Does ANYONE OUT THERE have a proven, easy to implement, somewhat universal way, to simple set connect and read timeouts for JAX-WS web-service clients? I can’t seem to find them, and neither can tons of others out there by the looks for dozens of posts/blogs I have read in forums etc.

This is one of the most insidious problems with an application. Timeouts, or the lack thereof causing a thread in your application to mysteriously (or not) hang up sitting there forever. Is my app deadlocked? Why is this thread hung? Then after a while your app’s thread pool may be exhausted etc leading to harder to diagnose and worthless artifact error symptoms being spewed into a log file.

In an enterprise app, one of the common things we do is use a web-service to send or receive data from some other application out there… and a lot of people use some sort of JAX-WS generated variant of clients.

Here is my question. HOW can I reliably set a jax-ws client timeout for both connect and read operations? I seem to see various answers to this, often time they don’t work for folks. Other times I suspect folks are getting confused with regards to the actual JAX-WS client implementation executing their code (jboss, glassfish, websphere etc).. and I guess these settings vary based on where you code is deployed, which is SUPER convenient because there is not abstract definition of this in the spec itself to allow developers to specify their timeouts in a portable way??

Hey Oracle: Why can’t Java just support a simple solution to this stupid time-wasting problem?? @see Axis clients and how easy it is to do there!

PLEASE POST YOUR SOLUTIONS IN THE COMMENTS SECTION OF THIS POST TO HELP OTHERS (and me!)

Here are some examples I’ve seen out there of threads that have random answers that often go unanswered.

http://www.coderanch.com/t/537394/Web-Services/java/JBoss-Jax-ws-Timeout-Configuration

https://community.jboss.org/message/607864

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2592303/how-do-i-set-the-jax-ws-client-request-timeout-programatically-on-jboss

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3130913/setting-jax-ws-client-timeout

http://www.java.net/node/676074

http://www.websphere-world.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2058

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wasinfo/v7r0/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.ibm.websphere.express.doc%2Finfo%2Fexp%2Fae%2Frwbs_trbclientruntime.html

http://chamerling.org/2009/09/23/setting-timeout-on-generated-jaxws-cxf-clients/

https://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=1666087

Downsides to the book? Some of the headings, intros to subsections are not bolded in the text when it appears they should have been.

Overall, 5 out of 5 for this book. I recommend it! You can tell this was written by someone with a ton of experience under their belt.

Would I recommend this read? Yes, go get it if you want to brush up on the latest with Oracle.

Lastly the book does touch on clients but all examples are from the standard client command line tools. I’ve searched around and have ended up using Apache Directory Studio. Its nice but I’ve had problems with schema data being cached and/or not properly updating when the schema is changed on the server.

Overall I would skip this book as I think the info available online regarding LDAP will get you up to speed just as well!

Overall I was quite impressed with this product and will look forward to (hopefully) getting to implement a full solution. I am currently working with the Endeca CADK to design a small framework for record adapters.

The project was a dynamically driven Flex app embedded in a web-browser that could also run on AIR. The application was read-only and did not collect data from the user but simply presented data one way. This app consisted of a your typical main screen, featuring configurable “portlets” that gave teasers into the deeper content contained within. It also had primary top navigation each of which drove to sub-screens which could render their data-sets in various customizable layout views, each of which having its own set of second level navigation to navigate within that sub screen. The data was stored in an XML implementation of an “Content Store” interface which could also be swapped out with a SQLite or web-service backed version if necessary. The lower level service layer that stored and managed all of the content as well as the navigation meta-data was wired together using Spring Actionscript and also leveraged other libraries like AS3 Commons.

For the application logic itself (i.e. how the views render, how the user navigates around, what screen renders what data etc) was all handled by using Caringorm 2.2.

By default, Cairngorm seems to drive the developer to be extremely granular with their Command, CairngormEvent and Delegate declarations. What this means is that if you are not careful, you will end up with an absolute overload of classes for a simple application. Instead I took the approach consolidating domain related functionality into larger Delegate classes which could handle more than one type of small specific operation. My Delegate classes abstracted away my lower level service layer (where the content and navigation meta-data was stored) away from the application and fulfilled its contracts through the delivery of VOs to the commands, subsequently to the model and finally to the views via Flex data binding.

I also tried to limit the number of events down to a total of four, one for bootstrapping Spring, one for handling a screen change, one for rendering the correct body and finally one for launching external resources. The number of VOs (value objects) I ended up with was fairly large (about 10) as I was very careful to create granular VOs so that I had zero coupling with the underlying service layer which was hidden away by the Delegate classes. The underlying service layer certainly had its own VO like objects which I could have permitted to bubble up to the model/view, but taking the decoupled VO approach is the way to go in an MVC framework such as Cairngorm. You can end up replicating a lot of properties etc, but it is worth it in the long run as your VOs help you gel your domain model without tying it to the underlying implementation.

In the past I’ve played around with PureMVC, as well as my own custom MVC like framework for throwing together quick Flex apps. Overall I would say that my experience with Cairngorm in this small app was a positive one. There was a slight learning curve to get going, but it was not difficult at all if you have used other MVC frameworks in any other language. Cairngorm is heavily dependent upon Flex/AS3′s internal data binding and that can be a positive or negative depending on your personal views, however I found it to be quite powerful and convenient.

On the downside, the most awkward thing in Cairngorm for me was the Model (ModelLocator), for a small app like this one it was fine, but it just seems like a giant “global variable” store (not seems, it is in fact one) and if you are doing a complex app, I feel it would be necessary to break this up into different model’s for different parts of the application. Ideally each view should not be directly bound to your custom ModelLocator as Cairngorm forces this which basically couples your view directly to a specific model implementation. Instead a DI approach might be better.

Thankfully this application did not have to use the ServiceLocator as I was using in-process services (not web-services or remoting). Why was I thankful? Well when I looked at the ServiceLocator the whole thing made me cringe! The documentation on how to use it as well as the source, plus the fact you declare an wire it up in MXML…. It just seemed like a combination of bad naming and bad implementation. Secondly, unless you are using the hardwired web-service, http object or remoting versions in that class, the ServiceLocator in Cairngorm appears to be useless out of the box without customization. You just can’t easily plop in your own services bound by an arbitrary key. Why don’t they support custom abstractions of a “service” beyond the default “remote” three provided in Flex? Why does a “service” have to be remote in Cairngorm? Why should it care?

Overall… like I said my experience was fairly positive and would use it again for a similar project. That said, I do have some issues with the framework. I also fundamentally don’t understand why this framework is the “de-facto” standard promoted by Adobe and seemingly viewed as required knowlege for any “real Flex/AS3 developer”. Shouldn’t knowing the principles of MVC be more of a requirement than simply the nuts and bolts of a specific framework implementation?

Next stop… I am going to try out some other AS3/Flex MVC frameworks. I’ll report back on those.

The problem came up when I tried to debug my app. When I hit debug I got the dreaded *** Security Sandbox Violation *** (Adobe’s equivalent of the blue screen of death) once my app attempted to make an UrlLoader request for a sibling resource to the SWF. Now, at this point I was frustrated as this was an exact cloned copy of the project that still worked under the original project name in Eclipse.

Turns out, that during a true “Create new Flex Builder Project” setup in Eclipse, Flex Builder adds your project’s bin-release and bin-debug directories to the local Flash Players global security settings as a trusted resource. This is necessary so you can debug/run your Flex projects in eclipse without getting the Security Sandbox Violations when accessing local resources.

Now how to fix this?

Simply go here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager04.html

and proceed to add your copied/new project’s bin-debug and bin-release dirs. Then next time you run, the security sandbox exceptions will go away, just as if you originally created the project in Flex Builder’s “wizards” of smart.

So that said, just take a look at Chapter 3, which describes the Cairngorm’s “ServiceLocator”. Wow, if that does not seem like an overly convoluted set of classes and interfaces just to lookup HTTP/WS/RMI services, then I am not sure what it is.

Moving on….. to the book. This is a decent book, and the author is correct that for a newcomer to Cairngorm, there is not a ton of very good documentation out there for those starting with this framework. The author does a fairly good job of presenting the framework and how it works in a simple straightforward approach. Roughly the first 1/2 of the book is dedicated to discussing the inner working of the major Cairngorm players, the last 1/2 of the book covers a detailed step by step case study (blog app) followed by good coverage of the communities Cairngorm complaints, expert tips and 3rd party extensions.

Complaints about this book: First off I felt like the author may have been rehashing a lot of the material that is already out there, given the many references to official docs and other resources that were cited. The second complaint is the horrible formatting of the code samples. The wrapping of code lines is awful and so is the spacing between methods etc. Very hard to read and they could have done a better job with that.

Overall: Do you need to learn Cairngorm in about a day? Get this book.

Skill levels/Audience: Targeted towards people with zero Cairngorm experience, but intermediate to advanced AS3/Flex experience. Backgrounds with other MVC frameworks is helpful in understanding the material. This book is NOT for people brand new to Flex/AS3.

FYI, last year I played around with PureMVC, and this year (2010) after reading this book, I am going to make an effort to do at least one or two projects using Cairngorm. Lets see how it goes and I will report back!