Blogs Introducing WildFly Clustering Spring Session

Introducing WildFly Clustering Spring Session

March 16, 2021 Tags: spring spring session httpsession wildfly

By Paul Ferraro

Dear Infinispan community,

Last week I released version 3.0.0.Final of wildfly-clustering-spring-session, a new Spring Session implementation based on WildFly’s distributed HttpSession manager and Infinispan.

Doesn’t Infinispan already provide a Spring Session implementation?

Yes, it does.

Infinispan’s existing Spring Session implementation stores instances of org.springframework.session.MapSession into a Spring cache, which is backed by either an embedded or remote cache.

However, like many MapSession based SessionRepository implementations, it suffers from a common set of problems/limitations:

The MapSession object, including all session metadata and attributes must be serialized and replicated/persisted on every request, regardless of the extent to which the session was modified.
- Because Spring Session triggers session persistence from a ServletFilter, this cost is borne per request.
Since each request for a given session operates on a copy of the MapSession, and since the MapSession is not persisted/replicated until the end of the request:
- Session modifications in one requests are not visible to concurrent requests for the same session.
- A given session modification can be overwritten by a previous modification of the same session from a concurrent request if that request finishes first.
Session attributes implementing HttpSessionActivationListener are never notified before/after they are marshalled/unmarshalled.

How does it work?

wildfly-clustering-spring-session is implemented as a Spring SessionRepository facade to a container-independent SessionManager implementation that persists session attributes and metadata to either an embedded Infinispan cache or a remote Infinispan server cluster via HotRod. This grants all of the features to Spring Session that one would normally expect when deploying a distributed web application to WildFly, including:

Minimal persistence payloads using configurable persistence granularity.
Consistent view of a given session from multiple concurrent request threads on a given server
Mutable session attribute semantics (emulates the semantics of local session manager)
- Ability to treat specific session attributes as immutable
Configurable limit for the number of active sessions to retain in memory
Proper HttpSessionActivationListener notifications.
Configurable session attribute marshaller (ProtoStream, JBoss Marshalling, or Java Serialization)

How do I use it?

In this example, we’ll use a remote Infinispan cluster containing a single member, deployed to the localhost, using its default configuration. See the project README for details on the available configuration annotations and their attributes.

Create a class containing the session repository configuration, for example:

@org.wildfly.clustering.web.spring.hotrod.annotation.EnableHotRodHttpSession \
(@HotRod(uri = "hotrod://127.0.0.1:11222"), manager = @SessionManager(granularity = ATTRIBUTE))
public class Config {
  // ...
}

Ensure your /WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml will process your configuration annotation:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
       xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
       xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
       xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
                           http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd
                           http://www.springframework.org/schema/context
                           http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context.xsd">
  <context:annotation-config/>
</beans>

Create an application initializer class that will auto-register the requisite servlet filters required by Spring Session:

public class MyHttpSessionApplicationInitializer extends AbstractHttpSessionApplicationInitializer {
  public MyHttpSessionApplicationInitializer() {
    // Do not call super constructor (see project README for details)
  }
}

Create a @WebListener that bootstraps our session repository configuration:

@javax.servlet.annotation.WebListener
public class MyContextLoaderListener extends org.wildfly.clustering.web.spring.context.ContextLoaderListener {
  public MyContextLoaderListener() {
    super(Config.class);
  }
}

Deploying your application will automatically create a new cache instance in the Infinispan cluster named according to the the host and context of the web application.

Can I use WildFly clustering Spring Session outside of WildFly?

Of course! Like most Spring Session repository implementations, it is meant to work with any implementation of the Jakarta Servlet 4.0 specification. The project README contains sample instructions for installing on Tomcat.

Where can I find it?

You can find the source code on github. Contributions are always welcome!

File any issues with the github issue tracker.

Checkout the README for more details.

Enjoy!

Paul Ferraro

Get it, Use it, Ask us!

We’re hard at work on new features, improvements and fixes, so watch this space for more announcements!

Please, download and test the latest release.

The source code is hosted on GitHub. If you need to report a bug or request a new feature, look for a similar one on our JIRA issues tracker. If you don’t find any, create a new issue.

If you have questions, are experiencing a bug or want advice on using Infinispan, you can use GitHub discussions. We will do our best to answer you as soon as we can.

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