Easy Tricks for JPA, Spring and Hibernate

Java frameworks have evolved, making us write less code and ship faster! Here, I will discuss some neat tricks to address common concerns in Hibernate and Spring.

1. Auto Scan JPA entities. This is an old trick!

Listing entities (via <class> element)  in persistence.xml isn't needed any more. You may drop it all together and use Spring's packagesToScan feature. Sample spring configuration below.

<bean id="entityManagerFactory" class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean">
 <property name="persistenceUnitName" value="HelloService" />
 <property name="packagesToScan" value="com.x.y.z" />
 <property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource" />
 <property name="jpaVendorAdapter">
  <bean class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.vendor.HibernateJpaVendorAdapter">
   <property name="showSql" value="true" />
   <property name="databasePlatform" value="org.hibernate.dialect.MySQL5Dialect" />
  </bean>
 </property>
</bean>

2.Entities often have audit columns like the following:

@Column(name = "created_by", updatable = false)
protected String createdBy;

@Column(name = "creation_date", updatable = false)
protected Date createdOn;

@Column(name = "last_updated_by")
protected String lastUpdatedBy;

@Column(name = "last_updated")
protected Date lastUpdatedOn;

And providing those values require either writing pre-insert/update Hibernate listeners or writing setters. How about sprinkling some annotations to get the job done? I mean ...

@Column(name = "created_by", updatable = false)
@ModifiedBy
protected String createdBy;

@Column(name = "creation_date", updatable = false)
@CreationTimestamp
protected Date createdOn;

@Column(name = "last_updated_by")
@ModifiedBy
protected String lastUpdatedBy;

@Column(name = "last_updated")
@UpdateTimestamp
protected Date lastUpdatedOn; 

It is quite simple. Read this: http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/orm/4.3/topical/html/generated/GeneratedValues.html

3. Applications are deployed in different environments and configuring those are often messy and by messy I mean repetitive. Spring property place holder has a neat trick by using property of property to dynamically create the property key for each environment.

Sample common properties file for all environments.

# ec2.properties is a properties for all environment.  
awsAccountId=${${env}.awsAccountId}
availabilityZone=${${env}.availabilityZone}
keyName=${${env}.dev}
expiry=${${env}.expiry}
instanceType=${${env}.instanceType}

dev.awsAccountId = 11111111111
dev.availabilityZone = us-east-1a
dev.keyName = dev
dev.expiry = 360000
dev.instanceType = m1.small

beta.awsAccountId = 222222222222
beta.availabilityZone = us-east-1a
beta.keyName = beta
beta.expiry = 360000
beta.instanceType = m1.large

Here is how you will use this file in spring context configuration -

<bean id="ec2Settings"  class="x.y.z.EC2Settings">  
 <property name="accountId" value="${awsAccountId}" />  
 <property name="zone" value="${availabilityZone}" />  
 <property name="key" value="${keyName}" />  
 <property name="expiry" value="${expiry}" />
 <property name="instanceType" value="${instanceType}" />  
</bean>  

Codahale Metrics and Spring

This is a revision of my previous post on Coda Hale Metrics available here.

Goal: Integrate Metrics (v 3.1.0) and Spring (v 4.1.x) in a JEE environment.

Metrics-spring resides here. Code snippets to help you get started below:

1. Add the following dependency in pom.xml

<dependency>
     <groupid>io.dropwizard.metrics</groupid>
     <artifactid>metrics-servlets</artifactid>
     <version>3.1.0</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
     <groupid>com.ryantenney.metrics</groupid>
     <artifactid>metrics-spring</artifactid>
     <version>3.0.3</version>
</dependency>
..
Other metrics dependencies

2. Add the following in web.xml

<servlet>
 <servlet-name>metrics-admin</servlet-name>
 <servlet-class>com.codahale.metrics.servlets.AdminServlet</servlet-class>
</servlet>
<servlet-mapping>
 <servlet-name>metrics-admin</servlet-name>
 <url-pattern>/metrics/admin/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

3. Define metrics.xml and include it in your main spring configuration file.

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:metrics="http://www.ryantenney.com/schema/metrics"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
            http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd
               http://www.ryantenney.com/schema/metrics
               http://www.ryantenney.com/schema/metrics/metrics-3.0.xsd">

    <!-- Registry should be defined in only one context XML file -->
    <metrics:metric-registry id="metrics" />

    <metrics:health-check-registry id="healthCheck" />

    <!-- annotation-driven must be included in all context files -->
    <metrics:annotation-driven metric-registry="metrics"
        health-check-registry="healthCheck" />

    <!-- (Optional) Registry should be defined in only one context XML file -->
    <metrics:reporter type="console" metric-registry="metrics"
        period="1m" />

    <bean
        class="org.springframework.web.context.support.ServletContextAttributeExporter">
        <property name="attributes">
            <map>
                <entry key="com.codahale.metrics.servlets.MetricsServlet.registry">
                    <ref bean="metrics" />
                </entry>
                <entry key="com.codahale.metrics.servlets.HealthCheckServlet.registry">
                    <ref bean="healthCheck" />
                </entry>
            </map>
        </property>
    </bean>
</beans>

4. Define HealthCheck classes and annotate methods with @Timed as per Metrics documentation. And we are done!

Navigate to: http://hostname:port/<webappname>/metrics/admin to view "Operational Menu"

The output metrics is dumped in JSON format. You can parse it and pass it to your favorite graphing library.

Note: All metrics are reported via Console. You can easily enable other reporters in metrics.xml.

The sweetness of developing REST services using Dropwizard

Jersey is my goto software for developing REST services and then I came across Dropwizard. It is a simple and neat framework written on top of Jersey and glues together all essential libraries for creating production ready services.

Before externalizing a web service, it must be operationally ready to take real world traffic and provide HA. So many engineers end up writing health checks, enabling the required logs and metrics metrics etc. All of these features are available out of the box in Dropwizard. Furthermore, it has nice features such as HTTP client for invoking other services, authentication,  integration with Hibernate and DI.

So, while the documentation is straight forward and 'Getting Started' guide does get you started, integration with Spring and JPA via Hibernate requires some work. This article will help you with that assuming you have a working service written using Dropwizard.

1. Wiring up Spring and Dropwizard. HelloWorldApplication is the entry point to the Dropwizard application. The run method is where we initialize Spring.

   @Override
   public void run(HelloWorldConfiguration configuration,
   Environment environment) {

  //init Spring context
        //before we init the app context, we have to create a parent context with all the config objects others rely on to get initialized
        AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext parent = new AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext();
        AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext ctx = new AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext();

        parent.refresh();
        parent.getBeanFactory().registerSingleton("configuration", configuration);
        parent.registerShutdownHook();
        parent.start();

        //the real main app context has a link to the parent context
        ctx.setParent(parent);
        ctx.register(MyAppSpringConfiguration.class);
        ctx.refresh();
        ctx.registerShutdownHook();
        ctx.start();

        //now that Spring is started, let's get all the beans that matter into DropWizard

        //health checks
        Map healthChecks = ctx.getBeansOfType(HealthCheck.class);
        for(Map.Entry entry : healthChecks.entrySet()) {
            environment.healthChecks().register("template", entry.getValue());
        }

        //resources
        Map resources = ctx.getBeansWithAnnotation(Path.class);
        for(Map.Entry entry : resources.entrySet()) {
            environment.jersey().register(entry.getValue());
        }

        //last, but not least,let's link Spring to the embedded Jetty in Dropwizard
        environment.servlets().addServletListeners(new SpringContextLoaderListener(ctx));
}

It is a standard way to initialize Spring. Two important points to note here. One, no need to register resources explicitly. Spring will look for classes annotated with @PATH and register it with Dropwizard. Second is to include MyAppSpringConfiguration which provides additional resources to be included.

2. Definition for MyAppSpringConfiguration is below:

/**
Main Spring Configuration
 */
@Configuration
@ImportResource({ "classpath:spring/applicationContext.xml", "classpath:spring/dao.xml" })
@ComponentScan(basePackages = {"com.nishant.example"})
public class MyAppSpringConfiguration {

}

3. Next, annotate the resource class with @Service annotation and we are ready!

@Service
@Path("/hello-world")
@Produces(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)
public class HelloWorldResource {

 @Autowired
 private HelloWorldConfiguration configuration;

    private final AtomicLong counter = new AtomicLong();

    @GET
    @Timed
    public Saying sayHello(@QueryParam("name") Optional name) {

        final String value = String.format(configuration.getTemplate(), name.or(configuration.getDefaultName()));
        return new Saying(counter.incrementAndGet(), value);
    }
}

For complete working example, see https://github.com/nchandra/SampleDropwizardService

Spring annotations and Ehcache

Ehcache-spring-annotations is a library that simplifies caching in Spring based application using popular Ehcache library. In this article, I will present a simple way to integrate Ehcache in a spring based project.

Spring annotations are particularly useful when there is a need to cache methods of an application with minimal code changes and to use configuration to control the cache settings. In such cases, Ehcache Annotations can be used to dynamically configure caching of method return values.

For example, suppose you have a method: Product getProduct(long productId).

Once caching is added to this method, all calls to the method will be cached using the " productId" parameter as a key.

The steps described below works with Spring 3.1.0, Ehcache 2.5.1 and Ehcache-spring-annotations 1.2.0.

Step 1.

Configure maven to include the required libraries.

<dependency>
 <groupid>net.sf.ehcache</groupid>
 <artifactid>ehcache</artifactid>
 <version>2.5.1</version>
 <type>pom</type>
</dependency>
<dependency>
 <groupid>com.googlecode.ehcache-spring-annotations</groupid>
 <artifactid>ehcache-spring-annotations</artifactid>
 <version>1.2.0</version>
 <type>jar</type>
 <scope>compile</scope>
 <exclusions>
  <exclusion>
   <groupid>org.springframework</groupid>
   <artifactid>spring-expression</artifactid>
  </exclusion>
 </exclusions>
</dependency>
<!-- Include all spring dependencies -->
<dependency>
 <groupid>org.springframework</groupid>
 <artifactid>spring-core</artifactid>
 <version>3.1.0.RELEASE</version>
 <type>jar</type>
 <scope>compile</scope>
</dependency>

Step 2.

Configure Spring. You must add the following to your Spring configuration file in the beans declaration section:

<!-- Ehcache annotation config -->
<ehcache:annotation-driven cache-manager="ehCacheManager"/>

<bean id="ehCacheManager" class="org.springframework.cache.ehcache.EhCacheManagerFactoryBean">
 <property name="configLocation">
  <value>/WEB-INF/ehcache.xml</value>
 </property>
</bean>

Step 3.

Configure ehcache.xml and put it in /WEB-INF/ or in classpath.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<ehcache xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="http://ehcache.org/ehcache.xsd" updateCheck="false">

    <defaultCache eternal="false" maxElementsInMemory="1000"
        overflowToDisk="false" diskPersistent="false" timeToIdleSeconds="0"
        timeToLiveSeconds="600" memoryStoreEvictionPolicy="LRU"/>

    <cache name="product" eternal="false"
        maxElementsInMemory="100" overflowToDisk="false" diskPersistent="false"
        timeToIdleSeconds="0" timeToLiveSeconds="300"
        memoryStoreEvictionPolicy="LRU" />

</ehcache>

 If you are not familiar with configuring EhCache please read their configuration guide.

Step 4.

Add the Annotation to methods you would like to cache. Lets assume you are using the Product getProduct(long productId) method from above.

@Cacheable(cacheName = "product")
public List getProduct(long productId) {
 Query query = entityManager.createQuery(" from Product where productId = :productId");
        query.setParameter("productId", productId);
 query.setMaxResults(10);
 return query.getResultList();
}

@Cacheable annotation can be placed on a method of an interface, or a public method on a class.

Note: The cache name should match the cache name defined in ehcache.xml. Multiple cache names can be defined in ehcache.xml.

What is Spring annotations library doing in the background?

EhCacheInterceptor.java is where all the work is done. It handles invocations on methods annotated with @Cacheable. It simply calls the method and stores the value in Ehcache if the key is not already present.

//See if there is a cached result
final Element element = cache.getWithLoader(cacheKey, null, methodInvocation);
if (element != null) {
    final Object value = element.getObjectValue();

    final boolean ignoreValue = cacheInterceptor.preInvokeCachable(cache, methodInvocation, cacheKey, value);
    if (!ignoreValue) {
 return value;
    }
}
....
....
//No cached value or exception, proceed
final Object value;
try {
    value = methodInvocation.proceed();
}
if ((value != null || cacheableAttribute.isCacheNull()) && shouldCache) {
     cache.put(new Element(cacheKey, value));
}

return value;

Simple, isn't it!