Peter Voss wrote:
On 01.10.2009, at 08:57, Patrick Hunt wrote:
2) what purpose does ZkEventThread serve?
ZkClient updates it's connection state from the ZooKeeper events. Based
on these it notifies listeners, updates it's connection state or
reconnects to ZooKeeper. ZkClient has its own event thread to prevent
dead-locks. When a listener blocks (because it waits until ZkClient has
reconnected to Zookeeper), ZkClient wouldn't be able to receive the
reconnect event from ZooKeeper anymore, if we had re-used the Zookeeper
event thread to notifier listeners. See the javadoc for ZkEventThread
for more information.
I see. Ok, that makes sense. I did see the javadoc on that, but I didn't
make the connection on what "deadlock" it was talking about. Perhaps it
was just the late hour and I was too sleepy. ;-) You might want to just
add this to your existing javadoc to make it more clear.
3) there's definitely an issue in the retryUntilConnected logic that
you need to address
Good catch. I wasn't aware that nodes could still be have been created
when receiving a ConnectionLoss. But how would you deal with that?
If we create a znode and get a ConnectionLoss exception, then wait until
the connection is back and check if the znode is there. There is no way
of knowing whether it was us who created the node or somebody else, right?
Anyway. That's definitely a design issue.
Well this is what makes connloss a problem, we recognize that this is
not a great situation for users, and why we are doing ZOOKEEPER-22.
Using the std bindings it's really up to the user/situation. In some
cases it's easy (if you're the only potential owner) in others not so much.
4) when I saw that you had separated zkclient and zkconnection I
thought "ah, this is interesting" however when I saw the
implementation I was confused:
a) what purpose does this separation serve?
It's just to have all ZooKeeper communication in one place, where the
higher lever stuff is in ZkClient. That way we are able to provide an
in-memory ZkConnection implementation that doesn't connect to a real
ZooKeeper. This could be used for easier testing.
b) I thought it was to allow multiple zkclients to share a single
connection, however looking at zkclient.close, it closes the
underlying connection.
Actually each ZkClient instance maintains one ZooKeeper connection.
Ok, I see the illegalstateexception being thrown in zkconnection. gotit.
(putting this in the javadoc would really help though ;-) )
5) there's a lot of wrapping of exceptions, looks like this is done in
order to make them unchecked. Is this wise? How much "simpler" does it
really make things? Esp things like interrupted exception? As you
mentioned, one of your intents is to simplify things, but perhaps too
simple? Some short, clear examples of usage would be helpful here to
compare/contrast, I took a very quick look at some of the tests but
that didn't help much. Is there a test(s) in particular that I should
look at to see how zkclient is used, and the benefits incurred?
Checked exceptions are very painful when you are assembling together a
larger number of libraries (which is true for most enterprise
applications). Either you wind up having a general "throws Exception"
(which I don't really like, because it's too general) at most of your
interfaces, or you have to wrap checked exceptions into runtime exceptions.
We didn't want a library to introduce yet another checked exception that
you MUST catch or rethrow. I know that there are different opinions
about that, but that's the idea behind this.
Similar situation for the InterruptedException. ZkClient also converts
this to a runtime exception and makes sure that the interrupted flag
doesn't get cleared. There are just too many existing libraries that
have a "catch (Exception e)" somewhere that totally ignores that this
would reset the interrupt flag, if e is an InterruptedException.
Therefore we better avoid having all of the methods throwing that
exception.
Ok. I didn't mean to imply that it's wrong - just that it should be well
thought out for the particular use cases you want to support and well
documented for the user. I think sun did the right thing with
exceptions, having both checked and unchecked lets you tailor the api
for the use cases you want to support. In too many cases though ppl
don't think about it (I hate when I see stuff like what you mentioned,
doing the wrong thing with interrupts for example) and do the wrong
thing, making the end user suffer.
Thanks a lot for the valuable feedback,
NP. It's great to see users interested enough in ZK to provide
contributions back to the community!
Patrick
ps. I post some (interesting) side projects, many related to ZK, on github
http://github.com/phunt
feel free to follow me, or fork some of my projects there.
--Peter
Regards,
Patrick
Patrick Hunt wrote:
Hi Stefan, two suggestions off the bat:
1) fill in something in the README, doesn't have to be final or
polished, but give some insight into the
what/why/how/where/goals/etc... to get things moving quickly for
reviewers & new users.
2) you should really discuss on the dev list. It's up to you to
include user, but apache discourages use of user for development
discussion (plus you'll pickup more developer insight there)
Patrick
Stefan Groschupf wrote:
Hi Zookeeper developer,
it would be great if you guys could give us some feedback about our
project zkclient.
http://github.com/joa23/zkclient
The main idea is making the life of lazy developers that only want
minimal zk functionality much easier.
We have a functionality like zkclient mock making testing easy and
fast without running a real zkserver, simple call back interfaces
for the different event types, reconnecting handling in case of
timeout etc.
We feel we come closer to a release so it would be great if some
experts could have a look and give us some feedback.
Thanks,
Stefan
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