cgpSoftware

Is it wise to use REST in an eCommerce application? The answer at first seems a no. There is definitely a lot of dynamic content on the backend and eCommerce is as much about requesting services (request CC validation etc..) as much as modifying state (cart contents etc...)

Sun gives us this pretty well defined acid test as to when REST should be used.

The irony of course is that the example given in the sun article is a purchase order.

There is very little that couldn't have a REST "pattern" applied to it. A good example would be something temporary, like sending an email, or resending a receipt. Hrm. Interesting.

This is the documentation of my effort to do WSDL with Apache CXF, an incubation project yet. I'm not sure what the accepted path for web services currently is with Spring, but I've gone through AXIS, XFire, and now this.

Since it's an incubation project, we'll have to cut it some slack, but here we go. Configuring a WebService (WSDL/SOAP) using CXF with Spring is described here. First of all, I put in all the depedencies that I would need. It looks like it's missing an entry. I added in:

<dependency>
<groupId>org.apache.cxf</groupId>
<artifactId>cxf-bundle</artifactId>
<version>${cxf.version}</version>
</dependency>

This jar contains the cxf.xml file (META-INF/cxf/cxf.xml) which is used by my Spring my beans.xml file.

The beans.xml file sets up the endpoint. A schema mentioned in the header is broken. Originally, I just couldn't get the schema to load, but I figured I would load it temporarily from a localhost, which apparently others have done as well.

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xmlns:jaxws="http://cxf.apache.org/jaxws"
xsi:schemaLocation="
http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd
http://cxf.apache.org/jaxws http://cxf.apache.org/schemas/jaxws.xsd">

to this:

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xmlns:jaxws="http://cxf.apache.org/jaxws"
xsi:schemaLocation="
http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd
http://cxf.apache.org/jaxws http://localhost/schemas/jaxws.xsd">

So, now I'm down to this error:

[INFO] Failure

Embedded error: Configuration problem: Unable to locate Spring NamespaceHandler for XML schema namespace
[http://cxf.apache.org/jaxws]
Offending resource: ServletContext resource [/WEB-INF/beans.xml]

I dug around, I searched for something which suggested how to fix this. I tried to make all of the resources local. No luck. I read some of these articles. Still no luck.

I experienced firsthand the dangers of software RAID as implemented by an onboard SATA controller posing as a RAID controller. Many computer enthusiasts who want to utilize RAID take the lower cost controllers found on a motherboard and use them considering them to be a full RAID solution. Not so. While the performance numbers are nearly indistinguishable from most of the cheaper full RAID solutions, there are some features found on real hardware RAID controllers which really set them out from your onboard software controllers.

Here are some traits of a true RAID controller:

1. Diagnose hard drives on their own. They can detect SMART failures, and/or read failures.
2. Use native RAID commands instead of SATA/IDE ones provided by the BIOS.
3. Have a read/write cache built on board. They have a battery backup in case of power failure.
4. Upon detection of failure, they recover without the use of a driver.
5. They present a single drive per RAID volume/array to the OS, never multiple)

If your card is missing any of these traits, it's probably not hardware RAID.

Somewhere out there, Chad is laughing, hopefully not too hard. (for his own good) :)

References

1. Linux faq-sata-raid