Around the start of the year, I took a little time to see if I could get XPages as it exists today running outside of a Domino server, specifically inside Open Liberty. I met with a good deal of success, finding that I could run stripped-down apps "freely" inside a normal WAR web app, and I could run full-fledged NSF-hosted apps using the LCDEnvironment container-within-a-container technique that normal XPages uses.
Since then, the prospects had been percolating in my mind, including coming back around a few months later to get XPages running on iOS and Android by way of Darwino. At the end of that post, I mused a bit about what a proper setup would look like, which would be essentially taking XPages, custom controls, and supporting resources and putting them into a Maven-structured webapp.
This past week, I decided to put WoW Classic aside for a bit and put some evening-and-weekend time into seeing if I could my get client's huge, 500-XPages-and-CC, plugin-backed, JAX-RS-heavy app working in this setup. And, like before:
Short Answer
Yep!
Long Answer
Building on what I had before, there were some medium- and large-scale hurdles I had to overcome:
- Hook up the remaining Servlets and listeners at the right times
- Figure out what to do about transpiling XSP source
- Add and adapt the remaining required IBM Commons Extensions
- Tweak the OSGi bridge for more bundle-like behavior and remove Equinox dependencies in our code
- Make the stack have a Notes runtime, but not think it's too much like Domino
- Adapt Java EE standards use to ensure it'd work with different implementations
A lot of this work ended up being finding the right little bit to tweak or add - an environment variable here, a META-INF/services file there - but a couple of the topics warrant expansion.
App Legwork
The core of what made this possible was a combination of coincidental and intentional work I had been doing in the main app for a good while. The first big part was that I had started bringing in components of my separate XPages Jakarta EE Support project, in particular bean validation and JAX-RS 2.1. We had previously used an older version of Hibernate Validator, and we were using the ExtLib-provided Wink for a good while to build out our REST services. Moving to RESTEasy's JAX-RS 2.1 implementation not only let us use the newer features it provided, but also let us set aside the Wink-isms we had been using in a couple places in favor of what became standard after Wink went moribund.
I also stripped out as many Equinox-isms as I could that I had made assumptions about over the years, such as removing home-brewed Equinox extension points in favor of portable IBM Commons extensions and reducing our use of Require-Bundle in favor of Import-Package, which pointed out all the areas where we depended on a specific implementation of a standard as opposed to just the cross-server spec.
Notes Runtime
One of the pleasant things I found out in my original experiments was that, while a lot of the newer and more-complex components of the XPages stack end up having some assumptions about the presence of a Notes or Domino environment, there's no dependency on nHTTP specifically. As long as the stack can call into the lotus.domino and NAPI classes, it's happy.
Really, the only thing I had to tiptoe around was making sure that I didn't include the LCDEnvironment stuff and its associated platform assumptions. At one point, I did investigate whether I could use that and make the running web app just another "module" like an NSF - there's even partial support classes like FileModule for this kind of thing in a "mashupmaker" package - but I ran into too many assumptions about the environment and class hierarchies that way. It's a bit of a shame, since that would have allowed transparently referencing NSF-housed apps in the same server, but that was only a "nice to have" anyway. Plus, it would have had the down side of keeping everything within the LCD wrappers, which do things like report the environment as Servlet 2.5 no matter how they're running (which is, horrifically, an upgrade over the underlying 2.4 on Domino).
XSP Source
My original experiment and my bootstrapping here involved copying the generated Java xsp.* files from Designer into the src/main/java build path of the Maven project, which are then picked up by the CompiledPageDriver used by the XPages runtime. This works, but it's not exactly developer-friendly. To make it in any way practical, I'd need to be able to continue working with the XML source like in Designer.
The trouble here is conceptually similar to the impediment to incremental compilation in the ODP Compiler: due to the way XSP Libraries work, they require not only the presence of the full classpath to know what components are available, but also an active running Java application. They can't just be derived statically - this is why you have to install library plugins into Designer-the-application.
However, I had a distinct advantage here: though I didn't have a running app at editing/compile time, I sure would have a running app while the app is, uh, running. And that is a problem I did solve in the ODP Compiler, thanks to the Bazaar's hooks into the XSP interpreter inside the XPages stack. I realized that I could implement a FacesPageDriver that received requests for pages and compiled them on the fly. The interface is very simple: it contains only one method, which takes a FacesContext and a page name (like "/foo.xsp") and returns a FacesPageDispatcher, which is the obliquely-named interface implemented by the translated xsp.* Java classes.
Really, this could be anything; it's not actually tied to the Java translation and compilation process at all, and could be something like a live translator of XSP into spitting out UIComponent objects on the fly, which is something I considered. Though the use of compiled classes is an implementation detail, I ended up deciding to still piggyback on that, since a dynamic interpreter would have extra legwork to do to make sure the behavior was the same, whereas using the translator would guarantee the same results as if they were compiled the normal way. In practice, the main differences between my code here and the code in the ODP Compiler is that I could use the existing component registry from the running app and that I ended up compiling the classes as Groovy source instead of Java. I did the latter because the Groovy in-memory compiler didn't require the same kind of classpath crawling that the Java compiler does, and which had ended up being a major performance sink in practice. Groovy is almost a strict superset of Java syntax, so it only took a little bit of tweaking to the generated source to make it work - tweaking that could be done simply since the problem domain is so small.
Liberty-Specific Gotcha
Though I'm still smitten with Open Liberty as my Java host of choice, I did pull my hair out a bit over some of the side effects of it. Specifically, I ran into trouble when having the JSP feature enabled (which is on by default), where it would load up com.sun.faces.config.ConfigureListener much earlier in the process than it's supposed to be. It's something to do with an optimization for when you have real JSF enabled as well, but, since IBM didn't rename the core packages, Liberty picked up on the presence of it and kicked it off on server start, instead of during app load when it's expected.
Fortunately, Liberty's architecture is such that, if you don't choose to enable a feature, it's entirely absent at runtime, so there was a clear workaround. It's a bit of a shame, since going from XSP ? JSP is a legitimate potential path, but it's not the end of the world. Additionally, there's nothing Liberty-specific in my approach here. I haven't tried it, but the same app should work in Tomcat (if you bring in some standards implementations) or in another JEE server like Glassfish.
The Results
After wrangling with this stuff enough, though, the results were ideal: the full app, with all its dynamic content, runtime component additions, use of home.xsp/foo/bar path info shenanigans (its own hurdle in the Servlet world), dependency on ODA and half a dozen other XPages Libraries, and its plugin-served resources works just as it does on Domino. And, though some of the runtime setup was a bit hairy, the app itself is pretty svelte and straightforward. All the Java code is where it's expected to be, resources in src/main/webapp show up like you'd want, and it all just acts like it should.
The Future
So now I have an odd conundrum. I prefaced my post in January by saying that I didn't plan to do anything with the experiment, but now I'm looking over a precipice where I could theoretically plop the WAR file into the Domino Open Liberty Runtime, add a redirection rule to point to it, and call it a day. I certainly don't plan to, since there could be any number of weird problems with this and the app still points back to normal classic Domino web resources in some places, but now there's a dark voice whispering into my mind. "No more Designer," it says. "No more Tycho, or writing OSGi plugins just to get a third-party library to work nicely. No more Java policy nonsense. No more Servlet 2, or missing Javadoc, or the server not loading pages because the wrong logging JAR went into jvm/lib/ext. You could be free!" The dark voice makes a good case, I'll give it that. We'll see.