jPOS.org

/by apr/

For some time I have been playing with the idea of supporting a PAUSE action at prepare time in the jPOS transaction manager (think continuations), but it has some side effects related to transaction recovery, so it is still in the works.

But I´ve added an easy to use and handy RETRY action that you can use while implementing your participants. If you return RETRY at prepare time, the TransactionManager will store your context in the persistent space and will re-queue it at regular intervals (default to 5 seconds, configured by a retry-interval property) back into the main queue.

Imagine you have a system that connects to different remote processors and one processor goes slow or down for a while. Even if you are handling a big number of concurrent sessions, eventually all sessions might get locked waiting for responses coming from that particular endpoint.

You could solve a situation like this by using multiple transaction manager instances (one per endpoint) but with this new RETRY thing, you can just RETRY the transaction at a later time (usually a few seconds later).

You can place a retry counter in the context, or check the timestamp in order to avoid retrying the transaction forever. There´s an example in jpos6/modules/txnmgr/test/org/jpos/transaction/TestRetryParticipant.java.

/by apr/

Yesterday´s late afternoon, I had an unexpected and welcome IM call from my friend Rodolfo Pilas, he said he was there with
Mr. Federico Heinz and they were keen to step by jPOS.org. Would you believe that?

Interesting enough, I was aware Mr. Heinz was coming to speak at the JIAP 2006. That´s an event organized by government employed IT people. I would have loved to assist to Mr. Heinz presentation, but something very funny and weird happened to me last year with the JIAP 2005 event, so I said nah…

I hate to speak at events (just because I get very anxious due to lack of practice) but last year, JIAP organizers asked the local Linux User Group about providing a presentation about local free software project initiatives, and they contacted me to speak about ours.

Instead of talking about jPOS, I thought that it would be a good idea to speak about how we develop software in a distributed and collaborative environment, trying to map this to distributed government agencies with their replicated IT departments, reinventing the wheel on a regular basis instead of collaborating with each other.

I said yes, but then the organizers though that talking at their event would somehow promote jPOS, so they thought it was a good idea to charge me! Hilarious. I asked for a printed and signed quote just to frame it and nail it at my office, but never managed to get one. I was told that the audience was mostly mainframe guys, I think that they really need to listen about how we develop software these days or they´d be lost, but yet the people that´s leading them are greedy and blind and driven just by money.

Anyway, I did not assist to Mr. Heinz´s presentation yesterday, but was honored by his visit to our little jPOS project, it was amazing to be able to speak with a person of his caliber, and to get to know that he likes our logo!

Thank you for your visit!