How to structure different common code shared with different projects? - java

I have a webserver project that works with soap webservices and saves data to db.
Now I'd like to write some importer classes that process build some kind of database cache on a regular basis. These importer classes should reuse lot's of the webserver project (especially the domain leyer, domain POJOs, database services, configs etc). The importers shall later run on a different machine than the webserver, thus independently.
How does a maven/eclipse project have to be structured so that I can separate these two projects, but reuse lots of the common code?
Would I place the classes just both into the same project? Or would I move the common code to a single jar, and create 1 webserver and 1 importer project using this jar as dependency?

Your last paragraph did give a rational solution.
If the importer and web application is something that is closely related, and the "reusability" for those "common class" is aimed to be within this project only, what you can do is having a multi-module project like this:
foo // your project name
+ foo-main // your reusable classes, you may split it into several modules if appropriate
+ foo-web // have foo-main as dependency
+ foo-importer // have foo-main as dependency
+ foo-parent // my personal preference is to make parent project a module, not mandatory
If your importer is something irrelevant to your foo project, but you still want to reuse, you can split it out
foo // your project name
+ foo-main // your reusable classes, you may split it into several modules if appropriate
+ foo-web // have foo-main as dependency
+ foo-parent // my personal preference is to make parent project a module, not mandatory
bar-importer // another project, having foo-main as dependency
or even make that common code a separate project
app-common // the common code in original foo-main,
// maybe a multi-module project
foo // your project name
+ foo-main // foo-specific codes, have app-common as dependency
+ foo-web // have foo-main as dependency
bar-importer // having app-common as dependency
For Eclipse, there should be nothing to worry about. Given you are using latest Eclipse + M2E plugin (should already been bundled with latest Eclipse), if you have correct POM, when you are importing the projects to Eclipse (by Import -> Existing Maven Project), relationships between projects should already been created.

Related

Reuse a Spring-boot submodule in another non Spring project

I'm working on a multi module spring-boot project to build a REST API. Here is my project structure:
Parent project (packaging is pom)
core module (#SpringBootApplication + handle path like / or /status)
restControllerA module (Handle path like /routeA/*)
restControllerB module (Handle path like /routeB/*)
Everything is working in this project :)
In another non Spring project I would like to reuse a service of restControllerB. This service return the result of the request body validation.
First I try to add the restControllerB.jar as a dependency to this new project... But this jar does not contain its depedencies (who are in the fatJAR "core.jar"). When I run the project, I get a lot of ClassNotFoundException.
How can I manage to reuse this service as a dependency ? I thought to create a validator module which implements the validatorService interface, but I'm not sure if it is the best solution.
After few hours googling, It seems that creating an external librairy is the right choice. I create an external module and add it as a dependecy to restControllerB.

Nested modules with Spring

I am developing project with Spring Framework.
I have created about 5 modules, sometimes one depend on other, but they are all on top level, and up to this point everything works fine.
Example:
Database module has only external dependencies
Identity module depends on database module
Facebook stuff module depends on identity module
Now, I have created directory in root of project called modules, and moved all modules into it (so they all were, and still are on same relative distance to each other).
All tests passes and I can build/compile and inspect classes without any problem.
However, now when I try to run only identity module (that does not require facebook stuff) spring throws me an exception, that it cannot find facebook beans. Of course it cannot, because there is no dependency, but I do not want to add this dependency. #Configuration is #Lazy so there is no point creating such #Bean anyway.
Code:
new AnnotationConfigApplicationContext(Application.class);
Application class is #Lazy #Configuration and does #ComponentScan from whole application, and as I understand it finds also #Configuration's from other modules and then - I do not know why - tried to create those #Bean's from other modules but fails as expected.
I have verified with git, that the only between working and not working states are moving those modules into new folder.
So to clarify, working/default structure is:
/.gradle
/.idea
/DatabaseModule
/IdentityModule
/FacebookModule
/.out
/.gitignore
and not working one is:
/.gradle
/.idea
/modules/DatabaseModule
/modules/IdentityModule
/modules/FacebookModule
/.out
/.gitignore
Code stays the same.
I think, that if I will add all dependencies to all modules then it will work but for obvious reasons I do not want to do this.
Am I doing something wrong?
Is there any convention, that I am breaking?
Bonus question: how are nested modules different, from ordinary folder containing modules?
EDIT:
I should also note, that all tests pass in both scenarios, however I am not using spring in tests (no dependency injection) - just new or Mock() everything

Maven Plugin: accessing resources accross multiple modules

I'm currently writing a custom maven plugin for generating a XML file in a multi-module maven project.
My maven structure is pretty standard: one parent project and a module by project components in the parent project folder:
-- Parent
-- module A
-- module B
-- module C
I need to list, by module, a set of classes flagged by a custom annotation.
I already wrote a set of custom annotations and an annocation processor to create a XML file at compile time in the corresponding module output directory (${project.build.outputDirectory}) .
Now i need to merge each module XML into one file, but i don't know how to access each modules from within my maven plugin except having each path set as parameters (i don't like this method).
Any idea on how to do this ?
Does maven plugins can traverse project modules ?
Thank you in advance.
To get the list list of all projects you can use:
List<MavenProject> projectList = MavenSession.getProjectDependencyGraph().getSortedProjects()
If one of your goals is correctly executed you will get everything you need. Every MavenProject contains a getBaseDir() etc.
After some researches, it seems that MavenProject.getCollectedProjects() will return the list of projects beeing manipulated by a goal execution in a multi-module project.

Maven Assembly: config files best practice

I have a multi-module maven project, including a seperate assembly-project. As i develop and run my application from eclipse (during development), i have specific configuration-files (e.g. log4j or other property-files) in my main-module (which contains the main-class). These files contain development-time-specific information. The assembly-project contains each of the config-files for production. The assembled product then should use these configs instead. This is my current setup:
MainModule/src/main/resources
+configA.properties
+log4j.properties
Module1/src/main/resources
+configB.properties
AssemblyProj/src/main/resources
+configA.properties
+configB.properties
+log4j.properties
And the generated project has this structure:
libs/
+MainModule.jar
+Module1.jar
configs/
+configA.properties
+configB.properties
+log4j.properties
the config-directory overlays the config-files in each *.jar because of the classpath, i.e.
java -cp configs/;libs/* My.Main.Class
Now the problem that i have, is that there are still all dev-configs included in each jar. Also i have kind of a bad feeling about using that overlay-classpath-method. Is there any practice on how to do this in a better manner?
Extract these resources into classifier-based dependencies for each of the mentioned modules. Then define <profiles/> that trigger their usage. In your assembly use the classifiers as necessary.

How to extend/customize a WAR with another project

We have the following scenario with our project:
A core web application packaged as a
war file (call it Core project).
The need to "customize" or "extend" the core app
per customer (call it Customer project). This mostly includes
new bean definitions (we're using
Spring), ie. replacing service
implementations in the core.war with
customer-specific implementations.
We want to develop the Core and Customer projects independently
When the Customer project is developed, we need to be able to run/debug it in Eclipse (on Tomcat) with the Core project as a dependency
When the Customer project is built, the resulting war file "includes" the core and customer projects. So this .war is the customer-specific version of the application
I'm looking for suggestions as to the best way to do this in terms of tooling and project configuration.
We're using Ant currently, but would like to avoid getting buried in more ant. Has anyone done this with Maven?
I've seen a lot of posts on how to build a web application that depends on a java application, but nothing on a web application depending on another web app.
Thanks!
Sounds like Maven WAR overlay does what you want.
In Eclipse there is a "native" WTP way to do this. It mainly using linked folders and a little hack in .settings/org.eclipse.wst.common.component file. You can read the article about it at http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=759232&seqNum=3 the chapter called "Dividing a Web Module into Multiple Projects". The problem with this is that the linked folder must be relative to some path variable can be defined in Window/Preferences/General/Workspace/Linked Resources tab. Otherwise the linked folder definition (can be found in .project file in project root) will contain workstation specific path. The path variable practicly should be the workspace root. This solution works great with WTP, deploy and everything else works like it should.
The second solution is to use ant for it. Forget it. You will deeply regret it.
The third solution is to use maven for it. You can forget the comfort of WTP publishing if you dont do some tricks. Use war overlays like others suggested. Be sure to install both m2eclipse, m2eclipse extras. There is an extension plugin released recently, that can help you. Described at this blog. I did not try it, but looks ok. Anyway Maven have nothing to do with linked folders, so I think even the first solution and this maven overlay can live together if necessary.
As for headless builds you can use HeadlessEclipse for the first solution. It is dead (by me) now, but still works :). If you use the maven overlay + eclipse stuff, headless builds are covered by maven.
This is little bit more involved but at a high-level we do it as below. We have the core platform ui divided to multiple war modules based on the features (login-ui,catalog-mgmt-ui etc). Each of these core modules are customizable by the customer facing team.
We merge all of these modules during build time into 1 single war module. The merge rules are based on maven's assembly plugin.
You usually start from the Java source code. WARs don't include the Java source code, just the compiled classes under WEB-INF/classes or JARs under WEB-INF/libs.
What I would do is use Maven and start a brand new empty webapp project with it: http://maven.apache.org/guides/mini/guide-webapp.html
After you have the new empty project structure, copy the Java source code to it (src/main/java) and fill out the dependencies list in pom.xml.
Once you've done all this you can use mvn clean package to create a standard WAR file that you can deploy to Tomcat.
You might want to look into designing your core app with pluggable features based on interfaces.
For example say your core app has some concept of a User object and needs to provide support for common user based tasks. Create a UserStore interface;
public interface UserStore
{
public User validateUser(String username, String password) throws InvalidUserException;
public User getUser(String username);
public void addUser(User user);
public void deleteUser(User user);
public void updateUser(User user);
public List<User> listUsers();
}
You can then code your core app (logon logic, registration logic etc) against this interface. You might want to provide a default implementation of this interface in your core app, such as a DatabaseUserStore which would effectively be a DAO.
You then define the UserStore as a Spring bean and inject it where needed;
<bean id="userStore" class="com.mycorp.auth.DatabaseUserStore">
<constructor-arg ref="usersDataSource"/>
</bean>
This allows you to customise or extend the core app depending on specific customer's needs. If a customer wants to integrate the core app with their Active Directory server you write a LDAPUserStore class that implements your UserStore interface using LDAP. Configure it as a Spring bean and package the custom class as a dependant jar.
What you are left with is a core app which everyone uses, and a set of customer specific extensions that you can provide and sell seperately; heck, you can even have the customer write their own extensions.

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