Eclipse has a large ecosystem. So large that it is reasonable to assume that most people will not know many of the available tools.

That can be a problem in the corporate world, where you would like all the developers using the same tools, and have those tools installed easily and fast.

One simple way of achieving this is to setup a corporate p2 mirror with the standarized extensions that all developers can/should/must install. To achive that, this simple script can be used to create a mirror on the p2-mirror folder:

mirror.cmd

@echo off
SET ECLIPSE=D:\usuarios\java\eclipse-jee-galileo-RC4

echo Mirroring metadata for %1
java -jar %ECLIPSE%\plugins\org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_*.jar ^
 -application org.eclipse.equinox.p2.metadata.repository.mirrorApplication ^
 -source %1 ^
 -destination p2-mirror ^
 -destinationName "Corporate P2 Repo" ^
 -verbose ^
 -compare

echo Mirroring artifacts for %1
java -jar %ECLIPSE%\plugins\org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_*.jar ^
 -application org.eclipse.equinox.p2.artifact.repository.mirrorApplication ^
 -source %1 ^
 -destination p2-mirror ^
 -destinationName "Corporate P2 Repo" ^
 -verbose ^
 -compare

Just invoke it with the url of the repository you want to mirror, and call it as many times as needed.

For instance:

mirror http://q4e.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/updatesite-iam
mirror http://q4e.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/p2-nightly
mirror http://eclipse-cs.sf.net/update/
mirror http://findbugs.cs.umd.edu/eclipse/
mirror http://pmd.sourceforge.net/eclipse
mirror http://download.eclipse.org/technology/subversive/0.7/update-site/
mirror http://www.polarion.org/projects/subversive/download/eclipse/2.0/update-site/

Now you only have to make the p2-mirror folder available (in shared network folder or published on an http server) so everyone can access it.

This is quite rough, so any suggestions for improvements are welcome!

I have been deep into configuring a development ecosystem with my client lately, with a boring session of integration tests for another project going in parallel, so I wanted to try something different for a change.

Eclipse 3.5 is about to come out and I have been playing with the RCs for a while. I’m on a Mac, so one of the things I wanted to see the new support for Cocoa (so far works great, but I have not been able to use Java 6 or 64bits). The other one was updating Eclipse IAM to run on the new Eclipse.

These notes can be seen as a total noob’s comments on Scala and Lift.

Installing

Everything installed nicely on Eclipse 3.5 (JEE package for Mac OS X Cocoa). I have used the nighty release of IAM.

Creating a Lift project

Step one is creating the project from the lift archetype.

Creating a new lift project with the new maven project wizard

After all dependencies are downloaded I was welcome with some build errors on the test cases, which seem to be caused by Lift’s open dependency on Jetty (there were some refactorings in Jetty 7).

Compile errors after creating the project

Setting an upper bound of 7.0.0 for the jetty dependency fixed those.

<dependency>

<groupid>org.mortbay.jetty</groupid>

<artifactid>jetty</artifactid>

<version>[6.1.6,7.0.0)</version>

<scope>test</scope>

</dependency>

Clean the project and the errors are gone.

Running the project

Starting with Lift, suggests running the project launching jetty from maven. I wanted to use WTP instead, so I tried to install the Jetty adapter by using the support in WTP for downloadable adaptors. Unfortunately, the installation did not work, so I used the built-in support for Tomcat 5.5 instead.

The LIft webapp is up and running

Playing around

Before getting into the next chapter of Starting with Lift, I played around with the application I had just built.

• Changes to index.html were shown immediatly
• Same thing when modifying the default.html template
• Modifying the HelloWorld class to return a new value causes the context to be reloaded and the changes can be seen live (no redeployment needed)
• Adding a second method to HelloWorld and using it on the index.html template works as above (as expected)

End of chapter one

There might be some surprises down the road, but the initial impression has been good.

• IAM has "just worked" and stayed out of the way in a non-java project (there is no special support on IAM for Scala or Lift, although esmi is on the works)
• WTP performed well. I expect the issues with the installation of the Jetty adapter to go away soon, since Jetty has joined Eclipse.
• About Lift and Scala... well, I have a lot of things to learn yet.

I am looking forward to keep using these tools together (at least go through the Starting with Lift guide!).

I’ve been getting in and out of rails development for some time now… and my biggest problem is finding documentation for simple things (I guess that people already know all the stuff, but I’m still getting up to speed).

So I decided to blog about one of those simple things… in case there is still someone who has not mastered Ruby on Rails.

When several models are saved in a single transaction in Rails, the usual case is that you want to rollback the transaction if any of them fails. This is done automatically if an exception is thrown.

The example in ActiveRecord::Transactions::ClassMethods accomplishes this by using save! on the models.

However, you usually also want to display validation errors and not show the full rails trace to the user.

What the example does not show is how to accomplish this. Two options here:

1. use save (no exclamation mark) and check the return value. If any of the saves return false, raise an ActiveRecord::RollbackException after your render or redirect.
2. rescue from ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid and render or redirect there.

I think #2 is more elegant… but since I knew about it too late, my code uses #1.

begin
  transaction do
    first.save!
    second.save!
    third.save!
    fourth.save!
  end
rescue ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid => invalid
# do whatever you wish to warn the user, or log something
end

Example is from this other blog post. I wish I’ve read it sooner!

Sometimes you spend time developing and testing your new bundle using the runtime workbench launched from the same eclipse, and everything is fine… until some user installs that bundle and finds that it does… nothing!

The OSGi console is a great help in such cases. The `diag` command can tell you what’s wrong. Usually it is a dependency that is missing.

Start by launching eclipse from the command line with the -console command line option.

Now, just diag your.bundle.id, and you’ll see eclipse telling you what’s wrong.

Some weeks ago I wrote down some notes for making Oracle work harder and faster with hibernate.

Those notes were collected from several places on the Internet and are supposed to help.

But they didn’t. Not for us.

Good news is that we found the problem of the bad performance and fixed it… it was all caused by foreign key integrity checks.

We got our first clue when the sysadmin detected a lot (say, 12 or so) open cursors for a simple update sentence.

We were using defaults for most of the hibernate settings and even when the update was intended to only change one column, the sql sentence set all the fields in the table for the affected row.

And Oracle fired all the checks.

I’m not sure why Oracle does not optimize this by first checking if the value has changed (if it hasn’t, then the constraints are forcedly valid), but the solution was simple… don’t update more than you need.

I have  a new friend and it is called @org.hibernate.annotations.Entity(dynamicUpdate=true). There is some (extremely brief) documentation on the hibernate annotations reference and javadocs. Of course you can also use it in the hbm files if XML is your thing.

Just in case you did not guess it, this only updates dirty properties of your objects (i.e. those that you updated after retrieving it from the database).

This has potential caveats if another transaction somehow updates your object, since the database state will be different that what you expect. To the best of my understanding this can only happen with detached objects in any reasonable isolation level… and you should reload the state from database in that case.

Well, so that was it… too many constraints on a table and updating more columns than needed. Updating only the affected columns increased performance to where we expected: better than the mysql-based prototype.

I’ve collected the following bits of information regarding the tunning of Oracle when used with Hibernate performance… it might help someone (and I need to write it down somewhere I won’t loose when moving from a desk to another!).

The following properties should be set:

# See http://martijndashorst.com/blog/2006/11/28/hibernate-31-something-performance-problems-contd/
# NOTE: See http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/hibernate/browse/HHH-3359
hibernate.jdbc.wrap_result_sets = true

# See http://www.hibernate.org/120.html#A10
hibernate.dbcp.ps.maxIdle = 0
hibernate.c3p0.max_statements = 0


# Everything else comes from http://docs.codehaus.org/display/TRAILS/DatabaseConfigurations
# The Oracle JDBC driver doesn't like prepared statement caching very much.
hibernate.statement_cache.size=0
# or batching with BLOBs very much.
hibernate.jdbc.batch_size=0


I have not tested the performance difference… just collected the information.

Let me know if you know more tricks!

Update: Added a warning about a memory leak in current hibernate, thanks to dfernandez.

Update 2: Statement caching for Oracle can be enabled directly on the datasource implementation. See this article.

This is just a brief note to publicly welcome our two new committers on Eclipse IAM:

• Joakim Erdfelt, who has started by enhancing wtp integration to reach beyond web projects.
• Ismael Teijeiro, author of the Buckminster integration and maven actor.

More news soon!

I am probably the last one in posting about eclipse summit, so I will make this brief and painless.

It was a great experience (my first time with the eclipse community). The event was incredibly well organized! Congratulations!

It was not perfect, though. Both IAM and M2E had new&noteworthy talks, but finally M2E was cancelled… I was hoping to meet Jason on that talk, so I was a bit disappointed.

I couldn’t meet with Ed Merks (which is one of the IAM mentors)… he is a busy guy!

Another problem… too many great talks! I was tempted for a moment to skip my IAM New & Noteworthy talk so I could attend the parallel sessions (specially Equinox P2: Provisioning your world by Jeff McAffer).

On the good side, I was able to meet with some of the Eclipse community in Spain, which seems to be focused on modeling. There are the folks from the European Software Institute, which had a poster on the first day and then some more from the MOSKitt team (who are hosting an Eclipse Day next week).

I attended the Buckminster talks (IAM added Buckminster support a while back, with some more waiting on bugzilla) and found it very interesting for several tasks, specially creating target platforms.

Finally. the two main things that I got back from ESE2008 regarding IAM are:

• People do care about maven integration, but not only as users. Questions about integration of P2 and Maven was raised several times, so it is good to know that we have that on IAM’s project plan.
• Users still wonder why there are 2 integration plug-ins for maven. Well, I so do I! Let’s see if we can change this in the future.

A great experience! Hope I can repeat soon!

It’s almost the time to start packing for Eclipse Summit Europe.

I’ll be arriving at Ludwigsburg this tuesday evening, so if anyone feels like having a late refreshment, let me know.

On Wednesday I’ll be assisting to some of the talks (still have not decided) and I expect to have some time to talk with other attendees.

Thursday is the day for my IAM New and Noteworthy talk. If you are interested in Maven integration in Eclipse, you should come!

Ismael Teijeiro will also be coming. He has contributed the integration of IAM with Buckminster. This a bridge between the two projects which works in both directions… IAM can use Buckminster and Buckminster can use IAM. It is an extremely interesting work, so you might want to learn more from him.

After the summit, I’ll spend a few days on Stuttgart, so you have one more chance to learn more about IAM .

This is meant to be my introduction to the Eclipse blogging community. It is something that I have delayed too much already, but (finally) I got around to writing it.

My name is Abel Muiño (but just write Muino if you have a non-spanish keyboard),  and I am the project lead for Eclipse IAM, which stands for Integration for Apache Maven.

Eclipse IAM is a technology project focused in integrating maven into the eclipse IDE. It comes with a year-long history as Q4E.

I’m thrilled by joining this community of exceptional developers, and looking forward to meet some of you at Eclipse Summit Europe in a few days (by the way, be sure to attend the “IAM New & Noteworthy” talk… I’ve heard the speaker is extremely handsome).