Annotation Visibility between EJB and Client layer - java

I am attempting to read method annotations in my web layer that are defined on classes in my EJB3 layer.
The object I am working with is a JPA defined entity on my EJB layer that is being fetched with a local ejb lookup to my client layer. When I attempt to read the annotations on the methods they are missing. It appears that all of the annotations are being stripped off of the objects that are being passed from the EJB layer to the Client layer.
The annotation I would like to read is not one of the EJB or JPA annotations but something to drive the processing of the class on the web tier.
If this is typical behavior of the servers then I can write the process differently, annotating the class was the simplest solution.
Thanks
-Scott

OK, the ease of EJB 3 tripped me up here.
In the client of an EJB app I am not looking at an instance of the Class from the EJB tier but a generated instance based on a generated interface from the EJB layer. Therefore the annotations defined on the EJB layer class are not present in the client layer of the application.

Related

Where should Business Delegate & Service Locator reside to not have circular dependency in this case?

I am working with Java 1.7, XDoclet 1.2.3, WildFly 8.2.1.Final, Dynamic Web Module 2.5, EJB 2.1 in Eclipse Luna.
I have an Enterprise Application project named
P001_EAR.
I have a Dynamic Web Project named P001_WAR.
I have a EJB Project named P001_EJB.
I have a EJB Client Project named P001_EJBClient.
I have a Utility Project named P001_SRC.
The P001_SRC contains the data layer, domain objects, business interface, helper classes.
The P001_EJB has Stateless Session EJBs which implements the business interface. It has a reference of P001_SRC.
The P001_EJBClient contains the remote and home interfaces of EJBs. It has a reference of P001_SRC.
The P001_WAR contains web stuff listeners, filters, servlets, JSPs, HTMLs. It has a reference of P001_SRC.
This is a typical scenario:
JSP call Servlet, Servlet call Business Delegate, Business Delegate call EJB (using ServiceLocator), EJB perform business operation.
Question is where to put Business Delegate?
I was thinking of putting them in P001_SRC but Business Delegate needs a reference to P001_EJBClient to perform their actions and that means a circular dependency.
How you would solve this issue?
Also the issue is to where to put the Service Locator? Would it go in the same project as Business Delegate?
Thanks
In a classic J2EE design pattern, the each client module of the EJB would have its own Business Delegate, which knows about the actual EJB. In your scenario, it would be in the WAR (as it's the client of the EJB). Similarly, your Service Locator would reside along with your Business Delegate and provide data about where your EJB is.
But seriously, is this some kind of exercise or school/interview question? Or are we traveling back in time? :-)
If this is for a new application, I would seriously consider moving away from EJB 2.x in favor of EJB 3.x, as it simplifies a lot. You can't even say that you "can't move", as you are already using an application server that supports EJB 3.x.

What is EJB alternative in Spring Framework

I am trying to learn Spring Framework, before that I used to create application with EJBs
[Web services]->[Business Layer]->[DAO Layer] | [Database]
in following way
WebServices: Restful API using Jersey with url mappings, that support both JSON and XML format( news/list.json, news/list.xml). Once a request is received by an endpoint(url-mapped-method) it is forwarded to a relevant EJB through lookup(remote, local). EJB process every thing, apply business rules and return result as DTO(Data transfer object),Service then transform the result into required format (JSON, XML)
Business Layer: Business Layer (Facade) implemented in EJB with remote and local interfaces, these EJBs can call other EJBs. WebService layer(and/or Timer service and MDBs) can also call any of the EJBs). For timer service related functionality I used EJB Timer Service and for Messages used Message Drive Bean and interceptor for logging and auditing.
DAO Layer: All the Database related functions(add,edit, delete, search) JPA/Hibernate using EntityManager are written here (Entity beans and HQL).
Seamless Transaction support, each EJB's method (lookup-based) call is treated as a separate transaction and calling methods of DAO layer are part of same transaction(provided that no extra configuration is provided). multiple operations are carried out in a single transaction If one db operation fails all others are roll backed automatically. Each Table is mapped as an entity class with relations etc.
I have worked on Spring MVC but could not map/understand correctly for above architecture
I know bit about AOP and that I think is a perfect replacement for Interceptors (or at least it work for me)
Now my question is how all these could be replaced in Spring framework?
Jersey (RestAPi) alternative in Spring>
EJB alternative in Spring (as EJB supports remoting, each lookup call to a method is treated as a transaction, calls to EJB's method could be intercepted and it comes with state-full and stateless flavors)?
Timer Service alternative in Spring?
Message Drive Bean alternative in Spring?
Interceptor alternative is AOP in Spring (As per my experience and that serve my purpose)
JPA(entity manager) alternative in spring?
Jersey (RestAPi) alternative in Spring?
Spring MVC does this perfectly fine, in my opinion. Just annotate your methods in your controller as the REST apis you want to use.
EJB alternative in Spring (as EJB supports remoting, each lookup call to a method is treated as a transaction, calls to EJB's method could be intercepted and it comes with state-full and stateless flavors)?
There is no full alternative. There are several techniques that implement this in parts: Spring remoting for remote calls, Spring transactions as transactions, Spring AOP interceptors for intercepting calls. However, for example XA transactions on remote calls are something you don't get as such in Spring. Spring however works fine with EJBs, so if you prefer them, you can still have them and use Spring in other parts of your software.
Timer Service alternative in Spring?
Spring task scheduling
Message Drive Bean alternative in Spring?
Message Listener Containers
Interceptor alternative is AOP in Spring (As per my experience and that serve my purpose)
There are several levels of interceptors in spring. There are handler interceptors in mvc, there are bean call interceptors like the SpringAutowiringInterceptor, and there are AOP-based interceptors that can be used in multiple layers.
JPA(entity manager) alternative in spring?
Spring has multiple of these as well. It's actually quite straightforward to just use JPA with Spring-Data, it's designed to integrate to JPA. There are Spring JDBC and other data layer alternatives though if Spring Data is not what you want.
Jersey (RestAPi) alternative in Spring ⇨ it's rest api (in spring with #Path annotation) or spring mvc if you want to use controllers (#Controller annotation)!
EJB alternative in Spring ⇨ Spring doesn't give statefull bean out of a box but you can use #Service annotation (or #Repository for DAO) but you have to handle transactions manually (with annotations for example)
Message Drive Bean alternative ⇨ There is no equivalent out of the box in Spring, you could use injection and librairies of Spring to get it working (package org.springframework.jms should contains what you need)!
JPA(entity manager) alternative is not ejb ⇨ so it can be used in Spring.
Spring is a lighweight library so you can do all you do with EJB but it's more configurable so you will have more work to do the same that EJB do. But this configuration brings you some advantages: you have the hand on it!
This explains Spring and Java EE (which is what you would have used EJBs in) side by side: http://www.slideshare.net/reza_rahman/java-ee-and-spring-sidebyside-34320697
Jersey offers Spring solutions too - see their website
Spring does support remote calls through, e.g., RMI; It also supports transactions; AFAIK, no explicit stateful/stateless Spring Components - it depends on how you use it
AFAIK nothing as awesome as TimerService, however, you could use Quartz
Spring offers MDPs (Message-Driven POJOs)
Spring does support JPA - see first link.
Another cool comparison slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/kelapure/java-e-evsspringshootout

Spring hierarchy visibility best practice

I am trying to understand how to best make use of spring application context hierarchies. Assuming I have an Application where I have #Controller beans, #Service beans, and #Repository beans, representing a front-end, business and persistence layer, it would seem nice if the layers had contexts in which only beans are visible which are relevant to the context. It would also be nice if I did not need special code for creating beans, just using #Autowired should be enough.
I can create a context for my repositories, let's say repoContext, in which there exist only the repository beans. The service layers needs access to those, but not vice versa, so I'd might create another context serviceContext which has repoContext as parent. Now the front-end layer needs the services, so I might create a controllerContext with serviceContext as parent. But doing so, the controllerContext would also be able to deliver repository beans to the front-end layer, which is the opposite of what I wanted.
So it seems to me that to properly separate bean dependencies in separate contexts, the parent-child relationship is not very useful to provide dependencies to a context.
Is there any better way? Could there be a front-end and a backend context sharing configuration of the service beans, but with the backend context being resposible to insatntiate service beans first (because only this context has repositories)? Or would that approach lead to the frontend context trying to instantiate own service beans?

should a Service layer be a Spring bean?

Can or should a Service layer be a Spring bean?
If so, how should it be got from a calling application, a consumer of a service?
Because the consumer must be aware that such a bean exists, so it in any case must use Spring
to make use of Service methods.
Of course. The service layer is the part of your application that is visible to other users (e.g. a Web layer) so it needs to be configured and setup somewhere. Imho a Spring configuration is the best place to put this configuration in. The Service Layer user then has to take care of instantiating that context and getting the Service Objects he needs.
An alternative - if it needs to run standalone - would be for your service class(es) implementing the Service Layer interface(s) to instantiate the Spring application context themselves.
By making your consumers also spring beans, and inject the service bean with dependency injection.
Yes, It is always nice to configure service beans as spring beans. In the web layer you need to take care of instantiating the needed service objects. Another option is to make the web layer classes also as spring beans and inject the necessary service layer spring beans. From the testing point of view also, this type of design is very helpful when we use Spring testing framework.

Making sense of JPA and EJB3 and WebServices

I'm just getting started with JPA, creating stateless session beans from the JPA entities, then accessing the beans through a web service. While I have a lot of experience developing database backed web services "the old way", I have some questions about what's going on behind the scenes with this new "annotation driven approach".
What I see is, NetBeans sort of directs you to build applications in this manner though their wizards.
Create an Enterprise Application with EJB and Web Application modules.
Create Entity classes. I created mine from an existing database.
Create session beans from the entity class.
Create Web services from the session bean.
It all looks pretty simple, but what's going on behind the scenes? Specifically:
I see that the web service (created with the #WebService annotation) references my stateless session bean (using the #EJB reference).
What happens here? Does it just grab an instance of the EJB from the application server's EJB pool?
Nevermind. I was thinking of an instance where there was more than 1 table - meaning more than 1 type of Entity class and more than 1 type of EJB. I was looking at the web service and just seeing the #EJB reference and didn't understand who it was getting the bean type from that annotation. Just below that however, it the reference to the local bean interface - so that's that.
If there is more than 1 type of EJB deployed to the server, how does it know which one to grab?
The EJB is defined via the #Stateless and #Local annotations. The bean implementation references an EnityManager via the #PersistenceContext annotation.
Where is the jndi lookup to the database done (maybe in the persistence.xml file)?
Do all of the EJBs share a common EntityManager (assuming the EntityManager is thread safe)? If not, I know that the EnityManager utilizes a second level cache to help reduce trips to the database, are these caches somehow kept in sync?
I know this is a lot of questions, but they're all sort of related and there seem to be a lot of complicated concepts for something that's so easy to build through the wizards. I want to make sure I understand what's all going on here.
Thanks in advance!
What happens here? Does it just grab an instance of the EJB from the application server's EJB pool?
A JAX-WS web component endpoint (as opposed to a JAX-WS EJB endpoint) follows the typical servlet threading model, which means that typically there is one instance that is executed concurrently for each client. JAX-WS implementations are free to leverage pools of bean instances to handle a request in a fashion similar to stateless session EJB components. (source: Developing Applications for the JavaTM EE Platform FJ-310).
In all cases, it is fine to inject/look-up stateless beans because the container guarantees that the beans will always be thread safe. In affect, the container automatically serializes clients calls but uses instance pooling to make sure you still get concurrency benefits.
If there is more than 1 EJB deployed to the server, how does it know which one to grab?
Hmm... I didn't get this one. Can you clarify what you mean exactly? Why would there be any ambiguity?
Where is the jndi lookup to the database done (maybe in the persistence.xml file)?
In a Java EE environment, you specify your data source in a <jta-data-source> element in each persistence unit of the persistence.xml file (which can contain several persistence units) and the data source will be obtained by the EntityManager (only when needed, i.e. only if a data access is really needed).
Do all of the EJBs share a common EntityManager?
No. The EntityManager is a non-thread-safe object that should be used once, for a single business process, a single unit of work, and then discarded. In a Java EE environment using EJB 3, the default pattern is "entitymanager-per-request". A request from the client is send to the EJB 3 persistence layer, a new EntityManager is opened, and all database operations are executed in this unit of work. Once the work has been completed (and the response for the client has been prepared), the persistence context is flushed and closed, as well as the entity manager object. (source: Chapter 4. Transactions and Concurrency).

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