Primitives and its wrapped types compatibility

IntroductionHow often do you think about possible changes in your API? Do you consider that something required could become optional in future? How about compatibility of such change? One of this changes is going from primitive (e. g. int) to its wrapp…

Introduction

How often do you think about possible changes in your API? Do you consider that something required could become optional in future? How about compatibility of such change? One of this changes is going from primitive (e. g. int) to its wrapped type (e. g. Integer). Let’s check it out.

API – first iteration

Let’s start with simple DTO class Dep in our public API.

public class Dep {
    private int f1;

public int getF1(){
return f1;
}

public void setF1(int f1){
this.f1 = f1;
}

// other fields and methods omitted
}

f1 is obligatory field that never will be null.

Let’s use it in Main class:

public class Main {
    public static void main(String... args) {
        Dep dep = new Dep();
        dep.setF1(123);
        System.out.println(dep.getF1());
    }
}

compile it:

$ javac depInt/Dep.java
$ javac -cp depInt main/Main.java

and run:

$ java -cp depInt:main Main
123

It works.

API – obligatory field become optional

Now suppose our business requirements have changed. f1 is not longer obligatory and we want possibility to set it to null.

So we provide next iteration of Dep class where f1 field has type Integer.

public class Dep {
    private Integer f1;

public Integer getF1(){
return f1;
}

public void setF1(Integer f1){
this.f1 = f1;
}

// other fields and methods omitted
}

We compile only the new Dep class because we do not want to change the Main class:

$ javac depInteger/Dep.java

and run it with old Main:

$ java -cp depInteger:main Main
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: Dep.setF1(I)V
    at Main.main(Main.java:4)

Wow! It does not work…

Why does it not work?

We can use javap tool to investigate Main class.

$ javap -c main/Main.class
Compiled from "Main.java"
public class Main {
  public Main();
    Code:
       0: aload_0
       1: invokespecial #1                  // Method java/lang/Object."<init>":()V
       4: return

public static void main(java.lang.String…);
Code:
0: new #2 // class Dep
3: dup
4: invokespecial #3 // Method Dep.”<init>”:()V
7: astore_1
8: aload_1
9: bipush 123
11: invokevirtual #4 // Method Dep.setF1:(I)V
14: getstatic #5 // Field java/lang/System.out:Ljava/io/PrintStream;
17: aload_1
18: invokevirtual #6 // Method Dep.getF1:()I
21: invokevirtual #7 // Method java/io/PrintStream.println:(I)V
24: return
}

The most important are 11th and 18th instructions of main method. Main lookups for methods which use int (I in method signature).

Next let’s compile the Main class with Dep which has f1 of type Integer:

javac -cp depInteger main/Main.java

and use javap on this class:

$ javap -c main/Main.class
Compiled from "Main.java"
public class Main {
  public Main();
    Code:
       0: aload_0
       1: invokespecial #1                  // Method java/lang/Object."<init>":()V
       4: return

public static void main(java.lang.String…);
Code:
0: new #2 // class Dep
3: dup
4: invokespecial #3 // Method Dep.”<init>”:()V
7: astore_1
8: aload_1
9: bipush 123
11: invokestatic #4 // Method java/lang/Integer.valueOf:(I)Ljava/lang/Integer;
14: invokevirtual #5 // Method Dep.setF1:(Ljava/lang/Integer;)V
17: getstatic #6 // Field java/lang/System.out:Ljava/io/PrintStream;
20: aload_1
21: invokevirtual #7 // Method Dep.getF1:()Ljava/lang/Integer;
24: invokevirtual #8 // Method java/io/PrintStream.println:(Ljava/lang/Object;)V
27: return
}

Now we see the difference. The main method:

  • converts int to Integer in instruction 11th,
  • invokes method setF1 which takes parameter of type Integer (Ljava/lang/Integer;) in instruction 14th,
  • invokes method getF1 which returns Integer in instruction 21st.

These differences do not allow us to use the Main class with Dep without recompilation if we change f1.

How about Groovy?

We have GroovyMain class which do the same as Main class written in Java.

class GroovyMain {
    static void main(String... args) {
        Dep dep = new Dep(f1: 123)
        println(dep.f1)
    }
}

We will compile GroovyMain class only with Dep which uses int:

$ groovyc -cp lib/groovy-all-2.4.5.jar:depInt -d main main/GroovyMain.groovy

It runs great as expected with int:

$ java -cp lib/groovy-all-2.4.5.jar:depInt:main GroovyMain
123

but with Integer… It works the same!

$ java -cp lib/groovy-all-2.4.5.jar:depInteger:main GroovyMain
123

Groovy is immune to such change.

With CompileStatic

But what if we compile groovy with CompileStatic annotation? This annotation instructs groovy compiler to compile class with type checking and should produce bytecode similar to javac output.

GroovyMainCompileStatic class is GroovyMain class with only CompileStatic annotation:

import groovy.transform.CompileStatic

@CompileStatic
class GroovyMainCompileStatic {
static void main(String… args) {
Dep dep = new Dep(f1: 123)
println(dep.f1)
}
}

When we compile this with Dep with int field:

$ groovyc -cp lib/groovy-all-2.4.5.jar:depInt -d main main/GroovyMainCompileStatic.groovy

then of course it works:

$ java -cp lib/groovy-all-2.4.5.jar:depInt:main GroovyMainCompileStatic
123

but with Dep with Integer field it fails like in Java:

$ java -cp lib/groovy-all-2.4.5.jar:depInteger:main GroovyMainCompileStatic
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: Dep.setF1(I)V
    at GroovyMainCompileStatic.main(GroovyMainCompileStatic.groovy:6)

Conclusion

Change from primitive to its wrapped java type is not compatible change. Bytecode which uses dependent class assumes that there will be method which consumes or returns e. g. int and cannot deal with the same class which provides such method with Integer in place of int.

Groovy is much more flexible and could handle it, but only if we do not use CompileStatic annotation.

The source code is available here.

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Zookeeper + Curator = Distributed sync

An application developed for one of my recent projects at TouK involved multiple servers. There was a requirement to ensure failover for the system’s components. Since I had already a few separate components I didn’t want to add more of that, and since there already was a Zookeeper ensemble running - required by one of the services, I’ve decided to go that way with my solution.

What is Zookeeper?

Just a crude distributed synchronization framework. However, it implements Paxos-style algorithms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_(computer_science)) to ensure no split-brain scenarios would occur. This is quite an important feature, since I don’t have to care about that kind of problems while using this app. You just need to create an ensemble of a couple of its instances - to ensure high availability. It is basically a virtual filesystem, with files, directories and stuff. One could ask why another filesystem? Well this one is a rather special one, especially for distributed systems. The reason why creating all the locking algorithms on top of Zookeeper is easy is its Ephemeral Nodes - which are just files that exist as long as connection for them exists. After it disconnects - such file disappears.

With such paradigms in place it’s fairly easy to create some high level algorithms for synchronization.

Having that in place, it can safely integrate multiple services ensuring loose coupling in a distributed way.

Zookeeper from developer’s POV

With all the base services for Zookeeper started, it seems there is nothing else, than just connect to it and start implementing necessary algorithms. Unfortunately, the API is quite basic and offers files and directories abstractions with the addition of different node type (file types) - ephemeral and sequence. It is also possible to watch a node for changes.

Using bare Zookeeper is hard!

Creating connections is tedious - and there is lots of things to take care of. Handling an established connection is hard - when establishing connection to ensemble, it’s necessary to negotiate a session also. During the whole process a number of exceptions can occur - these are “recoverable” exceptions, that can be gracefully handled and not break the connection.

    class="c8"><span>So, Zookeeper API is hard.</span></p><p class="c1"><span></span></p><p class="c8"><span>Even if one is proficient with that API, then there come recipes. The reason for using Zookeeper is to be able to implement some more sophisticated algorithms on top of it. Unfortunately those aren&rsquo;t trivial and it is again quite hard to implement them without bugs.</span>

And since distributed systems are hard, why would anyone want another difficult to handle tool?

Enter Curator

<p
    class="c8"><span>Happily, guys from Netflix implemented a nice abstraction for dealing with Zookeeper internals. They called it Curator and use it extensively in the company&rsquo;s environment. Curator offers consistent API for Zookeeper&rsquo;s functionality. It even implements a couple of recipes for distributed systems.</span>

File read/write

<p
    class="c8"><span>The basic use of Zookeeper is as a distributed configuration repository. For this scenario I only need read/write capabilities, to be able to write and read files from the Zookeeper filesystem. This code snippet writes a sample json to a file on ZK filesystem.</span>

<a href="#"
                                                                                                  name="0"></a>

EnsurePath ensurePath = new EnsurePath(markerPath);
ensurePath.ensure(client.getZookeeperClient());
String json = “...”;
if (client.checkExists().forPath(statusFile(core)) != null)
     client.setData().forPath(statusFile(core), json.getBytes());
else
     client.create().forPath(statusFile(core), json.getBytes());


Distributed locking

Having multiple systems there may be a need of using an exclusive lock for some resource, or perhaps some big system requires it’s components to synchronize based on locks. This “recipe” is an ideal match for those situations.

ref="#"
                                                                                    name="b0329bbbf14b79ffaba1139881914aea887ef6a3"></a>



lock = new InterProcessSemaphoreMutex(client, lockPath);
lock.acquire(5, TimeUnit.MINUTES);
… do sth …
lock.release();


 (from https://github.com/zygm0nt/curator-playground/blob/master/src/main/java/pl/touk/curator/LockingRemotely.java)

Sevice Advertisement

<p

    class="c8"><span>This is quite an interesting use case. With many small services on different servers it is not wise to exchange ip addresses and ports between them. When some of those services may go down, while other will try to replace them - the task gets even harder. </span>

That’s why, with Zookeeper in place, it can be utilised as a registry of existing services.

If a service starts, it registers into the ServiceRegistry, offering basic information, like it’s purpose, role, address, and port.

Services that want to use a specific kind of service request an access to some instance. This way of configuring easily decouples services from their configuration.

Basically this scenario needs ? steps:

<span>1. Service starts and registers its presence (</span><span class="c5"><a class="c0"
                                                                               href="https://github.com/zygm0nt/curator-playground/blob/master/src/main/java/pl/touk/curator/WorkerAdvertiser.java#L44">https://github.com/zygm0nt/curator-playground/blob/master/src/main/java/pl/touk/curator/WorkerAdvertiser.java#L44</a></span><span>)</span><span>:</span>



ServiceDiscovery discovery = getDiscovery();
            discovery.start();
            ServiceInstance si = getInstance();
            log.info(si);
            discovery.registerService(si);



2. Another service - on another host or in another JVM on the same machine tries to discover who is implementing the service (https://github.com/zygm0nt/curator-playground/blob/master/src/main/java/pl/touk/curator/WorkerFinder.java#L50):

<a href="#"

                                                                                                  name="3"></a>

instances = discovery.queryForInstances(serviceName);

The whole concept here is ridiculously simple - the service advertising its presence just stores a file with its whereabouts. The service that is looking for service providers just look into specific directory and read stored definitions.

In my example, the structure advertised by services looks like this (+ some getters and constructor - the rest is here: https://github.com/zygm0nt/curator-playground/blob/master/src/main/java/pl/touk/model/WorkerMetadata.java):



public final class WorkerMetadata {
    private final UUID workerId;
    private final String listenAddress;
    private final int listenPort;
}


Source code

<p

    class="c8"><span>The above recipes are available in Curator library (</span><span class="c5"><a class="c0"
                                                                                                    href="http://curator.incubator.apache.org/">http://curator.incubator.apache.org/</a></span><span>). Recipes&rsquo;
usage examples are in my github repo at </span><span class="c5"><a class="c0"
                                                                   href="https://github.com/zygm0nt/curator-playground">https://github.com/zygm0nt/curator-playground</a></span>

Conclusion

<p
    class="c8"><span>If you&rsquo;re in need of a reliable platform for exchanging data and managing synchronization, and you need to do it in a distributed fashion - just choose Zookeeper. Then add Curator for the ease of using it. Enjoy!</span>


  1. image comes from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jfgallery/2993361148
  2. all source code fragments taken from this repo: https://github.com/zygm0nt/curator-playground

An application developed for one of my recent projects at TouK involved multiple servers. There was a requirement to ensure failover for the system’s components. Since I had already a few separate components I didn’t want to add more of that, and since there already was a Zookeeper ensemble running - required by one of the services, I’ve decided to go that way with my solution.

What is Zookeeper?

Just a crude distributed synchronization framework. However, it implements Paxos-style algorithms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_(computer_science)) to ensure no split-brain scenarios would occur. This is quite an important feature, since I don’t have to care about that kind of problems while using this app. You just need to create an ensemble of a couple of its instances - to ensure high availability. It is basically a virtual filesystem, with files, directories and stuff. One could ask why another filesystem? Well this one is a rather special one, especially for distributed systems. The reason why creating all the locking algorithms on top of Zookeeper is easy is its Ephemeral Nodes - which are just files that exist as long as connection for them exists. After it disconnects - such file disappears.

With such paradigms in place it’s fairly easy to create some high level algorithms for synchronization.

Having that in place, it can safely integrate multiple services ensuring loose coupling in a distributed way.

Zookeeper from developer’s POV

With all the base services for Zookeeper started, it seems there is nothing else, than just connect to it and start implementing necessary algorithms. Unfortunately, the API is quite basic and offers files and directories abstractions with the addition of different node type (file types) - ephemeral and sequence. It is also possible to watch a node for changes.

Using bare Zookeeper is hard!

Creating connections is tedious - and there is lots of things to take care of. Handling an established connection is hard - when establishing connection to ensemble, it’s necessary to negotiate a session also. During the whole process a number of exceptions can occur - these are “recoverable” exceptions, that can be gracefully handled and not break the connection.

    class="c8"><span>So, Zookeeper API is hard.</span></p><p class="c1"><span></span></p><p class="c8"><span>Even if one is proficient with that API, then there come recipes. The reason for using Zookeeper is to be able to implement some more sophisticated algorithms on top of it. Unfortunately those aren&rsquo;t trivial and it is again quite hard to implement them without bugs.</span>

And since distributed systems are hard, why would anyone want another difficult to handle tool?

Enter Curator

<p
    class="c8"><span>Happily, guys from Netflix implemented a nice abstraction for dealing with Zookeeper internals. They called it Curator and use it extensively in the company&rsquo;s environment. Curator offers consistent API for Zookeeper&rsquo;s functionality. It even implements a couple of recipes for distributed systems.</span>

File read/write

<p
    class="c8"><span>The basic use of Zookeeper is as a distributed configuration repository. For this scenario I only need read/write capabilities, to be able to write and read files from the Zookeeper filesystem. This code snippet writes a sample json to a file on ZK filesystem.</span>

<a href="#"
                                                                                                  name="0"></a>

EnsurePath ensurePath = new EnsurePath(markerPath);
ensurePath.ensure(client.getZookeeperClient());
String json = “...”;
if (client.checkExists().forPath(statusFile(core)) != null)
     client.setData().forPath(statusFile(core), json.getBytes());
else
     client.create().forPath(statusFile(core), json.getBytes());


Distributed locking

Having multiple systems there may be a need of using an exclusive lock for some resource, or perhaps some big system requires it’s components to synchronize based on locks. This “recipe” is an ideal match for those situations.

ref="#"
                                                                                    name="b0329bbbf14b79ffaba1139881914aea887ef6a3"></a>



lock = new InterProcessSemaphoreMutex(client, lockPath);
lock.acquire(5, TimeUnit.MINUTES);
… do sth …
lock.release();


 (from https://github.com/zygm0nt/curator-playground/blob/master/src/main/java/pl/touk/curator/LockingRemotely.java)

Sevice Advertisement

<p

    class="c8"><span>This is quite an interesting use case. With many small services on different servers it is not wise to exchange ip addresses and ports between them. When some of those services may go down, while other will try to replace them - the task gets even harder. </span>

That’s why, with Zookeeper in place, it can be utilised as a registry of existing services.

If a service starts, it registers into the ServiceRegistry, offering basic information, like it’s purpose, role, address, and port.

Services that want to use a specific kind of service request an access to some instance. This way of configuring easily decouples services from their configuration.

Basically this scenario needs ? steps:

<span>1. Service starts and registers its presence (</span><span class="c5"><a class="c0"
                                                                               href="https://github.com/zygm0nt/curator-playground/blob/master/src/main/java/pl/touk/curator/WorkerAdvertiser.java#L44">https://github.com/zygm0nt/curator-playground/blob/master/src/main/java/pl/touk/curator/WorkerAdvertiser.java#L44</a></span><span>)</span><span>:</span>



ServiceDiscovery discovery = getDiscovery();
            discovery.start();
            ServiceInstance si = getInstance();
            log.info(si);
            discovery.registerService(si);



2. Another service - on another host or in another JVM on the same machine tries to discover who is implementing the service (https://github.com/zygm0nt/curator-playground/blob/master/src/main/java/pl/touk/curator/WorkerFinder.java#L50):

<a href="#"

                                                                                                  name="3"></a>

instances = discovery.queryForInstances(serviceName);

The whole concept here is ridiculously simple - the service advertising its presence just stores a file with its whereabouts. The service that is looking for service providers just look into specific directory and read stored definitions.

In my example, the structure advertised by services looks like this (+ some getters and constructor - the rest is here: https://github.com/zygm0nt/curator-playground/blob/master/src/main/java/pl/touk/model/WorkerMetadata.java):



public final class WorkerMetadata {
    private final UUID workerId;
    private final String listenAddress;
    private final int listenPort;
}


Source code

<p

    class="c8"><span>The above recipes are available in Curator library (</span><span class="c5"><a class="c0"
                                                                                                    href="http://curator.incubator.apache.org/">http://curator.incubator.apache.org/</a></span><span>). Recipes&rsquo;
usage examples are in my github repo at </span><span class="c5"><a class="c0"
                                                                   href="https://github.com/zygm0nt/curator-playground">https://github.com/zygm0nt/curator-playground</a></span>

Conclusion

<p
    class="c8"><span>If you&rsquo;re in need of a reliable platform for exchanging data and managing synchronization, and you need to do it in a distributed fashion - just choose Zookeeper. Then add Curator for the ease of using it. Enjoy!</span>


  1. image comes from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jfgallery/2993361148
  2. all source code fragments taken from this repo: https://github.com/zygm0nt/curator-playground