EJPPG0003E: ServletContext lookup for /.CreditCounterPartyReviewLog returned the portal context. It has to be a different one.

I’m working on a Portlet project right now. It helps a group over at TransAlta keep their financial obligations and exposures in check. I like the application…it has great business value, terrific customer participation…a great project.

A second developer was introduced to the project recently. He brought the portlets down from CVS and tried running them on his workstation. The received the following error:

2006.08.23 13:37:49.064 E com.ibm.wps.pe.om.definition.impl.WebApplicationDefinitionImpl getServletContext
EJPPG0003E: ServletContext lookup for /.CreditCounterPartyReviewLog returned the portal context. It has to be a different one.

hmmm, what does that mean? He created an EAR file to associate the project with…ahh, but wait! When Rational Application Developer associates Web Modules with an EAR, it doesn’t give it a context root. It tries using the context root for the Portal itself (uh oh) and then throws the exception found above. Fixing it, as my good friend from IBM Thomas Young discovered, is quite simple. Open the EAR, find the module reference and click ‘Refesh’ located beside the Context Root field.

ReDeploy and run…

Presentations

Paul Glen wrote a funny little list of things not to do when giving a presentation. While most are fairly obvious (and correct), I don’t quite know if I agree with all of them. I know it’s not a good idea to stray from topic but really, he contradicts himself a little. You should stay on topic but if you follow what Paul says, you should also gauge your audience to see if you’re hitting the mark. In my opinion (and experience) you need to improvise from time to time.

It’s also interesting to note his point on keeping opinions away from a presentation, especially when presented as facts. Mr. Glen goes on to say an audience member gives a presenter 30 seconds before determining whether the presentation is worth their attention (hard thing to prove — sounds a little like an opinion to me…). He was trying to emphasize the importance of a strong opening. For anyone attending Eric Evans present at XPAU in 2004, you’ll probably agree on how inaccurate Mr. Glen’s assessment is. Eric opened quietly, meandered for a few minutes before finding his stride. I was happy to have the chance to meet Eric afterwards (while signing my copy of Domain Driven Design) and let him know how incredible I found his talk. There wasn’t a strong opening and if memory serves, not a very ’strong’ closing. Just a talk comprised of really, really interesting Domain related experiences and findings.

As with everything, take the list with a grain of salt. It’s still nice to see folks in the industry pointing out the importance of a good presentation. I, for one, love delivering presentations on the things near and dear to me.

Refactoring

My wife and I took the kids out to Nipika for a four day weekend. It’s a wonderful place, I’d highly recommend it to anyone looking to get away from the hustle and bustle of city life for a while.

The last thing I did before leaving was export a .war file for release to my client’s Test Environment. I’m starting to learn the last thing you do prior to holidays is rarely the thing that causes the biggest upset while you’re gone. The second last thing you do prior to holidays…now that’s a different story.

As I prepared to export the .war and send it through the deployment process, I noticed something. I noticed a package within the code base with the following name: “org.transalta.creditservices.managedbeantests”.

I like to maintain two projects for every stream of production code, one for the code and one for the tests. That should explain why a package in my deployment release with ‘managedbeantests’ in its name seemed out of place. It’s not uncommon, it usually means I forgot to change the package name at the time of the classes creation. Since I typically create a class from within the context of my ‘Test’ project, it stands to reason why this happened.

No big deal.

So just before exporting, I refactor the package by changing its name to match the other managedbeans, “org.transalta.creditservices.managedbeans”…done. Export .war, send to Tommy and it’s a 4 day weekend.

I return Monday morning to find a note from Tommy, the deployment administrator. To summarize the content of the note, “Jamie, your deployment didn’t work”.

What?!?! Impossible. It worked when I left, I remember deploying it to my development environment right before packaging it up and sending it to Tommy, he must be mistaken. A thread of emails later, he’s right. It’s not working in either Project Dev or Test. I fire up my development environment to prove that I’m not nuts, that it worked just before I left.

It didn’t work.

again, What?!?!?

I spend 5 minutes thinking about the deployment and what may have gone wrong. I focus on the last thing I did before leaving (packaging the .war). A quick look at the code and I find an empty package, “”org.transalta.creditservices.managedbeantests”. Ahhhhh…a clue.
I moved the class but didn’t delete the package (lucky much?). That was enough to trigger my memory, a path to what may have happened lay ahead…. The class I moved is a JSF managed bean. These are beans used within JSF and registered with the JSF context. That means, you guessed it, an explicit reference to it within the faces-config.xml file (bloody xml!?!?!).
Oh, and by the way, nice exception logging JSF, “cannot instantiate ReviewLogManagedBean” (not even the bean in question, just the first referenced bean in the faces-config.xml file.  Almost as useful as Portal’s ‘AssertionFailed’ exception in the log…thanks guys.

I pop open faces-config.xml and there it is, a reference to the old package location. How foolish could I have been? I changed the reference to the new locations, ran it in Dev (it worked), deployed it to Tommy (it worked) and informed the customer (it worked).

So rather than learn a lesson over and over, I thought I’d jot down my lessons learned on this little adventure.

1) Never make a change between final test and deployment, no matter how trivial you think it is. Make the change, rerun your local tests and deploy (Comp. Sci 101, I know, I know)

2) Refactoring tools within Eclipse 3.02 are good, just not good enough to know about references within an XML file. 3.02, I know, is old but it’s what IBM use for Rational Application Developer (tool of choice here).

3) When a container driven exception is thrown and you’re working with JSF, take a look at the faces-config.xml file. It’s worth a shot and really, that’s the heart of the framework.

4) Never make a change between final test and deployment, no matter how trivial you think it is. Make the change, rerun your local tests and deploy (Comp. Sci 101, I know, I know) [worth a second mention]

5) Don’t release anything within 2 hours of a vacation and leave yourself a note.

6) Don’t fry bacon in a cast iron frying pan over a bbq in the mountains if you don’t want to smell like  bacon for the rest of the day.

A Project of Problems

My friend and colleague Iwona and I were talking this afternoon about our current project. It’s a complex integration exercise, joining 4 very different systems while surfacing a new interface through Portal. Iwona is an excellent team member constructing a data model that is both durable and dynamic.

The conversation came around to how we’ve been tackling the problems as they come. Her preference would have been more upfront analysis and less refactoring. It came out that she believes we’ve been ‘designing the system to solve the next problem’.  I bristled at the suggestion….but only for a moment (and the moment’s gone)

I thought about it and realized that’s exactly what we’re doing and I don’t think I’d have it any other way. I’m not saying upfront analysis is a bad thing. Lightweight design meetings are a great way to start a project. They introduce everyone to the Domain, get lots of foundation knowledge on the table. I love that part of a project. I love getting to know a new Domain, form a common Domain language and figure out where the wins are. Conversations beyond that start returning diminished value.

Under a certain light, projects can be viewed as nothing more than a series of problems needing solved. Isn’t that why we got into this in the first place, to solve problems? I know that’s where the draw was on my 1983 Apple II clone, solving the riddles that made the bloody thing work (I was 12 and it the machine rarely worked without some coaxing…).

You often hear team members  describe a pre-production problem as “Murphy’s Law strikes again” and yeah, I guess that’s one way of looking at it. To me, it means a problem wasn’t ready to appear. Now I know that sounds a bit too, I don’t know, abstract or philosophical to have any meaning. What I mean to say is some problems are revealed only through the solving of others. You’ll never solve them all, you just need to solve enough to provide value to those who feel the problem’s pain the hardest.

So whether you spend the time designing the holes in which the fence post will be placed or drawing a rough idea and putting the shovel into the ground…there are rocks, they weigh a lot and it feels amazing once they’re out.