All entries for December 2005

Interesting article on threadLocals

Writing about web page http://blog.arendsen.net/index.php/2005/02/22/threadlocals-and-memory-leaks-revisited/

link

Very good.

: 16 Dec 2005 10:48 |  Tags: Local Spring Thread |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

How to post process a Spring Bean?

So I have a FactoryBean which produces a FreeMarker configuration and it all works well.

Now I wanted to precompile all the freeMarker templates and started looking for the appropriate Springs infrastructure to tie into.

I came up with the following options:
[extend the existing BeanFactory
This just seemed hacky. I wasn't changing the strategy for loading the object so the factoryness hadn't changed.

[implement a BeanPostProcessor
This looked like promising; it executed after the factory had done it's thing and had a very convenient "postProcessAfterInitialization" method which passed in the name of the bean, and the bean itself. Cool. The problem is that the bean is the original beanFactory. Sure, I could call getObject() but it all started to feel a bit fragile and icky

[implement BeanFactoryPostProcessor
This went out of the window for two reasons; it suffers the same "problem" as BPP (not a "problem" with Spring, just the way I want to use it) and the single "postProcessBeanFactory" is called before the beans are realised (or instantiated as Spring prefers).

at this point I was thinking, surely there must be something more :)

and there is

[implement ApplicationListener
This little gem (thanks Dave Hewitt :)) listens to all the various events that hook in very nicely with the lifecycle of a BeanFactory, so there is a ContextClosed, ContextRefreshed and RequestHandled event. Implementing the single method "onApplicationEvent" which passed in the ApplicationEvent meant I could write the following bean:

public final class FreeMarkerCompilerEventListener implements ApplicationListener {
    private static final Logger LOGGER = Logger.getLogger(FreeMarkerCompilerEventListener.class);
    private final File templateDir;
    private final Configuration configuration;

    public FreeMarkerCompilerEventListener(final Configuration theConfiguration, final Resource theResource) {
        this.configuration = theConfiguration;
        this.templateDir = verifyResource(theResource);
    }

    public void onApplicationEvent(final ApplicationEvent event) {
        if (event instanceof ContextRefreshedEvent) {
            compile();
        }
    }

    private File verifyResource(final Resource resource) {
        File file;
        try {
            file = resource.getFile();
        } catch (final IOException e) {
            throw new IllegalStateException("Resource " + resource + " must be a directory!", e);
        }

        if (!file.isDirectory()) {
            throw new IllegalStateException("Resource " + resource + " must be a directory!");
        }

        return file;
    }

    private void compile() {
        String[] templateNames = getTemplateNames();
        for (String name: templateNames) {
            try {
                LOGGER.info("Precompiling freemarker template [" + name + "]");
                configuration.getTemplate(name);
            } catch (final IOException e) {
                throw new IllegalStateException("Cannot get template for " + name, e);
            }
        }
    }

    private String[] getTemplateNames() {
        List files = new ArrayList();
        for (File file: templateDir.listFiles()) {
            findFreeMarkerTemplates(file, "", files);
        }
        return files.toArray(new String[] {});
    }

    private void findFreeMarkerTemplates(final File root, final String parentPath, final List filesFound) {
        if (root.isDirectory()) {
            for (File file: root.listFiles()) {
                String newParentPath = parentPath;
                if (StringUtils.hasLength(newParentPath)) {
                    newParentPath += "/";
                }
                newParentPath += root.getName();
                findFreeMarkerTemplates(file, newParentPath, filesFound);
            }
        } else {
            if (root.getName().toLowerCase().endsWith(".ftl")) {
                filesFound.add(parentPath + "/" + root.getName());
            }
        }
    }
}

No messing around with BeanFactories, or fragile bean lookups by name, I simply wire this :

 <bean id="freeMarkerConfig" class="org.springframework.ui.freemarker.FreeMarkerConfigurationFactoryBean">
   <property name="templateLoaderPath"><value>/WEB-INF/freemarker/</value></property>
 </bean>

  <bean id="freeMarkerCompiler" class="uk.ac.warwick.sbr.freemarker.FreeMarkerCompilerEventListener">
    <constructor-arg index="0" ref="freeMarkerConfig"/>
    <constructor-arg index="1" value="/WEB-INF/freemarker/"/>
  </bean>

Spring will realise (via the proper use of it's BeanFactoryPostProcessor) that I have defined an ApplicationListener and will automatically call it when an ApplicationEvent is fired.

Cool.

: 12 Dec 2005 15:33 |  Tags: Freemarker Spring |  Comments (4) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Hibernate + Spring DI

Writing about web page http://www.springframework.org/docs/api/org/springframework/beans/factory/config/AutowireCapableBeanFactory.html

People keep asking how to inject service dependencies into Hibernate backed objects. I briefly responded here but I have recently revisited this code.

I stumbled across AutowireCapableBeanFactory which has a really useful method: autowireBeanProperties) which does the DI on an existing bean.

After reading the javadocs I created this simple class:

package uk.mycompany;
import org.springframework.beans.BeansException;
import org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanFactory;
import org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanFactoryAware;
import org.springframework.beans.factory.config.AutowireCapableBeanFactory;

import uk.mycompany.ClassFilteringLoadEventListener.LoadedObjectListener;

public final class AutoWiringLoadedObjectListener implements LoadedObjectListener, BeanFactoryAware  {
    private AutowireCapableBeanFactory beanFactory;

    public void loaded(final Object loadedObject) {
        beanFactory.autowireBeanProperties(loadedObject, AutowireCapableBeanFactory.AUTOWIRE_BY_NAME, false);
    }

    public void setBeanFactory(final BeanFactory beanFactory) throws BeansException {
        this.beanFactory = (AutowireCapableBeanFactory) beanFactory;
    }
}

and replaced theuk.mycompany.ClassThatDoesTheAdvisingLoadedListener with the uk.mycompany.AutoWiringLoadedObjectListener and it works beatifully. Is it slow? Not at all. After load testing there was no discernable difference.

Now I don't need to write a class to do per class introspection. Just leave it up to Spring.

I love Spring.

: 02 Dec 2005 17:54 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem