Maven Failsafe plugin build error: SurefireBooterForkException: The forked VM terminated without properly saying goodbye. VM crash or System.exit called?

When you get this exception during running mvn clean verify, which executes both the Surefire and Failsafe plugin (for which the last one uses the Surefire plugin!):

SurefireBooterForkException: The forked VM terminated without properly saying goodbye. VM crash or System.exit called?

it can mean several things. For example as the message says maybe somewhere in your integration tests you call System.exit, which you shouldn't do. That one is easy to find. Also this Stackoverflow post covers that plus some other options, like shortage of memory.

It has also higher chance on happening when using the docker-maven image and 3.x-openjdk-8 or 3.y-openjdk-10.

But if that doesn't fix it, what then?  Then due to this issue you probably have to add this property in your pom.xml in the configuration of both the Surefire and the Failsafe plugin:

<usesystemclassloader>false</usesystemclassloader>

Thus not only for the Failsafe plugin, for both! :)

PS: adding that configuration property also is a workaround for https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SUREFIRE-1588, also reported here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50661648/spring-boot-fails-to-run-maven-surefire-plugin-classnotfoundexception-org-apache/50661649#50661649

Gitlab maven:3-jdk-8 Cannot get the revision information from the scm repository, cannot run program "git" in directory error=2, No such file or directory

Introduction

In a Gitlab project setup the most recent Docker image for maven was always retrieved from the internet before each run by having specified image: maven:3-jdk-8 in the gitlab-ci.yml. The image details can be found here.

Of course this is not a best-practice; your build can suddenly start failing at a certain point because an update to the image might have something changed internally causing things to fail.

What you want is controlled updates. That way you can anticipate on builds failing and plan the upgrades in your schedule.

The issue and workarounds/solutions

And indeed suddenly on March 29 2018 our builds started failing with this error:

[ERROR] Failed to execute goal org.codehaus.mojo:buildnumber-maven-plugin:1.4:create (useLastCommittedRevision) on project abc: Cannot get the revision information from the scm repository :
[ERROR] Exception while executing SCM command.: Error while executing command. Error while executing process. Cannot run program "git" (in directory "/builds/xyz"): error=2, No such file or directory

That message is quite unclear: is git missing? Or is the directory wrong? Or could the maven buildnumber plugin not find the SCM repository?

After lots of investigation it turned out the maven:3-jdk-8 image indeed had changed about 18 hours before.

And after running the maven command in a local version of that Docker image indeed the same error occured!  Awesome, the error was reproducable.

And after installing git again in the image with:

- apt-get update
- apt-get install git -y

the error disappeared!  But a new one appeared:

[ERROR] The forked VM terminated without properly saying goodbye. VM crash or System.exit called?

This also hadn't happened before. After some searching it turned out it might be the surefire and failsafe plugins being outdated.

So I updated them to 2.21.0 and indeed the build succeeded.

Here's the issue reported in the Docker Maven github. UPDATE: it is caused by an openjdk issue (on which the maven:3-jdk-8 is based upon.

This issue made us realize we really need an internal Docker repository. And so we implemented that :)

One disadvantage about Docker images is that you can't specify a commit hash to use. Yes you can specify a digest instead of a tag, but that is a unique UUID hashcode only. You can't see from that hashcode anymore the (related) tagname.

JBoss EAP 6.2.0 + Camel + CXF + JSF 2.2.8 Project Summary

Introduction

This blogpost is a short summary of a project I did a short while ago in 2014.

Tools used

1. Oracle's jdk1.8.0_05 with target 7
   
2. JBoss EAP 6.2.0
   
3. Testng 6.8 (instead of JUnit)
   
4. Camel 2.13
   
5. CXF (for calls to external webservices)
   
6. Less (CSS similar a bit to SASS)
   
7. Spring 4.0
   
8. Lombok
   
9. Mockito 1.0
   
10. Hamcrest 1.3
    
11. DBUnit 2.5
    
12. Embedded tomcat 7 for integration tests with maven 3
    
13. Sonar, Confluence, Sourcetree (for Git over SVN)
    
14. Spring-rabbit 1.2 for accessing RabbitMQ
    
15. JSF 2.2.8
    
16. Hibernate 5.1.1
    
17. Hsqldb 2.3

Lessons learned

1. My first time use of the Maven plugin dependency which gives warnings of undeclared and used or unused declared dependencies:
   
   mvn dependency:analyze-only
   
   Very handy. You *can't* trust on analyze-only though! In the end you still need to perform a full build to make sure all still works. The plugin can only determine dependencies.
   
   It is possible that some "hidden" non-explicit dependency on an @Entity class creates a FK, which causes the project (with the missing explicit ) hbm.ddl.auto=create not be able to drop a table because it doesn't know about that FK (and thus can't drop that and thus not the table).
   
   Luckily in log (perhaps you need to set the hibernate level to log all queries/statements) you can see what exactly is being dropped and thus can you spot the missing 'drop contraint xyz' line, where xyz is the constraint the current project doesn't know about. Add it as to the project's pom.xml and the statement should appear. Note that mvn dependency:analyze-only will complain about it as 'unused declared dependency'. Probably this FK dependency is an incorrect project setup anyway.
   
   
   
2. Sonar's //NOSONAR does not seem to ignore code-coverage violations... Only issues (e.g the Blocker, Critical etc rules).
   
   
3. Camel 2.13: example expression to only have file moved if same file prefix file but with extension .ready already exists:
   
   // Reference: http://camel.apache.org/file-language.html
   private static final String FILE_READY_TO_BE_PICKED_UP_EXPRESSION = "doneFileName=$simple{file:name.noext}.ready";
   
   
4. Parsing in jodatime:
   
   private final DateTimeParser[] parsers = {
       DateTimeFormat.forPattern(SOME_DATE_FORMAT).getParser()
   };
   
   DateTimeFormatter formatter = new DateTimeFormatterBuilder().append(null, parsers).toFormatter().withZone(DateTimeZone.UTC);
   And the other direction:
   
   String nowText = DateTime.now().toString(SOME_DATE_FORMAT);
   
   
5. Suppose you have two maven profiles A and B. When running mvn clean install -PA,B it appeared only the <exclude> of the last profile was being used (as seen when adding the -X parameter when running the mvn command).
   
   Problem was that both profiles had the same <id> in the <execution> part!
   
   Solution: prefix the execution ids to make them unique. E.g:
   
   <id>A-tests</id>
   and
   <id>B-tests</id>
   
   
6. TestNG (and JUnit vx.y in a bit different way but same mechanism) supports groups to divide tests in for example unit vs integration tests.
   But what if you have a combination of previous unittests which don't have that annotation yet, and you don't want to have to update all tests classes?
   Because if you have specified in your root pom.xml, then the tests w/o the groups attribute in the @Test annotation  won't get picked up by the maven-sure-fire plugin.
   
   For that you need this specified with your maven-surefire-plugin configuration:
   
   <plugin>
   ...
   <configuration>
       <!-- Need to specify an empty variable. Leaving the tags empty does not make it overrule the defined in the inmotiv-root/pom.xml -->
       <groups>${emptyProperty}</groups>
   </configuration>
   ...
   </plugin>
   Note the ${emptyProperty} property. It has *no* value set!
   
   Would you remove the ${emptyProperty}, so you have <groups><groups/>, or replace the line with <groups/> you'll see the test class won't get run! My guess is that maven just removes the empty tag, but won't if you put in a variable...
   
   
7. When renaming files by change the casing (uppercase or lowercase) that are already git controlled, use
   
   git mv -f FILE file
   otherwise GIT won't see it.

Lessons learned webservices project

At a recent project we used the following tools & frameworks:

• Java 6


• Spring 3.0


• Hibernate 3.2.7


• JMS


• JBoss ESB 4.5/5.1


• SOAP 1.1


• JAXB


• JAX-WS


• Apache CXF


• Maven2


• Jetty 6.1


• Oracle 10g


• Eclipse Mylyn


• SVN


• JUnit


• Bamboo


• Jira


• Crucible


• Nexus

Below are a couple of lessons learned which I remembered to write down:

JUnit

• To skip a testclass (e.g Util.java) during a test in a maven project: put @Ignore above it.

Java

• Throw checked exceptions in case of functionality errors. To not have to return those errors as return-values of the methods and making them checked, makes the interface clearer.

SOAP

• Should you use the service response for functional errors, and SOAP fault only for technical errors?
  Nothing in the SOAP 1.1 spec says you should do that or are not allowed to put functional errors in the <detail>.
  Makes sense to me to do that: otherwise you can get errors in the response AND in the soap fault. More complex to handle in the client...
  Less of an issue if you say when there are SOAP faults we just give up, only if there's a response we try to see what's going on.
  


• Apparent best practice: no underscores in xml/xsd/wsdl for element nor attributes, for better readability

ESB

• JBoss ESB 4.5 JMS queue had loads of problems with high load and would sometimes just completely drop the queue. We moved to JBoss ESB 5.1 with ActiveMQ, that proved much more stable.

Transactional atomic file manipulation and file locking
Bunch of interesting articles related to this:

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/595631/how-to-atomically-rename-a-file-in-java-even-if-the-dest-file-already-exists


• http://commons.apache.org/transaction/


• http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/01/file-systems-transactions


• http://www.coderanch.com/t/495417/java/java/Distributed-Tx-Transactional-File-Access


• https://xadisk.dev.java.net/


• Lower-level stuff: http://java.sys-con.com/node/37798


• EJB/XA example: http://matthewneale.net/category/software-development/

Related to file locking:

• See reply 3: http://forums.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=5284898


• Another example: http://www.java2s.com/Code/Java/File-Input-Output/DemonstratesfilelockingandsimplefilereadandwriteoperationsusingjavaniochannelsFileChannel.htm


• "But if you can change/write the writing program: You have to change the design. App1 should write to "temporary" files, and when it's done, close and rename them to a naming convention that App2 will recognize as being "finished files, ready for processing"."


• Lock service, platform independent: http://www.devx.com/Java/Article/7870/1954. But requires all access via this service, so external FTP programs for example don't see the lock & the java program won't see a lock so read it.

Maven

• With Maven you can also have it put the sources + javadocs in the repository.
  Running 'mvn eclipse:eclipse' after that, and refresh the project in Eclipse, within Eclipse you can then see the javadocs and debug the sources.
  Just make sure you set <downloadSources> and <downloadJavadocs> to true.
  

Misc

• If you have an action that can't be made transactional (e.g a file move), do that as last thing in your steps. More precisely: start a (e.g database) transaction, move the file. If that move succeeds, update status that move was successful. If that move fails, rollback the transaction, and thus is the status of that file still in "to move".

Best of this Week Summary 15 March - 21 March 2010

• Twitter and Digg are moving from MySQL to Cassandra (a highly scalable second-generation distributed database, bringing together Dynamo's fully distributed design and Bigtable's ColumnFamily-based data model; a Facebook opensourced project). The reason for Digg for the move "is the increasing difficulty of building a high-performance, write-intensive application on a data set that is growing quickly, with no end in sight. This growth has forced them into horizontal and vertical partitioning strategies that have eliminated most of the value of a relational database, while still incurring all the overhead".
  Twitter has about the same reason: "No single points of failure", "Highly scalable writes (we have highly variable write traffic)", and "A healthy and productive open source community".
  Twitter tried HBase, Voldemort, MongoDB, MemcacheDB, Redis, Cassandra, and HyperTable amongst others before deciding to go with Cassandra. Interesting to read is how they slowly rollout Cassandra to limited sets of users.
  An introduction to Cassandra to get it up and running can be found here.
  
  


• A short post on how to implement Automatic testing Oracle Service Bus using Hudson, Maven and SoapUI.
  


• What to expect from HTML5 for webdevelopers.
  

Best of this Week Summary 24 March - 05 April 2009

• How can you make sure your site can handle peak-loads? This article lists the possibilities:
  
  
  
  • Over-provisioning (estimating what the peak will be).
    
  
  
  • Under-provisioning.
    
  
  
  • Right-sizing: estimate for a short period in time, then scale up or down: flexible scaling and auto-scaling.
    
  
  How this can be achieved? Add a middleware virtualisation layer that helps the application take advantage of these new dynamically added resources. The article also describes in detail how to add auto-scaling to your existing application, including a description how to try it out on GigaSpaces XAP which uses EC2.
  


• Quite amazing, Salesforce.com runs on only about 1000 servers (and that's mirrored, so only really about 500 servers). Salesforce has more than 55K enterprise customers, 1.5M individual subscribers, 30M lines of third-party code and hundreds of TBs of data.
  


• Here's a list of criteria when selecting a SOA testing tool.
  


• A nice introduction to Hibernate's second-level cache.
  


• Five tips for successfully deploying Maven. Including a bunch of pros and cons in the comments.
  


• On a keep-an-eye-on-this-innovation side note, Digg introduced a interesting (new?) way of a URL shortener like TinyURL, and at the same time attract traffic. Just prefix any URL with http://digg.com/, and voila, a shortened URL appears including a Digg toolbar. Below I entered http://digg.com/http://ttlnews.blogspot.com/ in the address bar:
  
  
  

Best of this Week Summary 29 October - 02 November 2008

• Lots of OpenID news this week: Microsoft Live ID will be an OpenID provider. It is still in a testing phase; you can already try it out. Google is also going to be an OpenID provider, including the use of OAuth. But that looks less promising when looking carefully: the implementation is not completely following the OpenID standards! See step 3 and 4 in the image below.
  
  A clarification on why Google has done this can be found here. Basically, two reasons:
  
  1. this way users can use their Gmail accounts instead of the normally required URLs. But a URL does exist in the form of 'https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id'.
     
  2. Google doesn't allow OpenID for users at sign-in, because its federated login would break many of their rich-client applications. Google is working on this one.


• Whitepaper on how the JTeam company has implemented Continous Integration. Their complete list of CI tools is described; handy when you're looking for inspiration.
  


• Things to think about when considering Maven as your build tool (different angle on the post :-)
  


• Interesting posts from the Google Chrome team on the decisions they made creating the browser.
  

Best of this Week Summary 28 April - 04 May 2008

• Nice overview on how Dutch social network Hyves (> 5M users) uses Gentoo.
  


• An explanation how to setup soapUI with Maven for automated SOAP testing.
  


• Interesting rumor is that Twitter might be moving away from using Ruby on Rails; it might move to PHP or Java. The potential reason for switching is most likely scalability. Their system has to support about 3 million messages a day and has over a million users (march 2008 numbers).
  


• Springsource (the guys from Spring) introduced their beta Application Platform (aka S2AP). Summarizing: "an application platform, built on OSGi, that can resolve Spring bean references by looking up services through OSGi - all of the capabilities OSGi provides, without the headache of deployment. And it would be able to deploy .WAR files through the use of a Tomcat (or servlet container) service."
  

Best of this Week Summary 31 March - 6 April 2008

• Good explanation on how to integrate Eclipse WTP with Maven2.
  


• Great article focused on SOA Testing model, methodology, types, tools etc, but also explains the terms clearly, including related terms like SOA Governance. Does not go into the details on *how* you exactly test all the mentioned types of tests.
  


• Interesting insight in the design of Audiogalaxy.com's high performance MySQL search engine. As an indication: "At peak times, the search engine needed to handle 1500-2000 searches every second against a MySQL database with about 200 million rows."
  


• Downloadable from IBM Alphaworks: a wiki for architectural decision knowledge.
  


• How to retag a version in Subversion. Basically you first have to delete the old tag.
  
  
  
• Google, Yahoo and MySpace recently formed the OpenSocial Foundation, thus even more forces behind Google's OpenSocial initiative.