Raible Designs

Fun with Log4J and JBoss

I've had the pleasure of working with JBoss (3.2.5) and an AppFuse-based application for the past week. It was fairly easy to setup thanks to Rick Hightower's instructions. AppFuse uses commons logging (like many of its open-source dependencies), but uses log4j to control what gets printed to where. By default, it changes Hibernate and Spring to use WARN and the application classes to use DEBUG. For most containers, this works great. Drop in the WAR, or package it in an EAR and voila - your logging statements show up in the console. Not so with JBoss. Spring and Hibernate use INFO and I can't get any debug statements to show from my classes.

I shouda known this would be a pain since Rick wrote "Setting up logging is a pain in JBoss. Don't mess with the console log... it misbehaves. Create a file logger and tail it.". Is this the best practice for logging with Log4J in JBoss?

You'd think printing to the console would be easy. This wiki page even makes it look easy: change your log4j.properties to log4j.xml and add a <class-loading> snippet to your jboss-web.xml. Unfortunately, I get this nice error message:

00:21:17,593 WARN  [DeploymentInfo] Only the root deployment can set the loader repository, ingoring
 config=LoaderRepositoryConfig(repositoryName: log4j.config:loader=appfuse.war, repository
ClassName: org.jboss.mx.loading.HeirarchicalLoaderRepository3, configParserClassName: org.jboss.mx.l
oading.HeirarchicalLoaderRepository3ConfigParser, repositoryConfig: java2ParentDelegation=false)

Any ideas are appreciated - it seems wrong that I have to write to file just to tail it so I get the same console behavior I get with other servers.

Make your JUnit Tests run faster when using Spring

JRoller is down, and has been down for an hour or so - so I've decided to post this Spring Live entry here.

I discovered an interesting thing today about Spring and my JUnit tests. I noticed that the VelocityEngine I was setting on my PositionManager was getting initialized once for each test* method in my Test. This means that since my PositionManagerTest has 10 test methods - it would load the context 10 times.

Loading the context so many times was because the following code was in my Test's parent's constructor:

    ctx = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("/applicationContext.xml");

I suppose I expected any constructor-iniatialized variables to be initialized once and only once. So I figured out a solution to make my JUnit tests run faster. By making the ctx variable static, and loading the file in the member variables definition, I greatly reduced the amount of time needed to run tests. Below is the new code I'm using:

    protected static ApplicationContext ctx = 
    	new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("/applicationContext.xml");

By doing this, the ApplicationContext is only set once, and my tests run much faster. Here's some performance comparisons from Struts Resume:

Average time to run "ant test-dao": 36 seconds
Average time to run "ant test-dao" after this change: 26 seconds

A 10 second improvement - that's crazy talk dontcha think?! I've tried it on single tests, as well as suites - and it seems to improve performance by approximately 30% across the board.

Because of this experience, I have to recommend that when you write JUnit tests that use Spring - you should initialize your ApplicationContext in a static member variable. It seems to be the best performing and logical choice. Of course, if I'm off my rocker - please let me know.

On a sidenote, it would be cool if Roller allowed me to turn off comments for a single post. I like how Simon posts stuff on java.net and then aggregates it to his personal weblog.

[ANN] Struts Resume 0.9 Released!

Struts Resume 0.9 is a major improvement over 0.8. Not only did I upgrade all the code to use AppFuse 1.4 (release notes), but I also removed Struts from the services layer. Moreover, you can actually enter almost all of the pieces of a resume and render it in HTML and Word format. The resume-entry piece (and sections you can enter) is largely based on what Monster.com uses. I may add other sections in the future (i.e. awards and publications).

The main reason this is not a 1.0 release is because an administrator is the only one who can edit the HTML template - and the Word/RTF template is not editable online. Allowing a user to override the default template(s) will be the primary goal in 1.0.

Here's a specific rundown of all the changes from the changelog:

• Upgraded to AppFuse 1.4 - Includes Spring and all kinds of other goodies.
  • AppFuse 1.4 Release Notes
• Added Resume Creation/Editing Wizard.
• Added ability to edit HTML Template online (Admins only).
• UI Updates:
  • Background borrowed from alistapart.com. (Thanks!)
  • Changed from ListMenu to TabbedMenu.
  • Changed to fixed-width layout (700px).
  • Added CSS drop shadows to headers.
    • Idea from http://phoenity.com/newtedge/drop_shadow/
    • Hack to fix Safari in web/layouts/baseLayout.jsp
• The Tomcat User's resume can be on the demo server at http://demo.raibledesigns.com/struts-resume/tomcat.html.

Download (~10.5 MB for src, ~5.4 MB for bin), Online Demo and Homepage.