Know your CLASSPATH in Google App Engine/J

Continuing the exploration of the Google App Engine Java environment I decided to explore what's in the CLASSPATH of the live GAE/J environment (this differs from the CLASSPATH of the development environment).

I did the following: 

First I created a list of classes that might be available in the GAE/J live environment. The list of potential classes was created by compiling a list of all classes available in the development environment. This gave a list of 4391 class names.

From the original list of 4391 classes in the development environment I was able to successfully load 3689 classes of those using Class.forName(...) in the live environment.

After loading each class I used reflection to recursively find references to other classes using the following method:

Assume a class called A:

public class A {

  public void doSomething(B bObject) { ... }

  public C getC(int i) { ... }

}

By enumerating all methods of class A using the reflection API an looking at the return types and parameters passed to the methods we can infer the existence of classes B and C. We can then load classes B and C and find additional classes using the same method.

Using this method recursively I was able to load an additional 220 classes giving a total of 3909 classes (3689 + 220).

For each of the 3909 loadable classes I used queried for the JAR that each file was loaded from using Class.forName(...).getProtectionDomain().getCodeSource().getLocation().toString()

Of the 3909 loadable classes 2023 originated from JARs uploaded to the system (/WEB-INF/lib/*.jar). This gives a total of 1886 (3909 - 2023) loadable "GAE/J standard classes" -- that is classes that are available given an empty /WEB-INF/lib/. Please note that the total number of available classes most probably is larger since the methodology described does not catch all available classes.

Based on this analysis described above the GAE/J JVM appears to load classes from the following locations:

• /base/data/home/apps/[app-id]/[version-id]/WEB-INF/lib/*.jar
  
• JDK Base Classes (1332 classes)
  
• /base/java_runtime/user-privileged.jar (1 class)
• /base/java_runtime/runtime-shared.jar (107 classes)
• /base/java_runtime/restricted-class-stubs.jar (31 classes)
• /base/java_runtime/appengine-api.jar (415 classes)

What follows is a list of packages that are loaded from each location/JAR:

JDK Base Classes

• java.*
  
• javax.*
  
• org.w3c.dom.*
  
• org.xml.sax.*
  

Classes in /base/java_runtime/user-privileged.jar

• com.google.apphosting.runtime.security.shared.CustomURLClassLoader

Packages in /base/java_runtime/runtime-shared.jar

• com.google.apphosting.api.*
  
• javax.servlet.*
  
• javax.servlet.http.*
  
• javax.servlet.jsp.*
  
• javax.servlet.jsp.el.*
  
• javax.servlet.jsp.jstl.core.*
  
• javax.servlet.jsp.jstl.fmt.*
  
• javax.servlet.jsp.jstl.sql.*
  
• javax.servlet.jsp.jstl.tlv.*
  
• javax.servlet.jsp.tagext.*

Packages in /base/java_runtime/restricted-class-stubs.jar

• com.google.apphosting.runtime.security.shared.stub.java.awt.*
  
• com.google.apphosting.runtime.security.shared.stub.java.awt.datatransfer.*
  
• com.google.apphosting.runtime.security.shared.stub.java.awt.event.*
  
• com.google.apphosting.runtime.security.shared.stub.java.beans.*
  
• com.google.apphosting.runtime.security.shared.stub.java.io.*
  
• com.google.apphosting.runtime.security.shared.stub.java.lang.instrument.*
  
• com.google.apphosting.runtime.security.shared.stub.java.net.*
  
• com.google.apphosting.runtime.security.shared.stub.java.nio.*
  
• com.google.apphosting.runtime.security.shared.stub.java.nio.channels.*
  
• com.google.apphosting.runtime.security.shared.stub.java.nio.channels.spi.*
  
• com.google.apphosting.runtime.security.shared.stub.java.text.*
  
• com.google.apphosting.runtime.security.shared.stub.javax.naming.*
  
• com.google.apphosting.runtime.security.shared.stub.javax.swing.text.*
  
• com.google.apphosting.runtime.security.shared.stub.javax.tools.*

Packages in /base/java_runtime/appengine-api.jar

• com.google.appengine.api.*
  
• com.google.appengine.api.datastore.*
  
• com.google.appengine.api.images.*
  
• com.google.appengine.api.mail.*
  
• com.google.appengine.api.mail.stdimpl.*
  
• com.google.appengine.api.memcache.*
  
• com.google.appengine.api.memcache.stdimpl.*
  
• com.google.appengine.api.urlfetch.*
  
• com.google.appengine.api.users.*
  
• com.google.appengine.repackaged.com.google.common.base.*
  
• com.google.appengine.repackaged.com.google.common.base.genfiles.*
  
• com.google.appengine.repackaged.com.google.common.base.internal.*
  
• com.google.appengine.repackaged.com.google.common.collect.*
  
• com.google.appengine.repackaged.com.google.common.io.*
  
• com.google.appengine.repackaged.com.google.common.primitives.*
  
• com.google.appengine.repackaged.com.google.common.util.*
  
• com.google.appengine.repackaged.com.google.io.base.*
  
• com.google.appengine.repackaged.com.google.io.protocol.*
  
• com.google.appengine.repackaged.com.google.io.protocol.proto.*
  
• com.google.apphosting.api.*
  
• com.google.apphosting.utils.servlet.*
  
• com.google.storage.onestore.v3.*
  
• javax.cache.*
  
• javax.mail.*
  
• javax.mail.event.*
  
• javax.mail.internet.*
  
• javax.mail.search.*
  
• javax.mail.util.*
  
• org.apache.geronimo.mail.handlers.*
  
• org.apache.geronimo.mail.util.*

That's all of the CLASSPATH analysis for now!

Hope you didn't miss today's great GAE/J news: four hours ago the Grails project lead Graeme Rocher got Grails up and running on the AppEngine/J. That is excellent news for all us Google App Engine- and Grails-fans! I really do believe the scalability of GAE/J in combination with the high productivity of the Grails framework will be a killer combination! Exciting times! :-)