Dependency management

SOFABoot is based on Spring Boot. It means SOFABoot manages SOFA middleware dependencies and provides the Starter for Spring Boot, facilitating the use of SOFA middleware in Spring Boot.

SOFABoot dependency management

You must load SOFABoot’s management dependencies before using SOFA middleware. In a way similar to use Spring Boot, add the configuration tag <parent/> in the project settings:

<parent>
    <groupId>com.alipay.sofa</groupId>
    <artifactId>sofaboot-dependencies</artifactId>
    <version>${sofa.boot.version}</version>
</parent>

Where ${sofa.boot.version} represents the SOFABoot version (refer to release history).

Use Middleware of SOFAStack

For SOFABoot, use -sofa-boot-starter suffixes to name middleware components. If you want to use middleware, simply add its dependencies; To use SOFARPC, for example, simply add the following Maven dependencies:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.alipay.sofa</groupId>
    <artifactId>rpc-sofa-boot-starter</artifactId>
</dependency>

Note that there is no version declaration in the above Maven dependencies as the version has already been declared in sofabook-dependencies. This allows for unified upgrade of all SOFA middleware versions, allaying concerns over dependency conflicts or incompatibility brought by upgrade of a single middleware version. The SOFABoot middleware under control is listed as follows:

Introducing SOFABoot Extension

Based on Spring Boot, SOFABoot provides extended capabilities such as health check, module isolation, and class isolation. In accordance with Spring Boot’s the dependency-as-a-service principle, the extension capability will be ready immediately after relevant dependencies are added. Currently, there are several extension modules available:

Introducing the SOFA middleware: the Ark plug-in

SOFABoot provides a class isolation component—SOFAArk, which enables users to package third-party packages with dependency conflicts into an Ark plug-in. At run time, the Ark plug-in is loaded with a separate classloader; it is isolated from other Ark plug-ins and business dependencies to address class conflicts. SOFABoot provides SOFARPC and SOFATracer’s Ark plug-ins; the Ark plug-in SOFARPC, for example, is loaded into the application to replace SOFARPC starter, to isolate the application from SOFARPC and its indirect dependencies. The controlled Ark plug-ins are listed as follows:

Introducing SOFABoot namespace

Before using SOFA middleware, we need to add relevant configurations in XML according to specific middleware usage. At this point, we need to introduce the SOFABoot namespace xmlns:sofa="http://sofastack.io/schema/sofaboot" so that the corresponding configuration labels can be correctly parsed. For example:

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
       xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
       xmlns:sofa="http://sofastack.io/schema/sofaboot"
       xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
       xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd
            http://sofastack.io/schema/sofaboot   http://sofastack.io/schema/sofaboot.xsd"
       default-autowire="byName">
</beans>