This repository contains a simple proof-of-concept Web application.

The web application's scope in itself is very simple: it is the Tomcat7 websocket chat example, which can be found under tomcat-path/examples/websocket/chat.html.

In addition to the standard websocket example, this proof-of-concept app uses the Guice architecture implemented to persist chat logs to the DB. That's all.

Objectives and Structure

The objective is to be able to replicate the inability to use Tomcat7 web sockets with the Guice server-side architecture put in place in this architecture.

The structure of the project is divided in a core and in a web part:

• core implements the DAO layer, which handles the lifecycle of EntityManagers, the definition of entities that represent the DB tables, and general DB interaction

• web takes care of:

  • implementing the Handler layer and servlets utilizing it; a Handler in this context refers to an HTTP handler class in which the common HTTP variables, namely the request, response and session variables, are injected

  • implementing any servlet; in this project's MainSocket class extending WebSocketServlet is implemented

Maven/Eclipse/Tomcat7 Setup

Steps:

Navigate to core folder and execute:

cd poc-core
rm -rf .project .classpath .settings/
mvn clean install
mvn eclipse:eclipse

Success of the above operation ensures the core part builds successfully and sets up for an Eclipse Java project.

Navigate to the project root:

cd ..
rm -rf .project .classpath .settings/
mvn clean install

This prepares for the build of the web part; execute:

cd poc-web
rm -rf .project .classpath .settings/
mvn clean install
mvn eclipse:eclipse -Dwtpversion=2.0;

The last command creates an Eclipse Java Web project.

About web sockets

This wiki article should answer any questions with regards to web sockets usage (in the cif desktop).

Tomcat7 in Eclipse

This link was more or less followed to set up Tomcat7 locally within Eclipse IDE. But the guiding principle for this setup was to follow these steps:

1. download Tomcat7
2. run Tomcat7 via Eclipse using the IDE's New server wizard
3. drag the web part poc-web project onto the Tomcat7 server in the Servers tab

The web part should run under /poc-web/ under Tomcat7. For example, if your Tomcat7 runs at localhost:8080, the web application will run under poc-web. poc-web should have poc-core as one of its referenced libraries if the steps in Maven Project Setup were executed correctly.

Exception

The exception that is raised results in the following traceback:

SEVERE: Error reading request, ignored
java.lang.IllegalStateException: Attempting to execute an operation on a closed EntityManager.
	at org.eclipse.persistence.internal.jpa.EntityManagerImpl.verifyOpen(EntityManagerImpl.java:1704)
	at org.eclipse.persistence.internal.jpa.EntityManagerImpl.persist(EntityManagerImpl.java:446)
	at com.cif.dt.domain.dao.AbstractDAO.insert(AbstractDAO.java:22)
	at com.google.inject.persist.jpa.JpaLocalTxnInterceptor.invoke(JpaLocalTxnInterceptor.java:66)
	at com.cif.dt.domain.dao.AbstractDAO.insert(AbstractDAO.java:12)
	at com.cif.dt.app.chatlog.ChatLogHandlerImpl.logChatMsg(ChatLogHandlerImpl.java:25)
	at com.cif.dt.app.websocket.MainSocket$SocketMessageInbound.onTextMessage(MainSocket.java:98)
	at org.apache.catalina.websocket.MessageInbound.onTextData(MessageInbound.java:74)
	at org.apache.catalina.websocket.StreamInbound.doOnTextData(StreamInbound.java:186)
	at org.apache.catalina.websocket.StreamInbound.onData(StreamInbound.java:134)
	at org.apache.coyote.http11.upgrade.UpgradeProcessor.upgradeDispatch(UpgradeProcessor.java:83)
	at org.apache.coyote.AbstractProtocol$AbstractConnectionHandler.process(AbstractProtocol.java:583)
	at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.JIoEndpoint$SocketProcessor.run(JIoEndpoint.java:310)
	at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.runTask(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:886)
	at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:908)
	at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:662)

The reason for this exception is because the injected ChatLogHandler reference variable is not used from within the usual servlet Singleton, but rather it is used in one of the methods of a newly-instanciated instance of class SocketMessageInbound (see method createWebSocketInbound).

A more in detail description of the problem can be found on the question posted on stackoverflow.