Using the Log4j Framework, Syslog, and Swatch to create a Responsive Central Logging Service
Log files are potential weeds in the system administrator's garden. This article shows one way of turning these weeds into a good source of event notification nourishment. Log4j in combination with Syslog and Swatch can act as an efficient and cheap means of log file maintenance and harvesting. This combination is particularly interesting for small to middle-sized companies that wish for a simple and quick solution for plumbing Java applications into a standard UNIX/Linux based infrastructure.
The Convenient Way of Deploying Web Services and Extensions Modules
Web services has become highly demanding and a large number of players have entered the web services arena. Axis2, an Apache initiative, is the latest addition to the web services stack, and addresses almost all current web service requirements and provides a user friendly, highly flexible, highly extensible, more reliable, high performance SOAP processing engine. Axis2 was developed with the experience gained from the Axis 1.x family and the advancements in the Web Service stack in the last few years. For one, Axis 1.x's cumbersome deployment model has been updated to an archive-based deployment mechanism in Axis2, which includes hot deployment and hot update. This article steps you through the workings of this brand new deployment mechanism.
Geronimo is built on a J2EE agnostic Kernel and is positioned as a general-purpose Inversion of Control (IoC) framework for components called GBeans. This article explains the theoretical aspects of the IoC framework, describes the GBean Life Cycle, GBean States and Dependency Injection with a few examples, and concludes with an explanation of how to write a simple GBean.
Struts is a popular Web presentation framework that has garnered considerable community support. This article aims to highlight some best practices that can be applied in medium to large projects to aid efficient development and low-maintenance quality code. In the course of this article we shall explore ways to optimize the design and development of Struts-based applications.
Following extensive redesign and refactoring, the Tomcat team recently announced the first release of the new Tomcat 5.5 branch, Apache Jakarta Tomcat 5.5.0. This release sports increased performance and an improved internal structure. Although not a stable release, it sets the tone right for a solid 5.5 release, replete with significant additions, a possible change in packaging, dependencies, and Tomcat internal APIs.
Building reusable code is all the rage today - after all, if we can build it once and reuse it over and over, we can build less and less over time. The whole short history of software development is an exploration of the layers of abstraction used to make building applications easier. Once you have a collection of pre-built generic parts, you have the beginnings of a framework. A framework is a set of related classes and other supporting elements that make application development easier by supplying pre-built parts. They provide the infrastructure for application development.
