If you are developing a distributed application, you can’t get by with any single technology. You’re using at least one programming language and one or more frameworks.  I work in the world that requires Adobe Flex and Java EE knowledge.

To develop a front end I use, at a minimum, HTML, MXML, ActionScript, and Flex framework (add Eclipse with WTP and Flash Builder).   The server side’s consists of a Java Servlet Container with installed BlazeDS Web application (throw in some XML configuration files) that talks to the business tier of your application, which ideally, has just Plain Old Java Objects (yeah, right!) that embed SQL queries talking to a DBMS using some JDBC driver. Almost forgotten about the ANT build tool.

Have I mentioned that this dozen of different pieces of software is a bare minimum?  The client-server technology of early 90th with its 3-piece set (e.g. VB-SQL-Oracle) sounds like a toy these days.

Each of these pieces of software (a.k.a. moving part) can, potentially, give you some problems. That’s why I’m and always was against bringing into the architecture any additional tools or framework that require developers writing more code and make this card house more shaky and the finger-pointing game more likely.

That’s why I don’t like any Flex MVC framework that requires you to write extra code. That’s why I don’t like Object-Relational Mapping frameworks like Hibernate. That’s why I don’t like Java Persistence API with its 500-page spec that, supposed to “make your life easier” comparing to elegant SQL.

To make the long story short, whenever I can, I use our own open source code generator Clear Data Builder that generates the basic CRUD application from requiring very little of manual coding. As for the communication with the database, there is a light-weight (no, really!) SQL mapping framework called MyBatis (formerly iBatis). It’s not an 800-pound gorilla Hibernate, but requires you to supply your own SQL as Java annotations and map it to Java DTOs. It’s a nice and easy process (see this tutorial).

My yesterday’s morning started as usual – CDB obediently generated CRUD, and started the program that was supposed to execute my SQL query and bring the data first the Java and then to Flex UI. MyBatis conveniently displays in Eclipse console the SQL  it executes and the returned result set. Here’s my SQL, but there is no data ands no errors. Trying the same SQL in Oracle SQL Developer – the data’s there. The cleaning of the project didn’t help. Log files show no errors.  Who would you blame next? MyBatis doesn’t generate any code – it just executes my SQL. I started to think of jdbc driver. When to Google – no one blames this Oracle JDBC driver in no reporting errors.

Here comes the BlazeDS little dirty secret. Its folder WEB-INF/classes has a little used by the Apache Commons Logging configuration file commons-logging.properties :
Here it is:

# suppress logging for 3rd-party libraries using commons-logging
# Flex logging is not configured here. It is configured through in the logging section of flex-config.xml
org.apache.commons.logging.LogFactory=org.apache.commons.logging.impl.LogFactoryImpl
org.apache.commons.logging.Log=org.apache.commons.logging.impl.NoOpLog

This last option (NoOpLogs) means suppress errors! I was mad. I could understands if my fellow developer from the BlaseDS team wanted to minimize the output and temporarily change set this option. But the comment in the file explicitely states that the was done intentionally to “suppress logging for 3rd-party libraries”!  Changing NoOpLog to Log4JLogger fixed the situation, and I started seeing a lot of output on the console. Sure enough, there was a run-time error returned by the Oracle driver that explain the problem…two hours later.

Hopefully, revealing this BlazeDS little dirty secret will same someone a little grief. But I’m still wondering, “Why the NoOpLog proudly made it into BlazeDS?”

For more little secrets, attend our 4th Annual Symposium in New York City in August.

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