Inside JavaBlackBelt

You must obey the rules !

2008-05-16T13:00:00.003+02:00

With the upcoming revamp of the moderation process, here at the JavaBlackBelt secret HQ we are fiercely arguing about What Makes A Question Good. I've summed up our discussions in the form of rules and have decided to share them with the community in this blog entry.

A question must be in the right place. A major problem in the basic exams is that many questions are too hard for the category they're in.
The question's statement must be clear, easy-to-understand, well-formatted, typo-free and focussed on testing real knowledge.
Avoid ambiguity: nothing is worse than knowing the answer but hesitating to state it because it's unclear what the question author wants. Example: "How old is J2SE?"
Avoid trick questions: does a question test the user's attention rather than her technical knowledge?
Avoid never-ending questions: questions containing too much text/code/choice are usually of poor quality.
Avoid cut & paste code questions : ask yourself "Is it easy to find the right answer without even understanding why the answer is right, simply by pasting into an IDE or googling for 10 seconds?"
A question must include a clear and pedagogical explanation that will teach the user something. We aim to teach people new things.
Don't copy other people's questions. Plagiarism is evil.

You must obey the rules !

We've built JavaBlackBelt as a learning tool where people play with exams to discover new things. Help them in their journey. The main mantra when you write a question should be "Do not try to trap people, help them learn and understand the technology."

Singing about architecture is like...

2008-05-09T08:30:00.001+02:00

Extreme Programming and stand-up meetings have appeared in Dilbert over the years, but there's a new reference point to prove that software development methodology is a hot topic in mainstream pop culture: "The Architect" by dEUS (one of Belgium's best-known rock bands - which sounds like an insult, but isn't... I hope):

There's more to the song than a catchy guitar riff that's both dissonant and jerkily propulsive, it's clearly lambasting Waterfall, Big Design Up Front and Architecture Astronauts. Check out some of the lyrics:

What is the architect doing?
(...)
I'm gonna go home and shut up for a year
And when that year is over I will reappear
And have a solution.
I've reason to believe that what I find
Is gonna change the face of human kind
(...)
Cause I'm the architect.
(...)
About all the problems on this earth we should
Worry now to solve them later
And so he’s brooding and alluding on a perfect design.
(...)
Now if these aspirations bother you
Well you are just you, you don’t have a clue
I'm sticking to the plan, I will see it through
Let there be no confusion.
Cause I'm the architect.

It may only be software development, but at least now it's rock 'n' roll, too.

JUnit and auto-boxing

2008-05-07T12:01:00.000+02:00

After that gigantic previous post, I thought it'd be good to post something simpler and more widely applicable.

I came across a little JUnit assertion gotcha that had me puzzled for a second. I was testing this (note, calculateDurationInSeconds() returns a long)

assertEquals(120, subjectUnderTest.calculateDurationInSeconds());

and getting the following, less-than-helpful test failure message

expected: <120> but was: <120>

I figured this one out pretty quickly because my Eclipse underlines cases of auto-boxing/unboxing. Since the assertEquals(Object, Object) method is being used, my int is becoming an Integer and the long returned by the method is becoming a Long. Obviously, any equals() comparaison is going to fail. I corrected this by using the long literal notation:

assertEquals(120L, subjectUnderTest.calculateDurationInSeconds());

What with all the conversion already going on between the presentation and data layers, I'm trying to generalise the practice of making primitive/wrapper conversions explicit, just in case.

How Tomcat ruined my night

2008-05-05T18:16:00.001+02:00

Tomcat is probably one of the more widely used pieces of open source infrastructure and it's a great boon to our productivity. Sometimes, though, a deep-rooted problem can sneak up on you and drag you into a sleep-deprived night of frantic web searching.

One day, I happened to see our production JVM restart, for no apparent reason. Intrigued, I looked into it a little bit more and realised that since the release of JBB v3 last December, it had been restarting roughly 6 times per month. After an OutOfMemory, the JVM dumps its heap into an hprof file, so there were a number of these files on the server, often over 1GB each!

I downloaded an hprof file and tried to open it with jhat, provided with the default Java 6 distro. jhat creates a website for you to visualise the heap [1]. Unfortunately, I couldn't get jhat to work, probably because JavaScript support is not yet implemented in MacOSX's JDK 1.6. I got around this problem by reading the hprof with YourKit Java Profiler 7.0 and quickly saw that vast amounts of memory were being taken up by several huge char arrays (click on the image for a larger version).

As you can see from the screenshot, 115 instances of org.apache.jasper.runtime.BodyContentImpl were holding on to over 560 million bytes worth of objects, keeping them from being garbage-collected and eating up inordinate amounts of RAM. So, what's BodyContentImpl actually doing?

Tomcat maintains a pool of PageContext instances, which in turn have an array of BodyContentImpls. Each BodyContentImpl has an array with the text from the tag's body. This array has a default size of 512 that is hard-coded as org.apache.jasper.Constants.DEFAULT_TAG_BUFFER_SIZE. Once the body of a custom tag gets bigger than that, the array grows and is never reset to its original size. With concurrent users, several such arrays might be created, so if a few popular pages use big custom tags, you can end up with a number of gigantic, un-garbage-collectable char arrays. In our case, this happened because in v3 we started decorating large blocks of JSP code with SiteMesh custom tags.

One solution would be to set the environment variable org.apache.jasper.runtime.BodyContentImpl.LIMIT_BUFFER to true, so that arrays over 512 bytes are released. Another would be to recompile Tomcat with a tag buffer size more suited to our needs. So both choices are extreme: either you maintain huge arrays for ever, or you're constantly creating and garbage collecting arrays, as 512 bytes is a fairly low limit for custom tags. We settled on giving the JVM more RAM to handle the extra garbage collection.

Of course, others have experienced the same problem. What's the word from the Tomcat camp? Well, Remy Maucherat, Tomcat committer, considers that:

Using sensibly written software helps. It should be obvious reading the API that using large body tags is going to be a huge problem.

Please draw your own conclusions.

By the way, jhat loads the whole hprof file into memory, so you may need to use the -J-mx512m flag if you're having OutOfMemory thrown.

Welcome!

2008-04-30T10:52:00.000+02:00

Welcome to JavaBlackBelt's new blog!

The aim and content are likely to evolve, but at the moment, we plan to write about some of the interesting technical issues Aymeric and I face developing the website, along with tips and tricks/how-to posts to help you get the most out of JBB.

Please leave comments, bookmark us, subscribe to the RSS feed, share us on your favourite social networks and whatever else people are doing to blogs nowadays. We hope you enjoy delving Inside JavaBlackBelt!