[jboss-dev] fragile JBossAS component integration

[Jonathan Halliday]

Hi all

I'm attempting to test a new version of the transaction 
manager against AS trunk and running into assorted problems.

Some unit tests are essentially stress tests. I can make 
them pass on my hardware, but only by cranking up memory 
settings, thread pool sizes and various ulimit values. Is it 
really desirable to require this? If should the environment 
settings with which the tests are expected/required to pass 
be documented somehwere?

Now onto the main issue:

Some tests use methods on the transaction manager that are 
not part of the transactions integration spi. Or to put it 
another way, they rely on implementation details of the 
component.

For example, tests that use JMX to get the TransactionCount 
in order to determine if a tx ran or not. Lets set aside the 
fact this is broken because the method always returns 0 
unless you remember to turn on statistics gathering, which 
is off by default.

Instead, can we discuss what constitutes the stable API for 
test purposes? If I'm expected to fix assorted tests that 
break whenever I change the component API (rather than the 
SPI) that's fine, but I need to know in advance so I can 
plan time for it.

On a similar theme, I'm adding a bunch of new transactions 
related beans to the transaction-jboss-beans.xml file. These 
are essentially implementation specific for the transaction 
manager, but nothing prevents other modules beans.xml using 
them, even though they are not part of the SPI. What's the 
stability/revision policy here? Should anything in the 
-beans.xml have to be in the SPI .jar? Be commented with the 
expected stability so people wiring their beans to it can 
make informed decisions?

MC is great, but it takes us into a world where the 
traditional spi interface .jars are no longer the whole 
integration story. I'd appreciate some guidelines on how to 
maintain clean separation of components in the new server 
architecture.

Thanks

Jonathan.

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