Integrating Tivoli Access Manager with JBoss AS 4.x
Posted by Mark Bakker in the early morning: December 22nd, 2009
Introduction
Currently I am working at a big Enterprise where they use Tivoli Access Manager as authorization and authentication source for a lot of there applications.
This Enterprise is using JBoss as open source application server platform and is using this more and more. When they began using JBoss they got a TAM plug-in for JBoss from IBM. This plug-in did the complete authorization and authentication by implementing JAAS and registering all the used security roles in TAM. This is done during deployment time.
If you have an application with a lot of roles this is very frustrating because it can take a lot of extra time to start up (think of 30 minutes per application) because TAM is synchronizing all the new roles.
Most applications at this customer are using JAAS but do not have special method level authorizations implemented by using TAM. So only the roles are important.
After realizing this I thought is could be a good idea to create a simpler solution for integration TAM and JBoss. For this I wrote some custom code (only 250 lines).
Future of deployment: Part 1 – Monuments vs Cheap housing
Posted by Robert van Loghem in the early evening: December 21st, 2009
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?
Google Guice and Multibinding
Posted by Mischa Dasberg around lunchtime: December 21st, 2009
Last week I started migrating an application that used Spring for DI to Google Guice when I stumbled on multibinding.
Since Google Guice 2.0 we can use Multibinding which allows us to bind multiple objects to a collection.
But the one thing I missed in the current release is the ability to bind objects with a specific annotation. So I thought, why not build it myself 
Middleware integration testing with JUnit, Maven and VMware, part 2 (of 3)
Posted by Vincent Partington at around evening time: December 14th, 2009
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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Improving web application performance by parallelizing requests
Posted by Kris Geusebroek mid-afternoon: December 9th, 2009
For a web application i develop we had a problem with the performance. After a small investigation we found out that it had relations with the amount of requests to the server that were done.
The application is running in a browser (currently IE7) and browsers are generally limited to do not more then 2 parallel request to the same domain.(this has improved a bit in later versions of the browsers). In this post i will describe the quest for solutions.
Middleware integration testing with JUnit, Maven and VMware, part 1 (of 3)
Posted by Vincent Partington at around evening time: December 7th, 2009
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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Mocking the ‘unmockable’: too much of a good thing?
Posted by Andrew Phillips mid-morning: December 6th, 2009
Static calls, final classes, objects created in test code: there are few things some of the current mocking frameworks cannot handle. Using powerful approaches like bytecode instrumentation or custom class loaders, these libraries make code that was previously a 'no go' area amenable to unit testing. This, moreover, in an elegant and convenient manner that will feel familiar to developers used to 'standard' mocking frameworks.
The question is: does such power perhaps come with hidden dangers? Might it be possible that the ability to test more could actually result in less code quality?
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CQRS: Designing the Event Store
Posted by Erik Rozendaal mid-afternoon: December 5th, 2009
One of the things I like about CQRS is that many of the infrastructure components become simpler, at least compared to the classical ORM approach. However, some of these components have not seen widespread use in existing enterprise applications and will be new to most people. One such component is the Event Store that is used for persistence of the (transactional) domain in CQRS.
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Domain-Driven Design and Command-Query Separation example application
Posted by Erik Rozendaal in the early morning: December 3rd, 2009
Ever since attending Greg Young's Unshackle Your Domain talk at QCon '08 in San Francisco and a later two-day training course given by Greg Young I've wanted to build a sample application that made use of the principles of Command-Query Responsibility Separation (CQRS).
However, other interesting things intervened and I never got around to doing this.
But every few months we have a one day internal training course at Xebia Software Development and after Sjors Grijpink and I proposed to give a training on DDD and CQRS we got some time to actually prepare and implement a CQRS example application.
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Restricting the number of JMS / MQ connections made by the OSB
Posted by Tjeerd Kaastra at around evening time: December 2nd, 2009
It is very easy to create JMS consuming services in the Oracle Service Bus (previously known as BEA AquaLogic Service Bus or ALSB), but one of the things that you may want to control is the number of connections that is used to poll a JMS server. This blog describes the background to JMS listeners in OSB and how to solve problems with the JMS server being overloaded with connections. In this particular case, the JMS server is actually an IBM Websphere MQ server but most of the principles also apply to different JMS implementations.
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