Introduction I made security a top priority for my consumer application from the very beginning. My application is a Mobile App with a Server component currently made up of Tomcat7 and MySql. Given the recent frequency of cyber attacks, both DDoS and those for stealing proprietary data and credentials, its quite clear that security is… Read more: Configuring IP BlockLists for your Tomcat7 Web Applications

NOTE This post builds upon my previous post HTTPS Communication between an Android App and Tomcat7 using Self-Signed Certificates. Please see that post for the fundamentals of HTTPS communication and how Android Apps can authenticate the server. Configuring Tomcat7 to do Client Certificate Authentication Create the Client App’s Private Key in PEM format Create the… Read more: Client Certificate Authentication between an Android App and Tomcat7

Introduction This post describes how I setup central logging for the distributed cloud application that I am developing, and why I did so. It details the software that I used and how I configured it, and it explains why I did, what I did, where I did it. I wanted to add central logging to… Read more: Setting up Central Logging with syslog-ng OSE and simplifying Application and System Maintenance

Typically when you install Tomcat, you also install the Tomcat-Admin Web Applications – manager and host-manager. These Admin Web Applications enable you to manage your own Web Applications that you are hosting on the Tomcat. In most cases your own Web Application will allow only one of either HTTP, or HTTPS (SSL / TLS) access.… Read more: Setup the default Admin “manager” and “host-manager” Web Applications to always use HTTPS when Tomcat allows both HTTP and HTTPS connections

Note The steps below were tested on Tomcat7 running on an Ubuntu Linux 14.04 LTS instance in AWS EC2. However, these steps should work on Tomcat7 running on any OS (after adjusting for the particular installation directories). Steps Enable the HTTPS Connector in the file server.xml in /etc/tomcat7/ or /var/lib/tomcat7/conf/ Next, enable the HTTP Connector… Read more: Configure HTTP Access for some URLs and HTTPS Access for other URLs on Tomcat7

Technology Overview HTTPS and TLS (SSL) HTTPS (HTTP Secure) uses TLS (previously SSL) to provide authenticated and encrypted communication between a client and a server. Typically the authenticity of the server is verified by the client but occasionally you may also want the server to verify the authenticity of the client. This post describes the… Read more: HTTPS Communication between an Android App and Tomcat7 using Self-Signed Certificates

This post covers the setttings required to send emails through Amazon Web Sevice’s Simple Email Service SMTP endpoint using Apache Commons Email. Apache Commons Email provides an API for sending email. It is built on top of, and simplifies, the Java Mail API. More information on Apache Commons Email is available here: http://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-email/ AWS SES… Read more: Sending emails through AWS SES using Apache Commons Email

The Issue Products need to be tested thoroughly before release. The more problems that your own QA and Product engineers find, means that your customers will have that much more of a smoother experience with your product. At the same time you also need to shrink your product release cycle times so as to more… Read more: Having Developers and QA Engineers working together in the same Organizational Structure

Note This article was written using Cassandra 1.1.4 on CentOS 6.3 with a remote Java Client on Windows 7 Ultimate Setting up Cassandra Download the Cassandra release from http://cassandra.apache.org/download/ I downloaded release 1.1.4 Create the directory /usr/local/cassandra and expand the TAR in it You now have /usr/local/cassandra/apache-cassandra-1.1.4 as the Cassandra home directory Create the default… Read more: Installing, Configuring, and Testing Apache Cassandra

This article covers the following: Using your own instance of log4j instead of the one included with JBoss Using your own log4j.properties file Placing your logs in the JBoss AS logs directory Introduction While developing my web application, I needed to use my own instance of log4j on my JBoss Application Server 7.1.1 Final. I… Read more: Using your own instance of log4j, in your WAR, on JBoss AS 7.x