Posts Tagged ‘software’

The @Bean annotation is a great way to declare Spring beans when writing code.  This allows the programmer to control which beans get instantiated and with what arguments.   Some situations call for deciding if beans should be instantiated at runtime based on configuration this is often done with the @Conditional annotation on @Configuration classes.   The @Conditional annotation works well if you are enabling or disabling a particular bean through configuration but sometimes the number of beans needs to be completely dynamic.

This often comes up if your application needs to connect to a bunch of external services such as a database.  You want the number of  services or databases that the application connects to be configurable.



Spring integration makes it easy to monitor an sftp server for new files and inject those files into your application for processing.  I like to configure my spring integration applications with annotations and @Bean configurations.  I found the documentation, and online examples for doing this annotations a bit lacking.


This post demonstrates the basics on how to connect get a spring-boot (1.3.x or 1.4.x) application to monitor a sftp server.


Sometimes the behaviour of an application is controlled through properties
and the application needs to detect changes to the property file so it can switch to the new configuration. You also want to ensure that a particular request either uses the old configuration or the new configuration but not a mixture of old and new. Think of this as ACID like isolation for properties to ensure that your requests don’t get processed using an inconsistent configuration.

We accomplish this by using a property lookup bean (PropertyBean) that returns property lookups. The PropertyLookupBean is a request scoped bean meaning that a new instance is created for each request in a spring MVC application. The PropertyLookup bean has an init method that runs post construction and calls the PropertyCache bean to get the current set of properties. Each instance of the PropertyLookup bean will return the property values from the Properties object it gets at initialization.


The property lookup bean has a reference to a singleton scoped PropertyCache. The PropertyCache maintains a reference to the current Properties object. When the PropertyCache bean is asked to return the current properties it checks to see if they have changed on disk and if so reloads the properties.

class PropertyBean {
    private Properties currentProperties;

    PropertyCache propertyCache;

    void doInit() {
        currentProperties = propertyCache.getProperties();
    public String getProperty(String propertyName) {
        return currentProperties.getProperty(propertyName);


The PropertyBean would look similar to the above sample class. This class simply caches an instance of a Properties object post-construction and delegates property requests to this instance.

The PropertyBean needs to be created as a request scoped bean. This can be done with a Spring annotation configuration class as follows.

class MyConfig {
    public PropertyBean propertyBean() {
        return new PropertyBean();


Managing the loading of properties falls to the PropertyCache class which would look similar to the below class

public class PropertyCache {
    private Properties currentProperties;
    private Long lastReloadTime=0;
    private String propertyFileName;

    public Properties getProperties()  {
         synchronized(this) {
             return currentProperties;

    private reloadPropertiesIfRequired() {
         FileInputStream stream = null;
         try {
             File f = new File(propertyFileName);
             if(f.lastModified() > lastReloadTime) {
                 Properties newProperties = new Properties();
                 stream = new FileInputStream(f);
                 synchronized(this) {
                     lastReloadTime = System.getCurrentMillis();
                     currentProperties = newProperties;
    catch(IOException exp) {
        //do something intelligent on the error
    finally {
        if (stream != null)


All of the business logic code that needs properties to process a request will use the request scoped PropertyBean instance bean. This ensures that the entire request uses the same set of properties even if the underlying property file changes.

class SomeBusinessService {
    private PropertyBean propertyBean;

   public void someOperation() {
      String v = propertyBean.getProperty("");


When a new request is started a new instance of the PropertyBean is created. The doInit() method invokes the PropertyCache getProperties() method. The Property Cache checks the timestamp of the file and looks for modifications, if it detects one it reloads the property file. Any PropertyBean instances that have already been initialized will continue to use the old properties instance.








Updated: You can view a recording of the video below



I found the documentation on urllib2 a bit unclear about how to get cookie handling working properly.

I was working on a python script that needed to contact the OpenStreetMap web server, login with my OSM credentials and interact with the website.

The first step is to setup a urllib2 opener instance that is configured to store cookies.

import cookielib,Cookie,urllib2,urllib
import xml.etree.cElementTree as ElementTree

cookies = cookielib.CookieJar()
opener = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(cookies))

This will create an opener that can be used to retrieve URL’s. Any cookies set in the HTTP response will be stored in the cookie’s cookie jar. If I needed to add additional openers (ie for special redirect handling) I would just add them as additional parameters to the build_opener call. ie urllib2.build_opener(handler1, handler2,handler3)…

Next we need to contact OpenStreetMap to get a blank login form. The blank login screen has a hidden variable ‘authenticity_token’ that needs to be passed back as part of the POST with my login credentials

inptag = '{}input'
formtag = '{}form'
# fetch the blank login form
response_tokenfetch =
html =
# parse the HTML elements in the form
# extract any input fields for later resubmission
# this will pick up the authenticity_token and anything else
xml_tree = ElementTree.parse(htmlfile)
for form in xml_tree.getiterator(formtag):                
    for field in form.getiterator(inptag):
        if 'name' in field.attrib and 'value' in field.attrib:
                login_payload[field.attrib['name']] = field.attrib['value']
login_payload['username'] = username
login_payload['password'] = password
login_payload['remember_me'] = 'yes'
login_payload['cookie_test'] = 'true'

Next we submit the LOGIN request as a POST. Any session cookies returned as part of the blank form will be added to the second request.

response =,urllib.urlencode(login_payload))

If our login was successful then cookies contains an _osm_session and _osm_username that will be used in subsequent API calls.

response2 =

You could then parse the HTML to extract a list of messages.
If your using the formal OpenStreetMap API (ie calls under /api/0.6/…) then you should instead use oauth for authentication instead of logging in through the website. Some OSM features such as messaging can only be accessed by pretending to be a web session and parsing/faking HTML.