DDevelopment & Design

OSGi Blueprint visualization

What is blueprint?Blueprint is a dependency injection framework for OSGi bundles. It could be written by hand or generated using Blueprint Maven Plugin. Blueprint file is only an XML describing beans, services and references. Each OSGi bundle could hav…

What is blueprint?

Blueprint is a dependency injection framework for OSGi bundles. It could be written by hand or generated using Blueprint Maven Plugin. Blueprint file is only an XML describing beans, services and references. Each OSGi bundle could have one or more blueprint files.

Blueprint files represent architecture of our bundle. Let’s visualize it using groovy script and graphviz available in my github repository and analyze.

Example generation

Pre: All you need is groovy and graphviz installed on your OS

I am working mostly with bundles with generated blueprint, so I will use blueprint file generated from Blueprint Maven Plugin tests as example. All examples are included in github repository.

Generation could be invoked by running run.sh script with given destination file prefix (png extension will be added to it) and path to blueprint file:

mkdir -p target

./run.sh target/fullBlueprint fullBlueprint.xml

Visualization is available here.

Separating domains

First if you look at the image, you see that some beans are grouped. You could easily extract such domains with tree roots: beanWithConfigurationProperties and beanWithCallbackMethods to separate blueprint files and bundles in future and generate images from them:

./run.sh target/beanWithCallbackMethods example/firstCut/beanWithCallbackMethods.xml
./run.sh target/beanWithConfigurationProperties example/firstCut/beanWithConfigurationProperties.xml
./run.sh target/otherStuff example/firstCut/otherStuff.xml

Now we have three, a bit cleaner, images: beanWithConfigurationProperties.png, beanWithCallbackMethods.png and otherStuff.png.

We also could generate image from more than one blueprint:

./run.sh target/joinFirstCut example/firstCut/otherStuff.xml example/firstCut/beanWithConfigurationProperties.xml example/firstCut/beanWithCallbackMethods.xml

And the result is here. The image contains beans grouped by file, but if you do not like it, you could force generation without such separation using option --no-group-by-file:

./run.sh target/joinFirstCutGrouped example/firstCut/otherStuff.xml example/firstCut/beanWithConfigurationProperties.xml example/firstCut/beanWithCallbackMethods.xml --no-group-by-file

It will generate image with all beans from all files.

Exclusion

Sometimes it is difficult to spot and extract other domains. It will be easier to do some experiments on blueprint. For example, bean my1 is a dependency for too many other beans. You could consider converting my1 bean to OSGi service and extracting it to another bundle.

Let’s exclude my1 bean from generation via -e option and see what happens:

./run.sh target/otherStuffWithoutMy example/firstCut/otherStuff.xml -e my1

Result is available here. Now we see, that tree with root bean myFactoryBeanAsService could be separated and my1 could be inject to it as osgi service in another bundle.

You could exclude more than one bean adding -e switch for each of them, e. g. -e my1 -e m2 -e myBean123.

Conclusion

Blueprint is great for dependency injection for OSGi bundles, but it is easy to create quite big context containing many domains. It is much easier to recognize or search for such domains using blueprint visualizer script.

 

YOUR CODE HRER

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Private fields and methods are not private in groovy

I used to code in Java before I met groovy. Like most of you, groovy attracted me with many enhancements. This was to my surprise to discover that method visibility in groovy is handled different than Java!

Consider this example:

class Person {
private String name
public  String surname

private Person() {}

private String signature() { "${name?.substring(0, 1)}. $surname" }

public String toString() { "I am $name $surname" }
}

How is this class interpreted with Java?

  1. Person has private constructor that cannot be accessed
  2. Field "name" is private and cannot be accessed
  3. Method signature() is private and cannot be accessed

Let's see how groovy interpretes Person:

public static void main(String[] args) {
def person = new Person()   // constructor is private - compilation error in Java
println(person.toString())

    person.@name = 'Mike'       // access name field directly - compilation error in Java
println(person.toString())

    person.name = 'John'        // there is a setter generated by groovy
println(person.toString())

    person.@surname = 'Foo'     // access surname field directly
println(person.toString())

    person.surname = 'Bar'      // access auto-generated setter
println(person.toString())

println(person.signature()) // call private method - compilation error in Java
}

I was really astonished by its output:

I am null null
I am Mike null
I am John null
I am John Foo
I am John Bar
J. Bar

As you can see, groovy does not follow visibility directives at all! It treats them as non-existing. Code compiles and executes fine. It's contrary to Java. In Java this code has several errors, pointed out in comments.

I've searched a bit on this topic and it seems that this behaviour is known since version 1.1 and there is a bug report on that: http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GROOVY-1875. It is not resolved even with groovy 2 release. As Tim Yates mentioned in this Stackoverflow question: "It's not clear if it is a bug or by design". Groovy treats visibility keywords as a hint for a programmer.

I need to keep that lesson in mind next time I want to make some field or method private!

DDevelopment & Design

Context menu or Action buttons ?

Recently I was drawn into one of those UI "religious" disputes that has no easy answers and usually both sides are right. One of our web developers was trying out new web tech (with pretty rich widget library) and started to question himself about some basic usability decisions. The low level problem in this case is usually brought to "which widget should I use ?". I'm not fond of bringing the usability problems to questions: Should I use Tabs over Menu ? Or should I use Context menu instead of buttons panel ? But sometimes if time is crucial factor and other usability levels are by default not addressed at all - better developer that asks those basic questions than developer that do not question himself at all.