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{ Category Archives } Research

RetriableTask — a generic wrapper for retrying operations in Java

A couple of times recently I’ve needed to write methods that retry up to n times if an error occurs, and surprisingly, couldn’t find any standard patterns to accomplish this on the web. So I wrote my own. All comments appreciated (there may well be massive holes in my logic but it works so far).

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Simple server status monitoring with PHP and Perl

Recently, one of our web servers fell victim to an apparent DoS attack, being hammered with hundreds of simultaneous dynamic page requests, far more than it’s specced to handle. To its credit, it stayed up, although it took about five minutes to log in via ssh, and when we spotted what was happening, the load [...]

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IteratorReader — streaming character data from an iterator

Recently when plugging two components of a high-throughput web service together, I ran into a snag. One component (a data repository) exposes an Iterator for pulling XML-formatted records out of it one by one. The other (for serving SOAP response documents) needed, ideally, something that could be wrapped in a StreamSource — i.e. an InputStream [...]

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Java web service frameworks — a brief survey

One of the current ongoing R&D projects at CATH is the development of a library of web services for both internal and external use. The first step in this process was the selection of a web service toolkit (or ’stack’) to use, as there are several competing (and often mutually incompatible) frameworks available. This page [...]

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