Investigating Memory Leaks Part 2 - Analysing the Problem

The first blog in this mini-series looked at creating a very leaky sample application, so that we can investigate techniques for solving heap based problems on server applications. It demonstrates the big problem with the Producer-Consumer pattern, namely that the consumer code has to be able to remove items from the queue at least as fast, if not faster than, the producer. The blog ended with me starting the sample code and sitting back whilst it leaked enough memory away to investigate. It’s now time to do that investigation.

If you read part 1 of this blog, you’ll know that the leaky code is part of an application¹ that records stock/share orders in a dummy database using the Producer Consumer pattern. The sample code has been written to contain a very obvious flaw, namely that the OrderRecord can’t keep up with the OrderFeed. This means that the Order queue gets bigger and bigger until finally, the application runs out of heap space and falls over. The thing is, looking at my simple code, the problem should be obvious, but what if you've never seen the code before and it's huge, complex industrial strength code, plus there's no simple monitoring thread to keep an eye on the queue size or other internals? What do you do then?

Investigating Memory Leaks Part 1 - Writing Leaky Code

I found this little problem the other day: there’s this server that runs for a while and then falls over. It’s then restarted by its startup script and the whole process repeats itself. This doesn't sound that bad as it isn't business critical although there is a significant loss of data, so I decided to take a closer look and to find out exactly what's going wrong. The first thing to note is that the server passes all it's unit tests and a whole bunch of integration tests. It runs well in all test environments using test data, so what's going wrong in production? It's easy to guess that in production it's probably under a heavier load than test, or than had been allowed for in its design, and therefore it's running out of resources, but what resources and where? That's the tricky question.

Getting Started with Hazelcast

In July I wrote a blog introducing erlang to Java developers, highlighting some of the similarities and differences between the two languages. The erlang virtual machine has a number of impressive, built-in features, one of which is that they are location independent and can talk to each other. This means that that data can be synchronised between VMs by writing very few lines of code. This is really good news if you have a networked cluster of servers all doing the same thing.

You could argue that there's something lacking in the JVM if it can't even perform the most basic interprocess communication; however, Java takes the opposite view, it has a basic VM and then layers different services on top as and when required. Whether this is right is a matter of opinion and I'll leave it as a subject for a future blog, because it seems that the Hazelcast Guys have solved the problem of JVMs talking to each other; which is the point of this blog.

So, what is Hazelcast?

Tomcat's Graceful Shutdown with Daemons and Shutdown Hooks

My last couple of blogs have talked about long polling and Spring's DeferredResult technique and to demonstrate these concepts I've shoehorned the code from my Producer Consumer project into a web application. Although the code demonstrates the points made by the blogs it does contain a large number of holes in its logic. Apart from the fact that in a real application you wouldn't use a simple LinkedBlockingQueue, but would choose JMS or some other industrial strength messaging service, and the fact that only one user can get hold of the match updates, there's also the problem it spawns badly behaved threads that don't close down when the JVM terminates.

You may wonder why this should be a problem…

Long Polling with Spring 3.2’s DeferredResult

In our last episode, the CEO of Agile Cowboys Inc had just hired a Java/Spring consultant by giving him the Porsche that he originally bought for his girlfriend. Being upset by the loss of her prize Porsche, the CEO’s girlfriend has told his wife of their affair. His wife, after cutting up the CEO’s suites has filed for divorce. Meanwhile the CEO has implemented a new ‘casual’ dress code at the office and the Java/Spring consultant has just arrived back from a spin in his new Porsche and is sitting down at his desk about to fix the TV company’s software... If this doesn’t mean anything to you then take a look at Long Polling Tomcat With Spring.

The Java/Spring Consultant has to fix the TV Company’s server resource problem before the next big game, and he knows he can do this by implementing Spring’s Deferred Result technique using the Servlet 3 specification as implemented on Tomcat 7¹

The first thing that the Java/Spring consultant does is to check

Long Polling Tomcat with Spring

"Ooh err Missus" as comedian Frankie Howerd would have said, but enough of British innuendo and double entendre because Long Polling Tomcat isn't some kind of sexual deviance with next door's moggy, it's a technique (or more of a hack) that's been developed as a result of Steve Jobs's refusal to support Adobe Flash Player on the iPhone and iPad. The thing is, using Flash Player as part of a web application was a really good way of supporting the Publish and Subscribe paradigm as it was able to cater for those scenarios that require live updates, such as live stock prices, news updates and changes to betting odds, whereas straight forward HTTP, with its request/reply paradigm, is a good way of supporting static pages. A good number of companies put a lot of effort in to developing applications that used Flash in order to provide their users with realtime data. When Apple announced that iOS would not support Adobe Flash they were left high and dry without an iPhone solution and to get back into the mobile market I imagine that a good number of them went for long polling.

So, what is a long poll? Well, it isn't a tall guy from Warsaw, the idea is to mimic the Publish and Subscribe pattern. The scenario goes like this:

Erlang for Java Developers

You probably haven't noticed, but it's a couple of weeks since I last posted a blog. There is reason for this is that I've ruptured my Soleus and my leg is in a plaster cast. Being immobile I thought that it would be a good idea to investigate something totally different - it was either that or watch day time TV and, even though reruns of Kojak and Magnum PI were tempting, investigating Erlang came out tops.

The thing to remember here is that this is not an Erlang tutorial, the idea here is to examine a few of the similarities between Erlang and Java in order to try an provide a starting point for learning Erlang. If I've made any howling mistakes, then hopefully someone with more Erlang experience will let me know.

When getting started, the first thing they tell you about Erlang is that it's a functional language; however, before you have apoplexy at the thought, it's such a well structured functional language that you'd think you were dealing with objects.

Getting Started With Spring’s MVC Test Framework - Part 2

The first blog in this mini-series introduced the Spring MVC Test Framework and demonstrated its use in unit testing Spring MVC Controller classes as controllers rather then as POJOs. It’s now time to talk about using the framework for integration testing.

By ‘integration testing’ I mean loading the Spring context into the test environment so that the controller can work with its collaborators in ‘end to end’ tests.

Getting Started With Spring’s MVC Test Framework - Part 1

Newly promoted to the main Spring framework is the Spring MVC Test Framework, which the Guys at Spring claim is a “first class JUnit support for testing client and server side Spring MVC code through a fluent API”¹. In this and my next blog, I’m going to take a look at Spring’s MVC Test Framework and apply it to some of my existing sample code to figure out whether or not it does what it says on the tin.

The API has been designed with two ways of setting up server side tests. These are firstly, with a Spring context file and secondly, programmatically without a context file. The Guys at Spring refer to the programatic method as ‘standalone’ mode.

Setting tests up programmatically

Auditing a Spring MVC Webapp with AspectJ. Part 2

Now, this is the blog you want to read if you're interested in creating a Spring MVC Webapp that uses Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) in the form of Aspectj's @Aspect and @Before annotations to audit a user's visit to a screen.

As I said in my last blog auditing a user’s visits to a screen is one of those few cross-cutting concerns that Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) solves very well. The idea in the case of my demo code, is that you add an annotation to the appropriate controllers and every time a user visits a page, then that visit is recorded. Using this technique you can construct a picture of the most popular screens and therefore the most popular chunks of functionality in your application. Knowing these details makes it easier to decide where to aim your development effort as it doesn’t pay to develop those chunks of your application that hardly anyone ever uses.

For the demo-code I created a simple Spring MVC application that has two screens: a home page and a help page. On top of this I’ve created a simple annotation: @Audit, which is used to mark a controller as one that needs auditing (not all of them will, especially if you choose to audit function points rather than individual screens) and to tell the advice object the screen id. This I've demonstrated in the snippet of code below:

Auditing a Spring MVC Webapp with AspectJ. Part 1

If you’re like me, then you’ll have those kinds of programming days where everything seems to go incredibly well. You write the code and the tests and it just works. And then and there are those other kinds of days, the really bad ones, where you know that everything you’ve written is as right as it can be and the code refuses to work: something is obviously wrong, but you’ve no idea what. I had one of these kinds of days when writing the code for this blog. The idea was to demonstrate how to use Spring and Aspectj to audit a user’s visits to a screen.

Acceptance Criteria Should be Executable

Having covered the debacle at Backwater Bank inc, you would have thought that my last blog had said just about everything there is to say about Agile User Stories. Well, that turns out not to be the case. If you take a look at an example order a cheque book story from the Backwater Bank inc scenario, you'll see that includes some acceptance criteria:

Title: Order Cheque Book
As a customer
I want to access my online account
So that I can order a new cheque book

Acceptance Criteria
1) The bank will only send out a cheque book if the customer is in credit.
2) The user can only request a cheque book if the bank has his/her complete address details.

...and acceptance criteria implies that there are tests associated with the story.

So, what's in a story?

I don't know about you, but I always feel a little nervous when it comes to writing Agile stories. I often worry whether I'm the best person to write them and if I've got them right. The reason for the first worry is that the agile gospel says that the best stories are written by the customers whilst, the reason for the second worry is that my stories will be reviewed by a number of people including various project stake holders. All of which got me thinking: writing a story, how hard can it be? So, I took a good look around to see what advice others could offer.

Some of this advice was often vague such as that in

Spring and the java.lang.NoSuchFieldError: NULL Exception

A few days ago I was going through a project's Maven dependencies, removing unused junk, checking jar file version numbers adding a little dependency management and generally tidying up (yes, I know that this isn't something we often get time to do, but even Maven dependencies can be a form of technical debt). After recompiling and running the unit tests I ran some end to end tests only to find that the whole thing fell apart... Big time.

The exception I got was the usual one that all Spring developers get, a

Spring MVC, Ajax and JSON Part 3 - The Client Side Code

If you’ve been following this short series of blogs on Spring, Ajax and JSON you’ll recall that I’ve got as far as creating a Spring MVC web application that displays a form, which allows the user to select a bunch of items and submit a request to the server to purchase them. The server then replies with some JSON allowing the user to confirm their purchases. If you already know all this you can now jump to HERE. If you’re wondering what I’m talking about then take a look at the first two blogs in this series:

• Spring MVC, Ajax and JSON Part 1 - Setting The Scene
• Spring MVC, Ajax and JSON Part 2 - The Server Side Code

HERE

Having completed the server side code then the next thing to do is to move on to the client side code,

Spring MVC, Ajax and JSON Part 2 - The Server Side Code

In my last blog I said that I was going to talk about Spring, Ajax and JSON, but didn't. The reason for this is that I wanted to set the scene using a (barely) credible shopping web site scenario. In this scenario when the user clicks on the eCommerce page link, the server app loads some the items from a catalogue and displays them on the page. The user then checks a number of items and presses 'Confirm Purchase'. Now, this is where Ajax and JSON come in, on pressing 'Confirm Purchase' the browser makes an Ajax request to the server sending it the item ids. The server then retrieves the items from the database returns them as JSON to the browser. The browser then processes the JSON, displaying the items on he screen.

My last blog got as far as creating and displaying a form that presented a list of items from the imaginary catalogue to the user. This blog takes a look at the next step in the project: creating some JSON.

Spring MVC, Ajax and JSON Part 1 - Setting The Scene

I've been thinking about writing a blog on Spring, Ajax and JSON for a good while, but I've never got around to it. This was mainly because it was quite complicated and the technique required has been in a state of flux. When I decided to write this blog, I had a scout around the Internet and if you look on places such as Stack Overflow you'll see many different and often contradictory answers to the question "how do I write a Spring Ajax/JSON application?" I think that this is fault of the Guys at Spring in that they've been really busy improving Spring's support for JSon; not only that the Guys at JQuery have also been busy, which means that overall things have changed dramatically over the last couple of years and the answers to this "how do I write a Spring Ajax/JSON application?" are out of date.

Five Ways of Synchronising Multithreaded Integration Tests

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog on synchronizing multithreaded integration tests, which was republished on DZone Javalobby from where it received a comment from Robert Saulnier who quite rightly pointed out that you can also use join() to synchronize a worker thread and its unit tests. This got me thinking, just how many ways can you synchronise multi-threaded integration tests? So, I started counting...

Just What Are Spring 3.2 Matrix Variables? - Part 2: The Code

My last blog on Spring's support for Matrix Variables concentrated on explaining what they were and why you'd want to use them. Having sorted out the what and the why, this blog is all about the how and how you use them. I also gave several examples of Matrix URIs and so, it seems good idea to demonstrate some code that processes a couple of them.

Does Defensive Programming Deserve Such a Bad Name?

The other day I went to an hour's talk on erlang, merely as an observer; I know nothing about erlang except that it does sound interesting and that the syntax is... well... unusual. The talk was given to some Java programmers who had recently learnt erlang and was a fair critic about their first erlang project, which they were just completing. The presenter said that these programmers needed to stop thinking like Java programmers and start thinking like erlang programmers¹ and in particular to stop programming defensively and let processes fail fast and fix the problem.

Now, apparently, this is good practice in erlang because one of the features of erlang, and please correct me if I'm wrong, is that work is split into supervisors and processes. Supervisors supervise processes, creating them, destroying them and restarting them if required. The idea of failing fast is nothing new and is defined as the technique to use when your code comes across an illegal input. When this happens your code just falls over and aborts the point being that you fix the supplier of that input rather than your code. The sub-text of what the presenter said is that Java and defensive programming is bad and fail-fast if good, which is something that really needs closer investigation.

Just What Are Spring 3.2 Matrix Variables? - Part 1

Spring 3.2 introduced support for processing something called 'Matrix Variables' and probably like most developers, I've never heard of them. So, after some research, this blog is my understanding of what they are and what you can do with them. As usual, please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

When I first read about them a whole bunch of questions came to mind, for example:

• What are they?
• Why use them?
• Why do the Guys at Spring think they're important?
• Why now?

Exception Handling with the Spring 3.2 @ControllerAdvice Annotation

A short time ago, I wrote a blog outlining how I upgraded my Spring sample code to version 3.2 and demonstrating a few of the little 'gotchas' that arose. Since that I've been perusing Spring 3.2's new feature list and whilst it doesn't contain any revolutionary new changes, which I suspect the Guys at Spring are saving for version 4, it does contain a few neat upgrades. The first one that grabbed my attention was the new @ControllerAdvice annotation, which seems to neatly plug a gap in Spring 3 functionality. Let me explain…

Creating a Spring 3.2 MVC Web App

A couple of days ago, I wrote a blog outlining how I upgraded my Spring sample code to version 3.2.1-RELEASE and demonstrated a few of the little 'gotchas' that arose. One of those 'gotchas' involved a Spring ContentNegotiationManagerFactoryBean error and I demonstrated a fix that involved declaring the spring-web module in your POM file, rather than relying on its import as a transient dependency, which I'm guessing pulled in the wrong version.

Since than I've been perusing Spring 3.2's new feature list, deciding which I thought were useful and would also make good blogs. When writing a blog, the first thing I like to do is to create a working sample and so I decided to create a new Spring MVC project using the Spring Project Template feature on the SpringSource Dashboard.

Upgrading to Spring 3.2

A few days ago I thought that it was about time to upgrade my sample code to Spring 3.2, after all it’s been around for a respectable amount of time and even has a bug fix release.

Upgrading to Spring 3.2 is very simple matter of upgrading your Maven version number and rebuilding, something like this:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-core</artifactId>
    <version>3.2.1.RELEASE</version>
</dependency>

...for every Spring dependency and then recompiling

Producers and Consumers - Part 3 Poison Pills

A couple of weeks ago I wrote part 2 of a short series of blogs on the Producer Consumer pattern. This blog focused upon the need to close down my Teletype’s worker thread, fixing a bug in the original code from part 1 of the series.

The idea here is that the Teletype’s worker thread can be controlled by a command from the application’s main thread. This command tells the worker thread to shutdown thus allowing the app the gracefully shutdown as demonstrated by the code below:

Maven’s Non-resolvable parent POM Problem

I recently got an email from Nosheen Javed asking about an exception he was getting on his Maven build. The exception was:

[FATAL] Non-resolvable parent POM: Failure to find com.mycompany.samples:biometrics-samples:pom:4.2.0.0

...which when listed in full comes out as:

Apache Maven 3.0.4 (r1232337; 2012-01-17 13:44:56+0500)
Maven home: C:\Users\Nosheen\workspace\simple-fingers-sample\EMBEDDED
Java version: 1.7.0_07, vendor: Oracle Corporation
Java home: C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre7
Default locale: en_GB, platform encoding: Cp1252
OS name: "windows 7", version: "6.1", arch: "x86", family: "windows"

SLF4J: Failed to load class "org.slf4j.impl.StaticLoggerBinder".
SLF4J: Defaulting to no-operation (NOP) logger implementation
SLF4J: See http://www.slf4j.org/codes.html#StaticLoggerBinder for further details.
[INFO] Error stacktraces are turned on.
[DEBUG] Reading global settings from EMBEDDED\conf\settings.xml
[DEBUG] Reading user settings from C:\Users\Nosheen\.m2\settings.xml
[DEBUG] Using local repository at C:\Users\Nosheen\.m2\repository
[DEBUG] Using manager EnhancedLocalRepositoryManager with priority 10 for C:\Users\Nosheen\.m2\repository
[INFO] Scanning for projects...
[ERROR] The build could not read 1 project -> [Help 1]

Producers and Consumers - Part 2 - Interrupting Worker Threads

This blog isn’t really about Producers and Consumers, I covered all that in my last blog. If you’ve not seen it then to recap it demonstrates the Producer Consumer pattern using the scenario of commentators reporting on football (soccer) games by putting updates on a queue. These updates are then read back in the TV studio by a Teletype and displayed on the viewer’s TV screen.

Producers and Consumers - Part 1

The Producer Consumer pattern is an ideal way of separating work that needs to be done from the execution of that work. As you might guess from its name the Producer Consumer pattern contains two major components, which are usually linked by a queue. This means that the separation of the work that needs doing from the execution of that work is achieved by the Producer placing items of work on the queue for later processing instead of dealing with them the moment they are identified. The Consumer is then free to remove the work item from the queue for processing at any time in the future. This decoupling means that Producers don't care how each item of work will be processed, how many consumers will be processing it or how many other producers there are. It's a fire and forget world as far as they're concerned. Likewise consumers don't need to know where the work item came from, who put it in the queue, and how many other producers and consumers there are. All they need to do is to grab some work from the queue and process it.

In the Java world, the Producer Consumer pattern is often based around some kind of blocking queue and there are several to choose from. These include ArrayBlockingQueue, LinkedBlockingQueue and PriorityBlockingQueue. Each have slightly different characteristics.

Synchronising Multithreaded Integration Tests

Testing threads is hard, very hard and this makes writing good integration tests for multithreaded systems under test... hard. This is because in JUnit there's no built in synchronisation between the test code, the object under test and any threads. This means that problems usually arise when you have to write a test for a method that creates and runs a thread. One of the most common scenarios in this domain is in making a call to a method under test, which starts a new thread running before returning. At some point in the future when the thread's job is done you need assert that everything went well. Examples of this scenario could include asynchronously reading data from a socket or carrying out a long and complex set of operations on a database.

Three Spring Bean Lifecycle Techniques

When using the term 'lifecycle' the Guys at Spring are referring to the construction and destruction of your beans and usually this is in relation to the construction and destruction the Spring Context. There are those occassions when the management of your bean's lifecycle is not a trivial task as there's the need for it to perform its own internal set up. This is usually true when your bean has to interact with an external system including: loading a file, opening a socket or reading some data from the database. It doesn't really matter what it is, to solve this problem all you need is for Spring to call your bean when it's both loading the Spring Context and closing it down.

To that end Spring has three ways of calling your code during initialisation and shut down. These are:

How Do You Organise Maven Sub-Modules?

Being an itinerant programmer one of the things I've noticed over the years is that every project you come across seems to have a slightly different way of organising its Maven modules. There seems to be no conventional way of characterising the contents of a project's sub-modules and not that much discussion on it either. This is strange, as defining the responsibilities of your Maven modules seems to me to be as critical as good class design and coding technique to a project's success. So, in light of this dearth of wisdom, here's my two penneth worth...

Super Quick Tomcat App Deployment Using a PULL Script

If you managed to read my last blog you'll remember that I demonstrated a simple script for creating a new tomcat installation on a server by splitting the tomcat binaries from the conf files, storing the binaries on a FTP server and the conf files in version control, with a script recombining the two parts.

The next and most obvious improvement to this idea is to create a system for automatically deploying an application once it has compiled and passed its unit tests. There are many ways of doing this,

Super Fast Tomcat Installation using FTP and Version Control

When talking about Continuous Delivery one of the tests that both Martin Fowler and Jez Humble often mention is their "flame thrower" test. It goes something like this: Jez will say "How long would it take you to get up and running if Martin and I went into your machine rooms armed with flame throwers and axes and started attacking your servers"?