The quest for the Java Portal - Gridsphere Tests

GridSphere compiled in an zero-error-in-deploy WAR file. But, with my well-known luck and my incredible skill of catch the weirdest bugs on Earth, I got the classic "error-page-that-throws-error" bug. A page throwed an error. This triggers the error page. But, the same error was throwed. This triggers the error page. I love when this happens. My luck was the StackOverflowError. In some EPTTE bugs the error page leads to HTTP infinite redirection.

The origin of the error? This little piece of code:

public synchronized Object deepCopy(Object oldObj) throws Exception {
   ObjectOutputStream oos = null;
   ObjectInputStream ois = null;
   try {
       ByteArrayOutputStream bos =
           new ByteArrayOutputStream(); // A
       oos = new ObjectOutputStream(bos); // B
       // serialize and pass the object
       oos.writeObject(oldObj);   // C
       oos.flush();               // D
       ByteArrayInputStream bin =
           new ByteArrayInputStream(bos.toByteArray()); // E
       ois = new ObjectInputStream(bin);                  // F
       // return the new object
       return ois.readObject(); // G
   } catch (Exception e) {
       throw e;
   } finally {
       if (oos != null) oos.close();
       if (ois != null) ois.close();
   }
}

I will not comment the weird "catch e throw e" fragment, but this was the most expensive way to follow the Prototype pattern (deep copy variant) I ever seen. You don't need to be an extreme Java programmer to notice this code will fail on the first non-serializable class found by oos.writeObject. Now, guess what was the exception I got?

java.io.NotSerializableException: org.apache.log4j.Level

After digging into the code, I discovered that GS team knows the use of transient keyword, but didn't used it on BasePortletComponent.java, line 42:

protected Log log = LogFactory.getLog(PortletPageFactory.class);

How this works on Tomcat is a mistery to me. Changing it to a final static attribute and adding some dependencies of dependencies (Jackrabbit needs Lucene and yet another logging implementation - SLF4J), made it work, but not as expected.

Result: an installation page with some really ugly URL rewrite techniques.

<link ... href="/tmp54563GridSphere-exp.war/...css" ...>
<img src="/@GRIDSPHERE_DEPLOY@/...png" ...>

The second one is a side-effect of using my own build script. The first one (along with cool design patterns) gives GridSphere an one-way ticket to my attic.