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Container ready spring boot application

Spring boot applications are now ubiquitous. The usual way to build one is to create an uber jar. At the same time, Docker allows us to build self reliant containers which are unaffected by the underlying server architecture or neighboring applications or their dependencies. Spring boot applications can also run in docker containers.  However running an uber jar inside a container fails to satisfy an important goal. That of high speed build and deployment. An uber jar is a heavy weight entity. That will make docker image heavy and slow to build. Here's a step by step solution, which leverages docker layer caching feature for faster builds with all spring boot goodness. We will use Maven to build a deployment structure for our docker image that allows fast deployments. Step 1: Create a spring boot application with only the SpringBootApplication and Configuration classes, such as one for REST configuration package scanning, one for JPA etc. Most often this wil...
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POV: Prototype injection into Spring singleton, an antipattern. Opinions invited

Today someone asked me, how would Spring behave with respect to object instantiation if a Prototype bean was injected into a Singleton. This took me by surprise and the reaction was "Why in the world would we even do that?". Do we ever have instance level objects in Singletons, that might be prone to change, as that is what prototype beans would be for? No we do not, then why would we do that in Spring. The very intent of Singleton is to embody the logic of our application code, that has no state. It makes sense for Prototype beans, to have Singleton beans injected in them, for doing work. But the other way round, not so much. However, I went through the spring documentation and to my surprise there was a section(3.5.3) dedicated to Prototype beans injected into Singleton beans. And as expected, though it does not fail, such a dependency injection just results in a fixed instance of the Prototype bean to be injected into the Singleton. That instance does not change th...

Upgrading from standalone SOLR to SOLR Cloud

SolrCloud is designed to provide a highly available, fault tolerant environment for distributing your indexed content and query requests across multiple servers. So what if we already have a standalone SOLR setup running on a single server and fulfilling ou search needs. As data grows or search traffic increases, vertically scaling that one single server is neither efficient nor cost effective. The answer comes as SOLR cloud and this document aims at providing an effective solution to migrating from standalone SOLR to a cluster with minimum effort. Step 1: Identify and setup SOLR and Zookeeper on required set of servers. Step 2: Start SOLR in cloud mode with the available Zookeeper configuration. Step 3: Rebuilding the cores. An efficient way to build the cores is to reuse our existing standalone SOLR setup.We can simply copy the existing SOLR core to the {solr.installation}/server/solr directory to start with. Copies of this SOLR core can be placed on all SOLR installati...

Catch hold of that Exception and hide that stacktrace!!!

E xceptions happen!!! Rules are to be followed, too. Time and again, Java developers are told the golden rule to catch specific exceptions and not to catch the generic Exception. The thought process behind that is, applications should not catch runtime exceptions. This is apt as runtime exceptions are an indicator of "bugs" in the code. However, blindly following rules, as always, can have unexpected consequences. If you are developing services that are to be exposed over the wire, it is always a good idea to break this rule and "catch that Exception". Instead, follow the below principles: Service methods should implement a generic Exception block, along with catching declared exceptions, thrown from inner layers of the code.  If needed, the service can throw another exception back to the client. What's important is that we create a new Exception instance to be thrown, along with relevant message for the client. The service can log stacktrace for the E...

Nuances of Spatial data and operations Apache SOLR

SOLR is a scalable, distributed and powerful search and indexing solution. SOLR supports indexing spatial data and provides fast search capabilities on spatial data. Unlike conventional spatial data solutions like PostGIS, indexing spatial data in SOLR provides high speed search using bounding box and range queries, commonly used in spatial data exploration and processing. Indexing points and running bounding box queries is covered extensively in Apache SOLR documentation . We will discuss some specific use cases here, described but not explained in the documentation. 1. Indexing Fences in SOLR : SOLR provides a convenient and powerful type, location_rpt which is an implementation of  solr.SpatialRecursivePrefixTreeFieldType.  location_rpt indexes POINT data, consisting of latitude and longitude. Points are sufficient to index locations that need to be monitored, and that can be done by using bbox or geofile queries as in the documentation.  A typical use case in g...

Musings on SSL troubles in websphere container

SSL is a standard technology for connecting systems in a client server architecture. Setting up our Java based applications to use SSL requires setting up keystores and truststores. Java provides a key and certificate management utility called keytool that can be used to setup required key and trust-stores for secure communication. With websphere, things get a little different. Websphere provides a tool called ikeyman that is used to manage key and trust databases. The JEE container loads the SocketFactory, that an application can refer using SSLSocketFactory.getDefault(), with the certificates from the key and trust databases. The default instance of SSLSocketFactory does not load certificates that might be present in the JRE. This brings us to a major consideration while working with SSL on websphere. Work only with default SSLSocketFactory . APIs not using default SSLSocketFactory will not work, unless we write code that handles the certificates and sets up SSLSocketFac...

Using JNDI managed JMS objects with Apache CAMEL

Apache CAMEL uses Spring JMS to work with JMS Queues or Topics. Evidently, we will need Spring to configure and use JMS capabilities provided by CAMEL. Details about how to implement JMS based routes using Apache CAMEL can be found in the CAMEL documentation. However, the documentation leaves a lot to be figured out. In a typical Java EE container, it is usually a good idea to abstract the underlying JMS resources by using JNDI. We can use the below configuration to achieve that. This configuration is tested in Websphere environment, but should work in any JEE container. Create a JMS queue connection factory in the JNDI registry. CAMEL configuration will be able to use only one queue connection factory, even if we have more than one. Create one or more JMS queue or topics, in the JNDI registry, as required. The above two steps are related to generic JNDI configuration for JMS resources. Now we come to the setup required for making these JMS resources work with CAMEL rout...