I was accepted to present at JBoss World 2008 about a couple of months ago, and I am just about done crafting my presentation. My presentation highlights how to unit-test, integration-test, and acceptance test your jboss seam web applications.

The presentation will use a slew of technologies from easymock to selenium. I only have a measly 90 minutes to go through it all, but I hope and anticipate that it will be exciting, entertaining , and informational.

My bio and information about the presentation is here. For complete information on JBoss World 2008 in Orlando and other presentations that will be presented, please visit jbossworld.com

The best java web framework, JBoss Seam 2.0.0GA is out and it is absolutely amazing.

What is so amazing about it?

• PDF generation
• email generation
• easiest ajax development
• integrated ajax widgets
• integrated facelets templating
• unit-test, functional-test, integration-test friendly
• component-based
• ejb3-based
• rapid-development
• conversation based scoping
• integrated security
• GWT integration
• extended JSF EL features
• and on and on...

I am so confident in everything that JBoss Seam does that I am ready to change my entire business around it. This is your complete solution in a web framework. I am updating a customer's site currently using JBoss Seam 2.0.0, and I am really excited about it mainly because Seam is expressive and keeps me productive. I look forward to doing more business with this framework for many years to come.

Disclaimer: I am not an employee or contractor with JBoss

• Groovy will enjoy great success. People will love the idea of having a powerful scripting language that uses the well known Java API at their disposal. Groovy will bring about the repatriation of several Ruby users that defected from Java.
  
• Grails will see some success, but that success won't come 'til late 2007. This is because people need time to learn Groovy first, and the Grails developers will probably be working diligently towards version 1.0 throughout 2007.
• Developers will realize that SOA has nothing to do with Web Services. The SOA community will also gain a general understanding of what SOA really is, hopefully before SOA 2.0 comes out. ;)
• The Java community will continue to seek clarity on the future of Java and whether or not Java is meant to be an easy language to learn. Such ruminations will lead to more great debates on generics, in-line XML, the arrow operator, and whether it is Java's manifest destiny to include features from other languages in the JDK in order for Java to remain on top.
• EJB3 will finally be released by major vendors and will gain acceptance by developers.
  
• JBoss Seam will gain acceptance by many web developers, but will continue to have problems selling its idea because those same web developers will have difficulty wrapping their heads around what stateful development is and how it's useful to them.
  
• Legions of well-known web and desktop Java developers will be bored with web and desktop development and will start to get creative with Java on other devices.
• JUnit dominance will be relinquished to TestNG.
• Ant will be demoted by the masses as merely a vehicle for scripting to get builds done.
• Dependency Injection and Interface Oriented Design will continue to be accepted by Java Developers.
• The Google Web Toolkit will be the most talked about Java based product in 2007. It will bring non-Java developers to the Java language, eager to do outstanding things with AJAX without the need to code in JavaScript.
  
• With systems like Subversion/CVS, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Feature/Bug Tracking software, Gmail, Blogs and Wikis. Developer machines will be and should be relegated to being hard drives dedicated to holding only the JDK, version controlled source code and libraries, and music files that developers listen to while coding. 
  

If you are trying to get JSF-RI and JBoss 4.0.3 to work with each other, you are in for a special surprise. The following code will help de-stupefy the situation:

java.lang.NullPointerException
        at javax.faces.webapp.UIComponentTag.setupResponseWriter(UIComponentTag.java:615)
        at javax.faces.webapp.UIComponentTag.doStartTag(UIComponentTag.java:217)
        at org.apache.myfaces.taglib.core.ViewTag.doStartTag(ViewTag.java:71) 

The NullPointerException is a result of a collision with the JSF-RI. This error occurs only with JBoss 4.0.3 because it comes packaged with MyFaces. The following solution was recommended by JBoss in their wiki.

The all configuration has something missing from the all/deploy/jbossweb-tomcat5.5.sar/meta-inf/jboss-service.xml file. If using the all configuration with JSF you should edit the value of the FilteredPackages attribute to make it look like this:

<attribute name="FilteredPackages">javax.servlet,org.apache.commons.logging</attribute>

Note that there should be no space on either side of the comma. For more details on this issue, see http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/JBAS-2349

To use the JSF Reference Implementation instead of the bundled MyFaces implementation, simply delete the jbossweb-tomcat55.sar/jsf-lib directory. Then, package the RI in your WEB-INF/lib directory as usual.

Note: You may also need to delete temp directories such as server/default/tmp and server/default/work. See comment by Geoffery in http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/JBAS-1508

I hope that helps.

Ok, so you have developed an enterprise application using JBoss. You deploy, and you fire up your web app, and it hangs. The web site never comes up and before you know it your processor is screaming. You check and double check. You're kicking in chairs and knocking down tables, in a restaurant, in a western town. What to do?

Well, I had this problem a while ago and corrected it. It came up again this morning. I knew I had resolved something similar. It was the same problem and of course the same solution.

The problem is that JBoss isn't a graceful server if you get a JNDI name wrong. So if you have this problem, double check the following:

• Your configuration files like your ejb-jar.xml or your web.xml. It is possible that names, links, or references are not matching up correctly.
• Your code. Remember that the standard lookup prefix is java:comp/env/ when looking up resources on a J2EE server. Check the names of the resources you are looking for in your code. This happened to be my problem consistently.

I hope this helps. I will check the mailing lists and bug databases and see if it has already been taken care of. If it hasn't, I will create a new report. If you have similar problems and/or solutions I would like to see them, so comment away.

A few days ago, I set up a virtual host on my server using JBoss/Tomcat with an Apache front-end. It was pretty simple. First thing is that I edited the server.xml document located in the tomcat sar directory in the deploy directory of your favorite server (minimal, default, or all). When I refer to the tomcat sar I am referring to the sar directory that houses all tomcat information. On my current server (JBoss-4.0.2), the sar directory is called jbossweb-tomcat55.sar

In the server.xml file you will see something similar to the following...

<Server>

   <Service name="jboss.web"
      className="org.jboss.web.tomcat.tc5.StandardService">

      <!-- A HTTP/1.1 Connector on port 8080 -->
      <Connector port="8080" address="${jboss.bind.address}" .../>

      <!-- A AJP 1.3 Connector on port 8009 -->
      <Connector port="8009" address="${jboss.bind.address}" .../>

      <!-- SSL/TLS Connector configuration using the admin devl guide keystore
      <Connector port="8443" address="${jboss.bind.address}" .../>

      <Engine name="jboss.web" defaultHost="localhost">
         <Host name="localhost"
            autoDeploy="false" deployOnStartup="false" deployXML="false">
             ....
         </Host>
         <!--Here is where you will set up your hosts -->

      </Engine>

   </Service>
</Server>

Inside the engine element is where you will set up your hosts configuration. Currently there is a host set up for localhost. What needs to be done is that there needs to be a sibling to localhost set up for your new virtual host.

<Server>

   <Service name="jboss.web"
      className="org.jboss.web.tomcat.tc5.StandardService">

      <!-- A HTTP/1.1 Connector on port 8080 -->
      <Connector port="8080" address="${jboss.bind.address}" .../>

      <!-- A AJP 1.3 Connector on port 8009 -->
      <Connector port="8009" address="${jboss.bind.address}" .../>

      <!-- SSL/TLS Connector configuration using the admin devl guide keystore
      <Connector port="8443" address="${jboss.bind.address}" .../>

      <Engine name="jboss.web" defaultHost="localhost">
         <Host name="localhost"
            autoDeploy="false" deployOnStartup="false" deployXML="false">
             ....
         </Host>
         
         <Host name="virtualhost2" autoDeploy="false"
                deployOnStartup="false" 
                deployXML="false">

             <!-- Add all your aliases here -->
             <Alias>virtual.evolutionnext.com</Alias>
             <Alias>myvirtual.evolutionnext.com</Alias>

              <!-- Set up logging -->
              <Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.AccessLogValue" prefix="virtualhost2" suffix=".log" pattern="common" directory="${jboss.server.home.dir}/log"/>
               <DefaultContext cookies="true" crossContext="true" override="true"/>
         </Host>
         

      </Engine>

   </Service>
</Server>

Restart the JBoss server and your JBoss server is ready to host a new subhost. Remember to update your DNS servers! Unfortunately the simplest things are the hardest to figure out, and it took me a while to figure out to update my DNS server.

If you are using Apache as a front end. What I did is modify my mod-jk.conf to let all traffic through to JBoss and let jboss take care of the virtual hosting. There is a sample of my mod-jk.conf below. Before doing this the easy way, I was trying to set up a virtual through httpd.conf and that seemed to have been fruitless and aggravating. You should probably know already by now how torturous it is to edit the httpd.conf file. I think you will find it a pleasure to let JBoss handle all J2EE virtual hosting.

# Load mod_jk module
# Specify the filename of the mod_jk lib
LoadModule jk_module modules/mod_jk.so

# Where to find workers.properties
JkWorkersFile conf/workers.properties

# Where to put jk logs
JkLogFile logs/mod_jk.log

# Set the jk log level [debug/error/info]
JkLogLevel info

# Select the log format
JkLogStampFormat  "[%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Y]"

# JkRequestLogFormat
JkRequestLogFormat "%w %V %T"

# Mount your applications
JkMount /* mainWorker

Notice my JkMount is letting all traffic through. If I have something else specific that I need apache to care of I provide an explicit path in my httpd.conf directory. That would usually be non-J2EE services like Subversion for example.

The last thing that is needed, is to adjust your webapp. If, in your war file you do not have a jboss-web.xml file in your WEB-INF directory, create one, and put in the following. If you are updating yours, then make sure that it has the following elements...

<jboss-web>
	<context-root>/</context-root>  <!--Make what ever context root you want -->
	<virtual-host>virtual.evolutionnext.com</virtual-host>
</jboss-web>

This will route traffic to the Alias mapped in your server.xml file. Now, try to go to your new subhosted website and it should work like a champ. If it doesn't, post me a comment.