out with the super smart developers at MuleSoft has made me realize how much I missed the days of writing code. So I wanted to get back to doing some code, and what better way to do it than to write a few JSPs? JSPs are easy to write, and you get instant gratification as well.

I wrote a simple JSP that extracts data from an XML file, and it was working fine. When I showed it to the developers, they laughed and told me that I could make the code a lot simpler by using XPath. Sure enough, XPath looked easy enough to use, and I started refactoring my JSP. But during this process, I ran into a nasty bug. It seemed like once in a while, the JSP did not return forever. As any newbie developer would do, I immediately blamed the problem on the XML libraries I am using and started Googling for a solution. Unable to find a solution, I turned to Tcat Server to get diagnostic data. Continue reading →

Recompiling Tomcat May Cause Runtime Problems

Posted on | by jasonb | Leave a Comment on Recompiling Tomcat May Cause Runtime Problems
Reading Time: 11 minutes

It’s a very good thing that Tomcat is open source software. Because it is open, it enjoys broad stand-alone adoption, plus it has been incorporated as part of many other application server products, both commercial and open source. Why reinvent the wheel when Tomcat works great as a generic web container, and the source code is free? Many smart application server teams have chosen to embed Tomcat as their web container. They pull a copy of the Tomcat source code that they know works well, put it into their own source tree, and hook Tomcat’s Ant build system into their own, and rebuild Tomcat as part of their project. Continue reading →

Whats new with Tcat Server?

Posted on | by Sateesh Narahari | Leave a Comment on Whats new with Tcat Server?
Reading Time: 4 minutes

Since the launch of the public beta of Tcat Server a few weeks ago, the team at MuleSoft has been busy working on adding new features to the product. We also launched a new product called Mule iBeans. To complement iBeans, we released public beta 2 of Tcat Server, which is now optimized as the ideal runtime for iBeans and contains several new features. Here are the highlights:

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iBeans = Dead Simple Integration for Web Apps

Posted on | by Ross Mason | 10 Comments on iBeans = Dead Simple Integration for Web Apps
Reading Time: 6 minutes

I am very excited to announce that MuleSoft has launched a new open source integration product called iBeans (short for Integration Beans). iBeans provide a way to dramatically simplify common integration tasks for Web application developers.

Why did we create iBeans?

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Overcoming XML Validation Errors in Eclipse 3.5

Posted on | by Dirk Olmes | 24 Comments on Overcoming XML Validation Errors in Eclipse 3.5
Reading Time: 2 minutes

When I recently switched to Eclipse Galileo, I noticed that a Mule configuration file that had previously validated correctly now had validation errors. Since I did not change the file, something in Galileo’s validation of XML files must have changed.

The symptoms are these:

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Agile Planning at Mule

Posted on | by Ken Yagen | 1 Comment on Agile Planning at Mule
Reading Time: 5 minutes

At MuleSoft we use Agile development to build and deliver all of our software products. One of the more challenging and potentially time consuming part of agile is story estimating. Recently we decided to take a new approach to this that has proven to be a lot of fun and amazingly accurate. I call it Bubble Sort Estimation. Continue reading →

Revamping the XMPP transport

Posted on | by Dirk Olmes | 12 Comments on Revamping the XMPP transport
Reading Time: 3 minutes

Some time ago I wanted to do a Mule demo. I’m a Jabber fan so I wanted to use the XMPP transport for the demo.

I soon found out that the XMPP transport in its current form doesn’t work with real world Jabber servers any more. SSL connections are negotiated through TLS now and authentication seems to involve SASL – two things that the outdated smack version we’re using for the XMPP transport cannot currently do.

So I decided to not only update the library but rather make the config of the transport more user friendly.

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Tomcat Performance Tuning Tips

Posted on | by jasonb | 2 Comments on Tomcat Performance Tuning Tips
Reading Time: 8 minutes

I often get questions about how to tune Tomcat for better performance.  It is usually best to answer this only after first spending some time understanding the installation of Tomcat, the web site’s traffic level, and the web applications that it runs.  But, there are some general performance tips that apply regardless of these important details.  In general, Tomcat performs better when you:

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