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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Starting with Resin 4.0.2 (due out within a week), the Resin administration application supports a REST interface for grabbing server information. In this blog post, I’ll give an overview of the REST interface, how to write plugins, and even how to integrate with Nagios.

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The Internet is becoming more and more about sharing data, and, uploading files had become nearly universal requirement for a web application. Prior to Servlet 3.0, implementing file upload successfully required external libraries or tedious input processing. Version 3.0 of the spec goes a long way towards providing us with a solution to the problem in a generic and portable way.
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Resin 4.0 introduced Early Access Servlet 3.0 support and, in version 4.0.2, we’ve solidified the implementation. Among many interesting features, Servlet 3.0 introduces annotations that make deploying Servlets, Filters and Listeners of all types easier. This short tutorial opens with the introduction of annotations of javax.servlet.annotation package, shows how to use WebListener, WebServlet, WebFilter and WebInitParam annotations and closes with an example demonstrating a use of IOC (javax.inject package) in a Servlet.
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We’ve been quiet on the blog for a while, but pretty busy behind the scenes for the last couple of weeks. There’s lots going on, but what I’m working on specifically is a new deployment model for Resin 4. In addition to our current file system based hot-deploy, we’re now adding a deploy model based on Git. We introduced this in Resin 4.0.0 and 4.0.1, but we started exploring the benefits of Git repositories and realized that we have the ability to do some really powerful things like sophisticated application versioning and rolling out applications in stages. I’ll show you the new model and give a preview of how you can use it in upcoming versions of Resin.

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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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This is a very rough draft of a pomegranate specification. It should contain the main details needed for an early implementation.
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Over the last few months, I’ve been talking to a lot of people, doing conference sessions about cloud computing and I’ve found out a lot about the different architectures in this space. I’m still very happy with our architecture (perhaps even happier) even after of all these discussions. In past blog posts and in our whitepaper, we’ve explained how the new Resin 4 cloud architecture works. Now I’ll talk a little about why it’s a nice alternative to other approaches.

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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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We’ve used test-driven development from the beginning of Caucho, almost 12 years now, and it heavily influences our development, refactoring, and also our release cycle. Today, we’re in the final two weeks of the release cycle for 4.0.1 which means passing our regression test suite and working through load testing.

Each week in our release cycle is influenced by our TDD methodology. For Resin, we aim for an eight week release cycle, and usually slip a week or two so it ends up being ten-ish weeks.

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