Spring Dependency Injection and Plugin Jar

Question

I have web application running with a default impl of a backend service. One should be able to implement the interface and drop the jar into the plugins folder (which is not in the apps classpath). Once the server is restarted, the idea is to load the new jar into the classloader, and have it take part in dependency injection. I am using Spring DI using @Autowired. The new plugin service impl will have @Primary annotation. So given two impls of the interface, the primary should be loaded.

I got the jar loaded into the classloader and can invoke the impl manually. But I haven't been able to get to to participate in the Dependency Injection, and have it replace the default impl.

Here's a simplified example:

@Controller
public class MyController {
   @Autowired
   Service service;
}

//default.jar
@Service
DefaultService implements Service {
   public void print() {
       System.out.println("printing DefaultService.print()");
   } 
}

//plugin.jar not in classpath yet
@Service
@Primary
MyNewService implements Service {
   public void print() {
      System.out.println("printing MyNewService.print()");
   } 
}

//For lack of better place, I loaded the plugin jar from the ContextListener

public class PluginContextLoaderListener extends org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener {

        @Override
        protected void customizeContext(ServletContext servletContext,
                                        ConfigurableWebApplicationContext wac) {
                System.out.println("Init Plugin");
                PluginManager pluginManager = PluginManagerFactory.createPluginManager("plugins");
                pluginManager.init();

                    //Prints the MyNewService.print() method  
                    Service service = (Service) pluginManager.getService("service");
                    service.print();                  
            }
    }

     <listener>
            <listener-class>com.plugin.PluginContextLoaderListener</listener-class>
     </listener>

Even after I have loaded the jar into the classloader, DefaultService is still being injected as service. Any idea how I get the plugin jar to participate into the spring's DI lifecycle?

Edited: To put it simply, I have a war file that has a few plugin jars in a plugins directory inside the war. Based on a value from a configuration file that the app looks at, when the app is started, I want to load that particular plugin jar and run the application with it. That way, I can distribute the war to anyone, and they can choose which plugin to run based on a config value without having to to repackage everything. This is the problem I am trying to solve.

Answer 1

It seems like all You need is to create the Spring ApplicationContext properly. I think it's possible without classpath mingling. What matters most are the locations of the Spring configuration files within the classpath. So put all Your plugin jar's into WEB-INF/lib and read on.

Let's start with the core module. We'll make it to create it's ApplicationContext from files located at classpath*:META-INF/spring/*-corecontext.xml.

Now we'll make all plugins to have their config files elsewhere. I.e. 'myplugin1' will have its config location like this: classpath*:META-INF/spring/*-myplugin1context.xml. And anotherplugin will have the configs at classpath*:META-INF/spring/*-anotherplugincontext.xml.

What You see is a convension. You can also use subdirectiries if You like:

• core: classpath*:META-INF/spring/core/*.xml
• myplugin1: classpath*:META-INF/spring/myplugin1/*.xml
• anotherplugin: classpath*:META-INF/spring/anotherplugin/*.xml

What matters is that the locations have to be disjoint.

All that remains is to pass the right locations to the ApplicationContext creator. For web applications the right place for this would be to extend the ContextLoaderListener and override the method customizeContext(ServletContext, ConfigurableWebApplicationContext).

All that remains is to read Your config file (its location can be passed as servlet init parameter). Than You need to construct the list of config locations:

String locationPrefix = "classpath*:META-INF/spring/";
String locationSiffix = "/*.xml";

List<String> configLocations = new ArrayList<String>();
configLocations.add(locationPrefix + "core" + locationSiffix);

List<String> pluginsTurnedOn = getPluginsTurnedOnFromConfiguration();
for (String pluginName : pluginsTurnedOn) {
    configLocations.add(locationPrefix + pluginName + locationSiffix);
}

applicationContext.setConfigLocations(configLocations.toArray(new String[configLocations.size()]));

This way You can easily manage what is and what is not loaded into Spring ApplicationContext.

Update:

To make it work there's one more hidden assumption I made that I'm about to explain now. The base package of the core module and each plugin should also be disjoint. That is i.e.:

• com.mycompany.myapp.core
• com.mycompany.myapp.myplugin1
• com.mycompany.myapp.anotherplugin

This way each module can use <context:componet-scan /> (on equivalent in JavaConfig) easily to add classpath scanning for it's own classes only. The core module should not contain any package scanning of any plugin packages. The plugins should extend configuration of ApplicationContext to add their own packages to classpath scanning.

Answer 2

If you restart the server, I see no reason why you can't just add the JAR to the WEB-INF/lib and have it in the CLASSPATH. All the complication of a custom class loader and context listener goes away, because you treat it just like any other class under Spring's control.

If you do it this way because you don't want to open or modify a WAR, why not put it in the server /lib directory? Let the server class loader pick it up. This makes all plugin classes available to all deployed apps.

The answer depends on how important the separate /plugin directory is. If it's key to the solution, and you can't add the JAR to the server's /lib directory, then that's that. I've got nothing. But I think it'd be worthwhile to at least revisit the solution you have to make sure that it's the only way to accomplish what you want.