01 November 2008 ~ 7 Comments

Integrating Apache MINA with Spring

Apache MINA

So far we have seen Apache MINA code samples in standalone form. Apache MINA can be nicely integrated into DI frameworks like Spring. Lets see how to integrate a simple MINA application with Spring

This is how our application is structure. To see details of this application, please refer to the post Implementing Trap Receiver in 30 minutes using Apache MINA

To integrate with Spring, we need to do following

  • One Handler
  • Two Filter – Logging Filter and a ProtocolCodec Filter
  • NioDatagram Socket

This is how our code looks like for the standalone application

public void initialize() throws IOException {
 
	// Create an Acceptor
	NioDatagramAcceptor acceptor = new NioDatagramAcceptor();
 
	// Add Handler
	acceptor.setHandler(new ServerHandler());
 
	acceptor.getFilterChain().addLast("logging",
				new LoggingFilter());
	acceptor.getFilterChain().addLast("codec",
				new ProtocolCodecFilter(new SNMPCodecFactory()));
 
	// Create Session Configuration
	DatagramSessionConfig dcfg = acceptor.getSessionConfig();
        dcfg.setReuseAddress(true);
        logger.debug("Starting Server......");
        // Bind and be ready to listen
        acceptor.bind(new InetSocketAddress(DEFAULT_PORT));
        logger.debug("Server listening on "+DEFAULT_PORT);
}

To integrate with Spring, we need to do following

  1. Set the IO handler
  2. Create the Filters and add to the chain
  3. Create the Socket and set Socket Parameters

NOTE: The latest MINA releases doesn’t have the package specific to Spring, like its earlier versions. The package is now named Integration Beans, to make the implementation work for all DI frameworks.

Lets see the Spring xml file. Please see that I have removed generic part from xml and have put only the specific things needed to pull up the implementation. This example has been derived from Chat example shipped with MINA release.

Now lets pull things together

  1. Lets set the IO Handler

  2. Lets create the Filter chain

    3. Here, we create instance of our IoFilter. See that for the ProtocolCodec factory, we have used Constructor injection. Logging Filter creation is straight forward. Once we have defined the beans for the filters to be used, we now create the Filter Chain to be used for the implementation. We define a bean with id “FilterChainBuidler” and add the defined filters to it. We are almost ready, and we just need to create the Socket and call bind

  3. Lets complete the last part of creating the Socket and completing the chain

Now we create our ioAcceptor, set IO handler and Filter Chain. Now we have to write a function to read this file using Spring and start our application. Here’s the code

public void initializeViaSpring() throws Exception {
	new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("trapReceiverContext.xml");
}

We just call this method from main, and this shall initialize our MINA application. Will try to write a post using some other DI framework like Google Guice.

Reference:

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7 Responses to “Integrating Apache MINA with Spring”

  1. Mike 4 November 2008 at 8:18 pm Permalink

    Thanks for this example. It was invaluable in porting my mina-1.1.7 spring configuration over to 2.0.

  2. Declan 10 December 2008 at 11:43 pm Permalink

    Hi Ashish,
    Thanks for the example. One question that has been vexing me for the past while that you may know the answer to. Do you know why the reuseAddress session config parameter no longer exposed when configuring an NioDatagramConnector/Acceptor ? Of course it is possible to set it programmatically by getting a hold of the DatagramSessionConfig from the acceptor/connector once created, however it makes it awkward from a spring config point of view.

    Thanks,
    Declan.

  3. ashish 13 December 2008 at 8:00 am Permalink

    To be true, I don’t have an answer right now. Let me check and get back to you.

  4. serge 26 February 2009 at 11:31 pm Permalink

    Hi Ashish

    We need the chain filters in a certain order, so a Map is not appropriate !

    By.

  5. Les Hazlewood 21 October 2009 at 2:28 am Permalink

    @serge

    You don’t need to worry about this – Spring uses a LinkedHashMap implementation for map definitions by default which does retain definition order.

    - Les

  6. Les Hazlewood 22 October 2009 at 4:15 am Permalink

    @Declan and Ashish,

    Spring supports nested property configuration by using OGNL path expressions. For example, if you wanted to change the ‘tcpNoDelay’ property of the NioSocketAcceptor’s nested SessionConfig instance:

    …

    …

    Naturally the default,no-arg constructor of whatever bean you’re instantiating must ensure that any beans referenced via a OGNL expression are non-null (the NioSocketAcceptor does indeed ensure this for its internal SessionConfig instance). No coding necessary :)

    Using the nested property technique above, I think you can easily satisfy almost all of your Mina Spring-configuration needs.

    Here is the Spring doco reference:

    http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/2.5.x/reference/beans.html#beans-compound-property-names

    Regards,

    Les

  7. Les Hazlewood 22 October 2009 at 4:18 am Permalink

    Oops – my XML example didn’t show correctly. Let’s try again with brackets instead:

    [bean class="org.apache.mina.transport.socket.nio.NioSocketAcceptor"
    init-method="bind" destroy-method="unbind"/]
    …
    [property name="sessionConfig.tcpNoDelay" value="true"/]
    …
    [/bean]

    Ashish, please feel free to edit/consolidate my comments so this shows proper XML if you have the ability to do so.

    Regards,

    Les


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