Recently I have rediscovered a JBoss Fuse functionality that I had forgotten about and I’ve thought that other people out there may benefit of this reminder.
This post will be focused on JBoss Fuse and Fabric8 but it might interest also all those developers that are looking for minimally invasive ways to add some degree of dynamic support to their static configuration files.
The idea of dynamic configuration in OSGi and in Fabric8
OSGi framework is more often remembered for its class-loading behavior. But a part of that, it also defines other concepts and functionality that the framework has to implement.
One of the is ConfigAdmin.
ConfigAdmin is a service to define an externalized set of properties files that are logically bounded to your deployment units.
The lifecycle of this external properties files is linked with OSGi bundle lifecycle: if you modify an external property file, your bundle will be notified.
Depending on how you coded your bundle you can decide to react to the notification and, programmatically or via different helper frameworks like Blueprint, you can invoke code that uses the new configuration.
This mechanism is handy and powerful, and all developers using OSGi are familiar with it.
Fabric8 builds on the idea of ConfigAdmin, and extends it.
With its provisioning capabilities, Fabric8 defines the concept of a Profile that encapsulates deployment units and configuration. It adds some layer of functionality on top of plain OSGi and it allows to manage any kind of deployment unit, not only OSGi bundles, as well as any kind of configuration or static file.
If you check the official documentation you will find the list of “extensions” that Fabric8 layer offers and you will learn that they are divided mainly in 2 groups: Url Handlers and Property Resolvers.
I suggest everyone that is interested in this technology to dig through the documentation; but to offer a brief summary and a short example, imagine that your Fabric profiles have the capability to resolve some values at runtime using specific placeholders.
ex.
# sample url handler usage, ResourceName is a filename relative to the namespace of the containing Profile:
profile:ResourceName
# sample property handler, the value is read at deploy time, from the Apache Zookeeper distributed registry that is published when you run JBoss Fuse
${zk:/fabric/registry/containers/config/ContainerName/Property}
There are multiple handlers available out of the box, covering what the developers thought were the most common use cases: Zookeeper, Profiles, Blueprint, Spring, System Properties, Managed Ports, etc.
And you might also think to extend the mechanism defining your own extension: for example you might want to react to performance metrics you are storing on some system, you can write an extension, with it’s syntax convention, that injects values taken from your system.
The limit of all this power: static configuration files
The capabilities I have introduced above are exciting and powerful but they have an implicit limit: they are available only to .properties files or to files that Fabric is aware of.
This means that those functionality are available if you have to manage Fabric Profiles, OSGi properties or other specific technology that interact with them like Camel, but they are not enabled for anything that is Fabric-Unaware.
Imagine you have your custom code that reads an .xml configuration file. And imagine that your code doesn’t reference any Fabric object or service.
Your code will process that .xml file as-is. There won’t be any magic replacement of tokens or paths, because despite you are running inside Fabric, you are NOT using any directly supported technology and you are NOT notifying Fabric, that you might want its services.
To solve this problem you have 3 options:
- You write an extension to Fabric to handle and recognise your static resources and delegates the dynamic replacement to the framework code.
- You alter the code contained in your deployment unit, and instead of consuming directly the static resources you ask to Fabric services to interpolate them for you
- *You use
mvel:url handler (and avoid touching any other code!)
What is MVEL ?
MVEL is actually a programming language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MVEL .
In particular it’s also scripting language that you can run directly from source skipping the compilation step.
It actually has multiple specific characteristics that might make it interesting to be embedded within another application and be used to define new behaviors at runtime. For all these reasons, for example, it’s also one of the supported languages for JBoss Drools project, that works with Business Rules you might want to define or modify at runtime.
Why it can be useful to us? Mainly for 2 reasons:
- it works well as a templating language
- Fabric8 has already a
mvel:url handler that implicitly, acts also as a resource handler!
Templating language
Templating languages are those family of languages (often Domain Specific Languages) where you can altern static portion of text that is read as-is and dynamic instructions that will be processed at parsing time. I’m probably saying in a more complicated way the same idea I have already introduced above: you can have tokens in your text that will be translated following a specific convention.
This sounds exactly like the capabilities provided by the handlers we have introduced above. With an important difference: while those were context specific handler, MVEL is a general purpose technology. So don’t expect it to know anything about Zookeeper or Fabric profiles, but expect it to be able to support generic programming language concepts like loops, code invocation, reflection and so on.
Fabric supports it!
A reference to the support in Fabric can be find here: http://fabric8.io/gitbook/urlHandlers.html
But let me add a snippet of the original code that implements the functionality, since this is the part where you might found this approach interesting even outside the context of JBoss Fuse:
public InputStream getInputStream() throws IOException {
assertValid();
String path = url.getPath();
URL url = new URL(path);
CompiledTemplate compiledTemplate = TemplateCompiler.compileTemplate(url.openStream());
Map<String, Object> data = new HashMap<String, Object>();
Profile overlayProfile = fabricService.get().getCurrentContainer().getOverlayProfile();
data.put(“profile”, Profiles.getEffectiveProfile(fabricService.get(), overlayProfile));
data.put(“runtime”, runtimeProperties.get());
String content = TemplateRuntime.execute(compiledTemplate, data).toString();
return new ByteArrayInputStream(content.getBytes());
}
What’s happening here?
First, since it’s not showed in the snippet, remember that this is a url handler. This means that the behavior get’s triggered for files that are referred to via a specific uri. In this case it’s mvel:. For example a valid path might be mvel:jetty.xml.
The other interesting and relatively simple thing to notice is the interaction with MVEL interpreter.
Like most of the templating technologies, even the simplest ones you can implement yourself you usually have:
- an engine/complier, here it’s
TemplateCompiler - a variable that contains your template, here it’s
url - a variable that represent your context, that is the set of variables you want to expose to the engine, here
data
Put them all together, asking the engine to do it’s job, here with TemplateRuntime.execute(...) and what you get in output is a static String. No longer the templating instructions, but all the logic your template was defining has been applied, and eventually, augmented with some of the additional input values taken from the context.
An example
I hope my explanation it’s been simple enough, but probably an example is the best way to express the concept.
Let’s use jetty.xml, contained in JBoss Fuse default.profile, that is a static resource that JBoss Fuse doesn’t handle as any special file, so it doesn’t offer any replacement functionality to it.
I will show both aspects of MVEL integration here: reading some value from the context variables and show how programmatic logic (just the sum of 2 integers here) can be used:
<Property name="jetty.port" default="@{ Integer.valueOf( profile.configurations['org.ops4j.pax.web']['org.osgi.service.http.port'] ) + 10 }"/>
We are modifying the default value for Jetty port, taking its initial value from the “profile” context variable, that is a Fabric aware object that has access to the rest of the configuration:
profile.configurations['org.ops4j.pax.web']['org.osgi.service.http.port']
we explicitly cast it from String to Integer:
Integer.valueOf( ... )
and we add a static value of 10 to the returned value:
.. + 10
Let’s save the file, stop our fuse instance. Restart it and re-create a test Fabric:
# in Fuse CLI shell shutdown -f # in bash shell rm -rf data instances bin/fuse # in Fuse CLI shell fabric:create --wait-for-provisioning
Just wait and monitor logs and… Uh-oh. An error! What’s happening?
This is the error:
2015-10-05 12:00:10,005 | ERROR | pool-7-thread-1 | Activator | 102 - org.ops4j.pax.web.pax-web-runtime - 3.2.5 | Unable to start pax web server: Exception while starting Jetty
java.lang.RuntimeException: Exception while starting Jetty
at org.ops4j.pax.web.service.jetty.internal.JettyServerImpl.start(JettyServerImpl.java:143)[103:org.ops4j.pax.web.pax-web-jetty:3.2.5]
…
Caused by: java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException
at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance0(Native Method)[:1.7.0_76]
at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.java:57)[:1.7.0_76]
at sun.reflect.DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.java:45)[:1.7.0_76]
at java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstance(Constructor.java:526)[:1.7.0_76]
at org.eclipse.jetty.xml.XmlConfiguration$JettyXmlConfiguration.set(XmlConfiguration.java:572)[96:org.eclipse.jetty.aggregate.jetty-all-server:8.1.17.v20150415]
at org.eclipse.jetty.xml.XmlConfiguration$JettyXmlConfiguration.configure(XmlConfiguration.java:396)[96:org.eclipse.jetty.aggregate.jetty-all-server:8.1.17.v20150415]
…
Caused by: java.lang.NumberFormatException: For input string: “@{profile.configurations[’org.ops4j.pax.web'][‘org.osgi.service.http.port’] + 1}”
at java.lang.NumberFormatException.forInputString(NumberFormatException.java:65)[:1.7.0_76]
at java.lang.Integer.parseInt(Integer.java:492)[:1.7.0_76]
at java.lang.Integer.<init>(Integer.java:677)[:1.7.0_76]
… 29 more
If you notice, the error message says that our template snippet cannot be converted to a Number.
Why our template snippet is displayed in first instance? The templating engine should have done its part of the job and give us back a static String without any reference to templating directives!
I have showed you this error on purpose, to insist on a concept I have described above but that might get uncaught on first instance.
MVEL support in Fabric, is implemented as an url handler.
So far we have just modified the content of a static resource file, but we haven’t given any hint to Fabric that we’d like to handle that file as a mvel template.
How to do that?
It’s just a matter of using the correct uri to refer to that same file.
So, modify the file default.profile/org.ops4j.pax.web.properties that is the place in the default Fabric Profile where you define which static file contains Jetty configuration:
# change it from org.ops4j.pax.web.config.url=profile:jetty.xml to org.ops4j.pax.web.config.url=mvel:profile:jetty.xml
Now, stop the instance again, remove the Fabric configuration files, recreate a Fabric and notice how you Jetty instance is running correctly.
We can check it in this way:
JBossFuse:karaf@root> config:list | grep org.osgi.service.http.port org.osgi.service.http.port = 8181
While from your browser you can verify, that Hawtio, JBoss Fuse web console that is deployed on top Jetty, is accessible to port 8191: http://localhost:8191/hawtio
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