I Wish I'd Said That

In a previous post I talked about solving a business problem with some open source technologies and this is the first installment of that series.

Since the decision was made on what the environment was going to be comprised of I thought it might be prudent to see if I could actually put the pieces in place to accomplish my project.

The end goal is to deliver an application using Grails and Glassfish so I downloaded Glassfish V2 UR1 an installed it on my Mac server. Just download the binary for your platform and install it according to the instructions on the download page and you’re set, the Quick Start Guide will have you up and running in minutes.

This turned out to be a very simple step in the process and I am very impressed with Glassfish at this point but more on that later. I had it installed and running in minutes and successfully deployed a small application to test it. All I had to add was the MySQL JDBC jar file to the domain lib folder and I soon had a couple of jdbc connection pools working.

I then downloaded Subversion 1.4.6 and installed it, again with no difficulties, so I now have the application server, VCS and database ready to go. I’m using the MySQL that shipped with Leopard as well as the default JDK (1.5) to keep things as simple as possible.

My next install was Netbeans and the hardest part of this was, which one to choose? You have 5.5.1, 6.0.1 and 6.1 Beta all available in various configurations so I chose 6.1 Beta with everything. This install went as smoothly as the rest and everything appears to be working fine. I chose the NetBeans, Glassfish and openesb packages from the downloaded image and decided to ignore the tomcat package since it’s not part of the project.

The last part of the environment to be installed was Groovy and Grails and the instructions here had me going in minutes with Netbeans. The last part of today’s exercise was to wire the pieces together so I followed one of the Grails tutorials using Netbeans and assembled a tiny program. I imported that application into Subversion through Netbeans to test that connectivity and I was pleasantly surprised at how well that went. The last step for the day was to generate a war file of the Grails app and deploy it under Glassfish. I created the war file from within Netbeans and deployed it using the Glassfish Administration console and, of course, it worked just fine.

At this point in my exercise I have my development and production environment in place and I’ve invested about 2 hours in the project. Please keep in mind that this is just an exercise for me and when I talk about my “production” environment it’s just a basic install of the application server and database. In my next article I’ll get started describing the application.

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written by Rob Caljouw

The past few weeks have been pretty busy, hence the lack of postings here, but they’ve been rather interesting all in all. I’ve had the opportunity to investigate some tools and technologies that are new to me so I thought I’d start sharing some of the fun.

J2EE environments are nothing new and I’ve worked a lot with IBM’s WebSphere, Oracle’s AS10g, JBoss and others but I never got the chance to use Glassfish until recently. I have been very impressed with it and will write more about my experiences with in upcoming articles. I’ve also had opportunity to try out some of the Glassfish related technologies like OpenESB, OpenDS and OpenSSO and again, have been very impressed. This makes for a powerful infrastructure but what about application delivery? This is where I started to delve into Groovy and Grails to see what they are all about.

To put this all in a little context, I have been asked a lot of questions lately about the economy and its impact on IT initiatives in businesses of varying sizes and in different markets. They all come down to the same thing, we still have a need for certain IT initiatives but our budgets have been slashed and all too often, head count has been, or is being, reduced so what do we do? I thought I’d try and answer the question with an exercise in application delivery for a fictional scenario to see what happens.

My fictional customer has the following business problem. They are a manufacturer with a number of plants around the country. At one plant they receive all inbound parts in trailers and containers that sit in the yard until the parts are required on the assembly line. There are many problems associated with this process but two main ones stand out. The first is the lack of inventory control, it often takes a lot of time to find the right parts in the yard so the line stops frequently. The other problem is trailer detention and container demurrage charges, the trailers and containers often sit too long in the yard so the manufacturer gets billed for this time.

The long term plan is to build a new warehouse with all the latest technology but that is one of the many initiatives that has been put on hold. The plant manager, however, is still held accountable by corporate to reduce costs and increase efficiency. The plant manager calls IT to see if they have any ideas but he is told that their budgets are restricted and they can not start any new projects because of the high cost of working with their ERP system. What is a poor plant manager to do?

The environment for my little exercise is as follows; the application will be developed on an Intel based Mac laptop and deployed on a little PPC based Mac server both running Leopard 10.5.2. I will use Glassfish as the application server, MySQL as the database and Netbeans as the development environment. Subversion is my VCS of choice and, of course, everything will be built in Groovy and Grails.

This will not be a tutorial for any of the above technologies but more of a diary of my experience in trying to solve a problem with them and learning something along the way.

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written by Rob Caljouw