Saving Time Using Tcat Server’s Centralized Configuration Management

Reading Time: 8 minutes

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. Continue reading

The new @Schedule annotation in Mule and iBeans

Reading Time: 7 minutes

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.
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Announcing Tcat Server 6 R2

Reading Time: 6 minutes

I am happy to report that Tcat Server 6 R2 is now available for download. Since the first release of Tcat Server 6, we have had a lot of feedback from users. In addition to positive feedback, they also wanted us to add new features to the product. We worked closely with these users to come up with the user stories and then implement them. We believe these features make Tcat Server 6 even more compelling for organizations using Apache Tomcat in development and production, as the features are focussed on reducing the manual effort associated with using Apache Tomcat.
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Using JSON bindings with iBeans

Reading Time: 7 minutes

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.
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WS-Security and SAML for Mule

Reading Time: 10 minutes

Mule ESB has had support for WS-Security via CXF for some time now, but the enterprise edition of Mule 2.2.4 goes a bit further still with the inclusion of the Mule SAML Module and a new WS-Security example. In this article, I will step through the WS-Security example so that you can see the different possibilities available for incorporating WS-Security into your Mule application. Continue reading

Mule ESB 2.2.4 Enterprise Edition is now available

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We are pleased to announce that Mule ESB 2.2.4 Enterprise Edition is now available for download from the trial site (http://www.mulesoft.com/mule-esb-enterprise-trial-download) and our customer portal (https://www.mulesoft.com/lp/dl/mule-esb-enterprise).  Some of the changes include:
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Twitter your Blog with iBeans

Reading Time: 9 minutes

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.
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