Check if object is still bound to NameService (tnameserv) - java

Is there an easy way to check whether an object is still bound to a "tnameserv" ?
After you bind an object, the "tnameserv" process might crash, be killled, ... and I want my application to verify whether an object that I bound earlier is still bound.

Assuming you're using the Oracle Java ORB, why not use the persistent name service which they provide rather than the transient tnameserv? It sounds like your application needs a persistent registration of references, so trying to get persistent-like behavior from a transient naming service will likely be a dead-end.
BTW you can use any vendor's COS Naming Service, and not just the one provided by Oracle (nor does it even have to be written in Java, either). For example, the free JacORB Name Server can run in a persistent mode, allowing the references you register to survive a restart or crash of the service.
In any case, the answer to your question depends on whether or not you're asking it from the client's or server's perspective. A server using the Naming Service shouldn't need to check that there's an existing reference of its own already registered in there - it should instead just call rebind() to update the registration. If there's nothing in there already, the reference will be added. If there's one in there, it will get overwritten with the new value.
If you're asking about this from your client's perspective, you should remember that the Naming Service is like a phone book. If the client doesn't find a registration in there that it requires, it's pretty much dead in the water unless it can find other suitable objects which could be used to provide the services you need. It's probably better to have your client fail at that point rather than try to guess at how to compensate for what is really a catastrophic scenario.

Related

How to do many simultaneous jsoup sessions (Spring boot project and concurrancy)

Maybe this is a very basic Java question. Forgive me if it is.
I have this Spring Boot project that needs to, for every registered user, automatically (in the background) connect periodically to a website and download many documents and/or check for changes.
The "download/check" system was externally developed. Every method was static.
Am I right thinking that it IS a problem when I want to have more than one simultaneous execution?
Even if it has all specific connection parameters through parameters?
Thinking of that, I removed the static annotation on almost every method. Now I need to create a new instance for every execution.
When I began adding it to my Spring boot project, I realized there are a bunch of services that make simultaneous connections to a web service, and there I didn't even care about concurrency.
AFAIK, each service is a singleton. Right? So there is no new instance for every connection. Right?
My question is: If I happen to have 100's of users... How should I integrate the jsoup code?
Should I create a new instance from a service?
Should I convert it to a Service itself and just #Autowire it to the service where the process is triggered?
Is it better to make it static? (this one I don't think so, but maybe I'm wrong)
Any other option?
If possible, please add a reason why I should follow your suggestion.
Thank you all for your help.
First of all I'd say if your classes are not maintaining any state then it is actually a good thing if everything is static cause this gets you rather close to functional programming. If you are then passing everything as an parameter to a method and don't have any state in the class (not the method) then everything is kept on the stack which is not shared amongst threads. Long story short: thread-safe.
If you maintain any type of state in your classes – be it services or components – then you have to make sure that they are executing in a thread safe way. One of the easiest ways is to change the #Scope of that particular bean to prototype or for instance request as you are running this as a web app.

OSGi User Admin Service User Objects

I wanted to use the OSGi User Admin service for security but I could not get enough resource about it.
I want to authenticate certain bundles that will be installed in the system and represent them by User-Objects after authentication. So that I can later use these User-Object for authorization.
I have 2 questions:
Since I have more than one user, how can I know which bundle is calling a secured method? (I don't want to pass the user object as a parameter to every method I want to control).
How can I relate the bundles with the User-Object representing them?
I want to have one bundle as an entry point that will authenticate all these other bundles and have control over them. But I couldn't even find anyone mentioning using User Admin service. Is there another option for OSGi security besides CPA? I would like to use this to secure my console as well.
That's quite a few questions rolled into one. Let me try to answer them all.
First of all, the UserAdmin service is specified in the OSGi compendium. There, it explains how users, roles, etc are defined and how you can use the service to answer questions like "does this user have role X"? What that does not tell you is how to use this service as part of a security solution. That's up to you.
Regarding question 1, which is not an OSGi related problem (but rather a generic one in Java applications), there traditionally have been a few methods of passing on a "context" to a method:
Making it an argument to each method (which you do not want to do).
Storing it in the ThreadLocal context (which is fairly popular in JavaEE, but has its downsides if your application delegates work to threadpools that might or might not pass on such a context correctly).
If this is all about security for services that you implement yourself (and not third-party ones) you could use the ServiceFactory pattern in OSGi to give each client bundle it's own context (and embed the User object in there; for examples look at the LogService implementation in Felix, which uses that mechanism to add a bundle.id to each log message).
Sometimes it also makes sense to embed the context not in an extra parameter to your methods, but as part of some existing object (so effectively you are then associating the context with specific objects, which might or might not make sense depending on your domain).
Another option would be to use the Apache Felix Dependency Manager to intercept the services you want to secure (with an aspect) and, in the aspect, figure out what bundle is calling, and do the proper security checks (probably requires a more detailed answer if you want to give that a go).
Regarding question 2, bundles have a symbolic name that identifies them. You could use that to associate a bundle with a User. There are other options, but this is the most obvious one.
Regarding your question about options for OSGi security, I would say ConditionalPermissionAdmin (and the older PermissionAdmin) is the only solution to address security within the OSGi framework itself, if you want to specify what specific bundles can and cannot do in terms of importing packages, using services, accessing the filesystem, etc. You would have to write your own custom permissions if you want to integrate this with UserAdmin.
Finally, the secure console is yet another thing you need to address yourself. You might be able to find some building blocks as I know there have been people implementing some role based access (David Bosschaert comes to mind). However, the console is a complex and powerful thing, so answering this question alone takes more than a simple SO question because it depends what and how fine grained you want to implement this.

Sharing a java object across a cluster

My requirement is to share a java object across a cluster.
I get Confused
whether to write an EJB and share the java objects across the cluster
or
to use any third party such as infinispan or memecached or terracotta or
what about JCache?
with the constraint that
I can't change any of my source code with specific to any application
server (such as implementing the weblogic's singleton services).
I can't offer two builds for cluster and non cluster environment.
Performance should not be downgraded.
I am looking for only open source third party if I need to use it.
It need to work in weblogic , Websphere , Jbos and Tomcat too.
Can any one come up with the best option with these constraints in mind.
It can depend on the use case of the objects you want to share in the cluster.
I think it comes down to really the following options in most complex to least complex
Distributed cacheing
http://www.ehcache.org
Distributed cacheing is good if you need to ensure that an object is accessible from a cache on every node. I have used ehache to distribute quite successfully, no need to setup a terracotta server unless you need the scale, can just point instances together via rmi. Also works synchronously and asynchronously depending on requirements. Also cache replication is handy if nodes go down so cache is actually redundant and dont lose anything. Good if you need to make sure that the object has been updated across all the nodes.
Clustered Execution/data distribution
http://www.hazelcast.com/
Hazelcast is also a nice option as provides a way of executing java classes across a cluster. This is more useful if you have an object that represents a unit of work that needs to be performed and you dont care so much where it gets executed.
Also useful for distributed collections, i.e. a distributed map or queue
Roll your own RMI/Jgroups
Can write your own client/server but I think you will start to run into issues that the bigger frameworks solve if the requirements of the objects your dealing with starts to get complex. Realistically Hazelcast is really simple and should really eliminate the need to roll your own.
It's not open source, but Oracle Coherence would easily solve this problem.
If you need an implementation of JCache, the only one that I'm aware of being available today is Oracle Coherence; see: http://docs.oracle.com/middleware/1213/coherence/develop-applications/jcache_part.htm
For the sake of full disclosure, I work at Oracle. The opinions and views expressed in this post are my own, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or views of my employer.
It is just an idea. you might want to check the exact implementation.
It will downgrade performance but I don't see how it is possible to avoid it.
It not an easy one to implement. might be you should consider load balance instead of clustering.
you might consider RMI and/or dynamic-proxy.
extract interface of your objects.
use RMI to access the real object (from all clusters even the one that actually holds the object)
in order to create RMI for an existing code you might use dynamic-proxy (again..not sure about implementation)
*dynamic proxy can wrap any object and do some pre and post task on each method invocation. in this case it might use the original object for RMI invocation
you will need connectivity between clusters in order to propogate the RMI object.

is it possible save state between requests in GAE/java

I plan to implement a GAE app only for my own usage.
The application will get its data using URL Fetch service, updating it every x minutes (using Scheduled tasks). Then it will serve that information to me when I request it.
I have barely started to look into GAE, but I have a main question that I am not able to clear. Can state be maintained in GAE between different requests without using jdo/jpa and the datastore?
As I am the only user, I guess I could keep the info in a servlet subclass and so I can avoid having to deal with Datastore...but my concern is that, as this app will have very few request, if it is moved to disk or whatever (don't know yet if it has some specific name), it will loose its status?
I am not concerned about having to restart the whole app and start collecting data from scratch from time to time, that is ok.
If this is an app for your own use, and you're double-extra sure that you won't be making it multi-user, and you're not concerned about the possibility that you might be using it from two browsers at once, you can skip using sessions and use a known key for storing information in memcache.
If your reason for avoiding datastore is concern over performance, then I strong recommend testing that assumption. You may be pleasantly surprised.
You could use the http session to maintain state between requests, but that will use the datastore itself (although you won't have to write any code to get this behaviour).
You might also consider using the Cache API (like memcache). It's JSR 107 I think, which Google provide an implementation of. The Cache is shared between instances, but it can empty at anytime. But if you're happy with that behaviour this may be an option. Looking at your requirements this may be the most feasible option, if you don't want to write your own persistence code.
You could store data as a static against your Class or in an application scoped Object, but doing that means when your instance spins down or your instance switches to another instance, the data would be lost as your classes would need to be loaded into the new instance.
Or you could serialize the state to the client and send it back in with each request.
The most robust option is persistence to the datastore - the JPA code is trivial. Perhaps you should reconsider?

Extracting unique caller information in java

What I want to do is implement some basic security by checking not only what class has called a particular method, but also, which instance of that class.
I tried
StackTraceElement[] stackTraceElements = Thread.currentThread().getStackTrace();
but that obviously only gives me the class name. The problem with allowing/requiring the callers to send self, or personal IDs is that all the callers are required to have access to the details of all the others. Can anyone help?
EDIT: More information:
So we have a server which makes connections with several agents. The agents send packets of information which include the name they CLAIM to have. There is a special agent which decides whether or not people should be able to lie about this in each particular case.
The agents make connections to instances of an Agent class on the server, but there is also a possibility that some agents will run natively. The reason I'm interested in this approach is that I will need that technique later (extract the specific instance that called a given method)
I hope this is better, and sorry for not putting enough info before :/
This whole line of attack can't possible secure anything. If users can control the code that runs, they can just run a codegen library and edit your code. If users can't control the code, then this is all unnecessary.
If you can't resist this urge, one approach is to wrap everything in Proxies that communicate the information you need.
By Proxy, I mean java.lang.reflect.Proxy. That is, wrap every one of these objects in a proxy. The proxy's job would be to store away this on a stack of your own that the callees could consult.
This is essentially AOP (aspect oriented programming) reinvented, so you might want to read about that. Look at the Spring framework.
You are not securing anything like this.
I think for such problems just check that all contributing code comes from signed jars.
Look up Capability-based security. Instead of knowing which client is doing what, you should give each client separate capability objects (essentially proxy objects with different privileges).

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