Modern hardware systems have a multi-core architecture. So in contemporary software development concurrency is an even more crucial ingredient than before. But as we will see it is of great importance for single core systems, too. If you have already created a Java Swing application you’ve propably made an acquaintance with the SwingWorker, in order to delegate long running tasks from within Swing events to another thread. But first things first. In Swing the whole painting and event handling of the graphical user interface is executed in one thread the so called event dispatching-thread from AWT the underlying former window toolkit from Java. Therefore most of Swing-based methods are not thread-safe, meaning that you have to prevent race conditions by yourself, but it offers the possibility to dispatch tasks to the event-dispatcher thread. It is highly recommended to do everything, that updates the GUI in the corresponding thread.
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Tag: Java
Circular Injection of Util Classes in EJB 3.0
In my last post Circular Dependencies of Session Beans I presented a method to use interceptors in session beans in order to inject beans. This works great until you want to add circular dependencies. Then you have to look up the beans by name and inject them into the bean. But this is kind of cumbersome. So, if it is possible, have a bean structure, which is topologically sortable and inject util classes having circular dependencies between each other. This post shows how to achieve the latter.
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Ordering Collections with JPA
Often there is the need to sort an entity or a collection, e.g. If you have a list of line items in a bill and do not want that the order may change or is semantically wrong. Unfortunately, using a java.util.List will not suffice, since the DB has not to retain the order of the list. You might recognize this only after a long time, since some RDBMS will return the rows by insertion order. There are different ways to introduce an ordering with JPA (see Java Persistence: Ordering).
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Override fetch type in JPQL Queries
Executing a getter — representing a one-to-many or many-to-many association — on an entity causes one or n (with n entries in the collection) database calls, depending on the fetching strategy (see fetch strategies). This is a nasty little detail that may cause performance bottlenecks. Changing the fetch type (lazy/eager) may not be appropriate, since an association is generally used in more than one context, so there may be contradictory concerns. Generally spoken, an eager fetching is only in rare occasions a good idea on one-to-many or many-to-many associations, since this leads to the cartesian product problem (simply put, you have to read [nearly] the hole db in order to get one entity). Fortunately there is another solution that enables overriding a lazy fetch type in a dedicated JPQL-Query. This may entail a hole bunch of JPQL queries you will have to write (not more queries to execute on the db!!!), since you want to eagerly fetch an association in one situation but not in another.
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Unnecessary Code Detector
Recently I found a nice eclipse plugin for finding dead code. The standard eclipse check finds unused private fields and methods, only. You may use STRG+SHIFT+G for finding references to a public class or method in advance. But this approach is limited to search for methods/classes without references one by one, which is very time consuming. The UCDetector starts a search for methods and classses without any references to it in all projects in the current workspace respecting inheritance and presents the results in the ‘Problems’ view. Read More
instanceof on Class objects
If you need to access the metadata of a class or be a bit less type safe than Java is by itself, you will have to get involved with the Java Reflection API. At that the question may arise, how to check whether one class object is the super class of another. If you are working with objects, you may use the java keyword instanceof. But this won’t work as expected for class objects, since all class objects are instances of Class<?> . So Class<?> owns the method cls1.isAssignableFrom(cls2), checking whether cls1 is a super class/interface or the same as cls2. So it works just like instanceof on objects, but the order of the parameters is switched.
Bug in JDK Javadoc for class java.util.regex.Pattern
The Javadoc for class java.util.regex.Pattern contains a bug. It says that a back reference (Pattern (Java Platform SE 6)) to a capturing group is depicted by \n whereas n denotes the number of the capturing group. Unfortunately this won’t work. Use $n instead.
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Remote debugging with Java Virtual Machine
In order to remote debug a JVM export the following java options:
export JAVA_OPTS="-Xdebug -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,address=8888,server=y,suspend=n -XX:MaxPermSize=1024m"
I got this information from this site http://ztiromoritz.wordpress.com/2009/08/03/java-remote-debugging/.
After exporting these java options in the shell where you start the jvm you like to debug, you can use your favorite IDE to connect to port 8888 at localhost in order to start debugging.
Standalone Tomcat with jBoss plus authentication against LDAP
There is a 2nd edition of this post: Standalone Tomcat with jBoss (2nd Edition)!
This tutorial desribes, how to install and configure a standalone Tomcat, so that a deployed webapp can authenticate against LDAP and connect to a jBoss passing the credentials in every call of an EJB via remote interface , so that the business application can authenticate against the same LDAP, too. The configuration of the jBoss seems to be a more common and better documented task and will be covered in another tutorial, which I will link here later, as soon as I have written it.
WARNING: Please don’t use this solution in a productive system, but for testing purpose only. The custom LdapExtLoginModule presented here exposes the credentials of all online users to all classes using the same class loader! I will add a blog post, as I find a solution for production systems.
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