Nicolas Fränkel

Nicolas Fränkel

Nicolas Fränkel is a technologist focusing on cloud-native technologies, DevOps, CI/CD pipelines, and system observability. His focus revolves around creating technical content, delivering talks, and engaging with developer communities to promote the adoption of modern software practices. With a strong background in software, he has worked extensively with the JVM, applying his expertise across various industries. In addition to his technical work, he is the author of several books and regularly shares insights through his blog and open-source contributions.

771 posts •
session terracotta web

Managing web sessions

In the previous article, I set up a cluster of 2 Tomcat instances in order to achieve load-balacing. It also offered failover capability. However, when using this feature, the user session was lost when changing node. In this article, I will show you how this side-effect can be avoided. Reminder: the HTTP protocol is inherently disconnected (as opposed to FTP which is connected). In HTTP, the client sends a request to a server, it gets its response and that’s the end. The server cannot na
hibernate persistence spring

Spring Persistence with Hibernate

This review is about Spring Persistence with Hibernate by Ahmad Reza Seddighi from Packt Publishing. Facts 15 chapters, 441 pages, 38€99This book is intended for beginners but more experienced developers can learn a thing or twoThis book covers Hibernate and Spring in relation to persistence Pros The scope of this book is what makes it very interesting. Many books talk about Hibernate and many talk about Spring. Yet, I do not know of many which talk about the use of both in relation to per
cluster tomcat

Clustering Tomcat

In this article, I will show you how to use Apache/Tomcat in order to set up a load balancer. I know this has been done a zillion time before, but I will use this setup in my next article (teaser, teaser) so at least I will have it documented somewhere. Apache Tomcat is the reference JSP/container since its inception. Despite a lack of full JEE support, it certainly has its appeal. The reasons behind using a full-featured commercial JEE application server are not always technical ones. With lig
configuration convention installation

Seamless installation: convention over configuration

Today, I will not take the role of the architect that knows how to deliver applications but instead I will play the end-user part. In a previous post, I was tasked to put a whole development infrastructure in place. A continuous integration server was indeed in order. I took a look at some, but I was really dumbfounded when I tried Hudson. Features are not what stroke me at that time (although Hudson’s features did serve me well) but only the ease of installation. Let’s look at a

middleware security

Securing middleware products

My work is IT architecture, meaning I focus on the early steps of a project. Once the application is in production, I usually leave it to systems and production engineers. For example, for JVM fine tuning, most of the clients I worked for have people that have the right skills to do that. Nevertheless, I need sometimes to sully my nails. This happens in two cases: when the client is too small to have such dedicated teams or when its production team are not experienced enough to handle the probl
book maven

Maven The complete reference

This review is about Sonatype’s Maven: The complete reference by Tim O’Brien, John Casey, Brian Fox, Jason Van Zyl, Eric Redmond and Larry Shatzer. Disclaimer: I learned Maven from Sonatype’s site 3 years ago. I found it was a great tool to learn Maven. Now that I have a little more experience in the tool, I tried to write this review in an objective manner. Facts 13 chapters, 267 pages, free (see below)This book is intended for both readers who wants to learn Maven from scratch