Cron Job to restart Jetty Server

If you have an Java hosting on a virtual server, you normally have limited resources for that. That means you only have a certain amount of RAM. This leads to memory problems when deploying large applications. Restart the server by hand is annoying. Fortunately there are cron jobs. A cron job is a task in Linux which is to be executed at specific times automatically. The simplest way to start a cron job in Linux is to place a shell script below one of the following folders:
/etc/cron.daily
/etc/cron.weekly
/etc/cron.monthly

I intend to show a shell script for Jetty 8 server which is installed in /opt/jetty-distribution-8.1.0.RC2/ (path on my virtual server). The script checks the process id of the running Jetty server, kills it if it was found and restarts the server with the command "nohup java -jar start.jar".

#! /bin/sh

jettyPid='pgrep -f "java -jar start.jar"'

if [ "$jettyPid" != "" ]
then
kill -9 $jettyPid
fi

jettyHome="/opt/jetty-distribution-8.1.0.RC2/"
cd $jettyHome
nohup java -jar start.jar

exit

Alternative shorter variant:

#! /bin/sh

pgrep -f "java -jar start.jar" | xargs -i kill {}

cd /opt/jetty-distribution-8.1.0.RC2/
nohup java -jar start.jar

exit

New release of web resource optimization plugin

I have released a new 0.3 version of the Maven plugin for web resource optimization. As I mentioned in the last posts this plugin was created as a part of the PrimeFaces Extensions project. It produces better compression results than YUI Compressor and has some nice features. The current release fixes only one issue. Release notes are here. The plugin is available in the Maven central repository.

If you have any questions regarding to the configuration, ask me please in the PrimeFaces Extensions forum. This forum is also a good place for all questions to the components and more. Unfortunately, but PrimeFaces lead doesn't like to see any discussions related to our extensions in the main PrimeFaces forum. He considers such topics as advertisement and locks / removes them. That hurts and is weird because if it would be an advertisement, it would be an advertisement for PrimeFaces. We have "PrimeFaces" in the name "PrimeFaces Extensions". The aim was never to do an advertisement or get money. This project is just for fun, everybody can participate in.

Currently we are working on the last use cases for our showcase and plan to do a release in the middle of January. Next releases will be published at frequent intervals and include less stuff - approximately 2-4 new components, client behaviors, converters or similar JSF 2 related artefacts. Some stuff is amazing, so stay tuned.

Best wishes for the New Year!