Eugene Bogaart's Weblog: GlassFish in the land of Windmills, Wooden shoes and ...

Event Driven Architecture is an overloaded term. A common view of EDA is a software architectural pattern focusing on producing, detecting, consuming and acting upon events. At the JFall conference on Wednesday November 11, I have held a presentation that explains a practical approach to EDA with Glassfish.  There is quite a collection of information available, such as:

• Intelligent Event Processing website:
• IEP BluePrints:  See NetBeans Samples
• IEP Tutorial and Webcast by Tom Barrett

If you interested in this you can get the slides here.

On november 11th  the Dutch Java User Group organizes their half yearly conference. Each conference is always packed with many tracks.  So far several GlassFish related lectures can be found on the program. From Arun Gupta is a session on  Java EE 6 and GlassFish v3: Paving the path for future.

Second,  I noted that Wouter van Reeven has a lecture on Migration to Java Enterprise Edition 6. He is known as a GlassFish addict, so he probably has his samples in GF. Further there is a talk on Event driven Architecture with Glassfish ESB by myself. This is about theory and practice behind one of the service engines in GlassFish, the intelligent event processor (IEP).  In one of the following blog entries I will provide some background on this talk.

Of course, there are 2 sessions that I will certainly attend myself, the keynote by Reggie Hutherson and Simon Ritters last session which is about toys for boys.

The Fontys Venlo Software Engineering education department offered me the possibility to lecture about GlassFish in their colloqium.  The students that follow the software engineering cluster at Fontys in Venlo have used GlassFish at many different modules throughout their education. Also all of them are NetBeans users (more info).

Instead of programming and coding we discussed indepth all it takes to deploy applications.  Building the infrastructure and managing was the main topic of the talk.  If you interessed in the slides @slideshare.

The project that was described is an implementation at a Telecom provider. Part of the project was the implementation of the core business processes of mass market VOIP offering. The presentor's main conclusion was about cost saving, if compaired with closed source solutions, on 4 different areas: licensees & support fees, project duration time, deployed infrastructure and solution operation.

The developers and architects on this project explain what they used and what their approach is in a feature article in the Dutch Java Magazine. For a article reprint go here.

Exercise 1a: Install & deploy a web application with Web Admin Console

Prepare: GlassFish 2.1 install.jar and Jdk 5 of Jdk 6

Install as developer configuration. Instuctions on developer setup are on glassfish download page

Start domain: bin/asadmin start-domain

Next follow task 1 of the Glassfish Bootcamp

Exercise 1b: Webservices Sample monitoring

Next follow task 2 of the Glassfish Bootcamp

Exercise 1c: Deploy, manage and Monitor using CLI

Next follow task 3 of the Glassfish Bootcamp

Exercise 1d: Use Call Flow monitoring

In the administrative console goto the node: Application Server, Select tab: monitor, Select sub-tab - Call flow, click button: clear Data (if any data from a previous run is still on the page listed).
Check box: Enable CallFlow monitor, Click Button: Save

Go back to exercise 1b, to generated activity on a deployed webservice.

Return to the call flow monitor page and drill down the captured data.

Exercise 2: Perfomance Advisor

This exercise is about installing and using the performance advisor. The main documentation is found here. Use the Glassfish configuration of the previous exercise and download the Performance Advisor add-on here.

In the Quick Start manual is covered how the installation process works. Whenever the add-on is visible in the Admin Console, then your done! Playing around and testing it is left upto you as an additional exercise. A sample on how it maybe used, is in the a screencast here.
Note: this add-on is only available for existing customers.

Exercise 3: Performance Monitor

Complementary to exercise 2, a stand alone tool for performance monitoring is available to hook up to GlassFish. This monitor is based upon the Visual VM project and can be used to monitor, profile, analyze threads, and monitor and control Java applications across the entire network.

In the Quick Start Guide is covered how the installation process works and the tool is started. The required zip file on sunsolve. A sample on how it is used you may find in the second part of this screencast here.
Note: this add-on is only available for existing customers.

Exercise 4: SNMP Monitoring

Instead of using JMX to monitor behaviour of an Application Server, one can use SNMP. If you need a short intro on SNMP look here. To use snmp we need to do two steps. First, add and enable SNMP in GlassFish and second run a tool that understands the MIB and connect to GlassFish. The required sunolve download can be found here.

Step 1: In the Quick Start Guide is covered how the SNMP installation process works (skip the steps about snmpwalk, we will use another tool).

Step 2: Download a SNMP/MIB browser. I suggest you use iReasoning MIB Browser Free Personal Edition. After starting the tool load the J2EE MIB definition. This MIB definition can be found near the bottom of the J2EE management web page.
Note: The SNMP add-on is only available for existing customers.

Exercise 5:Create a cluster and deploy a web application

Install as cluster configuration (if you did one of the previous exercise then remove the directory). Instructions on cluster setup are on the glassfish download page

Next follow task 4 of the Glassfish Bootcamp

Independent software vendors have to cope with many different customer infrastructure requirements. Once you decide to support a certain combination of e.g application server and database, then you are stuck with it for quite a while. So those decisions have a big impact because you have to test, maintain and sustain a large set of components that also evolve overtime.

This ISV had a very interesting strategy. They bundled a web container with their product. This reduces the number of customer infrastructure component and it eliminates a big dependency in test and QA processes. It should not surprise you that the web container of their choice was Tomcat. According to them: if Glassfish is an alternative to Tomcat then this will allow our customers to scale way beyond the current boundries.

More information on Tomcat versus Glassfish, please read here. Or additional more technical discussion by Aran Gupta

The two hour presentation & demonstration had quite some interest. If your need a this presentation you may find it on slideshare. Actually, the demonstrations were even better received. The demonstration were compiled Glassfish cluster demo (you may find the original by John Clingan on YouTube. The second demo was short demo on Call Flow. Then we showed and played with the Performance Advisor in administrative console. This demo tried to trap CPU utilization above a certain level for a given period of time. Actual this demo I borrowed from recent Glassfish webinar. The last demo was about the JBI features of the Glassfish V2 and beyond, actually a small programming example of writing a SOA style application. The main inspiration can be found in the Tutorials for exploring Open ESB.