Technobabble

Run a huge query as fast and safely as possible

Ant — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 02:38:36 +0000

Use this as a last resort

Queries that take a long time are generally a bad thing. If your application requires these kinds of measures to perform its duties, then chances are you really need to revise your table structures and/or you queries – ideally these queries should take seconds at the most, while data warehouse type reporting queries should be on the order of minutes. That said, sometimes you may need to update your entire schema, delete columns on a table with millions of records, or run a stored proc that goes in and cleans up data across several…

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Configuring Data Sources, JBoss 7

Ant — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 04:30:17 +0000

Yep it’s gonna be a big year for JBoss AS 7

This will be the first in a series I’ll be writing on JBoss’ new application server version 7. Lately I’ve been playing around with JBoss AS 7 recently, and all I can say is.. !@#%, NICE! I downloaded 7.0 with the expectation that it would honor a lot of the previous version’s overall approach and layout. I was in for a BIG surprise. It comes off as a total rewrite, leveraging a lot of the latest and greatest technologies and frameworks – things like Weld (an implementation…

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Manually override and launch quartz jobs…

Ant — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 22:09:47 +0000

Override quartz settings?

So you have a quartz job that’s chugging along nicely until you’re hit with the reality that the job details parameters change or the job needs to be suspended, or something happens that you end up having to recompile and redeploy your application just to update the packaged quartz job properties. This is no fun. You will undoubtedly have to take the updated code through the regular qa cycle, regress test, and then ultimately redeploy your code into the production environment. Surely there must be some way to address this problem when using Jboss…

One way…

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Configure ssh authorized keys for cvs access

Ant — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 12:23:35 +0000

Continous Integration

Lately I’ve been working on adding Hudson as the continuous integration (CI) server for projects at work. The whole notion of CI merits an entire discussion, but suffice to say it’s a very clean, approach that helps automate the build process particularly if you run manual builds that use prompted shell scripts.

After looking at a few solutions, Hudson seemed from many accounts to be the easiest to get running, and pretty flexible when integrating into an existing build system. Add to the resume that it could run in a servlet container, divorcing environmental configuration…

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The conf directory, JBoss v5.x

Ant — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 04:24:09 +0000

Configure what you need

So you’re ready to configure some JBoss files? Great, lets have a look at the conf directory. The jboss/server/<configured instance>/conf directory is where you’ll find the majority of the configuration files for your jboss instance. For most deployments, the majority of these folders and files will remain untouched as they default to usable configurations. In this article we’ll go over the more practical configurable files, while leaving the really low level configurations alone.

`-- conf
    |-- bootstrap/
    |--|-- bindingservice.bean
    |   `-- META-INF
    |   |    `-- bindings-jboss-beans.xml *
    |   |-- aop.xml
    |

…

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Apache XSL-FO’ sho v1.0

Ant — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 04:39:36 +0000

Transforming XML into PDFs.. and stuff

If you’ve ever been tasked with providing PDF documents via xsl, you’ve surely done some homework and shopped around for viable third party libraries. Some are good, some are great and rightly so charge a price, and some are just flat out incomplete or shanty in their documentation. It’s not a knock on anyone, its just a fact well known to open source developers. Historically what has been missing is an open standard for pdf generation, and possibly other output formats.

Enter XSL-FO: XSL Formatting Objects is an open standard for formatting documents in…

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