(I have avoided that cliche all year, give me a break)
I’ve run various releases of Roller on various Glassfish versions, and am pretty happy with what I’ve settled on.
Here are some gotchas it’s taken me a while to Google fixes for.
Glassfish v2
Glassfish v3 is going to be awesome when it’s done, but it’s not a production release.
Get the Sun-branded release – it’s the same codebase, but has a pretty installer and the
option of commercial support down the line if you ever need it.
Roller bowler bowler penny a pitch
Roller 3 is obsolete now and clanky to setup. 4.0 is much much easier to deploy (the install guide even has instructions for Glossfish2), but JavaMail only works on 4.0.1. Dave Johnson (snoopdave, Roller developer) made a pre-built Roller 4.0.1 tarball available a while back.
It’s good, you should use it.
friends don’t let friends use DB2
No-one uses DB2 unless they’re forced to (no-one you’d want to talk to, anyway).
Roller hates it even more than I do. Avoid it unless you enjoy pain.
Better options I’ve tried are:
- PostgreSQL works fine with Roller I love it (but it can be tricky to cluster)
- MySQL is what most Roller guys use. I can’t bring myself to recommend it (we have previous) but I’d expect less Roller bugs talking to it.
- we’re currently on an Oracle 10g backend, it works so far. Someone else supports it, so that’s ok with me.
- Derby/JavaDB worked well enough, but it’s CLI is pretty dreadful (cheers IBM) and you might need to shell into it one day. Good within NetBeans, when you’re too lazy to install a real DB (did I mention the PostgreSQl installer yet)?
fustercluck
Glassfish clusters are easy to setup and actually fun to look after. If you want Glassfish to HA your sessions you should add a <distributable /> element to your web.xml. Roller doesn’t use sessions for much, but it’s not a lot of work, so you might as well. Other than that, it’s pretty straightforword.
Roller clusters are a different kind of fun.
Out of the box, Roller will do horrible things to you if you try to cluster it.
My favourites (so far)
- search is broken
- caching doesn’t work (well, it caches, it jut does it inconsistently on random nodes)
- scheduled tasks get run twice or not at all, often corrupting your schedule as they do it
- file uploads need a shared filestore.
I got round these with the following roller-custom.properties:
# hook in an external search engine instead
search.enabled=false
# these should be mounted from a reliable fileserver
uploads.dir=/glassfish/uploads
planet.aggregator.cache.dir=/glassfish/planet
# memcache instead of file-cache, scales better anyway
#
# see my last post for details
#
cache.defaultFactory=net.java.roller.tools.cache.memcached.MemcachedLRUCacheFactoryImpl
cache.memcached.default.servers=clusternode1:11211,clusternode2:11211
# it's a bit verbose by default
log4j.category.net.java.roller.tools.cache.memcached=INFO
# give each node a unique clientId - see below
config.expandedProperties=uploads.dir,search.index.dir,tasks.clientId
tasks.clientId=${roller.nodename}
wait, what?
tasks.clientId needs to be unique for each node in your Roller cluster.
Since we run the same WARfile on each node, we make that an alias to a JVM system property, ‘roller.nodename’, that’s different on each cluster node.
In Glassfish, you can do this by creating a cluster-wide JVM option which is set to a system property, and give each server instance a different value for system property.
Assuming we have a cluster called ‘rollercluster’ with 2 server instances ‘instance01’ and ‘instance02’, this should do the trick:
asadmin create-jvm-options --target roller-cluster '-Droller.nodename=${NODENAME}'
Command create-jvm-options executed successfully.
asadmin create-system-properties --target instance01 NODENAME=instance01
Command create-system-properties executed successfully.
asadmin create-system-properties --target instance02 NODENAME=instance02
Command create-system-properties executed successfully.Restart your server instances, and
‘ps’ should show ‘-Droller.nodename=instance02’ on the server running instance02.
(Thanks to Anil Gangolli and Kedar Mhaswade on the roller and glassfish lists for helping figure this out)