Up 
I was asked this morning about creating JDBC resources via REST. As with user management, it’s actually pretty simple, once you’ve seen how. Let’s take a look. (more…)
Popularity: 4% [?]
Debugging GlassFish REST Requests
If you’ve been following my series on using the GlassFish REST interface, you’ve probably noticed that your JSON and XML output isn’t pretty-printed like mine. While there are several online tools that can fix that for you, there’s no need for the extra step. GlassFish will do that for you. Let’s look at how to make that happen. (more…)
Popularity: 3% [?]
GlassFish 3.1 Is Now Available
For those that may not have noticed, today the GlassFish team officially released version 3.1. This new release brings in a myriad of features, the most significant of which is probably clustering and high availability. The Aquarium is the best place to find links to blogs, screencasts etc. from various GlassFish engineers (though Markus Eisele has a nice run down of the new features here as well). The Aquarium’s list is pretty extensive, so certainly check it out, but I’d like to highlight a few that I found interesting from teammates of mine:
- GlassFish 3.1 Overview
- GlassFish 3.1: New Features in Admin Console
- GlassFish 3.1: From Installation to Running Application in a Cluster
People often ask what the difference is between the free GlassFish and the commercially-supported version. The answer really is “not much” in terms of the core server itself (pretty much just branding changes). The commercial version, though, has some nice value-add features, such as the Performance Tuner, amongst others.
I’m really, really pleased with how GlassFish 3.1 has turned out. We still (and will always) have more work to do, but this is a solid release that finally fills in some enterprise holes that v3 didn’t have time to fill. Download it, install it, kick the tires a bit, and tell us what you what you think. In the meantime, we’re going to go ahead and get started on 3.2.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Java EE’s Buried Treasure: the Application Client Container
From time to time, I’m asked about accessing various EE artifacts (EJBs, etc) from a standalone client. Almost invariably, the user is having trouble getting the environment setup, grabbing an InitialContext, etc. Also almost invariably, my answer to them is “use the application client container”, which is as far as I can take them. The topic of application client container, or ACC, came up again recently when I was asked on Twitter about an issue with ACC and GlassFish in a clustered environment. While this user (hi, Markus! : ) figured out his issue before I could be of much help, I took this opportunity finally to learn exactly what the ACC is and how to use it. Thanks to Oracle’s Tim Quinn for his patient and tireless help, here’s what I learned… (more…)
Popularity: 13% [?]
GlassFish 3.1, REST, and Secure Admin
After posting my last entry, GlassFish 3.1, REST, and a Secured Admin User, I was asked about an entry on using GlassFish 3.1′s REST interface with secure admin enabled. Some of you may be asking, “Isn’t that what you just wrote about?” While the titles sound the same, they’re slightly different, but in a very significant way. Let’s take a quick look at secure admin and then see what our REST client needs to do make use of this new server configuration. (more…)
Popularity: 4% [?]
GlassFish 3.1, REST, and a Secured Admin User
In my last post on using the GlassFish REST interface, a commenter asked about how GlassFish handles security. So far, all of my examples have been using GlassFish 3.1 out of the box, which doesn’t require authentication (as a convenience for developers, as well as system admins evaluating the server). In production, of course, the server will be secured, which means our client code will have to be modified. In this installment, we’ll see how that might be done in Java. (more…)
Popularity: 4% [?]
Deploying Applications to GlassFish Using curl
Over the past few months, I’ve been posting tips on how to use the REST interface in GlassFish v3 and later to perform various functions. My last post used Scala. In this much briefer and far less ambitious post, I thought I’d share how to deploy an app using curl (from the shell of your choice). If you’re familiar with the REST endpoint, there’s really not just a whole lot new here:
curl -s -S \
-H 'Accept: application/json' -X POST \
-H 'X-Requested-By: dummy' \
-F id=@/path/to/application.war \
-F force=true http://localhost:4848/management/domain/applications/application
Remember that the actual archive contents are passed as the value to the parameter id, so we tell curl to send the contents of the file using the prefix @. The context root and application will be deduced by the system (or can be specified by passing contextroot and name parameters). The force parameter tells GlassFish to force the deployment even if an application is already deployed under that name (which is effectively a redeployment).
As an added bonus, to undeploy, you can issue this:
curl -s -S \
-H 'Accept: application/json' \
-H 'X-Requested-By: dummy' \
-X DELETE http://localhost:4848/management/domain/applications/application/$APPNAME
It’s as simple as that. If you’re using a shell script, you could always just use asadmin directly, of course. Using that approach, asadmin must be on the PATH, or you have to specify the full path in your script, so your choice comes down to preference, I think. Either way, now you know how to do both. :)
Popularity: 5% [?]
Running Long-Running Reports with JMS
At a recent meeting of the Oklahoma City JUG, I was asked by a member how her group could “script” JSF report generation. After a couple of questions, I figured what she really wanted: she wanted a way to allow users to request reports in an ad hoc manner, as opposed to the reports being run on a schedule. In a general sense, this is a pretty easy question to answer, but I’ve run into situations where the reports take a long time to run — and I’m sure she will, as well — making a web interface for generating the report less useful (due to timeouts, etc). In this entry, we’ll take a look at one way to handle that. (more…)
Popularity: 5% [?]