Inject beans into JBoss 7 Modules

It seems like JBoss 7.0 CDI has an issue with injecting beans that are located in shared libraries, and are not part of an EAR file. Irritating (but solved in the next version). However, I didn’t want to upgrade, so I decided to solve it instead.
Here’s a short step-by-step:

Deltaspike

Deltaspike is an apache library that has several useful CDI extensions. Add it as a module to your jboss-as. You can use the following module.xml file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 
<module xmlns="urn:jboss:module:1.1" name="org.deltaspike">
 
    <resources>
        <resource-root path="deltaspike-core-api.jar" />
        <resource-root path="deltaspike-core-impl.jar" />
    </resources>
 
    <dependencies>
        <module name="com.google.guava" />
        <module name="javax.enterprise.api" />
        <module name="javax.inject.api" />
    </dependencies>
</module>

Reflections

Reflections is a very useful library that allows you to find classes that has an annotation in runtime.
Add it as a module to your jboss-as.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 
<module xmlns="urn:jboss:module:1.1" name="org.reflections">
 
    <resources>
        <resource-root path="reflections.jar" />
    </resources>
 
    <dependencies>
        <module name="com.google.guava" />
        <module name="org.javassist" />
        <module name="org.slf4j" />
    </dependencies>
</module>

Module extensions

This is the heart of the solution. This module runs when the CDI container starts, and adds relevant beans to the CDI. Make sure this class is part of a JAR file that is inside your EAR file!

This code is greatly influenced from https://rmannibucau.wordpress.com/2013/08/19/adding-legacy-beans-to-cdi-context-a-cdi-extension-sample/

package com.tona.cdi;
import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.Map;
import java.util.Set;

import javax.enterprise.event.Observes;
import javax.enterprise.inject.Any;
import javax.enterprise.inject.spi.AfterBeanDiscovery;
import javax.enterprise.inject.spi.AnnotatedType;
import javax.enterprise.inject.spi.Bean;
import javax.enterprise.inject.spi.BeanManager;
import javax.enterprise.inject.spi.BeforeBeanDiscovery;
import javax.enterprise.inject.spi.Extension;
import javax.enterprise.util.AnnotationLiteral;
import javax.inject.Named;
import javax.inject.Singleton;

import org.apache.deltaspike.core.util.bean.BeanBuilder;
import org.apache.deltaspike.core.util.metadata.builder.AnnotatedTypeBuilder;
import org.reflections.Reflections;
import org.slf4j.Logger;
import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory;

import com.google.common.base.Strings;

public class ModuleConfigurationExtension implements Extension {
    private static final Logger log = LoggerFactory.getLogger(ModuleConfigurationExtension.class);
    private final Map beans = new HashMap();

    /**
     * This method is automatically activated by CDI, and loads all classes in the com.tona package that has NAMED or
     * SINGLETON annotations.
     * @param bdd
     */
    void readAllConfigurations(final @Observes BeforeBeanDiscovery bdd, BeanManager bm) {
        log.info("Starting to load beans from modules");
        addBeansFromPackage(bdd, bm, "com.tona");
    }

    private void addBeansFromPackage(final BeforeBeanDiscovery bdd, BeanManager bm, String packageName) {
        Reflections reflections = new Reflections(packageName);
        Set beanClasses = reflections.getTypesAnnotatedWith(Named.class);
        beanClasses.addAll(reflections.getTypesAnnotatedWith(Singleton.class));

        for (Class bean : beanClasses) {
            @SuppressWarnings({ "unchecked", "rawtypes" })
            AnnotatedType annotatedType = new AnnotatedTypeBuilder().readFromType(bean).create();
            Set foundBeans = bm.getBeans(annotatedType.getBaseType(), new AnnotationLiteral() {
            });

            if (foundBeans.size() == 0) {
                bdd.addAnnotatedType(annotatedType);
                String name;
                Named named = bean.getAnnotation(Named.class);
                if (named == null || Strings.isNullOrEmpty(named.value())) {
                    name = bean.getSimpleName();
                } else {
                    name = named.value();
                }
                beans.put(name, annotatedType);
            }
        }
    }

    /**
     * This method actually initializes the beans we discovered in <code>readAllConfigurations</code>. Again - this
     * method is automatically activated by CDI
     * @param abd
     * @param bm
     * @throws Exception
     */
    public void addCdiBeans(final @Observes AfterBeanDiscovery abd, final BeanManager bm) throws Exception {
        log.info("Starting to initialize beans from modules");

        for (Map.Entry bean : beans.entrySet()) {
            Set foundBeans = bm.getBeans(bean.getValue().getBaseType(), new AnnotationLiteral() {
            });

            if (foundBeans.size() == 0) {
                final Bean cdiBean = createBean(bm, bean.getKey(), bean.getValue());
                abd.addBean(cdiBean);
                log.debug("Added bean " + cdiBean.getName());
            }
        }
    }

    private static Bean createBean(final BeanManager bm,
            final String name,
            final AnnotatedType annotatedType)
            throws Exception {
        final BeanBuilder beanBuilder = new BeanBuilder(bm).
                readFromType(annotatedType).
                name(name);

        return beanBuilder.create();
    }
}

Configuring the extension

Create a file called META-INF/services/javax.enterprise.inject.spi.Extension. It should only have the following line:

com.tona.cdi.ModuleConfigurationExtension

Updating your EAR file

The EAR file should have dependencies on the org.deltaspike and org.reflections module. Add it in the MANIFEST.MF file.

Batch Update with JPA

A customer of mine has a highly scalable system, with high database load. To improve performance, we’ve decided to use Batch update. Alas – the application uses JPA, so how do we do it?

SessionFactoryImplementor sfi = SessionFactoryImplementor)entityManager.unwrap(Session.class).getSessionFactory();
//Retrieve DB connection
connect = sfi.getConnectionProvider().getConnection();
PreparedStatement ps = connect.prepareStatement("INSERT INTO temp_table values(?,?)");
for (Data p : insertCommands) {
	ps.setInt(1, p.getId());
	if (p.isWorking() != null) {
		ps.setInt(2, p.isWorking() ? 1 : 0);
	} else {
		ps.setNull(2, Types.INTEGER);
	}
	ps.addBatch();
}
ps.executeBatch();

Some points to remember:

  1. Do not close the connection!!! When closing the connection, it returns to the connection pool, without commit or rollback. You’ll get some exceptions in your code, but mainly – you’re open to database locks and dead-locks, as the connection keeps all the locks that were done in the batch update. And since other threads will reuse the connection – it will never close.
  2. Do not use Statement.addBatch. Use PreparedStatement.addBatch. When I checked both solutions, the Statement one took anywhere between 30s-60s. The PreparedStatement version took <300ms…

EJB inflation

Ever since the JavaEE standard introduced the Local interfaces (and especially in EJB3), I see people abusing EJBs. The logic is simple – if EJB calls are local, let’s use EJBs, and enjoy dependency injection.
Recently I assisted a customer who had over 200 EJBs in a project that had about 500 classes! I call it EJB inflation, and it’s bad. Really bad.
The reason – the EJB container does more than just proxy remote calls. It handles security, transactions, pooling and more. Using those, for every class, is paying a huge price in performance. Let’s just say that when I run a profiler on the customer code I saw that over 20% of the server time is wasted on the application server EJB related code (JTA, specifically).
I will post workarounds for this in future posts, but in the mean time – beware abusing EJBs. Don’t fall to the “if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail” trap.