It has been a while since I last blogged about the new XMPP transport for Mule ESB. I’ve been making slow progress since then, but I’ve finally arrived at a point where the transport is starting to be useable. I’d like to show that by building a simple jabber client using the XMPP and stdio transports.
Continue reading 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.
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In a recent post by Loraine Lawson on ITBusinessEdge, an informal survey was cited that referenced a majority of mid-market CIOs who “said they had no current business need for SOA.” I was a little surprised by the headline since MuleSoft continues to see tremendous adoption of our open source Mule ESB and subscriptions of our enterprise version among companies I would describe as mid-market. So, I decided to read further and try to learn more.
Continue reading 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.
Continue reading In our continuous quest to understand developer trends and preferences, we are conducting a short survey. The survey should take around 5 minutes to complete and will help us gain insight into developer trends. We may contact you for a follow-up discussion to get detailed input from you. We will also enter your name into a random drawing for $100 if you provide contact information.
Please retweet/blog or email the survey to your friends and colleagues. Thank you for your help!
To take the Survey, click HERE.
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?
Join Dan Diephouse, Sr. Architect at MuleSoft, and Jason vna Zyl, founder of Maven and Sonatype, for a webinar on Seamless Webapp Deployment with Maven and Tcat Server.
During this webinar you will learn how Tcat Server and Maven can simplify and automate your build and deployment processes. You’ll see how easy it is to build applications with Maven, automate deployments from Maven directly to your Tomcat servers, and do “one-click” upgrades and rollbacks to groups of Tomcat servers.
Continue reading As mentioned in my last post, I have recently spent some time improving the Tomcat package on the Ubuntu and Debian Linux distributions. This post goes into more detail on those changes.
For quite some time I have been studying the Tomcat startup and shutdown procedures, and trying to improve the reliability, security, and user experience on Linux. I noticed that the Ubuntu and Debian init scripts were starting Tomcat via the JSVC service runner, which is known to shut down Tomcat abruptly. JSVC also implements unreliable restarts, such that it is possible for the init script to be unable to restart Tomcat. Instead, the init script should start Tomcat by running Tomcat’s catalina.sh script, and that script should in turn run the Java binary, so that the init script can properly handle any issues with starts, stops, or restarts.
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A part of the work we are doing on Mule 3 is to clean up and simplify the existing design. One thing I recently started working on is untangling the relationship between MuleMessage and MessageAdapter and review the use of message adapters throughout the code base.
The current design around these two is somewhat awkward: MuleMessage extends MessageAdapter. I consider this to be the exposure of an implementation detail rather than a good design choice. The MessageAdapter is a throwback from the first Mule architecture, but we’ve moved on from that so it is high time to revisit this approach.
Reading Time: 4 minutesToday, MuleSoft announced a new cloud service offering – Cloudcat – which will dramatically reduce the time and effort it takes to use Apache Tomcat in the cloud.
Your application infrastructure should never get in the way of delivering the web applications. Cloud computing has been gaining rapid adoption with developers and IT organizations alike, as it is often the easiest way to provision infrastructure for delivering applications. Apache Tomcat is perfectly suited for the cloud, because it is light weight and does not have the burden of a full blown Java EE application server, a huge advantage when you are paying cloud service providers “by the drink .” However, until now, provisioning a new Tomcat instance in the cloud has required a considerable amount of work, since you need to provision a server image, manually download and install Tomcat, configure the database and more.
Reading Time: 7 minutesIn early days of my career, Sun Microsystems was the company we all looked towards. No other company innovated as much in hardware and then in software as Sun Microsystems did. In fact, Apache Tomcat started as a project at Sun. I would have guessed in the early 90s that Sun would buy Oracle – oh well, how times change.
Oracle has a daunting task ahead of integrating some amazing technologies they acquired from Sun Microsystems. Several important and critical technology pieces such as MySQL, NetBeans, and the whole Java community need careful attention. It is only natural then that some other products might not get an equal amount of TLC from Oracle executives. Continue reading