Thanks Gerard, That does sound reasonable, but wouldn't I effectively lose the unique individual codebase annotations of each entry? I have various unrelated services that interact in often-complex ways. Consider the following:
* In foo-api, I have an entry called FooEvent * In my space-based timer api, I have an entry called PublishLater, and a particular instance of PublishLater contains an instance of FooEvent, and a timestamp that says when to publish the nested entry. The timer service (and the timer-api) has no knowledge of foo-api. There would be no generic way to write that PublishLater entry to XML, and parse it again, making sure that the nested FooEvent has the correct codebase (which will be distinct from the codebase of the higher-level Entry). I have many such occurrences of entries generically containing other entries, and the codebase has to remain intact for each. I think I will (as Dan suggested( have to write a Java-based migration tool, that (using reflection) reconstructs each Entry, taking care to, at each level, retain the proper codebase, with only the changes required for the migration. Because I'm using Rio's maven-based class loading, I know that where a codebase URL was "artifact:foo:bar-api:1.0" I can now reconstruct it, replacing it with "artifact:foo:bar-api:1.1". This will be very interesting indeed, and I need to do it ASAP :-( A production deployment depends on this. After reading the Entry spec, it seems that only at each top-level field of an Entry can each object have a different codebase, right? (and not at lower levels within those objects). If so, that'll make things a lot easier. Anybody have any experience doing this the "hard" (with Java classloading) way? Dawid On Mon, 2013-02-04 at 06:56 -0800, Gerard Fulton wrote: > One easy option may be to write a simple client using your old code to > serialize the entries in the space to XML on disk. Then launch your new > application and put entries into the space instance. > > > On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 3:34 AM, Dawid Loubser <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Thanks for the quick response, Dan! > > > > I want to understand the classloading a bit better. Let me explain to > > you how I *think* it works. Also, for reference, I'm using the rio > > project, that has a special classloader that understands URLs in the > > form "artifact:foo:bar:1.0" and which loads classes from Maven > > artifacts, but I think it's conceptually the same as any other URL > > scheme etc. > > > > * When an Entry it written to space, it's turned into a > > MarshalledInstance. This is annotated with the codebase (a collection of > > URLs). Immediate question: Is there only one codebase at the top-level > > of the entry, or does every object in the graph have (or can have) its > > own codebase? > > > > * When a worker takes/reads an entry (which might contain things that > > both are on the worker's classpath, and perhaps lower-level content that > > is not (i.e. specialisations that it does not have to understand), how > > does the space proxy know what to do? I imagine it uses the thread > > context class loader, but then how does it deserialise the objects that > > is not on that classpath (using the codebase annotation of the > > MarshalledInstance, I imagine) whilst not colliding with the classes > > already available to the worker? Using some sort of parent/child > > delegation? > > > > I've got a very tricky ClassCastException problem I'm trying to debug, > > where it's clearly the same class loaded by two classloaders, and thus > > the field cannot be assigned. I don't know how to get "in there" and > > solve the problem, it seems I can only respond to the > > UnusableEntryException, get the partial entry, and lose the rest? > > > > thanks so much, > > Dawid > > > > > > On Mon, 2013-02-04 at 11:17 +0000, Dan Creswell wrote: > > > On 4 February 2013 11:10, Dawid Loubser <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > Hi all, > > > > > > > > I have a bunch of entries in a JavaSpace (representing long-running > > > > process state, i.e. they exist for days or weeks), and these contain > > > > some objects that were generated from XML (using JAXB). That vocabulary > > > > has evolved (additions only) but now, of course, the computed > > > > SerialVersionUIDs will be different. When I redeploy my workers that > > > > have been built against the new API, they will surely fail when reading > > > > the old entries. > > > > > > > > Any strategies as to how I can migrate the data in the space? I'm > > > > running a persistent outrigger (snaplogstore). I was thinking of, in a > > > > worker with an 'old' classpath, draining the space, and storing those > > > > entries in some non-java representation on disk, and then in a worker > > > > with the 'new' classpath, reading those entries and re-populating the > > > > space. > > > > > > Slightly more complicated but it's possible to have one worker do all > > > this with some classloader magic. You basically load old and new > > > definitions into separate classloaders with the old version being > > > directly on the classpath, the other dynamically loaded from something > > > not on the classpath. > > > > > > Then you can take the old easily and use reflection magic to populate > > > a new and write it. > > > > > > One other challenge is that most JavaSpace implementations don't like > > > mixed schemas do probably you're better to create a second space, > > > write the migrated ones into that and then turn off the old one (or > > > copy back to the old once you've cleared it down/re-built it). > > > > > > > > > > > Migrating data in a space is surely something that must have caused > > > > problems for somebody before, and I'd love to tackle this problem > > > > drawing on some experience of others. > > > > > > > > regards, > > > > Dawid > > > > > > > >
