ownCloud OpenShift Quickstart Update

Back in September, I wrote up how to get ownCloud running on the OpenShift Online.  Since then there have been several versions of ownCloud released and I went through and updated the ownCloud quickstart to use the latest bits.

As part of this update and in preparation for my talk at Red Hat Summit 2013 I also have been working with OpenShift Enterprise to develop an on-premise, private cloud solution that is a DropBox clone.  I'll have details on how to set this up in another blog entry either here or at my Company's Blog - An Open View.

For this version, I'm working with the HA-Proxy configurations to build a complete solution that has auto-scaling inherently built-in and has a strong security foundation.

Stay tune for details.

Mongo and Hibernate OGM

The next article in our series looking at different Java frameworks is out and it covers Hibernate OGM.  My colleague, Ken, took a look at OGM and came up with an expanded sample application that is more in the JEE mold - complete with JPA, REST, and other JEE goodness. You can check out our mongo-odm sample project over at Vizuri's GitHub repository.

Hibernate OGM provides Java Persistence (JPA) support for NoSQL solutions. It reuses Hibernate Core's engine but persists entities into a NoSQL data store like MongoDB or Infinispan.

In addition to OGM, Hibernate Search and Lucene are important components.  Check out the article  here and check out the project from the  Vizuri GitHub repository.  This is a JEE stack application and includes some Arquillian tests to get you started fairly quickly.

As always, comments are highly encouraged.

Morphia and MongoDB

The next article in the series on Mongo and Object Document Mappers is out.  For this article, we created a sample project over at our GitHub repository.

You can check out the article over here - Java and Mongo Object-Document Mappers - Morphia

I'm sure that over time, we can simplify the domain model and leverage the Query objects within Morphia for more generic classes.  But for now here's a good start.  As always, comments are highly encouraged.

Next up is Spring Data.

MongoDB and Java Persistence

I've been taking a look at how to approach persistence with Java and MongoDB.  Leveraging the Data Mapper and other JPA-related patterns seems like a good practice to continue with Mongo - especially given its non-relational status.

My colleagues and I are currently doing a bake-off of the different frameworks and are publishing our results over on our company's blog.  

In the interest of not incurring any DRY violations, I'll simple link to the articles from here.  However, I'm interested in hearing what everyone thinks and whether or not there is even a need for Data Mappers with Mongo.

Introduction - MongoDB, Data Mappers and Java

Morphia - Java and Mongo Object-Document Mappers - Morphia

Reverse Engineering Java to UML Class Model

Found a great little tool for generating UML Class diagrams from existing Java classes. It's a plugin in Eclipse that outputs the image to Omnigraffle. The good news is that Mac OS X users can create diagrams in their favorite tool.

Its available in the Eclipse Market place as 'javatoomnigraffle' or you can check out the page here.

Granted you have to pay some bucks for Omnigraffle, but its worth it and now with the Eclipse integration, it will make for some good pictures for upcoming blog posts.

Configuring PHP Values for OpenShift

This is probably basic stuff for you PHP experts out there, but recently I was doing some work to upgrade my ownCloud instance that's sitting in OpenShift.

There were some significant changes in the upgrade which required completely replacing the php directory - at least according to the upgrade instructions on ownCloud's site.

This was a fairly smooth process as I made sure I had checked out my latest deployed instance on OpenShift. Then, I removed everything in the PHP directory but the config and copied in the latest ownCloud version, committed the changes and watched the OpenShift magic automatically deploy the new CodeBase.

Well almost. I ran into an issue where the session.save_path php variable was not set to a writeable directory. Simple enough fix, just modify the php.ini to do this - except on OpenShift. The next place to set this then is to configure it in a .htaccess file. So in the .htaccess file I added -- 'php_value session.save_path /tmp' and then did an rhc app restart owncloud -l. Viola, I'm off and running again.

To fix it correctly, I need to modify the .htaccess to use one of the environment variables for openshift - most likely OPENSHIFT_TMP_DIR, but for now this works and I can tinker with the latest bits of ownCloud.

So in the future, if you need to modify a PHP variable, make sure to use the .htaccess file for this.

Now my next thing is to make sure that I modify the ownCloud openshift quickstart to use the latest code.

Trends: Gradle vs Ant Ivy vs Buildr vs Maven

I recently read @apemberton   article comparing trends for Maven vs Ivy.  I wasn't surprised to see that Maven was a clear winner and even less surprised to see that the Google trend line was still in a positive direction.

However, I decided to add in a couple of other Java build tools as well - in particular Buildr and Gradle.  This is where I was surprised - Gradle surpassed Maven in terms of interest in the across the intertubes.


Now this doesn't indicate adoption or maturity, but clearly over the last 2 years, Gradle has been on a steep upward trajectory. This will surely translate into more adoption for enterprise projects and is definitely a tool that I need to spend more time learning about it.