Author Archive

Monitoring Hippo Connection pool using jmx and groovy

August 19th, 2010 by Jettro Coenradie
(http://blog.jteam.nl/2010/08/19/monitoring-hippo-connection-pool-using-jmx-and-groovy/)

For a project we are using Hippo to manage our content. We have a few components that interact with the repository using the connection pool as provided by hippo. I have modified the connection pool to increase the amount of logs and I have added statistics to the pool which can be exposed using JMX. Our custom components use this altered connection pool, but I the site did not. Our site makes use of the Hippo Site Toolkit, and I want to have this monitoring available as well.

In this blogpost I will explain the changes I made to the connection pool. After that I’ll show what to do to make this changed connection pool available to a site created with the HST and I’ll show a groovy script that reads the data from the remote servers using the JMX connection.

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Posted in Development | 3 Comments »

JTeam en rijksoverheid.nl

April 5th, 2010 by Jettro Coenradie
(http://blog.jteam.nl/2010/04/05/jteam-en-rijksoverheid-nl/)

www.rijksoverheid.nl is live. Hoelang geleden het idee achter één rijksbrede website is ontstaan weet ik niet. Hoelang ik nu bij het project betrokken ben weet ik wel.

Screen shot 2010-04-04 at 08.52.08.png

Het is nu ongeveer anderhalf jaar geleden dat ik ben begonnen als Software Architect bij het project Overheid Nieuws Stijl. Het is een ambitieus project om 16 websites samen te laten komen in één rijksbrede website www.rijksoverheid.nl. Met de eerste live gang zijn er 7 websites over: postbus 51, regering.nl, minaz.nl, minez.nl, minocw.nl, minvws.nl en jeugengezin.nl. Uiteraard moest de meeste content van de websites ook op de nieuwe website terug te vinden zijn.

Vanuit de overheid is er voor gekozen om zoveel mogelijk Open Source software te gaan gebruiken. Ook voor het project Overheid Nieuwe Stijl (ONS) is er gekozen voor meerdere Open Source oplossingen. Naast het gebruik van Open Source software worden zaken als Open Standaarden en ook Open Data belangrijk gevonden. Vooral Open Data wordt door iedereen als zeer positief ervaren. De licentie voor alle content is Creative Commons.

Mocht je meer informatie willen hebben over dit enorme project, dan kun je deze hier vinden.

In deze blogpost wil ik me vooral concentreren op de betrokkenheid van JTeam bij dit ambitieuze project voor de rijksoverheid.

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Posted in Business, Development | 2 Comments »

Logging to the syslog from a java application

January 14th, 2010 by Jettro Coenradie
(http://blog.jteam.nl/2010/01/14/logging-to-the-syslog-from-a-java-application/)

Every application needs logging, it can help you during development and when debugging those annoying things that do not work in production. One question is where to put the logging events. All linux servers use a system log to log events that take place on the operating system level. You can find logs for the kernel, deamons, user actions and a lot of other items. The nice part about system logging is that maintenance people will always know where to look and that it is possible to use one server for logging.

At the moment I am on a project that uses a fair amount of servers. We have more than 20 servers for the different environments and a lot of components to investigate when trying to find problems. Think about squid logs, apache httpd logs, tomcat logs and more. To make this doable, we have a syslog server.

An application running in Tomcat does not log to the system log by default. In our situation, we want our components to log to different files. Syslog has a special facility that makes it easy to do just that.

This blog post discusses the different parts of configuring system logging from a java application using the well known log4j.

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Posted in Development | 2 Comments »

Using ehcache monitor

December 22nd, 2009 by Jettro Coenradie
(http://blog.jteam.nl/2009/12/22/using-ehcache-monitor/)

Screen shot 2009-12-22 at 10.25.31 AM.png

In my previous blog post serving a heavy load rss feed with spring 3 and ehcache I showed a solution for rss and caching using ehcache. After posting, Alex Miller commented about using a new product from ehcache called ehcache monitor. As curious as I am I decided to have a look.

In this blog post I give you a short introduction into the new monitor tool. I’ll use the sample from the previous post. I’ll explain the steps to take to do the test yourself, including installation. I will also show the screens to show you the actual monitoring.

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Posted in Development | 2 Comments »

Serving a heavy load rss feed with Spring 3 and EHCache

December 17th, 2009 by Jettro Coenradie
(http://blog.jteam.nl/2009/12/17/serving-a-heavy-load-rss-feed-with-spring-3-and-ehcache/)

For a project I am doing there was a feature request to come up with an rss component for their new website. This seems pretty easy but the amount of possible feeds (100.000) and the potential for very high load made us think about a custom made solution based on ehcache, spring 3 and rome.

Some of the requirements for the solution have already been mentioned. The following list gives an overview of the things to consider.

    

  • Over 100.000 of possible feeds.
  • Every search on the page can be used as a feed
  • Certain feeds will be under very high load
  • Content can easily be cached

Within this post I will discuss the different technical requirements for caching in these kind of solutions. I will also step through the creating of a feed using spring 3 and finally I present the demo application that can actually be used as a web application that exposes news content using a feed as well as a website.

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Posted in Development | 4 Comments »

Using GIT coming from subversion

November 12th, 2009 by Jettro Coenradie
(http://blog.jteam.nl/2009/11/12/using-git-coming-from-subversion/)

A while a go I upgraded to subversion 1.6. That was the moment I started to have more and more problems with subversion. The past years I was a strong advocate of subversion, but now I am having a hard time defending the usage of subversion. I got interested in GIT. About a month a go Jelmer did a presentation about GIT and I saw Peter Ledbrook using GIT during a training about groovy and grails. Now I have read the Git Community Book and I created an account at github. Time to share what I have learned.

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Posted in Development | 1 Comment »

Second meetup DDDNL usergroup

October 1st, 2009 by Jettro Coenradie
(http://blog.jteam.nl/2009/10/01/second-meetup-dddnl-usergroup/)

Is has been more than a month a go that we had our first meeting, it is shorter than a month before we have the second event. The next event will take place on the 27th of october. The second event will be held at JTeam office in Amsterdam.

The program for the event will be:

17:30 – 18:30 pizza at JTeam office
18:30 – 19:30 up to speed in DDD theory (by Rick van der Arend)
19:30 – 19:45 coffee
19:45 – 20:45 A practical perspective on DDD (by Wil Water)

You can register for the event by sending an email to info@dddnl.org.

regards Jettro

Posted in Development | 1 Comment »

DDD and modern software development

September 8th, 2009 by Jettro Coenradie
(http://blog.jteam.nl/2009/09/08/ddd-and-modern-software-development/)

One of the main things we do @ jteam is creating rock solid custom development. Of course we use proven frameworks, we keep innovating and we use a lot of the best practices for custom software development. Best practices I am talking about are: Continuous Integration, Test Driven Development, Peer reviews and of course Scrum. I guess I could use more buzz words in there, but that is not the scope for this item. So I am not going to talk about cloud, soa, virtualisation to name a few. This post is about why DDD is a match made in heaven with custom development.

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Posted in Business, Development | 3 Comments »

A perspective on content management

May 19th, 2009 by Jettro Coenradie
(http://blog.jteam.nl/2009/05/19/a-perspective-on-content-management/)

DiagramsPerspectiveCMS.pngFor more than a year I am working with the Hippo CMS. I started with hippo 6. For the project OnsOranje, I created a springframework layer on top of hippo. This layer enabled us to create a website using the techniques we are familiar with (spring mvc). After the onsoranje project, my interest for content management was rising. At that moment I started using the new Hippo CMS 7. It is this version that we use at my current project as well. While using hippo for the projects, we also created our own website using magnolia. After a presentation about JackRabbit, Erik pointed me to yet another CMS called Brix. Based on these choices and some evaluations I did of other CMS systems, I wanted to make a choice for the CMS. I concluded that the best CMS does not exist, you can try to make the best choice for a CMS for your requirements. That is what this blog post is about.

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Posted in Business | 3 Comments »