Call application method from embedded Tomcat/Jetty jsf-bean - java

I'm trying to develop an application that embeds tomcat or jetty with JSF.
Is it possible to make a call from a jsf-bean to a method of the application that embeds and started tomcat?
If it isn't possible, what would be a good way of communication between the application and the servlet container?
I haven't found anything in the docs, google or even on stackoverflow.com! But I'm sure there is a solution.
Thanks in advance!

ActiveMQ would be a overkill for this scenario. You could simply start a RMI registry in the main application and host some remote interfaces with the APIs you need to communicate between your application and the jsf webapplication.

Related

What is the recommended Application Server for Playframework 2.x deployment?

I planned to use jBoss to deploy, manage and monitor playframework applications, but from https://github.com/play2war/play2-war-plugin/wiki/ConfigurationLoggingJBoss7, I found jBoss and playframework doesn't play very well together.
From the official documentation, it only says Apache or Nginx can be used for HTTP server, but no application server is mentioned there. Does anyone have ideas about what would be a suiable application server for Playframework deployment? How about Apache Tomcat or GlassFish?
You don't need any application server to run a Play 2.x application. The application can run stand alone, it internally uses Netty to handle the sockets, Akka to handle the concurrency etc.
Usually Apache or Nginx are used in front of a Play application to offload serving of static resources, HTTPS handling (both can be done directly in the application itself) and above all to allow public access to multiple applications on the same IP and port under different paths.
In Play 1.0 you could build to a war to run in a container like you describe. This feature was removed in Play 2.0 to promote the embedded Netty server as the main way to deploy applications. Now you need the play2war to achieve this functionality.

Using Jersey without an application server

I am looking to use Jersey without the need of installing an application server such as Tomcat or Glassfish. Ideally I would like to create a lightweight program that listens on a port and allows connections. I believe you can do this with Grizzly + Jersey but I am not sure how easy this is, because from my understanding Grizzly is used to write new http servers from scratch?
Restlet looked good in this regard because it included an internal http server but the documentation provided is extremely meager.
You can use a light-weight servlet container like jetty. you can bundle and ship this with your application. Also building and shipping jetty with your application is very easy.
I've deployed an app recently that uses embedded Jetty in Spring to launch Jersey, so this is 100% possible. Jersey, in fact, has a SpringServlet for easy delegating to a Spring context based REST implementation. If you have additional questions down this route, let me know. It wasn't the most straight forward, but I can talk you through some of it with the appropriate links.

GWT as part of a non-web application

We have a java server application which runs certain batch jobs. It's core function is not as a web application and there's no reason for it to be that. But we would like to add an option to check what the app is doing from a web page. And we thought this could be nicely done with the Google Web Toolkit.
In any previous experiences we have with GWT we have deployed it on Tomcat. But in this case it seems like overkill. The web part is more of a side function to what the application is actually doing.
I'm thinking of a solution where the web server is integrated into the jar file - perhaps Jetty? So that the full java application can be deployed to a single jar file together with the web/GWT part.
There may be performance aspects to this but the web side of things will have very few users. Are there any other reasons not to do it this way?
And, can you give some advice on how to configure Eclipse / Ant / Jetty / GWT for this?
we had the similar experience at our previous project. There was an eclipse-rcp application, with embedded Jetty server (it was started programmatically when application was starting). GWT application was deployed into the Jetty as usually. Also there was a OSGI-service as a controller to provide communication between GWT-server and other parts of application. GWT server was usual RCP server, which is described in the most of examples. It had a reference to the controller. Moreover, it was an event listener, to support bot-side communication.
The main problem for us I think, was synchronization problem. Since there were a lot of messages between eclipse-rcp application an GWT-part (every let say 100 ms the message was received) and GWT had an asynchronous way of communication between client part and its server part, then some mechanism had to be created to synchronize those messages. Otherwise there were no performance problems (except IE 6. which had to be supported:S :D).
Hope this will somehow help.
Upd: As far as I remember, the controller was registered as OSGI service only to be able to communicate with other services of Eclipse-RCP part. In order to communicate with GWT controller was implementing special interface, which was known to the GWT-server (Controller was registered as an implementer through instantiation and the server was regsitered in the controller as IMessageListener). This interface was lying in separate project, which could was also built into the .war file. This project also contained number of event to support backward communication from controller to GWT-server through IMessageListener interface.
It's kind of confusing probably, sorry. May be I should draw a diagram..

Java application inside tomcat?

I have a standalone java application which uses java based TCP NIO to collect some information from various clients (not on web/HTTP but through some indigenously developed middleware). Now I have to develop a front-end for the users to perform a lot of querying through HTTP. So is there a way to put this application inside tomcat, so that servlets can invoke required functions on this application ???
The thing is it has to listen on that middleware outside tomcat too and at the same time service servlets inside tomcat. How to do this ??
Putting this application outside tomcat and using RMI is an option but I don’t want to do that.
Can embedding tomcat inside my application is an option ???
The brand-new Tomcat 7 has Embedded version for download.
Tomcat is big. You should try to embed Jetty, which is meant in order to make it possible.
http://jetty.codehaus.org/jetty/
I don't know about embedding Tomcat, but you can embed a servlet container inside your application using embedded Jetty. If what you want is to add an HTTP interface to an existing server, I think that's the way to go.
It also should be perfectly workable to launch your server's TCP listening components from a standard servlet in Tomcat. Then the servlet can call methods in your existing application directly, while it continues to listen to its usual TCP ports.
A third option is to write a servlet that just talks to your existing server in the same way other clients do.
The way you want to go, is to have an embedded web server to your existing application since you just need a little bit of web functionality.
Going the other way is possible. You can use servlet listeners to get started and stopped, and you need to take great care of any thread you start since Tomcat have no idea they exist.
As Traroth said, embedding Jetty is a much better option than doing the same with Tomcat. You have an example and a small tutorial in the Jetty website:
http://docs.codehaus.org/display/JETTY/Embedding+Jetty
You can always open the ports and listen manually if the requests aren't complicated.
Have you considered going the other way? That is embedding your application inside a web application?
Using spring you can instantiate your web application and then inject in into the appropriate web classes (e.g. struts2 actions).
This way you can deploy your web application into any web server that is preconfigured separate from your application.
If you do have to use Tomcat, you're best just making your application as a .war file which when Tomcat is ran will deploy your code. This can then talk to any RMI/middleware you like.
I'm not sure I understand your comment regarding memory spaces.
At a very basic level you have two choices:
Run your appication and the web
application in the same virtual
machine.
Run your application and
the web application in a different
virtual machine
If you take approach 1, you will be able to get instances of your applications classes from the servlets and call methods on them.
Embed tomcat / jetty inside your application. You will start your application normally through its main method. After starting your app you will need to create instances of the tomcat / jetty classes which will start up their own threads.
Embed your application inside a war file to be deployed on tomcat / jetty. Similar to the previous option instead you will need to start your application from a context listener.
If you prefer approach 2; start tomcat / jetty and deploy your web app and separately deploy your application. You'll now have two jvms running. To communicate between these two processes you'll have to use some form of socket communication: OutputStream/InputStream over sockets; RMI; JMX; JMS etc.

Java Web Service for .NET 2.0 Client on Linux (Fedora)

I'm tasked with creating a Java Web Service for a .NET 2.0 client to consume.
What would your suggestions for the implementation be?
The solution doesn't need to be very heavyweight (don't need a full Java EE container I believe) but what do you think is the best solution for this? I have thought about using Glassfish v2 with JAX-WS annotations (#WebService), and JAXB XML Bindings(e.g. #XmlElement), which I assume the .NET client would be able to consume?
Has anyone tried this scenario?
Would Glassfish be overkill though, since I'm merely using the Web Service as a mechanism for .NET on Windows to communicate to the Linux box, the underlying application is extremely small.
Any suggestions are more than welcome :)
Thanks,
James
P.S. Other notes - would you use Axis/CXF instead of Glassfish? Would you use a servlet container such as Tomcat? etc.
I have used Axis2 and it works.
I had the same problem of making Data Exposing API (Web Service in my case) in Java.
I made the web service using Axis2 and Spring (to access database) and the WSDL created via Axis2 was easily consumed via ASP.NET Application via its Add Web Service Dialog Box and the corresponding Proxy Classes were created easily.

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