Dynamic class loading in OSGi - java

I have a whole bunch of framework modules that work fine on OSGi, all the services and components are finding one another and running just fine.
There is however one framework that does some dynamic stuff regarding classes. Basically at some point you give it a class name and it performs Class.forName() and then reflection magic happens.
This works great when running in a standard jvm and using SPI to wire together the frameworks but it fails in OSGi because of course that random class "test.MyTest" that you are trying to approach via the framework is not visible to said framework.
It will throw a "java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: test.MyTest not found by framework"
So my question: how can I solve this lack of visibility for the framework that needs to see all? Import-Package: *?
UPDATE
Assuming OSGi hasn't changed much since 2010 on this front, the article http://njbartlett.name/2010/08/30/osgi-readiness-loading-classes.html is very interesting. I have currently added support for both actively registering classes and a domain factory to be injected via OSGi.
Apart from that the default resolving uses context classloader anyway so if all else fails that will be used to try and load the class.
UPDATE
I have added support for the suggested DynamicImport-Package as well which is easier for small projects.

You can use DynamicImport-Package:*. This will allow the bundle to see all classes. The problem is that you have no real control over what exactly is exposed. So this is normally a last resort and not the recommended way.
You should first try to use Thread.currentThread().setContextClassLoader() and set it to the classloader of the class you provide to the framework. Sometimes the frameworks also consult this classloader.
The even better way is to find a method in the framework that allows to provide the user classloader.
If you have control over the code then avoid Class.forName(). Instead let the user either give you a class object instead of a class name or let the user give you the combination of a class name and the classloader to use. Both ways work perfectly in and outside OSGi.

Related

CDI - Injecting Classes at runtime

I'm working on a project, where it is needed to load some classes at runtime. The classes to load are parts of CDI-Containers and have to be able to inject some stuff. The "loading class" itself is a part of a CDI-Container as well.
Now comes my problem. It is possible to load and instantiate any class via reflection, but in this case it would not be possible for the classes to be loaded to get anything injected. So it is needed to get an instance of these classes as it would be internally done by the server like when we would use the annotation #javax.inject.Inject.
Is there any way to load the classes of another CDI-container in a way that they can still work with Injections (otherwise it would not make any sense^^)? Maybe there is any kind of Class which is responsible for for handling all of these classes so that I can simply tell it the name of the class to load (as I would do it with reflections)... ?
Thanks
You can use the BeanManager API to query and laod contextual references based on bean types.
Review your design carefully, as it sounds like you're entering into "procedural style" programming rather than OO. This is likely the first of many problems with your design you're likely to encounter.
I have an idea that might work though; can you make these classes implement a certain interface? If they do, you can use normal #Inject annotations in your code with the interface, then stuff the class implementation into a /lib directory on a server. This, combined with CDI alternatives may be able to get you what you want.
A better approach may be to use reflection and some kind of factory...

Java ServiceLoader with multiple Classloaders

What are the best practices for using ServiceLoader in an Environment with multiple ClassLoaders? The documentation recommends to create and save a single service instance at initialization:
private static ServiceLoader<CodecSet> codecSetLoader = ServiceLoader.load(CodecSet.class);
This would initialize the ServiceLoader using the current context classloader. Now suppose this snippet is contained in a class loaded using a shared classloader in a web container and multiple web applications want to define their own service implementations. These would not get picked up in the above code, it might even be possible that the loader gets initialized using the first webapps context classloader and provide the wrong implementation to other users.
Always creating a new ServiceLoader seems wasteful performance wise since it has to enumerate and parse service files each time. Edit: This can even be a big performance problem as shown in this answer regarding java's XPath implementation.
How do other libraries handle this? Do they cache the implementations per classloader, do they reparse their configuration everytime or do they simply ignore this problem and only work for one classloader?
I personally do not like the ServiceLoader under any circumstances. It's slow and needlessly wasteful and there is little you can do to optimize it.
I also find it a bit limited -- you really have to go out of your way if you want to do more than search by type alone.
xbean-finder's ResourceFinder
ResourceFinder is a self-contained java file capable of replacing ServiceLoader usage. Copy/paste reuse is no problem. It's one java file and is ASL 2.0 licensed and available from Apache.
Before our attention spans get too short, here's how it can replace a ServiceLoader
ResourceFinder finder = new ResourceFinder("META-INF/services/");
List<Class<? extends Plugin>> impls = finder.findAllImplementations(Plugin.class);
This will find all of the META-INF/services/org.acme.Plugin implementations in your classpath.
Note it does not actually instantiate all the instances. Pick the one(s) you want and you're one newInstance() call away from having an instance.
Why is this nice?
How hard is it to call newInstance() with proper exception handling? Not hard.
Having the freedom to instantiate only the ones you want is nice.
Now you can support constructor args!
Narrowing search scope
If you want to just check specific URLs you can do so easily:
URL url = new File("some.jar").toURI().toURL();
ResourceFinder finder = new ResourceFinder("META-INF/services/", url);
Here, only the 'some.jar' will be searched on any usage of this ResourceFinder instance.
There's also a convenience class called UrlSet which can make selecting URLs from the classpath very easy.
ClassLoader webAppClassLoader = Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader();
UrlSet urlSet = new UrlSet(webAppClassLoader);
urlSet = urlSet.exclude(webAppClassLoader.getParent());
urlSet = urlSet.matching(".*acme-.*.jar");
List<URL> urls = urlSet.getUrls();
Alternate "service" styles
Say you wanted to apply the ServiceLoader type concept to redesign URL handling and find/load the java.net.URLStreamHandler for a specific protocol.
Here's how you might layout the services in your classpath:
META-INF/java.net.URLStreamHandler/foo
META-INF/java.net.URLStreamHandler/bar
META-INF/java.net.URLStreamHandler/baz
Where foo is a plain text file that contains the name of the service implementation just as before. Now say someone creates a foo://... URL. We can find the implementation for that quickly, via:
ResourceFinder finder = new ResourceFinder("META-INF/");
Map<String, Class<? extends URLStreamHandler>> handlers = finder.mapAllImplementations(URLStreamHandler.class);
Class<? extends URLStreamHandler> fooHandler = handlers.get("foo");
Alternate "service" styles 2
Say you wanted to put some configuration information in your service file, so it contains more than just a classname. Here's an alternate style that resolves services to properties files. By convention one key would be the class names and the other keys would be injectable properties.
So here red is a properties file
META-INF/org.acme.Plugin/red
META-INF/org.acme.Plugin/blue
META-INF/org.acme.Plugin/green
You can look things up similarly as before.
ResourceFinder finder = new ResourceFinder("META-INF/");
Map<String,Properties> plugins = finder.mapAllProperties(Plugin.class.getName());
Properties redDefinition = plugins.get("red");
Here's how you could use those properties with xbean-reflect, another little library that can give you framework-free IoC. You just give it the class name and some name value pairs and it will construct and inject.
ObjectRecipe recipe = new ObjectRecipe(redDefinition.remove("className").toString());
recipe.setAllProperties(redDefinition);
Plugin red = (Plugin) recipe.create();
red.start();
Here's how that might look "spelled" out in long form:
ObjectRecipe recipe = new ObjectRecipe("com.example.plugins.RedPlugin");
recipe.setProperty("myDateField","2011-08-29");
recipe.setProperty("myIntField","100");
recipe.setProperty("myBooleanField","true");
recipe.setProperty("myUrlField","http://www.stackoverflow.com");
Plugin red = (Plugin) recipe.create();
red.start();
The xbean-reflect library is a step beyond the built-in JavaBeans API, but a bit better without requiring you to go all the way to a full-on IoC framework like Guice or Spring. It supports factory methods and constructor args and setter/field injection.
Why is the ServiceLoader so limited?
Deprecated code in the JVM damages the Java language itself. Many things are trimmed to the bone before being added to the JVM, because you cannot trim them after. The ServiceLoader is a prime example of that. The API is limited and OpenJDK implementation is somewhere around 500 lines including javadoc.
There's nothing fancy there and replacing it is easy. If it doesn't work for you, don't use it.
Classpath scope
APIs aside, in pure practicality narrowing the scope of the URLs searched is the true solution to this problem. App Servers have quite a lot of URLs all by themselves, not including the jars in your application. Tomcat 7 on OSX for example has about 40~ URLs in the StandardClassLoader alone (this is the parent to all webapp classloaders).
The bigger your app server the longer even a simple search will take.
Caching doesn't help if you intend to search for more than one entry. As well, it can add some bad leaks. Can be a real lose-lose scenario.
Narrow the URLs down to the 5 or 12 that you really care about and you can do all sorts of service loading and never notice the hit.
Have you tried using the two argument version so that you can specify which classloader to use? Ie, java.util.ServiceLoader.load(Class, ClassLoader)
Mu.
In a 1x WebContainer <-> Nx WebApplication system, the ServiceLoader instantiated in the WebContainer will not pick up any classes defined in WebApplications, just those in the container. A ServiceLoader instantiated in a WebApplication will detect classes defined in the application in addition to those defined in the container.
Keep in mind WebApplications will need to be kept separate, are designed that way, things will break if you try and circumvent that, and they are not the method and system available to extend the container - if your library is a simple Jar, just drop it into the appropriate extension folder of the container.
I really like Neil's answer in the link I added in my comment. Due to I have same experences in my recent project.
"Another thing to bear in mind with ServiceLoader is to try to abstract the lookup mechanism. The publish mechanism is quite nice and clean and declarative. But the lookup (via java.util.ServiceLoader) is as ugly as hell, implemented as a classpath scanner that breaks horribly if you put the code into any environment (such as OSGi or Java EE) that does not have global visibility. If your code gets tangled up with that then you'll have a hard time running it on OSGi later. Better to write an abstraction that you can replace when the time comes."
I actually met this problem in OSGi environment actually it's just eclipse in our project. But I luckily fixed it in a timely fashion. My workaround is using one class from the plugin I want to load ,and get classLoader from it. That will be a valid fix. I didn't use the standard ServiceLoader, But my process is quite similiar, use a properties to define the plugin classes I need to load. And I know there is another way to know each plugin's classloader. But at least I don't need to use that.
Honest, I don't like the generics used in ServiceLoader. Because it limited that one ServiceLoader can only handle classes for one interface. Well is it really useful? In my implementation, it don't force you by this limitation. I just use one implementation of loader to load all the plugin classes. I don't see the reason to use two or more. Due to the consumer can know from the config files about the relationships between interfaces and implementation.
This question seem to be more complicated than I first anticipated. As I see
it, there are 3 possible strategies for dealing with ServiceLoaders.
Use a static ServiceLoader instance and only support loading classes from
the same classloader as the one holding the ServiceLoader reference. This
would work when
The service configuration and implementation are in a shared classloader
and all child classloaders are using the same implementation. The example
in the documentation is geared towards theis use case.
Or
Configuration and implementation are put into each child classloader and
deployed along each webapp in WEB-INF/lib.
In this scenario it is not possible to deploy the service in a shared classloader
and let each webapp choose its own service implementation.
Initialize the ServiceLoader on each access passing the context classloader of
the current thread as the second parameter. This approach is taken be the JAXP
and JAXB apis, although they are using their own FactoryFinder implementation
instead of ServiceLoader. So it is possible to bundle a xml parser with a webapp
and have it automatically get picked up for example by DocumentBuilderFactory#newInstance.
This lookup has a performance impact, but in the case of xml parsing
the time to look up the implementation is small compared to the time needed to
actually parse a xml document. In the library I'm envisioning the factory
itself is pretty simple so the lookup time would dominate the performance.
Somehow cache the implementation class with the context classloader as the key.
I'm not entirely sure if this is possible in all the above cases without
causing any memory leaks.
In conclusion, I will probably be ignoring this problem and require that the library
gets deployed inside each webapp, i.e. option 1b above.

How to modularize a JSF/Facelets/Spring application with OSGi?

I'm working with very large JSF/Facelets applications which use Spring for DI/bean management.
My applications have modular structure and I'm currently looking for approaches to standardize the modularization.
My goal is to compose a web application from a number of modules (possibly depending on each other). Each module may contain the following:
Classes;
Static resources (images, CSS, scripts);
Facelet templates;
Managed beans - Spring application contexts, with request, session and application-scoped beans (alternative is JSF managed beans);
Servlet API stuff - servlets, filters, listeners (this is optional).
What I'd like to avoid (almost at all costs) is the need to copy or extract module resources (like Facelets templates) to the WAR or to extend the web.xml for module's servlets, filters, etc. It must be enough to add the module (JAR, bundle, artifact, ...) to the web application (WEB-INF/lib, bundles, plugins, ...) to extend the web application with this module.
Currently I solve this task with a custom modularization solution which is heavily based on using classpath resources:
Special resources servlet serves static resources from classpath resources (JARs).
Special Facelets resource resolver allows loading Facelet templates from classpath resources.
Spring loads application contexts via the pattern classpath*:com/acme/foo/module/applicationContext.xml - this loads application contexts defined in module JARs.
Finally, a pair of delegating servlets and filters delegate request processing to the servlets and filters configured in Spring application contexts from modules.
Last days I read a lot about OSGi and I was considering, how (and if) I could use OSGi as a standardized modularization approach. I was thinking about how individual tasks could be solved with OSGi:
Static resources - OSGi bundles which want to export static resources register a ResourceLoader instances with the bundle context. A central ResourceServlet uses these resource loaders to load resources from bundles.
Facelet templates - similar to above, a central ResourceResolver uses services registered by bundles.
Managed beans - I have no idea how to use an expression like #{myBean.property} if myBean is defined in one of the bundles.
Servlet API stuff - use something like WebExtender/Pax Web to register servlets, filters and so on.
My questions are:
Am I inventing a bicycle here? Are there standard solutions for that? I've found a mentioning of Spring Slices but could not find much documentation about it.
Do you think OSGi is the right technology for the described task?
Is my sketch of OSGI application more or less correct?
How should managed beans (especially request/session scope) be handled?
I'd be generally grateful for your comments.
What you're aiming to do sounds doable, with a few caveats:
The View Layer: First, your view layer sounds a little overstuffed. There are other ways to modularize JSF components by using custom components that will avoid the headaches involved with trying to create something as dramatic as late-binding managed beans.
The Modules Themselves: Second, your modules don't seem particularly modular. Your first bullet-list makes it sound as if you're trying to create interoperable web apps, rather than modules per se. My idea of a module is that each component has a well-defined, and more or less discrete, purpose. Like how ex underlies vi. If you're going down the OSGi route, then we should define modular like this: Modular, for the sake of this discussion, means that components are hot-swappable -- that is, they can be added and removed without breaking the app.
Dependencies: I'm a little concerned by your description of the modules as "possibly depending on each other." You probably (I hope) already know this, but your dependencies ought to form a directed acyclic graph. Once you introduce a circular dependency, you're asking for a world of hurt in terms of the app's eventual maintainability. One of the biggest weaknesses of OSGi is that it doesn't prevent circular dependencies, so it's up to you to enforce this. Otherwise your dependencies will grow like kudzu and gradually choke the rest of your system's ecosystem.
Servlets: Fuhgeddaboudit. You can't late-bind servlets into a web app, not until the Servlet 3.0 spec is in production (as Pascal pointed out). To launch a separate utility servlet, you'll need to put it into its own app.
OK, so much for the caveats. Let's think about how this might work:
You've defined your own JSF module to do... what, exactly? Let's give it a defined, fairly trivial purpose: a login screen. So you create your login screen, late-bind it using OSGi into your app and... then what? How does the app know the login functionality is there, if you haven't defined it in your .jspx page? How does the app know to navigate to something it can't know is there?
There are ways to get around this using conditional includes and the like (e.g., <c:if #{loginBean.notEmpty}>), but, like you said, things get a little hairy when your managed loginBean exists in another module that may not have even been introduced to the app yet. In fact, you'll get a servlet exception unless that loginBean exists. So what do you do?
You define an API in one of your modules. All the managed beans that you intend to share between modules must be specified as interfaces in this API layer. And all your modules must have default implementations of any of these interfaces that they intend to use. And this API must be shared between all interoperable modules. Then you can use OSGi and Spring to wire together the specified beans with their implementation.
I need to take a moment to point out that this is not how I would approach this problem. Not at all. Given something like as simple as a login page, or even as complicated as a stock chart, I'd personally prefer to create a custom JSF component. But if the requirement is "I want my managed beans to be modular (i.e., hot-swappable, etc)," this is the only way I know to make it work. And I'm not even entirely sure it will work. This email exchange suggests that it's a problem that JSF developers have only just started to work on.
I normally consider managed beans to be part of the view layer, and as such I use them only for view logic, and delegate everything else to the service layer. Making managed beans late-binding is, to my mind, promoting them out of the view layer and into the business logic. There's a reason why all those tutorials are so focused on services: because most of the time you want to consider what it would take for your app to run "headless," and how easy it would be to "skin" your view if, for instance, you wanted it to run, with all its functionality, on an Android phone.
But it sounds like a lot of what you're working with is itself view logic -- for instance, the need to swap in a different view template. OSGi/Spring should be able to help, but you'll need something in your app to choose between available implementations: pretty much what OSGi's Service Registry was built to do.
That leaves static resources. You can modularize these, but remember, you'll need to define an interface to retrieve these resources, and you'll need to provide a default implementation so your app doesn't choke if they're absent. If i18n is a consideration, this could be a good way to go. If you wanted to be really adventurous, then you could push your static resources into JNDI. That would make them completely hot-swappable, and save you the pain of trying to resolve which implementation to use programmatically, but there are some downsides: any failed lookup will cause your app to throw a NamingException. And it's overkill. JNDI is normally used in web apps for app configuration.
As for your remaining questions:
Am I inventing a bicycle here? Are there standard solutions for that?
You are, a little. I've seen apps that do this kind of thing, but you seem to have stumbled into a fairly unique set of requirements.
Do you think OSGi is the right technology for the described task?
If you need the modules to be hot-swappable, then your choices are OSGi and the lighter-weight ServiceLocator interface.
Is my sketch of OSGI application more or less correct?
I can't really tell without knowing more about where your component boundaries are. At the moment, it sounds like you may be pushing OSGi to do more than it is capable of doing.
But don't take my word for it. I found other reading material in these places.
And since you ask about Spring Slices, this should be enough to get you started. You'll need a Git client, and it looks like you'll be training yourself on the app by looking through the source code. And it's very early prototype code.
I am facing the same problems in my current project. In my opinion, OSGi is the best and cleanest solution in terms of standards and future support, but currently you may hit some problems if you try using it in a web application:
there is no well integrated solution between a Web Container and the OSGi platform yet.
OSGi may be too much for a custom build web application that is just searching for a simple modularized architecture. I would consider OSGi if my project needs to support third party extensions that are not 100% under our control, if the project needs hot redeployments, strict access rules between plugins, etc.
A custom solution based on class loaders and resource filters seems very appropriate for me.
As an example you can study the Hudson source code or Java Plug-in Framework (JPF) Project(http://jpf.sourceforge.net/).
As about extending the web.xml, we may be lucky with the Servlet 3.0 specification(http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2008/10/14/introduction-to-servlet-3.html#pluggability-and-extensibility).
The "web module deployment descriptor fragment" (aka web-fragment.xml) introduced by the Servlet 3.0 specification would be nice here. The specification defines it as:
A web fragment is a logical
partitioning of the web app in such a
way that the frameworks being used
within the web app can define all the
artifacts without asking devlopers to
edit or add information in the
web.xml.
Java EE 6 is maybe not an option for you right now though. Still, it would to be the standardized solution.
Enterprise OSGi is a fairly new domain so dont think you will get a solution that directly satisfies your need. That said one of the things I found missing from Equinox (osgi engine behind eclipse and hence one with largest user base!) is a consistent configuration / DI service. In my project recently we had some similar needs and ended building a simple configuration osgi service.
One of the problems which will be inherent to modular applications would be around DI, as the module visibility could prevent class access in some cases. We got around this using a registered-buddy policy, which is not too ideal but works.
Other than configuration, you can take a look at the recently released Equinox book for guidance on using OSGi as base for creating modular applications. The examples may be specific to Equinox, but the principles would work with any OSGi framework. Link - http://equinoxosgi.org/
You should look into Spring DM Server (it's being transitioned to Eclipse Virgo but that's not been released yet). There's a lot of good things in the recent OSGi enterprise spec which has also just been released.
Some of the Spring DM tutorials will help, I'd imagine. But yes, it's possible to have both resources and classes loaded from outside the web bundle using standard modularity. In that, it's a good fit.
As for the session context - it gets handled as you would expect in a session. However, you might run into problems with sharing that session between web bundles to the extent that in not sure if it's even possible.
You could also look to have a single web bundle and then use e.g. the Eclipse extension registry to extend the capabilities of you web app.

Is there a simple framework allowing for Dependency Injection in a stand alone program?

We basically need to be able to adjust behaviour at start-up time, by providing desired classes to be produced by various factories inside our application (to avoid the hard binding of the "new" operator).
I am aware that this is provided by several large frameworks, but I was looking for something easily used by a stand-alone Java application without being gigantic.
Any suggestions?
Edit: It is my experience that frameworks tend to grow big as part of maturing (and complex too). I need this to be retrofittable to a legacy application as part of major refactoring (technical debt), so simplicity is essential of the used libraries. I do not mind having to do a bit of coding in our application, but it must be very visible what is going on. AOP has a tendency for moving stuff out of the way, and that may make the application harder to maintain.
Edit: We have now reached the point where we actually need to make a decision. The application will probably live for decades so we need to make a reversible decision with a framework that will be maintained for hopefully as long. I really like the static type check available with Guice, but not that the annotations bind explicitly to Guice instead of being external like in Spring. I also like that code appears to be more concise when using Guice as opposed to Spring. We need something that is robust and helpful. We do not need more than just DI at the moment. Is there a use case that definitive says go for one of these?
Edit 2011-07-27: The final decision was to use the JSR-330 API in code, and choose on a per-project basis if to use Spring, Guice or Weld. For stand-alone applications Guice has worked well so far as the JSR-330 implementation.
You can always use Spring Framework 2.5. It is a big one, but if you planning to use only DI you can use spring-core and spring-beans modules, which are pretty small (ca. 500KB and 300KB).
There is also Google Guice 2.0 which comes with a package with only basic stuff (no AOP) and it's 430KB.
Have you looked at the Google Guice framework? It's pretty lightweight and annotation-based, avoiding XML configuration files
There's also Pico- and Nano-container (from codehaus) which are quite lightweight although the last time I looked (admittedly a few years ago) the documentation was lacking.
I must say that I agree with others about what I assume is your presumption that Spring is massive and confusing. It's really a very simple IoC container and to be recommended.
There are a couple I know of you might find useful:
PicoContainer
Plexus (used in Maven)
I've found Plexus very useful in standalone apps as it has optional utility components for CLI interaction.
By "gigantic" I'm going to assume you're referring to Spring, but that's unfair, since you can cherry-pick the bits of Spring you want to use. If all you need is the IoC container, just use the appropriate JAR files and the appropriate bit of the API, and ignore the rest of it.
Most answers so far seem to be concerned with the size of the jar files to be added.
However I think the more important question is the impact on the project: How many lines of code must be added/changed in order to use the framework?
Even the "big" spring framework is actually very easy to use:
You basically need:
a xml file that describes your factories.
one line of code to initialize the container by loading the xml file
The nice thing is that spring is non-intrusive. So you do not have to implement specific interfaces or add any specific annotations or imports to your classes.
At best the single spot where you actually initialize the Spring container is the only
place in your application that has an actual dependency to spring classes.
I would strongly suggest to take a look at Spring ME. Although originally meant to be a way to use Spring on Java ME applications, it also works fine for standalone applications.
True, it doesn't give you all of the bells and whistles that Spring (Full) has to offer, but then again, Full Spring is much much more than a simple dependency injection framework.
On the plus side: it's based on a (compliant) subset of Spring's configuration files, and the footprint of the runtime is 0%. In fact, there isn't any. Spring ME will take your application context, and turn it into a class that has no dependencies on classes other than your own.
What's wrong with Spring?
These days it's packaged pretty well so you wouldn't need to take the whole kit and caboodle.
As an aside, I'm not a fan of the annotation based injection frameworks. This is because the annotations are bound to the class rather than the instance, the later being a pre-requisite, imho, for DI. This means every instance of a given class gets the same object(s) injected, which seems to defeat the point.
Also consider that DI doesn't even need a framework, what's wrong with your main method wiring together the application?
If you want something maximally simple and appropriate, then write some code that does what you want done. Presumably this involves wiring together factories based partly on fixed logic, and partly on run-time settings.
This has the advantage that the set of possible run-time configurations is known, and so documentable and testable.
It has the disadvantage that an deploying an unanticipated logic change inherently takes an extra second or so of compile time, and (more significantly) can't be sneaked into production without full testing by disguising it as 'just a configuration change'.
About a year ago I asked myself a question very like this. So I spend a few hours reading the Spring and Guice documentation. After about an hour with Spring I was left feeling that I could get a basic web app going, but had no idea how to use it in a stand alone application. After an hour with the Guice document everything had clicked and I could see just how I to do what I wanted to get done.
Now on to recommending Guice? Well no. What does your team already know? If someone already knows say Spring leaver that knowledge and have them spread it about. Like wise with Guice or Pico.
If you want something really light weight you might want to have a look at fuse it's fairly extendable so might be what you're looking for.
cheers
N

Using Guice with OSGi

I have a project that I am trying to convert to OSGi. However, this project has been built with Guice as its dependency injection manager. It's a large project with Guice interwoven all throughout. Guice has been giving me many fits with the conversion process. Specifically, it has been given me a NoClassDefFoundError for com.google.inject.internal.cglib.reflect.FastClass. I have made sure that nothing is package-private and I also downloaded and used the guice-2.0-customloader.jar. Still, to no avail.
Is there any advice from anyone that has gone down this path? It is worth mentioning that I use peaberry to get dynamic services from the OSGi environment (for a plugin-type architecture) that I then use in the program later on.
Thanks a lot,
Steve
Hard to say exactly what the problem is, classloader issues can be very situation specific in OSGi and hard to debug.
If guice really is a core to your application it may make sense to make it a Fragment bundle of the System Bundle. The System Bundle is the root node in the classloader tree for ALL bundles. If classes exist in this bundle, they'll be accessible everywhere. This is a technique I've used successfully to wrap Swing LAF (Substance, Alloy, Jide) as OSGi bundles. They've gotta be at the root level since all of my bundles use Swing (especially the Swing classloader)
You'll want to check the OSGi specs for creating a Fragment bundle and making that fragment bundle a framework extension fragment. I've only been able to do this using Eclipse's Equinox runtime. At the time I wrote most of the supporting classes, Apache Felix did not yet support framework extension fragments. It may have changed now. I have no idea about frameworks (knopplefish, spring-dm)
Just use Peaberry. It has all the support you need for using Guice in OSGi. No need to reinvent everything from scratch!
I'm assuming your comments on package-private are related to this page on Guice and bridging class loaders?
There's a bug report/patch that may be related to your issue: http://code.google.com/p/google-guice/issues/detail?id=343
Have you tried adding Guice and cglib to the standard classpath and doing boot delegation for them? That would prove/disprove your issue is the same one as mentioned on the above bug report.
You could try my latest patch for Issue 343 - just attached a freshly patched build which is the latest Guice trunk plus this one patch, so people can try it and give feedback.
The latest patch avoids a lot of these CGLIB exceptions without forcing you to make classes public, and also provides a better error message in the few remaining places where this is still necessary (basically when you explicitly use method interception).

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