Ian Smith

Nuxeo on Glasshfish TV

ismith — 2009-03-25

Glassfish TV tomorrow!

I'll be playing Ed McMahon to Stefan Fermigier's Johnny Carson tomorrow on Sun's Glassfish TV. Well, perhaps one could apologize to Paul Simon and say "you can call me Al" ... of "Stefane Fermigier et al."

We will discussing a number of key areas of interest that are of interest to Nuxeo users/developers, Glassfish users/developers/crustaceans, and general Web ne'er-do-wells:

Our analysis of the (approximately) two dozen Java web technologies and how they perform under the strain of a transport workers strike.
Our efforts to reduce the locking costs -and thus increase the number concurrent users served - of our large (>200,000 lines) JSF application, after we have had a few bottles of Beaujolais Nouveau at lunch.
Maximizing the heat dissapation of a large number of JVM in a small machine room : Reblochon is the answer.
Our proposal for a new JVM bytecode op that could dramatically increase bandwidth utilization in applications that have complex content negotiation needs: MILD_INTRANSIGENCE_AT_THE_UN.
Finally, we will give an overview our use of Glassfish and OSGi in the 5.2 RC Release of Nuxeo («une nouvelle de derni�re minute») as well as various and sundry ideas that we have that are Java-, Glassfish-, or paté-related for the future of Nuxeo 6, Nuxeo 7, or the heat death of the universe.

Java Management Interface, coming in 5.2 RC1

ismith — 2009-03-09

Credit Where It's Due

This blog post would not have been possible without the diligent and thoughtful assistance of St�phane Lacoin. Stephain gave me the big clues on how to configure the current Nuxeo 5.2 "head" to make all the JMX stuff "turn on" and also personally tracked down and squashed a number of bugs that made this article possible (including one in JBoss!). Somebody, please give that man a croissant!

Not Quite in 5.2.0.m4

This blog post is about a feature that did not quite make it into the 4th milestone release of Nuxeo 5.2. It is in the current source code build (or you can get it from the nightly snapshots) but I thought those that are waiting for the release candidate release might be interested to see what's "coming down the pike." As of the time of this writing, it is expected to be in the 5.2 RC1 release.

JMX: The Java Management Extensions

The Java Management Extensions or JMX debuted with Java 1.5. These extensions allow an client application to manage and monitor a collection of devices, computers, and services. A simple example might be a three-tiered web application, deployed on three separate servers. One would like to all the feedback for monitoring sent to a single place, often called the management client, where a human can look at the incoming data or the management client itself can process the data with some type of analysis procedure. The data from a three-tiered web application would include data from all the software layers such as database, application server, and application itself, but might also include reports from the network connecting the layers, and some type of hardware monitoring daemons as well. Once this has been analyzed, by a human, computer, or both, then one may want to take some time of actions to manage the objects being monitored; in the example of the three-tiered application one can easily a imagine a scenario where you would want to begin an orderly shutdown procedure. Coordinating all the layers of software, on different machines, to do this gracefully is clearly a management problem!

Configuring Nuxeo

You need to install one extra bundle into your build of Nuxeo 5.2 to get this to work, the bundle is nuxeo-runtime-management. You should put the bundle in <nuxeo-install-dir>/server/default/deploy/nuxeo.ear/plugins. Nuxeo is smart enough to "pick up" this additional modules and its features the next time you fire it up just because it is present. So, go ahead and restart (or start) your server with the script bin/run.sh (or run.cmd for windows).

Connecting JConsole to the running Nuxeo

With Nuxeo now running and exposing its management interfaces you need to hook up a JMX client to see what's going inside the Nuxeo system. You can do this with the program "jconsole" that is supplied with the Java development kit (at least if you got your JDK fairly recently). When you fire it up, you'll need to enter these three values:

The first one is the tricky one, obviously! The hostname of the machine running nuxeo in this example is "localhost" and the nuxeo server, at the time of this writing, exposes its java management interface on port 2009. Normally, the nuxeo server does not require a username and password, the second and third values, since the management service is "turned off" by default and you have to turn it on by installing bundles.

Getting information about the system state

Once you have connected, you will see the set of mbeans (management beans) that are exposed by Nuxeo:

When you drill down into a category you can get statistics about the objects in that category. In the previous screenshot, for example, if you click on the "metric" you will get information about the number of http sessions that have been created and destroyed while the nuxeo server is running. Also shown in the previous screen shot is the "probe" mbean. This mbean does a probe of the repository periodically (about every 30 seconds) and keeps track of the successes and failures. Here's what you would see if you drilled down into that item:

So, from this display you can see that the probe has been run 25 times without failures and the last probe took 111 milliseconds.

Running Methods

You can not only see data with the JMX interface to Nuxeo, but you can execute management functions as well. For example in the previous screen shot, if you click on the "Operations" button you will be presented with a list of methods that you can execute from the management interface. One of these is "disable" that you can use to turn off the probe behavior. When you run a method via the management interface, normally you get a message like this:

More fun, though, is to map the Nuxeo Runtime's inventory with the RuntimeInventory's factory object. You can click on that object (shown in the upper left) of the probe screenshots under category "nx" then category "Runtime" inventory. You will have your choice of a number of methods on that screen that give information about your system, but the most interesting one is "bindTree". The result of clicking this button to invoke that method is shown in this screenshot:

This takes all the bundles and components that the runtime knows about and makes them available via the JMX interface, so you can get some statistics about them, although in many cases this is quite minimal. You can, of course, unbind that tree of objects with "unbindTree" as shown in the screenshot above.

Getting audited isn't all bad...

Athough it's getting perilously close to tax day for our friends in the United States (tax days come in September in France), we are going to bring up the subject of auditing anyway. Many of the actions that users peform when using Nuxeo are audited (assuming you have deployed the auditing bundle) and some summary statistics can be seen via the JMX interface. The following screen shot gives you a feeling for what types of actions can be seen via the NXAuditService category:

The JMX interfaces are a nice way to interact with enterprise software systems like Nuxeo and not only keep an eye on how they are running but also perform many basic management functions. This is going to be a standard feature of Nuxeo starting with the 5.2 GA release and you can expect that we will gradually be exposing more functionality through JMX is we go forward.

If you have questions or comments about Nuxeo and JMX, or this article, drop me a note at ismith [at] nuxeo [point] com. We would especially love to hear from folks who have specific needs for functions to be exposed by Nuxeo through the management interface.

Two more soldiers down

ismith — 2009-03-05

Double your pleasure, Double your fun

This has been a busy week on the book front and general purpose Nuxeo chicanery. I've got a number of things cooking right now so that I can show off features of the platform. Both of these features are of the "should be available to the public soon" type, so I've had to actually garner time from the developers to get them to give me demos and let me capture screenshots. I hope both of those posts are available tomorrow. I have the text of one written and the other should not be a major hurdle.

I've completed two more chapters, one fairly short one about XMap and Apache Commons Logging. I think it's only fair to admit that I really dislike Apache Commons Logging beacuse it gives people the distinct idea that writing more logging frameworks is ok. I can't believe the Apache Foundation green-lighted a meta-framework for logging when they already had log4j. Oh well. The other part of the short chapter is about the XML un-pickling code we use, which is packaged up into the library XMap. We use this all over the place in nuxeo to read in snippets of XML and turn it into Java objects.

The more meaty chapter is about Users and Groups. I got a lot of help, particularly on understanding directories and the test infrastructure needed for UserManager, from Anahide T. Big props to her! In this lesson, we construct a new class that interacts with the UserManager to create a new Group. Although it doesn't do that much, there is quite a bit to working with the UserManager service because of the wide variety of situations in which Nuxeo can be deployed. We have to work with flat text files, databases of user records of all sorts, and LDAP to be good enterprise citizens. I think that folks that read this chapter will come away realizing, more than anything, that messing around with users and groups in a big organization is serious business!

As always, the whole text can be found at http://www.nuxeo.com/static/book-draft.

Events, both real and imagined

ismith — 2009-03-01

Another week, another chapter?

Yeah, I know I said I'd be releasing these chapters every day or so, but sometimes things go astray. I had a rough week with a lot of immigration into France problems (for my dog! my wife didn't have any) as well as having to install my "world" on yet another machine. I've got through an old mac, a big server in the amazon cloud, and I'm now using my desktop remotely (via the old mac) on some huge 8 way server in a Nuxeo machine room. Sigh. Anyway, that setup is performing pretty well so I should be out of the woods now until my new macbook comes. (Air! Will somebody give me an Air, puh-leeze?)

This installation is nominally about Events and Event Handling--but secretly there is a agenda! I wanted to introduce readers to all of the tricks involved in getting eclipse to work well for testing but I did't want to do it in a chapter where the content itself was super-tricky. So, I figured most Java developers know about Events and Event Handling (since this used everywhere else) and it would be a good place to introduce the "Eclipse for testing, Maven for deploying" mantra that I'm using in the book.

So, here it is in all it's glory, chapter 8, Events and Event Handling.

The whole book can be found here.

It's only fair to admit that Alexandre Russel helped me a ton on this chapter--he re-introduced me to the idea of Eclipse's source path. I, foolishly, thought that a source path should contain, you know, "java source code." Oh, no, no! The "source path" in Eclipse can be better named "Places where the content will be copied into eclipse's designated output folder, unless it is Java source code, in which case we will compile it and then put the compiler OUTPUT in the designated output folder." I guess that was hard for them to fit on the menu item.

I1N on I18N

ismith — 2009-02-18

Lost In Translations

I've updated the book, again. I've added a new chapter to the book on how to make a Nuxeo bundle behave correctly in different locales:

Chapter 7: Internationalization and Localization

This is a chapter that is near and dear to my heart as a beginning (or dare I say intermediate?) student of la langue fran�ais. One thing that I didn't really get into this too much in the chapter, although it's important to me these days, is how quickly you can process (or misprocess) things when the language is your own. Some of the applications on my desktop here in Paris are in French and I find myself glancing at things like menus and thinking it says "Close File" when really it's saying something totally different. The brain can really play tricks on you when things are buried way down there will all that reptile stuff!

I have now put together 40 some-odd pages of text and images for Java programmers and have yet to put a line of Java code in the book! I think, though, we are reaching the limit of that and the plans for the next chapters will include some Java chicanery, although we are not yet ready to graduate from XML entirely...

Get Ready, CET, it's coming [H/T slashdot]

ismith — 2009-02-08

This coming saturday morning--maybe on your way home on the metro from a Friday night outing--Unix time will reach 1234567890. The CET time for this monumental event is:

Sat Feb 14 00:31:30 2009

Be ready. The world may end. Or not.

Already Dead, Yet Alive, Operating Systems Crack Me Up...but...

ismith — 2009-02-07

Look, I get a laugh out of reading the announcements of new (or rebuilt old) operating systems. I am frankly pretty skeptical that world needs a great many more operating systems now that it has 1 poor, big commercial, closed-source one, 1 good free, small-or-large, open source one, and 1 good, small-or-large, half-open-source-half-closed-source one. From a market standpoint, I'm not sure we need more since it's really unclear where the gap is that is going to be filled by something else that can grow into something better than either of these; the alternative of replace-all-at-once cannot even be accomplished by one of the largest, richest companies in the world and is, in my view, too much work to be useful.

So, this new Phatom OS would have been just another laugh-at-somebody-else's-expense... except something caught my eye.

The clever bit, at least to me when I read it, was that by targeting *only* virtual machines you can actually produce a situation where the underlying operating system doesn't matter much. This is clever and appeals to my sense of the macroeconomics (see above) since it allows you to get something small out the door, get some customers on it for some special/custom operations, and grow into something bigger.

I have somewhat reached this agnostic point already. Nuxeo is a large system, but it runs on basically anything that has a decent JVM. There are some "environmental" issues with windows that make it a bit tougher to support than Mac or Linux (either 32 or 64), but from the standpoint of 99% of the development, the underlying OS doesn't matter at all. So, all-of-the-sudden we have myriad gaps in the market! If the OS runs the JVM well (or the CLR, if you care) you can switch to it. That is the only thing that really matters to me anyway, and with the JCK it seems feasible that this could be guaranteed to a reasonable level of compatibility.

Once this is achieved--and it's not trivial--you can start differentiating your OS with extra Java packages that exploit super-cool-feature-X. Who cares what it is, it is something that *might* entice someone to stay on (get stuck with) the OS. Similarly, if you support some weirdo hacks in your OS that allows some JVM operation (or, better yet, a whole method or class) to run 10X faster, then you might be able to differentiate on performance. (This is risky, though, because the linux weasels will steal it in 10 mins! Look at the Tomcat native support if you need any more proof!)

This idea should have occured to me before. It strikes me, having thought through this now, that it might be the sole reason anybody wants Solaris anymore.

Presentation On "What Is ECM" by JM Pascal (in English)

ismith — 2009-02-06

What Is ECM?

Nuxeo 5.2 Milestone 4 Feature: Conversions and Previews

ismith — 2009-02-06

Exploiting OpenOffice

I decided to start off with the good stuff for this post. I couldn't really call this article, "How you really don't need Microsoft Office anymore because the open source tools are good enough" because I was afraid of Bill Gates. Or, to be more specific, I was afraid his hired goons; I would guess that he has the best goons money can buy, and lots of 'em! Anyway, if you haven't been following the progress of OpenOffice, you should catch up on things; the product has come a long way since of the ... cough, ahem.... "rough" builds of the early days. It runs really smoothly now, and being open source it's designed to allow other programs to leverage the great work that the Open Office (O-O) developers have done. (I am sure there is a climate-controlled cave somewhere for the poor slaves that toil away in anonymity on MS Office. I'm sorry, to those folks, for their working conditions, but the good news is that their company is becoming more like other companies now.)

The "leveraging the work of others" part is where this blog post connects with Nuxeo EP 5. Open Office (starting around version 2), exported a service that programs can connect to and use the imaging capabilities of O-O. The Nuxeo engineering folks did a number of nice things that use this capability--and we could only do this legally because we are open source too! Woo-hoo!

Seeing It In Action

I have mentioned the "Preview" tab that's now available in Nuxeo 5.2 milestone 4 in a previous blog post. One of the cool things that happens when you have O-O running on your system is that the MS Office formats "just work" in the Preview tab. O-O has to be running for this to work, so you should start it yourself if you want to play along with this post at home. So, to demonstrate, I've created a workspace with a few documents in it about cloud computing:

These are three files I found with google as demo material... I won't vouch for the quality of their information! These are, from top to bottom, a PDF file, a Powerpoint presentation, and a MS Word file. Lets see what happens if we click on the word file and then switch to the preview window:

So, what has happened here is that the MS Word document has been sent to O-O for conversion to HTML, then Nuxeo has rendered that converted version into a Preview pane. If you are a regular user of O-O, you are probably saying "Ho, hum, I've been doing that for years." Well, maybe you should revisit my previous post on annotating documents, huh? That little eye and the annotation service work for MS Word documents as it does for images:

As you would expect, the same holds true for the PowerPoint presentation--you can see it in the preview panel. Somewhat cooler, is you actually get some sensible controls to actually read the presentation as well. Here is a snapshot from the presentation:

Note the extra controls at the top like "Continue" (perhaps should be "Next Slide") and "Last Page." This is a pretty nice preview for not only not running MS Office, but not paying for it at all!

PDF Magic

So, of course, I'm going to show you a screen snap of a preview of a PDF document. Before I do that, I should mention that the PDF imaging is actually not being provided by the O-O system that I have been raving about but by another linux tool called pdftohtml that is part of the (very impression) popper PDF imaging project. Ok, here it is, sans any gratuituous annotations:

To return to my previous ranting about how cool O-O is, O-O does have a story to tell about PDF, but in the other direction. To generate a preview of PDF, as was done above, you need to render PDF and then figure out how to best display that in HTML. O-O is good at going to PDF from other formats, like those associated with MS Office. Thus, when you have OpenOffice available, you get a slightly different Summary tab as I am showing here:

The "Generate PDF" link will give you a PDF version of the document by rendering it with O-O and then sending it to your browser, without even needing a copy of MS Office! Sweet!

Internals Note

If you thought it was a little weird that you had to start up OpenOffice yourself to get these features, well, you are right. That was just to make it a bit easier to explain. In fact [extra coolness points here] there is a new part of Nuxeo 5.2 milestone 4 that manages a copy of Open Office for you, behind the scenes, if you configure your server to turn this on. Since Open Office is based on Java and Nuxeo is based on Java--and all three are open source--we actually use the OpenOffice code directly (rather than through a unix pipe or something) which should give us much better reliability as we move forward in the 5.2 GA release. There are a number of options about how you would like this to work, such as how many resources you are willing to dedicate to this slave version of O-O, in the configuration directory in the file ooo-config.xml.

I hope this gives you some hope that you don't have to keep paying the tax to run Office applications in the content of your content management system! If you have questions or comments about this article or anything else related to ECM or Nuxeo, drop them to me at ismith [at] nuxeo [point] com.

Post Scriptum

Secretly, over a period of about a year, I worked with folks at Fortune 500 company on a daily basis that were an MS Office-only company. They never knew I was not running Office...it's not a drop-in replacement or 100% compatible, but it is good enough, now.

Learning Nuxeo (Book Draft): New Chapter: Running Nuxeo

ismith — 2009-02-06

Another day, another chapter

Today, I've updated the book site with chapter 3 (really the second meat-n-potatoes chapter). This chapter explains a bit about how to run the Nuxeo server, how the Nuxeo server is related to JBoss and proposes some excercise for you to do to explore how to use Nuxeo. These exercises are probably "old hat" to folks with a lot of ECM experience, but if you are new to the genre you are likely to find them quite enlightening about how an organization can use the basic Nuxeo (and ECM) tech.

Great Feedback

After the website debuted yesterday the chairman of Nuxeo, Stefane Fermigier, suggested that I check out this new tool called Intense Debate. I have to say it was a good call! IntenseDebate is a tool for allowing you to get feedback about content on your website or blog. It's a bit better integrated if you put it on a blog, but some hackery allowed me to get into our tech-writing loop, so we can have pages that take your feedback, let you vote on other people's comments, etc Woot!

I hope you enjoy this installment and we'll be back tomorrow. You can, if you prefer, send me feedback the 20th century way by sending email to me : ismith [at] nuxeo [point] com.