Unhappily Ever After: Support, Maintenance, and Troubleshooting of Java Technology-Based Applications in Production Environments
TS-1669

There is abundant information available on developing Java technology-based applications. By contrast, almost nobody talks about tasks involved in supporting and troubleshooting those applications once they are released. Issues such as troubleshooting the applications deployed in production environments, maintaining multiple versions of large code bases, and working with autogenerated code are insufficiently covered in public discussions and documents.

This lack of information might have been acceptable in the past, when the (non-Java technology) code was compiled into opaque stripped binaries; when most of a program's activity was CPU-bound; and when operating systems did not expose internal operations, for reasons of speed. These days, Java class format is well documented, applications are increasingly componentized and distributed over the network, and operating systems hurry head-over-heels to provide developers with hooks and customizations for any purpose imaginable. Combined, such advances allow previously impossible tasks to become merely difficult and many difficult tasks to become plain easy.

Formulating effective and transferable methods of troubleshooting requires a fusion of skill sets from the development and technical support worlds. Most of the developers rarely troubleshoot outside of their preferred environment, and a majority of their techniques are based on code recompilation and stable base setup - options rarely acceptable in a production environment. Technical support engineers do have to work with unknown environments and multiple versions of code but often lack deep knowledge of the Java platform and development methodologies. Neither set of techniques is sufficient in itself.

The presenter combines his prior work as senior BEA technical support engineer and more than seven years of Java technology-based development experience and delivers an organized overview of tools and techniques that help with resolving problems that arise in real production environments. The presentation places emphasis on free and open source tools available for multiple platforms and capable of being useful out of the box, without extensive configuration. Common problems are discussed, along with methods of rapid analysis and root cause determination.

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