I am trying to run a very simple REST API backend on EC2 for an Android App I am making for a school project. In a previous project, I used a NodeJS library, expressJS, to quickly create a backend that executes SQL updates/queries, and in the current project, I am using Java and a Java library called Spark to do the same thing (SQL queries/updates). I start a refreshed backend with
git pull; mvn clean install; mvn exec:java;
because I am using Maven. Anyway for both the previous ExpressJS and the current Spark backend, I can talk to the server for an hour or two perhaps, then I have to restart it. Why doesn't it just keep running? Is there some problem with my connection to the database leaking memory? You can check out the project here. I tried using nohup, but that didn't do it either; it still crashed after a few hours. It's not getting too many requests. Any other comments on improvements to my process or backend are welcome as well.
Thanks!
I did not close my database connections. The server kept open the connection until crashing.
Related
The title pretty much sums it up. I understand the idea of bundling all of the packages together and deploying them to a remote server where a client (browser) will download it and execute it.
I have an issue with wrapping my head around the terminology of "deployment" in this scenario. Technically, every client will deploy the frontend application in its own environment every time, or am I missing something? It only needs to have the correct version available on the server to allow for that to happen.
From my understanding, you'd be deploying it by releasing it to the public (or a group of people). but the browser would just be reading and executing.
So I created a frontend application that just shows hello world.
I published or "deployed" my application to the server.
The client now executes my code and shows hello world.
I'm running on Win 7 using Eclipse 4.2 starting a web app on a Tomcat 7 server and using Derby database. I have tried many approaches but run consistently into a common problem:
Everything works just fine the first time I start up and run.
When I redeploy my application after a change, all database connections hang (any kind of restart).
If I stop Eclipse and restart Eclipse, that clears up the problem and the next run works fine again.
Having done some investigation, it appears that the problem is that the Derby port (1527) is not released from one execution of the server to the next. That seems very strange to me since Derby is started by the Tomcat instance which is a separate javaw process.
I've tried:
Configuring the Derby connection as a Tomcat resource
Establishing the connection within my code (rather than via Tomcat resource)
Both the embedded and the network driver
Starting / stopping the network driver from a servlet on startup and shutdown of the Tomcat server
Shutting down the embedded driver via servlet on shutdown of Tomcat
Again, every approach works fine to connect the first time.
One other symptom that doesn't appear to be related (except for as a possible indicator of whether or not shutdown completes correctly) is that the db.lck file for my database never gets deleted. However, whether or not it exists has no bearing on whether or not I can reconnect (only stopping/starting eclipse has an impact).
Any insight would be appreciated.
Thanks!
After some further investigation I'm going to call this a duplicate of: Cannot create JDBC driver of class ' ' for connect URL 'null' : I do not understand this exception. It's not quite the same thing, but that solution (creating META-INF/context.xml) allows it to proceed to failing calls rather than hangs, which is a significant improvement and suggests it's largely related.
I did finally figure this out. It turns out I had the derby jars in the Tomcat lib folder (for Tomcat) and in the deployment assembly for my application in Eclipse (rather than just in the build path). So Tomcat was using the built-in libs, while my app was using the embedded libs, and this resulted in conflicts. Leaving the libs as part of Tomcat and removing them from my war file solved the problem completely.
Whenever I run Google App Engine it seems to be running an older version of the servlet than the last one I've saved.
What's going on? How can I fix this?
I'm using the GAE Eclipse Plugin.
I think this is a common pitfall. I also ran into a couple of times.
You should delete the cookies and the cache from Chrome.
If this isn't working, you should terminate and restart the server at eclipse all the time, when you modify the server side code.
I'm building a web app with Backbone.js (I'm not tied to Backbone yet though). I need a back-end framework only for persistence to a database via a RESTful API. However, I also need to able to deploy it as a 'desktop' app for off-line use, i.e. running a local server and launching a browser window, but I don't want users to have to start a server from the command line to run the application.
I can use SQLite as a database since it's only a single user application, it's just the framework that I'm stuck on. I have looked at the following:
Rails and Django: Default web servers are too flimsy, requires Ruby/Python and runs from the command line. I'm aware of the Bitnami stacks but at 99mb it's too big of a dependency and not exactly hidden from the user.
Sproutcore: Run from command line, also too bulky.
Pyjamas Desktop - Depends on MSHTML which I suspect limits my ability to use HTML5 features.
I'm leaning towards creating a Java app that starts a Scala/Lift server instance and opens a web browser, then sits in the system tray (kind of like WAMP). Is anyone familiar with a tool or framework built for user-friendly deployment as a standalone desktop app?
I do not know if PHP is an option for you? Then I would recommend phpdock.
web2py has a standalone deploy-to-desktop feature with no dependency on Python: http://web2py.com/books/default/chapter/29/14#How-to-distribute-your-applications-as-binaries
As Eydun said, phpdock is an option but it's commercially licensed .
I settled on using Java/Spring/H2/Hibernate/Jetty. I find that Jetty serves requests VERY quickly so the application looks real-time when launched in a browser. There is a tutorial on embedding the Jetty server here. I imagine it's quite trivial to build a GUI that launches the server and a browser.
Another Java option is to use the Play Framework, which may be more at home to those coming from a Django/Rails background. However, the documentation for "creating a standalone version of your application" for Play 2.0+ indicates that they have ditched using Java EE containers (Tomcat/Jetty) and WAR files in favor of running the JARs with the bundled copy of JBoss Netty, so it may take a bit of work to get it running the way you want it.
I would recommend the Play Framework approach if you're OK with using/learning Scala.
I love Heroku but I would prefer to develop in Scala rather than Ruby on Rails.
Does anyone know of any services like Heroku that work with Scala?
UPDATE: Heroku now officially supports Scala - see answers below for links
As of October 3rd 2011, Heroku officially supports Scala, Akka and sbt.
http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2011/10/3/scala/
Update
Heroku has just announced support for Java.
Update 2
Heroku has just announced support for Scala
Also
Check out Amazon Elastic Beanstalk.
To deploy Java applications using
Elastic Beanstalk, you simply:
Create your application as you
normally would using any editor or IDE
(e.g. Eclipse).
Package your
deployable code into a standard Java
Web Application Archive (WAR file).
Upload your WAR file to Elastic
Beanstalk using the AWS Management
Console, the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse,
the web service APIs, or the Command
Line Tools.
Deploy your application.
Behind the scenes, Elastic Beanstalk
handles the provisioning of a load
balancer and the deployment of your
WAR file to one or more EC2 instances
running the Apache Tomcat application
server.
Within a few minutes you will
be able to access your application at
a customized URL (e.g.
http://myapp.elasticbeanstalk.com/).
Once an application is running,
Elastic Beanstalk provides several
management features such as:
Easily deploy new application versions
to running environments (or rollback
to a previous version).
Access
built-in CloudWatch monitoring metrics
such as average CPU utilization,
request count, and average latency.
Receive e-mail notifications through
Amazon Simple Notification Service
when application health changes or
application servers are added or
removed.
Access Tomcat server log
files without needing to login to the
application servers.
Quickly restart
the application servers on all EC2
instances with a single command.
Another strong contender is Cloud Foundry. One of the nice features of Cloud Foundry is the ability to have a local version of "the cloud" running on your laptop so you can deploy and test offline.
I started working on the exact same thing as what you said a few weeks ago. I use Lift, which is a great framework and has a lot of potential, on top of Linux chroot environment.
I'm done with a demo version, but Linux chroot is not that stable (nor secure), so I'm now switching to FreeBSD jail on Amazon EC2, and hopefully it'll be done soon.
http://lifthub.net/
There are also other Java hosting environment including VMForce mentioned above.
If you are looking for a custom setup which also has the ease of deployment that heroku offers: http://dotcloud.com. They are invite only right now but I was given access in under three days. I am working on a Lift/MongoDB project there and it works well.
Off the top of my head, only VMForce comes to mind, but its not available yet. This will be a Java-oriented service, so that probably means you'll have to spend a wee bit of time figuring out how to package the app.
For more discussion, there was a debate about this in 2008.
I'm not entirely sure if it's really suitable or not, but people have deployed Scala applications to Google App Engine, for example http://mawson.wordpress.com/2009/04/10/first-steps-with-scala-on-google-app-engine/
Actually you can run scala on heroku right now. You don't believe it?
https://github.com/lstoll/heroku-playframework-scala
I'm not sure the tricks lstoll has used are legit but using the
new cedar platform where you can run custom processes and some
ingenious Gemfile hacking he has managed to bootstrap the Java
play platform into a process. Seems to work as he has a live
site running a test page.
Stax cloud service offers preconfigured lift project skeleton. Also, there is a tutorial on how to deploy lift project to appengine.