DDevelopment & Design

Eclipse ecosystem

Do you use Eclipse? Or perhaps you use other IDE but would like to try “the big E”? Well, that’s OK, and completely understandable, because Eclipse is actually a great, versatile tool. But Eclipse is not just an IDE, in fact it is a comp let, extensible platform. What’s even more important, there are tones of valuable Eclipse-related projects gathered around the platform.

Yes, there are lots. Some are good, some are bad, but the usual, stock ones, signed by Eclipse, are worth taking a closer look. They’re not a mere innovation to the way we write code with an IDE. Those tools provide new ways to _create_ our code.

Consider Eclipse just a foundation for better things to come. Having Equinox OSGI container underneath it is fully modular ecosystem, that allows multiple bundles (in which we pack the plug-ins) coexist, and benefit from each others functionalities. Not dwelling on details of OSGI, it gives us a simple extensible platform to play with.

That in fact is great, because out of piles of Eclipse components you can build your own component base, and thus create a basis for your own solution. Since Eclipse is extensible you can extend the IDE’s workbench, by implementing plug-ins, or you can choose to implement a standalone application, that is based on RCP (Rich Client Platform) concept. And there are really big apps written with this in mind, like IBM’s Lotus Suite, totally based on Eclipse – and pretty neat also.

Well, that looks nice, but who writes so much code these days, who wants to create all the domain classes and GUI stuff by hand crafted api interfaces? Nope, one no longer have to go this path, just try Eclipse EMF sub-project, which offers model driven development practices, and whole bunch of code generation plug-ins will come to aid you. Using EMF you can create your domain model in just a few clicks, or import it from your existing java interfaces – actually you can use a couple more ways to do this. Having an EMF model you are just a few clicks from generating a working, domain editor, that would serve as a sandbox for your ideas about the domain you’re implementing, or it can be used right away in your new shiny web application.

Another few clicks and you get free model persistence with Hibernate, or other ORM framework. And this really works.

Since it would be nice to present things to end users you could generate some basic graphic editor, of course Eclipse supports that. But who uses thick clients today? Be serious, right? If you want something web-enabled, you don’t have to move your skills from the Eclipse ecosystem, just try out Eclipse RAP and have your Eclipse application in your browser via some serious Javascript voodoo magic – like on-the-fly converters. Of course other popular frameworks are allowed :)

What is most important here, is the constant use of the same tools, developing subsequent stages of the app don’t require you to switch skills. It’s Java all way up to this place.

And it gets more interesting when you dive deeper and deeper into this rich and flourishing community. Some examples of the vastness of the platform may be:

  • Swordfish – SOA solution, with BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) implemented
  • XText – enables you to write a simple (or not) DSLs for your apps
  • E4 – next gen Eclipse IDE, with many great ideas in it

Of course, the whole picture gets a bit blurry if you consider more technical details, there is not so much ease of use or scalability, etc, as you might expected. The whole Eclipse ecosystem may not be suitable for all your applications, but it may be for some. Or perhaps it is suitable for only a couple stages in your current project?

Let this be just a simple introduction to the rich Eclipse Community projects. With next iterations of this cycle I’d like to describe more in-depth details of the Eclipse framework, and various usage scenarios for Eclipse projects. Stay tuned!

— Previous article

Passive view for Ext GWT applications

Next article —

Writer versus Constructor

You May Also Like
DDevelopment & Design

Integration testing custom validation constraints in Jersey 2

I recently joined a team trying to switch a monolithic legacy system into set of RESTful services in Java. They decided to use latest 2.x version of Jersey as a REST container which was not a first choice for me, since I’m not a big fan of JSR-* specs. But now I must admit that JAX-RS 2.x is doing things right: requires almost zero boilerplate code, support auto-discovery of features and prefers convention over configuration like other modern frameworks. Since the spec is still young, it’s hard to find good tutorials and kick-off projects with some working code. I created jersey2-starter project on GitHub which can be used as starting point for your own production-ready RESTful service. In this post I’d like to cover how to implement and integration test your own validation constraints of REST resources.

Custom constraints

One of the issues which bothers me when coding REST in Java is littering your class model with annotations. Suppose you want to build a simple Todo list REST service, when using Jackson, validation and Spring Data, you can easily end up with this as your entity class:

@Document
public class Todo {
    private Long id;
    @NotNull
    private String description;
    @NotNull
    private Boolean completed;
    @NotNull
    private DateTime dueDate;

    @JsonCreator
    public Todo(@JsonProperty("description") String description, @JsonProperty("dueDate") DateTime dueDate) {
        this.description = description;
        this.dueDate = dueDate;
        this.completed = false;
    }
    // getters and setters
}

Your domain model is now effectively blured by messy annotations almost everywhere. Let’s see what we can do with validation constraints (@NotNulls). Some may say that you could introduce some DTO layer with own validation rules, but it conflicts for me with pure REST API design, which stands that you operate on resources which should map to your domain classes. On the other hand - what does it mean that Todo object is valid? When you create a Todo you should provide a description and due date, but what when you’re updating? You should be able to change any of description, due date (postponing) and completion flag (marking as done) - but you should provide at least one of these as valid modification. So my idea is to introduce custom validation constraints, different ones for creation and modification: 

@Target({TYPE, PARAMETER})
@Retention(RUNTIME)
@Constraint(validatedBy = ValidForCreation.Validator.class)
public @interface ValidForCreation {
    //...
    class Validator implements ConstraintValidator<ValidForCreation, Todo> {
    /...
        @Override
        public boolean isValid(Todo todo, ConstraintValidatorContext constraintValidatorContext) {
            return todo != null
                && todo.getId() == null
                && todo.getDescription() != null
                && todo.getDueDate() != null;
        }
    }
}

@Target({TYPE, PARAMETER})
@Retention(RUNTIME)
@Constraint(validatedBy = ValidForModification.Validator.class)
public @interface ValidForModification {
    //...
    class Validator implements ConstraintValidator<ValidForModification, Todo> {
    /...
        @Override
        public boolean isValid(Todo todo, ConstraintValidatorContext constraintValidatorContext) {
            return todo != null
                && todo.getId() == null
                && (todo.getDescription() != null || todo.getDueDate() != null || todo.isCompleted() != null);
        }
    }
}

And now you can move validation annotations to the definition of a REST endpoint:

@POST
@Consumes(APPLICATION_JSON)
public Response create(@ValidForCreation Todo todo) {...}

@PUT
@Consumes(APPLICATION_JSON)
public Response update(@ValidForModification Todo todo) {...}

And now you can remove those NotNulls from your model.

Integration testing

There are in general two approaches to integration testing:

  • test is being run on separate JVM than the app, which is deployed on some other integration environment
  • test deploys the application programmatically in the setup block.

Both of these have their pros and cons, but for small enough servoces, I personally prefer the second approach. It’s much easier to setup and you have only one JVM started, which makes debugging really easy. You can use a generic framework like Arquillian for starting your application in a container environment, but I prefer simple solutions and just use emdedded Jetty. To make test setup 100% production equivalent, I’m creating full Jetty’s WebAppContext and have to resolve all runtime dependencies for Jersey auto-discovery to work. This can be simply achieved with Maven resolved from Shrinkwrap - an Arquillian subproject: 

    WebAppContext webAppContext = new WebAppContext();
    webAppContext.setResourceBase("src/main/webapp");
    webAppContext.setContextPath("/");
    File[] mavenLibs = Maven.resolver().loadPomFromFile("pom.xml")
                .importCompileAndRuntimeDependencies()
                .resolve().withTransitivity().asFile();
    for (File file: mavenLibs) {
        webAppContext.getMetaData().addWebInfJar(new FileResource(file.toURI()));
    }
    webAppContext.getMetaData().addContainerResource(new FileResource(new File("./target/classes").toURI()));

    webAppContext.setConfigurations(new Configuration[] {
        new AnnotationConfiguration(),
        new WebXmlConfiguration(),
        new WebInfConfiguration()
    });
    server.setHandler(webAppContext);

(this Stackoverflow thread inspired me a lot here)

Now it’s time for the last part of the post: parametrizing our integration tests. Since we want to test validation constraints, there are many edge paths to check (and make your code coverage close to 100%). Writing one test per each case could be a bad idea. Among the many solutions for JUnit I’m most convinced to the Junit Params by Pragmatists team. It’s really simple and have nice concept of JQuery-like helper for creating providers. Here is my tests code (I’m also using builder pattern here to create various kinds of Todos):

@Test
@Parameters(method = "provideInvalidTodosForCreation")
public void shouldRejectInvalidTodoWhenCreate(Todo todo) {
    Response response = createTarget().request().post(Entity.json(todo));

    assertThat(response.getStatus()).isEqualTo(BAD_REQUEST.getStatusCode());
}

private static Object[] provideInvalidTodosForCreation() {
    return $(
        new TodoBuilder().withDescription("test").build(),
        new TodoBuilder().withDueDate(DateTime.now()).build(),
        new TodoBuilder().withId(123L).build(),
        new TodoBuilder().build()
    );
}

OK, enough of reading, feel free to clone the project and start writing your REST services!

I recently joined a team trying to switch a monolithic legacy system into set of RESTful services in Java. They decided to use latest 2.x version of Jersey as a REST container which was not a first choice for me, since I’m not a big fan of JSR-* specs. But now I must admit that JAX-RS 2.x is doing things right: requires almost zero boilerplate code, support auto-discovery of features and prefers convention over configuration like other modern frameworks. Since the spec is still young, it’s hard to find good tutorials and kick-off projects with some working code. I created jersey2-starter project on GitHub which can be used as starting point for your own production-ready RESTful service. In this post I’d like to cover how to implement and integration test your own validation constraints of REST resources.

Custom constraints

One of the issues which bothers me when coding REST in Java is littering your class model with annotations. Suppose you want to build a simple Todo list REST service, when using Jackson, validation and Spring Data, you can easily end up with this as your entity class:

@Document
public class Todo {
    private Long id;
    @NotNull
    private String description;
    @NotNull
    private Boolean completed;
    @NotNull
    private DateTime dueDate;

    @JsonCreator
    public Todo(@JsonProperty("description") String description, @JsonProperty("dueDate") DateTime dueDate) {
        this.description = description;
        this.dueDate = dueDate;
        this.completed = false;
    }
    // getters and setters
}

Your domain model is now effectively blured by messy annotations almost everywhere. Let’s see what we can do with validation constraints (@NotNulls). Some may say that you could introduce some DTO layer with own validation rules, but it conflicts for me with pure REST API design, which stands that you operate on resources which should map to your domain classes. On the other hand - what does it mean that Todo object is valid? When you create a Todo you should provide a description and due date, but what when you’re updating? You should be able to change any of description, due date (postponing) and completion flag (marking as done) - but you should provide at least one of these as valid modification. So my idea is to introduce custom validation constraints, different ones for creation and modification: 

@Target({TYPE, PARAMETER})
@Retention(RUNTIME)
@Constraint(validatedBy = ValidForCreation.Validator.class)
public @interface ValidForCreation {
    //...
    class Validator implements ConstraintValidator<ValidForCreation, Todo> {
    /...
        @Override
        public boolean isValid(Todo todo, ConstraintValidatorContext constraintValidatorContext) {
            return todo != null
                && todo.getId() == null
                && todo.getDescription() != null
                && todo.getDueDate() != null;
        }
    }
}

@Target({TYPE, PARAMETER})
@Retention(RUNTIME)
@Constraint(validatedBy = ValidForModification.Validator.class)
public @interface ValidForModification {
    //...
    class Validator implements ConstraintValidator<ValidForModification, Todo> {
    /...
        @Override
        public boolean isValid(Todo todo, ConstraintValidatorContext constraintValidatorContext) {
            return todo != null
                && todo.getId() == null
                && (todo.getDescription() != null || todo.getDueDate() != null || todo.isCompleted() != null);
        }
    }
}

And now you can move validation annotations to the definition of a REST endpoint:

@POST
@Consumes(APPLICATION_JSON)
public Response create(@ValidForCreation Todo todo) {...}

@PUT
@Consumes(APPLICATION_JSON)
public Response update(@ValidForModification Todo todo) {...}

And now you can remove those NotNulls from your model.

Integration testing

There are in general two approaches to integration testing:

  • test is being run on separate JVM than the app, which is deployed on some other integration environment
  • test deploys the application programmatically in the setup block.

Both of these have their pros and cons, but for small enough servoces, I personally prefer the second approach. It’s much easier to setup and you have only one JVM started, which makes debugging really easy. You can use a generic framework like Arquillian for starting your application in a container environment, but I prefer simple solutions and just use emdedded Jetty. To make test setup 100% production equivalent, I’m creating full Jetty’s WebAppContext and have to resolve all runtime dependencies for Jersey auto-discovery to work. This can be simply achieved with Maven resolved from Shrinkwrap - an Arquillian subproject: 

    WebAppContext webAppContext = new WebAppContext();
    webAppContext.setResourceBase("src/main/webapp");
    webAppContext.setContextPath("/");
    File[] mavenLibs = Maven.resolver().loadPomFromFile("pom.xml")
                .importCompileAndRuntimeDependencies()
                .resolve().withTransitivity().asFile();
    for (File file: mavenLibs) {
        webAppContext.getMetaData().addWebInfJar(new FileResource(file.toURI()));
    }
    webAppContext.getMetaData().addContainerResource(new FileResource(new File("./target/classes").toURI()));

    webAppContext.setConfigurations(new Configuration[] {
        new AnnotationConfiguration(),
        new WebXmlConfiguration(),
        new WebInfConfiguration()
    });
    server.setHandler(webAppContext);

(this Stackoverflow thread inspired me a lot here)

Now it’s time for the last part of the post: parametrizing our integration tests. Since we want to test validation constraints, there are many edge paths to check (and make your code coverage close to 100%). Writing one test per each case could be a bad idea. Among the many solutions for JUnit I’m most convinced to the Junit Params by Pragmatists team. It’s really simple and have nice concept of JQuery-like helper for creating providers. Here is my tests code (I’m also using builder pattern here to create various kinds of Todos):

@Test
@Parameters(method = "provideInvalidTodosForCreation")
public void shouldRejectInvalidTodoWhenCreate(Todo todo) {
    Response response = createTarget().request().post(Entity.json(todo));

    assertThat(response.getStatus()).isEqualTo(BAD_REQUEST.getStatusCode());
}

private static Object[] provideInvalidTodosForCreation() {
    return $(
        new TodoBuilder().withDescription("test").build(),
        new TodoBuilder().withDueDate(DateTime.now()).build(),
        new TodoBuilder().withId(123L).build(),
        new TodoBuilder().build()
    );
}

OK, enough of reading, feel free to clone the project and start writing your REST services!