Yearly Archives: 2017

Caucho Newsletter November 2017

Caucho Newsletter September 2017


Caucho Newsletter July 2017

 

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           New Releases, Partnerships and Success Stories!

          Resin Pro has the advantages of being lightweight and fast. Thanks to the fast and precise support of Xest Information Technology, Caucho’s Korean partner, we have been able to create our current Resin operating environment. I've used WebLogic, Jeus, JBoss and other app servers. Resin is the most satisfying of all of them.” 

– Kyobobooks IT Team Leader Seo-ho, Cho (Kyobobooks is a leading bookstore in South Korea, with 35 bookstores and a mobile site that services 160,000 users/day).
 

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  • Resin 4.0.52 and 4.0.53

  • Case Study – ChosunILBO migration from WebLogic to Resin

  • Caucho Partners with NTT Data Intramart Figtree Innovation Centre in Sydney, Australia

  • ​Cool Resin tip – dispatch rule

 

Resin Updates
 

A lot of engineering work has gone into the latest release of Resin.  Users see a notable growth in performance and long-term stability. Good news! We have less than 10 open bug reports, including feature requests.

 

Bug fixes in the new versions include:

 

Resin – 4.0.52

==============

- 0006051: Diffie-Hellman group vulnerability

- 0006041:  com.caucho.jmx.MBeanView does not match wildcard queries

- 0006037:  ByteCodeParser with jdk8 constants

- 0006042:  JSP and PHP is not reloaded after modification

- 0006045: issue with mmap read

- 0006033:  access.log rotation issue

- 0005920:  access log not archived intermittently

- 0006049:  indirection through jndi:/server/<path> removes server

- 0006047:  resin-data db corruption creates large log file, prevents restart

- 0006044:  stat_data.db startup time slow

- 0006038:  Access log broken data

- 0005943:  Dupliate Access-Log Entries when using host-level Redirect Rule with an IfMBeanEnabled condition
- 0006039:  session saving issue with forward

 

Upcoming fixes in the new 4.0.53 (in progress)

 

Resin – 4.0.53

==============

- 0005951: 4.0.46 bad install over existing 4.0.37

- 0005979: Double start of application

- 0006059: PHP is not reloaded after modification

- 0006061: TempCharStream null pointer

- 0006060: UnsupportedOperationException: com.caucho.bytecode.MethodTypeConstant

- 0006055: Add log-level configuration to resin.properties
- 0006058: NullPointerException @ buildInvocation(WebAppContainer.java:847) instead of 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

 

Resin 4.0.52 improves efficiency of data and log storage. Resin 4.0.53 will also include single line configuration in resin.properties for enabling/disabling health and modifying logging content & levels of resin-data.

 

These changes are being implemented at the request of developers. Send us your bugs at http://bugs.caucho.com/main_page.php

Case Study – Korea's largest media company increases performance by 30% and reduces TCO by 40% by migrating from WebLogic to Resin

Check out these impressive performance and cost savings results for ChosunILBO, Korea’s largest media company that also publishes the most influential newspaper in the country. 
 

        “Before Caucho, we used WebLogic in our main business systems. By migrating to Resin, we 'caught two birds with one stone’ and successfully achieved high performance. We also reduced our total cost of ownership (TCO) by 40%.”

        - SeongHyun, Song, Sir. Development Team, ChosunILBO
 

Working with our Korean partners, Xest Information Technology, ChosunILBO replaced WebLogic with Resin. Engineers benefitted from the following changes in productivity, performance and scalability:

  • They could increase work efficiency​ ​rapidly​ ​by a simple setting method and configuration change 

  • They could apply​ ​app source changes without downtime even if application source code was altered frequently 

  • By using Resin’s lightweight and rapid restart in less than 10 seconds, they could minimize downtime and increase efficiency by over 30% 

Because Resin provides seamless integration with popular frameworks including Spring, iBatis and Struts, developers used Resin as the core for their vital applications while successfully integrating their legacy applications.
 
Read the full ChosunILBO case study here.

 

Caucho Partners with NTT Data Intramart Figtree Innovation Centre

  

In June 2017, Caucho joined the Intramart Figtree Innovation Centre in beautiful Sydney, Australia. The partnership was formalized in San Diego by Luis Ohri, Senior VP of NTT DATA Intramart; Ricky Au, CEO of NTT Data Figtree Systems and Steve Montal, CEO of Caucho.



This technology alliance will seek strengthen NTT DATA Intramart’s sales footprint in the Asia Pacific region, while bolstering NTT DATA Figtree Systems’ technology capability and service portfolio in business process management (BPM). The Intramart Figtree Innovation Centre recognizes the significant technical benefits and synergy of incorporating Caucho products, where customers can leverage the powerful architecture of Resin, Quercus and Baratine.

 

The Intramart Figtree Innovation Centre will seek to develop upon the existing product IP offered by NTT DATA Figtree Systems, NTT DATA Intramart and Caucho to provide a mutually beneficial sales model and growth strategy throughout the over 5,500 existing clients, distribution channels and NTT DATA Group companies.

 

Caucho is honored to join the Intramart Figtree Innovation Centre. We look forward to working with our friends in Australia!
 

 

Cool Resin Tip: Dispatch Rules

 

Controlling flow, access, and authorization within individual web-apps is simple with Resin.

Resin's dispatching is based on a list of dispatch rules configured in the resin-web.xml or the resin.xml configuration files. Each rule has a regular expression matching request URLs. The first dispatch rule that matches takes control of the request. For example, a <resin:Redirect> sends a HTTP redirect, and a <resin:Dispatch> dispatches the request as normal.

Each matching rule can rewrite the URL using a target attribute that accepts Java regular expressions. The following rule flips the first two segments around, so /foo/bar would become /bar/foo.

Basic conditions check the request and return true if the condition matches. Conditions can check on authentication (<resin:IfUserInRole>), the remote IP (<resin:IfNetwork>), check for SSL (<resin:IfSecure>), and check for activation time (<resin:IfCron>) or if a file exists (<resin:IfFileExists>).

The rewrite conditions can also be used as security conditions, e.g. for <resin:Allow> or <resin:Deny>.An action tag can have zero condition tags or at most one. If you want combine multiple conditions, then you'll need to use composite conditions like <resin:And>, <resin:Or>, <resin:Not>, <resin:NotAnd>, and <resin:NotOr>.

Example: send 403 Forbidden if port is 80 and user is not admin

<web-app xmlns="http://caucho.com/ns/resin"
​xmlns:resin="urn:java:com.caucho.resin">

<resin:Forbiddenregexp="^/secret">
<resin:And>
<resin:IfLocalPort value="80"/>
<resin:Not>
<resin:IfUserInRole role="admin"/>
</resin:Not>
</resin:And>
</resin:Forbidden>  

</web-app>

  
Download Resin and Develop up! 

 http://caucho.com/products/resin/download                                                   Facebook: Caucho Technology  Resin Twitter page

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Caucho Newsletter March 2017

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    Caucho at Devoxx - for the developers!

     Q1 has been filled with activity at Caucho!

Developer Sean Wiley is on the road presenting at key events including Devoxx US. We continue to collect valuable feedback from Resin users and look forward to the next release, Resin 4.0.51. We encourage you to report any issues with reproducible behavior to bugs.caucho.com website, or by reaching out directly to us at presales@caucho.com.

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  • Caucho presents Baratine @ Devoxx 2017, March 21-23 in San Jose
  • Caucho presents webinar with Elastic Beam
  • Caucho presents @ San Diego JUG
  • Resin High Availability Settings (Part 2)
 
Caucho Presenting Baratine @ Devoxx 2017
 

Join Caucho Engineer Sean Wiley for a “Tools in Action” presentation on server side Java. Sean will be presenting on operational service views using Caucho’s MicroService Platform Baratine (link to www.baratine.io)

Sean’s presentation will provide details into how MicroServices can improve high volume web services, making bottlenecks a thing of the past. The talk will integrate these services with current architecture, allowing developers to use platforms they are familiar with for next generation applications.

 

If you’d like to meet up with Sean for a coffee or beer during Devoxx, contact him at wiley@caucho.com

 

Devoxx conferences in Europe are famous for being vendor neutral community events, organized by developers, for developers. The events are always highly intellectual, geeky and fulfilling conversations with some of the best speakers and attendees in the industry.

Register for the event and find out more information here: http://cfp.devoxx.us/2017/index.html

Caucho/Elastic Beam Webinar
 

Ouch!!! We saw that Gartner estimates that downtime costs are >$300,000/hr with variation based on industry vertical and other factors. So we partnered with Elastic Beam to build a robust web application server environment that delivers performance, security and minimizes costly downtime.

 

Our webinar focused on simplifying and securing application infrastructures with example deployments. We also touched on the following questions: 

 

   What is causing availability issues with today’s Java EE application servers?

   What are the critical requirements to consider when building robust web-scale infrastructure?

   How do you build highly available web infrastructure with a software only approach to avoid significant costs?

   What types of hacker attacks do you need to worry about?

   How to secure your applications against malicious activity? 

   How to track API usage and detect abnormal behavior?

 

To  learn more, please reach out to us at presales@caucho.com.



San Diego JUG

We gave a talk at the San Diego Java Users Group on high availability of the Resin Application Server. The talk was well received and we were glad to share with the San Diego developer community details to improve their application deployments.
 

Check out the abstract: Uptimes, scalability, clustering and performance monitoring are all important aspects of running a successful Java Web Application. This talk will focus on real world examples of features and advanced configurations deployed in the Resin Application Server to achieve success in the aforementioned aspects. Features and examples covered will reveal how users of the Resin Application Server are achieving 99.99% uptime with their enterprise deployments.

Details and presentation slides are online at http://www.sdjug.org/meetings.

 

High Availability Part II - How does the Web Tier find the App Tier
 

Following up on Part I presented in January's newsletter, here is Part II. As always, we value your feedback so take a look and feel free to send your comments to wiley@caucho.com.  

​The Web Tier hosts the load balancer, which is configured in resin.xml with the following:
 

 

New Picture (1)

Note that resin:LoadBalance has a cluster parameter which will be used to find servers that serve that cluster (Tier). In the case above the cluster is called 'app'.
 

New Picture (2)

Web Tier resolves servers in the App Tier using resin.properties. Resin.properties configuration file must have a correct app_serversproperty which lists static App Tier servers. Once the Web Tier can find core servers of the App Tier it can resolve the dynamic servers using the cluster state that is communicated by the App Tier to Web Tier.

Deploying Web Applications

Web Applications should be deployed into App Tier using Resin deploy command. Once deployed into one of the three founding members of the cluster (the first three static servers defined in app_servers) application is replicated to the rest of the static and dynamic servers in the cluster. Deploying a foo.war application will look as so:

New Picture (3) 2

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Configuring user name and password

Username and password are configured in resin.properties with admin_user and admin_password properties.

For production deployment the password must be generated with Resin's password command as so:

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Lines admin_user and admin_password can be copied into resin.properties replacing the commented out admin_user and admin_password properties

 

For testing the password can be specified in plain text as so:
 

New Picture (6)

Cluster Security: Cluster Key

Cluster Key is used as a security token which allows participants in Resin Cluster Resin Servers to communicate. Cluster key should be specified in resin.properties as so:

New Picture (7) 

  
Extended – New Years gift to optimize your configuration! 

Contact Caucho engineer Sean Wiley at wiley@caucho.com or (858) 456-0300 to set up a complimentary review of your deployment, including learning about new Resin features and tips to optimize your configuration.

Download Resin                                                   Facebook: Caucho Technology  Resin Twitter page

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Caucho Newsletter January 2017

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​  Celebrating 19 years as the #1 Java app server!

Sun_with_Sunglasses_Transparent_Picture.png"Though it rarely happens, whenever one of our domains goes down, Resin's watchdog monitor restarts it automatically. We have been using Resin for five years and have achieved 99.99% up time. It is very reliable and fast. We host several websites and we particularly like the ability to run each domain in its own isolated java virtual machine”

- Peter BetBasoo, Assyrian International News Agency

 

Resin 4.0.50 will be available for download this week on caucho.com/download. With many new fixes in the latest release, the number of open requests is down to 15! We recommend upgrading to the latest version for the highest performance and stability.

Notable bug fixes in 4.0.50:

  • 0006027:  ref #6009: Shutdown doesn't appear to give requests time to finish
  • 0006025: add ignore-lock
  • 0006023: NPE: tld discovery
  • 0006022: command jmx-list -operations NPE
  • 0005990: IndexOutOfRangeException in Caucho.IIS.LoadBalancer.OpenServer
  • 0005948: apr_pool_cleanup_register(config->web_pool, s, cse_cleanup_, NULL) at modules/c/src/common/stream.c:1848 cause segfault
  • 0006021: JSTL Custom tag upper to lowercase
  • 0006002: add custom global error page for 503 service unavailable
  • 0005918: resin crashes on server shutdown on windows with openssl
  • 0005916: OPENSSL: SIGSEGV
  • 0006017: db pool issues when full
  • 0006020: Resin.properties defaults with persistent sessions on
  • 0005969: forward in include with context /foo
  • 0006008: resin:Forward at host level does not forward if @regexp matching context exists
  • 0006015: Allow server id be muted on error pages
  • 0006014: proxy-cache not showing updated files
  • 0005957: Deployment of war file causes Java to use 100% CPU and Resin to crash
  • 0005989: Resin pauses for 30 or more seconds during startup performing some git operations

For bug fixes, email us at presales@caucho.com or submit bugs directly at http://bugs.caucho.com/main_page.php
 

Resin High Availability – easy default setup!
 

We want to make sure you are getting the best out of your Resin deployment. Through best practices gathered from emails, phone calls, and on-site visits, we continue to craft the default setup of Resin as a High Availability setup. To this end, we have put together a two-part overview that describes this setup.

 

The purpose of this overview is to familiarize new users with the architecture and configuration of Resin, and cement what long-time users may already know. As always, we value your feedback so take a look and feel free to send your comments to wiley@caucho.com.

Overview – Part I

Running a web application in high availability configuration requires a Resin Cluster. Resin cluster is a feature of Resin Pro which provides load distribution and session and cache replication.

 

In a minimal configuration with two application servers load can be split in two, with each server serving 50% of requests. In such a cluster consisting of two servers, sessions can be maintained in-memory or can be replicated between the two servers with each server has a copy of a every live session. This determination is dependent upon the session_store property in the resin.properties file which defaults to false.

 

A suggested Resin High Availability cluster with failover support should have three or more servers. Such configuration ensures that sessions and distributed cache data are triplicated providing extra redundancy for session data.

 

The core three servers of the cluster should be configured as static servers in resin.properties file. These three servers will construct the cluster core with each storing a full copy of all live sessions and distributed cache data.

 

Additionally a Load Balancer is required to balance load between cluster peers. Resin Pro provides Load Balancing capability as one of the core features of its Web Tier. If a hardware load balancer is used instead, it should be capable of supporting sticky sessions i.e. be capable of forwarding all requests from one client to the same Resin server. Sticky sessions help make the most efficient use of Resin cluster as each request is forwarded to the server where corresponding session was originated.

Configuration Files Overview

Default installation using:

1.  ./configure

2.  make

3.  sudo make install

will install Resin configuration files in the in /etc/resin directory

Resin Properties File

Named resin.properties the file configures values for Resin Pro standalone and Resin Pro cluster. Values from resin.properties are imported into resin.xml and cluster-default.xml

Resin Configuration File

Named resin.xml the file provides configuration for application and web (load balancer) clusters. File resin.xml imports values from resin.properties

Resin Default Configuration Files

Resin extracts default configuration into cluster-default.xml, app-default.xml files. Default configuration is imported into resin.xml and should rarely be changed.

Default Cluster Configuration

By default clusters for application and Web Tiers are defined in resin.xml. Application tier is used for hosting web applications while Web Tier is used for load balancing. Typically, requirements for Web Tier may not be as high as they are for App Tier which makes using fewer Web Tier servers with more servers in the App Tier possible.

Web Tier servers provide load balancing and web content caching, reducing load on the servers in App Tier.

Configuring App Tier Cluster in resin.properties:

Resin.xml exports server configuration for app and web clusters into resin.properties.

Servers for App and Web tiers are mapped to app_servers and web_servers properties respectively.

Excerpt below shows how to configure three servers in the App Tier cluster; let the App Tier ips range be between 192.168.1.10 and .19

Dynamic Servers

Both App Tier and Web Tier clusters support dynamic servers. Dynamic servers can be taken in and out of rotation on an as needed basis.

Enabling dynamic servers requires setting the following property in resin.properties
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Starting Servers in the App Tier

Servers defined statically in resin.properties needs to start first. They will form the core of the cluster. Since the first three static servers compose the cluster core, cluster will operate normally as long as at least one of those servers is operational.

Starting the servers is achieved with bin/resinctl start –server app-33443 command.
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​The 33443 parameter comes from the position of the server in app_servers (or web_servers )property.
 
For example server 192.168.1.10:6800 should be started with command:

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Starting Dynamic servers in the App Tier

After static servers are started dynamic servers can join the cluster. Let the dynamic servers ip range start with 192.168.10.20 and start two dynamic servers:
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Note, that the command requires specifying the ip and port to which to bind the new dynamic server. Note also, that specifying cluster name is required as well.

The cluster name maps to servers in the cluster using cluster servers property defined in resin.properties. All servers in the cluster should be using identical configuration i.e. they should all share the same resin.xml and resin.properties file, along with cluster-default.xml and app- default.xml if these files were changed.

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Configuring Web Tier Cluster

Web Tier cluster exports its server configuration into web_servers property. Configuring the Web Tier servers is identical to configuring the App Tier's. Both tier clusters support adding dynamic servers.

Let the Web Tier have ips range start with 192.168.1.80:

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Web Tier servers can be started independently of App Tier but the Web Application will start being served only after servers of the App Tier become operational.

Stay tuned for Part II in the next Caucho newsletter!

Resin Tip – Secure Virtual hosts Redirect
 
Did you know that you can issue secure redirects in Resin at the host level? This setup is advantageous for users who might use a load balancer listening on their secure port to redirect traffic to Resin. By having the response from Resin secure, you can avoid a “double redirect” for your traffic.
 
There are two ways to configure the host for the redirect.
 
1. Add a <host-name> to the <host>.
 
<host id="" host-name="https://www.foo.com">
     …
</host>
 
The redirect will use the host-name when filling in the redirect. That assumes you've got a single fixed virtual host, of course.
 
2. Add a secure="true" to the <web-app>.
 
<web-app secure="true">
     …
</web-app>
 
That secure="true" will tell Resin to assume the real connection is secure even though Resin itself isn't using an SSL connection. So redirects will use “https:” instead of “http:”.
 
 

New Years gift to optimize your configuration!
 
Contact Caucho engineer Sean Wiley at wiley@caucho.com or (858) 456-0300 to set up a complimentary review of your deployment, including learning about new Resin features and tips to optimize your configuration.

Download Resin                                                   Facebook: Caucho Technology  Resin Twitter page

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