NetBeans or Glassfish problem?

When your working environment is NetBeans and it is set up to automatically deploy to an instance of Glassfish it is sometimes difficult to sort out if a problem you encounter is a problem with NetBeans or a problem with Glassfish.

I had been hard at work enhancing/updating portlets that I had written several months ago when one afternoon my progress suddenly hit a major bump in the road. Every time I made a change to the NetBeans project and then selected either "Run" or "Debug" I found myself staring for an average of 7 minutes at the NetBeans output window that showed the progress of the build and deployment.

I narrowed it down to the step where the printed output is "Deployment Started". A lot of progress information related to the build would scroll by quickly prior to that statement. But then 7 minutes would pass before the "Deployed Successfully" statement appeared, followed quickly again by the remainder of the printed output, culminating in the statement that showed "BUILD SUCCESSFUL" and the total amount of elapsed time. I couldn't imagine what was causing the hang-up between the start and completion of the deployment process.

A couple of days went by as I began to collect more data, look in logs, reboot processes and the workstation, try building with different projects, etc. I could come up with nothing. Every project I tried to run or deploy would require 7 minutes to do the deployment. I began to plan my code changes carefully to not have to recompile any more than necessary. And I also made a point of leaving myself other tasks like reading email that I could look at while the deployment was grinding along.

Since the slowdown was occurring during the deployment process did that mean the problem was with NetBeans or with Glassfish? Would I need to reinstall one or the other or both? I sure hoped that it wouldn't come to that because I'd have to do some digging to find the notes I accumulated from the many installs of multiple versions of those 2 applications.

One troubleshooting tip that's commonly given whenever the problem is related to a Windows workstation suddenly acting up is to trace back through anything that you might have installed immediately before the problem started to occur. I vaguely remembered that the day I started to notice the problem was also the day I was asked to set up my workstation with a Virtual Private Network (VPN) client that would allow me to access a CM tool my team members were going to start using that was located on a remote network.

The executable I was asked to install was the Contivity VPN client and no one had yet used it on the type of laptop I have. There were warnings about the version not being up-to-date and, sure enough, when I started to install it there were a number of warnings and failure messages that appeared. One warning said that by continuing the installation there was a possibility of my system becoming unstable. At that point I decided to cancel the installation. It took a couple of tries and more error messages to finally get the installation stopped. I sent the text of the error messages to the person who had provided the installation instructions and went back to portlet development.

After exhausting all the other troubleshooting tips I could think of and hearing of someone who successfully installed the VPN client on a laptop like mine I decided I would try again to install the application. Who knows what it might have left behind when I cancelled out of the installation?

By ignoring a couple of warnings that did appear, this time I managed to successfully install the VPN Client. And, lo and behold, after going back to NetBeans and doing a "Run" of the project the results were almost instantaneous. The problem with the 7 minute delay had vanished. I have no idea how the 2 things were related, but I'm just thankful that I can now once again make better progress with the deployments working as they should.