Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Eclipse and Maven

This one is really stupid, but it had me scratching my head for a long time, so ... in it goes.

I develop mainly on a powerful desktop machine in work. Recently however I was transferring some work to my laptop, so I could potentially work on some problems from home.

When I imported the project I was working on onto the same version of eclipse on my laptop it was producing errors.

We use mvn for our builds, so I did the usual thing, of running

mvn eclipse:clean eclipse:eclipse

Still no luck.

After much head scratching te problem was that I had never initialized my M2_REPO variable within my laptops version of eclipse. Therefore all the M2_REPO based libs that mvn eclipse:eclipse generates, were not pointing to anything.

Very annoying.

Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Weblogic states

WE had a question on our weblogic status recently. SOme libraries were listed as been in the "Installed" state, as opposed to the usual "Active" state.

Heres a breakdown on the various states in Bea Weblogic:

1. There is no valid deployment state as "Installed".

2.. The deployment state is stored in "weblogic.management.runtime.AppRuntimeStateRuntimeMBean". As per the documentation these are the states:
STATE_ACTIVE, STATE_ADMIN, STATE_FAILED, STATE_NEW, STATE_PREPARED, STATE_RETIRED, STATE_UPDATE_PENDING
This is the link to documentation: http://e-docs.bea.com/wls/docs90/javadocs_mhome/weblogic/management/runtime/AppRuntimeStateRuntimeMBean.html

3. You can also check this runtime MBean on the MBean Reference: http://e-docs.bea.com/wls/docs92/wlsmbeanref/core/index.html

4. I got some known issues where it is stated that "Installed" is a console text string that indicates the LibraryMBean is present in the configuration.The Installed state can be changed by rebooting the domain. The problem can happen unexpectedly. Also the library works fine with Installed state as well.

5. It may be possible that the console is picking up a wrong state for the deployment.

6. We can verify this by using WLST to reach the AppRuntimeStateRuntimeMBean and then get the status.
i) First access the DomainRuntimeMBean using the following link: http://e-docs.bea.com/wls/docs92/config_scripting/nav_edit.html#wp1001225
ii) The DomainRuntimeMBean has the handle to AppRuntimeStateRuntimeMBean. Please check the API docs for the method getAppRuntimeStateRuntime(): http://e-docs.bea.com/wls/docs92/javadocs_mhome/weblogic/management/runtime/DomainRuntimeMBean.html
iii) Then get the module IDs and then access the status using AppRuntimeStateRuntimeMBean.getCurrentState(..).

Please let me know what are the results of this test.

Moreover this seems to be a non-reproduceable issue as we can see this occurs only in Production but not in Test.

Please let me know whether the provided information is sufficient. Also let me know if you face any problems in testing the deployment status using WLST.

Monday, December 01, 2008

svn externals

It often useful to link to an external resource within a svn project.

for instance you may store Wsdl and Xsd files in one location, but your implementation code may need to access it. You don't want to copy and paste it since you will end up with 2 copies to maintain.

for these cases you can use svn externals to link to an external svn directory (note only directories can be linked to, not individual files)

e.g. (I set svn:externals via eclipse)

Use Team> Set Property > [select svn:externals]
Enter the name of the directory link you want, (a revision number if required, e.g. -r123), followed by the remote directory to link to.

wsdl [-r rev] http://svnHost/repos/trunk/MyProject/myDir1/wsdl

xsd [-r rev] http://svnHost/repos/trunk/MyProject/myDir1/xsd

SVN Ignore
Svn can be instructed to ignore certain files etc.

For example when working with eclipse projects you will want to specify that .classpath, and .project files will not be included in svn, checkin's or diff's.

Ignores can be setup globally or per directory.

Global
This can be done via eclipse (in the windows/ preferences/ Team control),

or find your subversion config file. e.g. ~/.subversion/config then edit the following line, e.g.

global-ignores = .project .claspath *.o *.lo *.la #*# .*.rej *.tmproj

Local
cd to project directory,
svn propset svn:ignore "target/*

This should ignore the target directory (e.g. for maven builds)