When to use Application context in Springs. - spring

I have to develop a full fledged project. by full fledged i mean need to insert, update delete values in a database, Performing operations on values. Its like i have set of model classes for every object. Employee, products etc. its a web application developed using Spring MVC. I know when a user enters a data in a form , the request goes to dispatcher servlet from there to a particular handler(Controller) and then to view. But i don't know what application Context or web Application Context does ? its like is it necessary to have that xml file. ? What all it contains. thanks ...

You are right in your assumptions. What you don't know is that DispatcherServlet has its own context, defined in *-servlet.xml. This context is typically a child of a main application context, typically defined in applicationContext.xml. Child can access all beans defined in parent context but not the other way around.
Theoretically you can live with just a single DispatcherServlet context and have all beans there (DAOs, services, transaction demarcation). But this is a poor practice in a bigger projects. Also two context allow you to draw a line between business logic and web layer.
Practical implication - if you have two DispatcherServlets there is no way of sharing beans between them if they don't have a common parent context.

Related

how requests gets handled by dispacther servlet?

Would like to know how many instances of dispatcher servlet is created in a real time environment.
When there are multiple requests coming to the application, and if spring creates singleton objects how does one object handles multiple requests?
What happens when there are so many people accessing the website and since dispatcherServlet object is only one and all requests are handled by same object, won't it create any performance issue?
As M. Deinum says, one servlet to rule them all. I'll try to provide a very general description of the ServletDispatcher life cycle.
When the request leaves the browser it carries with it information from the user. This goes to the DispatcherServlet the front controller which is the single servlet that delegates requests to other components.
DispatcherServlet's job is to send the request to the right controller. Since a application can have many controllers DispatcherServlets get the help to decide which one to send it to by consulting the handler mapping
The DispatcherServlet sends the request to the destination controller,
The controller packs up the model-data and identifies the name of the view that is showing the output and sends this back to the dispatcherservlet.
DispatcherServlet consults with the viewResolver and looks up the view that is set to display the data.
The view is implemented (by a JSP for example) by using the model data to generate output. Which is sent back to the client.
This all happens very fast (ms) which means that thousands of requests can be handled in a very short time.

Struts 2 tomcat request/session contamination

I am using Struts 2 v 2.3.16.3 with tomcat 6.
A user will click on an action which finds an object by id and the page displays it. I have encountered a sporadic bug where the user will all of a sudden get the id of another lookup from another user on another machine. So effectively they are both calling the same action but passing different id to the request, but both end up viewing the same id.
This is obviously disastrous, and the data is totally corrupted as both users think they are editing a different record. Any ideas how make sure session/request activity is kept secure to each session?
I am also using spring and am using the #Transactional annotation in my Service layer, which returns the objects from the DAO. Is there something I need to do with this annotation to make it secure for each session ?
I am using org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.HibernateTransactionManager
Classic Thread-UnSafe problem.
Since you nominated Spring, my first guess is that you have not specified the right scope for your action beans in Spring xml configuration.
Be sure you are using scope="prototype" because otherwise the default scope of Spring is Singleton, and you don't want a single(ton) instance of an Action, that would not be ThreadLocal (and hence ThreadSafe) anymore.
If it is not that, it could be something on an Interceptor (that, differently from an action, is not Thread Safe), or you are using something static (in your Business / DAO layer, or in the Action itself) that should be not.

Stateless session bean maintaining state

I deployed a web application on the localhost GlassFish server. This application takes order information from user and stores it in a List type variable in a Stateless Session Bean.The list object is created in the constructor.
I open the order page and add multiple orders in it. When I open the show orders page in different tabs and different browsers, it displays all the order information bean correctly, as though the state is maintained in a Stateless Bean!
I think this behavior is wrong as each browser/tab should create different session with the server and new order information should be shown for each browser/tab. How can this behavior be explained?
Your use case is precisely what a stateful session bean is for, if you want your List object to be maintained across method invocations, and if you want each session to be assigned its own bean.
Stateless session beans are pooled and made available to any session. But your instance fields are not guaranteed to be cleared, so you can't depend on them being cleared. The behavior that you are seeing is not unexpected. Even if you were successful in creating separate sessions in multiple tabs, those sessions could very well have been (and apparently were) assigned the same session bean. That's because the associated method invocations occurred at different points in time. Now if the associated method invocations occurred simultaneously instead, then the platform would have assigned a different stateless bean to each invocation (session). In that case, you'd see different behavior.
See also;
conversational state of session beans
and
Stateless and Stateful Enterprise Java Beans
Never let what you can't do get in the way of what you can do.
Problem: Stateful Session Bean was not maintaining separate state per client. In the example I tried, I input orders from the JSP page, which were stored in a List in a Stateful Session Bean. When I called the same URL from a different browser (i.e. a different session), the list of orders input in the previous session were visible. The same EJB was getting referenced in both sessions. (Verified by sysouts)
It's like saying, the shopping cart of some other user was directly visible to me as if they were my orders!!
Solution: Used an HttpSessionListener and got the dependency of the Stateful EJB through JNDI, in sessionCreated(HttpSessionEvent se) method. Next, added the stateful EJB in an HttpSession and accessed the EJB through session in servlet.
Suggestions for using JNDI, instead of DI, for Stateful Session Bean and Adding EJB to HttpSession are given in the answer above. Don't know if it is the proper way to go, but it works!!

JSF-SPRING-HIBERNATE architecture- Backing bean related best practice

I am developing a web project and after much research I have decided to go ahead with JSF+Primefaces, Spring and Hibernate approach. While designing the architecture of my project I have finalized the following approach :
Actor --> JSF+PrimeFaces page --- > Backing Bean -- > Service Bean -- > Dao -- > Hibernate
Service Bean and DAO are spring beans with dependency injection.
My concern now is now with respect to backing bean:
I plan to use multiple backing beans for UI page depending upon the type of Page I need to render.
Now for example: For a new user registration page i have UserProfile.xhtml which uses UserBackingBean. UserBackingBean has UserServiceBean injected by spring. UserServiceBean has UserDao injected by Spring.
Now in UserBackingBean when the user enters the form data from UserProfile.xhtml I will have to populate the User.java domain(ORM) object.
a) What is the best practice for this ? Should I initilize the User.java in the constructor on UserBackingBean ? Is this the proper approach ? Please suggest if there is any other way out ?
b) Also please suggest on the above architecture I have decided upon for my project ? Is it the proper approach ?
The general rule I follow is that transaction boundaries are marked in the service beans therefore I don't like to modify hibernate POJO outside of a service because I don't know if there is a transaction already running. So from the backing bean I would call the service layer pass in the parameters that the service layer needs to build up the hibernate pojo and save it, update it, ... etc.
Another way to do this would be have your backing bean implement an interface defined by the service layer and then pass the backing bean to the service layer. For example.
public interface UserInfoRequest {
public String getName();
}
#Service
public class SomeSpringService {
#Transactional(.....)
public void registerNewUser(UserInfoRequest request)
{
}
}
public class SomeBackingBean implements UserInfoRequest {
private SomeService someSpringService;
public void someMethodBoundToSJF()
{
this.someSpringService.registerNewUser(this);
}
}
Regarding your last question I am not a fan of JSF, I think JSF is fundamentally flawed because it is a server component based framework. So my argument against JSF is a generic argument against server side component based frameworks.
The primary flaw with server side component based frameworks is that you don't control what the component will output which means you are stuck with the look of the component, if you want something that looks different you have to write your own component or you have to modify an existing component. Web browsers are currently evolving very quickly adding new features which can really improve the quality of an application UI but to you those features you have to write HTML, CSS, and JavaScript directly and the server side components make that harder.
Client side component architectures are here and much better than doing components on the server side. Here is my recommend stack.
Client Side Architecture:
jquery.js - Basic libary to make all browser look the same to JavaScript
backbone.js + underscore.js - High level client side component based architecture
handlebars.js - for the client side templates
Twitter bootstrap - to get a decent starter set of CSS & widgets
You write code in HTML, CSS and JavaScript organized as backbone views that talk to server side
models using AJAX. You have complete control over the client side user experience with enough
structure to really make nice reusable code.
Server Side Architecture:
Annotation Driven Spring MVC, Services and Dao (#Controller, #Service, #Repository)
Spring component scanning with autowiring by type (#Autowired, #Inject)
AspectJ Load Time Weaving or Compile Time Weaving
Hibernate
Tomcat 7
JSP as the view technology for Spring MVC (yes it cluncuky but you wont be creating
too many jsp pages, mostly for usng <% #inculde > directive
Tooling:
- Spring Tool suite
- JRebel (so that you don't have to start and stop the server) it really works really worth the money
- Tomcat 7

How to refresh the Spring context when using CXF?

We have a web application that uses Spring (3.0.5) and CXF (currently 2.4.2 for various reasons but upgrading is an option if that makes any difference) and is deployed on Tomcat.
The application is initialized using the org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener.
Starting and shutting the application down works like a charm but if I try to refresh the Spring application context, using
((ConfigurableApplicationContext)applicationContext).refresh();
I run into problems. The application context first destroys all its beans (including CXFBusImpl, or rather its subclass SpringBus). SpringBus however calls close() on its application context - leading to a NullPointerException when the application context shortly after tries to close its bean factory:
java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.springframework.context.support.AbstractRefreshableApplicationContext.closeBeanFactory(AbstractRefreshableApplicationContext.java:152)
at org.springframework.context.support.AbstractRefreshableApplicationContext.refreshBeanFactory(AbstractRefreshableApplicationContext.java:124)
at org.springframework.context.support.AbstractApplicationContext.obtainFreshBeanFactory(AbstractApplicationContext.java:467)
at org.springframework.context.support.AbstractApplicationContext.refresh(AbstractApplicationContext.java:397)
Is there anything I can do to avoid this (other than modifying CXF)? If I skip CXF everything works.
I don't think you can tell CXF not to work that way. What you could do though is to isolate the parts of your application that need restarting into their own context that you build and and tear down as you choose without involving the main context over much. Perhaps you'd do that with a ClassPathXmlApplicationContext, though there are a few choices. I think you'll be setting the outer context as the parent of the inner, and referring to outer beans with XML-config syntax like:
<ref parent="foo" />
You'll then need to create some way of proxying the activity with CXF in the outer context to the beans in the inner context. This is the tricky part, as it is usually considered bad form for references to go that way round. You'll probably have to have some kind of registry/proxy in the outer context that (relevant) inner beans connect to as part of their creation/init process (and deregister from at tear-down). You'll also have to decide how to handle the case where a request needs to be served when there is no inner context. Tricky, especially if you want to do it elegantly...

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