Java EE + MongoDb with Apache TomEE and Jongo Starter Project

Know MongoDB and Java EE, but you don't know exactly how to integrate both of them? Do you read a lot about the topic but you have not found a solution which fits this purpose? This starter project is for you:

You will learn how to use MongoDB and Java EE in a fashion way without having to depend on Spring Data MongoDB framework but with "similar" basic features.

The only thing better than a Maven archetype is a repository you can fork with everything already setup. Skip the documentation and just fork-and-code. This starter project contains:

• Jongo as MongoDB Mapper (www.jongo.org).
• Apache TomEE as application service and integration. (tomee.apache.org)
• Arquillian for tests. (www.arquillian.org)

The example is pretty simple, we want to store colors inside a MongoDB collection.

Our POJO is like:

Note that we are using @ObjectId annotation provided by Jongo to set this field as MongoDB id. Moreover because it is called _id, the id will be set automatically.

Then the service layer:

Note that there isn't a lot of code, but some points are really interesting stuff. Let's analyze them.

@Singleton is used to define an EJB as singleton, it works with @Stateless as well, for Java EE users no news here.

The class is abstract. Why? Because it allows us to not implement all methods but define them.

Also implements java.lang.reflect.InvocationHandler. This is because we want to use one really interesting feature which allows us to create a fallback method called invoke. For any method defined but not implemented this method is called.

We have a MongoCollection class (from Jongo project) that it is injected. MongoCollection represents a collection in MongoDB. Because we need to set which collection we want to work with, an annotation called @JongoCollection is created so you can pass the name of the backend collection. Note that MongoCollection is produced by CDI container by using our custom producer. Again no news here for CDI users.

Then there is a lot of methods which represents CRUD operations. Note that they are not implemented, they are only annotated with @Insert, @Find, @Remove, ... to set which is the purpose of the method we want to execute. Some of them like finders or removers can receive Jongo-like query to be executed. And also a method called countColors which as you can see you can implement as custom method without relying to logic implemented within invoke method.

And finally the invoke method. This method will be called for all abstract methods, and simply sends to PersistenceHandler class, which in fact is a util class against Jongo to execute the required operation.

And that's all, quite simple, and if you want to add new abstract operations, you only need to implement them inside PersistenceHandler class.

Some of you may wonder why I use annotations and not the typical Spring Data approach where the name of the method indicates the operation. You can implement this approach as well, it is a simple matter of creating a regular expression inside PersistenceHandler class instead of if/else with annotations, but I prefer annotations approach. Faster in execution time, clean, and for example you can refactor the annotation name from @Find to @Buscar (Spanish equivalent) without worrying if you are breaking some regular expression.

And finally the test:

This is an Arquillian test that has nothing special apart from one line:

.addAsManifestResource(new StringAsset(MONGODB_RESOURCE), "resources.xml")

Because we are using Apache TomEE we use the way it has to configure elements to be used as javax.annotation.Resource in our code.

The META-INF/resources.xml content will be:

and then we use in our MongoClient producer to create the MongoClient instance to be used inside code. Note that we are using @Resource as any standard resource like DataSource, but in fact MongoClientURI is injected:

so in fact Mongo connection is configured in META-INF/resources.xml file and thanks of TomEE we can refer it as any standard resource.

If you are going to use other application server you can change this approach to the one provided by it, or if you want you can use DeltaSpike extensions or your own method. Also because MongoClient database is get from a method annotated with @Produces  you can be injected it wherever you want on your code, so you can skip the abstract services layer if you want.

What are the benefits of this approach?

First that it is Java EE solution, you can use it without depending on Spring framework or any other library. You implement what you need, you do not download a bunch of libraries simply for accessing a MongoDB with some kind of object mapping.

Also as you may see, the code is quite simple and there is no magic behind it, you can debug it without any problem, or even improve or change depending on your needs. The code is yours and is waiting to be modified. Do you want to use native MongoDB objects instead of Jongo? No problem, you can implement it. Moreover there aren't much layers, in fact only one (the PersistenceHandler) so the solution is pretty fast in terms of execution.

Of course this do not mean that you can't use Spring Data MongoDB. It is a really interesting framework, so if you are already using Spring, go ahead with it, but if you plan to use a full Java EE solution, then clone this project and start using MongoDB without having to make some research on the net about how to integrate both of them.

You can clone the project from https://github.com/lordofthejars/tomee-mongodb-starter-project

We keep learning,
Alex.

I'm driving down to the barrio, Going 15 miles an hour cause I'm already stoned, Give the guy a twenty and wait in the car, He tosses me a baggie then he runs real far (Mota - The Offspring)

Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xS5_TO8lyF8

Apache TomEE + Shrinkwrap == JavaEE Boot. (Not yet Spring Boot killer but on the way)

WARNING: I am not an expert of Spring Boot. There are a lot of things that I find really interesting about it and of course that can really improve your day-to-day work. Moreover I don't have anything against Spring Boot nor people who develop it or use it. But I think that community are overestimating/overvenerating this product.

A year ago I started to receive a lot links about blogposts, tweets, information about Spring Boot. From his website you can read:

Spring Boot makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring based Applications that can you can "just run". 

And it seems that this thing has just revolutionized the Java world.

For example a Spring MVC (RESTful as well) application in Spring Boot looks like:

As you can see the magic happens inside SpringApplication class which starts an embedded Tomcat or Jetty and using Spring thing it registers this controller. Pretty impressive I know with a few lines you can have an endpoint ready to be used.

But I wonder to myself if it is possible to use the same approach in JavaEE world and with the same low-level and light requirements. And the answer is absolutely. I have just created a really small protoype/proof-of-concept to prove that it is possible.

Also please don't misunderstand me, Spring boot offers a lot of more things apart from self-contained application like monitoring, actuators, or artifact dependency resolution. But these things are only integration with other technologies, my example has been developed from zero in 1 hour and a half so don't expect to have a Spring boot ready to be used.

The first thing to choose is the application server to be used, and in this case there is no doubt that the best one for this task is Apache TomEE. It is a certified web profile Java EE server which takes 1 second to start up and works with default Java memory parameters.

So I added tomee dependencies in my pom.xml file.

In used tomee embedded version (1.7.1) you can only deploy applications contained inside a file, you cannot add for example a Servlet programmatically like it is done in Tomcat. This may change in near future of embedded tomee API, but for now we are going to use ShrinkWrap to create these deployment files in a programmatic way.

This is what we want to do:

Notice that we are only importing JavaEE classes and it is as reduced as Spring Boot one. In only 2 seconds the application is ready to be used. Keep in mind that you can use any feature provided by web profile spec as well as JAX-RS or JMS. So for example you can use JPA, Bean Validation, EJBs, CDI, ...

And what's inside TomEEApplication? You will be surprised a class with only 70 lines:

As you may see it is really simple piece of code and for example configuration or name of the application is hardcoded, but see that with several small easy changes you may start configuring server, application and so on.

In summary, of course Spring Boot is cool, but with really simple steps you can start having the same in JavaEE world. We (Apache TomEE contributors) are going to start to work on this and expand this idea. 

So don't underestimate Java EE because of Spring Boot.

We keep learning,

Alex.

Do you believe in life after love, I can feel something inside me say, I really don't think you're strong enough, Now (Believe - Cher)

Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4p0chD8U8fA

Defend your Application with Hystrix

In previous post http://www.lordofthejars.com/2014/07/rxjava-java8-java-ee-7-arquillian-bliss.html we talked about microservices and how to orchestrate them using Reactive Extensions using (RxJava). But what's happen when one or many services fail because they have been halted or they throw an exception? In a distributed system like microservices architecture it is normal that a remote service may fail so communication between them should be fault tolerant and manage the latency in network calls properly.

And this is exactly what Hystrix does. Hystrix is a latency and fault tolerance library designed to isolate points of access to remote systems, services and 3rd party libraries, stop cascading failure and enable resilience in complex distributed systems where failure is inevitable.

In a distributed architecture like microservices, one service may require to use other services as dependencies to accomplish his work. Every point in an application that reaches out over the network or into a client library that can potentially result in network requests is a source of failure. Worse than failures, these applications can also result in increased latencies between services. And this leaves us to another big problem, suppose you are developing a service on a Tomcat which will open two connections to two services, if one of this service takes more time than expected to send back a response, you will be spending one thread of Tomcat pool (the one of current request) doing nothing rather than waiting an answer. If you don't have a high traffic site this may be acceptable, but if you have a considerable amount of traffic all resources may become saturated and and block the whole server.

An schema from this scenario is provided on Hystrix wiki:

The way to avoid previous problem is to add a thread layer which isolates each dependency from each other. So each dependency (service) may contain a thread pool to execute that service. In Hystrix this layer is implemented by HystricxCommand object, so each call to an external service is wrapped to be executed within a different thread.

An schema of this scenario is provided on Hystrix wiki:

But also Hystrix provides other features:

• Each thread has a timeout so a call may not be infinity waiting for a response.
• Perform fallbacks wherever feasible to protect users from failure.
• Measure success, failures (exceptions thrown by client), timeouts, and thread rejections and allows monitorizations.
• Implements a circuit-breaker pattern which automatically or manually to stop all requests to an external service for a period of time if error percentage passes a threshold.

So let's start with a very simple example:

And then we can execute that command in a synchronous way by using execute method.

new HelloWorldCommand().execute();

Although this command is synchronous, it is executed in a different thread. By default Hystrix creates a thread pool for each command defined inside the same HystrixCommandGroupKey. In our example Hystrix creates a thread pool linked to all commands grouped to HelloWorld thread pool. Then for every execution, one thread is get from pool for executing the command.

But of course we can execute a command asynchornously (which perfectly fits to asynchronous JAX-RS 2.0 or Servlet 3.0 specifications). To do it simply run:

In fact synchronous calls are implemented internally by Hystrix as return new HelloWorldCommand().queue().get(); internally.

We have seen that we can execute a command synchronously and asynchronously, but there is a third method which is reactive execution using RxJava (you can read more about RxJava in my previous post www.lordofthejars.com/2014/07/rxjava-java8-java-ee-7-arquillian-bliss.html).

To do it you simply need to call observe method:

But sometimes things can go wrong and execution of command may throw an exception. All exceptions thrown from the run() method except for HystrixBadRequestException count as failures and trigger getFallback() and circuit-breaker logic (more to come about circuit-breaker). Any business exception that you don't want to count as service failure (for example illegal arguments) must be wrapped in HystrixBadRequestException.

But what happens with service failures, what Hystrix can do for us? In summary Hystrix can offer two things:

1. A method to do something in case of a service failure. This method may return an empty, default value or stubbed value, or for example can invoke another service that can accomplish the same logic as the failing one.
2. Some kind of logic to open and close the circuit automatically.

Fallback:

The method that is called when an exception occurs (except for HystrixBadRequestException) is getFallback(). You can override this method and provide your own implementation.

Circuit breaker:

Circuit breaker is a software pattern to detect failures and avoid receiving the same error constantly.

But also if the service is remote you can throw an error without waiting for TCP connection timeout.

Suppose next typical example: A system need to access database like 100 times per second and it fails. Same error will be thrown 100 times per second and because connection to remote Database implies a TCP connection, each client will wait until TCP timeout expires.

So it would be much useful if system could detect that a service is failing and avoid clients do more requests until some period of time. And this is what circuit breaker does. For each execution check if the circuit is open (tripped) which means that an error has occurred and the request will be not sent to service and fallback logic will be executed. But if the circuit is closed then the request is processed and may work.

Hystrix maintains an statistical database of number of success request vs failed requests. When Hystrix detects that in a defined spare of time, a threshold of failed commands has reached, it will open the circuit so future request will be able to return the error as soon as possible without having to consume resources to a service which probably is offline. But the good news is that Hystrix is also the responsible of closing the circuit. After elapsed time Hystrix will try to run again an incoming request, if this request is successful, then it will close the circuit and if not it will maintain the circuit opened.

In next diagram from Hystrix website you can see the interaction between Hystrix and circuit.

Now that we have seen the basics of Hystrix, let's see how to write tests to check that Hystrix works as expected.

Last thing before test. In Hystrix there is an special class called HystrixRequestContext. This class contains the state and manages the lifecycle of a request. You need to initialize this class if for example you want to Hystrix manages caching results or for logging purposes. Typically this class is initialized just before starting the business logic (for example in a Servlet Filter), and finished after request is processed. 

Let's use previous HelloWorldComand to validate that fallback method is called when circuit is open.

And the test. Keep in mind that I have added a lot of asserts in the test for academic purpose.

This is a very simple example, because execute method and fallback method are pretty simple, but if you think that execute method may contain complex logic and fallback method can be as complex too (for example retrieving data from another server, generate some kind of stubbed data, ...), then writing integration or functional tests that validates all this flow it starts having sense. Keep in mind that sometimes your fallback logic may depends on previous calls from current user or other users.

Hystrix also offers other features like cashing results so any command already executed within same HystrixRequestContext may return a cache result (https://github.com/Netflix/Hystrix/wiki/How-To-Use#Caching). Another feature it offers is collapsing. It enables automated batching of requests into a single HystrixCommand instance execution. It can use batch size and time as the triggers for executing a batch. 

As you may see Hystrix is a really simple yet powerful library, that you should take under consideration if your applications call external services.

We keep learning,

Alex.

Sing us a song, you're the piano man, Sing us a song tonight , Well, we're all in the mood for a melody , And you've got us feelin' alright (Piano Man - Billy Joel)

Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxEPV4kolz0