Application profiling
Use application profiling to identify particular units of work to the product runtime environment. The run time can tailor its support to the exact requirements of that unit of work.
Application profiling requires accurate knowledge of an application's transactional configuration and the interaction of the application with its persistent state during the course of each transaction.
We can execute the analysis in either closed world or open world mode. A closed-world analysis assumes that all possible clients of the application are included in the analysis and that the resulting analysis is complete and correct. The results of a closed-world analysis report the set of all transactions that can be invoked by a web, JMS, or application client. The results exclude many potential transactions that never execute at run time.
An open-world analysis assumes that not all clients are available for analysis or that the analysis cannot return complete or accurate results. An open-world analysis returns the complete set of possible transactions.
The results of an analysis persist as an application profiling configuration. The assembly tool establishes container managed tasks for servlets, JSPs, application clients, and Message Driven Beans (MDBs). Application profiles for the tasks are constructed with the appropriate access intent for the entities enlisted in the transaction represented by the task. However, in practice, there are many situations where the tool returns at best incomplete results. Not all applications are amenable to static analysis. Some factory and command patterns make it impossible to determine the call graphs. The tool does not support the analysis of ActivitySessions.
You should examine the results of the analysis very carefully. In many cases you must manually modify them to meet the requirements of the application. However, the tool can be an effective starting place for most applications and may offer a complete and quick configuration of application profiles for some applications.
Access intent is the only runtime component that makes use of the application profiling functionality. For example, we can configure one transaction to load an entity bean with strong update locks and configure another transaction to load the same entity bean without locks.
Application profiling introduces two new concepts in order to achieve this function: tasks and profiles.
- Tasks
- A task is a configurable name for a unit of work. Unit of work in this case means either a transaction or an ActivitySession. The task name is typically assigned declaratively on a J2EE component that can initiate
a unit of work. Most commonly, the task is configured on a method of an Enterprise JavaBeans file that is declared either for container-managed transactions
or bean-managed transactions. Any unit of work that begins in the scope of a configured task is associated with that task name. A unit of work can only be named when it is initiated, and the name cannot change for the lifetime
of that unit of work. A unit of work ignores any subsequent task name configurations
at any point after it has begun. The task is used for the duration of its unit of work to identify configured policies specific to that unit of work.
If we select the 5.x Compatibility Mode attribute on the Application Profile Service's console page, then tasks configured on J2EE 1.3 applications are not necessarily associated with units of work and can arbitrarily be applied and overridden. This is not a recommended mode of operation and can lead to unexpected deadlocks during database access. Tasks are not communicated on requests between applications that are running under the Application Profiling 5.x Compatibility Mode and applications that are not running under the compatibility mode.
For a Version 6.x client to interact with applications run under the Application Profiling 5.x Compatibility Mode, set the appprofileCompatibility system property to true in the client process. We can do this by specifying the -CCDappprofileCompatibility=true option when invoking the launchClient command.
- Profiles
- A profile is simply a mapping of a task to a set of access intent policies
that are configured on entity beans. When an invocation on a bean (whether
by a finder method, a CMR getter, or a dynamic query) requires data to be retrieved from the back end system, the current task associated with the request is used to determine the exact requirement of the transaction. The same bean loads and behaves differently in the context of the task-to-profile mapping.
Each profile provides the developer an opportunity to reconfigure the application's
access intent. If a request is operating in the absence of a task, the runtime environment uses either a method-level access intent (if any) or a bean-level
default access intent.
The application profile configuration is application scope configuration data. If any Enterprise JavaBean (EJB) module contains an application profile configuration, all other EJB modules are implicitly regulated by the Application Profiling service even if they do not contain application profile configuration data.
For example, an application has two EJB modules: EJBModule1 and EJBModule2.
The EJBModule1 has an application profile named AppProfile1. This AppProfile1 is registered by a task named task1. This task1 becomes a known-to-application task and is honored when associated with a unit of work within this application. With the presence of any known-to-application task, method level access intent configurations are ignored and only bean level access intent configurations are applied.
The EJBModule2 contains no application profile configuration data. All entity beans are not configured with bean level access intent explicitly, but some methods have method level access intent configurations. If an entity bean in the EJBModule2 is loaded in a unit of work that is associated with task1, the bean-level access intent configuration is applied and method level access intent configuration is ignored. Because the bean level access intent is not set explicitly, the default bean level access intent, which is wsPessimisticUpdate-WeakestLockAtLoad, is applied.
- Tasks and units of work considerations
The application profiling function works under the unit of work (UOW) concept. UOW in this case means either a transaction or an ActivitySession. - Application profiles
An application profile is the set of access intent policies that should be selectively applied for a particular unit of work (a transaction or ActivitySession). - Application profiling tasks
Tasks are named units of work. They are the mechanism by which the runtime environment determines which access intent policies to apply when an entity bean's data is loaded from the back end system.
Related tasks
Concept topic