Shared Services on Tomcat 6? - java

I have been trying to figure out a way to create shared Hibernate session service on Tomcat 6.
basically, I need to have this service: 1. to be re-deployable (which exclude the JNDI service); 2. all the web applications can share the same Hibernate sessions (cache). The Tomcat class loading mechanism seems make sharing the db sessions impossible. I could create a web application with the Spring HttpInvoker which can be used by other web applications. Or I could go with the Spring dm-Server but it seems the complexity of the solution would comparable to that of an application server (JBoss or Glassfish).
What would be the viable solution?

You can use the 2nd level cache
Apart from that - let's assume you want to modularize you application and that's the reason for having two (or more) webapps. But if you want to cache entities from two different webapps, that means the same entity classes exist in both. Which by itself isn't that wrong, but having the same cache for these entities in different contexts seems wrong. Perhaps you don't need two web apps after all?
If you are certain that you need this, you can try implementing a custom Tomcat valve, but I can give you neither recommendations nor details about it.

Related

Secure two separate java applications with one spring security

I have been looking for quite awhile for solution to have one spring security for 2 or more applications.
Basically I have a main app (/) running on tomcat, where the user can interact with it etc, and second one, in separate a context (/player).
I want to use one spring security to secure both app. So when user will login to main app (/) will be also able to access another context.
This is the point where I got stuck. If anyone has any idea how to set it up, that would be more then great.
In my opinion, you can use security for two contexts, if they are part of one application only. Means, both are deployed with one war itself.
If two applications are deployed with separate wars - I do not think that you can use single security context.
A basic example (& some google) might help you.
you should try single sign with spring security
http://www.disasterarea.co.uk/blog/saml-based-single-sign-on-sso-in-spring-security-applications/

Heterogeneous Java EE cluster

Is it possible to form a cluster in which there are different types of application servers? For instance, 1 JBoss, 1 Glassfish and 1 WebSphere? Lets assume we are using EJB3.0.
Stateless session beans should be relatively easy and simple load balancing among the instances should do the work, but what about SFSBs and session replication? Is it possible to utilize some cache storage like infinispan for it?
I would appreciate any comments or sharing your experience on this topic.
I assume it may be possible if you use some application server agnostic solution like Hazelcast. According to its documentation it's pretty easy to configure web session replication and the only requirements it has are
Target application or web server should support Java 1.5+
Target application or web server should support Servlet 2.4+ spec
Session objects that needs to be clustered have to be Serializable
I've not tried to configure a cluster the way you've described, however I think it may do the trick.
The responce is simply NO. Clusturing is a non standard feature, it is up to the Java EE implementation to provide clustoring keeping standard behaviour (with very litle constrains, as stickiness is expected and session object are expected to be serializable) and no interoperability is forseen.
You can of course made the cluster your self, setting up an external data grid to serve as session store and manage your self the cache, but then you will lose any framework functionality related to the session (you will need to do every thing by your self) and what the point any more to use a full Java EE application server. Yes you will then need to forget about SFSBs.
I am ready curous what issue you want to solve by this type of architecture. I don't see any that can over come the cost of maintining 3 differents apps (app server have slite difference on the dev side) and more importantly 3 differents infrastructure operation stack (on this side there is lot of difference, so you need to multiply the opperation team knowlages).

EJB3 Enterprise Application As Portal & Client Web Apps - Architecture/Design

As shown in the above pic, I have a EJB-3 Enterprise application (EAR file), which acts as a portal and holds 3 web applications (WAR files) that communicate and transact with the same datastore. These 3 webapps are not portlet implementations, but normal webapps which interact with the datastore through the Enterprise App's Persistence Layer. These webapps are developed independently and so, some of 'em use Webservices from the Enterprise App and some of 'em use EJB-Clients.
Also, there is an other option of replacing these webapps (Web App1, Web App2 and Web App3) and using independent Enterprise Apps to communicate and transact with the database, as shown below:
Now, my questions are:
1) What is the best Option among the listed 2 options (above)?
2) How does it affect when we replace those webapps acting as clients to the Enterprise App, as independent Enterprise Apps (EAR files)?
3) What is a better model for Transaction handling, SSO functionality, Scalability and other factors?
4) Are there are any other better models?
EDIT:
1) In the first model, which method is a preferred way to interact with the EAR file - webservices or ejb-client jar file/library (interfaces and utility classes)?
2) How do both models differ in memory usage (server RAM) and performance. Is there any considerable difference?
Since you are being so abstract I will do it as well. If we remove all buzzy words as "Portal", "Enterprise Apps" and so on... What we have at the end is three web apps and a common library or framework (The enterprise App).
Seeing its app as simple as posible. You have three developers that need develop three web apps. You will provide some common code useful to build their apps. The model you will use will depends of what kind of code you will provide them.
1.- You will only provide some utils, and common business code. May be the clasical library fit your needs. (In Java EE environments you must take in account how can you take the advantages of persistence cache level 2 sharing a Session Factory for a single datastore)
2.- You will provide shared services as persistence, cache, security, audit, and so on... You will need a service layer as the first option. You will have a shared state so you need only one instance.
3.- The more common case is both you provide some business API and a service layer to common services.
You aren't indicating any requirement that force you to use a more complex solution for your scenario.
EDIT:
About if it is prefered rmi (the ejb-client) or webservices. I always use rmi to communicate applications geographically close. It use is simple and the protocol is much more faster that webservices (you can read a lot of comparison over this topic searching for rmi webservices performance on google).
On the other hand rmi is more sensible to network latence, require special firewall configurations and it is more coupled that webservices. So if I pretend to offer services to a third party or connect geographically sparse servers I will prefer webservices or even REST.
About the last question initially there is no any difference about deploy one or ten applications in the same server. The deploy fee will be insignificant over the overhead for the use of the application. Of course, you must take this as a generical assumption. Obviously the size and how you deploy your applications will have an impact about the memory consumption and others.
You must take in account that this decisions can be easily changed as you will needed. So as I said you could start with the simple solution and if you encounter a problem deploying your applications your could restructure your ears easily.
I'm inclined to agree with Fedox. If there is no reason for choosing one solution over the other ( business reason, technical reason, etc) then you might as wel choose the path of least resistance. To my mind that would be the first solution.
In general terms start simple and add complexity as you need to. Your solutions have no meaning without context. A banking app needs different considerations to a blog.
Hope this helps
There is a new platform called Vitria's BusinessWare, it's a very successful project which is worth millions.
Now let's see how does it work and what it does so that we can do the same in theory:
It interconnects projects with their databases, web-services with their EJBs..etc.
From their concept we can learn the following:
Create main EJB stateless bean (API), whose job is to pass messages
from:
web-services to other web-services
web-services to webapps
webapps to other web-services
The purpose of this EJB is first do validations in the main database
and then pass the calls to the other modules.
Only this EJB has access to the DB to more secure the connections
This EJB will queue the messages until the modules to sent are free
to accept
This EJB will control all the processes in the DB
This EJB will decide where to send the messages

Oracle/Java application, recommended architectures

I am working on a desktop Java application that is supposed to connect to an Oracle database via a proxy which can be a Servlet or an EJB or something else that you can suggest.
My question is that what architecture should be used?
Simple Servlets as proxy between client and database, that connects to the database and sends results back to the client.
An enterprise application with EJBs and remote interfaces to access the database
Any other options that I haven't thought of.
Thanks
Depending on how scalable you want the solution to be, you can make a choice.
EJB (3) can make a good choice but then you need a full blown app server.
You can connect directly using jdbc but that will expose url of db (expose as in every client desktop app will make a connection to the DB. you can not pool, and lose lot of flexibilities). I would not recommend going this path unless your app is really a simple one.
You can create a servlet to act as proxy but its tedious and not as scalable. You will have to write lot of code at both ends
What i would recommend is creating a REST based service that performs desired operations on the DB and consume this in your desktop app.
Start off simple. I would begin with a simple servlet/JDBC-based solution and get the system working end-to-end. From that point, consider:
do you want to make use of conenction pooling (most likely). Consider C3P0 / Apache DBCP
do you want to embrace a framework like Spring ? You can migrate to this gradually, and start with using the servlet MVC capabilities, IoC etc. and use more complex solutions as you require
Do you want to use an ORM ? Do you have complex object graphs that you're persisting/querying, and will an ORM simplify your development ?
If you do decide to take this approach, make sure your architecture is well-layered, so you can swap out (say) raw JDBC in favour of an ORM, and that your development is test-driven, such that you have sufficient test cases to confirm that your solution works whilst you're performing the above migrations.
Note that you may never finalise on a solution. As your requirements change, and your application scales, you'll likely want to swap in/out the technology most suitable for your current requirements. Consequently the architecture of your app is more important than the particular toolset that you choose.
Direct usage of JDBC through some ORM (Hibernate for example) ?
If you're developing a stand-alone application, better keep it simple. In order to use ORM or other frameworks you don't need a J2EE App Server (and all the complexity it takes with it).
If you need to exchange huge amounts of data between the DB and the application, just forget about EJBs, Servlets and Web Services, and just go with Hibernate (or directly with plain old JDBC).
A REST based Web Services solution may be good, as long as you don't have complex data, and high numbers (try to profile how long does it takes to actually unmarshal SOAP messages back and to java objects).
I have had a great deal of success with using Spring-remoting and a servlet based approach. This is a great setup for development as well, since you can easily test your code without deploying to an web container.
You start by defining a service interface to retrieve/store your data (POJO's).
Create the implementation, which can use ORM, straight JDBC or some pooling library (container provided or 3rd party). This is irrelevant to the remote deployment.
Develop your application which uses this service directly (no deployment to a server).
When you are satisfied with everything, wrap your implementation in a war and deploy with the Spring DispatcherServlet. If you use maven, it can be done via the war plugin
Configure the desktop to use the service via Spring remoting.
I have found the ability to easily develop the code by running the service as part of the application to be a huge advantage over developing/debugging something running on a server. I have used this approach both with and without an EJB, although the EJB was still accessed via the servlet in our particular case. Only service to service calls used the EJB directly (also using Spring remoting).

Creating an application instance specific cache for Java/WebLogic Web Services

I'm new to both J2EE and WebLogic. I'd trying to determine the best way to implement a non-distributed cache (one cache per application instance) in a Java Web Services application running on WebLogic 10.3. I need to cache several different POJO's.
There will be multiple WebLogic instances running on each server in a cluster. When reading about ServletContext and InitialContext, I was a bit confused. I believe ServletContext is instance specific, but I can only access it from a Servlet, correct? I will need to access to the cache in separate threads so I'm not sure if this is possible outside of a Servlet.
I was reading a bit about JNDI, but it seems to work at the server or cluster level and not for each WebLogic/application instance.
Can anyone provide me with a suggestion and a code example to initialize, access, and destroy a cache of Java POJO's?
Thanks!
Leon
Here is an example on how to implement a method cache with Spring and EHCache:
http://opensource.atlassian.com/confluence/spring/display/DISC/Caching+the+result+of+methods+using+Spring+and+EHCache
The cache will be local if configured as in the example.
I am using this method in a web service client library to cache the results of a frequently used service that has nearly no update to its data.

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