Watch your Spring webapp: Hibernate and log4j over JMX

I have been actively using Java Management Extensions (JMX), particularly within web applications, in order to monitor application internals and sometimes tune some parameters at runtime. There are few very useful tools supplied as part of JDK, JConsole and JVisualVM, which allow to connect to your application via JMX and manipulate with exposed managed beans.

I am going to leave apart basic JMX concepts and concentrate on interesting use cases:
- exposing log4j over JMX (which allows to change LOG LEVEL at runtime)
- exposing Hibernate statistics over JMX

In order to simplify a bit all routines with exposing managed beans I will use Spring Framework which has awesome JMX support driven by annotations. Let's have our first Spring context snippet: exposing log4j over JMX.

That's how it look like inside JVisualVM with VisualVM-MBeans plugin installed (please notice that root's logger LOG LEVEL (priority) could be changed from WARN to any, let say, DEBUG, at runtime and have effect immediately):

Let's add Hibernate to JMX view! In order to do that I will create very simple Hibernate configuration using Spring context XML file (I will repeat configuration for JMX-related beans but it's exactly the same as in previous example):

    

    
    
        
        
        
    
 
    
        
    
 
    
        
    
 
    
    

    
    
        
  
        
            
        
    
        
            
                org.hibernate.dialect.HSQLDialect
                true
            
        
    
 
    
  
    
        
      

       
    
        
    

And now we see this picture (please notice very important Hibernate property in order to see some real data here hibernate.generate_statistics = true):

Cool, simple and very useful, isn't it? :)

Testing untestable: JUnit + Mockito + Spring Test against static instances

This post is about my recent experience with the projects I thought don't exists anymore nowadays. Unreadable code base, chaotic design, any minor change breaks everything and, for sure, no tests. Worth mentioning deployment is nightmare. How this projects are supposed to evolve? I have no idea ... but we need to make fixes and changes. So ... what should we do? Write tests first!

That's not about how to write tests, but about techniques which allows to overcome some very bad coding practices in case you are not allowed to modify code base (as my team was put in such restrictions).

Let's start with such a pearl: private static initialized members (we will skip the thread safety aspects and concentrate on instance member only).

package org.example;

public class SomeStaticUtil {
    private static SomeStaticUtil instance = SomeStaticUtil.getInstance();
 
    public static SomeStaticUtil getInstance() {
        if( instance == null ) {
            instance = new SomeStaticUtil();
        }
  
        return instance;
    }
}

So how to substitute SomeStaticUtil with different implementation suitable for testing scenarios (aka mocks)? Remember, you are not allowed to modify the code (I would love to). There are few ways to do that:
- Excellent PowerMock framework. Didn't fit this project because bytecode manipulations crashed JVM.
- Magnificent AspectJ framework. Didn't fit this project because of complex aspects and necessary runtime weaving.
- Old and well-known reflection :-)

So what we can do here? Let's us exploit two excellent and very powerful test scaffolding frameworks: Mockito and Spring Test. Here is what we can do:

package org.example;

import org.junit.Before;
import org.junit.Test;
import org.mockito.Mockito;
import org.springframework.test.util.ReflectionTestUtils;

public class SomeStaticUtilTestCase {
    private SomeStaticUtil someStaticUtil;
 
    @Before
    public void setUp() {
        someStaticUtil = Mockito.mock( SomeStaticUtil.class );
        ReflectionTestUtils.setField( someStaticUtil, "instance", someStaticUtil );
    }
 
    @Test
    public void someTest() {
        // ... some tests
    }
}

Very simple but powerful: replace private static member instance with mock implementation. Cool.