You’d think that documentation on creating a search engine for a Spring 3 MVC website would be plentiful- search boxes are on most sites these days, and it should be trivial to implement some type of search functionality in Spring MVC. Unfortunately, there is very little direct documentation on the subject, so I thought I’d write up what I did so others can benefit (and hopefully I hit enough keyword combos to have it be found).

So as I mentioned earlier, loadtesting with 70 threads failed because the default MTA on Ubuntu (exim) is limited by default to 20 concurrent connections (smtp_accept_max). Since I was using under 20% of the cpu and the bottleneck was an unconfigured mailserver, I really wanted to see where my app bottomed out, meaning I needed to fix the mail issue and keep moving. I should also mention that I switched to localhost to avoid getting myself in trouble by sending out 10,000 registration emails (when I checked the exim queue, there were 28.

One concern I have with SPoE is that, should it get popular, it must handle traffic to a reasonable degree. Since I deal with misbehaving Java apps at work all the time, I decided to test mine and see how it behaved under load. I’m running tomcat via eclipse, trending memory usage with VisualVM, and running the test with JMeter. I decided to start small- simply registering a new account. With only 5 pages, the test flew by and gave me a false sense of security.

I’ve been slowly chugging away at SPoE in my free time here and there and have added a few bits that I’d like to share. Welcome Page – now displays recently modified Snippets and Reviews (although reviews are unimplemented). Snippets – Now have a publish flag to hide snippets from the public. If a snippet is unpublished, no one can review it. Snippet lists can be paginated now. Accounts – users can register, activate, edit, their accounts and change and reset their passwords.

I’ve been relatively quiet on SPoE because I’ve been focused. Users can now register, log in, log out, and view existing snippets. I’ve added a jquery navigation menu which looks slick in firefox but ugly in IE 7. I’ve also added wymEditor for adding snippets, despite the fact that it doesn’t save; I’m not sure if it’s the final choice, but it’ll work for now. The card system was a complete catastrophe;Â I was too focused on learning the framework and building out parts as I figured it out.

After my last round of mock-up tools fizzled out, I moved on to other things. Today I had a coworker inform me that Eclipse has a mock-up plugin. After giving it a spin, I have to say it’s the best of all the apps I’ve tried to use. I am amused that the solution to my problem has been sitting right under my nose this entire time. Sadly, it’s a non-free plugin, but I’m not sure what that means yet.

So SpringFuse was a dud. In the end it was just wasn’t a good fit for me. I’m trying to learn java and spring along the way and the library conflicts were getting out of hand. I dumped it and more or less zeroed out my checkout. On the bright side, trying to debug springfuse taught me quite a bit about maven, java dependencies, using eclipse for debugging, and spring classes.

So far, getting infrastructure in place has been much easier than actually doing any coding. As it stands now, I have added the following helpers: Cobertura and Emma: Code coverage. Findbugs: finding obvious bugs in my code PMD: Find other problems in the code. So far that’s all I have- bells and whistles to distract me from doing actual work. Ideally they’ll help keep me honest about code quality, but this early in the game they don’t offer much value.

One thing I knew going into creating SPoE was that there were two types of users, Reviewers and Authors. Authors are essentially Reviewers with an expanded view. Since I’ll be using Spring and MVC, it made sense to make Reviewer a model class and Author a child class. Then I could simply add the functionality to Author as needed. I’m starting to rethink that; Spring Security has the concept of Roles, which I’d originally planned on reserving for regular users and admins, but now I’m thinking that it might be a superficial distinction.

This is intended to be a set of user stories/use cases for the author beta-reader site I intend to build (the initial article can be found here). The purpose of this project is to create a site where Authors can go to have their content beta-read. Site is meant as an author-to-author tool for critiqing snippets. User Stories User Account theme As a user I want to be able to log into the site [done] I want to be able to create an account [done] I want to be able to change passwords [done] I want to configure profile information [done] I want to be able to recover passwords via email [done] General User stories