My Cubes

As we all know the phrase 'there is no such thing as a free lunch', that also counts for the new release of the VM Ware PAAS platform, Cloud Foundry. 

MyCubes has been using cloud foundry from the beginning. Though we are exited about the usage, we sure have seen problems with unstable deployments and strange work arounds. So we are not that sad about the new release of Cloud Foundry V2 where the service is switching to a paid variant. Maybe now, they will provide better support and stability.

What we do find disturbing is that, we are already in the mids of June and still there is no clarity on what the pricing will be. It can't be that they their management still don't know what the pricing is, right? Just tell the people and be done with it. Also I would expect VMware to make lots of buzz about this new release, since they will be terminating the old service by the end of june. Except for a mailing that was sent to all users, you have to get in the FAQ to find that V1 will be terminated in 3 weeks (!!!). Existing apps on V1 are not compatible by default with V2. I suppose there won't be a big issue with Grails applications but still.. I hope that this is just a communication issue and that it doesn't set the tone in how Cloud Foundry will develop and act in the future.

As promissed additional to last post, adding some sample code for the 'geeks' :)

try {

System.out.println("Loading Truststore with trusted public certificate");

KeyStore trustStore  = KeyStore.getInstance(KeyStore.getDefaultType());

try {

                trustStore.load([truststore],

"password".toCharArray());

            } catch (Exception e) {

e.printStackTrace();

throw new RuntimeException(e);

}

System.out.println("Loading Keystore with private key to identify the client");

KeyStore keystore  = KeyStore.getInstance("pkcs12");

try {

keystore.load([keystore],

"password".toCharArray());

            } catch (Exception e) {

e.printStackTrace();

throw new RuntimeException(e);

}

            SSLSocketFactory socketFactory = new SSLSocketFactory(keystore, "password", trustStore);

            Scheme sch = new Scheme("https", 443, socketFactory);

            defaultHttpClient.getConnectionManager().getSchemeRegistry().register(sch);

            HttpGet httpget = new HttpGet('https://2waysslservice/something');

            HttpResponse response = defaultHttpClient.execute(httpget);

            HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity();

            System.out.println("Do what you like with the response");

Today created a piece of code for a client to demo how to download a file from a server over a 2 way SSL connection. It was quite a puzzle in the beginning to get it working. 

Initially I was looking at HttpClient because I was working with it in the past. Now it was confusing that it appears that the HttpClient is completely re-architected and now is part of the Http components libraries. From other forums, some guys were complaining that it was over architected and far too complicated...

I must admit, it's confusing due to the same name and many examples that were outdated. But having eventually found the pointer to 'SSLSocketFactory (http://hc.apache.org/httpcomponents-client-ga/httpclient/apidocs/org/apache/http/conn/ssl/SSLSocketFactory.html)' it was quite easy to get it all working. The key was to use the constructor where  you provide both a keystore with the private key and a trust store with the public keys. By linking it in the SSL scheme, I successfully connected to the server.

NOTE: somehow I couldn't get the private key from a JKS file. After extracting it to a separate p12 file (with password), I was able to use the private keystore wiithin the constructor.

Since Yahoo has bought Tumblr for 1.1 biljon dollars and because of all the fuzz, we thought it might be worthwhile to check out what makes Tumblr so great. We were actually planning to start a blog site for My Cubes. Might as well give this a try.

The idea about microblogging without the annoying message size limitation of Twitter is one of primary reasons why we would like to try it out. It's often the case that we want to post something small but interesting while working on projects. This seems to be a nice place to start.