In my previous blog post I was sketching up a possible solution to BTrace extensibility.

A few experiments with AST and bytecode verifiers later I came up with a relatively easy way to provide the extensibility of the core BTrace functionality by the means of external plugins. Very importantly, introducing external plugins doesn’t incur any additional overhead on top of the one caused by the extension functionality itself.

Creating a New Service

Creating a new service is just a matter of extending one of the following two classes

• com.sun.btrace.services.spi.SimpleService
• com.sun.btrace.services.spi.RuntimeService

SimpleService

A stateless service which can even be a singleton. It has no access to the BTrace runtime and can rely on the provided values.

RuntimeService

For each BTraceRuntime a new service instance will be created. The service can use BTrace features exposed via BTraceRuntime - eg. send messages over the wire channel.

Using Services

Services become available by adding the jars containing them to the bootclasspath. (eg. via agent options)

The recommended way to use services in the script is to create fields of the appropriate service type and annotate them by the @Injected annotation.

@BTrace public class MyTrace {
    // a simple service instantiated via the default noarg constructor
    @Injected private static MyService svc;

    // a simple service instantiated via the given static method
    @Injected(factoryMethod = "singleton") private static MyService svc1;

    // a runtime-aware service instantiated via the default single arg (*BTraceRuntime*) constructor
    @Injected(ServiceType.RUNTIME) private static RtService svc2;

    @OnMethod(....)
    public static void interceptMethod(...) {
        svc.process(...);
        svc1.process(...);
        svc2.process(...);
    }
}

There is an alternative approach valid only for locally accessible services.

@OnMethod(...)
public void handler(...) {
    // a simple service instantiated via the default noarg constructor
    MyService svc = Service.simple(MyService.class);
    
    // a simple service instantiated via the given static method
    MyService svc1 = Service.simple("singleton", MyService.class)

    // a runtime-aware service instantiated via the default single arg (*BTraceRuntime*) constructor
    RtService svc2 = Service.runtime(RtService.classs);

    svc.process(...);
    svc1.process(...);
    svc2.process(...);
}

These two approaches are functionally equivalent - it really depends on the script author which one she should choose.

Planning

This functionality is planned for the upcoming version 1.3 of BTrace.

Integration is tracked by this pull request