Bernhard Huemer schrieb:
I´d rather have a single pretictable triggering point than having
the compiler being triggered continously in unpredictable manner.
A standalone developer can code and save and can cause continous
errors. But at the time he hits refresh, he can be pretty sure that
his code should work (well often it does not but that is a different
matter)
Even if you compile continuously the developer can introduce mistakes,
save them and the application won't pick them up as it simply doesn't
compile anyway - or do you mean runtime errors? Just thinking about it -
apparently it doesn't really matter at which point you pick up the
changes as long as you pick them up at all (which you do), which
basically means, if the developer introduces runtime errors at runtime
it will affect your application regardless of whether you recompile it
JSP-like or not (btw. using the term "JSP-like" as a way to express how
you manage compilation isn't really precise either as e.g. the Jasper 2
engine provides background compilation as well - but let's stick with
the usual approach to define what "JSP-like" means).
Anyhow if it works JSP-like in your case, then you can't just treat
users and developers the same. The relationship that any developer who
uses your module is a user of your module doesn't really matter when it
comes to race conditions, so I'd suggest we'll ignore that fact.
However, what matters is that there are people who issue requests to the
web server, namely the users, and people who actually modify the source
files of those applications, the developers. The problem with the users
requests being the "compilation trigger" is apparently that you'll have
to deal with race conditions as there are multiple possible request
threads. If, however, the developer, or more precisely said the daemon
thread that checks for file modifications, triggers compilations you've
only got one thread - the file monitoring thread - that could possibly
access the compiler, hence no need for synchronization at all in this case!
Well, we've already talked about it a lot anyway, and it's probably just
a matter of preference, I just wanted to point out some issues and
compare different approaches. Maybe others want to follow that
discussion as well, which is why I'm still responding to this emails as
well
Actually the trigger point of the compiler is really just a matter of
personal preference, but the concurrency issues go way deeper than that
and mostly are singleton related.
We have application scoped, session scoped and request scoped beans.
Well what happens if a compile is done in a middle of a request for
someone who hits the site, this happens in both approaches.
Under normal no locking circumstances, the beans get replaced in the
middle of the request because someone else triggered it for the
application singleton, which is probably fine but somewhat dirty because
in some cases this might end up with a temporary classcast exception
which is resolved then at the following request cleanly.
If you want to solve it cleanly you have various options.
a) Let the requests run out which already are in progress
Then compile and while compilation put any new request on hold
Then let the requests through again.
The compile has to be seen as transaction boundary, everything
before the compile has to be a single unit, which is not mutable,
everything after the compile also.
The problem here starts with long running requests like comet
frameworks issue them, then suddenly the compiler literally has to wait
for ages until it can trigger (until the timeout for the comet related
long running xhr request, if you run for instance on Bayeux not on
websockets which are handled differently).
b) Try to double buffer everything possible so that requests before and
during the compile see a single application state (the biggest issue
simply is the singleton constructs like application scoped managed
beans, that means double buffer the class files so every compile has to
go into a separate dir, double buffer the managed beans which means the
old beans have to be preserved until the last jsf request has terminated
which accesses the current state, so I even assume we need an unlimited
nesting depth of the application state here.
Just in short terms to sum it up, this is way too much to handle for my
1.0 version, which is mainly aimed at easing the life of the developers.
I probably will add solution a) but will make it only optionally turned
on sort of as additional safety net for production sites which do not
run comet over jsf (99% of all sites). I am not aiming for a 100%
perfect solution in 1.0 but only for a solution which should ease the
life of the developers by reducing the number of server restarts as much
as possible.
What we are talking about here is a 1% corner case which imposes 90%
extra work in that area, and that is definitely a post 1.0 thing to
solve. After all the entire library is not done with 1.0, 1.0 is just a
first version which aims to solve certain things to some extend.
And we are not talking about rendering the application in an unusable
state but that after compile time users in a multiuser environment might
get an error for exactly one request. A situation which cannot happen in
a single user dev environment entirely.
So hot patching a running server or having multiple developers
programming against a running server might trigger this, but only for
one request only. It simply is not worth it for 1.0 to solve that,
although I am sure some users will run into it, hence this needs to be
documented!
And to go back to the original discussion, the compile trigger point is
mostly a matter of preferrence, I have to admit doing the compile on
request start was just because I had jsps behavior in mind, when I was
coding it, I was not even thinking of doing it parallely in the watchdog
daemon thread.
