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Posted to user@geronimo.apache.org by sim085 <si...@hotmail.com> on 2009/09/06 20:23:39 UTC
Can I make Geronimo work with my own implementation of web server?
Hi,
At the moment when you download Geronimo you are asked if you want Geronimo
with Jetty or Tomcat. These are both web servers which handle http requests.
I am trying to develop my own web server to handle different type of
requests (but still have to return html and therefore the connector
framework is not suitable). So my question is can I develop my own web
server and if yes where can I read more about this?
Regards,
Sim085
--
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Can-I-make-Geronimo-work-with-my-own-implementation-of-web-server--tp25320346s134p25320346.html
Sent from the Apache Geronimo - Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
RE: Can I make Geronimo work with my own implementation of web
server?
Posted by Simon Aquilina <si...@hotmail.com>.
> Geronimo is pretty modular so you should have no difficulty
> integrating whatever you come up with in geronimo. Since you don't
> provide any details of what you are trying to do its difficult to do
> anything other than point you at the geronimo code base. If you
> provided more details on the protocol you are planning to use we could
> point you in a more focussed direction. Personally I'm a little
> confused because I thought "web server" was usually used to mean
> "server for http requests".
Hi David,
First of all thank you very much for your quick reply. You are right I did not explain my self fully on what I am trying to achieve. I am mostly asking the question as part of a research I am making to understand how modular Geronimo is and in which ways I could customize it for my needs.
Basically my question is if I can build my own "server to handle custom protocol requests" that can live next to tomcat with the Geronimo. For example, if I have a web application that consists of a single servlet (that inherits from GenericServlet class), then can I set Geronimo to load by custom protocol handler at start up (just like I assume it does with Tomcat)? and can I access the deployed servet from this custom protocol handler?
I have looked into the possiblity of adding a connector directly into Tomcat but the problem here is that the Tomcat adapter handles all requests as http. I also thought of using the JEE Connector Framework. However the problem here is that the only way to access a deployed web application is to use the URLConnection class which internally sends an http request.
Regards,
Simon J.
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Re: Can I make Geronimo work with my own implementation of web
server?
Posted by Quintin Beukes <qu...@skywalk.co.za>.
I just noticed the XML I gave was for a dev version. Here is another
semi-production one I found lying around, which I used when testing
against already balanced production servers, which shows some more
magick you can do with Tomcat, mostly related to custom valves, custom
config and custom HttpResponse/Request objects, and a very basic
clustering I had between 2 balancers that configured a floating IP in
case the "other" went down. You can really do alot (though with the
config I cheated by loading the LoadBalancer tag data into my own XML
processor).
<Service name="NineLives" className="mypackage.tomcat.NLService">
<Executor name="ninelivesThreadPool" namePrefix="ninelives-exec-"
maxThreads="225" minSpareThreads="15"/>
<Connector executor="ninelivesThreadPool" port="80"
protocol="org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11NioProtocol"
connectionTimeout="15000" />
<Engine name="NineLives" defaultHost="balancer.status"
className="mypackage.tomcat.NLEngine">
<LoadBalancer protocol="HTTP/1.1"
className="mypackage.lb.requesttyperobin.Manager">
<BackendNode commonName="dynamic1noauth" hostname="10.85.0.101"
port="10080" alive="true">
<Not><Authenticated/></Not>
<Or>
<Match>\.php(\?.*)?$</Match>
<Match>.*/cgi-bin/.*</Match>
</Or>
</BackendNode>
<BackendNode commonName="dynamic2noauth" hostname="10.85.0.102"
port="10080" alive="true">
<Not><Authenticated/></Not>
<Or>
<Match>\.php(\?.*)?$</Match>
<Match>.*/cgi-bin/.*</Match>
</Or>
</BackendNode>
<BackendNode commonName="dynamic3auth" hostname="10.85.0.103"
port="10080" alive="true">
<Authenticated/>
<Or>
<Match>\.php(\?.*)?$</Match>
<Match>.*/cgi-bin/.*</Match>
</Or>
</BackendNode>
<BackendNode commonName="static1" hostname="10.85.0.104"
port="10080" alive="true">
<Not>
<Or>
<Match>\.php(\?.*)?$</Match>
<Match>.*/cgi-bin/.*</Match>
</Or>
</Not>
</BackendNode>
<BackendNode commonName="backup1" hostname="10.85.0.105"
port="10080" alive="false">
<Match>.*</Match>
</BackendNode>
</LoadBalancer>
<Host name="balancer.status" appBase="webapps" unpackWARs="false"
autoDeploy="true" xmlValidation="false" xmlNamespaceAware="false">
</Host>
<Valve className="mypackage.filters.content.GoogleAnalyticsHtmlAppender"
gaID="[google-analytics-id]"/>
<NineLivesCluster probePort="10050" partner="10.80.0.2"
probeTime="1000" maxFail="10"/>
<!--<NineLivesCluster probePort="10050" partner="10.80.0.1"
probeTime="1000" maxFail="10"/>-->
</Engine>
</Service>
Q
On Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 9:21 PM, Quintin Beukes <qu...@skywalk.co.za> wrote:
> Well, it is quite tricky doing custom protocols. Though I had a vague
> plan on implementing SMTP using the same Connector framework.
>
> The problem with the connector framework is that it revolves around
> something like an "Adapter" which works only with stream based
> protocols following the "request/response" pattern.
>
> So, if your protocol follows this pattern, then you can use it. Beyond
> this the Request/Response classes are pretty generic. They don't yet
> have HTTP design in them. For that you have the
> HttpRequest/HttpResponse classes.
>
> So what you want to do is completely possible, and proven by the AJP
> protocol handler, which is widely used by people wanting to link
> tomcat and Apache HTTPD. Though AJP is very "HTTP like", it's not
> HTTP. It's a non-text protocol, and only shares similarities with http
> because it's meant to be an HTTP reverse proxy protocol, so it
> supports the concepts of headers/bodies, and follows the
> request/response pattern.
>
> Further. The protocol implementations in Tomcat have what is called
> "endpoints", which is the other party in the request IIRC. And with
> this class you can do you communication. The protocol handler is very
> generic, in having only lifecycle callbacks, and in these you would do
> you communicate and construct Request/Response objects, and pass it up
> the stack to the engine/service implementations.
>
> So to handle a completely custom protocol in Tomcat you would have to
> make your own Connector, with your own extensions of Request/Response,
> and then have your Engine/Service implementations that understand
> these types. You can even add your own XML tags, very easily. For this
> i had to modify the tomcat base, as they have no way to "extend" on
> the config file. I did however put the minimal code in the tomcat
> base, which accepted an interface and did callbacks to my library for
> the XML parsing. I for instance had the following <Service> tag (just
> to give an idea about the Engine/Service implementation and the custom
> XML:
>
> <Service name="NineLives" className="mypackage.tomcat.NLService">
> <Executor name="ninelivesThreadPool" namePrefix="ninelives-exec-"
> maxThreads="150" minSpareThreads="4"/>
>
> <Connector executor="ninelivesThreadPool"
> port="80" protocol="org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11NioProtocol"
> connectionTimeout="20000" />
>
> <Engine name="NineLives" defaultHost="ninelives.status"
> className="mypackage.tomcat.NLEngine">
> <LoadBalancer protocol="HTTP/1.1"
> className="mypackage.lb.roundrobin.Manager">
> <BackendNode commonName="backend1" hostname="127.0.0.1"
> port="8580" alive="true"/>
> <BackendNode commonName="backend2" hostname="127.0.0.1"
> port="8580" alive="true"/>
> </LoadBalancer>
>
> <Host name="ninelives.status" appBase="webapps"
> unpackWARs="false" autoDeploy="true"
> xmlValidation="false" xmlNamespaceAware="false">
> </Host>
> </Engine>
> </Service>
>
> As you can see I used HTTP, and thus didn't have my own protocol
> handler. But the <LoadBalancer> does have a protocol specification,
> which I would change to SMTP at a later time when linking my own
> connector. IIRC correctly the protocol option could be used to link
> back to a Connector so each load balancer would only handle requests
> from the appropriate connectors.
>
> I know this has nothing to do with Geronimo, or with your application.
> I just figured giving you some information on what I did might help
> clear up how you would do these things in Tomcat.
>
> After having written this I built up tremendous respect for Tomcat. If
> you have a look at the request stack, you would notice Tomcat has
> minimal overhead. It does very little in between receiving the request
> and handing it to the servlet. And it's extensible design allows you
> to completely customize next to anything in it's behaviour, while
> still having the benefit of it's thread pools and optimized
> request/response handling. I would definitely recommend using it. It's
> not easy to write your own protocol handlers. There is too many things
> to do if you want something that works well under all kinds of
> situations, esp. the "high load" situation, where Tomcat keeps up
> quite well.
>
> When I was researching the design of my load balanced, I did some
> benchmarks between some OSS Java proxies/servlet/HTTP
> containers/implementations. Of these, Tomcat was able to keep it's
> request times quite stable under high loads, where jetty started to
> have a very hard time keeping up. So it just shows that if you had to
> build on top of a Tomcat, not only do you benefit from a lot of
> existing features with years of maturity, but also from a high
> performance design, able to take the punch. It's actually these
> benchmarks that inspired the name for my application, ie. NineLives.
> The word "cat" in Tomcat, together with it's "survival" ability, and
> the "nine lives of a cat", I though of NineLives.
>
> So in my very critical/harsh research, I have to admit I started with
> a little bit of a negative attitude towards Tomcat, hoping Jetty would
> win. In the end Tomcat really made an impression on me.
>
> So all in all. What you would do should be possible, depending on the
> nature of the protocol you wish to implement. And if it's possible,
> you should seriously consider Tomcat over Jetty or your complete own
> development.
>
> Q
>
> On Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 2:16 PM, sim085 <si...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> Quintin Beukes-2 wrote:
>>>
>>> Are you referring to the connector framework of Tomcat? Frankly I
>>> don't see how you can't do what you want with Geronimo+Tomcat.
>>>
>>
>> Hi Quintin,
>>
>> That is what I tried to do a few months ago. What I tried to do is build my
>> own custom protocol handler within Tomcat itself. However the problem I
>> faced here was that the CoyoteAdapter class provided by tomcat handled all
>> request objects as HttpRequests. I had started a thread about this on the
>> Tomcat Nabble Forum here:
>> http://www.nabble.com/Tomcat-Custom-Connector-tc17620116.html (the last
>> entry). On that thread no one answered if I could create my own adapter and
>> if I could configure Tomcat to use this adapter together with the
>> CoyoteAdapter it already has.
>>
>> Unfortunately that has been some time ago and what was clear back then is a
>> little bit foggy now. However I am more then happy to check the code again
>> and try to understand it should it be necessary.
>>
>> --
>> View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Can-I-make-Geronimo-work-with-my-own-implementation-of-web-server--tp25320346s134p25329613.html
>> Sent from the Apache Geronimo - Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>>
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Quintin Beukes
>
--
Quintin Beukes
Re: Can I make Geronimo work with my own implementation of web
server?
Posted by Quintin Beukes <qu...@skywalk.co.za>.
Yes, it all depends on how up in the class tree you are overriding.
Which is why I made implementations of all the classes to the top.
This gave me total control for optimization and ability.
Q
On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 11:50 AM, sim085 <si...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> Quintin Beukes-2 wrote:
>>
>> Well, it is quite tricky doing custom protocols. Though I had a vague
>> plan on implementing SMTP using the same Connector framework.
>>
>
> Thanks Quintin, I'll try to fetch the code I was working on when trying to
> do this with Tomcat and try to make it work again :) I was under the
> impression that the Adapter class given by Tomcat was threating all requests
> and responses as of type httprequest and httpresponses. However the Adapter
> interface in the API seems to contradict this. I'll try it again and see
> where it leads :)
>
> Thanks again,
> Simon J.
>
> --
> View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Can-I-make-Geronimo-work-with-my-own-implementation-of-web-server--tp25320346s134p25361776.html
> Sent from the Apache Geronimo - Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
>
--
Quintin Beukes
Re: Can I make Geronimo work with my own implementation of web
server?
Posted by sim085 <si...@hotmail.com>.
Quintin Beukes-2 wrote:
>
> Well, it is quite tricky doing custom protocols. Though I had a vague
> plan on implementing SMTP using the same Connector framework.
>
Thanks Quintin, I'll try to fetch the code I was working on when trying to
do this with Tomcat and try to make it work again :) I was under the
impression that the Adapter class given by Tomcat was threating all requests
and responses as of type httprequest and httpresponses. However the Adapter
interface in the API seems to contradict this. I'll try it again and see
where it leads :)
Thanks again,
Simon J.
--
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Can-I-make-Geronimo-work-with-my-own-implementation-of-web-server--tp25320346s134p25361776.html
Sent from the Apache Geronimo - Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
Re: Can I make Geronimo work with my own implementation of web
server?
Posted by Quintin Beukes <qu...@skywalk.co.za>.
Well, it is quite tricky doing custom protocols. Though I had a vague
plan on implementing SMTP using the same Connector framework.
The problem with the connector framework is that it revolves around
something like an "Adapter" which works only with stream based
protocols following the "request/response" pattern.
So, if your protocol follows this pattern, then you can use it. Beyond
this the Request/Response classes are pretty generic. They don't yet
have HTTP design in them. For that you have the
HttpRequest/HttpResponse classes.
So what you want to do is completely possible, and proven by the AJP
protocol handler, which is widely used by people wanting to link
tomcat and Apache HTTPD. Though AJP is very "HTTP like", it's not
HTTP. It's a non-text protocol, and only shares similarities with http
because it's meant to be an HTTP reverse proxy protocol, so it
supports the concepts of headers/bodies, and follows the
request/response pattern.
Further. The protocol implementations in Tomcat have what is called
"endpoints", which is the other party in the request IIRC. And with
this class you can do you communication. The protocol handler is very
generic, in having only lifecycle callbacks, and in these you would do
you communicate and construct Request/Response objects, and pass it up
the stack to the engine/service implementations.
So to handle a completely custom protocol in Tomcat you would have to
make your own Connector, with your own extensions of Request/Response,
and then have your Engine/Service implementations that understand
these types. You can even add your own XML tags, very easily. For this
i had to modify the tomcat base, as they have no way to "extend" on
the config file. I did however put the minimal code in the tomcat
base, which accepted an interface and did callbacks to my library for
the XML parsing. I for instance had the following <Service> tag (just
to give an idea about the Engine/Service implementation and the custom
XML:
<Service name="NineLives" className="mypackage.tomcat.NLService">
<Executor name="ninelivesThreadPool" namePrefix="ninelives-exec-"
maxThreads="150" minSpareThreads="4"/>
<Connector executor="ninelivesThreadPool"
port="80" protocol="org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11NioProtocol"
connectionTimeout="20000" />
<Engine name="NineLives" defaultHost="ninelives.status"
className="mypackage.tomcat.NLEngine">
<LoadBalancer protocol="HTTP/1.1"
className="mypackage.lb.roundrobin.Manager">
<BackendNode commonName="backend1" hostname="127.0.0.1"
port="8580" alive="true"/>
<BackendNode commonName="backend2" hostname="127.0.0.1"
port="8580" alive="true"/>
</LoadBalancer>
<Host name="ninelives.status" appBase="webapps"
unpackWARs="false" autoDeploy="true"
xmlValidation="false" xmlNamespaceAware="false">
</Host>
</Engine>
</Service>
As you can see I used HTTP, and thus didn't have my own protocol
handler. But the <LoadBalancer> does have a protocol specification,
which I would change to SMTP at a later time when linking my own
connector. IIRC correctly the protocol option could be used to link
back to a Connector so each load balancer would only handle requests
from the appropriate connectors.
I know this has nothing to do with Geronimo, or with your application.
I just figured giving you some information on what I did might help
clear up how you would do these things in Tomcat.
After having written this I built up tremendous respect for Tomcat. If
you have a look at the request stack, you would notice Tomcat has
minimal overhead. It does very little in between receiving the request
and handing it to the servlet. And it's extensible design allows you
to completely customize next to anything in it's behaviour, while
still having the benefit of it's thread pools and optimized
request/response handling. I would definitely recommend using it. It's
not easy to write your own protocol handlers. There is too many things
to do if you want something that works well under all kinds of
situations, esp. the "high load" situation, where Tomcat keeps up
quite well.
When I was researching the design of my load balanced, I did some
benchmarks between some OSS Java proxies/servlet/HTTP
containers/implementations. Of these, Tomcat was able to keep it's
request times quite stable under high loads, where jetty started to
have a very hard time keeping up. So it just shows that if you had to
build on top of a Tomcat, not only do you benefit from a lot of
existing features with years of maturity, but also from a high
performance design, able to take the punch. It's actually these
benchmarks that inspired the name for my application, ie. NineLives.
The word "cat" in Tomcat, together with it's "survival" ability, and
the "nine lives of a cat", I though of NineLives.
So in my very critical/harsh research, I have to admit I started with
a little bit of a negative attitude towards Tomcat, hoping Jetty would
win. In the end Tomcat really made an impression on me.
So all in all. What you would do should be possible, depending on the
nature of the protocol you wish to implement. And if it's possible,
you should seriously consider Tomcat over Jetty or your complete own
development.
Q
On Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 2:16 PM, sim085 <si...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> Quintin Beukes-2 wrote:
>>
>> Are you referring to the connector framework of Tomcat? Frankly I
>> don't see how you can't do what you want with Geronimo+Tomcat.
>>
>
> Hi Quintin,
>
> That is what I tried to do a few months ago. What I tried to do is build my
> own custom protocol handler within Tomcat itself. However the problem I
> faced here was that the CoyoteAdapter class provided by tomcat handled all
> request objects as HttpRequests. I had started a thread about this on the
> Tomcat Nabble Forum here:
> http://www.nabble.com/Tomcat-Custom-Connector-tc17620116.html (the last
> entry). On that thread no one answered if I could create my own adapter and
> if I could configure Tomcat to use this adapter together with the
> CoyoteAdapter it already has.
>
> Unfortunately that has been some time ago and what was clear back then is a
> little bit foggy now. However I am more then happy to check the code again
> and try to understand it should it be necessary.
>
> --
> View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Can-I-make-Geronimo-work-with-my-own-implementation-of-web-server--tp25320346s134p25329613.html
> Sent from the Apache Geronimo - Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
>
--
Quintin Beukes
Re: Can I make Geronimo work with my own implementation of web
server?
Posted by sim085 <si...@hotmail.com>.
Quintin Beukes-2 wrote:
>
> Are you referring to the connector framework of Tomcat? Frankly I
> don't see how you can't do what you want with Geronimo+Tomcat.
>
Hi Quintin,
That is what I tried to do a few months ago. What I tried to do is build my
own custom protocol handler within Tomcat itself. However the problem I
faced here was that the CoyoteAdapter class provided by tomcat handled all
request objects as HttpRequests. I had started a thread about this on the
Tomcat Nabble Forum here:
http://www.nabble.com/Tomcat-Custom-Connector-tc17620116.html (the last
entry). On that thread no one answered if I could create my own adapter and
if I could configure Tomcat to use this adapter together with the
CoyoteAdapter it already has.
Unfortunately that has been some time ago and what was clear back then is a
little bit foggy now. However I am more then happy to check the code again
and try to understand it should it be necessary.
--
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Can-I-make-Geronimo-work-with-my-own-implementation-of-web-server--tp25320346s134p25329613.html
Sent from the Apache Geronimo - Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
Re: Can I make Geronimo work with my own implementation of web
server?
Posted by Quintin Beukes <qu...@skywalk.co.za>.
Hey,
Are you referring to the connector framework of Tomcat? Frankly I
don't see how you can't do what you want with Geronimo+Tomcat.
I once developed an HTTP load balancer, and used Tomcat as the base.
It was very easy to link into any stage of the HTTP connection, from
the raw packets down to a Servlet instance back up to the raw
transmission of the response.
If you need any help on this, I should be able to help. I can even
send you some sample code if you get stuck with specifics.
The general idea was this:
1. I kept tomcat in tact. I did everything by adding a JAR file to
tomcat's lib directory.
2. I loaded my engine/connectors through server.xml configuration. I'm
not sure where this is in Geronimo. They might have their own classes
which generates the config responses programmatically. So I can't tell
you how you would load your own engine/connectors.
3. I implemented my own Service extends StandardService (You need to
override most of it's methods due to visibility problems - or
implement your own. A simple copy paste is a bit of code reuse, but it
achieves the purpose).
4. Implemented my own Engine extends StandardEngine
5. Used the standard Http11NioProtocol connector.
>From the above I was able to build a very complex load balancer. So
you don't need to write your own. Benefit from Tomcat's stability and
superior performance under high loads - something that will take you
long to do.
Anyway. Before you start modifying source code. What type of requests
do you want to handle?
Q
On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 8:44 PM, David Jencks <da...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> On Sep 6, 2009, at 11:23 AM, sim085 wrote:
>
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> At the moment when you download Geronimo you are asked if you want
>> Geronimo
>> with Jetty or Tomcat. These are both web servers which handle http
>> requests.
>> I am trying to develop my own web server to handle different type of
>> requests (but still have to return html and therefore the connector
>> framework is not suitable). So my question is can I develop my own web
>> server and if yes where can I read more about this?
>
> Geronimo is pretty modular so you should have no difficulty integrating
> whatever you come up with in geronimo. Since you don't provide any details
> of what you are trying to do its difficult to do anything other than point
> you at the geronimo code base. If you provided more details on the protocol
> you are planning to use we could point you in a more focussed direction.
> Personally I'm a little confused because I thought "web server" was usually
> used to mean "server for http requests".
>
> thanks
> david jencks
>
>>
>> Regards,
>> Sim085
>>
>> --
>> View this message in context:
>> http://www.nabble.com/Can-I-make-Geronimo-work-with-my-own-implementation-of-web-server--tp25320346s134p25320346.html
>> Sent from the Apache Geronimo - Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>>
>
>
--
Quintin Beukes
Re: Can I make Geronimo work with my own implementation of web server?
Posted by David Jencks <da...@yahoo.com>.
On Sep 6, 2009, at 11:23 AM, sim085 wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> At the moment when you download Geronimo you are asked if you want
> Geronimo
> with Jetty or Tomcat. These are both web servers which handle http
> requests.
> I am trying to develop my own web server to handle different type of
> requests (but still have to return html and therefore the connector
> framework is not suitable). So my question is can I develop my own web
> server and if yes where can I read more about this?
Geronimo is pretty modular so you should have no difficulty
integrating whatever you come up with in geronimo. Since you don't
provide any details of what you are trying to do its difficult to do
anything other than point you at the geronimo code base. If you
provided more details on the protocol you are planning to use we could
point you in a more focussed direction. Personally I'm a little
confused because I thought "web server" was usually used to mean
"server for http requests".
thanks
david jencks
>
> Regards,
> Sim085
>
> --
> View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Can-I-make-Geronimo-work-with-my-own-implementation-of-web-server--tp25320346s134p25320346.html
> Sent from the Apache Geronimo - Users mailing list archive at
> Nabble.com.
>