that’s great…

Resin, what happened?

I’ve been a loyal Resin user for about 3 years now. For a time, it was one of the fastest servlet containers. Well, I have an web-app, made up of 3 wars. It uses a number of open-source, 3rd party libraries, such as Hibernate, Spring, Acegi, DisplayTag. The length of startup time has never really been an issue. However, after upgrading from resin-3.0.19 to resin-3.0.23, and deploying the expanded war, startup time went from 90 to 117 seconds.

Since I simply deployed the expanded war from on instance to another, I knew it had nothing to do w/ the war contents. Rather Resin was doing something different. The majority of load time seems to be during the precompiling of jsps. I wouldn’t mind the extra time, if a benefit was visible at request-time, but I didn’t see that. Although just a visual inspection, the pages returned in about the same speed.

I was initially writing to see if maybe i was imagining this — and then I saw a comparison done by Matt Raible. Guess should to take a closer look at Tomcat-5.5.

Re-attachment

If you use Hibernate and Spring, but no JTA or Seam, and you have to subscribe to the session-per-request-with-detached-objects model, you may have run into the following situation: having to reattaching detached objects to the current open Hibernate session. Even with an Open-Session-In-View filter or interceptor, you may have situations where you need to perform and operation on a detached object, but its parent session is closed.

Well, there are a few ways to handle this. Jason C. showed me some code that would merge pending changes, using the merge(…) method on the Session interface. In my situation, I needed a way to attach the persistent parent to the current open session, and let the natural cascading occur. So, AOP to the rescue. I added the ReattachAdvice (below) as advice to the all my DAOs, for their “save*” and “update*” methods.

public class ReattachAdvice implements MethodBeforeAdvice {
    ...
    public ReattachAdvice(String... inomingMethodNames) {
     // store incoming method name patterns
    }

    /**
     * @see org.springframework.aop.MethodBeforeAdvice#before(java.lang.reflect.Method,Object[],Object)
     */
    public void before(Method method, Object[] incomingArgs, Object target) throws Throwable {
        ...
        if (!(target instanceof AbstractHibernateDao)) return;

        final HibernateTemplate template = ((AbstractHibernateDao) target).getTemplate();
        final String methodName = method.getName();
        for (String pattern : namePatterns) {
            // Is a handled method?
            if (CommonUtil.stringMatch(pattern, methodName)) {
                for (int index = 0; index < incomingArgs.length; index++) {
                    Object tmpArg = incomingArgs[index];
                    if (tmpArg instanceof Entity) {
                        incomingArgs[index] = handleEntity(template, (Entity) tmpArg);
                    }
                }
                return;
            }
        }
    }

    private static Entity handleEntity(HibernateTemplate template, Entity entity) {
        if (entity.isPersisted()) {
            try {
                entity = (Entity) template.merge(entity);
            } catch (StaleObjectStateException e) {
                template.load(entity, entity.getId());
            }
        }
        return entity;
    }
}

Then I had to make the following addition in my Spring context files. Pre-AOP, I would have had to ensure that any method that might run into this issue, would call some re-attach method. This seems cleaner.

    <bean id="reattachAdvice" class="somepackaging.ReattachAdvice">
        <constructor-arg>
            <list>
                <value>save*</value>
                <value>update*</value>
            </list>
        </constructor>
    </bean>
    ...
    <bean id="daoTemplate" class="org.springframework.aop.framework.ProxyFactoryBean" abstract="true">
        <property name="interceptorNames">
            <list>
                <value>reattachAdvice</value>
                ... other advice
            </list>
        </property>
    </bean>

just like a mini-mall…

I saw this months ago, and sent it in an email to a few people. When I last checked it had 960,020 views. It’s basically the best commercial ever! Well, I saw a reference to it on SNL last night, and thought why not post it here. Enjoy.

Echoes

Some guy (Jason) takes digital pictures of stuff (Rochester, NY). Vote for his work here. Note: You’ll have to sign up.

Cash to Kermit

Johnny Cash’s last video before he and his wife passed on was to the song Hurt. It was excellent. Here’s a rendition of that video with Kermit the Frog. Enjoy.