On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 6:04 PM, Simon Laws <[email protected]>wrote:

> So, I've put some simple classloader code [1]  together to help us
> understand the issues. Basically it stores classloaders in
> WarModuleInfo and EjbModuleInfo structures and then introduces an SCA
> JEE classloader to find the right classes. So back to Vamsi's original
> proposal/questions...
>
> > Some of the ideas that I have are:
> > 1. Have the current JavaEE introspection extension point return a class
> loader for the archive introspected.
> > 2. Have an extension point or a utility to return/resolve(?) a class
> loader based on the URI of the artifact passed as parameter.
>
> I took approach 1 here but current the module info structures already
> return JEE classes read from the same classloader so returning the
> classloader itself seems to unbalance the interface somewhat. Having
> access to the separate classloader may allow a solution to the deploy
> vs build problem described later but at the moment the new classloader
> interface is used at the "resolve" phased which is as close to the
> "read" phase as makes no difference.
>
> > Then create a new ContributionClassLoaderProvider to override the default
> one incase the runtime supports Java EE implementation types.
>
> Currently the DefaultContributionClassLoaderProvider is not picked up
> via the utility extension point so I removed it. This does allow me to
> exploit this extension point to install the JEEClassLoaderProvider but
> we then couldn't add anything else in the future. Not ideal but OK for
> now.
>
> > Another aspect that we need to consider is that incase of EAR
> application, there are multiple classloaders at play, like the Application
> > classloader with common libraries, EJB classloader with all EJB modules
> in the EAR and one classloader per web module.  So, the
> > contribution classloader will have to manage more than one classloader
> under the covers and delegate class loading to appropriate class loader.
>
> How to tell which classloader to delegate to? The answer may be that
> the class resolution is being performed in the context of a component
> whose implementation resolves to a JEE archive (or something in a JEE
> archive). However down in the Java class resolution code it doesn't
> have this context. Also if we have an EAR with multiple WARs which
> each expose references then how to know which SCA reference relates to
> which WAR. It may be that there is enough info in the component type
> structure to associate a reference with a WAR. I haven't looked yet.
> But even if this is the case we would need to be able to feed this
> through the interface.java resolution logic which is somewhat
> independent at the moment.  At the moment my code just looks at the
> modules in turn but of course there may be the case that two modules
> contain the same class. More investigation required.
>
> > During the build phase, the Java EE introspection code may be creating
> temporary classloaders (like OpenEJB does at the moment) to obtain
> > the metadata required for deployment.  And at runtime the classloaders
> are different and in most cases the classes are available in the thread
> > context classloader.
>
> This could be really problematic. The code at the moment assumes that
> the classes used to construct the component type are the classes used
> at runtime in the binding and wire processing. I don't know what the
> proposal is in terms of actually interacting with the runtime is but I
> would have to assume that the SCA runtime will be dealing with classes
> that the JEE runtime is also dealing with. I don't see how you would
> make it work without this.  So I can see that it is useful to do
> contribution testing with OpenEJB standalone but wouldn't this be
> performed by the container if we have an active container. It might be
> using OpenEJB also but if what you are saying is that OpenEJB creates
> these classloads in the knowledge that it is going to create some more
> to actually load and run the JEE artifacts then we have a problem. II
> think we need to find a way of getting the runtime classloaders at
> component type creation time.
>
> > It becomes more complicated in the case of nested EARs (i.e., an EAR
> contribution packaging another EAR inside).  One way I can think of >
> > handling this is by viewing the contribution as a heirarchy of logical
> contributions and having implicit imports.
>
> We may need a magic JEE import anyhow as this would help us with the
> external JEE archive scenario. So worth investigating.
>
> Simon
>
> [1]
> http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/tuscany/branches/sca-java-1.x/modules/contribution-jee-impl/src/main/java/org/apache/tuscany/sca/contribution/jee/impl/
>


As an FYI aside there is a project call Cargo for manipulating JEE artifacts
and its just had a 1.0 release, maybe it would help.

   ...ant

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