Dynamic loading in Golang? - java

I've got a common project and small projects which act such as connectors in the common project.
I want to create a common project such that when a new connector is developed I don’t have to modify code in the common project. Is it possible to dynamically load the structures in Go, only knowing the path (by putting this path in a file in common project and at runtime load that struct) of the struct and its folders?
connector1
connector1.go
/util
/domain
connectorN
connectorN.go
/domain
commonProject
main.go
config.ini
Structure config.ini
Conector
name = connector1
path = ..../connector1/connector1.go
Conector
name = connectorN
path = ..../connectorN/connectorN.go
I know that this is possible to do this in Java with code like this, but I am trying to do this in Go. Any ideas?
Class.forName(String)
or
ClassLoader.loadClass(String):

I can see two ways to achieve what you describe, but keep in mind, as #icza pointed out, that go produces static binaries, so you can't load external libraries dynamically.
You can, however:
use cgo to interface with C code, and load external libraries that
way.
use the net/rpc package to have several binaries communicate
with each other, and load those on demand.

In Java classes are loaded dynamically, on demand, when they are used/referred to.
Go produces statically linked native binaries without external dependencies, so you can't load new "types" or "functions" in a way you can do in Java with the Class.forName() (at least not code written in Go).

Related

Files with the .SCL.lombok extension

When the lombok jar file is opened in Intellij, all files other than the annotations end with .SCL.lombok (e.g. HandleAccessors.SCL.lombok). I was just wondering what the reason for this was and how it's handled.
The reason for it
Lombok has a public API - the stuff you're supposed to interact with. That'd be, for example, the #lombok.Getter annotation. Those are just class files in that jar, the aim is simply: add that jar to your classpath and your IDE autocomplete dialogs and the like will automatically start suggesting these, as per design.
But, lombok also has lots of classes that just 'make it tick', these aren't meant for public consumption. Things like lombok.eclipse.HandleGetter, which is the implementation for handling the #Getter annotation inside the eclipse agent. There is no point or purpose to referring to this class anywhere, in any project - it's an internal lombok thing. If we just stuck that jar file into the jar, and you typed Handle and hit your IDE's autocomplete shortcut key, you'd still get the suggestion.
Similarly, we ship a few dependencies straight into lombok.jar - it's a 'shaded jar' (a jar with all deps included), though we don't have many, keeping lombok.jar a nice small size. Still, ASM (a bytecode manipulation library) is in it, and that is fairly popular.
The standard shading solution offered by most shading tools is to prefix something to the name. ASM's org.objectweb.asm.AnnotationVisitor class would become org.projectlombok.shading.org.objectweb.asm.AnnotationVisitor. Point is, your IDE doesn't know that, and if you ALSO use asm in your project (where you also use lombok), and you want AnnotationVisitor thus you type AnnV and hit cmd+space or whatnot, your IDE suggests both. That's ugly and we'd like to avoid this.
Hence, we built our own shader, and it works by not having class files in the first place. This way, IDEs and any other automated tool doesn't even know either our ASM classes, or our implementation details, even exists. The only files that such tools (such as your IDE) sees are the types you're meant to see: lombok.Builder, lombok.extern.slf4j.Slf4j, lombok.experimental.UtilityClass, etcetera.
How does it work
Java's classloader architecture is abstracted: You can make your own. The primitives offered by a class loader is simply this: "Convert this byte array containing bytecode (i.e. the contents of a class file) into a Class<?> definition", and the primitives that you're supposed to implement when you write your own classloader is twofold:
Here is a resource key, such as "/com/foo/load.png". Please provide me an InputStream with this data.
Here is a fully qualified class name, such as "com.foo.MyApp". Please provide me with a Class<?> instance representing it.
Out of the box, java ships with a default classloader. This default classloader answers these questions by checking your CLASSPATH - which can be provided in various ways (via the jar manifest's Class-Path entry, or via the -cp argument to the JVM executable, or the CLASSPATH environment variable), and scanning each entry on the classpath for the resource requested, capable of reading the file system as well as opening jar files.
But that's just a classloader. One implementation of the general principle that's baked into java. You can write your own. You can write a classloader that generates resources on the fly, or that loads them from a network.
Or, as lombok does, that loads them by opening its own jar and looking for .SCL.lombok files.
Thus, lombok works like this: When you launch it, the 'entrypoint' (the class containing public static void main - or in lombok's case, for javac mode it's the annotation processor entrypoint and for eclipse it's agentmain), we 'hide' it from you using some fancy trickery: agentmain does not need to be in a public class (it can't be .SCL.lombok files - our classloader isn't available yet, we need to bootstrap that up first!). annotation processors do have to be in a public class, but, it's a public class inside a package private class, thus, just about every IDE knows it's 'invisible' and won't show it, but javac's annotation runner accepts it.
From there, we register a classloader that is capable of loading classes by way of reading in an .SCL.lombok file, and this lets us hide everything else we want to hide.
I want to develop lombok and this is getting in the way!
No need; just clone our repo, run ant eclipse or ant intellij, and off you go. There is no way to extend lombok without first forking it; we'd like lombok to be able to be extensible without it, but that would be far more complicated than simply not doing the .SCL.lombok thing. Eclipse runs on top of equinox, a runtime modularization system, and making that work properly requires all sorts of stuff that would make 'just toss some extra handlers on the classpath' not a feasible route to extending lombok in the first place.

Do I always have to type package name in Java?

Today I started learning Java.
I saw that package automatic gets included in .Java file.
I was wondering if it always need to be included?
Consider specify a common package for all the types within a same project.
In Java is common to start a project with a specific package setting. A package creates a namespace to disambiguate the types that it includes, to play nicelly with other projects that may or may not be in the same classpath. Normally, the package is bound to a URL of the project.
Think of Java packages like C++ namespaces.
A huge project/product written in Java can depend on lots and lots of projects, each described in a different package.
Organizations like Apache have lots of projects, organized under a common package pattern: org.apache.<<name_of_the_project>>.
Consider starting your project with a package named: com.user3552670; or something like your personal site, so persons that will consume your project can relate to the creator.
Yes and no.
It's used to specify the package of the class, read more here.
You could create a class without a package, but your code will look bad..
They exists to avoid conflicts, example between your code and default java package.
If packages doesn't exists, you can't create a class named ArrayList because already exists in Java.
Some IDEs force the fact that, if your .java file is in com/a/b/c folder his package should be com/a/b/c (If i don't remember wrong, IntellIJ IDEA do that)
Yes and no.
It must be there, but the IDE takes care of it (I don't use Netbeans, but I'd bet that it can do it, too). When moving files between packages, it has to be updated, but again, the IDE does it all.

Best way to override MATLAB's default static javaclasspath

MATLAB is configured to search its static java class path before searching the user-modifiable dynamic path. Unfortunately, the static path contains quite a number of very old public libraries, so if you are trying to use a new version you may end up loading the wrong implementation and get errors.
For instance, the static path contains an old copy of the google-collections.jar, which has long been supplanted by Google's guava library and which has some of the same class names (e.g. com.google.common.base.Objects). As a result, if you invoke a Guava method that uses a newer method of one of such a class, you will end up getting surprising NoSuchMethodErrors because the google-collections jar is found first.
As of R2012b, MATLAB lets you specify additional jars to add to the static path by putting a javaclasspath.txt file in your preferences folder, but that adds jars to the end of the path, and doesn't let you override jars that are built into MATLAB.
So what is the best way around this?
I got an official response from Mathworks:
As of MATLAB R2013a (also in R2012b), classes can be added to the front of the static Java class path by including the following line in javaclasspath.txt:
<before>
Any directory that is after this line in javaclasspath.txt will be added to the front of the static Java class path. This is an undocumented use of javaclasspath.txt as of R2013a.
But overall in MATLAB, the ability to add classes to the front of the static Java classpath is not available through javaclasspath.txt in MATLAB 8.0 (R2012b).
MATLAB searches for classpath.txt in the following order:
In the startup directory. As of MATLAB 8.0 (R2012b) a warning will be shown if the file is found there and it will be ignored.
In the first directory on the MATLABPATH environment variable. (This environment variable is used in the bin/matlab shell script on Linux and in general is not used by the end-user).
In the toolbox/local directory.
Although the MATLABPATH environment variable of point 2 is normally not used by end-users we can use it in a workaround to allow reading a custom classpath.txt outside of the toolbox/local directory.
On Windows:
You will need to create the MATLABPATH environment variable. The first directory on it should be your directory with the custom classpath.txt AND you will also need to add the toolbox\local directory as second option. So from a cmd prompt you could do:
set MATLABPATH=c:\Users\user\Documents\myMATLABClasspath;c:\Program Files\MATLAB\R2012b
\toolbox\local
matlab.exe
One hack that appears to work is to add the jar to the top of the classpath.txt file that can be found in your MATLAB installations toolbox/local folder. Unfortunately, this is automatically generated and may get rewritten at some unspecified time, such as when you install new toolboxes, so this approach would require you to have some way to notice when this happens and reapply the hack.
If you're distributing a jar that's intended to be used with matlab, it may be better to use proguard as described at http://code.google.com/p/guava-libraries/wiki/UsingProGuardWithGuava.
If you specify that all of your classes and their (public) fields and methods are to be preserved and include guava as a program jar (not a library), then it will rename all of guava's methods and update your compiled bytecode to reference the new names.
It seems a bit hackish, but depending on the audience, it may be significantly easier than teaching your users about static vs. dynamic classpath, and it won't break any matlab code that depends on the old behavior.
Instead of obfuscating the package as suggested by #user2443532, I have found it easier to "shade" the conflicting package instead of obfuscating it - unless you actually need obfuscation. One easy way to do this is to build your package using Maven and use the maven-shade-plugin. Internal calls are modified automatically, so you don't need to modify any of the Java code.
Direct calls from Matlab will need to be modified - for example, calls to com.opensource.Class become shaded.com.opensource.Class.
For more info on shading, see What is the maven-shade-plugin used for, and why would you want to relocate Java packages?

Minimizing jar dependency sizes

an application I have written uses several third party jars. Sometimes only a small portion of the entire 50kB to 1.7mB jar is used - one or two function calls or classes.
What is the best way to reduce the jar sizes. Should I download the sources and build a jar with just the classes I need? What existing tools can help automate this (ex I briefly looked at http://code.google.com/p/jarjar/)?
Thank you
Edit 1:
I would like to lower the size of my third party 'official' jars like swingx-1.6.jar (1.4 MB), set-3.6 (1.7 MB) glazedlists-1.8.jar (820kB) , etc. so that they only contain the bare minimum classes I need
Edit 2:
Minimizing a jar by hand or by using a program like proguard is further complicated if the library uses reflection.
Injection with google guice does not work anymore after obfuscation with proguard
The answer by cletus on another post is very good How to determine which classes are used by a Java program?
Proguard would be an option. It can eliminate unused classes and methods. You can also use it to obfuscate, which can further reduce the size of your final jar. Be aware that class loading by name is liable to break unless care is taken to keep the affected classes unobfuscated.
I've found Proguard quite effective - can be a bit cryptic to understand at the outset. But I don't have any experience with similar to offer a comparison.
First of all, if you use only one class from JAR file this does not mean that this class does not use other classed from that JAR.
The option for you, if you use open source JARs, is to get sources of that JAR, attach them to your project, remove unnecessary stuff and build the changes by yourself.
You could add GenJar as an Ant task and use it to build the JAR. As it says on the library's home page,
GenJar is a specialized Ant task that
builds jar files based on class
dependencies rather than simply the
contents of a directory.
You can find it on SourceForge.

java plugin specification via properties file

I have a project which I want to add plugins. I have all the interfaces/factories/etc. setup (my gateway interface is called ApplicationMonitorFactory), I just need to make a way to locate/activate the plugin. My configuration file is a java properties file.
I think what I need to do is:
find a good way to specify a set of one or more plugins
for each plugin, run it
1. find a good way to specify a set of one or more plugins
something like:
application.plugins=foo-monitor.jar,bar-monitor.jar
I think maybe it's just best to specify a list of jar files; for each jar file specified, the implication is that it contains one or more classes which implement ApplicationMonitorFactory, and these are the ones that will be instantiated. (I might also add an annotation #ApplicationMonitorPlugin so that a .jar file can have a test ApplicationMonitorFactory that does not get instantiated)
Does this sound reasonable?
2. for each plugin, run it
I did this once a while back, and if I remember right I think I need to use a custom classloader to add the appropriate .jar file to the classpath dynamically. Or is there an easier way?
Could I suggest using OSGI instead? If it's a serverside project, something like Apache Karaf gives you quite a lot out of the box in terms of plugin deployment and specification.
To answer the questions based on what you have at the moment:
1. find a good way to specify a set of one or more plugins
The properties file approach is fine. You may want to just be able to drop plugins into a folder that you monitor if you want hot deploy. Just having 1 jar file for a plugin does limit plugin developers to packaging all of their dependencies into a single jar file (maven shade plugin is useful for this). The annotation approach should work (the approach that Servlet 3.0 uses). Using OSGI, you'd have a manifest file with a Bundle-Activator property that would reference the plugin class that should be instantiated.
2. for each plugin, run it
Yes, you would need to fire up a class loader for the Jar files. This is where things get a bit hairier. It's easy enough to do but Class loading has all sorts of gotcha's. This is where OSGI would really help, even though it is a bit of an upfront cost.

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