How to reuse classes in a Spring Boot REST application? - java

I have a Spring Boot REST application with JPA entities and Repository classes (and related services) that works very well. Now I would like to reuse these classes for other purposes, like weekly CRON jobs and similar one-time processes which will be run from the command line.
What would be the best way to do this? The challenge is that the persistence context properties are set in application.properties, and the persistence context isn't initialized unless the Application class is initialized.
I can break out all of these classes into a separate project, and use a different way to define the persistence context there, but this becomes more of a maintenance headache if anything changes with the entities or DAO methods.
What I would really like is to have a way, from the command line, to tell Spring Boot to run another class instead of the main Application (and have the persistence context properly initialized). Any way to do this?
(Note I asked a similar question which got no response: Possible to use Spring Boot repositories from another main class?)
[Edit] is it possible to do this by creating a #component that implements the CommandLineRunner? I just want it to run a simple one-time process and not the full REST application.

There are a number of ways you could do this.
You can have multiple Main classes, and then select which application yuo want to start select main class, however if you don't know how ComponetScan works you will end up loading both applications if you are not careful.
Another way is to use Profiles, you can set the profile when you start your spring app, and then have your web profile that will start Tomcat, and a command line profile that will not .
In the project I'm working on we have choosen to have the data-layer as a completly separate module (same gradle project), which has it's own Spring Context. The data-layer spring context is then used as the parent context for other applications, as a reusable component. It is a somewhat cleaner separations of concerns, were the shared code is clearly marked, instead of having multiple applications inside the same code mudule.

Related

SpringBatch with SpringBoot

Hi folks need some opinions here.
I already have a spring boot application holding all my rest APIs running on tomcat that ships in with spring-boot-starter-web.
I would like to set up jobs using spring batch that will be schedule via kubernetes. The idea is to share the same business logic instead of creating a standalone batch project which i need to maintain double business logic.
Question, scheduling via kubernetes meaning i will be firing java -jar someJar --spring.batch.jobNames=xxx in container, doing that it will also start up all my RestApis right? which in turn unnecessary and waste of resources. Anyway to mitigate this or my understanding is wrong?
The way I would implement this is by extracting the common business logic in a separate module, and make the batch app and the webapp depend on that module.

Dynamically loading Spring Beans and Components in Spring Boot

I'm trying to make a Spring Boot app where plugins are loaded dynamically from JARs at runtime. I also want the plugins to have access to all the Spring Boot features, most prominently Spring Data JPA. I've already figured out how to load classes from JARs, and now my problem is how to "hook up" the loaded classes (that might be Beans, JpaRepositories etc.) to "work with" my main Spring Boot application.
I also might in the future want to have my own annotation system for doing different things with the main app from the plugins, (that I know how to do using reflection) and I would want to still be able to do it after I manage to sort the Spring stuff out.
I imagine I have to tell Spring somehow to additionally look for #Components and other meaningful classes from those JARs, when it's scanning for annotations. I tried with #ComponentScan's basePackageClasses attribute but that needs to be constant, and hard-coding this is not an option for what I wanna do.
So is what I want to achieve even possible? And if it is, then can I do it through Java code, or is it maybe achievable by writing some XML configs?
When you start an spring app, beans are loaded and hooked in its contexts, so if you want to add more to it manually you might need to reload the whole context which may not be a good idea for an spring boot app.
Instead, I would suggest to use spring profiles, so you can define different configurations and based on what you want you can simple enable the one you need.
Find out more at:
https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/reference/html/spring-boot-features.html#boot-features-profiles
Hope this helps!

Have one Tomcat application get a bean from another one

Currently I have a Spring project that uses Spring JPA to work with data objects and my database. All of it's functionality can be accessed by calling a single facade bean. I want to make a web application based on this data model, but I don't want to extend this project any further. Instead I would like to separate my persistence and service layers from an actual web application layer. That said, I want to package this project into a ".war" file and deploy it on my Tomcat instance. Upon demand from any other application working on Tomcat I would like to have this other application to be injected with the facade bean from my ".war".
I'm sort of new to Tomcat, and googling doesn't really help me much. So here are problems and questions that I have with this concept:
Is this the right way to do what I want? What I mean is I want behavior provided by my current Spring application to be accessible and reusable by different web applications working on one server. This might be a common case and I would like to know if this is ok as a solution.
If I have this facade bean in XML context or in annotation context of my project, how can I make this bean visible to any other application working on the same Tomcat instance upon being deployed? What should I write in my web applications to have them wired with this bean? If I want this bean to be a singleton and have all calls to it's functionality synchronized, should I do this through my code/context, or can I have Tomcat somehow take care of this for me?
Thanks in advance.
You might want to consider a REST API approach. You can't do "cross application injection" with Spring and JNDI can be cumbersome to use.
Webapps (the things that run in a servlet container like tomcat) are isolated from each other, by design. Sharing may well be a bad idea. However, to share, you can use JNDI. Setting up JNDI in tomcat 7 is described here. You will need a custom resource factory.

What does application context in Spring do?

I asked a question yesterday ( Using Spring in standalone apps ) on how you would use Spring in a standalone application. From that I learned that you only create the application context object once. So now the question is (even though it was partially answered in a comment) what happens when you create the application context?
Does Spring create the beans and wire them together when you say
new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("some.xml") ?
I am not sure if I understand the boot strapping, and why it is like that.
The idea behind the ApplicationContext in Spring is that in order to properly inject objects where they are needed, some thing needs to be aware of the configuration the user specifies and inject dependencies based on this configuration.
The ApplicationContext is the thing that understands the user's wishes in terms of where and what should be injected (as well as other things such as AOP pointcuts and such) based on the configuration a user provides, either through an xml file or annotations.
Yes it will parse the bean definition file , it will create the beans , give them the dependencies,
The easiest way to debug is to go with the output print statements,
Put the statements in constructor & setter methods and try different possibilities to track the flow

java web applicaton layout, please explain some design principles/patterns

I'm looking at this java web application that is using hibernate, jsp's, and spring framework. (from what I can tell!)
the file layout is like this:
classes/com/example/project1
inside project1
/dao
_entity_Dao.java
/dao/hibernate/
_entity_DaoHibernate.java
/factory
DaoFactory.java
DaoFactoryImpl.java
/managers
_entity_Manager.java
/managers/impl
_entity_ManagerImpl.java
/model
_entity_.java
/service
_xxxx_Service.java
/service/impl/
_xxxx_ServiceImpl.java
Have you guys read about this sort of layout somewhere? Is it considered best-practice?
What is the difference between a Factory and a Manager and a Service? (high level)
For typical layout of an application built with Spring I'd look at the example web applications that ship with it (meaning Spring).
Using things like DaoFactory is definitely not be a best-practice, the Daos should get injected instead. In general you should not need factories with Spring except for some unusual cases. Injecting is done when the web application starts up, spring reads the configuration information and constructs all the objects and plugs them in according to configuration xml and/or annotations (this is assuming singleton-scope for your objects, which is usual for stateless things like daos and services, things scoped as prototypes get new copies created as the application asks for them).
In Spring applications a service is similar to a Stateless Session Bean, it is a transactional layer encompassing application logic for a use case. So if your user takes an action that has the effect of causing several different tables to get updated you can inject the daos into that service, have a method on that service do the updates on the daos, and configure Spring to wrap that service in a proxy that makes that method transactional.
I've seen manager used as another name for what I described as service. Here I don't know what they're doing with it.
I don't like the idea of combining your interfaces and impls in one project. Just because you want to consume the interface doesn't mean you want to consume the impl and it's cumbersome transitive dependencies. The main reason is because there will be more than one impl (hypothetically, i.e. JPA/JDBC/Hibernate, or Axis2/CXF, etc.). The interfaces should not be bound to the implementation, otherwise the point is lost. This also allows for easy dependency injection as the impls simply reside on the classpath, then something like a Proxy or Spring (e.g.) can inject the implementations.
In all likelihood, all you need is a:
Interface Project
dao
EntityDao
types
Entity
HibernateImpl Project
dao
EntityHibernateDao
src/main/resources/
EntityMapping.cfg.xml

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