[wildfly-dev] WFLY-508, JBeret initial review and integration issues

[Cheng Fang]

David,

Thanks for sharing your comments and observations.  More inline...
On 7/24/13 12:09 PM, David M. Lloyd wrote:
> On initial review of JBeret we have noticed a number of issues that 
> need to be addressed.  The culmination amounts to a series of 
> questions and observations here:
>
> #1) Why did we not choose to just use the RI?  In other words, what 
> benefit do we get from JBeret that is not also in the RI?  In other, 
> other words, why should we *use* this code instead of the RI at this 
> point in time?
Batch RI (http://java.net/projects/jbatch from IBM) was created solely 
for the purpose of a reference implementation, and is a subset of IBM's 
batch offering.  The RI code base is refreshed periodically by IBM 
contributors and it doesn't seem to open to community contribution.  I 
haven't done a deep technical comparison between the 2 yet, but I guess 
there are areas that one is better than the other and vise versa.  
Looking a bit longer term, batch has been an area Java EE and JBoss 
haven't paid much attention to, and I believe is an area that can offer 
future growth potential.  Having our own impl would give us more 
flexibility when it comes to integration with the rest of the stack, 
design choices, and community building.  I'm also adding Kev and Pete 
for their perspectives.
>
> #2) Why does JBeret duplicate facilities already present in the 
> WildFly code base and deployer chain - e.g. annotation indexing, 
> reflection indexing, thread management, parsing facilities, etc.?
Batch spec require an impl to be run in either Java EE or Java SE 
environment.  So inevitably certain services have to reside in JBeret 
itself to satisfy the SE runtime.  Since we started the impl as a 
standalone first, there may be certain aspects that do not fit nicely in 
WildFly.  It is in the plan to better align with the appserver by 
leveraging existing services when running inside WildFly.  For example, 
use the concurrency utils in EE.

>
> #3) Specific to algorithmic complexity - it appears that jobs are 
> keyed by ID, yet accessed using a sequential search [1] - this does 
> not scale well to large numbers of jobs.  Is there no better approach?
The expectation is there is large amount of data, but the number of jobs 
are not that large.  Say we run a reporting job every day, it is still 
one single job with many JobInstance and JobExecution.  So I think the 
sequential access is acceptable.  I guess another reason I didn't want 
to maintain a mapping is I really don't want to duplicate the job id as 
the key.

>
> #4) JAXB seems to be being used to parse XML, which is a departure 
> from all of our other services which expect parsing to be done during 
> deployment processing in a more efficient manner.  Is there any better 
> way we can integrate this, preferably not using JAXB?
It works well so far in standalone distro, but I'm open to alternative 
mechanism in either standalone or EE.
>
> #5) There are a number of resources present that seem inappropriate 
> for the production JAR [2] [3].  Is this intentional?
These are work in progress.  sql files are for implementing a jdbc job 
repository.  Why are they inappropriate?
>
> #6) This code base makes extensive use of static state, including 
> static fields that seem not to be adequately protected for 
> thread-safety, and at least one static thread pool [4].  This needs to 
> be fixed, as these kinds of things make embedding difficult or 
> impossible.

In EE environment, thread pool will switch to the managed service 
provided by WildFly, preferably the new concurrency utils.  Can you list 
other places you've noticed that make bad use of static state?

Appreciate your feedback.

Cheng
>
> [1] 
> https://github.com/jberet/jsr352/blob/master/jberet-core/src/main/java/org/jberet/repository/AbstractRepository.java#L50
> [2] 
> https://github.com/jberet/jsr352/tree/master/jberet-core/src/main/resources/sql
> [3] 
> https://github.com/jberet/jsr352/blob/master/jberet-core/src/main/resources/jobXML.xjb
> [4] 
> https://github.com/jberet/jsr352/blob/master/jberet-core/src/main/java/org/jberet/util/ConcurrencyService.java#L22
>