I’ve been resuscitating a personal Amateur Radio related project from a few years back that I previously had hosted on RedHat’s OpenShift. It was previously deployed on WildFly 8, so before I start making changes I want to get it deployed again locally on WildFly 8.
First up I got this error:
org.jboss.weld.exceptions.DeploymentException: WELD-001408: Unsatisfied dependencies for type ServiceLocator with qualifiers @Default at injection point [BackedAnnotatedField] @Inject private org.glassfish.jersey.internal.inject.ContextInjectionResolver.serviceLocator
This error appears to be pretty common. From the suggestions posted in reply to a similar post to WildFly forum here, the suggestion was to include Glassfish dependencies. I never had these included before, so not sure why I need these now, but these did the job:
<!-- kh added for error: WELD-001408: Unsatisfied dependencies for type Set<Service> with qualifiers @Default --> <dependency> <groupId>com.google.guava</groupId> <artifactId>guava</artifactId> <version>17.0</version> </dependency>
The odd thing is if I deploy to WildFly 8.2 I don’t get this error or need these additional dependencies. Anyway, all set for now. I just tested deploying to 17.0.1 with no additional changes needed either.
A few years back I built an AngularJS webapp for visualizing JT65/JT9 spots over a period of time, logged as you run the WSJT-X app to decode FT8 signals you receive at your station. At the time I had it deployed on RedHat’s OpenShift, running in a couple of ‘gears’: one for JBoss hosting a REST API backend, a queue and MDB for processing uploaded spots, and one for a MongoDB database to store the collected spot info. Unfortunately the ‘bronze’ basic plan which was an incredible good deal for hosting apps at the time (at around $1 a month if I remember right) was discontinued, and the replacement plans were multiple times the cost, so I discontinued the app and didn’t redeploy it again after that.
At some point thought I was planning on taking another look at deploying it elsewhere, and if I’m going to pick it up again, I might as well take a look at refreshing the architecture. Here’s what the original v1 deployment looked like:
For personal projects I typically build them using some api or technology I want to get more familiar with. I remember at the time I had a need to refresh myself on JAX-WS SOAP based webservices, so the client that is monitoring the WSJT-X log file and uploading to the serverside for processing is a generated JAX-WS client to a webservice deployed in front of a queue; it receives the messages sent from the client and adds them to the queue for processing. If I had to refresh this part there’s no real need for this to be as heavy as JAX-WS and could be simpler with a simple REST api, so that’s probably how I’ll update that part.
I’m interested in something like Apache Kafka can be used to process high volumes of incoming data, so this might be a good refresh for the serverside queue and MDB.
I remember putting a lot of time into building my animated map display of received spots in the AngularJS app. This was back in 2015 I think, so this could probably do with a refresh to at least the latest/current Angular version, which would be a considerable rewrite I think. I’ll take a look.
Anyway, I haven’t run any part of this even locally in development for years, so that will be my first steps, get it up and running, and then start incrementally updating some of the parts.
This project is related to my recent experiments with getting WSJT-X and a SDRPlay RSP2 running on a Raspberry Pi, as a low cost FT8 monitoring station, so now that part is up and running, time to work on the software side again.
A while back an xkcd comic on Voting Software attracted a lot of attention on Twitter for it’s alarmist comparison of the attitudes of the software development industry to other engineering disciplines and in particular, this statement:
“our entire field is bad at what we do, and if you rely on us, everyone will die”
From: https://www.xkcd.com/2030/
From: https://www.xkcd.com/2030/
This was widely shared and quoted on Twitter, and even shared by industry leaders such as Grady Booch:
“I fear that perpetual adolscence is our curse and our gift – (we’re) always chasing the next shiny thing”
Joerg Muller-Kindt
This thought that as an industry we’re stuck in “perpetual adolescence” caught my attention. As an industry we struggle to advance. What’s unusual when you think back over the past 20 years and even further back looking at the history of our industry, there are developments and ‘movements’ where groups of individuals come together to champion an idea that at first seems to make a positive improvement to our industry as a whole, and then over a few more years the ideas fade away and seem to be forgotten. Some are even occasionally rediscovered again by another group of like-minded individuals years later.
The ‘perpetual adolescence’ of our industry as I see it is not that we’re stuck at a particular point in our industry’s growth and unable to progress, we do progress and advance. This growth however, appears to be in short cycles where we move forward, but then we go back to what we were doing before, and we’re stuck in a cycle of discovery and rediscovery. It’s not as bad as one step forward, two steps back, but it does appear to be something like one step forward, one step back. We’re never continually advancing, occasionally we move forward but we end up going backwards again. The progress of our industry never seems to be continually moving forward. Maybe this is typical of any industry in its infancy.
The cycle of centralized vs decentralized (distributed) systems
The hype of Functional languages
Strongly typed vs dynamic languages
Platform independence vs platform dependence (of languages and technologies)
Software development as an engineering discipline or an art, and everything in between
Serverless, as the solution to all problems
There’s plenty of other ideas and concepts that could be part of this list, and I’m not highlighting anything in my list to say these ideas good or bad, but when you look back it’s interesting how ideas come and go over time. People come and go too, some noticeably bringing new ideas and passion with them, sometimes rediscovering ideas again from the past. Sometimes as champions leave the industry their ideas no longer have a voice and their ideas disappear with them too.
If our industry is still in its infancy, is this cyclical, repetitive behavior just the industry trying out new ideas to see what sticks? Or is it that the people actively involved in championing ideas come and go too, bringing ideas in and sometimes taking ideas with them when they move on? Does this mean that as an industry as experienced developers leave the industry and new generations of developers come in, are we doomed to continually repeat our mistakes of the past?
