Pontus Scratchpad

One of the features of Mules ESB, that I find very useful, is the Mule Expression Language (MEL). It can be used not only for flow control and filters, in fact most of the components and transformers that come out-of-the-box with Mule ESB support that properties are specified using MEL.

In Mule ESB 3 they introduced the concept of Configuration Patterns. These patterns helps you simplify some specific but common integration scenarios.

A common integration scenario is that a company/organisation has a old internal web-service that they want to expose as a public interface.
Often these internal services have a less than ideal interface which is often auto-generated from some business logic so you do not want to simply expose the existing contract. Instead we want to have a interface more suited for use by external entities. However it is not always practical or possible to rewrite the internal service.

The solution is to build a SOAP proxy with transformation.

I found the guides available on mulesoft.org a bit cluttered when it came to how to build the Mule ESB from source.

First of it's the matter of finding the source. Following the guide lines in the official guide you see that it's the SVN repository on codehaus that is the main repo. There is a repository on github however this seems to just be a mirror that does not follow the main repository very well. The trunk is pretty much empty and it seems the branches/mule-3.3.x is where all the action is.

When building integrations with JBoss ESB you naturally need to interact with other systems via notification gateways other than messaging queues. It could be that you need to enrich data from a WS-SOAP service or just put data into a file in a specific directory. These addresses and location often need to be different depending on which environment you are running in.

I just finished reading Stevey's Google Platforms Rant.

Most of the attention this post has gotten is about the fact that Mr Yegge accidentally posted this publicly and how he goes on about his current company not doing things right. However if you look past the internal company politics rants and sarcasm about former employers this post is a really good article about how to build company wide service platforms.

It's really worth to read top to bottom.

From TECH BLOG FOR EJBCA ENTERPRISE OPEN SOURCE PKI's articel Converting keystores between JKS and P12.

Johan dug up these keytool commands, that with in JDK6 and onwards (not in JDK5 and earlier).

JKS → P12

keytool -importkeystore -srckeystore keystore.jks -srcstoretype JKS  -deststoretype PKCS12 -destkeystore keystore.p12

P12 → JKS

Here is my personal git cheat sheet.

Branches and tags

List branches local and remote

git branch -a

Make a local branch track a specific remote branch

git branch --set-upstream localbranch origin/remotebranch

push and delete remote branches

http://gitready.com/beginner/2009/02/02/push-and-delete-branches.html

Restore a deleted tag

This is stolen from Baptiste Wicht blog post Git Tip : Restore a deleted tag.

This is a simple step-by-step tutorial to install and configure exim to route all e-mails send though a local SMTP server to one local user, regardless of the e-mail address or domain. I found this set-up very usefull when testing applications that send e-mail messages and you do not want to generate multiple HotMail accounts for testing or in case I'm wanted to do some testing and development when I'm offline.

Install exim

Start with installing exim.

While testing your JBoss service it can be very handy to use DefaultDS as your data source. However you will probably not want to hardcode this JNDI name into your code, jboss-server.xml, web.xml or persistence.xml (depending on service you write). There you want to use your own "MyAppDS" JNDI name. So wouldn't it be sweet to be able to bind two different JNDI names to the same datasource ?

It is possible and quite simple however I could not really find any good example while Googling the problem. So here is a short description how I solved my problem.