Discovery by classpath analysis

Introduction

Analyzing the classpath of an application can provide interesting information about the current state of your SOA. This tool (compatible with Java servers only) allows to extract data about which Jars have been used to deploy services on your application.

Documentation

Setup

Right now, a prototype has been made available as "easysoa-classpath-discovery-prototype". It has been tested on an Apache CXF server only, but has the potential to work on numerous Java application servers.

1. Build the easysoa-classpath-discovery-prototype and add it to your application server as a library
2. [Server-dependent] Find a way to call new EasySOAClasspathAnalysis().discover(); during your server startup (in the Apache CXF test, we added this line directly within the server initialization, but it could be easily decoupled better - choose the solution that fits best your runtime)
3. Launch the server, after making sure the EasySOA Registry is launched

Configuration

You can configure the discovery behavior by adding a discovery.properties file to the root of the application's execution path. Example file:

discovery.nuxeoUrl=http://localhost:8080/nuxeo
discovery.nuxeoUsername=Administrator
discovery.nuxeoPassword=Administrator
discovery.appliImplUrl=http://localhost
discovery.appliImplTitle=My App
discovery.environment=Master
discovery.jarMatchers=*
discovery.logOnly=true

• nuxeoUrl: The URL of the EasySOA service registry
• nuxeoUsername / nuxeoPassword: The service registry credentials
• environment / appliImplUrl / appliImplTitle: Some (recommended) information about your application
• jarMatchers: A (set of) regular expression(s), separated by a |, that filters the watched JARs. Ex: easysoa*|nuxeo* will only discover EasySOA and Nuxeo-related JARs.
• logOnly: Retains the tool from actually sending discovery notifications to the registry (for testing/debugging purposes).

How does it work?

            // Fetch the classpath JARs list
            String[] classPath = System.getProperty("java.class.path").split(File.pathSeparator);
            
            // Extract the JAR names
            for (String classPathEntry : classPath) {
                if (classPathEntry.endsWith(".jar")) {
                    ...
                }
            }