Generate Spring Configuration - spring-boot

I'm actually working in a huge project providing a server and client spring application. The client - for runtime concerns - is using a xml configuration of its beans but the server does not, leading to an immense start up time (at least 20 minutes) due to the classpath scanning. Which is ok for deployment in its production environment, but is a huge overhead for all the developers waiting for the server to start up may be several times per day.
My Question:
Is there any "easy" way to switch from classpath scanning to a static configuration?
I'm thinking of some kind of xml generation for instance. To me, it should be possible to generate a static configuration file the same way the configuration is done via classpath scanning at start up. Are there any concerns I don't know preventing something like that? Does there exist any kind of generator like that?

Related

How do I run a single JVM with multiple spring boot applications?

Lets say I have 25 spring boot micro-services each of which starts with 1GB JVM in production. At any given time not all are in use and there is no instance when they are using the full 25GB memory at once. In reality many of them will sit idle 90% of the time but any of them might at some point get called and require up to 1GB memory.
In my development environment I would like to run all of them at once but only have 8GB memory. I don't need great performance but I need them all to run at the same time for the entire app to work. I would like to try to run all the applications within a single JVM with 6GB dedicated memory. That should be enough at any given time.
This seems like it would be a common issue as many companies are converting to cloud/microservices. 10 years ago we would have one monolithic app with single JVM (easy to run in dev environment). Now we have dozens of small apps which might not need a ton of memory but they each run in their own JVM so each has a good amount of overhead. This actually makes development more complex rather than simplifying. So Im trying to find a solution for our developers where they can run everything but not kill the memory on their machines.
The spring boot apps need to run without modification aside from
maybe local profiles. Otherwise developers would have to make tons of changes every time they pull the code from git
Each project needs to be able to configure a different port (application-local.properties setting)
for tomcat.
Each project needs its own classpath entries (for instance one might use version 1.0 of a jar and another might use version 2.0 and without separate classpaths one or the other would break)
I have been trying to follow this post but its not 100% what I want. I feel like a proper solution should respect the application.properties / application-local.properties file and use the port set inside the project rather than having to hardcode any configuration outside the project. Essentially his post is starting a separate thread for each microservice and attaching a separate classloader to each thread. Then calling SpringApplication.run and passing in the classname that would normally be used to start the microservice. I think this is maybe ignoring the auto configuration properties.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
You can manage how much resources your applications are consuming with docker. One spring boot application should be one docker container. You can at runtime change how much resources(in your case memory) container use. Take a look at this
article on how to at runtime change resource allocation in docker. Also, with kubernetes is possible to define minimum and maximum resources that your application needs.

Spring boot project publish to production environment choose war(standalone tomcat) or jar(embedded tomcat)?

Latest project I used Spring boot, and prepare to deploy to production environment, I want to know which way to run application have better performance or have the same performance?
generate a war package and put it in a stand-alone tomcat
generate a jar package and use embedded tomcat
In addition, when publish to production environment if should to remove devtools dependency.
This is a broad question. The answer is it depends on your requirements.
Personally, I prefer standalone applications with Spring Boot today. One app, one JVM. It gives you more flexibility and reliability in regard to deployments and runtime behaviour. Spring Boot 1.3.0.RELEASE comes with init scripts which allows you to run your Spring Boot application as a daemon on a Linux server. For instance, you can integrate rpm-maven-plugin into your build pipeline in order to package and publish your application as a RPM for deployment or you can dockerize your application easily.
With a classic deployment into a servlet container like Tomcat you will be facing various memory leaks after redeployment for example with logging frameworks, badly managed thread local objects, JDBC drivers and a lot more.
Either you spend time to fix all of those memory leaks inside your application and frameworks you use or just restart servlet container after a deployment. Running your application as a standalone version, you don't care about those memory leaks because you are forced to restart in order to bring you new version up.
In the past, several webapps ran inside one servlet container. This could lead to performance degradation for all webapps because every webapp has its own memory, cpu and GC characteristics which may interfere with each other. Further more, resources like thread pools were shared among all webapps.
In fact, a standalone application is not save from performance degradation due to high load on the server but it does not interfere with others in respect to memory utilization or GC. Keep in mind that performance or GC tuning is much more simpler if you can focus on the characteristics of just one application. It gets complicated as soon as you'll need to find common denominator for several webapps in one servlet container.
In the end, your decision may depend on your work environment. If you are building an application in a corporation where software is running and maintained by operations, it is more likely that you are forced to build a war. If you have the freedom to choose your deployment target, then I recommend a standalone application.
In order to remove devtools from a production build
you can use set the excludeDevtools build property to completely
remove the JAR. The property is supported with both the Maven and
Gradle plugins.
See Spring Boot documentation.

Need to Improve Startup Speed and Resource Usage on a Spring-WS Web Service

I have a Spring-WS web service that has three issues:
Slow startup time
Slow generation of the dynamic WSDL
Heavy usage of PermGen (app has to be 1.6 compatible)
Currently, the spring-ws-servlet.xml file has several <context:component-scan> elements for autowired dependencies. Two of these scan nearly everything in two external libraries containing Hibernate DAO and Entity classes. Similarly, the Hibernate session factory bean scans a large number of entities from these two libraries.
So, my questions:
Obviously, we would see at least some performance improvement by limiting the scope of the <context:component-scan> elements. But really, would it be that much?
Similarly, would I see improvements by limiting the scope of what Entities are scanned by the session factory?
Making these changes will NOT be a quick process (alter code, test, etc). Therefore, if anyone can add their wisdom, I would greatly appreciate it.
Actually I am developing a spring ws application on Google Cloud and I also have the same problem with slow start up time. The biggest difference that I have notice was when I have moved to aspectj compile time weaving using aspectj-maven-plugin. If you haven't done this yet try this one. The result may be vary depends on your code and deployment environment. On the cloud every file operation is much slower so this may be a reason why this work for me so well.

Verify Spring Configuration without full start up

I have a large spring project, using xml configuration. I'm looking for a quick way to verify changes to the xml configuration.
I can load the whole project locally - the problem is this takes more than 5 minutes, loads a huge amount of data.
My XML editor catches XML formatting errors.
I'm looking for something intermediate - to catch obvious problems like references to beans that aren't defined, or calling constructors with the wrong arguments. Is there a quick way to do this, without having to actually invoke all the constructors and bring up the whole environment?
I'm building with Maven and editing with Eclipse, although my question isn't specific to either.
Since you already use Eclipse, you could try Spring Tool Suite (comes either standalone or as an add-on). It's essentially Eclipse with extra Spring-specific features, like Beans Validator. I'm not sure how thorough the validation is, but it should catch most configuration problems.
It's maintained by SpringSource so its integration with Spring "just works" and it's guaranteed not be more or less in sync with Spring Framework's release cycle.
Beanoh :
http://beanoh.org/overview.html#Verify
this project does exactly what I'm looking for. Verify obvious problems with spring config, but without the overhead of initializing everything.
You can use a Spring testing support to integration test your Spring configuration. However if the loading of the context is taking 5 mins, then the tests will also take the same amount of time. Spring does cache the context so if you have multiple tests using the same set of Spring contexts, then once cached the tests should be very quick.
I can suggest a few ways to more efficiently test your configuration:
Organize your project in modules, with each module being responsible for its own Spring configuration - this way, each module can be independently developed and tested.
If you have a modular structure, the testing can be more localized by mocking out the dependent modules, again this is for speed.

JBoss Deployment Info

More of a standard practice questions:
Is there any difference in deploying an app as EAR vs WAR? How do you decide? (I know WAR is just a web application may or may not have Java EE features like messaging)
Lets say I have a Spring MVC application stack with Hibernate (MySQL DB), should this be deployed as a War or EAR?
When do we need to worry about JBoss deployment descriptors, if I am not using EJBs. (Just Spring MVC). Lets assume I have JMS as well. Do we need to configure/update/create any other JBoss related config files?
When we package our application EAR/WAR, it include EVERYTHING that we need for our app. Is there a scenario where we need to keep some config / xml files outside of this archive in a specified JBoss folder?
Is it common practice to deploy directly from Eclipse or better to use Ant, etc? Advantage / Disadvantage?
Obviously, I am a newbie :-). Trying to understand this.
1.
This is not always an easy decision, but for beginners and for small projects I would say it's nearly always a WAR. The reason for using an EAR is mainly to isolate a business layer from a UI/Web layer. See this question for more details: How can one isolate logical layers of an Java EE application
2.
I might be mistaken but I think that Spring people typically prefer WARs.
3.
JBoss (vendor) specific deployment descriptors are mostly needed to configure so-called "administered objects" and security. Sometimes they can be used for extra features that are not covered by the Java EE specification (e.g. setting the web root for a WAR). Administered objects are typically data sources (connection to a database) and JMS destinations (queues and topics).
In the traditional Java EE approach these have to be created as far away from the code as possible, which typically means a system admin would create them inside the target AS using some kind of GUI or admin console. In this setup, you as developer would throw a WAR with "unresolved dependencies" over the wall, and a system admin (or "deployer") would then spend days figuring out what those unresolved dependencies should be.
If the communication is relatively good between developers and deployers, the WAR or EAR might be thrown over the wall together with a readme-file, that at least gives some insight into which resources are needed. Depending on the organization the development team might not get any access or feedback about how those "unresolved dependencies" have been resolved. E.g. a data source with a max of 5 connections may have been created, but this may be insufficient if some code does say 10 parallel queries. Without the development team knowing the exact data source configuration, some classes of runtime problems and performance issues may be relatively hard to solve.
To mitigate these problems, some vendors, for some artifacts, offer the developer to create those "unresolved dependencies" instead using proprietary deployment descriptors which are then embedded in the WAR or EAR. For simple local JMS destinations this is then in most cases the end of it, but for data sources there is a little bit more to it. Namely, there has to be a mechanism to switch between data sources for different stages such as Dev, Beta, QA, Production etc. Additionally, it's rarely a good idea to have production passwords in the source code.
If you have a simple app that you want to try out locally, stages and production passwords are not a concern. If you deploy for a (large) company it is.
In Java EE 6 you can define a data source using a standard descriptor (web.xml, ejb-jar.xml or application.xml), and in Java EE 7 you can do the same for JMS destinations. There is no standard way to configure those based on stage, but there is a glimmer of hope that Java EE 8 will address this (see e.g. JAVAEE_SPEC-19). Vendors are not universally happy with those standardized methods, and their main documentation will almost always extensibly tell you how to do those things using their proprietary tools and descriptors, and if you're lucky as a small note tell you there's a standardized way (and then sometimes downplay that or scare you by saying it's not recommended to be used in production).
4.
See answer to 3 mostly. One option to solve the problem of how to switch between stages and keep production passwords out of the WAR/EAR, is to have the full definition of said data source inside the AS (inside JBoss in your case). Every AS installation is tied to a specific server in this setup. If data sources need to be updated, removed or new ones added, you have to communicate with your operations team (if any). As said, depending on your organization this can be anything between trivial and practically impossible.
5.
When developing you most often use your IDE to do a deployment. For production you would never do that. For production you may build with Ant (or Maven) and deploy via something like Jenkins, or e.g Chef.
Check here : .war vs .ear file
If you read the preceeding response, you'd guess that "WAR" it is.
Deployment descriptor are needed to manage the modules of JBoss, if you don't have any conflict or don't need any tweaking, you won't need any deployment descriptor.
You may need to play with some JBoss file if you want to add modules to JBoss, or configure datasources, etc. Read the JBoss documentation for more info.
You can deploy from eclipse during your development phase, but as your other environments (qualification, production, test, etc) should be separeted from your developing one and that they won't have any eclipse installed on them, you should get used to manage your server from the command line and drop your war's in the right directories.
It's a short answer, but I hope it will help.
Read JBoss documentation for more info.

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