Some of the mechanisms with the observable/subscriber. But I do not know enough about it to comment in full.
I’d want to make sure though that under the covers whatever the mechanism is capable of talking with “legacy” systems like REST, SOAP, JMS, etc. Just a standardized way to abstract away the details of the transports in the Camel from/to calls themselves. If you think about Camel itself and direct-vm/SEDA, one really doesn’t have to care or know much about how those are done in memory. Or with JMS request/response queues is another example. One thinks about them almost as if they are a single request/response call while under the covers something different is happening. What if something like that existed that had an interface or mechanism like the RxJava seems to promote but under the covers permitted configuration to/from other services. From a Camel route perspective, that would simply be a request/response call or an async call. While a REST call by its very nature and transport is request/response, that doesn’t mean that I necessarily care about the response when making the call (other than failures which might be normalized). The configuration would still have to happen at some level, obviously, but not at the level of Camel route definition. from(“camel-async:myReceivingEndpoint”) from(“camel-sync:myOtherReceivingEndpoint”) //same for “to” endpoints. Obviously the various Camel “pipes” would need to be responsible for handling the mechanics of converting whatever that underlying mechanism is using. Some of that could be accomplished via current Camel routes inside those pipes. But it would push the configuration down one level and out of the routes themselves. It would make switching from one type of transport to another a configuration change. One example of the utility is in switching from test mode where async/sync might simply be direct-vm/SEDA mechanisms. But when deployed they’d be the actual underlying REST, SOAP or JMS or ?? pipes. Right now this is hand waving on my part and until I actually have (or get) some time to sit down and prototype what that might be like to implement it’s difficult to say how practical or easy that would be to implement. Some would have to be able to understand misconfiguration. What do you do when a JMS request/response is mapped to an async call? That wouldn’t make sense. One could potentially misconfigure that so does the “pipe” where it just throws away a returned payload away? But that problem doesn’t get easier just by making all the connection details and flags explicit in the Camel route itself. If anything, those configuration details on from/to endpoints obscure the nature of what’s happening more than they help. One can still have a from(“seda:xxx”).to(“someRequestReponse”). That obviously doesn’t make sense. It might if there was some bean in between handling the returned data. But if all I see in Camel routes is async or sync calls I can easily scan it to determine if something doesn’t look right and if the route isn’t behaving as I expect I know to look for the culprit in the pipe configuration itself. From: Pratt, Jason [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, January 17, 2017 12:58 PM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: Opinionated... Brad are you looking at doing some sort of RxJava here? From: Brad Johnson [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Saturday, January 14, 2017 5:20 AM To: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> Subject: RE: Opinionated... Scott, It’s funny that you mention OSGi Remote Services as that was sort of in the back of my mind. I think I recall Christian said he was working on a Remote Services implementation as well. But I don’t know enough about it yet to include it in the discussion. I suspect what I’m going to do is set up a GitHub project with a basic project and then a set of appliances for a variety of enterprise integration purposes. That baseline has to be in place before lower levels can be addressed But I do think that a communications abstraction is going to be necessary. A next generation of communications pipes should abstract protocols away from the OSGi programmer. Or as the great and powerful Oz put it “never mind the little man behind the curtain”. When writing code in a Camel route in an OSGi bundle the programmer should either be thinking about using a named request/response pipe or an event pipe – IPs, ports, transports, and so on should happen via straight configuration files, parsed, configured and then registered as services to be picked up in bundles. There isn’t anything that stands in the way of doing that now other than a little elbow grease. So I’ll definitely give the Remote Services a deeper look. From: Scott Lewis [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, January 13, 2017 7:16 PM To: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> Subject: Re: Opinionated... Hi Brad, You might be interested in the OSGi Remote Services specification...which mentions the distributed computing fallacies in the introduction. It's chapter 100 in the enterprise spec [1]. A big part of Remote Services is the ability to use OSGi service dynamics to 'deal-with' distributed systems issues like partial failure (i.e. network is reliable). For example, one way to represent the failure of a remote service would be to make the local service proxy go away. Note that with OSGi service dynamics and (e.g.) DS, the consequences of such a thing on dependent services can be easily handled without introducing special mechanism. IMO another advantage of Remote Services is that the OSGi service contract/impl separation also decouples the service from the distribution system. This allows the service designer to create remote services (API and impl) that are independent of the distribution system's serialization format (e.g json, xml, obj serialization, etc) and comm approach/protocol (e.g. http/rest, pub/sub messaging, mqtt, tcp, etc). As an example of this, I've created three Karaf-hosted remote services that allow remote monitoring and management of Karaf bundles, services, and install/uninstall of Karaf features...and these services can be accessed from remote Eclipse via an mqtt broker, or via server-based tcp, or via other distribution systems without changing the service APIs or implementation. Scott [1] https://www.osgi.org/developer/specifications/ [2] https://wiki.eclipse.org/Karaf_Remote_Management_with_Eclipse On 1/13/2017 11:19 AM, Brad Johnson wrote: That is certainly the sort of library that could be used as a standard. Get an agreement on the standard OSGi service interface and then use it and others for that implementation. Which brings up a good question and issue. There would have to be some set of standardized messages and exception types. The CiruitBreaker example throws a CircuitBreakingException (naturally enough). If there’s an ErrorHandlerService it would have to know the standard set of exceptions that could be expected or, at least, a set of parent classes. Since CircuitBreakingException is a relatively simple class it would be perfect for a default ErrorHandlerService to catch for that class of exceptions. Obviously there will have to be some head scratching and chin rubbing about how the pieces fit together exactly. The CircuitBreakerService (and the others too) could also be more like container classes that listen and pick up CircuitBreakerListenerService instances. So one listener might just log the circuit breaker exception. But you might instantiate an SMTPCircuitBreakerNotifcationService that implements the CircuitBreakerListenerService and fires off an email to an admin email address if the breaker is tripped. That CircuitBreakerService might also be picked by the Kontainer instance which listens for on/off control events from the outside world. Some thinking to do there but they are tractable problems with services and events. The main services like CircuitBreakerService and ThrottlerService might register themselves as providers with the ErrorHandlerService which would catch the types of exceptions they throw. It in turn could listen for custom ExceptionHandlerListener<T> that listen for and handle specific exception types. Still thinking and hand waving about this but I think a sane set of standard services, listeners and events could be created that would permit a user to create simple handlers to register. There would also be the issue of the issue of how to automate injection of those into the Camel routes. That doesn’t seem like it should be a daunting challenge but it would be important. And I think very important that those get injected automatically even if the services only provide basic logging initially with no client custom code. From: James Carman [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, January 13, 2017 12:12 PM To: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> Subject: Re: Opinionated... Commons Lang3 has a pretty simple CircuitBreaker implementation that I used in Microbule: https://github.com/Microbule/microbule/blob/master/decorator/circuitbreaker/src/main/java/org/microbule/decorator/circuitbreaker/CircuitBreakerFilter.java On Fri, Jan 13, 2017 at 1:05 PM Brad Johnson <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: Folks, I wanted to make sure that my promoting CDI, Camel Java DSL, & static profiles didn’t obscure the point I was trying to make. Whatever mechanics we choose I’d really like us to be unified behind a common paradigm so that our documentation, exemplars, archetypes, blogs, libraries, and so on are all organized the same and use the same mechanics and layouts for projects. We should promote an idiomatic way to develop software using Karaf Boot. That’s one problem I hear from a lot of clients. There are such cross-currents of information about how to develop OSGi-based software that it gets confusing. Best or preferred practices are lost in the noise. I won’t get into all that since I’m sure most of you have dealt this problem. Not to pick on it but a good example is that the Camel in Action book recommends using Pojos instead of using Processors/Exchanges. It is on somewhere near the back of the book in a few pages. I don’t know how many examples on the web site actually use the Processor/Exchange but it is a lot. Then there are examples with Spring, Blueprint, Java DSL, Scala, etc. There are annotations that only work in one environment but not in all of them. By selecting an idiomatic and “opinionated” way of creating Karaf Boot microcontainers we could make sure that sort of confusion isn’t continued forward. It would require a lot less documentation to cover the same ground and make editing and updating easier. It would make creating sample and example projects a lot easier. It would simplify what Karaf Boot appliances have to support and make sure there aren’t concerns that work in one environment and not in another or that might work differently in a different environment. I’m personally interested in Karaf Appliances with standard Maven structures, standard bundle structures, and reference implementations that have a good chunk of the basic functionality. I’d say we take a page from the “convention over configuration” book or, at least, a “conventional configuration” and likely a bit of both. Because the appliances are focused on microservices we should get out ahead of the Gartner hype cycle. Right now we are at the Peak of Inflated Expectations and in a couple of years we’ll be at the Trough of Disillusionment. That disillusionment will come for a number of reasons. Flying Spaghetti Monster topology will be one of them but, more importantly for a Karaf Appliance, is the consistent problem of “network fallacies”. Every Karaf Kontainer should have standard OSGi service interfaces and basic implementations that address each of the fallacies that apply to a uService. The Kontainers should insist on it and not make it optional. If the user doesn’t want that functionality they would then need to disable via configuration. But the Kontainer will get stuck in a grace period and then fail if an expected, standard service isn’t available. All of the standard OSGi service APIs would have basic implementations to start but as more specific Kontainers. But, because they are standard services new ones can be developed by the community or by the end developer. As developers, we’ve all had to implement functionality and then come back and deal with error handling, security, etc. I say we simply cut those services in to the Kontainer right from the get-go. The Kontainer doesn’t run if it doesn’t find the service. That isn’t to say these become a fundamental part of Karaf but a fundamental part of the Kontainer service that runs in Karaf. The standard bundles would only implement basic functionality and not do anything sophisticated. New bundles and libraries for more sophisticated implementations could be added later. All of the bundles would likely have disable flags if the developer found the particular concern irrelevant. For example, security might not be relevant. The following aren’t meant to be comprehensive. Just addressing key concerns. Other standards like LoggingService might be included by default as well. The intent here isn’t to define the exact mechanics but the standard OSGi service interface that would be _required_ in any implementation of a Kontainer, even if the implemented bundle is simply a passthrough or can be disabled, it forces the developer to explicitly deal with the problems or choose to ignore them altogether. Because these service interfaces and the bundles that implement them are standard, the set can be specified by the dependencies specified in the Maven build, features and/or profiles. 1. The network is reliable. A standard “Error Handler” OSGi service. The default bundle would simply capture errors/exceptions and log them. Perhaps it would specify retries. Drop in solutions might include errors going to dead letter queues and so on. The OSGi service interface is required for Kontainer bootstrap so use the default or use a standard one or create one of your own. If they want to change configuration of this bundle or put in a new one, they know exactly what it is, where it exists, how it is specified to the build, and what configuration file is associated with it. No rummaging around through code. When the inevitable error, exceptions and problems arise, the developer isn’t left wondering where and how they should add the functionality to handle it. A standard “Circuit Breaker” service API and basic implemented bundle should be provided. Perhaps the standard bundle would simply count errors over a time frame and shut down if that limit is hit and allow those values to be configured. Default would be a rather unsophisticated implementation but provide the convention and automated wiring of a circuit breaker OSGi service. Other implementations might fire off emails to Sys Admins or be combinations. And if it is really undesirable, set a disable flag. 2. Latency is zero. A standard OSGi Throttling service interface and bundle implementation would be included. If you want different behavior, change it. If you want to disable it, set the flag. However, there are bigger issues here that I’ll address a bit more down below. 3. Bandwidth is infinite. Throttling OSGi service again. Ditto to comment 2. 4. The network is secure. Standard OSGi service to plug in in various authentication/authorization mechanisms. By default it might be pass through but also have a different implementation that uses a simple username/password. Obviously LDAP, JAAS, and other bundles could be created and dropped into place. 5. Topology doesn't change. Back to the Circuit Breaker, logging and perhaps notification mechanism. Also the transport issue below where I’ll mention some configuration. 6. There is one administrator. //No particular plugin for this but standardized configuration and expected bundles help and this also relates to the transport discussion. 7. Transport cost is zero. //Probably not a concern here directly but will be a big issue of uServices. 8. The network is homogeneous. //I think this issue can be dealt with in our context with many of the standard libraries but can be abstracted a bit more. Obviously a big issue we’ll see, and I’ve seen in the past, is chained request/response calls. Service 1 making a REST call to service 2 making a REST call to service 3…etc. And all of a sudden the latency is a killer. ServiceMix/Karaf/Camel can already abstract away some of that via property substitution. I’d suggest we take that one step further and put _all_ transport/protocol information in configuration and create a standardized URI. As a developer or a senior developer over a group of developers, I don’t want them to be concerned with the fiddly bits of the transport in the code and routes and I certainly don’t want to recompile just to make such changes. Akka, for example, uses local URIs like akka://. But a similar Karaf/Camel URI could be used and mapped via the configuration files. So the developer would always use karaf:// in their routes and configuration mapping would use the URI specified. karaf://myserviceName. In the configuration file might be mapped a transport.configuration.cfg file. I believe that is important for a lot of reasons. A mid-level or junior-level developer shouldn’t be involved in configuration like: " <ftp://foo@myserver/?> ftp://foo@myserver?password=secret& recursive=true& ftpClient.dataTimeout=30000& ftpClientConfig.serverLanguageCode=fr" So the cfg file might look like this: clientService="ftp://foo@myserver?password=secret <ftp://foo@myserver?password=secret&;> & recursive=true& ftpClient.dataTimeout=30000& ftpClientConfig.serverLanguageCode=fr" (At least properties get rid of the gawdaful escaped ampersands). The code would then say “karaf://clientService” One can do much of that via configuration right now but I think it is critical to move it completely to configuration so that admins know exactly what to change and where to find it when topologies change. It also means that when the backlash from microservice calling microservice calling microservice being slow happens, that simple mapping would permit things like going to JMS asynchronous request/response (or other fast, async mechanisms) that don’t swamp the virtual machine’s or Karaf instance resources. It would also allow for easy stubbing or mock testing of the Kontainer as it will be deployed without using PAX exam or other mechanism. Creating standard OSGi service APIs in an anticipation of these problems would permit for an evolutionary approach to these problems in the future and specific solutions when a standard Kontainer is developed. Even standard error handler service implementations can be created. Once such a basic, standard Kontainer exists, then uKontainers that implement basic functionality commonly used could be created. There are JPA examples already. But the average developer is going to be given a task to receive some canonical data model via a REST service and poke it into a database. That database model probably won’t look like what they are receiving. So a uKontainer that has a REST front end they can modify, a Dozer object mapping file in the middle with a transform, and a call to the database will be used repeatedly. It may be that Oracle, MySQL, BerklyDB, and so on each endup with different error handler plugin implementations which are used with the same REST, mapping, JPA container. Just change the Maven dependency or profile. There are a large number of examples like that. In the case of that uKontainer there would like be a JPAErrorService for catching common errors and another for Dozer errors and for unmarshaling errors. As a developer looking to solve very specific problems, I just download the uContainer and do the Dozer mapping, change some configuration and then test it. That also means, that much like Camel EIPs, open source developers can focus on hardening these containers, fixing bugs, putting in performance enhancements and the like. If a new error is coming from JPA that a user finds and isn’t being handled in a coherent fashion, then a new block or delegate code is added and released. Just as we’d do with a Camel endpoint or component. Having standard error handlers built into uKontainers would also help make coherent messages from the large and unwieldy stack traces full of reflection that we commonly see. The error handler OSGi plugin for a given problem would be highly focused on identifying and reporting problems with a specific technology or set of technologies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_computing
