Sivakumar Thyagarajan's Blog
Friday Dec 05, 2008
Connectors 1.6 Public Review available
The JSR 322
expert group has been working hard on defining new features,
addressing comments from the public and improving the early
draft. We are happy to announce that the Public Review Draft document
is now available off the JSR page in JCP. This blog introduces some of the new
and noteworthy features that are part of this draft.
Given the short
time between Public Draft and Proposed Final Draft, it would
be great if you could read the draft and send your feedback to the
expert group as soon as you can.
As mentioned above, this draft also addresses early draft related
comments that we received from the community and so we encourage you to
help us continue that effort by sending your review comments to the JSR
comments alias
jsr-322-comments@jcp.org
or in this blog.
Some of the major new features in the public review draft are:
- Ease of Development (EoD) through use of metadata annotations, optional deployment descriptor(ra.xml),better defaults, optional configuration etc.
- Integration with JSR 303: Bean Validation specification to handle validation requirements of configuration properties in various resource adapter JavaBeans.
- Support for Distributed
Work Processing and Work
processing Hints
Here is a brief overview of the new features:
- Ease of Development through metadata annotations: Java EE 5 brought in a huge change in the enterprise application programming model through the introduction of EoD enhancements such as the use of metadata annotations, better defaults, removal of boilerplate code etc. These improvements simplified component development to a great extent while still retaining the richness and the power of the technology.
Since the Conectors
technology was not updated as part of Java EE 5, the ease with which
resource adapters can be developed has not improved since J2EE 1.4.
However, as Roberto points out, EoD is an ongoing
goal in Java EE 6 and improvements are made to the Connectors
spec as well.
The spec now defines (in Chapter 18) a simplified API for development of resource adapters. The goal of the API was to simplify the development of resource adapter implementations for programmers who are just starting with resource adapters, or developing resource adapters of small to medium complexity.Through the introduction of new metadata annotations, the specification now reduces or completely eliminates the need to deal with a deployment descriptor(ra.xml) in many cases.
The new annotations defined in the spec are:
The spec now defines (in Chapter 18) a simplified API for development of resource adapters. The goal of the API was to simplify the development of resource adapter implementations for programmers who are just starting with resource adapters, or developing resource adapters of small to medium complexity.Through the introduction of new metadata annotations, the specification now reduces or completely eliminates the need to deal with a deployment descriptor(ra.xml) in many cases.
The new annotations defined in the spec are:
- @Connector: specify that the JavaBean is a resource adapter JavaBean. Used to provide metadata about the capabilities provided by the resource adapter. It is optional to provide a JavaBean implementing the ResourceAdapter interface. [However, there are scenarios where a resource adapter may want to provide an implementation -- see Section 18.4.1]
- @ConfigProperty: specifies to the application server, that the decorated property is a configuration property for that JavaBean. Configuration Properties are now auto-discoverable by the application server and hence need not specified using the deployment descriptor.
- @ConnectionDefinition(s): defines a set of connection interfaces and classes pertaining to a particular connection type (identical to the role played by the connection-definition element in ra.xml).
- @Activation: designate a JavaBean as an ActivationSpec JavaBean
- @AdministeredObject:
designates a JavaBean as an administered object.
Through the use of these
annotations and other improvements such as the auto-discovery of
configuration properties, the use of JSR 303 to express validation
constraints etc, we hope resource-adapter development would be radically
simplified. Please see Chapter 18 for more information on these
annotations and code samples on how then can be used.
[Please note: Metadata annotations and some new usecases (Resource injection, definition of a component naming context (ENC) for resource adapters etc) are still being actively discussed in the Expert group and hence these interfaces must be considered as work-in-progress and may go through changes in the next phases of the specification. -- We would also love to hear from the community on their thoughts on the proposed annotations and EoD capabilities defined so far.]
As the reference implementation is developed, I will follow up with more samples showcasing the use of annotations while building connectors. So, stay tuned.
[Please note: Metadata annotations and some new usecases (Resource injection, definition of a component naming context (ENC) for resource adapters etc) are still being actively discussed in the Expert group and hence these interfaces must be considered as work-in-progress and may go through changes in the next phases of the specification. -- We would also love to hear from the community on their thoughts on the proposed annotations and EoD capabilities defined so far.]
As the reference implementation is developed, I will follow up with more samples showcasing the use of annotations while building connectors. So, stay tuned.
- JavaBean Validation: The Bean Validation (JSR 303) specification is "defining a meta-data model and API for JavaBean validation based on annotations, with overrides and extended meta-data through the use of XML validation descriptors." The Connector spec now allows its JavaBeans such as ResourceAdapter, ManagedConnectionFactory, ActivationSpec, AdministeredObject and InteractionSpec to be decorated with the Bean Validation constraint annotations. This now provides the RA developer a richer and standard way of expressing their constraints and also get the configuration of a JavaBean validated prior to use. Please see Section 5.3.7.5 in the spec for more information
- Distributed
Work Processing: In deployment runtimes which span
multiple VMs/hosts, it is useful to have Work instances that were
submitted by a resource adapter to a local WorkManager to be
distributed to a different remote WorkManager, for reasons of
scaling, performance etc. The specification defines a mechanism to
allow such distributed Work processing. See Section 10.3.11 for more
information on this
feature.
- Work
processing hints: The specification also now enables a
resource adapter to pass quality-of-service metadata to the WorkManager
during the submission of a Work instance. The WorkManager
implementation of the application server may then use the specified
hints to control the execution of the Work instance. For those who
followed the InflowContext mechanism defined in the Early Draft, the
propagation of QoS hints is defined as a standard InflowContext,
HintsInflowContxt. See Section 11.7 for more information on this.
Posted at 10:10AM Dec 05, 2008 by Sivakumar Thyagarajan in connectors16_jsr322 |
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