From Java EE to Google App Engine to GigaSpaces, the idea of developing against a middleware or "infrastructure" API is well established in the Java world.
But these are fixed environments. With the (re-)advent of virtualization, it is now becoming feasible to package and rapidly provision your own environment, custom-designed to meet your application's needs.
As the big middleware vendors are realizing, it is not just possible to create such Virtual Appliances, but necessary: a production app's setup inevitably includes more than just a couple of EARs.

Here, we'll look at the current state of cloud and middleware deployment tooling, examine possible future developments and draw parallels between deployment and related processes.
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Tags: cloud, deployment automation, virtual appliance
Filed under Deployment, Java, Middleware, Oracle, Virtualization, websphere | 4 Comments »

Last year, before the Christmas holidays , I described how we do middleware integration testing at XebiaLabs and I described the way we deploy test servlets by wrapping them in WAR and EAR files that get generated on the fly. There is only one thing left to explain; how do we integrate these tests into a continuous build using Maven and VMware?

Running the middleware integration tests

So let's start with the Maven configuration. As I mentioned in the first blog of this series, the integration tests are recognizable by the fact that the classnames end in Itest. That means they won't get picked up by the default configuration of the Maven Surefire plugin. And that is fortunate because we don't always want to run these tests. Firstly they require a very specific test setup (the application server configurations should be in an expected state, see below) and secondly they can take a long time to complete and that would get in the way of the quick turnaround we want from commit builds in our continuous integration system.
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Filed under Deployment, JBoss, Java, Maven, Middleware, TDD, Testing, Virtualization, Xebia Labs | 2 Comments »

I'm going to start a series on the future of deployment. How and what do we deploy in, say 5 years or so. Of-course this is my opinion and please add your own ideas in the comments below.

To start this series off i'm going to talk about the current state of things, or at least what i see at a lot of enterprise customers. Most of the enterprises i've been at have physical servers which are used by numerous applications from different development teams. Some of these servers are old and have been in maintenance by operations for years (+4 years ). That means that the server has changed, lots of deltas, aka, patches, deployments etc. have been applied and as my colleague Vincent has stated applying deltas has its cons Of-course i'm talking about servers and not applications and the same rules do not apply, or do they?

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Filed under Deployment, Middleware, Virtualization, Xebia Labs | 2 Comments »

Last week I wrote about the approach we use at XebiaLabs to test the integrations with the different middleware products our Java EE deployment automation product Deployit supports.

The blog finished with the promise that I would discuss how to test that an application can really use the configurations that our middleware integrations (a.k.a. steps) create. But before we delve into that, let us first answer the question as to why we need this. If the code can configure a datasource without the application server, it must be OK for an application to use it, right? Well, not always. While WebSphere and WebLogic contain some functionality to test the connection to the database and thereby verify whether the datasource has been configured correctly, this functionality is not available for other configurations such as JMS settings. And JBoss has no such functionality at all. So the question is: how can we prove that an application can really work with the configurations created by our steps?
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Filed under Deployment, Java, Maven, Middleware, TDD, Testing, Virtualization, Xebia Labs | No Comments »

For Deployit, XebiaLabs' automated deployment product for Java EE applications, we are always building and modifying integrations with middleware systems such as IBM WebSphere, Oracle WebLogic and the JBoss application server. These integrations are small enough so that they can be rearranged to get many different deployment scenarios. A typical step, as we call these integrations, would be "Create WebSphere datasource" or "Restart WebLogic Server". So how do the test that code?

We've had some success using FitNesse and VMware to do integration tests on our deployment scenarios. But there were a few problems with this apporach:

• We could only test complete deployment scenarios in this way. If we wanted to test just a single step, we had to make a deployment scenario that used that step just to be able to test it.
• Because FitNesse does not provide any feedback while a test is running and the steps, let alone the deployment scenarios, can sometimes take a while to execute, there was little feedback on the progress.
• While it is possible to debug a FitNesse Fixture using Eclipse the process is not very convenient when debugging a technical component such as this step.
• To verify that a deployment scenario has executed succesfully we had to extend our FitNesse Fixture often. And while debugging code under test in FitNesse is complicated enough, debugging a Fixture is even harder!

Clearly we needed a different approach if we wanted to develop new steps easily.
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Filed under Deployment, Java, Maven, Middleware, TDD, Testing, Virtualization, Xebia Labs, websphere | 3 Comments »

Yesterday was a very good day! After speaking at QCon the day ended with CloudCamp. An evening dedicated to everything cloud with an amazing turnout! More then 500 folks joined.

Turns out that although in general people tend to agree what a cloud is, nobody actually knows exactly what to do with it! (more...)

Filed under Amazon Webservices, Architecture, General, Performance, Virtualization, qcon | No Comments »

VMWare Server 2.0 was released about two months ago. Virtualization is hot and has a lot of different uses. I use it to run the Linux-based middleware products (Apache, IBM WebSphere Server, IBM WebSphere Portal, etc.) for which we are building an automated deployment product on my . But more about that later...

Anyway, I've been running betas and release candidates of VMWare Server 2.0 for six months now and while the functionality is great, initially the performance was very bad on my Thinkpad T61p running Windows Vista. Last week I finally got it to work with proper performance. A perfect time to let other people know how.

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Filed under Performance, Virtualization | 3 Comments »