Seam in clustered environment.

[samdoyle]

I'm trying a Seam application across a GlassFish cluster with session data being replicated via the in memory replication. It looks like certain instances such as Identity are not serializable and as a result Seam does not behave well.

A basic scenario is if I login and then bring down the instance which did the authentication the new instance will not have the identity session data replicated and the user is forced to login again.

[samdoyle]

Is there some Seam documentation somewhere that discusses specifics dealing with a clustered deployment?

S.D.

[samdoyle]

Nothing?

[samdoyle]

up

[reind]

Don't have any information for you, but I'm also going to be thinking of clustering shortly and would appreciate any insight.

[svadu]

"samdoyle" wrote:
Is there some Seam documentation somewhere that discusses specifics dealing with a clustered deployment?

S.D.

All I've seen is recommendation to use session beans over pojo for clustered environment. There are number of references in the official reference (just do text search on 'cluster'):

http://docs.jboss.com/seam/latest/reference/en/html_single/


My guess is that if you have a specific issue (looks like you do) - you can create a JIRA issue.

[samdoyle]

I'm using EJB3 as is provided with GlassFish. I think the biggest factor was the Identity instance I'll go back to check if there are any others.

When you enable availability on an application for a GlassFish cluster you get in memory session data replication across the cluster. As a result what is stored for session data needs to be Serializable.

I noticed a Serializable exception being thrown pertaining to the Identity when it was attempted to replicate it although it does implement the Serializable interface. Perhaps there is some additional session state data that is not Serializable. All the ones that are outjected in our code are as far as I can tell.

S.D.

[pmuir]

Please post the exception.

[samdoyle]

Alright will do once I can get back our demo environment for testing. It is the only place we have atm which has load balancing and clustering setup.

S.D.

[samdoyle]

So I just upgraded Seam and I didn't encounter this error but I am still required to login again after the active cluster instance becomes disabled.

My session data appears to be replicated yet Seam requires a new login after the failover.

Can someone, if anyone, provide some information on Seam in a clustered environment it is giving me headaches at the moment.

S.D.

[samdoyle]

I guess the only thing I can do is try to find out from Sun what they use to debug/verify session data replication since having this type of high availability is a requirement for what we are doing. If Seam is not cluster safe I don't think we will be able to use it. This would be unfortunate considering the amount of time we have put into trying to make things work with it.

[przemjaskier]

Sam,

Please update this thread if you get with something on this subject. It's possible that I will have to deal with something similar in a few months perspective.

TIA

[samdoyle]

Will do. When I get back in the office on Monday I'm going to construct a very simple application to verify the clustering session replication. I know this functionality undergoes rigorous internal testing and has to be past a suite of testcases before each release. I don't suspect that this is an issue with the session replication in GlassFish.

S.D.

[samdoyle]

Please post the exception.

Ah, I had a configuration mistake but now with everything configured properly and I have verified HA is working properly I see the Identity exception being thrown when trying to replicate it. I'm using drools but not exactly sure what the relationship is between it and the Identity. This is definitely a show stopper for a high availability requirement.

Could someone from the Seam team please comment.

#|2007-12-03T12:09:13.520-0500|INFO|sun-appserver9.1|org.apache.catalina.session.ManagerBase|_ThreadID=22;_ThreadName=httpSSLWorkerThread-38080-1;|PWC2785: Cannot serialize session attribute org.jboss.seam.security.identity for session 0fba09ba81165626f5a35d7a2291
java.io.NotSerializableException: org.drools.reteoo.ReteooWorkingMemory$WorkingMemoryReteAssertAction

[samdoyle]

I have created a case for this.
http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/JBSEAM-2340

S.D>