Welcome to the boesebeck.biz blog

this blog will cover some topics from my personal experience in professional life. This will include Scrum as well as technical stuff

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found results: 15

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latest blog entries

Worauf es beim Homepage-Layout ankommt

Custom Caching in Morphium

MongoDB Messaging via Morphium

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latest updates

To scrum or not to scrum?

Security und Passwortstrategie

Whatsapp und Datenschutz! Sorglosigkeit in Deutschland...

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security data security Computer global

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category: global

Worauf es beim Homepage-Layout ankommt

there is no english version of this text available

Anm.: Dieser Text wurde zur Verfügung gestellt von homepage-erstellen.de

Worauf es beim Homepage-Layout ankommt

Hat man erst einmal die ersten Hürden bei der Erstellung einer Homepage gemeistert, muss man sich um ein passendes Layout kümmern. Ein übersichtliches und ansprechendes Layout sorgt dafür, dass relevante Inhalte leichter gefunden werden können und Seitenbesucher eher zurückkehren.

Was ein gutes Layout auszeichnet

Beim Layout einer Homepage gilt es zunächst darauf zu achten, welchem Zweck die Homepage dienen soll. Soll ein Produkt vorgestellt werden? Möchte man über die Dienstleistung einer Firma informieren? Oder nutzt man die Homepage, um über ein persönliches Anliegen aufzuklären? Wichtig ist, dass alle relevanten Informationen jederzeit gefunden werden können. Ein gutes Layout besteht aus Überschriften, Bildern, Fußzeilen und Spalten. So werden Informationen sinnvoll vorgefiltert und können schon mit wenigen Blicken erfasst werden. Das erhöht für den Besucher der Seite den Bedienkomfort und die Wahrscheinlichkeit, dass man zu einem späteren Zeitpunkt die Seite nochmal aufsuchen wird. Zuerst werden beim Layout Farben und Formen wahrgenommen. Ein farbenfrohes Layout kann sich zum Beispiel für ein Portfolio eignen, das Kreativität ausdrücken soll, passt aber kaum zu bestimmten Firmen oder Dienstleistern. Bei diesen ist es wichtig, dass man die Informationen zu jedem Produkt sofort finden kann.

Seitenleiste zum Teil sehr nützlich

Laut www.homepage-erstellen.de kann sich eine Seitenleiste als sehr nützlich für Besucher der Seite erweisen. Dort sollten aber nicht die wichtigsten Inhalte, sondern hauptsächlich ergänzende Informationen zusammengefasst werden. Die Ausrichtung spielt dabei keine große Rolle und die Seitenleiste kann sowohl auf der rechten als auch auf der linken Seite angebracht werden. In der oberen linken Ecke sollte sich ein Logo befinden. Bei E-Commerce-Seiten ist der Warenkorb meist in der rechten Ecke angebracht. Das Suchfeld befindet sich oftmals direkt neben dem oder in direkter Nähe zum Warenkorb.

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category: Computer --> programming --> MongoDB --> morphium

Custom Caching in Morphium

since the first version of Morphium it provided an internal cache for all Entities maked with the annotation Cache. This cache was configured mainly via those annotations.

This cache has proven its usefulness in countless projects and the synchronizing of caches in clustered environments via Morphium Messaging is working flawlessly.

But there are new and more sophisticated Cache Implementations out there . It would not be clever to built all those features also into morphium, better leverage on those projects. So we decided to include JCache-Support (JSR107) into morphium.

Of course, we had to adapt some things here and there, especially the MorphiumCahce-Interface needed to be overhauled.

Morphium itself always had the option to use an own MorphiumCache Implementation. But this was not always easy to achieve in own projects. Hence we use that now in order to be able to offer both the old, proven implementation and the new, future-implementation.

As always, morphium can be used out of the box, so we implemented a JCAche-Version of our cache as well into morphium.

How to use

With the upcoming V3.2.2BETA1 (via maven central oder auf github ) morphium will use the JCache compatible implementation. If you want to switch back to the old, proved Version of caching, you just need to change the config:

if you create your MorphiumConfig via properties or via JSon, you need to set the class name accordingly:

  cacheClassName=de.caluga.morphium.cache.MorphiumCacheImpl

JCache Support

If you leave all those settings to default, the JCache API is being used. By Default the cache creates the cache manager using Caching.getCachingProvider().getCacheManager(). This way you get the default of the default

If you want to configure the cache on your own (ehcache properties for example), you just need to pass on the CacheManager to the morphiumCache:

of course in this example, there are no additional options set, but I think you see, how that might work.

BTW: the morphium internal JCache implementation can be used via JCache API in your application also, if you want to. Just add the system setting -Djavax.cache.spi.CachingProvider=de.caluga.morphium.cache.jcache.CachingProviderImpl and with Caching.getCachingProvider() you will get the Morphium Implementation of the cache.

Attention All JCache implementation support expiration of oldest / least recently used entries in cache. Unfortunately the policy of morphium is a bit more complex (especially regarding the number of entries), so moprhium implements an own JCache-Housekeeping for now.

Additional Info: Whatever Cache Implementation you use, you might still use the CacheSynchronizer in order to synchronize caches. And this synchronization should be working via Mongo even if you are not storing any Entities using the cache as an application cache!

Maven settings

    <groupId>de.caluga</groupId>
    <artifactId>morphium</artifactId>
    <version>3.2.2BETA1</version>

known bugs

There are some minor known bugs in the current Beta, you might want to know:

• the CacheListener Callbacks do not seem to work properly with JCache implementations. That is when using EHCache at least. The Morphium Internal implementation works
• there is a bug with Global Cache override Settings, that are not properly passed on to the underlying Caches
• Messaging seems sometimes be affected as well by that. For some reason, we get a mongo exception here and there

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category: Computer --> programming --> MongoDB --> morphium

MongoDB Messaging via Morphium

One of the many advantages of Morphium is the integrate messaging system. This is used for synchronizing the caches in a clustered environment for example. It is part of Morphium for quite some time, it was introduced with one of the first releases.

Messaging uses a sophisticated locking mechanism in order to ensure that messages for one recipient will only get there. Unfortunately this is usually being solved using polling, which means querying the db every now and then. Since Morphium V3.2.0 we can use the OplogMonitor for Messaging. This creates kind of a "Push" for new messages, which means that the DB informs clients about incoming messages.

This reduces load and increases speed. Lets have a look how that works...

Messaging in Morphium - how it works

As mentioned above with V3.2.0 we need to destinguish 2 cases: are we connected to a replicaset (only then there is an oplog the listener could listen to) or not.

no Replicaset => Polling

No replicaset is also true, if you are connected to a sharded cluster via MongoS. Here also messaging uses polling to get the data. Of course, this can be configured. Like, how long should the system pause between polls, should messages be processed one by one or in a bulk...

All comes down to the locking. The algorithm looks like this (you can have a closer look at Messaging.java for mor details):

1. send a command to mongo, which will lock all messages either send directly to me (= this messaging) or is for all and exclusive (should only be processed once). Every system can be identified with a unique UUID and this id is use for locking, too. it will either lock one or all matching messages - depending if you want to process one or all
2. read in all locked messages
3. process them
4. mark message as processed by me (UUID->processed_by)
5. do a pause (configured) and go to 1.

Replicaset => OpLogMonitor or ChangeStreamListener

The OplogMonitor is part of Morphium for quite a while now. It uses a TailableCursor on the oplog to get informed about changes. A tailable cursor will stay open, even if thera are no more matching documents. But will send all incoming documents to the client. So the client gets informed about all changes in the system.

With morphium 4.0 we use the change stream instead the oplog to get polling of messages done. This is working as efficient, but does not need admin access.

So why not use a TailableCursor directly on the Msg-Collection then? for several reasons:

1. it only works with capped collections. Which is not a showstopper in our case, but unpleasant
2. it only informs about new entries in the collection. But the locking algorithm depends on the update being atomic - hence this is not working. We could try to lock messages by erasing old ones and creating new ones, but this is not atomic and will lead to misreads.

Messaging based on the OplogMonitor looks quite similar to the algorithm above, but the polling simplifies things a bit. on new messages, this happens:

1. is the incoming message an exclusive one, just try the locking described above. But as we now have the ID, it is a lot simpler and more efficient.
2. is it non exclusive (and not send by myself), just process it
3. is it an exclusive message and sent directly to me, process it

usually, when an update on messages comes in, nothing interesting happens. But for being able to reject messages (see below) we just start the locking mechanism to be sure.

how to use Messaging

Well, that is quite simple. Kust create an instance of Messaging and hit start.

of course, you could instanciate it using spring or something.

Message sending

to send a message, just do:

this message here does have a ttl (time to live) of 5 secs. The default ttl is 30secs. Older messages will automatically be deleted by mongo.

Messages are broadcast messages by default, meaning, all listeners may process it. if you set the message to be exclusive, only one of the listeners gets the permission to process ist (see locking above).

this message will only be processed by one recipient!

And the sender does not read his own messages!

Of course, you can send a message directly to a specifiy recipient. This happens automatically when sending answers for example. To send a message to a specific recipient you need to know his UUID. You can get that by messages being sent (sender for example) or you implement some kind of discovery...

storeMessage vs queueMessage

in the integration tests of Morphium both methods are being used. The difference is quite simple: storeMessage stores the message directly do mongodb whereas queueMessage works asynchronously - which might be the better choice when it comes to performance.

receiving messages

just register a Message listener to the messaging system:

here, messaging is the messaging system and message the message that was sent. This listener returns null, but it could also return a Message, that should be send back as an answer to the sender.

Using the messaging-object, the listener can also publish own messages, which should not be answers or something.

in addition to that, the listener may "reject" a Message by sending a MessageRejectedException - then the message is unlocked so that all clients might use it again (if it was not sent directly to me).

usage of messaging - cache synchronization

Within Morphium the CacheSynchronizer uses Messaging. It needs a messaging system in the constructor.

The implementation of it is not that complicated. The CacheSynchronizer just registers as MorphiumStorageListener, so that it gets informed about all writing accesses (and only then caches need to be syncrhonized).

on write access, it checks if a cached entity is affected and if so, a ClearCachemessage is send using messaging. This message also contains the strategy to use (like, clear whole cache, update the element and so on).

Of course, incoming messages also have to be processed by the CacheSynchronizer. But that is quite simple: if a message comes in, erase the coresponding cache mentioned in the message according to the strategy.

And you might send those clear messages manually by accessing the CacheSynchronizer directly.

And we should mention, that there you could be informed about all cache sync activities using a specific listener interface.

conclusion

the messaging feature of morphium is not well known yet. But it might be used as a simple replacement for full-blown messaging systems and with the new OplogMonitor-Feature it is even better than it ever was.

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category: Computer --> programming --> MongoDB --> morphium

New Release Morphium 3.2.0Beta2 - Java Mongo Pojo Mapper

Hi,

a new pre-release of morphium is available now V3.2.0Beta2. This one includes a lot of minor bugfixes and one big feature: Messaging now uses the Oplogmonitor when connected to a Replicaset. This means, no polling anymore and the system gets informed via kind of push!

This is also used for cache synchronization.

Release can be downloaded here: https://github.com/sboesebeck/morphium

The beta is also available on maven central.

This is still Beta, but will be released soon - so stay tuned

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category: Computer --> programming --> MongoDB --> morphium

New Release of Morphium V3.1.7

We just released V3.1.7 of morphium - caching mongodb pojo layer.

• performance increase insert vs upsert
• update handling of non-mongoid ID-fields (bugfix)
• updated Tests
• new strategy for buffered writer: WAIT
• setting maxwait / timeout for waitstrategy in bufferedwriter
• moving id creation to morphium, implementing proper inserts, fixing bugs
• fixing buffered writing on sharded environments
• performance increase
• mongodb driver version update, checkfornew default fix

Details can be found at the project page on github. You can easily add it to your projects using maven:

 <dependency>
            <groupId>de.caluga</groupId>
            <artifactId>morphium</artifactId>
            <version>3.1.7</version>
 </dependency>

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category: Computer --> programming --> MongoDB --> morphium

new release of Morphium 3.1.5

This release is about tidying up things a bit and includes some minor fixes and tweaks.

• fixed some statistics
• removing drivers into different project
• improving byte array / binary data handling
• fixing some tests
• fixing checkForNew behaviour, is now a bit easier to understand. If switched off globally, setting it at the annotation does not have an effect.

Available via Maven Central

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category: global

To scrum or not to scrum?

... that is not the Question!

This is exactly the Problem, most do not understand the agile methodology described in the Agile Manifesto. Now lets have a closer look at that...

disclaimer: I am a software dev, team lead and head of IT and not a scrum evangelist or expert. All I write here is based on experience

former softwareengineering

there was the maybe good, but definitely old waterfall model. Most people should know that by know. In short, you cut your project in 2 pieces: 1st conceptional phase, then implementing whats in the concept. That was copied from other areas like constructing a house. There you have a plan first, then you build it.

That is totally legit and does have its right to exist in engineering as well: you write a fine granular concept, test everything hundreds of times in theory before the first line of code is written.

And if you follow that principle, you end up with software Development processes used by organizations like NASA. And there it needs to be like that, as you cannot just fly up to mars to replace something on the rover that was not considered during conceptional phase.

Agile software development

But nowadays all do this agile methods, which is totally the shit... you can quadruple your productivity with that, without doing anything, just like that fingersnip

"That is what we're going to do now!"

With that mindset some start introducing agile development in the IT department. Or even worse: in the whole company.

The enthusiasm for Scrum is fine, but that alone is not enough. Its not enough to have a scrum coach for a couple of weeks in the company, read a book. You might think you know Agile management processes now - but you don't!

That is doomed to fail, saw that several times now.

Scurm is not a set of rules or constraints

Scrum is a set of methods and tools that were helping some teams to increase productivity and be successful.

But you need to have a closer look at those stories. When you look at where these teams started from, it is not hard to increase productivity a lot

A lot of departments and areas do already work in an agile fassion nowadays, often without actually knowing it. For example, support teams often use tools from 'Kanban' in order to have the support ticket processing a bit more structured and processes well defined in an area where you do not know what will happen in the next 15 minutes. Very often those tools or processes are not named Kanban or alike, although the whole department needs to be agile.

So, if you want to improve something, have a close look at the real proflem.

And that means, that the team does not have to implement everything ever written in a scrum book or what is mentioned in the scrum guides. These are good examples, scaffolds so to say. You need to decide, what is best for your team, what will work, what will probably not work. This is strongly related to the company culture!

Some of the Scrum-Nazis (that’s what I call people, who do scrum literaly out of the book with out being flexible at any point) will scream out loud now. But from my experience, this is true. That is actually also enforced by the "inventors" of scrum. I did a PO Certification end of 2016 with Jeff Sutherland, the only inventor of Scrum (his own words). In the company I worked for at that time, there was a Scrum consultant, who also was trained by Jefff, to help us introduce scrum. End even those two differ in tools, or statements. The consultant used Tools, never mentioned by Jeff and vice versa. Also some of the Statements in reference to our team did contradict the Statements Jeff did in the training.

And that is the beauty of it. the consulten, who has a close look at the circumstances can do better decisions then any "scientist". The trainer can only give overall advice.

But that shows, that Scrum is not written in stone, adapt it to your own needs, your team, your culture. You should only use these tools and concepts of this methodology, you feel good with. And the team also needs to feel fine for that.

There are a lot of things influencing what tool and methodology would work with your team. One of the most important ones is: Trust! Trust from the management in the team and vice versa!

If the team does not trust the management, it will not work (well, nothing will really, but scrum especially not).

Scrum and the company culture

Trust is very important. Unlike the old methodologies, scrum tries to empower the team, reverse the trust. But empowering also brings responsibility and trust.

In waterfall, the Project Manager would tell, when what will be implemented. In scrum the team tells, what will be implemented. And the order of those things is determined by the prioritization the PO created. But the team will also be held accountable for what it promised. That’s the beauty of it...

But if the team does not trust the management will to the right things for the project and the team, will not interfere with ceremonies and stuff, then this will definitely cause conflicts. And after a while, we end up with "pseudo"-Waterfall.

The team seems to be in charge of what is done when, but if that differs from the opinion of the management, you start endless discussions until one of them - the engineering or the management - will indulge.

Example:

at the refinement the CEO is taking part (which is wrong on its own, as this is one of the POs meetings), the team is working on a user story. Lets say, there is an architectural decision to be made as part of the story. There are 3 options, A, B and C. The team is going for A.

The CEO answers this with "hmm... yes, good Idea, but we should think that through"

The team things, B is a valid solution, but never C! But C is the favorite way of the CEO.

So, the CEO keeps saying things like "yes, good Idea - but we should go on a bit"

Eventually somebody will say something like "but then only C is left!". The CEO in that case will jump on it "cool, C, that is what we do"

Later, the Devs are right, things will explode. The CEO comes in and asks what happened. the Devs state, that it is due to option C instead of A... the answer of the CEO is "But you wanted C, so fix it"

You think that is far fetched? Really?

No - something similar happened to me and my team, I was there! of course, this is a bit overstated - but it was similar to what i wrote here.

So, where does something like that come from? Lack of trust, not willing to let go and pass on responsibility! and a weak scrum master role. Not the person, but the role was not lived to what it should be. The scrum master was not allowed to do the things he needed to do!

In that case, it was also combined with a very strange error culture. Although the management stated not to be interested in errors, they were discussed over and over again. Especially when decisions had to be made. But in exactly those moments, at least once the management stated, that "we have a great error culture... BUT..."

So, the team ends up not wanting to do any decision anymore. If it is my fault anyway, and I cannot decide also. So... as long as i am there, just sit it through.

And this kills every agile process. From the outside you "look" agile, but internally there is some mixture of Waterfall and... well... what? Monarchy?

Scrum is about transparency

A lot of things you do in Scrum (or other agile methodology) tries to optimize transparence in all areas. If done correctly, scrum will help identify problems and show them in all their beauty to everyone, who dares to look. Also it will help identify ways of improvement and show that an improvement did work - or not.

In the upper example, in the retro those problems were discussed very often. But the Scrum Master could not change the ways the management worked. So it did not change... and at some point, people stoped complaining about it.

Of course, scrum or agile methodologies do not only help in those complex and conflict situations. Also the normal day to day work will be more effective if everybody knows everything he needs to know to do the job best. If you know, where the journey is headed, you can do a better job.

But that is exaclty the problem: a lot of managers do not feel comfortable to "let go", not be on the helm anymore, to let the team do the things they were hired for. This is cause of a lot of conflicts and in the end, there is mutual "un-trusting" between team and management.

Of course, the transparency scrum offers is not everybodys cup of tea. Even in engineering not everybody does want to have this kind of responsibility. And for those, the good ol' waterfall method is better fitting. But there you only have "programmers" not "engineers" again a bit exaggerated, but I thing you know where I am going: some people like to im plement a fine granular concept, rather than doing something that is not as clearly defined.

"Heros"

Especially in Softwareengineering there are some "Leads", who do work agile with their team, at least it looks like, but the do not act agile. Those are usually quite experienced people, good engineers. And the end up doing everything themself. These "heros" are a big problem in agile teams. They can break everything. And if they are or act as teamlead, you and up with a team of "a lot of drudges and on head". This is frustrating as the team as a whole will not evolve, will not develop. And the team will be only as fast, as the one guy - more or less. Scalability? No way!

For this "Hero" the situation usually is as unpleasant as for the team. As he is doing everything on his own, or wants at least to know everything in details, he usually ends up with a lot of overtime, and the others just sit there nosepicking...

Scrum should show something like that, but often these Leads also define the Scrum they want to do. And those methods and tools that would help showing this, are - for whatever reason - not in place or will just not be used...

Agile methods and tools will also help in this case, but everything needs to fit.

Scrum in the company

Agile development works great in engineering teams, as this is the "natural" way devs would organize their work in an own (opensource) project. You would do this iteartive approach to the optimum. But how do you talk to the other teams?

Excaclty there is the problem: I saw that this Interface between the departments did work extraordinary well, although the whole company was not agile, only the engineering used scrum. I remember working for a consulting company where it worked that way. The Dev-Teams were working agile, the Managers and the Project Managers were not.

This worked astonishingly well, although there was a fraction in methodology

Of course, that is not always the case. If the management wants you to report and plan like waterfall, you will have a tough time working agile.

That happened in another company. They heard of "this scrum thing" and for test purposes they wanted to do a project in a agile fashion. At the end, this was an utter failure! The kommunication did not work, the expectations were totally different and at the end, there were a lot of "lessons learned"-Meetings to avoid a lawsuit.

If the management tries to be hip and wants to do scrum without knowing what that means - this is the worst thing, that could happen.

In those cases (have seen that twice in my career), the mangement tried to bend the scrum ceremonies to their gusto, for example to turn a scum of scrums into a Reporting.

Scrum in management can only work, if the management did understand scrum and have a lot of experience with it. And than they would probably not use Scrum for the management, but maybe some other agile methodology.

If that happens, you need a very strong unwavering scrum master. And Patience is also helpful...

This will otherwise end up in conflics: the CEO who understood scrum to 50% and could gain about 3 months of experience already (experience in like, he saw somebody do it) and the Scrum master just sees all his ceremonies fail, as they are misused by the ceo. If the Scrum Master does not have the standing against the CEO, things will not work.

That is a really tough call, and I really do not know one company which is agile in all aspects. Not to mention, using scrum in all departments (as if that would make any sense).

Agile methodology is totally awesome, especially in software engineering or you want to "build" something, you actually do not know exactly what it will turn out to be. So you will iteratively improve you solutions..

So, if in management you have that approach, like in the mangement does not know, what they want to achieve and iteratively try to get things done... this sounds a bit scary, doesn't it?

so, if you are in management, you have agile teams, why not take a look at Agile Management Methods? This is not Scrum but still agile and maybe the right tool for the job...

Just remember, just because you have a hammer, not every problem is a nail!

Links:

http://billschofield.net/The-Insufficiency-of-Scrum/

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/scrum-makes-you-dumb-daniel-jones?trk=v-feed&lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ad_flagship3_feed%3BhpLGl29RKJkQ2jmK4ZbMIg%3D%3D

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category: Computer

New blogging software

I did complain about wordpress several times (for example here). I took that for an opportunity, to take on my software development skills and use a weekend or two to build a new blogging software. Well, th result is this wonderful (well... hop so) page here.

PHP sucks

To stop all PHP fainbois from whyning, I do not like PHP very much, because I don't know it very much. Hence, wordpress is also kind of a mystery for me. The configuration works with luck, let alone get php to do what you want in a more secure way.

so, my blog was hacked several times during the last year now and this is pissing me off! So, I wanted to use a java based solution, but it seems like there is no simple, easy to use one out there.

so why not do it yourself?

exactly. That was my thought also. Could not be so complicated, could it? So, I wanted to create a blogging software that

• has a simple technology stack
• does not need a complex plugin funktionality. If it cannot do, what I like it to do, i rewrite it
• themes or designs... well... er... could be better, but I think this is ok
• Security, that is the point. I created the blogging software (called it jblog - not rally creative) myself and it is not so complex as wordpress. So we should be ok. I guess. But I know for sure, that th standard wordpress exploits wont work no more!
• Intrnationalization... also a topic. jblog does only do 2 languages, German and English (I do not speak more, so I don't need more for my blogs).
• whitelabeling. I have a couple of domains, I wanted to reuse / revive with this project.
• one administration: I did not want to create the same thing 3 times, I wanted to have the same thing look like 3 different hings. Hence there should only be one administration page.

jblog

I am quite ok with what I accomplished here. Although it took longer than one weekend, it was finished quite fast. I lik that.

But please: if some links do not work anymore, some images look strange or are missing - I will fix this eventually

the different blogs

boesebeck.name - this blog here

the private main blog. Will cover topics like hobby, drones, games, gadgets etc.

caluga.de - the java blog

There I will put all my opnsource stuff, like morphium. And all the other programming tips and tricks I wrote over time. Hmm... seems like 'java blog' is not the right term...

boesebeck.biz

This should be a business site anyways. So, here I will put in topics about my professional carreer, Scrum, processes etc.

Updates

well, this is going to be tough. I cannot produce content for 3 full blogs. Even filling one is quite hard. But I will try. And we will see, how that works

technical discussion

as mentioned above - not here, but at caluga.de

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category: Computer

Stephans Blog wieder online...

no english version available yet

Das war stressig. Zum Umzug kam noch hinzu, dass mein Server die Grätsche gemacht hat. Ich musste neu installieren. Was ja – dank Backups – eigentlich kein allzu großer Aufwand wäre, hätte ich nicht vergessen, ein Backup von der Datenbank zu machen… Deswegen jetzt der neue Start des alten Blogs ;-)

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category: Computer --> programming --> MongoDB --> morphium

Morphium Doku V3.0

want help translating / documenting / coding? Conctact us on github or via slack

M

Morphium Documentation

This documentation is refering to Morphium version [%morphium_version] and mongodb [%mongodb_version]. this documentation follows "MultiMarkdown" and was created using the MultiMarkdownComposer.

HTML Version here: MorphiumDoku If you just want to start right now, read [quick start]!

Ideas and concepts

When we started using MongoDB there was no fully capable POJO Mapper available. The only thing that was close to useable was Morphia (which is now developed by MongoDb. Unfortunately, Morphia had some issues, and lacked some features, we'd like to have, like (besides the usual features fast mapping, reliable query interface and so on):

• Thread safety
• cluster awareness
• declarative caching
• profiling support
• support for partial updates
• reference support incl. lazy loading of references
• adaptable API (need to implement special POJO Mappings, Cache implementation change etc)
• Cache synchronization in cluster
• Validation
• Declarative Index specification
• Aggregation support

At that time there was nothing available providing all those features or what we could use as a basis to create those features (although we tried to implement that on base of Morphia - but the architecture of Morphia was not built for customization).

So, we started creating our own implementation and called it "Morphium" to honor the project "Morphia" which was the best around at that time.

But Morphium is a complete new Project, it was built totally from scratch. Even the POJO-Mapper is our own development (although there were some available at that point), but we had some special needs for Morphium's mapping.

The mapping takes place on a per-type basis. That means, usually (unless configured otherwise) the data of all objects of a certain type, will be stored in a corresponding collection.

In addition to that, the mapping is aware of object hierarchy and would even take annotations and settings into account, that are inherited.

Usually Morphium replaces camel case by underscore-separated strings. So an Object of type MyEntity would be stored in the collection my_entity. This behaviour can be configured as liked, you could even store all Objects in one collection. (see [Polymorphism])

Changes in Version 3.0

Motivation

Morphium 3.0 brings a lot improvements and changes, most of them are not really visible to the user, but unfortunately some of them make V3.x incompatible to V2.x.

The changes were triggered by the recent mongodb java driver update to also 3.0, which brings a whole new API. This API is (unfortunately also) not backward compatible[^not quite true, the driver contains both versions actually, but old API is usually marked deprecated]. This made it hard to add the changes in the official driver into morphium. Some of the changes made it also impossible to implement some features in morphium as it was before. So - the current implementation of morphium uses both old and new API - wich will break eventually.

The next step was, to be more independent from the driver, as those changes caused problems almost throughout the whole code of morphium. So, introducing with V3.0 of morphium, the driver is encapsulated deep within morphium.

Unfortunately, even the basic document representation changed[^old version used BasicDBObject, new version uses Document], which are very similar, but unfortunately represented in a whole new implementation of BSON[^binary json - details can be found here].

Also, we had some problems with dependencies in maven, causing to be several version of the mongodb driver being installed on production - which then caused some weird effects, most of them not really good ones ;-)

This made us reduce all dependency to the mongodb driver to a minimum - actually it is only used in the MorphiumDriver implementation for the official mongodb driver. But that also meant, we needed to get rid of all usages of ObjectID and BasicDBDocument and reduce usages of that into the driver implementation within morphium.

The question was - do we need to introduces some new object type for representing a Map<String,Object>? We thought no, so we changed the whole code in morphium, to internally use only standard Java8 API.

Yes, that is one feature also, since Morphium 3.0 we‘re running on java 8.

Changes

As you know the motivation now, these are the changes.

• Driver encapsulated and configurable - you can now implement your own driver for usage with morphium
• no usage of MongoDb classes, replaced by type MorphiumId and simple Map<String,Object> - this might actually break your code!
• (soon) MongoDB Dependency in maven will be set to be provided, so that you can decide, which Version of the driver you want to use (or none...)
• Morphium 3.0 includes some own implementation of drivers (mainly for testing purpose):
  • Driver: This is the Implementation of MorphiumDriver using the official Mongodb driver (V3.x)
  • InMemoryDriver: Not connecting to any mongo instance, just storing into memory. Good for testing. Does not support Aggregation!
  • SingleConnectDirectDriver: Just connecting to a master node, no failover. Useful if you do not have a replicaset
  • SingleConnectThreaddedDriver: Same as above, but uses a thread for reading the answers - slightly better performance in multithreaded environments, but only useful if you don't run a replicaSet
  • MetaDriver: A full featured implementation of the MorphiumDriver Interface, can be used as replacement for the mondogdb driver implementation. It uses a pool of SingleConnectThreaddedDriver to connect to mongodb.
• Many changes in the internals
• in references you can now specify the collection the reference should point to.
• improvements in the internal caches, using the new improved features and performance of Java8[^see also here]
• complete rewrite of the bulk operation handling
• code improvements on many places, including some public interfaces (might break your code!)

quick start

Simple example on how to use Morphium:

First you need to create data to be stored in Mongo. This should be some simple class like this one here:

This given entity has a couple of fields which will be stored in Mongo according to their names. Usually the collection name is also derived from the ClassName (as most things in Morphium, that can be changed).

The names are usually translated from camel case (like aField) into lowercase with underscores (like a_field). This is the default behavior, but can be changed according to your needs.

In mongo the corresponding object would be stored in a collection named my_entity and would look like this:

By default, null values are not serialized to mongo. So in this example, there is no field "property".

The next example shows how to store and access data from mongo:

This gives a short glance of how Morphium works and how it can be used. But Morphium is capable of many more things...

Architecture

Morphium is built to be very flexible and can be used in almost any environment. So the architecture needs to be flexible and sustainable at the same time. Hence it's possible to use your own implementation for the cache if you want to.

There are four major components of Morphium:

1. the Morphium Instance: This is you main entrypoint for interaction with Mongo. Here you create Queries and you write data to mongo. All writes will then be forwarded to the configured Writer implementation, all reads are handled by the Query-Object
2. Query-Object: you need a query object to do reads from mongo. This is usually created by using Morphium.createQueryFor(Class<T> cls). With a Query, you can easily get data from database or have some things changed (update) and alike.
3. the Cache: For every request that should be sent to mongo, Morphium checks first, whether this collection is to be cached and if there is already a batch being stored for the corresponding request.
4. The Writers: there are 3 different types of writers in Morphium: The Default Writer (MorphiumWriter) - writes directly to database, waiting for the response, the BufferedWriter (BufferedWriter) - does not write directly. All writes are stored in a buffer which is then processed as a bulk. The last type of writer ist the asynchronous writer (AsyncWriter) which is similar to the buffered one, but starts writing immediately - only asynchronous. Morphium decides which writer to use depending on the configuration an the annotations of the given Entities. But you can always use asynchronous calls just by adding aAsyncCallback implementation to your request.

Simple rule when using Morphium: You want to read -> Use the Query-Object. You want to write: Use the Morphium Object.

There are some additional features built upon this architecture:

• messaging: Morphium has a own messaging system.
• cache synchronization: Synchronize caches in a clustered environment. Uses messaging
• custom mappers - you can tell Morphium how to map a certain type from and to mongodb. For example there is a "custom" mapper implementation for mapping BigInteger instances to mongodb.
• every of those implementations can be changed: it is possible to set the class name for the BufferedWriter to a custom built one (in MorphiumConfig). Also you could replace the object mapper with your own implementation by implementing the ObjectMapper interface and telling morphium which class to use instead. In short, these things can be changed in morphium / morphiumconfig:
  • MorphiumCache
  • ObjectMapper
  • Query
  • Field
  • QueryFactory
  • Driver (> V3.0)
• Object Mapping from and to Strings (using the object mapper)

Configuring Morphium

First lets have a look on how to configure Morphium. As you already saw in the example in the last chapter, the configuration of Morphium ist encapsulated in one Object of type MorphiumConfig. This object has set some reasonable defaults for all settings. So it should be just as described above to use it.

Configuration Options

There are a lot of settings and customizations you can do within Morphium. Here we discuss all of them:

• loggingConfigFile: can be set, if you want Morphium to configure your log4j for you. Morphium itself has a dependency to log4j (see Dependencies).
• camelCaseConversion: if set to false, the names of your entities (classes) and fields won't be converted from camelcase to underscore separated strings. Default is true (convert to camelcase)
• maxConnections: Maximum Number of connections to be built to mongo, default is 10
• houseKeepingTimeout: the timeout in ms between cache housekeeping runs. Defaults to 5sec
• globalCacheValidTime: how long are Cache entries valid by default in ms. Defaults to 5sek
• writeCacheTimeout: how long to pause between buffered writes in ms. Defaults to 5sek
• database: Name of the Database to connect to.
• connectionTimeout: Set a value here (in ms) to specify how long to wait for a connection to mongo to be established. Defaults to 0 (⇒ infinite)
• socketTimeout: how long to wait for sockets to be established, defaults to 0 as well
• socketKeepAlive: if true, use TCP-Keepalive for the connection. Defaults to true
• safeMode: Use the safe mode of mongo when set to true
• globalFsync, globalJ: set fsync (file system sync) and j (journal) options. See mongo.org for more information
• checkForNew: This is something interesting related to the creation of ids. Usually Ids in mongo are of type ObjectId. Anytime you write an object with an _id of that type, the document is either updated or inserted, depending on whether or not the ID is available or not. If it is inserted, the newly created ObjectId is being returned and add to the corresponding object. But if the id is not of type ObjectId, this mechanism will fail, no objectId is being created. This is no problem when it comes to new creation of objects, but with updates you might not be sure, that the object actually is new or not. If this obtion is set to true Morphium will check upon storing, whether or not the object to be stored is already available in database and would update. Attention: Morphium 3.0 removed the dependency from mogodb.org codebase and hence there is no ObjectId for POJOs anymore. You should replace these with the new MorphiumId.
• writeTimeout: this timeout determines how long to wait until a write to mongo has to be finshed. Default is 0⇒ no timeout
• maximumRetriesBufferedWriter: When writing buffered, how often should retry to write the data until an exception is thrown. Default is 10
• retryWaitTimeBufferedWriter: Time to wait between retries
• maximumRetriesWriter, maximumRetriesAsyncWriter: same as maximumRetriesBufferedWriter, but for direct storage or asynchronous store operation.
• retryWaitTimeWriter, retryWaitTimeAsyncWriter: similar to retryWaitTimeBufferedWriter, but for the according writing type
• globalW: W sets the number of nodes to have finished the write operation (according to your safe and j / fsync settings)
• maxWaitTime: Sets the maximum time that a thread will block waiting for a connection.
• writeBufferTime: Timeout for buffered writes. Default is 0
• autoReconnect: if set to true connections are re-established, when lost. Default is true
• maxAutoReconnectTime: how long to try to reconnect (in ms). Default is 0⇒ try as long as it takes
• blockingThreadsMultiplier: There is a max number of connections to mongo, this factor determines the maximum number of threads that may be waiting for some connection. If this threshold is reached, new threads will get an Exception upon access to mongo.
• mongoLogin,mongoPassword: User Credentials to connect to mongodb. Can be null.
• mongoAdminUser, mongoAdminPwd: Credentials to do admin tasks, like get the replicaset status. If not set, use mongoLogin instead.
• acceptableLatencyDifference: Latency between replicaset members still acceptable for reads.
• autoValuesEnabled: Morphium supports automatic values being set to your POJO. These are configured by annotations (@LasChange, @CreationTime, @LastAccess, ...). If you want to switch this off globally, you can set it in the config. Very useful for test environments, which should not temper with productional data
• readCacheEnabled: Globally disable readcache. This only affects entities with a @Cache annotation. By default it's enabled.
• asyncWritesEnabled: Globally disable async writes. This only affects entities with a @AsyncWritesannotation
• bufferedWritesEnabled: Globally disable buffered writes. This only affects entities with a @WriteBuffer annotation
• defaultReadPreference: whether to read from primary, secondary or nearest by default. Can be defined with the @ReadPreference annotation for each entity.
• replicaSetMonitoringTimeout: time interval to update replicaset status.
• retriesOnNetworkError: if you happen to have an unreliable network, maybe you want to retry writes / reads upon network error. This settings sets the number of retries for that case.
• sleepBetweenNetworkErrorRetries: set the time to wait between network error retries.
• blockingThreadsMultiplier: Sets the multiplier for number of threads allowed to block waiting for a connection.

In addition to those settings describing the behavior of Morphium, you can also define custom classes to be used internally:

• omClass: here you specify the class, that should be used for mapping POJOs (your entities) to DBOject. By Default it uses the ObjectMapperImpl. Your custom implementation must implement the interface ObjectMapper.
• iteratorClass: set the Iterator implementation to use. By default MorphiumIteratorImplis being used. Your custom implementation must implement the interface MorphiumIterator
• aggregatorClass: this is Morphium's representation of the aggregator framework. This can be replaced by a custom implementation if needed. Implements Aggregator interface
• queryClass and fieldImplClass: this is used for Queries. If you want to take control over how queries ar built in Morphium and on how fields within queries are represented, you can replace those two with your custom implementation.
• cache: Set your own implementation of the cache. It needs to implement the MorphiumCache interface. Default is MorphiumCacheImpl. You need to specify a fully configured cache object here, not only a class object.
• driverClass: Set the driver implementation, you want to use. This is a string, set the class name here. E.g. morphiumconfig.setDriverClass(MetaDriver.class.getName()

Morphium Config Directly

The most straight foreward way of configuring Morphium is, using the object directly. This means you just call the getters and setters according to the given variable names above (like setMaxAutoReconnectTime()).

The minimum configuration is explained above: you only need to specify the database name and the host(s) to connect to. All other settings have sensible defaults, which should work for most cases.

Morphium Config From Property File

the configuration can be stored and read from a property object.

MorphiumConfig.fromProperties(Properties p); Call this method to set all values according to the given properties. You also can pass the properties to the constructor to have it configured.

To get the properties for the current configuration, just call asProperties() on a configured MorphiumConfig Object.

Here is an example property-file:

The minimal property file would define only hosts and database. All other values would be defaulted.

If you want to specify classes in the config (like the Query Implementation), you neeed to specify the full qualified class name, e.g. de.caluga.morphium.customquery.QueryImpl

Morphium Config From Json File

The standard toString()method of MorphiumConfig creates an Json String representation of the configuration. to set all configuration options from a json string, just call createFromJson.

Documentation

Singleton Access

In some cases it's more convenient to use a singleton Instance to access Morphium. You don't need to implement a thread safe Morphium Singleton yourself, as Morphium does already have one.

The MorphiumSingleton is configured similar to the normal Morphium instance. Just set the config and you're good to go.

Connection to mongo and initializing of Morphium is done at the first call of get.

POJO Mapping

When talking about POJO Mapping, we're saying we marshall a POJO into a mongodb representation or we unmarshall the mongodb representation into a POJO.

Marshaling and unmarshalling is of utter importance for the functionality. It needs to take care of following things:

• un/marshall every field. Easy if it’s a primitive datatype. Map to corresponding type in Monogo - mostly done by the mongodb java driver (or since 3.0 the MorphiumDriver implementation)
• when it comes to lists and maps, examine every value. Maps may only have strings as keys (mongoldb limitation), un/marshall values
• when a field contains a reference to another entity, take that into account. either store the
• the POJO transformation needs to be 100% thread safe (Morphium itself is heavily multithreaded)

The ObjectMapper is the core of Morphium. It's used to convert every entity you want to store into a mongoldb document (java representation is a DBObject). Although it's one of the key things in Morphium it's still possible to make use of your own implementation (see chapter [Configuring Morphium]).

Querying Mongo

This is done by using the Query object. You need to create one for every entity you want to issue a query for. You could create one yourself, but the easiest way of doing so is calling the method .createQueryFor(Class class) in Morphium.

After that querying is very fluent. You add one option at a time, by default all conditions are AND-associated:

The f method stands for "field" and returns a Morphium internal representation of mongo fields. Threre you can call the operators, in our case it eq for equals, lt for less then and ne not equal. There are a lot more operators you might use, all those are defined in the MongoField interface:

Query definitions can be in one line, or as above in several lines. Actually the current query object is changed with every call of f...something combination. The current object is always returned, for making the code more legible and understandable, you should assign the query as shown above. This makes clear: "The object changed"

If you need an "empty" query of the same type, you can call the method q. This method will return an empty query of the same type, using the same mapper etc. But only without conditions or something - just plain empty.

As already mentioned, the query by default creates AND-queries. If you need to create an or query, you can do so using the or method in the query object.

or takes a list of queries as argument, so a query might be built this way:

This would create an OR-Query asking for all "MyEntities", that have a counter less than or equal to 10 OR whose name is "Morphium". You can add as much or-queries as you like. OR-Queries can actually be combined with and queries as well:

In that case, the query would be something like: counter is greater than 2 AND (counter is less then or equal to 10 OR name is "Morphium")

Combining and and or-queries is also possible, although the syntax would look a bit unfamiliar:

This would create a query returning all entries that do have a counter of less than 100 AND where the modulo to base 3 of the value counter equals 0, and the value of the field value equals "v".

Quite complex, eh?

Well, there is more to it... it is possible, to create a query using a "where"-String... there you can add JavaScript code for your query. This code will be executed at the mongodb node, executing your query:

Attention: you can javascript code in that where clause, but you cannot access the db object there. This was changed when switching to Mongodb 2.6 with V8 Javascript engine

Declarative Caching

Using the @Cache annotation, you can define cache settings on a per type (= class) basis. This is done totally in background, handled by Morphium 100% transparently. You just add the annotation to your entities and you're good to go. See [Cache] and [Cache Synchronization]

Cache Synchronization

Cache synchronization was already mentioned above. The system of cache synchronization needs a messaging subsystem (see [Messaging] below). You just need to start the cache synchronizer yourself, if you want caches to be synchronized.

CacheSynchronizer cs=new CacheSynchronizer(morphium);
cs.start();

If you want to stop your cache synchronizing process, just call cs.setRunning(false); . The synchronizer will stop after a while (depending on your cache synchronization timeout).

By default no cache synchronizer is running.

Cluster Awareness

Morphium is cluster aware in a sense, that it does poll the state of a replicates periodically in order to know what nodes are life and need to be taken into account. (Same does the Java Driver, this information is now moved into the morphium driver implementation, so the double check is not necessary anymore).

Morphium also has support for clusters using it. Like a cluster of tomcats instances. In this case, Morphium is able to synchronize the caches of those cluster nodes.

Messaging

Morphium supports a simple Messaging system which uses mongoldb as storage. The messaging is more or less transactional (to the extend that mongo gives) and works multithreaded. To use messaging you only need to instantiate a Messaging-Instance. You may add listeners to this instance to process the messages and you may send messages through this instance.

Messaging is 100% multithreaded and thread safe.

Bulk Operations Support

All operations regarding lists (list updates, writing lists of objects, deleting lists of objects) will be implemented using the new bulk operation available since mongodb 2.6. This gives significant speed boost and adds reliability.

Actually, all method calls to mongo support a list of documents as argument. This means, you can send a list of updates, a list of documents to be inserted, a list of whatever. The ´BulkOperationContext´ only gathers those requests on the java side together, so that they can be sent in one call, instead of several.

With Morphium 3.0 an own implementation of this bulk operation context was introduced.

Callbacks

You can add a number of Listeners to Morphium in order to be informed about what happens, or to influence the way things are handled.

• MorphiumStorageListeners: will be informed about any write process within morpheme. You can also veto if necessary. Works similar to [Lifecycle] methods, but for all entities.
• CacheListener: Can be added to Morphium cache, will be informed about things to be added to cache, or if something would be updated or cleared. In all cases, a veto is possible.
• ShutdownListener: if the system shuts down, you can be informed using this listener. It's not really Morphium specific.
• ProfilingListener: will be informed about any read or write access to mongo and how long it took. This is useful if you want to track long requests or index misses.

In addition to that, almost all calls to mongo can be done asynchronously - either by defining that in the @Entity annotation or by defining it directly.

That means, an asList() call on a query object can take an AsyncCallback as argument, which then will be called, when the batch is ready. (which also means, the asList call will return null, the batch will be passed on in the callback).

Support for Aggregation

Morphium does have support for Aggregation in mongo. The aggregation Framework was introduced in mongo with V2.6 and is a alternative to MapReduce (which is still used). We implemented support for the new Aggregation framework into mongo. Up until now, there was no request for MapReduce - if you need it, please let me know.

Here is how the aggregation framework is used from mongo (see more info on the aggregation framework at MongoDb

This is the Unit test for Aggregation support in Mongo:

The class Aggregate is used to hold the batch of the aggregation.

Validation

If javax.validation can be found in class path, you are able to validate values of your entities using the validation annotations. Those validations will take place before the object would be saved.

Technically it's implemented as a JavaxValidationStorageListener which is a storage listener and vetoes the write operation if validation fails.

an example on how to use validation:

Polymorphism

Its possible to have different type of entities stored in one collection. Usually this will only make sense if those entities have some things in common. In an object oriented way: they are derived from one single entity.

In order to make this work, you have to tell Morphium that you want to use a certain entity in a polymorph way (property of the annotation @Entity). If so, the full qualified class name will be stored in the mongo document representing the entity. Actually, you can store any type of entity into one list, if each of those types is marked polymorph. Only reading them is a bit hard, as you would iterate over Objects and would have to decide on type yourself.

Async API

Fully Customizable

Description

on the following lines you get a more in depth view of the

Names of entities and fields

Morphium by defaults converts all java CamelCase identifiers in underscore separated strings. So, MyEntity will be stored in an collection called my_entity and the field aStringValue would be stored in as a_string_value.

When specifying a field, you can always use either the transformed name or the name of the corresponding java field. Collection names are always determined by the classname itself.

CamelCase conversion

But in Morphium you can of course change that behaviour. Easiest way is to switch off the transformation of CamelCase globally by setting camelCaseConversionEnabled to false (see above: Configuration). If you switch it off, its off completely - no way to do switch it on for just one collection or so.

If you need to have only several types converted, but not all, you have to have the conversion globally enabled, and only switch it off for certain types. This is done in either the @Entity or @Embedded annotation.

@Entity(convertCamelCase=false)
public class MyEntity {
   private String myField;`

This example will create a collection called MyEntity (no conversion) and the field will be called myField in mongo as well (no conversion).

Attention: Please keep in mind that, if you switch off camelCase conversion globally, nothing will be converted!

using the full qualified classname

you can tell Morphium to use the full qualified classname as basis for the collection name, not the simple class name. This would batch in createing a collection de_caluga_morphium_my_entity for a class called de.caluga.morphium.MyEntity. Just set the flag useFQN in the entity annotation to true.

@Entity(useFQN=true)
public class MyEntity {`

Recommendation is, not to use the full qualified classname unless it's really needed.

Specifying a collection / fieldname

In addition to that, you can define custom names of fields and collections using the corresponding annotation (@Entity, @Property).

For entities you may set a custom name by using the collectionName value for the annotation:

@Entity(collectionName="totallyDifferent") 
public class MyEntity {
    private String myValue;

the collection name will be totallyDifferent in mongo. Keep in mind that camel case conversion for fields will still take place. So in that case, the field name would probably be my_value. (if camel case conversion is enabled in config)

You can also specify the name of a field using the property annotation:

@Property(fieldName="my_wonderful_field")
private String something;`

Again, this only affects this field (in this case, it will be called my_wondwerful_field in mongo) and this field won't be converted camelcase. This might cause a mix up of cases in your mongodb, so please use this with care.

Accessing fields

When accessing fields in Morphium (especially for the query) you may use either the name of the Field in Java (like myEntity) or the converted name depending on the config (camelCased or not, or custom).

Using NameProviders

In some cases it might be necessary to have the collection name calculated dynamically. This can be acchieved using the NameProvider Interface.

You can define a NameProvider for your entity in the @Entity annotation. You need to specify the type there. By default, the NameProvider for all Entities is DefaultNameProvider. Which acutally looks like this:

You can use your own provider to calculate collection names depending on time and date or for example depending on the querying host name (like: create a log collection for each server separately or create a collection storing logs for only one month each).

Attention: Name Provider instances will be cached, so please implement them threadsafe.

Entity Definition

Entitys in Morphium ar just "Plain old Java Objects" (POJOs). So you just create your data objects, as usual. You only need to add the annotation @Entity to the class, to tell Morphium "Yes, this can be stored". The only additional thing you need to take care of is the definition of an ID-Field. This can be any field in the POJO identifying the instance. Its best, to use MorphiumId as type of this field, as these can be created automatically and you don't need to care about those as well.

If you specify your ID to be of a different kind (like String), you need to make sure, that the String is set, when the object will be written. Otherwise you might not find the object again. So the shortest Entity would look like this:

@Entity
public class MyEntity {
   @Id private MorphiumId id;
   //.. add getter and setter here
}

indexes

Indexes are very important in mongo, so you should definitely define your indexes as soon as possible during your development. Indexes can be defined on the Entity itself, there are several ways to do so: - @Id always creates an index - you can add an @Index to any field to have that indexed:

@Index
private String name;

• you can define combined indexes using the @Index annotation at the class itself:

  @Index({"counter, name","value,thing,-counter"} public class MyEntity {

This would create two combined indexes: one with counter and name (both ascending) and one with value, thing and descending counter. You could also define single field indexes using this annotations, but it`s easier to read adding the annotation direktly to the field.

• Indexes will be created automatically if you create the collection. If you want the indexes to be created, even if there is already data stores, you need to callmorphium.ensureIndicesFor(MyEntity.class)- You also may create your own indexes, which are not defined in annotations by callingmorphium.ensureIndex(). As parameter you pass on a Map containing field name and order (-1 or 1) or just a prefixed list of strings (like"-counter","name").

Every Index might have a set of options which define the kind of this index. Like buildInBackground or unique. You need to add those as second parameter to the Index-Annotation:

@Entity
 @Index(value = {"-name, timer", "-name, -timer", "lst:2d", "name:text"}, 
            options = {"unique:1", "", "", ""})
public static class IndexedObject {

here 4 indexes are created. The first two ar more or less standard, wheres the lst index is a geospacial one and the index on name is a text index (only since mongo 2.6). If you need to define options for one of your indexes, you need to define it for all of them (here, only the first index is unique).

We're working on porting Morphium to java8, and there it will be possible to have more than one @Index annotation, making the syntax a bit more ledgeable

capped collections

Similar as with indexes, you can define you collection to be capped using the @Capped annotation. This annotation takes two arguments: the maximum number of entries and the maximum size. If the collection does not exist, it will be created as capped collection using those two values. You can always ensureCapped your collection, unfortunately then only the size parameter will be honored.

Querying

Querying is done via the Query-Object, which is created by Morphium itself (using the Query Factory). The definition of the query is done using the fluent interface:

In this example, I refer to several fields of different types. The Query itself is always of the same basic syntax:

As field name you may either use the name of the field as it is in mongo or the name of the field in java. If you specify an unknown field to Morphium, a RuntimeException will be raised.

For definition of the query, it's also a good practice to define enums for all of your fields. This makes it hard to have mistypes in a query:

There is a plugin for intelliJ creating those enums automatically. Then, when defining the query, you don't have to type in the name of the field, just use the field enum:

query=query.f(MyEntity.Fields.counter).eq(123);

After you defined your query, you probably want to access the data in mongo. Via Morphium,there are several possibilities to do that: - queryObject.get(): returns the first object matching the query, only one. Or null if nothing matched - queryObject.asList(): return a list of all matching objects. Reads all data in RAM. Useful for small amounts of data - Iterator<MyEntity> it=queryObject.asIterator(): creates a MorphiumIterator to iterate through the data, whch does not read all data at once, but only a couple of elements in a row (default 10).

the Iterators

Morphium has support for special Iterators, which steps through the data, a couple of elements at a time. By Default this is the standard behaviour. But the _Morphium_Iterator ist quite capable:

• queryObject.asIterable() will step through the results batch by batch. The batch size is determined by the driver settings. This is the most performant, but lacks the ability to "step back" out of the current processed batch.
• queryObject.asIterable(100) will step through the batch list, 100 at a time using a mongodb cursor iterator.
• queryObject.asIterable(100,5) will step through the batch list, 100 at a time and keep 5 chunks of 100 elements each as prefetch buffers. Those will be filled in background.
• queryObject.asIterable(100,1) actually the same as .asIterable(100) but using a query based iterator instead.
• queryObject.asIterable(100, new PrefetchingIterator())): this is more or less the same as the prefetching above, but using the query based PrefetchingIterator. This is fetching the datachunks using skip and limit functionality of mongodb which showed some decrease in performance, the higher the skip is. It's still there for compatibility reasons.

Internally the default iterator does create queries that are derived from the sort of the query, if there is no sort specified, it will assume you want to sort by _id.

you could put each of those iterators to one of two classes:

1. the iterator is using the Mongodb Cursor
2. the iterator is using distinct queries for each step / chunk.

these have significant different behaviour.

query based iterators

the query based iterators use the usual query method of morphium. hence all related functionalities work, like caching, life cycle methods etc. It is just like you would create those queries in a row. one by one.

cursor based iterators

due to the fact that the query is being executed portion by portion, there is no way of having things cached properly. These queries do not use the cache!

Storing

Storing is more or less a very simple thing, just call morphium.store(pojo) and you're done. Although there is a bit more to it: - if the object does not have an id (id field is null), there will be a new entry into the corresponding collection. - if the object does have an id set (!= null), an update to db is being issued. - you can call morphium.storeList(lst) where lst is a list of entities. These would be stored in bulkd, if possible. Or it does a bulk update of things in mongo. Even mixed lists (update and inserts) are possible. Morphium will take care of sorting it out - there are additional methods for writing to mongo, like update operations set, unset, push, pull and so on (update a value on one entity or for all elements matching a query), delete objects or objects matching a query, and a like - The writer that acutally writes the data, is chosen depending on the configuration of this entity (see Annotations below)

Annotations

a lot of things can be configured in Morphium using annotations. Those annotations might be added to either classes, fields or both.

Entity

Perhaps the most important Annotation, as it has to be put on every class the instances of which you want to have stored to database. (Your data objects).

By default, the name of the collection for data of this entity is derived by the name of the class itself and then the camel case is converted to underscore strings (unless config is set otherwise).

These are the settings available for entities:

• translateCamelCase: default true. If set, translate the name of the collection and all fields (only those, which do not have a custom name set)
• collectionName: set the collection name. May be any value, camel case won't be converted.
• useFQN: if set to true, the collection name will be built based on the full qualified class name. The Classname itself, if set to false. Default is false
• polymorph: if set to true, all entities of this type stored to mongo will contain the full qualified name of the class. This is necessary, if you have several different entities stored in the same collection. Usually only used for polymorph lists. But you could store any polymorph marked object into that collection Default is false
• nameProvider: specify the class of the name provider, you want to use for this entity. The name provider is being used to determine the name of the collection for this type. By Default it uses the DefaultNameProvider (which just uses the classname to build the collection name). see above

Embedded

Marks POJOs for object mapping, but don't need to have an ID set. These objects will be marshaled and unmarshaled, but only as part of another object (Subdocument). This has to be set at class level.

You can switch off camel case conversion for this type and determine, whether data might be used polymorph.

Capped

Valid at: Class level

Tells Morphium to create a capped collection for this object (see capped collections above).

Parameters:

maxSize	maximum size in byte. Is used when converting to a capped collection
maxNumber	number of entries for this capped collection

AdditionalData

Special feature for Morphium: this annotation has to be added for at lease one field of type Map<String,Object>. It does make sure, that all data in Mongo, that cannot be mapped to a field of this entity, will be added to the annotated Map properties.

by default this map is read only. But if you want to change those values or add new ones to it, you can set readOnly=false

Aliases

It's possible to define aliases for field names with this annotation (hence it has to be added to a field).

 @Alias({"stringList","string_list"})
List<String> strLst;

in this case, when reading an object from Mongodb, the name of the field strLst might also be stringList or string_list in mongo. When storing it, it will always be stored as strLst or str_lst according to config.

This feature comes in handy when migrating data.

CreationTime

has to be added to both the class and the field(s) to store the creation time in. This value is set in the moment, the object is being stored to mongo. The data type for creation time might be:

• long / Long: store as timestamp
• Eate: store as date object
• String: store as a string, you may need to specify the format for that

LastAccess

same as creation time, but storing the last access to this type. Attention: will cause all objects read to be updated and written again with a changed timestamp.

Usage: find out, which entries on a translation table are not used for quite some time. Either the translation is not necessary anymore or the corresponding page is not being used.

LastChange

Same as the two above, except the timestamp of the last change (to mongo) is being stored. The value will be set, just before the object is written to mongo.

DefaultReadPreference

Define the read preference level for an entity. This annotation has to be used at class level. Valid types are:

• PRIMARY: only read from primary node
• PRIMARY_PREFERED: if possible, use primary.
• SECONDARY: only read from secondary node
• SECONDARY_PREFERED: if possible, use secondary
• NEAREST: I don't care, take the fastest

Id

Very important annotation to a field of every entity. It marks that field to be the id and identify any object. It will be stored as _id in mongo (and will get an index).

The Id may be of any type, though usage of ObjectId (or MorphiumId in Java) is strongly recommended.

Index

Define indexes. Indexes can be defined for a single field. Combined indexes need to be defined on class level. See above.

PartialUpdate

If this annotation is present for an entity, this entity would only send changes to mongo when being stored. This is useful for big objects, which only contain small changes.

Attention: in the background your object is being replaced by a Proxy-Object to collect the changes.

Property

Can be added to any field. This not only has documenting character, it also gives the opportunity to change the name of this field by setting the fieldName value. By Default the fieldName is ".", which means "fieldName based".

ReadOnly

Mark an entity to be read only. You'll get an exception when trying to store.

Reference

If you have a member variable, that is a POJO and not a simple value, you can store it as reference to a different collection, if the POJO is an Entity (and only if!).

This also works for lists and Maps. Attention: when reading Objects from disk, references will be de-referenced, which will batch into one call to mongo each.

Unless you set lazyLoading to true, in that case, the child documents will only be loaded when accessed.

transient

Do not store the field.

UseIfnull

Usually, Morphium does not store null values at all. That means, the corresponding document just would not contain the given field(s) at all.

Sometimes that might cause problems, so if you add @UseIfNull to any field, it will be stored into mongo even if it is null.

WriteOnly

Sometimes it might be useful to have an entity set to write only (logs). An exception will be raised, if you try to query such a entity.

WriteSafety

Sepcify the safety for this entity when it comes to writing to mongo. This can range from "NONE" to "WAIT FOR ALL SLAVES". Here are the available settings:

• timeout: set a timeout in ms for the operation - if set to 0, unlimited (default). If set to negative value, wait relative to replication lag
• level: set the safety level:
  • IGNORE_ERRORS None, no checking is done
  • NORMAL None, network socket errors raised
  • BASIC Checks server for errors as well as network socket errors raised
  • WAIT_FOR_SLAVE Checks servers (at lease 2) for errors as well as network socket errors raised
  • MAJORITY Wait for at least 50% of the slaves to have written the data
  • WAIT_FOR_ALL_SLAVES: waits for all slaves to have committed the data. This is depending on how many slaves are available in replica set. Wise timeout settings are important here. See WriteConcern in MongoDB Java-Driver for additional information

AsyncWrites

If this annotation is present at a given entity, all write access concerning this type would be done asynchronously. That means, the write process will start immediately, but run in background.

You won't be informed about errors or success. If you want to do that, you don't need to set @AsyncWrites, use one of the save method with a Callback for storing your data - those methods are all asynchronous.

WriteBuffer

Create a write buffer, do not write data directly to mongo, but wait for the buffer to be filled a certain amount:

• size: default 0, max size of write Buffer entries, 0 means unlimited. STRATEGY is meaningless then
• strategy: define what happens when write buffer is full and new things would be written. Can be one of WRITE_NEW, WRITE_OLD, IGNORE_NEW, DEL_OLD, JUST_WARN
  • WRITE_NEW: write all new incoming entries to the buffer directly to mongo, buffer won't grow
  • WRITE_OLD: take one of the oldest entries from the buffer, write it, queue the new entry to buffer. Buffer won't grow
  • IGNORE_NEW: do not add new entry to buffer and do not write it. Attention: possible data loss Buffer won't grow
  • DEL_OLD: delete an old entry from the buffer, add new one. Buffer won't grow
  • JUST_WARN: just issue a warning via log4j, but add the new Object anyway. Buffer will grow, no matter what threshold is set!

Cache

Read-Cache Settings for the given entity.

• timeout: How long are entries in cache valid, in ms. Default 60000ms
• clearOnWrite: if set to true (default) the cache will be cleared, when you store or update an instance of this type
• maxEntries: Maximum number of entries in cache for this type. -1 means infinite
• clearStrategy: when reaching the maximum number of entries, how to replace entries in cache.
  • LRU: remove the least recently used entry from cache, add the new
  • RANDOM: remove a random entry from cache, add the new
  • FIFO: remove the oldest entry from cache, add the new (default)
• syncCache: Set the strategy for syncing cache entries of this type. This is useful when running in a clustered environment to inform all nodes of the cluster to change their caches accordingly. A sync message will be sent to all nodes using the Morphium messaging as soon as an item of this type is written to mongo.
  • NONE: No cache sync
  • CLEAR_TYPE_CACHE: clear the whole cache for this type on all nodes
  • REMOVE_ENTRY_FROM_TYPE_CACHE: remove an updated entry from the type cache of all nodes
  • UPDATE_ENTRY: update the entry in the cache on all nodes
  • This may cause heavy load on the messaging system. All sync strategies except CLEAR_TYPE_CACHE might batch in dirty reads on some nodes.

NoCache

Explicitly disable cache for this type. This is important if you have a hierarchy of entities and you want the "super entity" to be cached, but inherited entities from that type not.

Lifecycle

This is a marker annotation telling Morphium that in this type, there are some Lifecycle callbacks to be called.

Please keep in mind that all lifecycle annotations (see below) would be ignored, if this annotation is not added to the type.

PostLoad

If @Lifecycle is added to the type, @PostLoad may define the method to be called, after the object was read from mongo.

PreStore

If @Lifecycle is added to the type, @PreStore may define the method to be called, just before the object is written to mongo. It is possible to throw an Exception here to avoid storage of this object.

PostStore

If @Lifecycle is added to the type, @PostStore may define the method to be called, after the object was written to mongo.

PreRemove

If @Lifecycle is added to the type, @PreRemove may define the method to be called, just before the object would be removed from mongo. You might throw an exception here to avoid storage.

PostRemove

If @Lifecycle is added to the type, @PostRemove may define the method to be called, after the object was removed from mongo.

PreUpdate

If @Lifecycle is added to the type, @PreUpdate may define the method to be called, just before the object would be updated in mongo. Veto is possible by throwing an Exception.

PostUpdate

If @Lifecycle is added to the type, @PostUpdate may define the method to be called, after the object was updated in mongo.

Dependencies

Morphium does not have many dependencies:

• log4j
• mongo java driver (usually the latest version available at that time)
• a simple json parser (json-simple)

Here is the excerpt from the pom.xml:

<dependency> 
  <groupid>cglib</groupid> 
  <artifactid>cglib</artifactid> 
  <version>2.2.2</version> 
</dependency> 
<dependency> 
  <groupid>log4j</groupid> 
  <artifactid>log4j</artifactid> 
  <version>1.2.17</version> 
</dependency>
<dependency> 
  <groupid>org.mongodb</groupid> 
  <artifactid>mongo-java-driver</artifactid> 
  <version>2.12.3</version> 
</dependency>
<dependency> 
  <groupid>com.googlecode.json-simple</groupid> 
  <artifactid>json-simple</artifactid> 
  <version>1.1</version> 
</dependency>

There is one kind of "optional" Dependency: If hibernate validation is available, it's being used. If it cannot be found in class path, it's no problem.

Code Examples

All those Code examples are part of the Morphium source distribution. All of the codes are at least part of a unit test.

Simple Write / Read

for (int i = 1; i <= NO_OBJECTS; i++) { 
    UncachedObject o = new UncachedObject(); 
    o.setCounter(i); 
    o.setValue("Uncached " + i % 2); 
    MorphiumSingleton.get().store(o); 
 } 
 Query<uncachedobject> q = MorphiumSingleton.get().createQueryFor(UncachedObject.class);
 q = q.f("counter").gt(0).sort("-counter", "value");
 List</uncachedobject><uncachedobject> lst = q.asList();
 assert (!lst.get(0).getValue().equals(lst.get(1).getValue()));

    q = q.q().f("counter").gt(0).sort("value", "-counter");
    List<UncachedObject> lst2 = q.asList();
    assert (lst2.get(0).getValue().equals(lst2.get(1).getValue()));
    log.info("Sorted");

    q = MorphiumSingleton.get().createQueryFor(UncachedObject.class);
    q = q.f("counter").gt(0).limit(5).sort("-counter");
    int st = q.asList().size();
    q = MorphiumSingleton.get().createQueryFor(UncachedObject.class);
    q = q.f("counter").gt(0).sort("-counter").limit(5);
    assert (st == q.asList().size()) : "List length differ?";

And:

Query<complexobject> q = MorphiumSingleton.get().createQueryFor(ComplexObject.class);

    q = q.f("embed.testValueLong").eq(null).f("entityEmbeded.binaryData").eq(null);
    String queryString = q.toQueryObject().toString();
    log.info(queryString);
    assert (queryString.contains("embed.test_value_long") && queryString.contains("entityEmbeded.binary_data"));
    q = q.f("embed.test_value_long").eq(null).f("entity_embeded.binary_data").eq(null);
    queryString = q.toQueryObject().toString();
    log.info(queryString);
    assert (queryString.contains("embed.test_value_long") && queryString.contains("entityEmbeded.binary_data"));

Asynchronous Write

@Test
public void asyncStoreTest() throws Exception {
    asyncCall = false;
    super.createCachedObjects(1000);
    waitForWrites();
    log.info("Uncached object preparation");
    super.createUncachedObjects(1000);
    waitForWrites();
    Query<UncachedObject> uc = MorphiumSingleton.get().createQueryFor(UncachedObject.class);
    uc = uc.f("counter").lt(100);
    MorphiumSingleton.get().delete(uc, new AsyncOperationCallback<Query<UncachedObject>>() {
        @Override
        public void onOperationSucceeded(AsyncOperationType type, Query<Query<UncachedObject>> q, long duration, List<Query<UncachedObject>> batch, Query<UncachedObject> entity, Object... param) {
            log.info("Objects deleted");
        }

        @Override
        public void onOperationError(AsyncOperationType type, Query<Query<UncachedObject>> q, long duration, String error, Throwable t, Query<UncachedObject> entity, Object... param) {
            assert false;
        }
    });

    uc = uc.q();
    uc.f("counter").mod(3, 2);
    MorphiumSingleton.get().set(uc, "counter", 0, false, true, new AsyncOperationCallback<UncachedObject>() {
        @Override
        public void onOperationSucceeded(AsyncOperationType type, Query<UncachedObject> q, long duration, List<UncachedObject> batch, UncachedObject entity, Object... param) {
            log.info("Objects updated");
            asyncCall = true;

        }

        @Override
        public void onOperationError(AsyncOperationType type, Query<UncachedObject> q, long duration, String error, Throwable t, UncachedObject entity, Object... param) {
            log.info("Objects update error");
        }
    });

    waitForWrites();

    assert MorphiumSingleton.get().createQueryFor(UncachedObject.class).f("counter").eq(0).countAll() > 0;
    assert (asyncCall);
}

Asynchronous Read

@Test
public void asyncReadTest() throws Exception {
    asyncCall = false;
    createUncachedObjects(100);
    Query<UncachedObject> q = MorphiumSingleton.get().createQueryFor(UncachedObject.class);
    q = q.f("counter").lt(1000);
    q.asList(new AsyncOperationCallback<UncachedObject>() {
        @Override
        public void onOperationSucceeded(AsyncOperationType type, Query<UncachedObject> q, long duration, List<UncachedObject> batch, UncachedObject entity, Object... param) {
            log.info("got read answer");
            assert (batch != null) : "Error";
            assert (batch.size() == 100) : "Error";
            asyncCall = true;
        }

        @Override
        public void onOperationError(AsyncOperationType type, Query<UncachedObject> q, long duration, String error, Throwable t, UncachedObject entity, Object... param) {
            assert false;
        }
    });
    waitForAsyncOperationToStart(1000000);
    int count = 0;
    while (q.getNumberOfPendingRequests() > 0) {
        count++;
        assert (count < 10);
        System.out.println("Still waiting...");
        Thread.sleep(1000);
    }
    assert (asyncCall);
}

Iterator

@Test
public void basicIteratorTest() throws Exception {
    createUncachedObjects(1000);

    Query<UncachedObject> qu = getUncachedObjectQuery();
    long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
    MorphiumIterator<UncachedObject> it = qu.asIterable(2);
    assert (it.hasNext());
    UncachedObject u = it.next();
    assert (u.getCounter() == 1);
    log.info("Got one: " + u.getCounter() + "  / " + u.getValue());
    log.info("Current Buffersize: " + it.getCurrentBufferSize());
    assert (it.getCurrentBufferSize() == 2);

    u = it.next();
    assert (u.getCounter() == 2);
    u = it.next();
    assert (u.getCounter() == 3);
    assert (it.getCount() == 1000);
    assert (it.getCursor() == 3);

    u = it.next();
    assert (u.getCounter() == 4);
    u = it.next();
    assert (u.getCounter() == 5);

    while (it.hasNext()) {
        u = it.next();
        log.info("Object: " + u.getCounter());
    }

    assert (u.getCounter() == 1000);
    log.info("Took " + (System.currentTimeMillis() - start) + " ms");
}

Messaging

@Test
public void messagingTest() throws Exception {
    error = false;

    MorphiumSingleton.get().clearCollection(Msg.class);

    final Messaging messaging = new Messaging(MorphiumSingleton.get(), 500, true);
    messaging.start();

    messaging.addMessageListener(new MessageListener() {
        @Override
        public Msg onMessage(Messaging msg, Msg m) {
            log.info("Got Message: " + m.toString());
            gotMessage = true;
            return null;
        }
    });
    messaging.storeMessage(new Msg("Testmessage", MsgType.MULTI, "A message", "the value - for now", 5000));

    Thread.sleep(1000);
    assert (!gotMessage) : "Message recieved from self?!?!?!";
    log.info("Dig not get own message - cool!");

    Msg m = new Msg("meine Message", MsgType.SINGLE, "The Message", "value is a string", 5000);
    m.setMsgId(new MorphiumId());
    m.setSender("Another sender");

    MorphiumSingleton.get().store(m);

    Thread.sleep(5000);
    assert (gotMessage) : "Message did not come?!?!?";

    gotMessage = false;
    Thread.sleep(5000);
    assert (!gotMessage) : "Got message again?!?!?!";

    messaging.setRunning(false);
    Thread.sleep(1000);
    assert (!messaging.isAlive()) : "Messaging still running?!?";
}

Cache Synchronization

@Test
public void cacheSyncTest() throws Exception {
    MorphiumSingleton.get().dropCollection(Msg.class);
    createCachedObjects(1000);

    Morphium m1 = MorphiumSingleton.get();
    MorphiumConfig cfg2 = new MorphiumConfig();
    cfg2.setAdr(m1.getConfig().getAdr());
    cfg2.setDatabase(m1.getConfig().getDatabase());

    Morphium m2 = new Morphium(cfg2);
    Messaging msg1 = new Messaging(m1, 200, true);
    Messaging msg2 = new Messaging(m2, 200, true);

    msg1.start();
    msg2.start();

    CacheSynchronizer cs1 = new CacheSynchronizer(msg1, m1);
    CacheSynchronizer cs2 = new CacheSynchronizer(msg2, m2);
    waitForWrites();

    //fill caches
    for (int i = 0; i < 1000; i++) {
        m1.createQueryFor(CachedObject.class).f("counter").lte(i + 10).asList(); //fill cache
        m2.createQueryFor(CachedObject.class).f("counter").lte(i + 10).asList(); //fill cache
    }
    //1 always sends to 2....


    CachedObject o = m1.createQueryFor(CachedObject.class).f("counter").eq(155).get();
    cs2.addSyncListener(CachedObject.class, new CacheSyncListener() {
        @Override
        public void preClear(Class cls, Msg m) throws CacheSyncVetoException {
            log.info("Should clear cache");
            preClear = true;
        }

        @Override
        public void postClear(Class cls, Msg m) {
            log.info("did clear cache");
            postclear = true;
        }

        @Override
        public void preSendClearMsg(Class cls, Msg m) throws CacheSyncVetoException {
            log.info("will send clear message");
            preSendClear = true;
        }

        @Override
        public void postSendClearMsg(Class cls, Msg m) {
            log.info("just sent clear message");
            postSendClear = true;
        }
    });
    msg2.addMessageListener(new MessageListener() {
        @Override
        public Msg onMessage(Messaging msg, Msg m) {
            log.info("Got message " + m.getName());
            return null;
        }
    });
    preSendClear = false;
    preClear = false;
    postclear = false;
    postSendClear = false;
    o.setValue("changed it");
    m1.store(o);

    Thread.sleep(1000);
    assert (!preSendClear);
    assert (!postSendClear);
    assert (postclear);
    assert (preClear);
    Thread.sleep(60000);

    long l = m1.createQueryFor(Msg.class).countAll();
    assert (l <= 1) : "too many messages? " + l;
//        createCachedObjects(50);
//        Thread.sleep(90000); //wait for messages to be cleared
//        assert(m1.createQueryFor(Msg.class).countAll()==0);
    cs1.detach();
    cs2.detach();
    msg1.setRunning(false);
    msg2.setRunning(false);
    m2.close();
}

Geo Spacial Search

@Test
public void nearTest() throws Exception {
    MorphiumSingleton.get().dropCollection(Place.class);
    ArrayList<Place> toStore = new ArrayList<Place>();
//        MorphiumSingleton.get().ensureIndicesFor(Place.class);
    for (int i = 0; i < 1000; i++) {
        Place p = new Place();
        List<Double> pos = new ArrayList<Double>();
        pos.add((Math.random() * 180) - 90);
        pos.add((Math.random() * 180) - 90);
        p.setName("P" + i);
        p.setPosition(pos);
        toStore.add(p);
    }
    MorphiumSingleton.get().storeList(toStore);

    Query<Place> q = MorphiumSingleton.get().createQueryFor(Place.class).f("position").near(0, 0, 10);
    long cnt = q.countAll();
    log.info("Found " + cnt + " places around 0,0 (10)");
    List<Place> lst = q.asList();
    for (Place p : lst) {
        log.info("Position: " + p.getPosition().get(0) + " / " + p.getPosition().get(1));
    }
}

@Index("position:2d")
@NoCache
@WriteBuffer(false)
@WriteSafety(level = SafetyLevel.MAJORITY)
@DefaultReadPreference(ReadPreferenceLevel.PRIMARY)
@Entity
public static class Place {
    @Id
    private MorphiumId id;

    public List<Double> position;
    public String name;

    public MorphiumId getId() {
        return id;
    }

    public void setId(MorphiumId id) {
        this.id = id;
    }

    public List<Double> getPosition() {
        return position;
    }

    public void setPosition(List<Double> position) {
        this.position = position;
    }

    public String getName() {
        return name;
    }

    public void setName(String name) {
        this.name = name;
    }
}

the problems with Logging

today there is a whole bunch of loggin frameworks. Every one is more capable than the other. Most commond probably are java.util.logging and log4j. Morphium used log4j quite some time. But in our high load environment we encountered problems with the logging itself. Also we had problems, that every library did use a different logging framework.

Morphium since V2.2.21 does use its own logger. This can be configured using Environment variables (in linux like export morphium_log_file=/var/log/morphium.log) or java system parameters (like java -Dmorphium.log.level=5).

This logger is built for performance and thread safety. It works find in high load environments. And has the following features:

• it is instanciated with new - no singleton. Lesser performance / synchronization issues
• it has several options for configuration. (see above). You can define global settings like morphium.log.file but you can also define settings for a prefix of a fqdn, like morphium.log.file.de.caluga.morphium. For example java -Dmorphium.log.level=2 -Dmorphium.log.level.de.caluga.morphium.messaging=5 would switch on debugging only for the messaging package, the default has level 2 (which is ERROR)
• it is possible to define 3 Things in the way described above (either global or class / package sepcific): FileName (real path, or STDOUT or STDERR), Log level (0=none, 1=FATAL, 2=ERROR, 3=WARN, 4=INFO, 5=DEBUG) and whether the output should be synced or buffered (synced=false)
• if you want to use log4j or java.util.logging as logging, you can set the log filename to log4j or jul accordingly
• if you want to use your own logging implementation, just tell morphium the log delegate as filename, e.g. morphium.log.file=de.caluga.morphium.log.MyLogDelegate
• of course, all this configuration can be done in code as well.

Swtiching to logback in V3.2.0

Yes, keeping an own addintional logger framework alive is not the smartest or easiest thing to do. So we decided to use logback for configuration of logging, using slf4j in morphium ourselves (in performance checks this seemed to have almost no negative impact fortunately)

So with upcoming V3.2.0 the own logger implementation is gone...

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category: security

Security und Passwortstrategie

no english version available yet

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category: data security

Porno-Abmahnungen und der Datenschutz

no english version available yet

Das was jetzt mal wieder passiert ist, ist schon beinahe als Super-GAU zu bezeichnen und sollte eigentlich allen Datenschutz-Kritikern die Augen öffnen. Was ist passiert?

In den letzten Wochen gingen mehrere 10.000 Abmahnungen (vermutlich ca. 30.000 und es sollen noch mehr werden) wegen Urheberrechtschutzverletzungen im Internet an ahnungslose User. Das an sich wäre ja nix besonderes, allerdings ist der Grund diesmal, dass man sich das urheberrechtlicht geschützte „Werk“ auf einer Porno-Streaming-Plattform (redtube.com) angesehen haben soll. Bisher galt das Streamen nicht als Verbreiten von illegalen Inhalten (da man ja nichts verbreitet und sich die Datei auch nicht herunterlädt) und man konnte dem Benutzer auch normalerweise keine Klage bzw. Abmahnung ins Haus schicken. Es sei denn, es ist wirklich eindeutig, dass das ganze illegal ist (wie z.B. wenn man aktuelle Kinofilme oder Serien vor dem Deutschen TV-Start ansieht).

Hier ist der Sachverhalt anders. Redtube wird wohl von der Porno-Industrie als Werbeplattform verwendet, die dort angepriesenen Videos sollten also rechtefrei sein oder der Uploader tritt das Recht an redtube.com zum Zwecke des Streamens ab – wobei er sicherlich auch irgendwo zustimmen muss, dass er im Besitz dieser Rechte ist. Es war wohl in keiner Weise ersichtlich, ob und warum es sich bei den genannten Machwerken um urheberrechtlich geschütztes Material handeln sollte. Es unterschied sich nicht weiter von den weiteren Angeboten der Streaming Seite. Normalerweise auch nichts besonderes. Der Rechteinhaber verlangt die Herausgabe desjenigen, der das Video hochgeladen hat und kann sich an den wenden. Das wäre aber bei weitem nicht so lukrativ wie mehrere 10.000 Leute abmahnen, von denen jeder mind. 200€ Zahlen soll.Roblox HackBigo Live Beans HackYUGIOH DUEL LINKS HACKPokemon Duel HackRoblox HackPixel Gun 3d HackGrowtopia HackClash Royale Hackmy cafe recipes stories hackMobile Legends HackMobile Strike Hack

Es wurde wohl ein Antrag auf die Herausgabe der Privatadressen beim Landgericht Köln beantragt, und das hat man so formuliert, als handele es sich um eine Tauschbörse, nicht eine Streamingplattform. Auch die nachträgliche Begründung, beim Streamen hätte man am Ende die gesamte Datei auf der Platte, ist doch sehr fadenscheinig. Denn, zum einen wird die Datei beim Steramen nicht vollständig abgelegt und zum zweiten ist es wohl doch eher unwahrscheinlich, dass sich ein Konsument dieser Filme, diese wirklich bis zum Ende ansieht. Ich kann mir nicht vorstellen, dass die Handlung da besonders spannend ist, ihr versteht.

Wie kommen die netten Rechtsanwälte denn überhaupt an die IP-Adressen? Von Redtube haben sie die nicht, die haben sich sehr von dem Vorgehen distanziert und wollen ihrerseits eine Klage gegen die Rechtsanwaltskanzlei anstreben.

Die Gerüchte darüber sind schon wirklich haarsträubend und wenn nur ein Bruchteil davon stimmt, ist das schon wirklich extrem zwielichtig. So ist von extra dafür geschriebenen Viren bzw. Trojanern die Rede. Aber die weit wahrscheinlichere Variante ist die, dass man ein Werbebanner für das IP-Tracking genutzt hat. Das bedeutet, man kann auf Redtube einen Filmausschnitt bzw. Trailer hochladen und kann den dann mit einem eigenen Werbebanner versehen, damit die Leute das Filmchen dann im Idealfall auch kaufen können. Dieses Werbebanner liegt dann bei demjenigen, der die Werbung schaltet, also auf einem anderen Server als Redtube. Und auf dem eigenen Server kann ich natürlich alle IP-Adressen mit protokollieren, die darauf zugreifen.

Das ist insofern zwielichtig, als dass dieses Banner ja wissentlich von dem, der das Video hochgeladen hat, auch irgendwie eingestellt werden. Und wenn es so war, dann muss er gewusst haben, dass es sich bei dem Video um ein urheberrechtlich geschütztes Werk handelt – Warum sollte er dann solch ein Banner schalten? Vor allem stelt sich wohl raus, dass das Video schon seit geraumer Zeit dort gestreamt werden durfte, aber erst kürzlich das Banner geschaltet wurde. Aber anstelle bei Redtube anzumahnen, dass der Film da zu sehen ist und somit die Löschung des Films von deren Servern zu verlangen, wird lieber ein Werbebanner geschaltet, welches es dann möglich macht, 10.000e User abzumahnen?

Erstaunlich ist diese Grafik (hier der original-Post dazu), welche deutlich zeigt, dass die Zugriffe auf die angemahnten Inhalte zufälligerweise genau in der Zeit sprunghaft angestiegen sind, in der die angeblichen Urheberrechtsverstöße stattgefunden haben. Und dass zufälligerweise genau 2 Tage zuvor die Domain für das Werbebanner gekauft wurde…. Zufall?

Wie gesagt, es war für den User wohl nicht ersichtlich, dass es sich um ein illegal zum Streamen freigegebenes „Werk“ handelt. Und eigentlich hätten die Adressen der User gar nicht rausgegeben werden dürfen.

Was hat das jetzt mit Datenschutz zu tun?

Es beweist wieder ein mal, dass Daten in den falschen Händen immer irgendwie zu Geld gemacht werden können oder zumindest eine Menge Geld kosten können. Denn, selbst wenn sich herausstellen sollte, dass diese Abmahnungen alle nicht rechtens waren (zum Glück sieht es momentan so aus – siehe auch hier) und man die Adressen zu den IPs gar nicht hätte rausgeben dürfen, selbst dann bleiben die Betroffenen auf Kosten von mehreren Hundert Euro sitzen! Die können sie sich zwar theoretisch vom Verursacher (also dem Rechteinhaber) wieder holen, aber das geht nur, wenn man es den Schdandensersatz einklagt. Und es ist fraglich, ob das wirklich so einfach geht, denn der Rechteinhaber sitzt wohl in der Schweiz. Und internationale Klagen sich teuer. Und den eigenen Rechtsanwalt muss man vorher bezahlen… Und wenn wirklich, wie es scheint eine Sammelklage gegen diese Abmahnungen erfolg haben sollte, dann ist die Firma leider auch schnell pleite und die Geschädigten bekommen dann auch nichts oder nicht viel.

Ich bin auch der festen Überzeugung, dass das ganze nur deswegen probiert wurde, da es sich um Schmuddelkram handelt. Da werden bestimmt schon 1000e bezahlt haben, bevor das ganze überhaupt öffentlich geworden ist – eben um die Öffentlichkeit zu meiden und man will ja nicht mit so einem Kram in Verbindung gebracht werden. Und da kann man wohl eine Menge Geld machen…

Das ganze ist eine One-Shot-Aktion, man versucht schnell mit der Unwissenheit und der Peinlichkeit der Geschichte Geld zu machen, wohl wissend, dass man sich da auf dünnem Eis bewegt. Die haben aber dennoch sicherlich schon einige Hunderttausend Euro eingenommen.

Kurz zusammengefasst: Weil jemandem die Daten peinlich sind und er nicht will, dass es öffentlich wird, wird bezahlt. Klingelt es da? Ich hatte ähnliches als Schreckensszenario in einem meiner Posts beschrieben, und nun ist es Realität geworden.

Ja, jetzt kommt das Hammer-Argument: Ich gucke keine Pornos im Internet.

Damit ist natürlich alles gut, und es ist nur das Problem einzelner.

ARG!!!! Darum geht es nicht! Es geht darum, dass du, einfach nur weil du einen falschen Link angeklickt hast (denn genau darum handelt es sich), ohne zu wissen, was sich dahinter verbirgt, plötzlich Schadenersatz zahlen musst. Wenn das wirklich legitimiert wird, ist das Internet tot! Dann kann man sich nicht mehr frei bewegen, kann keinen Link mehr anklicken, ohne vorher zu wissen, was sich dahinter verbirgt. Man stelle sich das mal vor, dass man auf einen Link klickt, auf der Seite wird ein Zitat von einem Buch verwendet und der Buchautor will das nicht – Zack, klage am Hals! Und selbst wenn vor Gericht geht und evtl. sogar Gewinnt – man muss die Kohle erst mal vorstrecken (kann gar nicht jeder) und dann muss man auch noch im Nachhinein auf Schadenersatz klagen, bei dem man evtl. auch verliert aber auf jeden Fall wieder Kosten vorstrecken muss.

Ich finde es wirklich erschreckend, wie schlampig da auch auf Seiten der Gerichte gearbeitet wurde, wie einfach jemand, mit genug „Kreativität“ an die Privatadressen von sorglosen Internetusern kommt. So etwas hätte es gar nicht geben dürfen. Der Schaden der Beteiligten ist auf jeden Fall da, denn ohne Rechtsanwalt kommt man aus der Sache leider nicht wieder raus!

Und die Politik will allen Ernstes gerade wieder die Vorratsdatenspeicherung einführen? Das ist super, dann braucht man gar keine Werbebanner mehr, sondern kann sowas sicherlich auch rückwirkend machen und sich so bereichern…. Ich glaube es hackt!

Und um das gleich klar zu stellen: Nein, ich bin nicht betroffen 😉

Update: es scheint sich zu bestätigen, dass da wirklich eine absichtliche Täuschung versucht wurde. Was das ganze natürlich in noch schlimmeres Licht rückt und wieder einmal zeigt, wie wichtig es ist, die Privatsphäre zu schützen. Die Staatsanwaltschaft ermittelt wohl zurecht – alle Betroffenen sollten sich juristischen Rat holen!

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category: Computer

Whatsapp und Datenschutz! Sorglosigkeit in Deutschland...

no english version available yet

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category: global

Who is Stephan Bösebeck?

Whose blog is this? Yes, who am I ... this question is amazingly difficult to answer, foolishly. My IT career can be read here on the blog under My IT History.

There is not much more to say. There will be very little private life here, so my professional career will be in a nutshell:

• After the Abi (and a rather stupid episode at the Bundeswehr - but that is another story) I studied computer science at the University of Passau
• Degree with diploma
• Since I had little or no BaFöG and my parents were not able to contribute much, I started to work while I was studying
• Apart from a few student jobs (for example at the computer discounter ESCOM - unfortunately broke meanwhile, but since I learned a lot) I was from 1995 as an IT consultant
• I have also made some certifications during this time: Sun Certified Trainer, Certified Java Programmer, LPI Certification, Certified C ++ Programmer, Certified Macro4 Trainer, etc. - I could presumably cover entire rooms with the receipt
• Customers of mine were among others: IBM, Sun, Dresdner Bank, Deutsche Bank, HP, Unilog Integrata, Ixos Training, Goethe Institute ...
• I have specialized in the technologies Linux / Unix and Java. Therefore also the certifications in the areas
• I did Java training, especially for SUN and Integrata, from Beginner to Advanced Java Programmer Certification Training
• It looked similar with Linux training, u.A. For IBM. From beginner training courses to advanced clustering and firewalling topics
• Of course there were also training courses in other areas around Unix: Perl, TCL / Tk and a few other exotics (Python was still really exotic: smirk :)
• The knowledge for the Schlulungen I have me in many, unfortunately usually quite small projects appropriated. There was a lot of small and medium-sized companies, for which I developed software. Or worked on larger projects.
• Since I often can not realize the projects very often, I was quickly pushed into the role of the project manager / manager. As contact for customers, as subcontractor, etc.
• Since I as a freelancer alone had hardly a chance to lead a large project or realize I have decided to work hard. In this case, I started as a project manager at Softlab
• There I was able to realize some major projects (well, at least bigger than that before). Among other things for MAN and BMW
• I wanted to gain more management experience and was then "sued" by Acronis. I started there as "Manager Training & Consulting EMEA". And had to build the training department there. First only for Germany, later for EMEA, then worldwide.
• The training management and the training management has then more or less moved to USA, which is why I became "Head of Engineering" at Holidayinsider.com. Unfortunately HRS has bought us and now there are Holidayinsider also no more
• I was then little more than a year Head of Technology at Simplesystem GmbH & Co Kg - but that was unfortunately not quite the correct
• the next job is already fixed, but I will only post here, when I started there: smile:

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category: global

about Data preservation...

this is a German article about data preservation: http://t.co/vrQAaPk

found results: 15

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