How to prevent configuration file from repeatedly reloading? Holding it statically is not working

Question

I'm writing a taglet-based library, which, when the first taglet is found, loads some configuration (starting with a text-file filled with properties).

The configuration object is being held statically directly in each Taglet object, but it seems that they are being garbage collected and then respawned by javadoc.exe in a subsequent taglet, causing the configuration to be reloaded over and over again.

Am I understanding this correctly, and is there a way around it? How can I make it so that configuration loads only once?

Thanks.

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UPDATE

As mentioned in the comments, no, this does not impact performance or correctness. Since javadoc.exe is used by a single person on a single machine, performance is not much of an issue.

However, it clutters up the log each time configuration is loaded (at least five times per javadoc.exe run), and it does some moderately-heavy stuff, including loading package-lists from multiple websites, loading and parsing template files, and a bunch of other file processing. If there is any way to prevent this from happening many times in a single JavaDoc run, I would like to.

I have no experience with multithreading, so I may have this completely wrong...but what about setting up a daemon thread that does nothing but load configuration and then hold it all statically? This answer suggests that an I/O-based daemon thread is a bad idea, but I think it means ones that do ongoing I/O.

(I'm not sure if this would be something that should be manually started and stopped, or if its possible for the process itself to start the daemon thread... I'm going to read the concurrency chapters in Bloch's Effective Java...)

Answer 1

If two classes loaded by different ClassLoaders without parent-child relationship have to share data, the normal Java language constructs do not work. If you can get hands on a Class object or an instance, you have to access them via Reflection, even if it is the same class just loaded by different loaders.

Further, passing the data via heap variables won’t work as both ClassLoaders establish their own “namespace” hence a class loaded by two different loader creating two distinct Class objects will have their distinct copies of static variables as well. You need a storage which is independent from your own classes.

Thankfully, that storage exists in the context of Taglets. The register method receives a Map containing all previously registered Taglets. But besides the fact that you have to use Reflection rather than instanceof or Class comparison to find your “friend” Taglets, there is another obstacle: the JavaDoc implementation will wrap your Taglets within another object.

Putting it all together, you could implement the find-and-share logic into a base class of your Taglets and let the register method of the Taglets call it:

import java.io.IOException;
import java.lang.reflect.Field;
import java.util.Map;
import java.util.Properties;

public abstract class Base
{
  static Properties CONFIG=new Properties();

  static void initProperties(Map<?, ?> fromTagManager) {
    String className=Base.class.getName();
    for(Object o: fromTagManager.values()) {
      o=extractTagLet(o);
      if(o==null) continue;
      for(Class<?> cl=o.getClass(); cl!=null; cl=cl.getSuperclass())
        if(cl.getName().equals(className) && initFromPrevious(cl)) return;
    }
    // not found, first initialization
    try {
      CONFIG.load(Base.class.getResourceAsStream("config.properties"));
    } catch(IOException ex) {
      throw new ExceptionInInitializerError(ex);
    }
  }

  private static Object extractTagLet(Object o) {
    if(!o.getClass().getSimpleName().equals("LegacyTaglet"))
      return o;
    try {
      Field f=o.getClass().getDeclaredField("legacyTaglet");
      f.setAccessible(true);
      return f.get(o);
    } catch(NoSuchFieldException | IllegalAccessException ex) {
      ex.printStackTrace();
    }
    return null;
  }

  private static boolean initFromPrevious(Class<?> cl) {
    // this is the same class but loaded via a different ClassLoader
    try {
      Field f=cl.getDeclaredField("CONFIG");
      f.setAccessible(true);
      CONFIG=(Properties)f.get(null);
      return true;
    } catch(NoSuchFieldException | IllegalAccessException ex) {
      return false;
    }
  }
}

Then a Taglet will be implemented like this:

import java.util.Map;
import com.sun.javadoc.Tag;
import com.sun.tools.doclets.Taglet;

public class ExampleTaglet extends Base implements Taglet {
  @SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
  public static void register(@SuppressWarnings("rawtypes") Map map) {
    initProperties(map);
    final ExampleTaglet taglet = new ExampleTaglet();
    final String name = taglet.getName();
    map.remove(name);// must ensure new Taglet is the last one (LinkedHashMap)
    map.put(name, taglet);
  }

  // implement the Taglet interface below…