ProtoStream marshalling of web session attributes

In  clustering

Overview

Currently, WildFly uses JBoss Marshalling to marshal user objects (HttpSession attributes, SFSB instances, etc.) for the purposes of replication and persistence.

ProtoStream (developed by the Infinispan team) is a Java API for marshalling Google Protocol buffers (i.e. Protobuf). ProtoStream offers several advantages over JBoss Marshalling or Java serialization:

  • Inherently secure

    • No arbitrary code execution

    • ProtoStream can only read messages for which a Protobuf schema exists

    • Unmarshalling uses declared constructors

  • More efficient

    • Messages identified by unique FQN as opposed to serializing class descriptors

    • Nested messages are marshalled to individual buffers, preventing reallocation of progressively larger contiguous blocks of heap during marshalling

    • Null/default fields do not contribute to serialization payload

    • Native varint32/64 support for efficient int/long marshalling

  • Faster

    • Does not rely on reflection

    • Marshalling uses declared accessors; unmarshalling uses declared constructors/mutators.

  • More flexible

    • Message schemas are easy to evolve while maintaining serialization compatibility, which is essential for supporting rolling upgrades of a deployment.

WFLY-13426 replaced usage of JBoss Marshalling with ProtoStream for WildFly’s internal clustering modules. This feature seeks to make ProtoStream available to distributed web applications.

Issue Metadata

Issue

Dev Contacts

QE Contacts

TBD

Testing By

[X] Engineering

[ ] QE

Affected Projects or Components

  • Clustering

Other Interested Projects

  • JSF

  • Weld

Requirements

Hard Requirements

  • Expose the org.infinispan.protostream module to deployments

  • Add session management attribute to configure the marshaller for all deployments using a given distributable session management provider

    • Default behavior uses JBoss Marshalling (current behavior)

  • Add session management schema attribute to configure the marshaller for a given web application

    • Default behavior uses JBoss Marshalling (current behavior)

  • If configured to use ProtoStream, initialize the SerializationContext by dynamically loading SerializationContextInitializers from the deployment classloader.

Nice-to-Have Requirements

  • Add ProtoStream marshallers for session attributes used by Weld (to handle @SessionScoped objects)

  • Add ProtoStream marshallers for session attributes used by JSF

Non-Requirements

  • ProtoStream marshallers for session attributes used by web frameworks that WildFly does not distribute, e.g. SpringMVC, Tapestry, Wicket, Struts, etc.

    • These can be provided by modules in wildfly-extras, as needed/requested.

Test Plan

  • Update existing simple failover session test to use ProtoStream marshalling.

  • Update existing @SessionScoped CDI test in clustering testsuite to use ProtoStream marshalling

  • Update existing JSF test in clustering testsuite to use ProtoStream marshalling

Community Documentation

Expand distributable-web subsystem documentation to include instructions for configuring a distributable web application to use ProtoStream.

Release Note Content

  • Support ProtoStream, as an alternative to JBoss Marshalling, for marshalling distributable HttpSession attributes.