Enterprise Application : Snowman

Table of Contents

• Preamble
• Pre-requisites
• Software Architecture
• Database Design
• Data Access
  • Java - JDBC
  • Spring - JdbcTemplate
  • Object Relational Mapping
• Messaging
• Caching
• Uber Jar
• Embedded Jetty
• Database Migration
• Scalability
• Clustering
• Resiliency

This project aims to provide a skeleton example of a common traditional (perhaps now viewed as legacy) enterprise like application.

This project's concepts are an extension of another demo project Sales-Order-System where it showcase more advanced common features that is normally seen in a traditional big-scale enterprise application.

Note, this project is not a complete application and i have no intention of making it complete, it only serves the purpose of providing a variety of specific demonstrations only.

Preamble

Snowman is an fictional enterprise scale/ready employee management system (EMS). This project uses Snowman to demonstrate the characteristics of a stereotypical backend enterprise application.

Snowman exposes its functionality via REST (-like) endpoints. Essentially this is a backend web service.

Pre - Requisites

• Java JDK 7
• Maven
• MySQL

1. Start up MySQL Server
2. run run.sh script

Software Architecture

Instead of using a Layered Architecture where you commonly have 3 layers with one directional flow, this project showcase a Hexagonal Architecture (Ports and Adapters). The core domain comprises of the main business logic would be the inner and the application infrastructure (Database, Message Queues, REST endpoints) would be the outer layers.

This is how the system components fit together:

Database Design

Database table structure:

Data Access

Rather than having a logical Data Access Layer within a 3 layered architecture, in a hexagonal architecture data access are in an outer layer.

Java - JDBC

One way of accessing the db from the application is using raw JDBC. This is quite low level. See ApplicationInfoDaoImpl.java

Spring - JDBC

The application framework in Spring provides a level of abstraction of data access by giving the usage of JdbcTemplate. This class from Spring implements the GoF Template design pattern. By using this class, it relieves away a lot of the 'pain' of writing so called 'boilerplate' code in setting up db connections, exception handling etc. See UserDaoImpl.java

Object-Relational-Mapping(ORM)

Object Relational Mapping (ORM) is the mapping of relational database tables to objects and vice-versa. We use JPA standard along the the Hibernate implementation to achieve this. Model objects (Entities) are part of thus 'anemic' data model. The DAOs encapsulates Hibernate EntityManager to do the basic CRUD operations.

Messaging

Communication to 3rd party external systems is primarily achieved via messaging using JMS & ActiveMQ as the implementing underlying Messaging System (Message Brokers, Message Queues, Topics).

Apache ActiveMQ is JMS compliant belonging to open source apache foundation. One of the commonly used MQ out there.

Caching

[TBD]

Uber Jar

As part of the deployment process, Application is packaged up in a "uber" runnable executable jar. This jar contains all dependencies copied in. And can be easily run from a command line with:

java -jar target/Snowman.jar

This whole process is achieved by the Maven Shade Plugin

Embedded Jetty

Rather than deploying the application in either a full blown JavaEE application server (JBoss/Wildfly, Websphere, Weblogic, Geronimo etc) or a Web/JSP Container (Tomcat, Jetty, UnderTow), we embed a HTTP listener into the application in the form of "Embedded Jetty".

All dependencies are bundled/packaged together in an Uber jar file so it works. This means it is therefore wasn't necessary required to be provided with specific JavaEE dependencies from the JavaEE platform.

Database Migration

Database updates are implemented using patches via changesets with a database migration tool in liquibase to execute them in order to 'patch' up the database.

To run, execute the maven liquibase plugin by...

Running update patches:

mvn liquibase:update

And to rollback those particular patches:

mvn liquibase:rollback -Dliquibase.rollbackCount=1

Scalability

1. Horizonantal Scalability
2. Vertical Scalability

Horizontal Scalability a.k.a "Scaling Out"

To support horizontal scalability you run multiple instances of the same application.

You can do this manually like:

java -jar -Dport=[port number] target/Snowman.jar

where port number is an unused port

Veritcal Scalability a.k.a "Scaling Up"

This option is limited kind of a way. You can opt to run this application in a higher spec machine. Alternatively, you can give more memory to the JVM by tuning the min and max parameters like the following:

java -jar -Xms256m -Xmx2048m target/Snowman.jar

Clustering

No clustering options. This application does not run in a managed cluster. Horizontal scalability was chosen as demonstration in favour of running Cluster Servers to achieve Clustering.

See Scalability for more info.

Resiliency / Fault Tolerance

1. Failover and Recovery
2. Disaster and Recovery

Failover and Recovery

No F&R is supported.

You can failover the application easily (assuming you are running multiple instances to mimic multiple nodes servers). Just do a:

kill -9 [pid]

where pid is the process id of the particular application node server.

But there is no Recovery. Because no Clustering options. Refer to Clustering section.

Disaster and Recovery

Although not specifically supported here, you can achieve this also. Manual intervention is required though in order to start up the application (or group of applications) together.

To do Disaster Recovery a.k.a DR, you need to have the concept of a "Site". Commonly, use multiple sites. For simplicity, assume 2 sites - 1 Primary Site and the other is Standby Site. Both sites would house the set of applications but only one site is up.

If Primary site considered fail (i.e. multiple failovers of one or more applications (or application components if it is a Distributed Component Architecture)), then the Primary site should shutdown and thus Standby site would be required to be started up.

Author

Colin But.