Ethan Nicholas's Blog

Creating a Service Provider Interface

While working on my XML user interface language, JAXX, I wanted to provide a mechanism for users to add support for additional tags and data types. As JAXX is a command-line compiler, a run-time API to add additional features would be very awkward to access, so a Service Provider Interface (SPI) seemed like a natural fit.

In case you aren't familiar with SPIs, they have a tantalizing proposition: just put a special JAR file somewhere on your class path, and the features in the JAR file will be found and made available. Many of Java's internal APIs, such as JNDI and javax.imageio, have SPIs, which makes it a snap to plug in new features.

So, great, I needed to write an SPI. I spent some time wrestling with search engines to find documentation on how to actually create an SPI, and found nothing. Tons of information about how to interact with the SPIs built into Java, but absolutely nothing about how to create one. There was nothing left to do but dig through Java's source code to figure out what Sun was doing, so I could shamelessly copy it.

The answer turned out to be embarrassingly simple. The method ClassLoader.getResources() returns an Enumeration of all resources with a given name, like myspi.properties. To implement an SPI, you have each SPI JAR contain (say) a properties file with the same name in the same location. When you use ClassLoader.getResources() to get a list of all such properties files, you will find one properties file for each JAR on the class path which implements your SPI.

The properties file should contain whatever information is necessary for you to make use of the features in the JAR file. This typically takes the form of properties set to the names of classes found in the JAR file, which can then be loaded and used.

In the case of JAXX, the properties file is named jaxx.properties and is located at the root of the JAR file. It contains a single property jaxx.initializer, which should be set to the name of a class in the JAR file. This class must implement the interface jaxx.spi.Initializer. JAXX can then, via the magic of ClassLoader.getResources(), easily find all such initializer classes and load the support they contain.

Presto! A fully-functioning SPI, just like the ones Sun uses.

Comments

• Much like what laf-plugin does for look-and-feels. Looks up LAF-specific XML descriptors in the classpath, which allows providing jars for third-party components by simple dropping them anywhere on the classpath. The only drawback i found with this approach - since the resource name is hardcoded, you can't put more than one descriptor in the same jar.

  Posted by: kirillcool on April 07, 2006 at 10:20 AM

• The conventional approach is to have providers JARs include files named, in your case,

  META-INF/services/jaxx.spi.Initializer

  which can include impl class names, one per line (usually just one per JAR). This convention is used in various places in the JDK, documented here:

  http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/jar/jar.html#Service%20Provider

  As of Mustang you can access provider impls following this format quite easily, without manually writing the retrieval code:

  http://download.java.net/jdk6/docs/api/java/util/Service.html

  Posted by: jglick on April 07, 2006 at 05:14 PM

• Aha! Thank you. Evidently the JDK uses at least two different patterns for SPIs, and I stumbled upon the older of the two. Now to see which version of Java introduced the new interface, and therefore whether I can actually use it...

  Posted by: enicholas on April 07, 2006 at 06:08 PM

• I don't like this approach. It boils down to gambling which implementation you'll get. Typical symptoms: "seems like you have a xercesImpl.jar somewhere in your classpath." or "try listing xx.jar first".
  

  Posted by: mernst on April 08, 2006 at 01:45 AM

• See also the Java Module System, which looks like it will obsolete the approach above.

  Posted by: coxcu on April 10, 2006 at 02:35 PM

• Isn't this exactly how the OGSi framework discovers services described in the manifests?

  Posted by: phonetech on April 11, 2006 at 09:11 AM

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