Hello, web developers!

We’d like to get a sense of the development tools you’re using with Resin and what tools you’d like to use with Resin. If you could post your thoughts, we’d appreciate it and will try to incorporate your ideas into our upcoming development efforts. There are a few framing questions below, but please feel free to comment on any other development issues that we’ve missed:

• Do you use an IDE when developing with Resin? Which one?
• If you use Eclipse, do you use the plugin from http://caucho.com/eclipse?
• If you didn’t know about the Resin eclipse plugin, where do you expect to find it? (e.g. on our webpage, in the Eclipse update system, etc.)
• Do you use other tools such as Maven to develop with Resin?
• If you use Maven or some other command line tool, what plugins and/or features would you like to see from Resin?
• Do you deploy to Resin in production directly from an IDE or command line tool? If not, is that a desirable feature?

You can also reply to this related topic on our forums and/or take the poll there.

Much of the time for Resin 4.0 that we’re spending is in improving the underlying quality in the core Resin services. Most of these aren’t visible features, but do improve the reliability and testability of the underlying code.

Since Resin is a 12 year-old product, we need to balance the need to improve and learn from experience with the fact of a large, existing code base with a large customer base, and have found continual refactoring combined with a solid regression suite to be an effective development path.

In the case of the networking code, we’ve gone from the simple request/response of HTTP to supporting Comet/Async for the Java EE Web Profile, and prototyping WebSockets for the upcoming HTML 5.

The main networking code change was remodularization: removing all HTTP dependencies and making the networking a standalone module independent of the rest of Resin.

There are two main quality benefits of the change. By removing distractions, we can focus on exactly the networking code and nothing extraneous, making it easier to see bugs and review code. And by cleanly encapsulating the interfaces, we can verify that our testing is complete, because the quality is more dependent on the quality of our tests than the code itself.

The way that you start and stop Resin and the watchdog have changed a bit in the 4.0 branch. I realized as I was writing the Resin Refcard that there are probably a few options and concepts that many users don’t fully understand. In this post, I review the Resin watchdog architecture and show the syntax while highlighting recent changes. I’ll also describe some of the thoughts we have for the future of the watchdog and solicit your ideas and input.

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Sample JVM Graph from Resin Admin

We’ve been doing a lot of work on our Resin administration application over the last few releases, adding features like statistic graphs, postmortem reports, and REST. The framework we’re building for these features is also quite extensible and easy to use. One of the in-house extensions we developed combines the REST and graph features so that you can export and embed user-defined graphs. We’ve added this extension to the main application for the upcoming 4.0.4 release so it’s available without any coding. In this blog post, I’ll show you how to embed Resin statistics graphs in your own monitoring tools, how the underlying graph API works, and give some tips on how to write your own similar extensions.

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Apache Chainsaw is a popular graphical logging tool for Java. Even though it’s based on Log4j and Resin’s logging uses java.util.logging, you can use Chainsaw to analyze Resin’s logs in real time. In this blog, I’ll show you how to connect Resin with Chainsaw using a technique that can be extended to other Log4j-based analysis tools.

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I’ve updated our Eclipse plugin to fix bugs, add a couple of features, and generally improve the user experience. It’s up in a snapshot now on our Eclipse update site: http://caucho.com/eclipse. Just add this to the software repositories in your Eclipse set up. The changes include:

• Bug fixes (esp. debug handling)
• Better handling of Resin configuration files
• Support for deploying to a temporary directory

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Last week I was out of town doing some on-site training for a potential customer and they asked if it’s possible to log the number of threads active at any given time. We don’t do that as part of Resin normally, but it got me thinking that this should actually be very easy using our scheduled tasks and a PHP script to access our MBeans.
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Studying the source code for a full application is the best way to really understand a technology like Java Injection (CanDI, JSR-299). Fortunately, Jeff Schnitzer, Scott Hernandez, and Jon Stevens have created a subetha mail, an open-source Java implementation of a mail list manager (like mailman) using CanDI extensively. Because subetha is also a sophisticated JavaEE application using EJB @Stateless beans, JMS queues with EJB @MessageDriven beans, servlets, and Hessian remote services, it’s a great overall application to study.

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We’ve been pretty busy around here, working on the new Resin 4 cloud features (PDF) and improving the performance of Quercus (PDF), so soon it’ll be time to talk about it! We just got some good news yesterday that I’ll be speaking at JavaOne about Quercus performance. Here’s the session info for that talk. Right now, I’m scheduled for Tuesday, June 2 at 4:40PM in Esplanade 301.

I’ll also be talking about Resin 4’s cloud features a little later in June at Jazoon in Zurich. Check out the session info here. I hope you can make it to see one or both of the talks!

Last week I was been looking at ways to take advantage of Resin 4.0’s new cloud features within Amazon EC2. I’m in the process of developing some tools to make this simpler, but in the meantime, it’s already possible to get up and running with Resin 3.1 on Amazon EC2. In this post, I’ll show you how to create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) with Resin and install WordPress on Quercus with MySQL so that your data persists on the Elastic Block Store.

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