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Adding a web interface (Spring MVC) to existing Java application

I have an existing Java application (Spring based) that currently does NOT have a web interface, nor does it run in a web container. It packages up nicely with a start program and just works.
What I need to do is add an administrative web interface for some administrative type things, retrieving real time metrics, and perhaps some graphs to give the users a warm fuzzy feeling knowing that everything is working. As we are a Spring shop, and some of our web applications already use Spring MVC it only makes sense to us, however, I'm not happy with the suggestions I've had from our internal Spring folks on how I should procede.
What would be the ideal way to bolt on this web interface?
Convert my application to a web application and have a web container launch the application. I not too keen on this approach is the web tier is really secondary to the primary application.
Create a separate project that packages as a war, embed Jetty in my existing app and have it load the war. I think I can use the context loader listener to make the root context of my application the parent to the web application spring context. This would involve breaking up my Maven project into 2 projects I believe. I can't use an existing web technology for communication between the web tier and the primary application as my primary application is not web enabled.
Embed Jetty and put the Spring MVC stuff directly in my app. While I've done this approach before, it does involve some ugliness - for instance exploding the JSP tag libs into my jar.
Any thoughts on some clean separation here?
Also of note, my current jar contains some utility applications which some shell scripts launch. Going a pure WAR route would make this not so easy, since I can't juse point java at my war file and choose a class to execute.
Thanks.

If it's true that web is just a minor addition the application, migrating it to WAR and deploying in servlet container might be an overkill. Embedding web server/servlet container looks much simpler, although it doesn't have to be Jetty or Tomcat. You can use web server built into JDK or write one on top of netty or even raw sockets. But that's a hell to maintain.
Yet another solution to springs to mymind when reading:
web interface for some administrative type things, retrieving real time metrics, and perhaps some graphs
Maybe you don't need an interface, but monitoring infrastructure instead? Check out JMX (Spring has great support for JMX) - and write a second web application that simply connects to your standalone Java app via JMX and displays the metrics in fancy way. Another approach is to expose JMX via Jolokia, which translates JMX to REST services.
This approach has several advantages:
monitoring API is universal, and you get it for free
you don't have to use web client, monitoring application is completely decoupled,
finally changes to your original application are minimal. Check out this proof of concept: 1, 2.

It really depends on the structure of your existing Java/Spring app and how much of an API it provides. I've done something similar to this and I approached it by creating a separate Spring MVC project and then specified the existing Java app as a JAR dependency.
This is easy with Maven (or Ivy, etc) and provides nice decoupling. The trick is to be able to write service classes in the Spring MVC app which then access data via your dependent Spring app via a simple DAO class. That's why I stated at the beginning, that it depends on the structure of your original Java app. It has to be able to provide an API for data access that you can then plug your DAO (impl) into.
If this is not easily done, then the next option I'd suggest is simply converting your Spring app to a Spring MVC app. I've worked on another app where we did this. Using Maven, its possible to specify that the build can create either a war file or a jar file (or both). So it can be deployed as either a webapp (via war) or a normal app (via jar). Yes, the jar version has a bit of bloat but its a worthwhile compromise.
The question of embedding Jetty or using Tomcat via a war file is a completely separate issue that has its pros and cons. It shouldn't affect the approach you take in architecting the web app in the first place.

Running OSGi Container Inside Embedded Jetty Web Container. Possible?

Working on a project that runs an embedded Jetty web server withing its infrastructure. We are looking at addings a new web application that would benefit greatly from allowing views to be plugged in using OSGi. Vaadin is our web framework of choice.
There is a great tutorial on creating an OSGi pluggable Vaadin application in GlassFish where the web container and OSGi container are bridged. That is, the web container is not running in the OSGi container. Here is the tutorial: https://vaadin.com/wiki/-/wiki/Main/Creating%20a%20Modular%20Vaadin%20Application%20with%20OSGi
My question is. Would it be possible to bridge an embedded Jetty web container and OSGi container in the same way as described in this tutorial.
Running jetty in an OSGi container is simply not an option for us as we have to work with existing deployment.

You should be able to embed any 4.2 compliant framework via the org.osgi.framework.launch.FrameworkFactory class. There's a few good examples if you google, two good ones are on the Felix site, and Neil Barlett's blog.
Configuring it will be far more work - you'll need to export all the Jetty and servlet packages via a system property org.osgi.framework.system.packages.extra and use something like Felix fileinstall or a console and pax-url to un/deploy bundles.
While your Vaadin app will be dynamic - nothing from Jetty or the embedding application will be (i.e. domain entities, services etc).

Could you embed a different container? Eclipse Virgo and JBoss AS are both OSGi and J2EE containers.
http://www.eclipse.org/virgo/
http://www.jboss.org/as7

Containerless deployment of JAX-RS Restful Service In Java

JAX-RS is a specification that helps you develop restful web services in Java.
But JAX-RS seem to be requiring a servlet container like "Tomcat"or "Jetty".
Managing container in a clustered mode is painful and more operations heavy.
Is there way to start JAX-RS service like a normal Java program/application ?
I want to use JAX-RS implementation but I don't want to follow typical"deploy" cycle.

JAX-RS is strongly linked to HTTP, hence most implementations (eg Jersey, Apache CXF) run in a servlet, which in turn runs in a container such as Tomcat or Jetty. I guess you could develop your own standalone JAX-RS implementation, but you'd end up reinventing the wheel as you'd be forced to implement most aspects of a web server.
Your worries about clustering also seem unfounded. Clustering Tomcat is simple, it is a very common thing to do and there's plenty of information available on the subject. It seems like clustering a custom implementation would actually be a much harder job.

OSGI creating modular web application

I have been looking for a solution to create a modular web application, which is modular in the sense that user can provide its own plugin in form of a simple jar which will then provide its own data to my web application and my webapp will be responsible for displaying it.
Now the catch is i want my web app to be as generic as possible without relying on the j2ee web container to support anything . i.e. i cant rely on my web container to provide osgi support and deploy web application as an osgi bundle itself ( which truly makes things very simple for eg. glassfish and WAS).
I am planning to use equinox and only solution i see currently is the servlet bridge they provide on their official site, but to me it is really a pain to delegate everything to a servlet which will in turn interpret the request and find an apropriate bundle Class and then again communicate back somehow only the data to the web application.
To me it would be wonderful if my web app was also a bundle.
Is there anything close to this ideal solution which i can try for? Or any other communication method between the two relams of osgi and web appliction (container)?

The OSGi spec details the WAB (Web Archive Bundle) format.
And Pax Web offers great support for WAB/WAR webapps (PAX Web runs fine on Equinox, Felix, etc)
Using pax web you get the BundleContext via the ServletContext, eg:
BundleContext bundleContext = (BundleContext) getServletContext().getAttribute("osgi-bundlecontext");
For the user driven pluggability you mention, I'd suggested you provide some service interfaces for the plugin bundles to implement and in your webapp use a ServiceTracker to listen for their registration (unless you're using Declarative Services). You also easily be able to install bundles from an upload servlet.
I'm guessing users uploading plugins would have to be logged in and authorized, so security issues will have been met at this point.
EDIT: replying to comment here as not enough space in comment field
Apologies, think I misinterpreted you question - you have an existing webapp container(s) and you want to deploy a WAR with OSGi functionality? If that's the case then either use the ServletBridge as others have mentioned or embed an OSGi framework into your WAR (this is relatively easy, see this for example).
You could even make this optional by attempting to get the BundleContext from the ServletContext and if this returns null then launch your own embedded framework. That way it'll run in a native OSGi container (e.g. Glassfish) or in a Java EE app server.
Otherwise, PaxWeb is an implementation of the HttpService and WebApp OSGi specs, but with lots of extensions to make life easier - but you deploy this to an OSGi container.

You might want to look into Apache Sling. It is a web framework that has an embedded OSGi container. The OSGi container is called Apache Felix and is pretty good.

ServletBridge is for embedding an OSGI contianer within a web container. The other option is to embed a web container (as a bundle) in an OSGI container. The following article has some details on how to achieve this.
http://java.dzone.com/articles/osgi-and-embedded-jetty

You may want to try ChonCMS - http://www.choncms.com
Its architecture is based exactly on what you are asking, it comes with few plugins to enable base CMS functionality, it is modular platform with minor web app container using felix and plugins can be added/removed at run time as well.
Disadvantage might be that it has lack of documentation, but you may ask, it is open source, I'm sure they will be happy to answer questions, and even better you can contribute - it is still in incubation phase.

What do I need to download to start developing apps using the Spring framework?

I need to start developing applications using the Spring framework, and am wondering what tools I need to download to have me up and running.
On the SpringSource website I am seeing all these applications to download and I am wondering, do I really need all this? And what versions should I use, especially for Spring Framework?
Spring Framework
SpringSource dm Server Samples
Spring Security
Spring Web Flow
Spring Web Services
Spring Dynamic Modules
Spring Integration
Spring Batch
Spring.NET
Spring JavaConfig
Spring LDAP
Spring Extensions
Spring IDE
Spring BlazeDS Integration
SpringSource Bundlor
Spring ROO
What other applications do I need to download (eg. Struts, Glassfish, Apache, etc.)?

This depends on what you want to use Spring for. Typically that's Web applications. If so you only need two things:
Spring framework (with minimal dependencies); and
A servlet container (eg Tomcat) or a full-blown application server (eg Glassfish, JBoss).
Everything else is optional. I believe the only required dependency is Apache Commons logging. Depending on what features you use, you may well need more.
If so, here is a [tutorial][1] that creates a barebones Spring MVC project. There are countless others around for that and other topics.
It's entirely possible to use Spring in, say, a Swing application in which case you obviously don't need a servlet container.

All you need from SpringSource is the Spring Framework.
Spring 3.0 is on the way, but for now, use 2.5.6.SEC01, the current production release.
You can get started with a simple servlet container (ie: Tomcat) rather than a full blown application server (eg: JBoss, Glassfish).
The Spring Framework comes bundled with jars for web development - ie: spring-web and spring-webmvc.
See #117535 for a simple example of using Spring MVC.

It mainly dependent on what you need Spring for. Each and every piece of Spring can, actually, be used in separation from the rest. You may use it only for IOC, in this case you don't need, for example, MVC and Servlets, etc...
The easiest way to start is to dowload the main package from http://www.springsource.com/download/community?project=Spring%20Framework
You can use Spring from any IDE

The best way is to use Maven with your project. Basically all you have to do is edit your pom.xml file and tell it that you want to use Spring. Then when you compile your code, Maven will go out and automatically download the Spring libraries you need from their public repository.
Here's an example:
http://pookey.co.uk/blog/archives/63-Getting-started-with-Maven-and-Spring.html