How to share a library for data access in tomcat 7? - java

I'm fairly new to the whole web programming stuff and have the following problem:
I have 2 webapps, one a axis web service and another one is a spring application. Both should get a set of data from a library which contains the data in memory. This data is large so copying the data for each app is no option.
What I did so far is developing the library which loads and contains the data in a static container. The plan was, that both apps instatiate the class containing the container and may access the data.
Sadly, this doesn't work. I get an exception that the object I want to use are in different classloaders.
My question is: How can I provide such a container provider for both libraries in tomcat 7?
BTW: A database is no option, because its to slow.
Edit: I should have been clear about the data. The data is a Topic Map stored in an topic map engine. (see http://www.isotopicmaps.org ). The engine is used to access the data and therefore is the access point to the data. We have an own engine, which hold the data inmemory which is faster than a database backend.
I Want to have a servlet which provides the configuration and loading of topic maps and then the two servlets above should be able to read and modify a topic map. Thats why I need to have a sort of shared access point to the engine.

This is what distributed caches, key-value stores, document stores, and noSql databases are built for. There are many options and new ones each day. The free and open-source options are likely to meet your needs and provide you with as much support as you will needs. The one the is currently my favorite is membase.

So you want a distributed in-memory cache for a server cluster. You can use among others Terracotta for this. You can find here a nice introduction to Terracotta.
Update: I actually disagree the argument that a database is "too slow". If it's slow, then the datamodel and/or data access code is simply badly designed.

Related

Where to syncronize inside a Java WebApp

My employer has currently given me a project that has me scratching my head about synchronization.
I'm going to first talk about the situation I'm in:
I've been asked to create a pdf-report/quotation-tool that takes data (from csv-files; because the actual database the data is on is being used by old IBM software and they for reasons (unknown) don't want any direct access to this database (so instead of making copies of the data to other databases, they apparently found it incredibly fine to just create a folder on the server with loads and loads and loads of CSV-files.)), this piece of software is to load data into the application, query it, transform where needed, do calculations and then return with a pdf-file to the end-user.
The problem here is that getting, querying, and calculating things takes a fair amount of time, the other problem is: they want it to be a WebApp because the business team does not want to install any new software, they're mostly moving towards doing everything online (since the start of the pandemic), it being a WebApp means that every computation has to be done by the WebApp and getting the data likewise.
My question: Is each call to a servlet by a separate user treated as a separate servlet and should I only synchronize the methods on the business logic (getting and using the data); or should I write some code that puts itself in the middle of the servlet, receives a user-id (as reference), that then runs the business-logic in a synchronized-fashion, then receiving data and returning the pdf-file?
(I hope you get the gist of it...)
Everything will run on Apache Tomcat 8 if that helps. Build is Java 11lts.
Sorry, no code yet. But I've made some drawings.
With java web applications, the usual pattern is for the components to not have conversational state (meaning information specific to a specific user's request). If you need to keep state for a user on the server, you can use the http session. With a SPA or Ajax application it's often easier to keep a lot of that kind of state in the browser. The less state you keep on the server the easier things are as your application scales, you don't have to pin sessions to servers (messing up load balancing) or copy lots of session state across a cluster.
For simple (non-reactive) web apps that do blocking i/o, each request-response cycle gets its own dedicated thread from tomcat's pool. That thread delivers the http request to the servlet, handles the business logic and blocks while talking to the database, then carries the http response.
(Reactive webapps are going to be more complex to build, you will need a non-blocking database driver and you will have less choices for databases, so I would steer clear of those, at least for your first web application.)
The threadpool used by tomcat has to protect itself from concurrent access but that doesn't impact your code. Likewise there are 3rd party middletier caching libraries that have to deal with concurrency but you can avoid dealing with it directly. All of your logic is confined to one thread so it doesn't interfere with processing done by other threads unless there are shared mutable data structures. Those data structures would be the part of the application where synchronization might be one of several possible solutions.
Synchronization or other locking schemes are local to one instance of the application. If you want to stand up multiple instances of this application then you need to be aware each one would be locking separately from the others. So for some things it's better to do locking in the database, since that is shared across webapp instances.
If you can make use of a database to store your data, so that you can rely on the database for caching and indexing, then it seems likely your application should be able to avoid having doing a lot of locking.
If you want examples there are a lot of small examples for building web apps using spring at https://spring.io/guides. These are spring boot applications that are self hosted so you can put them together quickly and run them right away.
Going rogue with a database may not be the best course since databases need looking after by DBAs. My advice is put together two project plans, one for using a database, and one for using the flat files. The flat file one will have to allow for addressing issues like handling caching, indexing data, replication of data from the legacy database, and not having standard tools that generate pdfs from sql queries. The alternative plan using a database should have a lot less sorting out of infrastructure and a shorter time til you can get down to cranking out reports.

Is there a standard way of synchronising a Map of objects across a network?

In Java, I have a HashMap containing objects (which can be serializable, if it helps). Elsewhere on a network, I have another HashMap in another copy of the application that I would like to stay in sync with the first.
For example if on computer A, someone runs myMap.put("Hello", "World"); and on computer B, someone runs myMap.put("foo", "bar");, then after some time delay for changes to propagate, both computers would have mayMap.get("Hello") == "World" and mayMap.get("foo") == "bar".
Is this requirement met by an existing facility in the Java language, a library, or some other program? If this is already a "solved problem" it would be great not to have to write my own code for this.
If there are multiple ways of achieving this I would prefer, in priority order:
Changes are guaranteed to propagate 100% of the time (doesn't matter how long it takes)
Changes propagate rapidly
Changes propagate with minimal bandwidth use between computers.
(Note: I have had trouble searching for solutions as results are dominated by questions about synchronizing access to a Map from multiple threads in the same application. This is not what my question is about.)
You could look at the hazelcast in-memory database.
It's an open source solution designed for distributed architectures.
It maps really well to your problem since the hazelcast IMap extends java.util.Map.
Link: Hazelcast IMap
what you are trying to do is call clustering between two node
here i have some solution
you can achieve your requirement using serialization make your map
serializable read and write state of map in each interval of time
and sync it.this is core and basic way to achieve your
functionality.but by using serialization you have to manually manage
sync of map(i.e you have to do code for that)
Hazelcast open source distributed caching mechanism hazelcast
is best api and have reach libarary to achive cluster environment
and share data between different node
coherence web also provide mechanism to achieve clustering by
Oracle
Ehcache is a cache library introduced in 2003 to improve
performance by reducing the load on underlying resources. Ehcache is
not for both general-purpose caching and caching Hibernate
(second-level cache), data access objects, security credentials, and
web pages. It can also be used for SOAP and RESTful server caching,
application persistence, and distributed caching
among all of above Hazelcast is best api go through it will sure help you

Is there an embeddable Java alternative to Redis?

According to this thread, Jedis is the best thing to use if I want to use Redis from Java.
However, I was wondering if there are any libraries/packages providing similarly efficient set operations to those that already exist in Redis, but can be directly embedded in a Java application without the need to set up separate servers. (i.e., using Jetty for web server).
To be more precise, I would like to be able to do the following efficiently:
There are a large set of M users (M not known in advance).
There are a large set of N items.
We want users to examine items, one user/item at a time, which produces a stored result (in a normal database.)
Each time a user arrives, we want to assign to that user the item with the least number of existing results that the user has not already seen before. This produces an approximate round-robin assignment of the items over all arriving users, when we just care about getting all items looked at approximately the same number of times.
The above happens in a parallelized fashion. When M and N are large, Redis accomplishes the above much more efficiently than SQL queries. Is there some way to do this using an embeddable Java library that is a bit more lightweight than starting a Redis server?
I recognize that it's possible to write a pile of code using Java's concurrency libraries that would roughly approximate this (and to some extent, I have done that), but that's not exactly what I'm looking for here.
Have a look at project voldemort . It's an distributed key-value store created by Linked-In, and it supports the ability to be embedded.
In the quick start guide is a small example of running the server embedded vs. stand-alone.
VoldemortConfig config = VoldemortConfig.loadFromEnvironmentVariable();
VoldemortServer server = new VoldemortServer(config);
server.start();
I don't know much about Redis, so I can't compare them feature to feature. In the project we used Voldemort, we used it's readonly backing store with great results. It allowed us to "precompile" a bi-daily database in our processing data-center and "ship it" out to edge data-centers. That way each edge data-center had a local copy of it's dataset.
EDIT: After rereading your question, I wanted to add Gauva's Table -- This Table DataStructure may also be something your looking for and is simlar to what you get with many no-sql databases.
Hazelcast provides a number of distributed data structure implementations which can be used as a pure Java alternative to Redis' services. You could then ship a single "jar" with all required dependencies to run your application. You may have to adjust for the slightly different primitives relative to Redis in your own application.
Commercial solutions in this space include Teracotta's Enterprise Ehcache and Oracle Coherence.
Take a look at lmdb (Lightning Memory Database), because I needed exactly the same thing. I deploy a dropwizard application into a container, and adding redis or another external dependancy is painful. This seems to perform well, has good activity. fyi, though, i have not yet used this in production.
https://github.com/lmdbjava/lmdbjava
Google's Guava Library provides friendly versions of the same (and more) Set operators that redis provides.
https://code.google.com/p/guava-libraries/wiki/CollectionUtilitiesExplained
e.g.
Guava Redis
Sets.intersection(a,b) sinter a b
a.count() scard a
Sets.difference(a,b) sdiff a b
Sets.union(a,b) sunion a b
Multisets are a reasonably straightforward proxy for redis sorted-sets as well.

Accessing Data across two Databases

I have large set of data(more than 1TB). This will be accessed by more than 1000 people concurrently. Storing it in one database will make the application really slow. So I was planning to store it across different databases. Does mongo DB support routing between different databases? Or should this in our application? I am developing using Java and use Spring framework to interact with mongo.
Given the reason for splitting your data into multiple databases is to improve performance, I would suggest sharding a single database rather than splitting across multiple. If location is granular enough and you would like to split load across servers you could then use tag aware sharding to pin specific locations or location ranges to a specific server. There is a good tutorial on this available here.
Before following this route I would suggest performing load tests on your application with your database on the hardware you plan to use for your system. It is worth confirming that you really do need to shard/split data and if so the # of servers you may need. If your database is going to be read rather than write intensive it could be that a non-sharded database would handle your load giving your working set fits in memory.

How do I put data into the datastore of Google's app engine?

I have a little application written in php+mysql I want to port to AppEngine, but I just can't find the way to port my mysql data to the datastore.
How am I supposed to save the data into my datastore? Is that even possible? I can only see documentation for persistence of Java objects, does that mean I have to port my database to a bunch of fake objects, one per line?
Edit: I say fake objects because I don't want to use them, they're just a way to get over a shortcoming of the GAE design.
I have a 30 megs table I need to check on every GET, by using objects I would need to create an object for every row, so I'd have a java class of maybe 45 megs with thousands upon thousands of lines like:
Row Row23423 = new Row (123,346,75,34,"a cow");
I just can't believe this is the only way.
Here's an idea, what about populating the data store by POST-ing the objects one by one? I mean, like the posts in a blog. You write a class that generates and persists the data, and then you Curl the url with the data, one by one. Slow, but it may work?
How to upload data with the bulk loader is described here. It's not supported directly in Java yet, but that doesn't have to stop you - just do the following:
Create an app.yaml that looks something like this:
application: myapp
version: upload
runtime: python
api_version: 1
handlers:
- url: /remote_api
script: $PYTHON_LIB/google/appengine/ext/remote_api/handler.py
login: admin
Make sure the application name is the same as your Java app's, and the version is not the same as the version you're using for Java. Upload this 'empty' app using appcfg.py.
Now, follow the directions for bulk loading in the page linked to above. When it comes time to run the tool, specify the server address with --server=upload.latest.myapp.appspot.com .
Since multiple versions of the same app share the same datastore - even across runtimes - the data uploaded with the Python version will be accessible to the Java one.
There is documentation on the datastore here.
I can't see anything about a raw data-porting service but if you can extract the data from your MySQL database into text files, then it should be relatively easy to write a script to import it into the app engine's data store using the persistence frameworks provided by it.
Your script would take your raw data, convert into a (Java) object model and imprt those Java objects into the store.
Migrating an application to Googles App Engine I think would be quite some task. As you have seen the App Engine does not have a relational database instead it uses BigTable. This will likely involve exporting it to Java objects (serialized in some way) and the inserting them.
You say "fake" objects in your post but I as you will have to use Java objects anyway I don't think they would be fake unless you plan on using one set of objects for the migration and a new set for the application.
There is no (good) general answer to the question of how to port a relational application to the GAE datastore, because the notion of "data" is incompatible between the two. Relational databases are all about the schema. GAE doesn't even have one. It's a schemaless persistent object datastore with very specific APIs. The environment is great for certain types of apps if you're developing from scratch, but it's pretty tricky to port to.
That said, you can import CSV files, as Nick explains, which you should be able to export from MySQL fairly easily. GAE supports Java and Python "at the same time" using the versions mechanism. So you can set up your data store in Python, and then run against it for your application in Java. (A Java version of the bulk loader is under development.)

Categories

Resources