adding extra codes at runtime in java - java-bytecode-asm

I am developing a library and I need to add extra codes to some of my methods of my objects at run time. there are two points here. first of all, the program I wanted to add extra code, is written before by some body else, and I don't wanted to edit it. second, my work is very similar to adding aspect before calling a method.
After searching and reading on in internet, I found out many frameworks like aspectj, ASPECTWERKZ and etc. that could do this job, but for example the problem with aspectj(when using in spring context) is that it doesn't provide you any API to do your weaving at runtime.
I also found out there are some libraries like ASM and javassist and etc. but they are so general and hard to learn, and my job is more likely to aspects.
So what do you suggest? is there any good library out there? Am I wrong about above libraries i mentioned earlier? Please Help!

With AspectJ you can apply your aspects when classes are loaded at runtime. See Load-Time Weaving documentation. Alternatively, you don't have to change your old code and can apply aspects at compile time.

Related

PropsValues in liferay

why we should not use any classes from portal-impl.jar inside your portlet?
In my case, how can I read PropsValues without adding portal-impl to maven dependencies.
I'm using Liferay 6.2
Thanks
#Origineil - in a comment to your question - gave you the alternative of what to do instead of using portal-impl.jar (e.g. use GetterUtil.getBoolean(PropsUtil.get(PropsKeys.SESSION_TIMEOUT_AUTO_EXTEND)); instead of PropsValues.SESSION_TIMEOUT_AUTO_EXTEND.
Why shouldn't you add portal-impl.jar to your project? Well, there are many reasons. First of all: It doesn't work. If you add portal-impl.jar to your plugin, there are quite a lot of spring components in there that would re-initialize - and they'd assume they're in the portal context. They'll be missing other code they're dependent on and you'd basically pull in a lot of Liferay's implementation and dependency code, making your plugin ridiculously big. And the initialization can't be done twice, so it won't even work anyways.
Plus, in portal-impl.jar you'll only find Liferay's implementation details - none of this code is ever promised to be stable. Not only will nobody care if you're depending on it, it'll most likely break your assumptions even on minor upgrades. Of course some components in there are more stable then others, but the basic assumption is a good one.
Liferay's API (that you're encouraged to use) lives in portal-service.jar. This is automatically available to all plugins and it contains the implementation mentioned above. Don't depend on someone's (Liferay's) internal implementation. Rather depend on the published API. If this means that you'll have to implement something again - so be it. It might be slightly less elegant, but a lot more future proof. And if you compare the size of portal-impl.jar to the amount of code that you'd duplicate in the case of PropsValues, you'll see that this single expansion is actually a nobrainer. Don't pull in 30M of code just because you'd rather type 30 characters than 60.

Catel application initialization

I'm looking into Catel. I started following along in the Getting Started for WPF Developers. I create the initial project using the template and run it. All well and good.
Then I take a detailed look at the generated source files. I see references to DataWindow, StyleHelper, and ViewModelBase. And I run in the debugger and watch the Catel debug output, stepping so that I can see when things happen.
And it is all magical.
The view manager somehow runs and registers the MainWindow. And the ViewModelFactory is invoked to create MainWindowViewModel, and the MainWindow DataContext gets set.
How does this all happen? I am missing the documentation that puts together for me the sequence of events when an application starts. I am reluctant to take it on faith, and reluctant to dive into the giant code base without an inkling of where to start. I have read the CodeProject articles and the intro part of the documentation.
Is this driven off of the behaviors some way? How are they invoked? I just can't find the thread that starts me on my way.
Aside: I look at Catel because I found myself implementing a ton of plumbing for a significant MVVM application, and decided that someone else had already solved this problem.
Thanks for any leads. (And thanks, Geert. This is a significant work.)
-reilly.
If I understand correctly, you are looking for advanced information of the inner workings. I think this part of the documentation might be of interest for you.
It might not provide all information you are looking for, but it should provide some.
About some basic questions:
1) The startup windows is defined in App.xaml (that's standard WPF)
2) Since it derives from DataWindow, it uses WindowLogic => LogicBase. The LogicBase uses the IViewModelLocator to find the right view model based on naming conventions (all documented)
3) Then the IViewModelFactory will instantiate the vm (using dependency injection) and return it to the logic which will set it as datacontext.
Note that as the advanced documentation tells you, Catel injects an additional layer to make a difference between the outside datacontext and the VM datacontext (of a window or user control content).
ps. I really recommend starting to use the latest prereleases via NuGet. Catel 4.0 (will be released very soon) is nearly feature complete and will prevent you from a lot of breaking changes that you have to go through (and it is of course much better :-))

Avoiding CA2122 from Code Analysis in VS2012 with SecuritySafeCritical fails

I have here a C++/CLI solution which isn't mixed with native C++ (although we have this type too). It consists of three projects, where are two relevant for my question.
The first one is a static library (.lib) and deals with Acitve Diretytory matters.
The second one is the executable main project (.exe) which depends on the other projects.
I'm new to Visual Studio 2012 and want to use the advantages of tools like the code analysis. Running the code analysis over the solution reveals several CA2122 warnings:
CA2122 Do not indirectly expose methods with link demands
I understand the security concerns related to this warning and I think I understood how to deal with it, although I'm also new to this security stuff. This warnings are related to the Active Directory code when the whole solution is examined, while examining only the lib-project they will not appear and everything seems to be ok.
Now to the core of the problem:
I tried to mark all methods where I'm warned with the SecuritySafeCritical attribute
--> no changes, same warnings
I've solved this warning in another project by marking the whole assembly as SecurityCritical and adding the SecuritySafeCritical to the problematic method. This will not work since adding a AssemblyInfo.cpp with marking the assembly as SecurityCritical will not affect this problem. (I know that *.cpp seem to be obsolete in managed static librarys since the code seem to have to be complete in the header files making this kind of project obsolete... but we don't want to have .dll for every small part and we also want to have this stuff capsulated in an own project instead of having some loose header files or have it mixed with other regions)
After that I tried to mark the whole assembly of the main project as SecurityTransparent because so far I understand this SecuritySafeCritical marked code can be called by SecurityTransparent or SecurityCritical code (what is for me every kind of security). --> My as SecuritySafeCritical marked methods now are marked with CA2141 warnings and many other methods produce new warnings (most of them are related to exception handling):
CA2141:Transparent methods must not satisfy LinkDemands
CA2140: Transparent code must not reference security critical items
So I decided to try marking this assembly as SecurityCritical too.
--> My SecuritySafeCritical methods finally produce no warnings, but there are still all these other warnings from methods having exceptionhandling.
So I don't know how to solve this problem. I assume that having a managed static library is the problem and when having just a dll-project maybe I could solve the problem as mentionend in 2., but I want to avoid to share another *.dll project with our programs.
I searched for a solution but found nothing which would help in this case. Also informations on this topic are rare, out of date (because related to .Net Framework 2.0 while the whole security thing seems to be changed massively with .Net Framework 4.0) or hard to understand for me. So I hope someone has an idea what I could try or what I should do.

Groovy and dynamic methods: need groovy veteran enlightment

First, I have to say that I really like Groovy and all the good stuff it is bringing to the Java dev world. But since I'm using it for more than little scripts, I have some concerns.
In this Groovy help page about dynamic vs static typing, there is this statement about the absence of compilation error/warning when you have typo in your code because it could be a call to a method added later at runtime:
It might be scary to do away with all of your static typing and
compile time checking at first. But many Groovy veterans will attest
that it makes the code cleaner, easier to refactor, and, well, more
dynamic.
I'm pretty agree with the 'more dynamic' part, but not with cleaner and easier to refactor:
For the other two statements I'm not sure: from my Groovy beginner perspective, this is resulting in less code, but in more difficult to read later and in more trouble to maintain (can not rely on the IDE anymore to find who is declaring a dynamic method and who is using one).
To clarify, I find that reading groovy code is very pleasant, I love the collection and closure (concise and expressive way of tackle complicated problem).
But I have a lot of trouble in these situations:
no more auto-completion inside 'builder' using Map (Of Map (of Map))
everywhere
confusing dynamic methods call (you don't know if it is a typo or a
dynamic name)
method extraction is more complicated inside closure (often resulting in code duplicate: 'it is only a small closure after all')
hard to guess closure parameters when you have to write one for a method of a subsystem
no more learning by browsing the code: you have to use text search instead
I can only saw some benefits with GORM, but in this case the dynamic method are wellknown and my IDE is aware of them (so it is more looking like a systematic code generation than dynamic method for me)
I would be very glad to learn from groovy veteran how they can attest of these benefits.
It does lead to different classes of bugs and processes. It also makes writing tests faster and more natural, helping to alleviate the bug issues.
Discovering where behavior is defined, and used, can be problematic. There isn't a great way around it, although IDEs are getting better at it over time.
Your code shouldn't be more difficult to read--mainline code should be easier to read. The dynamic behavior should disappear into the application, and be documented appropriately for developers that need to understand functionality at those levels.
Magic does make discovery more difficult. This implies that other means of documentation, particularly human-readable tests (think easyb, spock, etc.) and prose, become that much more important.
This is somewhat old, but i'd like to share my experience if someone comes looking for some thoughts on the topic:
Right now we are using eclipse 3.7 and groovy-eclipse 2.7 on a small team (3 developers) and since we don't have tests scripts, mostly of our groovy development we do by explicitly using types.
For example, when using service classes methods:
void validate(Product product) {
// groovy stuff
}
Box pack(List<Product> products) {
def box = new Box()
box.value = products.inject(0) { total, item ->
// some BigDecimal calculations =)
}
box
}
We usually fill out the type, which enable eclipse to autocomplete and, most important, allows us to refactor code, find usages, etc..
This blocks us from using metaprogramming, except for Categories which i found that are supported and is detected by groovy-eclipse.
Still, Groovy is pretty good and a LOT of our business logic is in groovy code.
We had two issues in production code when using groovy, and both cases were due bad manual testing.
We also have a lot of XML building and parsing, and we validate it before sending it to webservices and the likes.
There's a small script we use to connect to an internal system whose usage is very restricted (and not needed in other parts of the system). This code i developed using entirely dynamic typing, overriding methods using metaclass and all that stuff, but this is an exception.
I think groovy 2.0 (with groovy-eclipse coming along, of course) and it's #TypeChecked will be great for those of us that uses groovy as a "java++".
To me there are 2 types of refactoring:
IDE based refactoring (extract to method, rename method, introduce variable, etc.).
Manual refactoring. (moving a method to a different class, changing the return value of a method)
For IDE based refactoring I haven't found an IDE that does as good of a job with Groovy as it does with Java. For example in eclipse when you extract to method it looks for duplicate instances to refactor to call the method instead of having duplicated code. For Groovy, that doesn't seem to happen.
Manual refactoring is where I believe that you could see refactoring made easier. Without tests though I would agree that it is probably harder.
The statement at cleaner code is 100% accurate. I would venture a guess that good Java to good Groovy code is at least a 3:1 reduction in lines of code. Being a newbie at Groovy though I would strive to learn at least 1 new way to do something everyday. Something that greatly helped me improve my Groovy was to simply read the APIs. I feel that Collection, String, and List are probably the ones that have the most functionality and I used the most to help make my Groovy code actually Groovy.
http://groovy.codehaus.org/groovy-jdk/java/util/Collection.html
http://groovy.codehaus.org/groovy-jdk/java/lang/String.html
http://groovy.codehaus.org/groovy-jdk/java/util/List.html
Since you edited the question I'll edit my answer :)
One thing you can do is tell intellij about the dynamic methods on your objects: What does 'add dynamic method' do in Groovy/IntelliJ?. That might help a little bit.
Another trick that I use is to type my objects when doing the initial coding and remove the typing when I'm done. For example I can never seem to remember if it's .substring(..) or .subString(..) on a String. So if you type your object you get a little better code completion.
As for your other bullet points, I'd really need to look at some code to be able to give a better answer.

Refactoring: Cross Cutting Concerns workaround

Is there a workaround for implementing cross cutting concerns without going into aspects and point cuts et al.?
We're in Spring MVC, and working on a business app where it's not feasible to go into AspectJ or Spring's aspect handling due to various reasons.
And some of our controllers have become heavily bloated (too heavily), with tons of out-of-focus code creeping in everywhere.
Everytime I sit down to refactor, I see the same things being done over and over again. Allow me to explain:
Everytime I have to prepare a view, I add a list of countries to it for the UI. (Object added to the ModelAndView). That list is pulled out of a DB into ehCache.
Now, initially it was terrible when I was trying to add the lists INLINE to the mav's everywhere. Instead, I prepared a function which would process every ModelAndView. How? well, with more garbage calls to the function!
And I bought out one trouble for another.
What's a design pattern/trick which can help me out a bit? I'm sick of calling functions to add things to my ModelAndView, and with over 3500 lines of only controller code, I'm going mad finding all the glue points where things have gone missing!
Suggestion are welcome. Cross cutting concerns flavor without AspectJ or Spring native.
Since you are using Java, you may consider moving your code to Scala, since it interacts well with Java, then you can use traits to get the functionality you want.
Unfortunately cross-cutting is a problem with OOP, so changing to functional programming may be a solution, but, I expect that in actuality they are using AOP to implement these mixins, so it would still be AOP, just abstracted out.
The other option is to look at redesigning your application, and make certain that you don't have duplicate code, but a major refactoring is very difficult and fraught with risk.
But, for example, you may end up with your ModelAndView calling several static utility classes to get the data it needs, or do ensure that the user has the correct role, for example.
You may want to look at a book, Refactoring to Patterns (http://www.industriallogic.com/xp/refactoring/) for some ideas.

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