Class Paths
Well it was nearly working today. The tests which failed seemed unrelated to the changes I'd made, so I was initially quite confused. A little logging eventually showed the way.

The problem was occurring during the constructor to RmiSessionFactory where it gets the URI of the local server from EmbeddedKowariServer via reflection. The confusing part was that it was giving a ClassNotFoundException for the class "SimpleXAResourceException", which at first glance appears to be completely unrelated.

Coincidentally, it was less than a week ago that I was having a conversation with DM about just this. Even though I only needed a simple static method from EmbeddedKowariServer, the class loader does not know this, and so attempts to load up the entire class. This includes having to recursively load all the classes for the return types and the exceptions. The SimpleXAResourceException was being thrown by the startServer method, and since this class wasn't available, the reflection code for this class failed.

There were two approaches to this problem. The first was to make sure that all referenced classes are available. However, this is fraught with difficulty for two reasons. The first is that I'll only discover which classes are needed at runtime. So even if I figured out where I needed to add SimpleXAResourceException, I could simply end up with a report on the next class which wasn't found.

The second problem is that it becomes difficult to know that I caught everything. In some instances the classes are all available and everything runs flawlessly. In other parts of the code some classes are not available. I don't know where or when the classpath changes, and while I might be able to get it working for every code path run in the tests, it's always possible that a new type of usage will call this code again without some required classes available.

The other approach was to factor out all the static information from EmbeddedKowariServer and put it in a simple public class specifically designed for handling this information. This works much better, as it does not have any dependencies on non-java packages. It also has the nice effect of putting all the server configuration info into one place.

The class I built for this was called ServerInfo. All methods and variables on this class are static. The getter methods are public and the setter methods are package scope, the intention being to only call them from EmbeddedKowariServer.

As usual, the tests to make sure all was well took a very long time to run on each occasion. In the meantime I used the opportunity to learn more of the SOFA API.

One little hiccough that I encountered was with the "filesystem" resolver. Fortunately, it turned out that it was just a JXUnit test that was getting back XML which differed from what it expected. The problem was that someone had checked in their own computer's name hardcoded in the file. I checked the CVS log to see who was the culprit, and I discovered that the problem had already been recognised and fixed.

With everything apparently going, I did a final CVS update and started the tests again for the night. At that point, the fact that it was all working at last, and a headache that I'd developed in the meantime convinced me to leave a half an hour early. :-)