Run java program at backend on Windows

Normally, if you want to start a Java program to run as back end process, just type the command follow by a '&'. However, how do you do the same on Windows?

Yesterday my colleague was facing this problem and i remembered i have gone through the same problem before in my previous company. After we went through the windows command list i found something, which is the 'start' command. Then i remembered i might have used this command before when i had faced the same problem last time.

So we tried the 'start' command and it was successful.

Why IT Project Fails!

I have come across an article talking about why IT project fails!

Take a look on it!

My experience told me that business users often do not want to spend much time with the developers during the development of a system. They do not realize that it is very very critical and useful to the final result of the system by spending time reviewing developers work to find out whether something is missing at the early phase of the project! Well i do agree that agile methodology approach is very very good provided the business users are willing to allocate resource to examine the system.

Finally i am working on 2nd project!!!

Finally i have a chance to work on 2nd project after joining this company.

The first one has gone for production and it is being supported by the production support team now. Anyway there are several environment issues occurring recently. I want to help them but too bad i am involved in new project already.

To be accurate it is not my 2nd project, but 3rd one. I was involved in a 3 days proof of concept anyway and that gave me a terrible nightmares. It was a typical last minute project which everyone in the team had to work extra time! It is about to build a portal for a telecommunications client.

Now one weird thing of the WBIA running on production is that sometimes the message will be processed twice! This creates a false impression to users of the telco company that the account registration process just fails! The production support team should be quite tension right now of this issue. I think it has something to do with the configuration anyway that why certain XML message is processed twice. Why it is routed back to the adapter again!

Also today i have learned how to upload a WSDL file to DataPower and do a testing today! My teammate said basically we can replace the whole DataPower team after we learned how to configure the WSDL at DataPower. That's funny!

Working on wrong direction

One day the client raised an issue to me. That issue would not happen if the Websphere Message Broker (WMB) flow that i deployed on the server is running fine.

I checked the queue and channel status by using a tool called MQJ explorer and found out both the sender and receiver channels' status were 'inactive'. I then turned it to 'running' again. However their status will still be 'inactive' after some time. I had gone mad about this and spent a whole day trying to find out what went wrong.


In the end i know i went into the wrong direction. It is normal that after some time the status of the channels go to 'inactive'. As long as the transmission trigger is on then there will be no problem. When the next message comes in then the sender and receiver channels will be activated again.

So what actually went wrong. Argh it is because the portal team did not set the correct queue name to the JMS header of the XML message and thus no response from the whole flow!

Complex investigation, easy solution

Yesterday I was facing one production issue where somehow at some time the connection to a database which is located at another server will be reset. I was getting java.lang.SqlException(io exception: connection resrt). I have reused a method that will reconnect to the database. I hope it works in the next deployment and i believe it should work. Code snippet as below:

public Connection getDBConnection(String dbName) throws OracleConnException, Exception { if (logger.isInfoEnabled()) { logger.info("getDBConnection(String) - String dbName=" + dbName); //$NON-NLS-1$ } Connection cachedConnection = null; if (ocDataSource == null) { ocDataSource = new HashMap(); this.printSQL("new HashMap"); } OracleDataSource ds = (OracleDataSource) ocDataSource.get(dbName); if(ds == null){ this.printSQL("creatingNewOracleDS"); ds = createNewOracleDS(dbName); this.printSQL("createdNewOracleDS"); ocDataSource.put(dbName.trim(), ds); } int i = 0; int retry = KenanAdaptorProperties.getORACLE_RETRY_NUM(); for(i = 0; i < retry; i++){ try { this.printSQL("ds.getConnection() " + ds.getPortNumber()); cachedConnection = ds.getConnection(); this.printSQL("error in connection? "); if(!isConnectionAlive(cachedConnection)){ this.printSQL("connection is not alive???"); try { ds.close(); } catch(Exception e){ //log.debug("Can't close DataSource object!"); } ds = null; ocDataSource.remove(dbName); ds = createNewOracleDS(dbName); ocDataSource.put(dbName, ds); } else { break; } } catch (SQLException se){ logger.error("getDBConnection(String)", se); //$NON-NLS-1$ } catch (Exception e){ this.printSQL("Exception:\r\n" + Util.getStackTraceForLog(e)); } // sleep for a specific amount of time! //make it configurable try { Thread.sleep(KenanAdaptorProperties.getORACLE_RETRY_SLEEP_TIME()); } catch (InterruptedException e) { // log.debug("Interrupted Exception:\r\n" + Util.getStackTraceForLog(e)); } } if(i == retry){ throw new OracleConnException("Connection is not established. Failed after " + retry + " retries."); } return cachedConnection; }

production rollout for Kenan Adapter running on Websphere Business Integration Adapters is successful!

Finally the production rollout for Kenan Adapter is successful!

This is the third deployment after the unsuccessful first two. Well it went well in spite of some minor issues. Most of the scenarios are catered this time. The client's testing team had done a good job this time for testing thoroughly on all kind of possible scenarios! Yeah they should have done that during the UAT time! If they would allocate some time for more scenario testing, the deployment would have gone well even before year 2009! No it's approaching March and the client only managed to use it now. Well, this project does not bring any income to my team anyway. My project manager took this project to cover up some other unit's shit. Now that the long term outsource deal has been closed.

I am studying Websphere Process Server now. It looks far more complicated. I think i need some time to digest some new terms here. I should get myself involved in at least one project related to this product so that i can gain more expertise in this product.

All in all, good news this week. I am glad especially for the successfull rollout for Kenan Adapter. I have put very much effort in making this successful. I would like to thank my project manager for the support! That is important to continue to boost my morale.

Terrible Project, Terrible Day

Bad news hit me last Thursday, i would have to help out in a Proof of Concept(POC) project for a famous Telco company in Malaysia!

I went to the meeting place in the morning. Met with new teammates. Obviously everyone was still trying to adapt to this adhoc situation.

On the first day, I was spending the whole day getting help from a few experts to set up the development and testing environment. They helped me to install IBM Websphere Portal Server, IBM Rational Software Architect for Websphere and etc. All these are resource hungry giants. They made the computer to run so slow! Also, in order to make sure i am developing on the same environment, they migrated their Virtual Machine Image to another laptop that has higher spec than my computer.

I started building simple stuff the second day. After several trials and errors, i managed to build and test run the first portlet! This is my first ever portlet that i built in my life! I was excited and i thought mission completed. Well, demand is never enough. I was assigned a few more tasks and my attendence was expected the next day.

On Friday the POC initiator expected to wrap up everything so that the sales team is able to present a nice thing to the potential client! I was thinking things were done so hurrily the quality will surely does not meet client's expectation. In the end i managed to built 4 portlets: some with static data, some queries data from the DB2 database. During the migration of my war file to the core laptop which one of the technical sales guy is going to use to present to the client, i was facing some database connection issue. Well that was easily solved. After that i was asked to enhance the UI on the portlet. Man! what is this! The scope of work will never end?! It's too much!

I kept quiet and finally completed my tasks at 2am in the morning. After that the technical sales guy was able to ping from A machine's VM to B machine's VM! Double good news! He said i stayed to help and that boost his morale and actually i did not find out the solution. It's him who found it.

I learnt a lot of things in this POC project. I learned how to use Rational Software Architect for Websphere to build portlet. I learned how to deploy a portlet using Websphere Portal Server. Also i have explored a few good features in the WPS. I also learned a lot of things on Virtual Machine. The idea of using Virtual Machine is cool. The Virtual Machine helps each developer to counter the barrier of different development & testing environment. It can reduce unexpected events especially due to environment setup when you are demoing your application to your client!

My teammates also shared some valuable stories with me. For e.g. the technical sales guy told me this is also his worst ever project in our company. Normally some other POC projects are simple. I was considered very unfortunate to get involved in this.

Anyway, i don't really like this kind of ad-hoc call up for help. I hope this is my first time and last time doing this shit. At least please tell me one week earlier, and also let me know the overall plan so that i can get ready.

I still prefer a plan. Hurry can't help win a client.