Thoughts Electrique

I’ve often seen Ubuntu being chosen instead of Debian because the LTS version offers support and security-fixes for five years. This kind of SLA is often a critical argument. But while Ubuntu is happily claiming to be enterprise-ready they yet enable the universe and multiverse software repositories per default even in the LTS server edition. Since these two repositories are not included in the SLA you might end up with software that is not provided with patches and therefore the whole security guarantee get’s thrown out of the window. While I’m not saying community backed security is bad it basically sets Ubuntu into the same mode of operation as Debian and this even without a specific warning or even notice. To be on the safe side you should disable the universe and multiverse repositories after installation or at least be aware of this fact.

Last Week I attended the JBoss World in Chicago and I had a good time. My favorite Session was Large Clusters in JBoss presented by Bela Ban. It was a very hands-on explanation of the new mod_cluster and presented nicely some of the problems with clustered environments (such as binary incompatible rolling updates, management of configuration files, discovery, etc.) and how to work with them (I always like sessions which keep it down a bit and don’t promote the technology as the next holy grail). I also enjoyed Putting Java to REST by Bill Burke which gave a good introduction to RESTeasy. The library (including the JAX-RS standard) looks very straightforward and easy to comprehend (This is always something which I didn’t like about all the SOA stacks). I must say that I’m a bit skeptical about the announced REST-star initiative. I think it may be a little early to start a standardization effort which will certainly make the technology seem more complex.

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As you may remember from my last blogpost I’m currently setting up a new hosting Server. Since this server will also host some OpenCms and JEE sites I need to set up a Servlet Container. In almost all of my projects until today Tomcat was successfully used for this purpose. Be it stand alone or embedded in a JEE application server (e.g. JBoss).

I must admit that I always had some kind of a love-hate relationship with Tomcat. The classloader had some bad issues when reloading a webapplication too often and often killed the complete server. Taking down all of the other webapplications too. Although this has gotten a lot better recently it’s still bothering me a bit.

Since I had some time after my last project I started investigating other open source alternatives. I often heard of Jetty, praised for it’s speed and simplicity, it seemed like a great alternative and I played around with it a bit. I really liked it since it was simple to use and easy to deploy but as I started to google for things like performance measurements or how to use it with a security manager I didn’t really found a lot of documentation (compared to Tomcat) and the performance doesn’t really doesn’t seem to differ from Tomcats.

So I’m once again going the Tomcat route. It has a big community and is even used in military and government organizations. It’s really not a technology decision (although I think Tomcat is solid) but more political thinking.

It will also save me some time which I can invest in trying out other technologies. Meow…

To create good documentation is an art for itself and most often underestimated by us fellow software developers, architects and software project management folks. I won’t go into the detail of what makes a good documentation (in my point of view) in this blog post too deeply (maybe in the future, if you are interested?). Instead I want to point out a negative point which I run into quite frequently: The almighty project document.

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