Spring and Infinispan Integration on Wildfly Cluster

Spring framework provides a caching abstraction API that makes it very easy and consistent to use a lot of embeddable caching frameworks like, EHCache, Infinispan, Hazelcast etc. But sometimes it is also necessary to integrate with the underlying application server’s caching framework, especially in a clustered, distributed environment. In this post I will show how we can integrate a spring-boot application, deployed on clustered Wildfly application servers (version 10.1.0.Final), to integrate with the distributed Infinispan cache. Below is an illustration:

Wildfly already packs Infinispan caching framework as a subsystem, which the applications can leverage from in order to cache shared/private objects. So lets first create a custom replicated-cache container which we can use to share cached objects across a cluster of Wildfly servers. In order to use replicated cache, each instance of Wildfly needs to be started with full-ha profile via standalone-full-ha.xml configuration file. Below is what we need to add in this configuration file in order to create a replicated cache container:

<cache-container name="mycache" aliases="ha-partition" default-cache="default" module="org.wildfly.clustering.server">
    <transport lock-timeout="60000"/>
    <replicated-cache name="default" mode="SYNC">
        <transaction mode="BATCH"/>
    </replicated-cache>
</cache-container>

We can lookup this cache container using the following JNDI name:

java:jboss/infinispan/container/mycache

In the Spring Boot Application we need the following dependency added to lookup and use the Infinispan cache.

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.wildfly</groupId>
    <artifactId>wildfly-clustering-infinispan-extension</artifactId>
    <version>10.1.0.Final</version>
    <scope>provided</scope>
    <exclusions>
        <exclusion>
            <groupId>org.jboss.metadata</groupId>
            <artifactId>jboss-metadata-common</artifactId>
        </exclusion>
        <exclusion>
            <groupId>org.jboss.metadata</groupId>
            <artifactId>jboss-metadata-ejb</artifactId>
        </exclusion>
        <exclusion>
            <groupId>org.jboss.metadata</groupId>
            <artifactId>jboss-metadata-ear</artifactId>
        </exclusion>
        <exclusion>
            <groupId>org.jboss.openjdk-orb</groupId>
            <artifactId>openjdk-orb</artifactId>
        </exclusion>
    </exclusions>
</dependency>

Also because the dependency is “provided” by the application server, we need to add manifest entries so that we have access to all the required classes on runtime. In order to achieve this we’ll add the following plugin to the pom file.

<plugin>
    <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
    <configuration>
        <failOnMissingWebXml>false</failOnMissingWebXml>
        <archive>
            <manifestEntries>
                <Dependencies>org.infinispan, org.infinispan.commons, org.jboss.as.clustering.infinispan
                    export
                </Dependencies>
            </manifestEntries>
        </archive>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

Now the application is all setup to lookup and use the distributed Infinispan cache, below is how we can do this:

String cacheContainerJndi ="java:jboss/infinispan/container/mycache";

Cache cache = (Cache) ((DefaultCacheContainer) new JndiTemplate().lookup(cacheContainerJndi)).getCache();
cache.put("mykey", "myvalue");

String val = cache.get("mykey");

The complete Spring Boot application is available on Github.

This is just a simple usecase that shows how we can use Wildfly’s distributed cache in applications. In the next blog entry I will demonstrate how this distributed Infinispan cache can be used to integrate CAS Single Sign On in order to effectively achieve SSO/SLO in a clustered/distributed Wildfly environment.