Viewing the contents of Session, Application and Request Bean - java

It would make a lot of sense to be able to monitor the contents of Session, Application and Request Bean while developing a JSF app but as far as I know, I should explicitly add watch points for the parameters I'm interested in.
Is there an easier way to see these values as I navigate through my apps the pages?

You can do it as a cross cutting concern using some Filter of your own, or some of the AOP techniques provided by the framework. The idea is to log all these information on every request. It can be console, why not.
IMO, monitoring the content of request might not be a very useful idea, though.

If you want to see what is being added to and removed from these scopes, have a look at ServletContextAttributeListener, ServletRequestAttributeListener and HttpSessionAttributeListener. You can define instances of these classes using your web.xml.
As Vinegar says, if you want to monitor arbitrary classes, you could use AOP. You could also think about using the debugger programmatically.

Related

Isolate Liferay access to frontend and REST URL's

I have a Liferay instance running on a URL like example.org/app. This instance does have a REST API that would normally be running under example.org/app/o/restpath.
The way the server running this instance is that the frontend is accessible without restrictions from the outside, however the REST API is only accessible from the inside the network under a URL like example.org/rest.
I need to make sure that it is impossible to access the REST API with example.org/app. I should also be impossible to access the frontend with example.org/rest. Does anybody have any suggestions?
There are tons of ways of doing that, the best one will depend on your stack, preferences and abilities.
A reverse proxy is the first that comes to mind, bearing in mind that is is normally better if your app has control of who can access it. So a wrapper or a filter checking who is accessing would help. But even then, is the filter to be put on the main application or on your module? That is an evaluation that needs to come from you.
You can also combine the proxy strategy, with a filter, just in case one day you are tuning up your proxy and let something through. You can also decide change your proxy server too..
Or your company already have a proxy that enables traffic going out, and would be easier if that proxy was to have access...
Your servlet contained might also be able to provide such control, so you do not actually need a proxy.
Although I would feel more comfortable if that kind of feature was in the application layer itself, like a wrapper for your component and that wrapper provides the service, a filter, or even a method in in the entry-point, while the others are just extra and to reduce load.
Some companies have networks devices that go up several layers of the network stack, those have lots of potential to help here too, IDS would be able to provide alarms, triggers and such...
As it stands, one would need more information to help you more, even in what you mean by "ensure" ( how far this assurance need to go, like are you thinking about passwords, certificates, IDS, or a simple approach like the mentioned ones ), but I guess that covers it.

User specific session crash (Java Spring MVC)?

I have a Spring MVC project in Java. This web app can be accessed by multiple users in different browsers. I haven't coded any session bean in my program.
Now I want to 'crash'/'timeout' the browsing of one of the users, while other users will go on with their normal expected browsing. I want to do this to see if this action has any effect on the shared variables.
What kind of coding I need to do for this? Thanks in advance!
It is not at all clear what you are trying to achieve here, but I'm assuming that you are doing this as an experiment ... to see what happens.
You could modify the webapp to implement some special request, or request parameter, or request parameter value that tells the webapp to crash or freeze the request being processed. Then send that request from one browser while others are doing "normal" things.
Whether this is going to reveal anything interesting is ... questionable.
Another interpretation is that you are aiming to include timed out requests and other things in your normal testing regime. To achieve that, you would need implement some kind of test harness to automate the sending of requests to your server; i.e. to simulate a number of simultaneous users doing things. There are various test tools for doing that kind of thing.

Best Practice to control access to service/screen access during run time in Spring based web application

I manage few spring based web applications. for example if my client is a flex application, with many modules/screens. Access to the screen or page or even a spring service is controlled by spring security based on the user role.
At certain time we may want to block access to that screen or service completely irrespective of the access granted by role. May be we want to take down a specific page/screen or a service for maintenance. and enable it after certain time. What is the best practice to achieve it. I do not want to restart the application.
I think of using some filter, so every request will pass through the filter and this filter will have the logic to check , if the current operation or view is allowed or disabled.
Is this the better way to handle it. or Is there any other solution.
What is the best practice.
Servlet filtler is a good choice if you want to block pages known by URL. This solution is simple and pretty straightforward.
Spring aspect will be better if you want to block services. Just wrap classes you would like to block and perform a check prior to calling it. Throw a specific exception that you can handle in the presentation layer.
We implemented a similar feature once in REST-based application. A global filter/aspect blocks all non-GET methods effectively switching an application to read-only mode.
You can always front your application with an apache httpd (or some other reverse-proxy web-front) and control access to individual URL-patterns there. That also gives you the added benefit that you can actually have a nice maitenance-page up while you take down the entire application.

Spring framework, how to load session in different project

I have a project. In the first project I set the session
in my first project I put here as code
req.getSession().setAttribute("x", name);
return "ses";
In second project I put here
model.addAttribute("ses", req.getSession().getAttribute("x"));
return "oses";
but session is not appear.
How to make a session appear in different project with Spring framework?
You can't. (Well, perhaps you can setup some sort of session-replication, but you shouldn't do it. See related question)
You should use other forms of communication between your applications. The flow will be more complicated and will include exchange of tokens through (simple) web services, but it is better than relying on the server container, and on the fact that both applications will be run in the same container.
It'd be helpful to describe what you're actually trying to accomplish; as Bozho says you can't really share session objects between apps.
You could, however, use JMS (or any other intra-app comms) to send data from one app to another. You'll still need the capability to decide what to do with that data once you have it in the receiving app: how do I associate it with a given user, how do I get it into that user's session, and so on.
User information can be passed in the message, but there has to be some commonality between the two systems, some agreed-upon key, that can be used to figure out who the info belongs to.
Once you have that, the rest is mechanics; there are interesting games to be played, and it's easy to mess it up :)

JSP/Servlet design question - Make request/response globally available via JNDI

In PHP one is always able to access the current request or response from any part of their code. This concept is fundamental to PHP programming. Request data, response data, session data (etc) are always there!
This does not happen in Java Servlets! In order to have access to the HttpServletRequest, HttpServletResponse, HttpSession (etc) in your code you need to pass them around as function variables. This means that you cannot code a web framework that inherently "knows" about all these and removes the complexity of passing them around.
So, I have devised this solution:
Create anf register a ServletRequestListener.
Upon the requestInitialized event bind the current HttpServletRequest to the JNI context giving in the name of the current Thread (Thread.currentThread().getName());
Upon the requestDestroyed event unbind the above JNI resource to cleanup.
This way one has access to the current request/response from any place of their code, since they are always there in the JNI context and can be retrieved by providing the current thread's name.
All known servlet container implement the single-thread model for each request, so there is no way for the requests to get mixed up (of course one must not forget to clean them up).
Also the JNI resources of each web application are separated by default so there are no concerns of mixing them up or of security issues that could arise from one web application having access to the requests of the others.
Kinda twisted, but nice and simple...
What do you think?
I think some web frameworks (GWT, Axis) already do that, but in a much simpler way: by using a ThreadLocal static variable (or accessible from a singleton). Spring also has this possibility.
I'm not sure it works with all the containers, though. If the container uses non-blocking IO and reuses the same thread to handle multiple requests in parallel, it won't work anymore.
See Get the HttpServletRequest (request) object from Java code for a similar question (and its answers).
If you are worried about different requests getting messed up (and then think about "sub requests" like a model window), perhaps you'd rather think about using Seam? They use an abstraction called a "Session" to handle a LOT of the things that we developers try to hack around with other traditional web technology stacks. Seam is built on JSF just as an fyi. You don't have to use EJB 3 or Hibernate with it, but it does integrate nicely with both of those as well. Something to think about.

Categories

Resources