Running Java application as a service

Question

We have a java application that's essentially a long running process. It's deployed on JBoss 6.1. We have to start it by going to the url http://ip.ip.ip.ip:8080/MyApp/Monitor

Is there a way we could run it as a service via the cli with some ability to start / stop / restart as needed?

Answer 1

If it is the only application running on the JBoss instance, you could configure your JBoss to automatically start you application when it starts and then follow the steps in http://community.jboss.org/wiki/JBossSystemService to run JBoss as a service.

If you have other applications on the JBoss instance or you want to start/stop only the application and not the whole server, you could write a Java application that connects to your JBoss instance remotely using Java Management Extensions and use the JMX Beans provided by JBoss to start/stop your application. More about JBoss JMX interface can be found in http://docs.jboss.org/jbossas/jboss4guide/r2/html/ch2.chapter.html I know this is of JBoss 4 but I don't think they dropped JMX support in newer versions.

Answer 2

Make it a console application?

public static void main(String [] args)
{
    doStuffThatMyAppMonitorNormallyDoes();
}

Answer 3

Fire a call to your application directly from the console using the java command.

Example :

public class MonitorService{

 ..

 public static void main(String[] args) {
  if(args[0].equalsIgnoreCase("-start")
  {
    //Do start routine
  }
  else if(args[0].equalsIgnoreCase("-stop")
  {
    //Do stop routine
  }
 }

 ...

}

Run the program as the follows.

Java MonitorService -start

Answer 4

You can turn it to windows/unix service using

java service wrapper

Answer 5

I would recommend using Apache Commons Daemon (or maybe YAJSW) to create your own wrapper controller class. An example of this is shown here . The wrapper controller extends the Daemon class of Commons-Daemon and it could be ran on the command line in the form of :

java -cp . WrapperController.class -windowsStop
java -cp . WrapperController.class -windowsStart
java -cp . WrapperController.class -verify

You could also of course, extend the example to have its own SysTray object. You could also implement your controller class as a Beanshell script so that it need not be a pre-compiled class to run.