[Quickfix-developers] [qfj] Publishing Messages to JMS

[Brad H. <Bra...@gb...>]

Hi,=20

I'm having a look at quickfixj (quickfixj-1.0.0-beta1-src.tar.gz) at the
moment with a view to making it exchange messages with my application
via JMS.  I'm instantiating quickfixj from a web app listener using
Spring (http://www.springframework.org).  After a little jiggling I've
been able connect to the order executor sample and have messages
published to JMS as object messages.  quickfixj is certainly easier to
use for this sort of thing than trying to make jni play nicely with the
container.

I came across a few problems along the way which I was able to find a
solution to:

The DataDictionary class isn't serializable, and messages keep a
reference to this class which causes a java.io.NotSerializableException:
quickfix.DataDictionary when I try to publish to JMS. =20

There's nothing stopping the DataDictionary and dependent classes from
being made Serializable, but it may not be desirable to be sending this
on every message.  I notice Message's clone method has been overridden
to not copy the data dictionary, so this can be used to workaround the
problem.  What impact will this have when I go to actually trying to use
the message on the other side of the JMS queue?  I haven't got to the
stage of trying messages with repeating groups yet.

Many of the Serializable classes are missing serialVersionUID fields.  I
think this is only a practical problem if you're using different
compiled classes on either side of the serialization (I was initially
publishing with eclipse compiled classes and receiving with the ant
built jar and ran into some serialVersionUID mismatch problems).

I wanted to be able to pick up the data dictionaries from my classpath.
DefaultSessionFactory tries to load using FileInputStream(path) with no
easy way to plug in something else.  As a temporary workaround I have
replaced this with a Spring resource loader:

     	ResourceLoader defaultResourceLoader =3D new
DefaultResourceLoader();
      dataDictionary =3D new
DataDictionary(defaultResourceLoader.getResource(path).getInputStream())
;

I can now specify the data dictionary location as classpath:FIX42.xml to
pick it up from the classpath, FIX42.xml to read from file, or even
http://www.quickfixengine.org/FIX42.xml if I want to eat up some
bandwidth :)  Obviously this approach isn't directly suitable for
quickfixj unless you want to add Spring as a dependency.  Perhaps a
pluggable DataDictionaryFactory would be helpful?

quickfix.SocketInitiator.onPoll() throws a ClassCastException if it gets
a Session object from the event queue - it needs the same instanceof
checks as onBlock().

quickfix.netty.AbstractSocketInitiator.quickfixSessions never gets
filled in as far as I can tell, so isLoggedOn() and getSessions() don't
work.

There were also some I didn't look into further:

- If I start an initiator and send a message before the logon process is
completed the message doesn't go anywhere.  If I explicitly wait until
the session is logged on then it works fine.
- If a session is disconnected it doesn't seem to logon again.  It says
'Initiating Logon' but nothing further happens.

Sorry if I seem to be pointing out a lot of negatives - I do realise
quickfixj is beta.  Keep up the good work!
Regards,
Brad.