In my earlier posts, I discussed using Gradle Rules to automate devops scripts. I’ve been working on a automated deployment pipeline, including a "rolling" upgrade of servers behind an Apache HTTPD Load Balancer. (See Gradle Rules! and Load Balancing).
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Gradle Rules!
There is plenty to like about Gradle. Plenty of bloggers have been singing its praises for build. But I see less discussion of it’s usefulness in the deployment pipeline. When in developer role, Groovy is my language of choice.. When I switch to my operations role, I prefer to stay in Groovy. Call me lazy, but I’ve never gotten as proficient with bash as I am with Groovy. Gradle provides a great way to collect and manage scripts for operations.
Apache HTTPD Load Balancer, Spring Security and Invalid Sessions
We recently configured an Apache httpd server to provide load balancing to three instances of Tomcat using mod_proxy_balancer over AJP. The backend application is not "distributable" (the sessions are not Serializable yet), so it’s not a proper cluster. Therefore, the sessions must be "sticky" using the JSESSIONID and jvmRoute in Tomcat. However, the application must be well-behaved regarding session creation to get full value from the balancer.
Converting from ehcache-spring-annotations to Spring’s own Cache Abstraction
Prior to Spring 3.1’s Cache Abstraction there was Ehcache Annotations for Spring (EAS). We had used the latter for quite a while without any problems, but I thought it would be better to switch to Spring’s own solution. Switching from one to the other was mostly trivial. There are minor differences in the annotations and bean configuration (to enable the aspect).
Spock Frameworks old() method
I’ve been using the Spock framework for several years. While watching HLS’s presentation on Spock at InfoQ, he mentioned the old() method. I’d never heard of it and could not find it mentioned in the Spock documentation. A quick check of the source of the Specification class showed the feature, with the following javadoc: