Singleton serialization and weblogic - help!

Question

hi everyone,
I'm trying to serialize a singleton cache object we're using for our (intranet)
website running on weblogic 6.1. I've made sure the singleton class
implements serializable, and i've also put the following method in the
singleton class (ChartCache.java):
private Object readResolve()
return theInstance; //which is of type ChartCache
By the way I'm using jdk 1.3. I've trawled the web and can't find anything to help me yet...
Basically I've written a jsp to get the current instance of the cache
and serialize it to a file. When I invoke another jsp i want it to
reinflate the object and place it back into the weblogic jvm so it can
once again be accessed as a singleton by all classes in the webapp. At
the moment its just not working - the cache object will eventually
take over half an hour to create (huge database processing going on)
so I want the option, if weblogic falls over, to reinstantiate the
cache without having to rebuild it from scratch. The cache will only
be refreshed once a day.
I'll c&p my jsp code below...
======================= restoreCache.jsp
<%@ page import = "java.util.*" %>
<%@ page import = "java.io.*" %>
<%@ page import = "com.drkw.agencylending.website.chartcache.*" %>
<%@ page import = "com.drkw.agencylending.log.Logger" %>
<%
ChartCache theCache = null;
try
String filename = "chartCache.dat";
FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream(filename);
ObjectInputStream in = new ObjectInputStream(fis);
theCache = (ChartCache)in.readObject();
in.close();
catch(Exception e)
Logger.log(e);
%>
Resurrected chart cache from file.
======================= saveCache.jsp
<%@ page import = "java.util.*" %>
<%@ page import = "java.io.*" %>
<%@ page import = "com.drkw.agencylending.website.chartcache.*" %>
<%@ page import = "com.drkw.agencylending.log.Logger" %>
<%
ChartCache theCache = ChartCache.getInstance();
String fileName = "chartCache.dat";
try
FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream(fileName);
ObjectOutputStream oos = new ObjectOutputStream(fos);
oos.writeObject(theCache);
oos.flush();
oos.close();
catch(Exception e)
Logger.log(e);
%>
Wrote cache object to file.
============================
At the moment, a file is getting written but it seems suspiciously
small (73 bytes!) for what is a very large object. When I try to load
it up again, I get no errors but when I call ChartCache.getInstance()
(my singleton) it recreates the cache rather than using the one I've
reinflated. BTW I don't need to worry about server clustering/JNDI to
ensure I have a truly singleton instance - there will only ever be one
JVM to worry about.
Any help greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

solved the problem using another technique. Rather
than serialize the entire singleton object, I just
serialized the hashmap (the only bit I really care
about). Then in the private constructor, the class
checks a database flag to see whether the singleton
was created today - if not, I refresh the cache,
otherwise load in the serialized hashmap and set that
as my class member. No complicated jndi/ejb registry
needed to get around it..!singleton serialization is not recommended in ejb enviroment, it will cause problems. in what you are doing, it is far better to persist the data values in a database.
just for the sake of writing a serializable sington: in addition to what you do in a regular object, you would first check to see if this obj has been serialized, if it is, deserialize it and return this one. you would have to write your own method to do serialization, making sure you have only one place to serialize it, and let the object know where the file is.