Spring, create a bean from deserializing - java

I've not used Spring too much, so I might be missing something obvious. Anyway, this is the question:
Say you have a Spring managed bean that is a networking client. After you call a method on it you get some object back, say it is a List
Now I want to process that List into something more useful for the rest of my application, say it is of a MyBusinessBean type.
How do I avoid doing a
new MyBusinessBean(List<String> info)
?? If I do this it becomes an object that is not part of the context.
I'm doing something like:
MyBusinessBean myBean = (MyBusinessBean) applicationContext.getBean("myBusinessBean", info);
However I keep reading everywhere that this is a signal of something not being done properly, since I am making my code context aware. What is the proper Spring way of doing this?

The second way is what you do in Spring. Calling "new" means you're breaking the model.
But don't assume that every call to "new" is eliminated by Spring. Every object need not be under Spring's control. Sometimes you just gotta call "new", usually in the scope of a single method. Create the object, use it, GC it - no Spring bean factory needed.
If you want to give an object in your app access to that List after serialization, simply pass the reference. You don't need the Spring bean factory in the situation you've described, because you've already got the serialized the object from the server.

Related

Spring properties hot reloading

In a project, I have a org.apache.commons.configuration.PropertiesConfiguration object registered as a Bean, to provide configuration values around the application, with hot-reloading capabilities.
Example: I defined a DataSource singleton Bean. I then created a ReloadingDataSource object, which wraps and delegate to the "real" DataSource, and each time the configuration file changes, it is able to recreate it in a thread-safe manner.
I'd like to do something similar for simple properties values.
I'd like to create a simple, Autowireable object that delegate retrieval to the Apache PropertiesConfiguration Bean.
The usage should be similar to:
#Property("my.config.database")
private Property<String> database;
And the call site would simply be:
final String databaseValue = database.get()
You'll say, just pass around the PropertiesConfiguration object. Maybe you're right, but I'd like to provide another abstraction over that, a simpler-to-use one.
I know that with ProxyFactoryBean it is possible to create an AOP proxy for method calls. Is this the right path, or are there better alternatives? Maybe pure Spring AOP/AspectJ?
I don't want to use Spring Cloud or similar dependencies.
Spring Cloud will recreate the beans, so keep in mind whatever solution you come up with, if you have another bean which only reads this value once for instance when it is initiated, it won't re-initialize itself, that is the problem Spring Cloud Config takes care of.
AOP only works at the method level as I understand, so you can definitely intercept a call to somebean.getFoo(). But within somebean, there is no way to proxy calls to the variable itself: somebean.foo. You would have to reset foo every time your PropertiesConfiguration changed, and again keep in mind that, if anything else needs the new value of foo you would need to handle this or bite the bullet use Spring Cloud.
The overhead you have with changing stuff at run-time to avoid a re-deploy should really be thought carefully about. For Netflix, this makes sense because they have thousands and thousands of servers. But for smaller players I can't see the justification, the decision adds much complexity. Nightmare to test.
Do you test changing your configuration at run-time or accept the risk and assume it works?
Do you test changing from A -> B whilst under load of a user performing a transaction to the database?
Test other raise conditions where foo is changing?
Some things to think about.

Spring: Scoped fields

I wrote this idea on the Spring JIRA and even though I know this is not a key feature and has minor priority, I'd still expect some answer by now. I publicize the idea, because I want to know what you guys think about it, if it's cool and I should implement it myself, or is the need for this is a sign of bad architecture.
So the idea itself is - as the title suggests - is a field in a Spring Bean, which has a different scope then the bean itself. We already have something like this, in the shape of scoped proxies, however it works only for bean dependencies. I might want to store a list of Strings of session scope in a bean of singleton scope. I, then have to create a new bean, with scope of session for one field and some functions to use that field. It seems a waste of code and I'd find it bad, because I wouldn't be able to use that bean anywhere else, because it'd already have that data the first class put into it.
I could rephrase the mess above and say that I want to have named beans with arbitrary type (so not necessarily spring beans) and on top of the scope we configure it to have, that field would also be different for every instance of the parent class.
This could make a field instance broader than a prototype scoped bean, but also less broad then the actual scope we'd like to use it in. Kind of a middle ground.
Here is the JIRA issue I wrote: https://jira.spring.io/browse/SPR-16971
In my understanding, Scopes only work with Dependency Injection as it's the DI Container that decides if it should return a new instance or an already existing one. So everything that is #Autowired can be scoped.
I can't imagine how scoping a normal field would work. If I change it, should it change in all other objects that "use" it? I would have to be some kind of proxy object then and neve a primivive value. If on the other hand you have a proxy object, why not use the currently available autowire mechanism.

Dynamic proxies to auto-save models

I'm trying to make some auto-magic happen in java using proxies to track objects and saving them when a set* method is called. I started of using java's built in Proxy, and everything works just fine, but from what I can understand I need a interface for every model, which is something that I'm trying to avoid.
This is where CGLIB comes in, it allows me to create proxies of my models without the use of interfaces. BUT, how can I now retrieve the original object, the one I am trying to save?
The optimal solution to be would be something like the EntityManager interface used by hibernate, where you keep your original object, but it is still tracked.
MethodInvocation interface specifies only one method that takes MethodInvocation as an argument. MethodInvocation has several methods to retrieve objects that are being acted upon: getStaticPart, getThis. Have you tried calling them?
As a shameless plug, you could actually use Hibernate together with Xstream. Here's my blog post about Xstream persister. But in this case Xstream is used to save fields in XML format in a database.

External thread callback to a session scoped Spring bean

I have a Spring Web MVC application where i need to use an external device driver which returns information in an asynchronous manner every time the device gathers some new data. We need to pass an object at the begging to the start read method. This object implements an API defined interface which declares the callback method.
The problem raises when this callback method needs to manipulate some bean in Spring's session scope. Because the callback gets called in the Thread of the driver when the callback implementation wants to access a Spring bean it yields an exception saying that the current thread is not in Spring's managed scope.
I'm wondering if there's any way to make the object which is implementing the callback interface into some kind of proxy which knows information about the context of the session which constructed it so this way it can invoke bean methods through Spring's context object?
I think you are approaching the problem from the wrong side. I guess you want the device driver callback to put some results in the user session. But this is not enough to display that data, so (guessing again) probably some long-polling is involved, looking into the session through session-scoped bean.
With this assumption I advice you to generate some sort of unique requestId every time you call the back-end driver and put that requestId both in the HTTP session and in the callback. When the callback is called, it pushes the results into some sort of map, where key is the assigned requestId. Now the client (who knows the requestId as well) can look into the map and fetch the results. You must remember about the synchronization (which is also the case with normal HttpSession).
If you have some more advanced way of notifying clients (Comet? WebSockets?) this can also be done in this callback.
Note that technically you can pass an instance of HttpSession object into the callback instance (but as you can see this does not work with Spring session-scoped beans) but passing session around doesn't seem like a good design. It is simply better to provide a level of indirection. What if, in the future, you would like to reuse that code with command-line or desktop client?

Singleton Object Created for each Request

I want to create a singleton object whose scope is basically only the request. This will be used to collect the errors and we need to send error whenever we send the response back.
Can anyone provide pointers toward this thing?
I am also using spring.
I tried using Spring container singleton object scope session or request but still my object is holding values from the earlier request
I am using this error object with AspectJ. Will that may cause problem on static binding?
how about
//sync this code
if(request.getAttribute("someKey") == null){
// create object and set it
}
If you set the Object life cycle in the Spring container to be per request then it should only exist for that HttpRequest.
Generally for direct injection containers like Spring when you set the object life cycle or object scope to be per request then it should create an new instance of the object for each http request that it recieves.
If it is not doing this then I would assume that it is more than likely something to do with your configuration.
Singleton is the defualt for the spring container when creating beans I think so you have to specifically set the object scope to per request.
Bean Scopes
http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/2.5.x/reference/beans.html
I'm not sure that singleton is what you want here - if two requests arrived concurrently they would share the singleton object, and their errors will get mixed up.
Is it possible to create an object to hold the errors and put that in to a ThreadLocal object. The scope of the object will be constrained by the request, and access to it in the ThreadLocal object is easily achieved from within your application without having to pass a refernce to the object around.
You can use ThreadLocal.

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