High Level Architecture

This article provides a high level description of the architecture of Qpid Broker-J.

Introduction

Broker-J is messaging broker that implements the AMQP protocols (version 0-8, 0-9, 0-91, 0-10 and 1.0). Any AMQP compliant messaging library can be used with the Broker. The Broker supports on the fly message translation from one AMQP protocol to another, meaning it is possible to use the Broker to allow clients that use different AMQP protocol version to exchange messages. It can be managed over a built in HTTP interface (that presents a REST API and a Web Management Console) or by AMQP Management (early draft implementation).

The Broker has a highly pluggable architecture that allows alternative implementations to be substituted for any concern. For instance, you can simply build a module delegating to your own storage or own authentication provider linking to your enterprise authentication backend.

Broker-J is 100% pure Java. It can be run standalone or embedded within another Java applications.

Model

A tree of manageable categories, all of which extend of the interface ConfiguredObject, underpin the Broker. A ConfiguredObject has zero or more attributes, zero or more children and zero or more context variable name/value pairs. A ConfiguredObject may be persisted to a configuration store so its state can be restored when the Broker is restarted. The manageable categories are arranged into a tree structure. SystemConfig is at the root and has a single descendent Broker. The Broker itself has children: Port, AuthenticationProvider, VirtualHostNode amongst others. VirtualHostNode has a child VirtualHost. The children of the VirtualHost are categories that directly involved in messaging such as Queue. The diagram below illustrates the category hierarchy but many categories are elided for brevity. The model tree structure is codified in the BrokerModel class.

Broker Model

Category Specializations

Some categories have specialisations. An example is the category Queue. It has specialisations corresponding to the queue types supported by the Broker e.g. StandardQueue, PrirorityQueue etc.

Attributes

Each ConfiguredObject instance has zero or more attributes. Attributes have a name and a value which can be a Java primitive value or an instance of any class for which an AttributeValueConverter exist. This mechanism allows attribute values to be Lists, Sets, Maps, or arbitrary structured types ManagedAttributeValues.

Attributes are marked up in the code with method annotations @ManagedAttribute which defines things whether the attribute is mandatory or mutable. Attributes can also be marked a secure which indicates restrictions on how the attribute is used (used for attributes that that store passwords or private-keys).

Attributes can have default values. The default value applies if the user omits to supply a value when the object is created. Defaults themselves can be defined in terms of context variable references.

Context Variables

Each ConfiguredObject instance has zero or more context variable assignments. These are simply name/value pairs where both name and value are strings.

When resolving an attribute‘s value, if the attribute’s value (or attribute‘s default) contains a context variable reference (e.g. ${foo}), the variable is first resolved using the ConfiguredObject‘s own context variables. If the ConfiguedObject has no definition for the context variable, the entity’s parent is tried, then its grandparent and so forth, all the way until the SystemContext is reached. If the SystemContext provides no value, the JVM’s system properties are consulted.

A context variable's value can be defined in terms of other context variables.

Context variables are useful for extracting environment specific information from configuration for instance path stems or port numbers.

Lifecycle

ConfiguredObjects have a lifecycle.

A ConfiguredObject is created exactly once by a call its parent's #createChild() method. This brings the object into existence. It goes through a number of phases during creation (ConfiguredObject#create)

  • resolution (where the attribute values are resolved and assigned to the object)
  • creation validation (ensuring business rules are adhered to)
  • registration with parents
  • implementation specific creation (#onCreate)
  • implementation specific opening (#onOpen)

When the Broker is restarted objects that exist in the configuration store are said to be recovered. During recovery, they follow the opening (ConfiguredObject#open)

  • resolution (where the attribute values are resolved and assigned to the object)
  • validation (ensuring business rules are adhered to)
  • implementation specific opening (#onOpen)

Some ConfiguredObjects support starting (ConfiguredObject#start()) and stopping (ConfiguredObject#stop()) but this have not yet been extended to all objects.

ConfiguredObject#delete() caused the object to be deleted.

AbstractConfiguredObject

Most configured object implementations extend AbstractConfiguredObject (ACO). ACO provides the mechanics behind the configured implementations: attributes, context variables, state and lifecycle, and a listener mechanism: ConfigurationChangeListener.

Threading Model

The threading model used by the model must be understood before changes can be made safely.

The Broker and VirtualHost ConfiguredObject instances have a task executor backed by single configuration thread. Whenever the a configuration object needs to be changed, that change MUST be made by the nearest ancestor's configuration thread. This approach ensures avoids the need to employ locking. Any thread is allowed to observe the state of a ConfiguredObject at any time. For this reasons, changes must be published safely, so they can be read consistently by the observing threads.

The implementations of the mutating methods (#setAttributes(), #start(), #stop(), etc) within AbstractConfiguredObject are already implemented to adhere to these rules.

Configuration Persistence

ConfiguredObject categories such as SystemConfig and VirtualhostNode take responsibility for managing the storage of their children. This is marked up in the model with the @ManagedObject annotation (#managesChildren). These objects utilise a DurableConfigurationStore to persist their durable children to storage. ConfigurationChangeListener is used to trigger the update of the storage each time a ConfiguredObject is changed.

AMQP Transport Layer

At the high level, the transport layer

  • accepts bytes from the wire and passes them to the protocol engines.
  • pulls bytes from the protocol engines and pushes them down the wire.

There are two AMQP Transport Layers in Broker-J.

  • Traditional TCP/IP connections
  • Websocket

We'll consider the two layers separately below.

The transport is responsible for TLS. The TLS configuration is defined on the Port, Keystore and Truststore model objects. If so configured, it is the transport's responsibility to manage the TLS connection.

TCP/IP

This layer is implemented from first principles using Java NIO.

It is non-blocking in nature.

It uses a Selector to monitor all connected sockets (and the accepting socket) for work. Once work is detected (i.e. the selector returns) the connection work is serviced by threads drawn from an IO thread pool. An eat-what-you-kill pattern is used to reduce dispatch latency. This works in the following way. The worker thread that performed the select, after adding all the ready connections to the work queue, adds the selector task to the work queue and then starts to process the work queue itself (this is the eat what you kill bit). This approach potentially avoids the dispatch latency between the thread that performed select and another thread from the IO thread pool. The Selector is the responsibility of the SelectorThread class.

A connections to a client is represented by a NonBlockingConnection instance. The SelectorThread causes the NonBlockingConnections that require IO work to be executed (NonBlockingConnection#doWork) on a thread from an IO thread pool (owned by NetworkConnectionScheduler). On each work cycle, the NonBlockingConnection first goes through a write phase where pending work is pulled from the protocol engine producing bytes for the wire in the process. If all the pending work is sent completely (i.e. the outbound network buffer is not exhausted), the next phase is a read phase. The bytes are consumed from the channel and fed into the protocol engine. Finally, there is a further write phase to send any new bytes resulting from the input we have just read. The write/read/write sequence is organised so in order that the Broker first evacuates as much state from memory as possible (thus freeing memory) before reading new bytes from the wire.

In addition to the NonBlockingConnection being scheduled when singled by the Selector, the Broker may need to awaken them at other times. For instance, if a message arrives on a queue that is suitable for a consumer, the NonBlockingConnection associated with that consumer must awoken. The mechanism that does this is NetworkConnectionScheduler#schedule method which adds it to the work queue. This is wired to the protocol engine via a listener.

The class diagram below depicts IO Model

IO Model

IO Threading

The only threads that execute NonBlockingConnnections are those of the NetworkConnectionScheduler. Furthermore, it is imperative that no NonBlockingConnnection is executed by more than one thread at once. It is the job of ConnectorProcessor to organise this exclusivity. Updates made by NonBlockingConnnection must be published safely so they can be read consistently by the other threads in the pool.

There is a NetworkConnectionScheduler associated with each AMQP Port and each VirtualHost. When a connection is made to the Broker, the initial exchanges between peer and broker (protocol headers, authentication etc) take place on the thread pool of the NetworkConnectionScheduler of the Port. Once the connection has indicated which VirtualHost it wishes to connect to, responsibility for the NonBlockingConnection shifts to the NetworkConnectionScheduler of the VirtualHost.

TLS

The TCP/IP transport layer responds to the TLS configuration provided by the Port, Keystore and Truststore model objects. It does this using the NonBlockingConnectionDelegates.

  • The NonBlockingConnectionUndecidedDelegate is used to allow Plain/TLS port unification feature (that is support for plain and TLS from the same port). It sniffs the initial incoming bytes to determine if the peer is trying to negotiate a TLS connection or not. Once the determination is made one of the following delegates is substituted in its place.
  • NonBlockingConnectionTLSDelegate is responsible for TLS connections. It feeds the bytes through an SSLEngine.
  • NonBlockingConnectionPlainDelegate is used for non-TLS connections.

Idle timeout

All versions of the AMQP protocol support the idea of the peers regularly passing null data to keep a wire that would otherwise by silent (during quiet times) busy. This is called idle timeout or heartbeating. It is configured during connection establishment. If a peer detects that counterpart has stopped sending this data, it can infer that the network connection has failed or the peer has otherwise become inoperable and close the connection. Sending of the null data is the responsibility of the ServerIdleWriteTimeoutTicker. Responsibility of detecting the absence of data from the peer is ServerIdleReadTimeoutTicker. When the Selector blocks awaiting activity the timeout is the minimum timeout value of all Tickers.

Websocket

AMQP 1.0 specification defines AMQP 1.0 over web sockets. The earlier version of the protocols didn't do this but the implementation within the Broker actually supports Websocket transport.

The websocket transport layer (WebSocketProvider) uses Jetty's websocket module. The methods of class AmqpWebSocket are annotated with the Jetty websocket annotations OnWebSocketConnect, OnWebSocketMethod, and OnWebSocketClose. The method implementations cause ProtocolEngine instances to handle new connection, process bytes passed to the engine, or close respectively. When the protocol engine signals the need to work, a Jetty thread is used to pull the pending bytes bytes from the protocol engine WebSocketProvider.ConnectionWrapper#doWork. The websocket transport tries to remain as close to the TCP/IP transport layer.

The Port, Keystore and Truststore model objects are used to configure the websocket connection according to the TLS requirements.

AMQP Protocol Engines

The ProtocolEngine:

  • accepts bytes from the transport (ProtocolEngine#received).
  • exposes a public method (ProtocolEngine#processPendingIterator) which is used by the transport layer to pull pending tasks that produce bytes for the wire from the engine.

The engine never pushes bytes onto the transport.

Accepting bytes

The transport references an instance of the MultiVersionProtocolEngine. Internally the MultiVersionProtocolEngine delegates to other ProtocolEngine implementations. It switches from one implementation to another during this connection's life.

In this beginning, the MultiVersionProtocolEngine does not know which version of the AMQP protocol the peer wishes to use. Internally it begins by delegating to a SelfDelegateProtocolEngine until sufficient header bytes have arrived from the wire to make a determination (all AMQP protocols begin with the bytes AMQP followed by a version number). Once a determination is made, a ProtocolEngine that supports the correct AMQP protocol is substituted in its place (an implementation of AMQPConnection). The other alternative is that the desired protocol is not supported. In this case a supported AMQP header is sent down the wire and the connection closed.

There is an implementation of AMQPConnection for every AMQP protocol:

  • AMQPConnection_0_8Impl - for AMQP 0-8..0-91
  • AMQPConnection_0_10Impl - for AMQP 0-10
  • AMQPConnection_1_0Impl - for AMQP 1.0

The AMQPConnection#received method accepts the raw bytes. The connection implementation uses AMQP codecs to turn this stream of bytes into a stream of objects representing the AMQP frames. The frames are then dispatched to the connection implementation itself (or other objects that the connection has caused to come into existence).

Unfortunately, there is no commonality between the AMQP codec implementations. For 0-8..0-91 it is a ServerDecoder, for 0-10 a ServerDisassembler and for AMQP 1.0 a ProtocolHandler.

As the AMQP protocols differ, the dispatch methods are necessarily different but the approach is similar across the protocols. Here's some examples to get you started.

  • AMQPConnection_0_8Impl#received ultimately delegates to methods such as AMQPConnection_0_8Impl#receiveConnectionStartOk
  • AMQPConnection_0_10Impl#received ultimately delegates to delegate ServerConnectionDelegate#connectionStartOk
  • AMQPConnection_1_0Impl#received ultimately delegates to AMQPConnection_1_0Impl#receiveOpen

Producing bytes

As already said, the transport pulls tasks from the protocol engine. These tasks produce bytes. To do this, the transport calls the pending iterator which provides a stream of tasks that generate bytes for the wire. The transport keeps pulling until the output exceeds the buffer. It then tries to write the buffered bytes to the wire. If it writes more than half to the wire it continues to pull more tasks from the engine. The cycle continues until the transport cannot take more bytes (back pressure at the TCP/IP layer or the pending iterator yields no more tasks). This arrangement always means that the transport retains control of backlog of bytes to be written to the wire.

The protocol engines' pending iterators are responsible for maintaining fairness within the connection. They do this by maintaining state between invocations. For instance if a connection had sessions A, B, C, all with tasks to producer and on this output cycle, the network stopped accepting bytes after A's tasks, on the next output cycle. B would be considered first, even if A had subsequently had more work. This fairness pattern is repeated through each layer of the protocol.

Exchanges

Exchange model objects provide the message routing functionality.

There are several specialisations of Exchange

  • Direct; routes messages into bound queues based on exact match of message routing key and queue binding key
  • Topic; routes messages into bound queues using wildcard match of message routing key and the binding key pattern defined on queue binding
  • Fanout; routes messages to all bound queues regardless their binding key
  • Headers; routes messages to bound queues based on message header properties satisfying the x-match expression specified as part of queue binding arguments

Please, refer Qpid Broker-J Documentation for more detailed description of Exchange routing algorithms.

Please note, that VirtualHost provides special routing functionality for messages published into so-called default destination, which works similar to direct exchange and routes messages into a VirtualHost Queue based on exact match of message routing key and a queue name. This functionality is mandated by AMQP 0-x protocols.

The model class diagram is provided below Exchanges

All exchange implementations extend AbstractExchange and implement the exchange specific routing functionality in methods declared as abstract in AbstractExchange:

  • #doRoute - implements exchange routing functionality
  • #onBind - implements exchange specific binding functionality
  • #onUnbind - implements exchange specific unbinding functionality
  • #onBindingUpdated - implements exchange specific functionality for updating existing bindings

The AbstractExchange implements category interface Exchange which in turn extends a more generic interface MessageDestination.

Queues

Queue model objects provide the messaging queues. There are several specialisations of Queue

  • StandardQueue which provides a FIFO behaviour
  • PriorityQueue which provides queuing ordered by a message's priority
  • LVQQueue which provides a last-value or conflation queue.
  • SortedQueue which sorts message based on message sorting key value using red-black tree algorithm.

Internally queues are implemented as a linked list (QueueEntryList) of nodes (QueueEntry). The linked list is implemented from first principals. It uses a thread safe and lock-less algorithm (it uses compare and swap operations).

Enqueueing

When a message is enqueued (using the AbstractQueue#enqueue() method) it adds the message to the tail of the queue and notifies a subscriber (consumer) about the new message. The connection that owns the consumer is then awoken and events proceed as described above in the Producing Bytes. This is described by Consumer-Queue-Interactions

Subscriptions

Each subscription keeps a “pointer” (QueueContext#_lastSeenEntry) into the list denoting the point at which that particular subscription has reached. A subscription will only take a message if it is the next AVAILABLE (MessageInstance.State.AVAILABLE) entry.

The diagram below shows point to point queue with three subscribers attached.

Subscribers

Messages

Each queue node QueueEntry refers to a ServerMessage. The server message encapsulates:

  • Message meta-data (loosely the message's headers)
  • Message payload
  • Original routing information,

Many QueueEntries may refer to the same ServerMessage. In the case where a incoming message is routed through an exchange to many queues, the QueueEntry point to the same ServerMessage. This means only one copy of the message exists in the Broker, regardless of however many queues refer to it. This is important for topics where the same message may be sent to hundreds of subscribers.

ServerMessage uses a Reference counting system to control its lifecycle. When the reference reaches zero, it knows no one references it and it can safely delete itself.

The ServerMessage refers to StoredMessage. The StoredMessage backs the underlying message storage. It provides methods that get the content and the metadata. This might return cached copies, or it might cause store operations to fetch the data from the disk.

StoredMessage can be flowed to disk. The Broker (FlowToDiskCheckingTask) responds to memory pressure by flowing messages that are in-memory only (i.e. transient messages) to disk and freeing the cached copies of persistent messages from memory. This approach frees up memory for messages.

Message and Configuration Store

Messages are written to the MessageStore and configuration to the DurableConfigurationStore. It is possible to back these with the same underlying provider or use a different provider for configuration and messages.

There are several store provider implementations:

  • JSON - Configuration Store only
  • Berkeley BDB JE - Durable Configuration and/or Message Store
  • Derby - Durable Configuration and/or Message Store
  • JDBC - Durable Configuration and/or Message Store

These interfaces are pluggable.

Messaging Transactions

Multiple messages can be consumed or/and published as a single atomic operation within messaging transaction. The transaction is usually initiated and discharged (committed or rolled back) on client side, but, Broker can also use messaging transactions for performing operations on group of messages in atomic way, for example, moving/copying messages between queues, deleting messages from queue using management interfaces, etc.

An interface ServerTransaction represents messaging transaction on broker side. The following operations can be invoked as part of messaging transactions:

  • dequeue - dequeue message or collection of messages
  • enqueue - enqueue message into a TransactionLogResource or collection of BaseQueue
  • commit - commit transaction
  • rollback - rollback transaction
  • addPostTransactionAction - an auxiliary operation to add some post-transactional work, which is executed after transaction is discharged

LocalTransaction is a concrete implementation of ServerTransaction which is responsible for performing messaging transaction. It delegates transactional operations to Transaction object provided by MesssageStore. Each message store type has its own implementation of Transaction.

The class diagram below illustrates the transactional model of Qpid Broker-J.

Transactions

As per diagram, apart from LocalTransaction, there are three other implementations of ServerTransaction.

  • DistributedTransaction is used to run distributed transaction (for AMQP protocol 0-10)
  • AutoCommitTransaction is used to model auto-commit transaction functionality
  • AsyncAutoCommitTransaction is used to model auto-commit transaction functionality with asynchronous discharge (i.e., the caller does not wait for finish of transaction discharge and proceed with invocation of next operations, but, the transaction eventually get discharged).

AsyncAutoCommitTransaction is used to invoke enqueueing and dequeueing operations when client does not need transaction but broker implementation semantic requires passing ServerTransaction object.

AutoCommitTransaction is used to run a number of messaging operations requiring atomicity, for example, clearQueue, publishMessage from management interface, etc.

Management

The Broker exposes two management layers:

  • AMQP management
  • HTTP management

The management layers essentially expose the Broker model over the management interface.

AMQP management

AMQP management is defined by the AMQP Management specification which is currently a Working Draft at Oasis. It defines a standard way to identify objects within the Broker, to invoke operations (CRUD operations or arbitrary operations such as clearQueue) and pass arguments and get results, all over AMQP itself. When interacting with management, you send management messages to a special node ($management) which support a reply-to address.

It also defines a standard way to discover the objects that an device managed by AMQP exposes. One idea here is that is should be possible to produce a generic console which is capable of managing (at least at a basic level) any device managed by AMQP.

For Broker-J:

  • To manage a virtualhost, you connect with AMQP to the virtualhost as normal, then send management messages to $management.
  • To manage the Broker as a whole, you connect with AMQP to a synthetic virtualhost $management and then send management messages to $management.

ManagementNode provides the implementation.

The model (objects, attributes, operations) are simply exposed verbatim over AMQP Management. In AMQP management, objects have a name identifying the type of the object. This is defined using an annotation ManagedObject#amqpName.

HTTP management

The Broker's model is exposed as a REST API. This allows simple tools such as cURL to be an effective way to both manage and monitor the Broker.

The URI for the REST API is /api/latest or /api/v<version>. Currently, the Broker supports a current version of the API and couple of preceding versions. Though, the support for more older versions can be added, if there will be a need for it. It is envisages that future version of management layer will maintain a support for at least one previous version, thus allowing a smooth upgrade for those migrating to new Broker versions.

The URI is mapped to the object's within the tree. The form of the URI is

/api/latest/<category type>/<name1>/<name2>/.../<namen>

where the names describe a path to an object starting at the root. It is always possible to refer to objects by ids.

  • POST/PUT - create or update
  • DELETE - delete an object
  • GET - get an object or a collection of objects.

The Broker embeds Jetty to provide the HTTP management interface. HttpManagment configures Jetty according to the configuration provided to by the Port/KeyStore/TrustStore model objects.

The embedded server also provides a Web Management Console. This is written using the Dojo framework. It uses the REST API to interact with the Broker.

Pluggable Architecture

The Broker utilizes java java.util.ServiceLoader for implementation of pluggable architecture. The org.apache.qpid.server.plugin.QpidServiceLoader is a thin wrapper around java.util.ServiceLoader. It is responsible for loading of services extending org.apache.qpid.server.plugin.Pluggable. All Broker extension interfaces extend org.apache.qpid.server.plugin.Pluggable. The diagram below illustrates some of the extension points.

Pluggable Architecture

The Broker allows alternative implementations for various entities. For example, a custom implementation of AcceptingTransport can be plugged into the Broker by adding into a broker classpath an implementation of TransportProviderFactory responsible for instantiation of the custom AcceptingTransport.

A new type of ConfiguredObject can be plugged into the Broker by implementing ConfiguredObjectTypeFactory responsible for creation and recovery of this ConfiguredObject type.

The ConfiguredObjectTypeFactory are auto-generated for majority of ConfiguredObject types. An abstract factory AbstractConfiguredObjectTypeFactory is used as a stub for auto-generated factory classes. An annotation @ManagedObjectFactoryConstructor needs to be declared on a constructor of ConfiguredObject implementation in order to have factory auto-generated by ConfiguredObjectFactoryGenerator from qpid-broker-codegen module.

Another useful annotation is @PluggableService. It is used for auto-generation of services files under META-INF/services/.

All implementations of ConfiguredObjectTypeFactory are aggregated in implementation of ConfiguredObjectFactory. The latter delegates ConfiguredObject creation and recovery to required implementation of ConfiguredObjectTypeFactory. The right ConfiguredObjectTypeFactory is selected based on value of type attribute.

Some of configured object categories have specialized implementations of ConfiguredObjectTypeFactory which are responsible for determining right ConfiguredObjectTypeFactory based on values of different attributes. For example, factories PortFactory and QueueFactory are used for creation/opening of Port and Queue accordingly. PortFactory examines attribute protocols to identify the Port type, whilst QueueFactory checks existence of attributes like priority, sortKey and lvqKey when attribute type is not specified in order to determine the type of the Queue.

A new type of SystemConfig can be plugged-in with SystemConfigFactory.

Please, check Broker code for all extension points by building type hierarchy for Pluggable.

Logging

Qpid Broker-J uses slf4j API for logging. The slf4j abstraction allows to plug-in any logging framework. The logback logging framework is used by the Broker. Though, only handful of modules (qpid-broker containing code for starting the broker and logging-logback plugins implementing management functionality) have compile time dependency to logback. The rest of Broker modules including qpid-broker-core and plugins modules (except for logging-logback plugins) depend only on slf4j API. The Broker can be easily started without logback dependent modules. Any other logging framework can be used with the Broker if required.

The Broker defines a number of ConfiguredObject categories to be able to dynamically configure logging settings at runtime and access generated logs from Broker management API.

  • Logger is responsible for production of logs
  • InclusionRule governs what appears within the logs. Loggers can include any number of InclusionRules for log collection.

In order to isolate applications running on dedicated VirtualHosts from each other, the Broker provides separate VirtualHost logging API. If configured, the users of specific VirtualHost can access their logs without seeing logs not related to their VirtualHost (including logs from other applications on different VirtualHosts and Broker own logs).

Thus, there are two sub-sets of logging API: Broker Logger Model and VirtualHost Logger Model.

The class diagram below illustrates Broker Logger Model.

Broker Loggers

The class diagram below illustrates VirtualHost Logger Model.

VirtualHost Loggers

Both Broker and VirtualHost support

  • FileLogger which is responsible for storing logs in files on file system
  • SysLogLogger is responsible for storing logs in SysLogs of Linux/Unix OS
  • JDBCLogger is responsible for storing logs in RDBMS

In addition to Loggers listed above, the Broker supports the following Loggers:

  • MemoryLogger is responsible for accumulation of predefined number of log records in cyclic memory buffer
  • ConsoleLogger is responsible for redirection of the logs into system standard output
  • BrokerLogbackSocketLogger is responsible for sending logs into socket (used in integration tests)

Both Broker and VirtualHost support the following inclusion rules

  • NameAndLevel is responsible for accepting log events that match a given log event source name and have a level that equals or exceeds the specified value
  • UserOrConnection is responsible for accepting the log events matching given regular expressions for principal name, container id and remote connection address

All existing logback-based Logger implementations (for both Broker and VirtualHost) extend AbstractLogger.

ACL

Authorization of operations performed by users is implemented in special AccessControl objects. The authorization check for user operation can result in the following outcomes:

  • ALLOWED
  • DENIED
  • DEFERRED

The DEFERRED outcome means that AccessControl cannot ALLOW or DENY the operation and the check needs to be delegated to another AccessControl.

The authorization checks are implemented for the operations of following types

  • CREATE when any type of ConfiguredObject is created
  • UPDATE when instance of ConfiguredObject is updated
  • DELETE when instance of ConfiguredObject is deleted
  • READ when attribute values of ConfiguredObject needs to be accessed
  • DISCOVER when ConfiguredObject metadata (like ConfiguredObject hierarchy, supported attributes, supported operations, etc) needs to be accessed
  • INVOKE_METHOD when a method on ConfiguredObject needs to be executed
  • PERFORM_ACTION used to check required permissions for the following actions:
    • “connect” when new messaging connection is established
    • “publish” when message is published
    • “manage” when user access management interfaces

The AccessControl objects lives on Broker or VirtualHost levels. The VirtualHost AccessControl can defer authorization check to Broker AccessControl.

The following methods are defined in AccessControl interface to perform the authorization checks

  • Result authorise(T token, Operation operation, PermissionedObject configuredObject)
  • Result authorise(T token, Operation operation, PermissionedObject configuredObject, Map<String,Object> arguments)

Special object of type SecurityToken can be passed into authorize methods. For example, “publish” authorization check leverages SecurityToken for caching purposes. The results of “publish” authorization check are kept in token and utilized on the following check for performance optimization.

The class diagram below illustrates the authorization model.

ACL

The ACL rules can be defined by end-users in special ConfiguredObjects of type AccessControlProvider. The rules are defined in terms of legacy LegacyAccessControl model. When authorization check is performed the entities of new ACL models are converted into legacy ACL entities.

The class diagram below illustrates legacy ACL model.

Legacy ACL

The legacy ACL model defines a number of LegacyOperations, ObjectTypes and Properties . The ACL rules are written using legacy ACL concepts.

The User Documentation illustrates how those rules can be defined. The links to Qpid Broker-J documentation are available under Qpid Broker-J Component page