Raspberry flavoured transactions

I got asked by a few different people lately about how to build Narayana on a Raspberry Pi. Well it's pretty easy and you don't even need one of the upgraded Model Bs with 512Meg of memory. Here are the steps you need to follow:

• I'm going to assume you know how to set up your Pi. I'm also going to assume that you're using the default pi account.
• You'll need to install OpenJDK (sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jre openjdk-6-jdk), maven and git (maven/git sudo apt-get install maven2 git). Other optionals include emacs (of course!) and your favourite databases, but we'll leave those for the curious.
• Then let's clone the source tree ... git clone https://github.com/jbosstm/narayana

• Then it's the usual steps to build, although due to some issues with idl on the Pi, we can't run JTS just yet using the ORB within the JDK, so let's go with the JTA implementation only ... ./build.sh clean install -P jta
• After that, sit back and wait ... for a long time, so be patient.

• It should take about 2 hours to complete, which is significantly slower than the 30 minutes or so that it can take on your laptop to build everything. (If you try to build everything, then it'll be closer to 5 hours!) But hey, the Pi is underpowered compared to that hardware and if you're looking to use a Pi then hopefully you've already taken that into consideration! And yes, you will see some warnings and maybe a timing error or two during the build execution of some tests, but nothing to be concerned about. We'll look into these and see if there's anything we can do to tidy-up the build in the future.

And that's it! Congratulations, you've just built and tested Narayana on your Raspberry Pi. And apart from the time it takes to build, there really wasn't much to it, now was there?

Note, if you want to build the JTS then you do have the option to use JacORB. However, at the moment this requires you to edit a number of the pom.xml files to remove the dependency on idlj.

Transactional android applications

OK, so it's taken me longer than I expected, but I finally found some time to commit the transactional Android code that I mentioned back in January. Thanks to my JBossWorld keynote preparation, a lot of EAP 6 work and too many meetings to count, I still haven't had enough time to actually commit these changes to the trunk of JBossTS (Narayana). However, rather than continue to delay things, I've decided to check in my edited source to the JBossTS svn repository along with a quick example.

I'll post another article soon to walkthrough the example and its configuration, but if you're interested in checking out the JBossTS source then it's available via svn at https://svn.jboss.org/repos/labs/labs/jbosstm/workspace/mlittle/android and the example at https://svn.jboss.org/repos/labs/labs/jbosstm/workspace/mlittle/TxAndroid. Of course you can build the JBossTS source if you want, but for the sakes of convenience I've included the necessary jars in the example directory.