Email fetcher using Play Framework - java

I need to develop an IMAP poller which pings an email server every few seconds and fetches every new email which arrives.
I've done it once for another application, but there I used an inbound mail channel from Spring Integration.
I just started "playing" with Play, and am not sure what the best way to achieve this is. I know that JavaMail already offers the possibility to fetch mails, but I am not sure how to actually package this. Should this be a separate module, a separate plugin, a service, or sth?
Should the polling functionality be implemented as a job?
NOTE: It is a web application BTW, although the description above may suggest it is not.

There are a few options to solve this:
1) Use java in a Job to poll the IMAP server at regular intervals
documentation on creating a Job is available and is pretty straight forward, just setup the job to run every minute or 5 minutes and then add the code to actually check for new emails.
http://www.playframework.org/documentation/1.2.4/jobs
If you're looking for how to check for new emails on IMAP then have a look through stack exchange there. For example, to poll gmail check out this question: Getting mail from GMail into Java application using IMAP
2) Use camel module to poll IMAP server with a custom route/processor
This is a heavyweight solution and only recommended if you want to make use of other features of Apache Camel.
The module is available here: http://www.playframework.org/modules/camel
Using camel to poll for IMAP messages is fairly easy once you get your head around how to use camel, the specific info for the IMAP route is here: http://camel.apache.org/mail.html

In my opinion you shouldn't use Play at all for this — if I understand your requirements correctly. Play is a web framework intended to handle HTTP requests. Your requirements say nothing about HTTP at all, so a large part of Play! would be useless.
You could use Play's server runtime and Job (and cron) architecture to run this, but you would be misusing the facilities of the framework for something for which they were never intended. You may also be inheriting requirements from Play that you wouldn't ever actually need for an application/service like the one you want to build (for example the Python runtime).
I think you should not use Play for this, but rather create this as a simple, straight-forward Java application using Spring. With Spring's scheduling capabilities you can just as easily implement what you want.
Naturally, when you intend to build a web front-end on top of this in the future, that would make it a completely different story.

Related

Manage running Java apps remotely

We have several Java standalone applications (in form of Jar files) running on multiple servers. These applications mainly read and stream data between systems. We are using Java 8 mainly in our development. I was put in charge recently. My main function is to manage and maintain these apps.
Currently, I check these apps manually by accessing these servers, check if the app is running, and sometimes run some database queries to see if the app started pulling data. My problem is that in many cases, some of these apps fail and shutdown due to data issue or edge cases without anyone noticing. We need some monitoring and application recovery in place.
We don't have docker infrastructure in place. We plan to implement docker in the future, but for now this is not an option.
After research, the following are options I thought of or solutions I tried:
Have the apps create a socket client which sends a heartbeat to a monitoring app (which needs to be developed). I am keeping this as my last option.
I tried to use Eclipse Vertx to wrap the apps into Verticles. Then create a web view that can show me status and other info. After several tries, the apps fail to parse the data correctly (might be due to my lack of understanding to Vertx library).
Have a third party solution that does this, but I have no idea what solutions are out there. I am open for suggestions.
My requirements are:
Proper monitoring of the apps running and their status.
In case of failure, the app should start again while notifying the admin/developer.
I am willing to develop a solution or implement a third party one. I need you guidance on this.
Thank you.
You could use spring-boot-actuator (see health). It comes with a built-in endpoint that has some health checks(depending on your spring-boot project), but you can create your own as well.
Then, doing a http request to http://{host}:{port}/{context}/actuator/health (replace with yours), you could see those health checks status and also use the response status code to monitor your application.
Have you heard of Java Service Wrappers? Not a full management functionality, however it would monitor for JVM crashes and out of memory conditions and restart your application for sure. Alerting should also be possible.
There is a small comparison table here: https://yajsw.sourceforge.io/#mozTocId284533
So some basic monitoring and management is included already. If you need more, I suggest using JMX (https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/javase/javamanagement.html) or Prometheus (https://prometheus.io/ and https://github.com/prometheus/client_java)

JMX Notifications design

We have a number of related Java Spring applications running on our servers. Lets call them App1, App2 & App3. As is standard all these use the common code in our-common-utils.jar
I want these applications(App1, App2 & App3) to broadcast their state to one or more remote listeners. For e.g.
App1: I failed to read file abc.
App2: I am using more than 90% of my heap space etc.
The listener/s of these events will take specific actions such as send emails to support and/or clients based on the notifications received.
The best solution I can think of is to have a NotificationSender JMX enabled(implements NotificationBroadcasterSupport) bean in our-common-utils.jar. This will have a thread consuming from a queue of Notifications and firing off sendNotification() to the listeners for each Notification. This will be done by each of the Apps in our eco system but using common code from common-utils.
Do you see any flaws in this design? Any more efficient ways/frameworks of doing it?
Many Thanks :)
Alternative solution is to use any distributed coordination service zookeeper for example. I used it in my very first micro service project. As I can see you are using spring. Spring cloud provides necessary solutions that you can use in declarative way. I would pay your attention to #FeignClient. It is very simple in use and flexible in spring world.
If I would work on this issue now, I would use spring hystrix based solution. To simplify integration between your java services I would recommend to check service-registration-and-discovery.
Ignore my opinion if spring is not general engine part in your projects (may be you need other vendor solutions, there are a lot of alternatives). I concentrate my attention on spring solutions because spring is not restricted in my projects and I can use anything I wish if it's reasonable.

Message Communication between two Independent Applications

I have a requirement where a Groovy Application is supposed to send event notifications to another Java Web Application Which will than display that data on
web interface.
I don't want to use Queues like ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ because this will introduce an extra layer and will be used if no other solution exists.
An idea have been shared with me that I should expose a web-service from my Java application, which will be consumed by the first application, and the data
sent to the web-service will be then received in second application and somehow displayed on it's web interface.
I am not sure how this will work i.e how the data which is received in web-service of second application will be displayed on its web interface.
Kindly help me to figure out the right solution for this task.
Your problem actually is "how to send notifications from server to browser/mobile client issued by another application".
If you have very strict requirements for latency, then I would suggest to use https://github.com/OpenHFT/Chronicle-Queue
It was created by HFT guys to process 6 millions of messages per second in a single thread.
To display events on user's screen please consider using mechanisms like WebSockets, Server Sent Events, Push Notifications, Long polling, whatsoever depending on your requirements ( like browser support ).
Actually in most cases it doesn't matter what transport are you using. Unless you have super strict non-functional requirements like sub microsecond latency you're free to choose any mechanism, e.g. HTTP, JMS.
Try not to over engineer and design your software based on your actual requirements - not on stackoverflow answers.
Cheers!
I would suggest you create an XML representation of the data you wish to transfer to the java web app. On the java web app if using simple servlets, create a new servlet to which you can post this xml. The servlet could then persist this to a database. This can then be retrieved when a user logs in to the web app at some point.
Let me know if you need any more help. I could only answer only so much based on the question. Some more light on the framework the java web app is using and the data you wish to transfer, might make it easier to add more info.

Using Camel to get data from a web service

There is a lot of information for using Camel with JMS, but I can’t find much on using Camel to request data from a web service. I am wondering if this is even possible to do this directly, or do I need to use some kind of JMS/queue?
Ideally, I want my service (using java DSL) to send out a request to another web service, retrieve the data, and then store this in a file locally. Is it possible to do this in Camel using a simple custom RouteBuilder and a camelContext? I’ve tried setting up my routes using
`from(“http:..”).to(“file:...");`
but this doesn’t seem to work, as it doesn’t seem to get the data from the web service. From what I've read, I was under the impression that the endpoint http: will build the request automatically and route this to a file.
I am now wondering what I could try next, and if this is even possible.
It is definitely possible. The best example to start with is the CXF-Proxy Example. This shows how to invoke a remote web-service from Camel. Feel free to ask specific questions if you run into issues and we can help.
Also you could use Spring Web Services Component
http://camel.apache.org/spring-web-services.html
In this case, your route would look like:
from("<some event to trigger the route>")
.to("spring-ws:<endpoint of the WS you want to use>")
.to("file:<write the WS result>")
If you don't mind trying things out at the SOAP level you could try out the approaches found here http://camel.apache.org/soap.html link. Its worth a look even if you end up using something a little more high level.

Best Java supported server/client protocol?

I'm in the process of writing a client/server application which should work message based. I would like re-use as much as possible instead of writing another implementation and curious what others are using.
Features the library should offer:
client and server side functionality
should work message based
support multi-threading
should work behind load balancer / firewalls
I did several tests with HTTPCore, but the bottom line is that one has to implement both client and server, only the transport layer would be covered. RMI is not an option either due to the network related requirements.
Any ideas are highly appreciated.
Details
My idea is to implement a client/server wrapper which handles the client communication (including user/password validation) and writes incoming requests to a JMS queue:
#1 User --> Wrapper (Check for user/password) --> JMS --> "Server"
#2 User polls Wrapper which polls JMS
Separate processes will handle the requests and can reply via wrapper to the clients. I'd like to use JMS because:
it handles persistence quite well
load balancing - it's easy to handle peaks by adding additional servers as consumer
JMSTimeToLive comes in handy too
Unfortunately I don't see a way to use JMS on it's own, because clients should only have access to their messages and the setup of different users on JMS side doesn't sound feasible either.
Well, HTTP is probably the best supported in terms of client and server code implementing it - but it may well be completely inappropriate based on your requirements. We'll need to actually see some requirements (or at least a vague idea of what the application is like) before we can really advise you properly.
RMI works nicely for us. There are limitations, such as not being able to call back to the client unless you can connect directly to that computer (does not work if client is behind a firewall). You can also easily wrap your communication in SSL or tunnel it over HTTP which can be wrapped in SSL.
If you do end up using this remember to always set the serial version of a class that is distributed to the client. You can set it to 1L when you create it, or if the client already has the class use serialver.exe to discover the existing class's serial. Otherwise as soon as you change or add a public method or variable compatibility with existing clients will break.
static final long serialVersionUID = 1L
EDIT: Each RMI request that comes into the server gets its own thread. You don't have to handle this yourself.
EDIT: I think some details were added later in the question. You can tunnel RMI over HTTP, then you could use a load balancer with it.
I've recently started playing with Hessian and it shows a lot of promise. It natively uses HTTP which makes it simpler than RMI over HTTP and it's a binary protocol which means it's faster than all the XML-based protocols. It's very easy to get Hessian going. I recently did this by embedding Jetty in our app, configuring the Hessian Servlet and making it implement our API interface. The great thing about Hessian is it's simplicity... nothing like JMS or RMI over HTTP. There are also libraries for Hessian in other languages.
I'd say the best-supported, if not best-implemented, client/server communications package for Java is Sun's RMI (Remote Method Invocation). It's included with the standard Java class library, and gets the job done, even if it's not the fastest option out there. And, of course, it's supported by Sun. I implemented a turn-based gaming framework with it several years ago, and it was quite stable.
It is difficult to make a suggestion based on the information given but possibly the use of TemporaryQueues e.g. dynamically created PTP destinations on a per client basis might fit the problem?
Here is a reasonable overview.
Did you tried RMI or CORBA? With both of them you can distribute your logic and create Sessions
Use Spring....Then pick and choose the protocol.
We're standardizing on Adobe's AMF as we're using Adobe Flex/AIR in the client-tier and Java6/Tomcat6/BlazeDS/Spring-Framework2.5/iBATIS2.3.4/ActiveMQ-JMS5.2 in our middle-tier stack (Oracle 10g back-end).
Because we're standardizing on Flex client-side development, AMF and BlazeDS (now better coupled to Spring thanks to Adobe and SpringSource cooperating on the integration), are the most efficient and convenient means we can employ to interact with the server-side.
We also heavily build on JMS messaging in the data center - BlazeDS enables us to bridge our Flex clients as JMS topic subscribers. That is extremely powerful and effective.
Our Flex .swf and Java .class code is bundled into the same .jar file for deployment. That way the correct version of the client code will be deployed to interact with the corresponding middle-tier java code that will process client service calls (or messaging operations). That has always been a bane of client-server computing - making sure the correct versions of the respective tiers are hooked up to each other. We've effectively solved that age-old problem with our particular approach to packaging and deployment.
All of our client-server interactions work over HTTP/HTTPS ports 80 and 443. Even the server-side messaging push we do with BlazeDS bridged to our ActiveMQ JMS message broker.

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