Author: Robert Magnus

Upgrade a Jenkins farm

| Robert Magnus

We have been using successfully Jenkins for a long time, but our Jenkins environment was very outdated. The master and its slaves were still running on JDK1.6 with Jenkins version 1.456. So it was “very” old. Even the installation of new plugins was impossible  because these were usually based on Java7. Overall we have 20 Jenkins slaves for 27 projects and 200 jobs. The projects are in several states: just started, ongoing, release or maintanence. The normal project work should not be disturbed by this upgrade.

Therefore we decided not to update the existing installation but to use a completely new Jenkins and update the JDK too.

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Split git repositories by subfolders with history

| Robert Magnus

This article describes how to turn the subfolders in a git repository into new git repositories, keeping the history.

In our case we have a big git repository (2GB) with slides for a lot of courses. Every course was a subdirectory in the repository. So even if you hold just one course, you have to clone everything. That’s why we decided to put every course into a separate repository. We use SCM-Manager for our repository and could therefore use its REST api in the script.

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Proof-of-Concept (POC) – Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) Environment for social media sites

| Robert Magnus

Goal

The customer (a big retail store chain) uses micro sites to implement small, time-limited areas in their web site. This proof of concept demonstrates, how the desired life cycle of a micro web site for social media activities could be realized with Openshift 2.x. The life cycle includes development, test, publish and archive. Another important aspect of this proof of concept is the scalability of the solution.

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Brave new world – Migrating a Java EE Application from JBoss AS 6 to JBoss AS 7

| Robert Magnus

We are migrating an existing Java EE Application from JBoss AS 6 to JBoss AS 7. This blog post introduces our experience we have gained during the migration of the application to the new JBoss AS 7.

Overview of the application

The application is a Java EE application based on EJB, JPA and it contains a web application built with JSF. Furthermore, the application contains a web service to interact with a third-party system and some MBean’s for administration and configuration.

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Start developing Play! applications with Scala

| Robert Magnus

The Play! Framework offers a new way to develop web applications. Relying on a stateless model, a light but complete stack and no big turnaround times for debugging, Play! makes developing Scala applications really efficient. akquinet is using Play! in several projects. But, what makes Play! even better and your development even more efficient is the Scala support. You can develop your application using the Scala language.

This blog post explains how to set up Play! and your development environment to develop web applications efficiently. It covers the Play framework and the Scala module installation, the integration inside the Eclipse IDE, the Source Code Management configuration and the deployment into Apache Tomcat and JBoss AS.

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