Migrating Spring Application from Tomcat 7.0 to JBoss EAP 5.1

It may appear quite obvious that any Spring based web application that works under Tomcat should be working when deployed to JBoss EAP 5.1. In fact, this is further than the truth. Most often than not, the Spring based web application would just spew out tones of exception messages. This is exactly what happened when I tried to deploy a Spring 3.0.5/Hibernate 3.5.6 web application to JBoss EAP 5.1. I did finally get the application to work but not after spending many hours of trial and error to figure out the exceptions. Here are my eventual fixes.

1. Removed all the XML parsers under WEB-INF/lib directory, i.e. xmlParsers, xml-api, xalan, xerces.

2. Added hibernate-validator-4.1.0.Final.jar to WEB-INF/lib directory. For some unknown reason, JBoss EAP 5.1 absolutely need this.

3. Add 2 entries to hibernate.properties to pass into Spring. See text in red below.

hibernate.properties

hibernate.dialect=org.hibernate.dialect.PostgreSQLDialect
hibernate.show_sql=true
hibernate.bytecode.use_reflection_optimizer=true
#hibernate.cglib.use_reflection_optimizer=true
#hibernate.cache.provider_class=org.hibernate.cache.HashtableCacheProvider
hibernate.cache.use_second_level_cache=true
hibernate.cache.region.factory_class=net.sf.ehcache.hibernate.EhCacheRegionFactory
hibernate.cache.provider_class=org.hibernate.cache.EhCacheProvider
hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto=update
hibernate.generate_statistics=true
hibernate.jdbc.batch_size=20

hibernate.validator.autoregister_listeners=false

hibernate.validator.apply_to_ddl=false

With these changes, the web application finally works.

Analysing Ant Project with Jenkins and Sonar

Jenkins(or Hudson) and Sonar are perhaps two of the most mature open source tools available today for implementing continuous integration. They comes with a plethora of features that make life easier at monitoring and managing quality of multiple software development projects. Out of the box, Sonar is designed for Maven project. However, it can be configured to work with Ant projects. The following steps show you how to achieve this:

Installation
1. Download this plugin Sonar Ant Jar
2. Copy the jar file into <ANT_HOME>/lib

This is very important, otherwise your project would not compile properly.

Configuration
Ant projects typically come with <PROJECT>.properties and <PROJECT>.xml files. So, just add the following code snippets into the existing ant build file. The code snippets assume that Sonar has already been installed to run at http://localhost:8080/sonar with Postgresql database.

myproject.properties

#Application Information

app.name=myproject

app.version=1.0.0-RELEASE

app.prettyName=My Project

artifact.id=org.mycompany.myapp:myproject

# Sonar configuration

sonar.db.url=jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/sonar?charset=utf-8

sonar.db.driverClass=org.postgresql.Driver

sonar.db.username=username

sonar.db.password=password

sonar.web.url=http://localhost:8080/sonar

# For Linux

# ant.home=/usr/local/ant

# ForWindows

ant.home=C:/apps/ant

myproject.xml

<project name="My Project - Build" default="compile" basedir=".">
     

     <!-- Define the properties file -->
     <property file="myproject_build.properties"/>

     <!-- Sonar database configuration -->
     <property name="sonar.jdbc.url" value="${sonar.db.url}" />
     <property name="sonar.jdbc.driverClassName" value="${sonar.db.driverClass}" />
     <property name="sonar.jdbc.username" value="${sonar.db.username}" />
     <property name="sonar.jdbc.password" value="${sonar.db.password}" />

     <!-- Sonar url -->
     <property name="sonar.host.url" value="${sonar.web.url}" />

     <!-- Add the Sonar task -->
     <target name="sonar" depends="compile" description="Sonar static code analysis" >
       
         <taskdef name="sonar" classname="org.sonar.ant.SonarTask"
                       classpath="${ant.home}/lib/sonar-ant-task-1.3.jar" />
   
         <!-- list of mandatories Sonar properties -->
         <property name="sonar.sources" value="${src.home}" />

         <!-- list of optional Sonar properties -->
         <property name="sonar.projectName" value="${app.prettyName}" />
         <property name="sonar.binaries" value="${build.all}" />
         <property name="sonar.tests" value="${test.home}" />
             <path id="sonar.libraries">
                 <path refid="compile.classpath"/>
             </path>    
         <sonar key="${artifact.id}" version="${app.version}" />
    </target>
</project

Running
From the command prompt or inside your favourite IDE, run "ant -f myproject.xml sonar". This will take awhile depending on your project size. Once completed, myproject should show up on the project list inside Sonar.

Integrating with Jenkins/Hudson
Under "configure" panel, just add a new ant task to execute the "sonar" task.

Reference: 
1. For more details on Ant Task, see Analyse with Ant Task 
2. For more details on Jenkins, see Jenkins 
3. For more details on Sonar, see Sonar