DDevelopment & Design

Use XMLs not groovy scripts with db migration plugin!

I have 48 domain classes in my Grails 2.1 project and I use Grails Database Migration Plugin 1.2 for a database management. Recently I’ve noticed that it becomes terribly slow when running application, even if there are no changes to be applied. I swit…

I have 48 domain classes in my Grails 2.1 project and I use Grails Database Migration Plugin 1.2 for a database management. Recently I’ve noticed that it becomes terribly slow when running application, even if there are no changes to be applied.

I switched do debug logging level for liquibase package and I found that it takes about 15 seconds to parse changelog.groovy and 20 files that were included in it!

Prepare benchmark

I couldn’t belive it so I’ve created two new clean changelogs:

$ grails dbm-generate-changelog changelog.groovy
$ grails dbm-generate-changelog changelog.xml

Both of these changelogs contain 229 change sets. It is enough that you can benchmark parsers for them. Two parsers in question are:

  • grails.plugin.databasemigration.GrailsChangeLogParser
  • liquibase.parser.core.xml.XMLChangeLogSAXParser

I need to modify a line in my Config.groovy and switch changelog.groovy with changelog.xml for a second test:

grails.plugin.databasemigration.updateOnStart = true
grails.plugin.databasemigration.updateOnStartFileNames = ["changelog.groovy"]
// grails.plugin.databasemigration.updateOnStartFileNames = ["changelog.xml"] grails.plugin.databasemigration.updateOnStart = true
grails.plugin.databasemigration.updateOnStartFileNames = ["changelog-all.groovy"]
// grails.plugin.databasemigration.updateOnStartFileNames = ["changelog-all.xml"]

Profile with JProfiler

I want to profile execution time. I use JProfiler from ej-technologies to measure execution times. Please notice that I don’t want to benchmark SQL queries performed by liquibase. I am only focused on parse method of these two classes.

Here’s how I set up JProfiler:

I switch to CPU Views – Method statistics and I click “Record”. Here are results for both parsers:

Results for changelog.groovy

Results for changelog.xml

Analysis

My assumptions were correct: 8 339 ms vs 139 ms. Parsing XML is 60 times faster! I want to jump and sing: “I switch to XML now!”, but I have some concerns. I have a production database that I need to be compatible with. And I should rewrite my all groovy changelog files by hand. So it’s not so trivial and it’s a time consuming and error prone task.

So as much as I want to switch to XML now, I won’t. But if you start your adventure with database migration plugin today I have an advice for you: use XML if you start from scratch.

For now I’ve just submitted a new JIRA issue – GrailsChangeLogParser – parse method is very slow and I hope it can be greatly improved.

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DDevelopment & Design

Micro services on the JVM part 1 – Clojure

Micro services could be a buzzword of 2014 for me. Few months ago I was curious to try Dropwizard framework as a separate backend, but didn’t get the whole idea yet. But then I watched a mind-blowing “Micro-Services Architecture” talk by Fred George. Also, the 4.0 release notes of Spring covers microservices as an important rising trend as well. After 10 years of having SOA in mind, but still developing monoliths, it’s a really tempting idea to try to decouple systems into a set of independently developed and deployed RESTful services.

Micro services could be a buzzword of 2014 for me. Few months ago I was curious to try Dropwizard framework as a separate backend, but didn’t get the whole idea yet. But then I watched a mind-blowing “Micro-Services Architecture” talk by Fred George. Also, the 4.0 release notes of Spring covers microservices as an important rising trend as well. After 10 years of having SOA in mind, but still developing monoliths, it’s a really tempting idea to try to decouple systems into a set of independently developed and deployed RESTful services.

DDevelopment & Design

Spock, Java and Maven

Few months ago I've came across Groovy - powerful language for JVM platform which combines the power of Java with abilities typical for scripting languages (dynamic typing, metaprogramming).

Together with Groovy I've discovered spock framework (https://code.google.com/p/spock/) - specification framework for Groovy (of course you can test Java classes too!). But spock is not only test/specification framework - it also contains powerful mocking tools.

Even though spock is dedicated for Groovy there is no problem with using it for Java classes tests. In this post I'm going to describe how to configure Maven project to build and run spock specifications together with traditional JUnit tests.


Firstly, we need to prepare pom.xml and add necessary dependencies and plugins.

Two obligatory libraries are:
<dependency>
    <groupid>org.spockframework</groupId>
    <artifactid>spock-core</artifactId>
    <version>0.7-groovy-2.0</version>
    <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupid>org.codehaus.groovy</groupId>
    <artifactid>groovy-all</artifactId>
    <version>${groovy.version}</version>
    <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
Where groovy.version is property defined in pom.xml for more convenient use and easy version change, just like this: 
<properties>
    <gmaven-plugin.version>1.4</gmaven-plugin.version>
    <groovy.version>2.1.5</groovy.version>
</properties>

I've added property for gmaven-plugin version for the same reason ;)

Besides these two dependencies, we can use few additional ones providing extra functionality:
  • cglib - for class mocking
  • objenesis - enables mocking classes without default constructor
To add them to the project put these lines in <dependencies> section of pom.xml:
<dependency>
    <groupid>cglib</groupId>
    <artifactid>cglib-nodep</artifactId>
    <version>3.0</version>
    <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupid>org.objenesis</groupId>
    <artifactid>objenesis</artifactId>
    <version>1.3</version>
    <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>

And that's all for dependencies section. Now we will focus on plugins necessary to compile Groovy classes. We need to add gmaven-plugin with gmaven-runtime-2.0 dependency in plugins section:
<plugin>
    <groupid>org.codehaus.gmaven</groupId>
    <artifactid>gmaven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>${gmaven-plugin.version}</version>
    <configuration>
        <providerselection>2.0</providerSelection>
    </configuration>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <goals>
                <goal>compile</goal>
                <goal>testCompile</goal>
            </goals>
        </execution>
    </executions>
    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupid>org.codehaus.gmaven.runtime</groupId>
            <artifactid>gmaven-runtime-2.0</artifactId>
            <version>${gmaven-plugin.version}</version>
            <exclusions>
                <exclusion>
                    <groupid>org.codehaus.groovy</groupId>
                    <artifactid>groovy-all</artifactId>
                </exclusion>
            </exclusions>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupid>org.codehaus.groovy</groupId>
            <artifactid>groovy-all</artifactId>
            <version>${groovy.version}</version>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>
</plugin>

With these configuration we can use spock and write our first specifications. But there is one issue: default settings for maven-surefire plugin demand that test classes must end with "..Test" postfix, which is ok when we want to use such naming scheme for our spock tests. But if we want to name them like CommentSpec.groovy or whatever with "..Spec" ending (what in my opinion is much more readable) we need to make little change in surefire plugin configuration:
<plugin>
    <groupid>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactid>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.15</version>
    <configuration>
        <includes>
            <include>**/*Test.java</include>
            <include>**/*Spec.java</include>
        </includes>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

As you can see there is a little trick ;) We add include directive for standard Java JUnit test ending with "..Test" postfix, but there is also an entry for spock test ending with "..Spec". And there is a trick: we must write "**/*Spec.java", not "**/*Spec.groovy", otherwise Maven will not run spock tests (which is strange and I've spent some time to figure out why Maven can't run my specs).

Little update: instead of "*.java" postfix for both types of tests we can write "*.class" what is in my opinion more readable and clean:
<include>**/*Test.class</include>
<include>**/*Spec.class</include>
(thanks to Tomek Pęksa for pointing this out!)

With such configuration, we can write either traditional JUnit test and put them in src/test/java directory or groovy spock specifications and place them in src/test/groovy. And both will work together just fine :) In one of my next posts I'll write something about using spock and its mocking abilities in practice, so stay in tune.