AJAX has grown up! People starting to wonder what impact AJAX style applications have as compared to the older logic. Some impacts are obviously positive, some not so.
From the support point of view, AJAX style application may cause more hidden problems due to the granularity of the communications. Specifically, where a single user previously might have made one new server request every 30 seconds after initial load, with AJAX, the same user might be generating a new request every couple of seconds.
Another troubleshooter decided to speak of his experience. This time it is Michael Baum with an IT Troubleshooter blog over at Infoworld.
The amount of content there is still small, but the ideas sound good to me. If you like what I write, check his blog out as well.
BlogicBlogger Over and Out
cynicalman asks what the “problem solving skills” in a job description actually mean and then tries to discover and blog the answers.
I do not actually agree that his first discovered rule is actually “a skill” (I think it is more of a test procedure), but the question asked does require a thought.
I was frequently told that I have good problem solving skills. So, here is my quick take on what those skills are:
Vinny Carpenter reviews Weblogic 9. He mentions many features, but forgets what I think will be a very interesting supportability aspect: Diagnostic Service
Up to the 9.0 release, one of the big support headaches was that for many of the subsystems, the running state was not exportable for analysis; that a transaction running through the system would have different IDs in different subsystems with no way to associate them.
Basically, it was often impossible to tell what the system is actually doing without writing custom patches, which the customer may or may not be willing to install in the production system.
When I worked at BEA support, we troubleshooted a lot of issues using the thread dumps. There were a couple of problems with them:
On Solaris/Linux/HP-UP, the thread dumps had to be extracted from the stdout files, which in some cases did not exist (never redirected) and in others were not rotated on restart and therefore had several months of logs (GBs). Either way finding the thread dumps was difficult.