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Errai

Errai Reference Guide

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Abstract

This is the Errai Reference Guide.


Preface
1. Document Conventions
2. Feedback
1. Introduction
1.1. What is it?
1.2. Required software
2. Messaging
2.1. Messaging Overview
2.2. Messaging API Basics
2.2.1. Sending Messages with the Client Bus
2.2.2. Recieving Messages on the Server Bus / Server Services
2.2.3. Sending Messages with the Server Bus
2.2.4. Receiving Messages on the Client Bus/ Client Services
2.3. Conversations
2.4. Handling Errors
2.5. Single-Response Conversations & Psuedo-Synchronous Messaging
2.6. Broadcasting
2.7. Client-to-Client Communication
2.7.1. Relay Services
2.8. Asynchronous Message Tasks
2.9. Repeating Tasks
2.10. Sender Inferred Subjects
2.11. Message Routing Information
2.12. Queue Sessions
2.12.1. Lifecycle
2.12.2. Scopes
2.13. Client Logging and Error Handling
2.14. Wire Protocol (J.REP)
2.14.1. Payload Structure
2.14.2. Message Routing
2.14.3. Bus Management and Handshaking Protocols
3. Dependency Injection
3.1. Container Wiring
3.2. Wiring server side components
3.3. Scopes
3.3.1. Dependent Scope
3.4. Built-in Extensions
3.4.1. Bus Services
3.4.2. Client Components
3.4.3. Lifecycle Tools
3.5. Client-Side Bean Manager
3.5.1. Looking up beans
3.5.2. Availability of beans
3.6. Alternatives and Mocks
3.6.1. Alternatives
3.6.2. Test Mocks
3.7. Bean Lifecycle
3.7.1. Destruction of Beans
4. Marshalling
4.1. Mapping Your Domain
4.1.1. @Portable
4.1.2. Manual Class Mapping
4.1.3. Custom Marshallers
5. Remote Procedure Calls (RPC)
5.1. Making calls
5.1.1. Proxy Injection
5.2. Handling exceptions
5.3. Session and request objects in RPC endpoints
6. Errai CDI
6.1. Features and Limitations
6.1.1. Other features
6.2. Events
6.2.1. Conversational events
6.2.2. Client-Server Event Example
6.3. Producers
6.4. Deploying Errai CDI
6.4.1. Deployment in Development Mode
6.4.2. Deployment to a Servlet Engine
6.4.3. Deployment to an Application Server
6.4.4. Configuration Options
7. Errai JAX-RS
7.1. Creating Requests
7.1.1. Proxy Injection
7.2. Handling Responses
7.3. Wire Format
7.4. Errai JAX-RS Configuration
8. Configuration
8.1. Appserver Configuration
8.2. Client Configuration
8.3. ErraiApp.properties
8.4. ErraiService.properties
8.4.1. errai.dispatcher.implementation
8.4.2. errai.async_thread_pool_size
8.4.3. errai.async.worker_timeout
8.4.4. errai.authentication_adapter
8.4.5. errai.require_authentication_for_all
8.4.6. errai.auto_discover_services
8.4.7. errai.auto_load_extensions
8.5. Dispatcher Implementations
8.5.1. SimpleDispatcher
8.5.2. AsyncDispatcher
8.6. Servlet Implementations
8.6.1. DefaultBlockingServlet
8.6.2. JBossCometServlet
8.6.3. JettyContinuationsServlet
8.6.4. StandardAsyncServlet
9. Debugging Errai Applications
10. Upgrade Guide
10.1. Upgrading from 1.x to 2.0
10.2. Upgrading from 2.0.Beta to 2.0.CR1 (or Final)
11. Downloads
12. Sources
13. Reporting problems
14. Errai License
A. Revision History

Errai requires a JDK version 6 or higher and depends on Apache Maven to build and run the examples, and for leveraging the quickstart utilities.

Launching maven the first time

Please note, that when launching maven the first time on your machine, it will fetch all dependencies from a central repository. This may take a while, because it includes downloading large binaries like GWT SDK. However, subsequent builds are not required to go through this step and will be much faster.

This section covers the core messaging concepts of the ErraiBus messaging framework.

ErraiBus forms the backbone of the Errai framework's approach to application design. Most importantly, it provides a straight-forward approach to a complex problem space. Providing common APIs across the client and server, developers will have no trouble working with complex messaging scenarios from building instant messaging clients, stock tickers, to monitoring instruments. There's no more messing with RPC APIs, or unweildy AJAX or COMET frameworks. We've built it all in to one, consice messaging framework. It's single-paradigm, and it's fun to work with.

The MessageBuilder is the heart of the messaging API in ErraiBus. It provides a fluent / builder API, that is used for constructing messages. All three major message patterns can be constructed from the MessageBuilder .

Components that want to receive messages need to implement the MessageCallback interface.

But before we dive into the details, let look at some use cases first.

In order to send a message from a client you need to create a Message and send it through an instance of MessageBus . In this simple example we send it to the subject 'HelloWorldService'.

In the above example we build and send a message every time the button is clicked. Here's an explanation of what's going on as annotated above:

In the following example we extend our server side component to reply with a message when the callback method is invoked. It will create a message and address it to the subject ' HelloWorldClient ':

The above example shows a service which sends a message in response to receiving a message. Here's what's going on:

Asynchronous messaging necessitates the need for asynchronous error handling. Luckily, support for handling errors is built directly into the MessageBuilder API, utilizing the ErrorCallback interface. In the examples shown in previous exceptions, error handing has been glossed over with aubiquitous usage of the noErrorHandling() method while building messaging. We chose to require the explicit use of such a method to remind developers of the fact that they are responsible for their own error handling, requiring you to explicitly make the decision to forego handling potential errors.

As a general rule, you should always handle your errors . It will lead to faster and quicker identification of problems with your applications if you have error handlers, and generally help you build more robust code.

The addition of error handling at first may put off developers as it makes code more verbose and less-readable. This is nothing that some good practice can't fix. In fact, you may find cases where the same error handler can appropriately be shared between multiple different calls.

The error handler is required to return a boolean value. This is to indicate whether or not Errai should perform the default error handling actions it would normally take during a failure. You will almost always want to return true here, unless you are trying to explicitly surpress some undesirably activity by Errai, such as automatic subject-termination in conversations. But this is almost never the case.

Errai further provides a subject to subscribe to for handling global errors on the client (such as a disconnected server bus or an invalid response code) that occur outside a regular application message exchange. Subscribing to this subject is useful to detect errors early (e.g. due to failing heartbeat requests). A use case that comes to mind here is activating your application's offline mode.

A repeating task is sent using one of the MessageBuilder's repeatXXX() methods. The task will repeat indefinitely until cancelled (see next section).

The above example sends a message very 1 second with a message part called "time" , containing a formatted time string. Note the use of the withProvided() method; a provided message part is calculated at the time of transmission as opposed to when the message is constructed.

Cancelling an Asynchronous TaskA delayed or repeating task can be cancelled by calling the cancel() method of the AsyncTask instance which is returned when creating a task. Reference to the AsyncTask object can be retained and cancelled by any other thread.

Every message that is sent between a local and remote (or server and client) buses contain session routing information. This information is used by the bus to determine what outbound queues to use to deliver the message to, so they will reach their intended recipients. It is possible to manually specify this information to indicate to the bus, where you want a specific message to go.

You can obtain the SessionID directly from a Message by getting the QueueSession resource:

The utility class org.jboss.errai.bus.server.util.ServerBusUtils contains a utility method for extracting the String-based SessionID which is used to identify the message queue associated with any particular client. You may use this method to extract the SessionID from a message so that you may use it for routing. For example:

The SessionID can then be stored in a medium, say a Map, to cross-reference specific users or whatever identifier you wish to allow one client to obtain a reference to the specific SessionID of another client. In which case, you can then provide the SessionID as a MessagePart to indicate to the bus where you want the message to go.

By providing the SessionID part in the message, the bus will see this and use it for routing the message to the relevant queue.

It may be tempting however, to try and include destination SessionIDs at the client level, assuming that this will make the infrastructure simpler. But this will not achieve the desired results, as the bus treats SessionIDs as transient. Meaning, the SessionID information is not ever transmitted from bus-to-bus, and therefore is only directly relevant to the proximate bus.

The ErraiBus maintains it's own seperate session management on-top of the regular HTTP session management. While the queue sessions are tied to, and dependant on HTTP sessions for the most part (meaning they die when HTTP sessions die), they provide extra layers of session tracking to make dealing with complex applications built on Errai easier.

ErraiBus implements a JSON-based wire protocol which is used for the federated communication between different buses. The protocol specification encompasses a standard JSON payload structure, a set of verbs, and an object marshalling protocol. The protocol is named J.REP. Which stands for JSON Rich Event Protocol.

All wire messages sent across are assumed to be JSON arrays at the outermost element, contained in which, there are 0..n messages. An empty array is considered a no-operation, but should be counted as activity against any idle timeout limit between federated buses.


In Figure 1 , we see an example of a J.REP payload containing two messages. One bound for an endpoint named "SomeEndpoint" and the other bound for the endpoint "SomeOtherEndpoint" . They both include a payload element "Value" which contain strings. Let's take a look at the anatomy of an individual message.


The message shown in Figure 2 shows a very vanilla J.REP message. The keys of the JSON Object represent individual message parts , with the values representing their corresponding values. The standard J.REP protocol encompasses a set of standard message parts and values, which for the purposes of this specification we'll collectively refer to as the protocol verbs.

The following table describes all of the message parts that a J.REP capable client is expected to understand:

Part

Required

JSON Type

Description

ToSubject

Yes

String

Specifies the subject within the bus, and its federation, which the message should be routed to.

CommandType

No

String

Specifies a command verb to be transmitted to the receiving subject. This is an optional part of a message contract, but is required for using management services

ReplyTo

No

String

Specifies to the receiver what subject it should reply to in response to this message.

Value

No

Any

A recommended but not required standard payload part for sending data to services

PriorityProcessing

No

Number

A processing order salience attribute. Messages which specify priority processing will be processed first if they are competing for resources with other messages in flight. Note: the current version of ErraiBus only supports two salience levels (0 and >1). Any non-zero salience in ErraiBus will be given the same priority relative to 0 salience messages

ErrorMessage

No

String

An accompanying error message with any serialized exception

Throwable

No

Object

If applicable, an encoded object representing any remote exception that was thrown while dispatching the specified service

Federation between buses requires management traffic to negotiate connections and manage visibility of services between buses. This is accomplished through services named ClientBus and ServerBus which both implement the same protocol contracts which are defined in this section.

Both bus services share the same management protocols, by implementing verbs (or commands) that perform different actions. These are specified in the protocol with the CommandType message part. The following table describes these commands:


Part

Required

JSON Type

Description

CapabilitiesFlags

Yes

String

A comma delimited string of capabilities the bus is capable of us

Subject

Yes

String

The subject to subscribe or unsubscribe from

SubjectsList

Yes

Array

An array of strings representing a list of subjects to subscribe to

The core Errai IOC module implements the JSR-330 Dependency Injection specification for in-client component wiring.

Dependency injection (DI) allows for cleaner and more modular code, by permitting the implementation of decoupled and type-safe components. By using DI, components do not need to be aware of the implementation of provided services. Instead, they merely declare a contract with the container, which in turn provides instances of the services that component depends on.

A simple example:

public class MyLittleClass {

  private final TimeService timeService;
  @Inject
  public MyLittleClass(TimeService timeService) {
    this.timeService = timeService;
  }
  public void printTime() {
    System.out.println(this.timeService.getTime());
  }
}

In this example, we create a simple class which declares a dependency using @Inject for the interface TimeService . In this particular case, we use constructor injection to establish the contract between the container and the component. We can similarly use field injection to the same effect:

public class MyLittleClass {

  @Inject
  private TimeService timeService;
  public void printTime() {
    System.out.println(this.timeService.getTime());
  }
}

In order to inject TimeService , you must annotate it with @ApplicationScoped or the Errai DI container will not acknowledge the type as a bean.

@ApplicationScoped

public class TimeService {
}

Best Practices

Although field injection results in less code, a major disadvantage is that you cannot create immutable classes using the pattern, since the container must first call the default, no argument constructor, and then iterate through its injection tasks, which leaves the potential – albeit remote – that the object could be left in an partially or improperly initialized state. The advantage of constructor injection is that fields can be immutable (final), and invariance rules applied at construction time, leading to earlier failures, and the guarantee of consistent state.

In contrast to Gin , the Errai IOC container does not provide a programmatic way of creating and configuring injectors. Instead, container-level binding rules are defined by implementing a Provider , which is scanned for an auto-discovered by the container.

A Provider is essentially a factory which produces dependent types in the container, which defers instantiation responsibility for the provided type to the provider implementation. Top-level providers use the standard javax.inject.Provider<T> interface.

Types made available as top-level providers will be available for injection in any managed component within the container.

Out of the box, Errai IOC implements three default top-level providers:

  • org.jboss.errai.ioc.client.api.builtin.MessageBusProvider : Makes an instance of MessageBus available for injection.

  • org.jboss.errai.ioc.client.api.builtin.RequestDispatchProvider : Makes an instance of the RequestDispatcher available for injection.

  • org.jboss.errai.ioc.client.api.builtin.ConsumerProvider : Makes event Consumer<?> objects available for injection.

Implementing a Provider is relatively straight-forward. Consider the following two classes:

TimeService.java

public interface TimeService {

  public String getTime();
}

TimeServiceProvider.java

@IOCProvider

@Singleton
public class TimeServiceProvider implements Provider<TimeService> {
  @Override
  public TimeService get() {
    return new TimeService() {
      public String getTime() {
        return "It's midnight somewhere!";
      }
    };
  }
}

If you are familiar with Guice, this is semantically identical to configuring an injector like so:

Guice.createInjector(new AbstractModule() {

  public void configure() {
    bind(TimeService.class).toProvider(TimeServiceProvider.class);
  }
 }).getInstance(MyApp.class);

As shown in the above example code, the annotation @IOCProvider is used to denote top-level providers.

The classpath will be searched for all annotated providers at compile time.

Important

Top-level providers are treated as regular beans. And as such may inject dependencies – particularly from other top-level providers – as necessary.

As Errai IOC provides a container-based approach to client development, support for Errai services are exposed to the container so they may be injected and used throughout your application where appropriate. This section covers those services.

The IOC container, by default, provides a set of default injectable bean types. They range from basic services, to injectable proxies for RPC. This section covers the facilities available out-of-the-box.

A problem commonly associated with building large applications in the browser is ensuring that things happen in the proper order when code starts executing. Errai IOC provides you tools which permit you to ensure things happen before initialization, and forcing things to happen after initialization of all of the Errai services.

It may be necessary at times to obtain instances of beans managed by Errai IOC from outside the container managed scope or creating a hard dependency from your bean. Errai IOC provides a simple client-side bean manager for handling these scenarios: org.jboss.errai.ioc.client.container.IOCBeanManager .

As you might expect, you can inject the bean manager into any of your managed beans.


If you need to access the bean manager outside a managed bean, such as in a unit test, you can access it by calling org.jboss.errai.ioc.client.container.IOC.getBeanManager()

It may be desirable to have multiple matching dependencies for a given injection point with the ability to specify which implementation to use at runtime. For instance, you may have different versions of your application which target different browsers or capabilities of the browser. Using alternatives allows you to share common interfaces among your beans, while still using dependency injection, by exporting consideration of what implementation to use to the container's configuration.

Consider the following example:

and

In our controller logic we in turn inject the View interface:

This code is unaware of the implementation of View , which maintains good separation of concerns. However, this of course creates an ambiguous dependency on the View interface as it has two matching subtypes in this case. Thus, we must configure the container to specify which alternative to use. Also note, that the beans in both cases have been annotated with javax.enterprise.inject.Alternative .

In your ErraiApp.properties for the module, you can simply specify which active alternative should be used:

You can specify multiple alternative classes by white space separating them:

You can only have one enabled alternative for matching set of alternatives, otherwise you will get ambiguous resolution errors from the container.

Similar to alternatives, but specifically designed for testing scenarios, you can replace beans with mocks at runtime for the purposes of running unit tests. This is accomplished simply by annotating a bean with the org.jboss.errai.ioc.client.api.TestMock annotation. Doing so will prioritize consideration of the bean over any other matching beans while running unit tests.

Consider the following:

You can specify a mock implementation of this class by implementing its common parent type ( UserManagement ) and annotating that class with the @TestMock annotation inside your test package like so:

In this case, the container will replace the UserManagementImpl with the MockUserManagementImpl automatically when running the unit tests.

The @TestMock annotation can also be used to specify alternative providers during test execution. For example, it can be used to mock a Caller<T> . Callers are used to invoke RPC or JAX-RS endpoints. During tests you might want to replace theses callers with mock implementations. For details on providers see Section 3.1, “Container Wiring” .

@TestMock @IOCProvider

public class MockedHappyServiceCallerProvider implements ContextualTypeProvider<Caller<HappyService>> {
 
  @Override
  public Caller<HappyService> provide(Class<?>[] typeargs, Annotation[] qualifiers) {
    return new Caller<HappyService>() {
      ...
    }
}

All beans managed by the Errai IOC container support the @PostConstruct and @PreDestroy annotations.

Beans which have methods annotated with @PostConstruct are guaranteed to have those methods called before the bean is put into service, and only after all dependencies within its graph has been satisfied.

Beans are also guaranteed to have their @PreDestroy annotated methods called before they are destroyed by the bean manager.

Beans under management of Errai IOC, of any scope, can be explicitly destroyed through the client bean manager. Destruction of a managed bean is accomplished by passing a reference to the destroyBean() method of the bean manager.


When the bean manager "destroys" the bean, any pre-destroy methods the bean declares are called, it is taken out of service and no longer tracked by the bean manager. If there are references on the bean by other objects, the bean will continue to be accessible to those objects.

Important

Container managed resources that are dependent on the bean such as bus service endpoints or CDI event observers will also be automatically destroyed when the bean is destroyed.

Another important consideration is the rule, "all beans created together are destroyed together." Consider the following example:



In this example we pass the instance of AnotherBean, created as a dependency of SimpleBean, to the bean manager for destruction. Because this bean was created at the same time as its parent, its destruction will also result in the destruction of SimpleBean ; thus, this action will result in the @PreDestroy cleanUp() method of SimpleBean being invoked.

Errai includes a comprehensive marshalling framework which permits the serialization of domain objects between the browser and the server. From the perspective of GWT, this is a complete replacement for the provided GWT serialization facilities and offers a great deal more flexibility. You are be able to map both application-specific domain model, as well as preexisting model, including model from third-party libraries using the custom definitions API.

All classes that you intend to be marshalled between the client and the server must be exposed to the marshalling framework. There are several ways you can do it and this section will take you through the different approaches you can take to fit your needs.

The simplest and most straight-forward way to map your domain entities is to annotate it with the org.jboss.errai.common.client.api.annotations.Portable annotation. Doing so will cause the marshalling system to discover the entities at both compile-time and runtime to produce the marshalling code and definitions to marshal and de-marshal the objects.

The mapping strategy that will be used depends on how much information you provide about your model up-front. If you simply annotate a domain object with @Portable and do nothing else, the marshalling system will use and exhaustive strategy to determine how to construct and deconstruct the object.

Let's take a look at how this works.

Immutability is almost always a good practice, and the marshalling system provides you a straight forward way to tell it how to marshal and de-marshal objects which enforce an immutable contract. Let's modify our example from the previous section.

Here we have set both of the class fields final. By doing so, we had to remove our default constructor. But that's okay, because we have annotated the remaining constructor's parameters using the org.jboss.errai.marshalling.client.api.annotations.MapsTo annotation.

By doing this, we have told the marshaling system, for instance, that the first parameter of the constructor maps to the property name . Which in this case, defaults to the name of the corresponding field. This may not always be the case – as will be explored in the section on custom definitions. But for now that's a safe assumption.

Another good practice is to use a factory pattern to enforce invariance. Once again, let's modify our example.

Here we have made our only declared constructor private, and created a static factory method. Notice that we've simply used the same @MapsTo annotation in the same way we did on the constructor from our previous example. The marshaller will see this method and know that it should use it to construct the object.

Some classes may be out of your control, making it impossible to annotate them for auto-discovery by the marshalling framework. For cases such as this, there are two approaches which can be undertaken to include these classes in your application.

The first approach is the easiest, but is contingent on whether or not the class is directly exposed to the GWT compiler. That means, the classes must be part of a GWT module and within the GWT client packages. See the GWT documentation on Client-Side Code for information on this.

The marshalling framework supports and promotes the concept of marshalling by interface contract, where possible. For instance, the framework ships with a marshaller which can marshall data to and from the java.util.List interface. Instead of having custom marshallers for classes such as ArrayList and LinkedList , by default, these implementations are merely aliased to the java.util.List marshaller.

There are two distinct ways to go about doing this. The most straightforward is to specify which marshaller to alias when declaring your class is @Portable .

In the case of this example, the marshaller will not attempt to comprehend your class. Instead, it will merely rely on the java.util.List marshaller to dematerialize and serialize instances of this type onto the wire.

If for some reason it is not feasible to annotate the class, directly, you may specify the mapping in the ErraiApp.properties file using the errai.marshalling.mappingAliases attribute.

The list of classes is whitespace-separated so that it may be split across lines.

The example above shows the equivalent mapping for the MyListImpl class from the previous example, as well as a mapping of a class to the java.util.Map marshaller.

The syntax of the mapping is as follows: <class_to_map> -> <contract_to_map_to> .

Although the default marshalling strategies in Errai Marshalling will suit the vast majority of use cases, there may be situations where it is necessary to manually map your classes into the marshalling framework to teach it how to construct and deconstruct your objects.

This is accomplished by specifying MappingDefinition classes which inform the framework exactly how to read and write state in the process of constructing and deconstructing objects.

All manual mappings should extend the org.jboss.errai.marshalling.rebind.api.model.MappingDefinition class. This is base metadata class which contains data on exactly how the marshaller can deconstruct and construct objects.

Consider the following class:

Let us construct this object like so:

It is clear that we may rely on this object's two getter methods to extract the totality of its state. But due to the fact that the mySuperName field is final, the only way to properly construct this object is to call its only public constructor and pass in the desired value of mySuperName .

Let us consider how we could go about telling the marshalling framework to pull this off:

And that's it. This describes to the marshalling framework how it should go about constructing and deconstructing MySuperCustomEntity .

Paying attention to our annotating comments, let's describe what we've done here.

There is another approach to extending the marshalling functionality that doesn't involve mapping rules, and that is to implement your own Marshaller class. This gives you complete control over the parsing and emission of the JSON structure.

The implementation of marshallers is made relatively straight forward by the fact that both the server and the client share the same JSON parsing API.

Consider the included java.util.Date marshaller that comes built-in to the marshalling framework:


The class is annotated with both @ClientMarshaller and @ServerMarshaller indicating that this class should be used for both marshalling on the client and on the server.

The demarshall() method does what its name implies: it is responsible for demarshalling the object from JSON and turning it back into a Java object.

The marshall() method does the opposite, and encodes the object into JSON for transmission on the wire.

ErraiBus supports a high-level RPC layer to make typical client-server RPC communication easy on top of the bus. While it is possible to use ErraiBus without ever using this API, you may find it to be a more useful and concise approach to exposing services to the clients.

Please note that this API has changed since version 1.0. RPC services provide a way of creating type-safe mechanisms to make client-to-server calls. Currently, this mechanism only support client-to-server calls, and not vice-versa.

Creating a service is straight forward. It requires the definition of a remote interface, and a service class which implements it. See the following:

@Remote

public interface MyRemoteService {
  public boolean isEveryoneHappy();
}

The @Remote annotation tells Errai that we'd like to use this interface as a remote interface. The remote interface must be part of of the GWT client code. It cannot be part of the server-side code, since the interface will need to be referenced from both the client and server side code. That said, the implementation of a service is relatively simple to the point:

@Service

public class MyRemoteServiceImpl implements MyRemoteService {
  public boolean isEveryoneHappy() {
    // blatently lie and say everyone's happy.
    return true;
  }
}

That's all there is to it. You use the same @Service annotation as described in Section 2.4. The presence of the remote interface tips Errai off as to what you want to do with the class.

Calling a remote service involves use of the MessageBuilder API. Since all messages are asynchronous, the actual code for calling the remote service involves the use of a callback, which we use to receive the response from the remote method. Let's see how it works:

In the above example, we declare a remote callback that receives a Boolean, to correspond to the return value of the method on the server. We also reference the remote interface we are calling, and directly call the method. However, don't be tempted to write code like this :

The above code will never return a valid result. In fact, it will always return null, false, or 0 depending on the type. This is due to the fact that the method is dispatched asynchronously, as in, it does not wait for a server response before returning control. The reason we chose to do this, as opposed to emulate the native GWT-approach, which requires the implementation of remote and async interfaces, was purely a function of a tradeoff for simplicity.

CDI (Contexts and Dependency Injection) is the Jave EE standard (JSR-299) for handling dependency injection. In addition to dependency injection, the standard encompasses component lifecycle, application configuration, call-interception and a decoupled, type-safe eventing specification.

The Errai CDI extension implements a subset of the specification for use inside of client-side applications within Errai, as well as additional capabilities such as distributed eventing.

Errai CDI does not currently implement all life cycles specified in JSR-299 or interceptors. These deficiencies may be addressed in future versions.

Important

The Errai CDI extension itself is implemented on top of the Errai IOC Framework (see Chapter 3, Dependency Injection ), which itself implements the JSR-330 specification. Inclusion of the CDI module your GWT project will result in the extensions automatically being loaded and made available to your application.

Any CDI managed component may produce and consume events . This allows beans to interact in a completely decoupled fashion. Beans consume events by registering for a particular event type and optional qualifiers. The Errai CDI extension simply extends this concept into the client tier. A GWT client application can simply register an Observer for a particular event type and thus receive events that are produced on the server-side. Likewise and using the same API, GWT clients can produce events that are consumed by a server-side observer.

Let's take a look at an example.


Two things are noteworthy in this example:

  1. Injection of an Event dispatcher proxy

  2. Creation of an Observer method for a particular event type

The event dispatcher is responsible for sending events created on the client-side to the server-side event subsystem (CDI container). This means any event that is fired through a dispatcher will eventually be consumed by a CDI managed bean, if there is an corresponding Observer registered for it on the server side.

In order to consume events that are created on the server-side you need to declare an client-side observer method for a particular event type. In case an event is fired on the server this method will be invoked with an event instance of type you declared.

To complete the example, let's look at the corresponding server-side CDI bean:


A key feature of the Errai CDI framework is the ability to federate the CDI eventing bus between the client and the server. This permits the observation of server produced events on the client, and vice-versa.

Example server code:


Domain-model:



Client application logic:


If you do not care about the deployment details for now and just want to get started take a look at the Quickstart Guide .

The CDI integration is a plugin to the Errai core framework and represents a CDI portable extension. Which means it is discovered automatically by both Errai and the CDI container. In order to use it, you first need to understand the different runtime models involved when working GWT, Errai and CDI.

Typically a GWT application lifecycle begins in Development Mode and finally a web application containing the GWT client code will be deployed to a target container (Servlet Engine, Application Server). This is no way different when working with CDI components to back your application.

What's different however is availability of the CDI container across the different runtimes. In GWT development mode and in a pure servlet environment you need to provide and bootstrap the CDI environment on your own. While any Java EE 6 Application Server already provides a preconfigured CDI container. To accomodate these differences, we need to do a little trickery when executing the GWT Development Mode and packaging our application for deployment.

In development mode we need to bootstrap the CDI environment on our own and make both Errai and CDI available through JNDI (common denominator across all runtimes). Since GWT uses Jetty, that only supports read only JNDI, we need to replace the default Jetty launcher with a custom one that will setup the JNDI bindings:

Once this is set up correctly, we can bootstrap the CDI container through a servlet listener:

We provide integration with the JBoss Application Server , but the requirements are basically the same for other vendors. When running a GWT client app that leverages CDI beans on a Java EE 6 application server, CDI is already part of the container and accessible through JNDI ( java:/BeanManager ).

JAX-RS (Java API for RESTful Web Services) is a Java EE standard (JSR-311) for implementing REST-based Web services in Java. Errai JAX-RS brings this standard to the browser and simplifies the integration of REST-based services in GWT client applications. Errai can generate proxies based on JAX-RS interfaces which will handle all the underlying communication and serialization logic. All that's left to do is to invoke a Java method. We have provided a Maven archetype which will create a fully function CRUD application using JAX-RS. See the Quickstart Guide for details.

An instance of Errai's RemoteCallback<T> has to be passed to the RestClient.create() call, which will provide access to the JAX-RS resource method's result. T is the return type of the JAX-RS resource method. In the example below it's just a Long representing a customer ID, but it can be any serializable type (see Chapter 4, Marshalling ).

RemoteCallback<Long> callback = new RemoteCallback<Long>() {

  public void callback(Long id) {
    Window.alert("Customer created with ID: " + id);
  }
};

A special case of this RemoteCallback is the ResponseCallback which provides access to the Response object representing the underlying HTTP response. This is useful when more details of the HTTP response are needed, such as headers, the status code, etc. This ResponseCallback can be provided as an alternative to the RemoteCallback for the method result.

ResponseCallback callback = new ResponseCallback() {

  public void callback(Response response) {
    Window.alert("HTTP status code: " + response.getStatusCode());
    Window.alert("HTTP response body: " + response.getText());
  }
};

For handling errors, Errai's error callback mechanism can be reused and an instance of ErrorCallback can optionally be passed to the RestClient.create() call. In case of an HTTP error, the ResponseException provides access to the Response object. All other Throwables indicate a communication problem.

ErrorCallback errorCallback = new ErrorCallback() {

  public boolean error(Message message, Throwable throwable) {
    try {
      throw throwable;
    }
    catch (ResponseException e) {
      Response response = e.getResponse();
      // process unexpected response
      response.getStatusCode();
    }
    catch (Throwable t) {
      // process unexpected error (e.g. a network problem)
    }
    return false;
  }
};

Errai's JSON format will be used to serialize/deserialize your custom types. See Chapter 4, Marshalling for details. A future extension to Errai's marshaller capabilities will support pluggable/custom serializers. So in the near future you will have the flexibility to use your own wire format.

This section contains information on configuring Errai.

Depending on what application server you are deploying on, you must provide an appropriate servlet implementation if you wish to use true, asynchronous I/O. See Section 8.6, “Servlet Implementations” for information on the available servlet implementations.

Here's a sample web.xml file:


<web-app xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee"
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee
  http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd"
  version="2.5">

  <servlet>
    <servlet-name>ErraiServlet</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>org.jboss.errai.bus.server.servlet.DefaultBlockingServlet</servlet-class>
    <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
  </servlet>

  <servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>ErraiServlet</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>*.erraiBus</url-pattern>
  </servlet-mapping>

  <context-param>
    <param-name>errai.properties</param-name>
    <param-value>/WEB-INF/errai.properties</param-value>
  </context-param>

  <context-param>
    <param-name>login.config</param-name>
    <param-value>/WEB-INF/login.config</param-value>
  </context-param>

  <context-param>
    <param-name>users.properties</param-name>
    <param-value>/WEB-INF/users.properties</param-value>
  </context-param>

</web-app>

he ErraiService.properties file contains basic configuration for the bus itself.

Example Configuration:

Errai has several different implementations for HTTP traffic to and from the bus. We provide a universally-compatible blocking implementation that provides fully synchronous communication to/from the server-side bus. Where this introduces scalability problems, we have implemented many webserver-specific implementations that take advantage of the various proprietary APIs to provide true asynchrony.

These included implementations are packaged at: org.jboss.errai.bus.server.servlet .

Errai includes a bus monitoring application, which allows you to monitor all of the message exchange activity on the bus in order to help track down any potential problems It allows you to inspect individual messages to examine their state and structure.

To utilize the bus monitor, you'll need to include the _errai-tools _ package as part of your application's dependencies. When you run your application in development mode, you will simply need to add the following JVM options to your run configuration in order to launch the monitor: -Derrai.tools.bus_monitor_attach=true


The monitor provides you a real-time perspective on what's going on inside the bus. The left side of the main screen lists the services that are currently available, and the right side is the service-explorer, which will show details about the service.

To see what's going on with a specific service, simply double-click on the service or highlight the service, then click "Monitor Service...". This will bring up the service activity monitor.


The service activity monitor will display a list of all the messages that were transmitted on the bus since the monitor became active. You do not need to actually have each specific monitor window open in order to actively monitor the bus activity. All activity on the bus is recorded.

The monitor allows you select individual messages, an view their individual parts. Clicking on a message part will bring up the object inspector, which will allow you to explore the state of any objects contained within the message, not unlike the object inspectors provided by debuggers in your favorite IDE. This can be a powerful tool for looking under the covers of your application.

This chapter contains important information for migrating to newer versions of Errai. If you experience any problems, don't hesitate to get in touch with us. See Chapter 13, Reporting problems .

The first issues that will arise after replacing the jars or after changing the version numbers in the pom.xml are unresolved package imports. This is due to refactorings that became necessary when the project grew. Most of these import problems can be resolved automatically by modern IDEs (Organize Imports). So, this should replace org.jboss.errai.bus.client.protocols.* with org.jboss.errai.common.client.protocols.* for example.

The following is a list of manual steps that have to be carried out when upgrading:

  • The bootstrap listener (configured in WEB-INF/web.xml ) for Errai CDI has changed ( org.jboss.errai.container.DevModeCDIBootstrap is now org.jboss.errai.container.CDIServletStateListener ).

  • gwt 2.3.0 or newer must be used and replace older versions.

  • mvel2 2.1.Beta8 or newer must be used and replace older versions.

  • weld 1.1.5.Final or newer must be used and replace older versions.

  • slf4j 1.6.1 or newer must be used and replace older versions.

  • This step can be skipped if Maven is used to build the project. If the project is NOT built using Maven, the following jar files have to be added manually to project's build/class path: errai-common-2.x.jar, errai-marshalling-2.x.jar, errai-codegen-2.x.jar, netty-4.0.0.Alpha1.errai.r1.jar.

  • If the project was built using an early version of an Errai archetype the configuration of the maven-gwt-plugin has to be modified to contain the <hostedWebapp>path-to-your-standard-webapp-folder</hostedWebapp> . This is usually either war or src/main/webapp .

The distribution packages can be downloaded from jboss.org http://jboss.org/errai/Downloads.html

Errai is currently managed using Github. You can clone our repositories from http://github.com/errai .

If you run into trouble don't hesitate to get in touch with us:

Errai is distributed under the terms of the Apache License, Version 2.0. See the full Apache license text .

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