JMockit & JavaAgent - Enterprise integration woes

We've been using JMockit as the preferred mocking utility at a large Bank that I'm consulting at. While generally the product and its non-intrusive mocking features are commendable, some of the under-the-hood mechanisms have caused us a nightmare with our continuous integration.After upgrading to latest version of JMockit, version 0.996.0, we had ALL our unit tests failing with the following spurious error

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org.junit.runner.Runner at org.junit.runners.model.RunnerBuilder.safeRunnerForClass(RunnerBuilder.java:59) at org.junit.internal.requests.ClassRequest.getRunner(ClassRequest.java:24) at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit4.runner.JUnit4TestReference.(JUnit4TestReference.java:29) at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit4.runner.JUnit4TestClassReference.(JUnit4TestClassReference.java:25) at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit4.runner.JUnit4TestLoader.createTest(JUnit4TestLoader.java:40) at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit4.runner.JUnit4TestLoader.loadTests(JUnit4TestLoader.java:30) at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit.runner.RemoteTestRunner.runTests(RemoteTestRunner.java:452) at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit.runner.RemoteTestRunner.runTests(RemoteTestRunner.java:683) at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit.runner.RemoteTestRunner.run(RemoteTestRunner.java:390) at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit.runner.RemoteTestRunner.main(RemoteTestRunner.java:197)

While my colleague who had been advocating the use of the utility asked me for a way to change the order of libraries in the classpath, we smelt rot and started debugging under the hood. After quite a bit of digging around, we found that the actual error was caused by the failure to load the JMockit agent dynamically. The following code is the sequence of calls which JMockit makes to load the agent.

 public class Startup {   // other code omitted    public static void verifyInitialization()   {      if (instrumentation == null) {         new AgentInitialization().initializeAccordingToJDKVersion();      }   }}public final class AgentInitialization{   public void initializeAccordingToJDKVersion()   {      String jarFilePath = discoverPathToJarFile();      if (Startup.jdk6OrLater) {         new JDK6AgentLoader(jarFilePath).loadAgent();      }      else if ("1.5".equals(Startup.javaSpecVersion)) {         throw new IllegalStateException(            "JMockit has not been initialized. Check that your Java 5 VM has been started " +            "with the -javaagent:" + jarFilePath + " command line option.");      }      else {         throw new IllegalStateException("JMockit requires a Java 5 VM or later.");      }   }   private String discoverPathToJarFile()   {      CodeSource codeSource = AgentInitialization.class.getProtectionDomain().getCodeSource();      if (codeSource == null) {         return findPathToJarFileFromClasspath();      }      URI jarFileURI; // URI is needed to deal with spaces and non-ASCII characters      try {         jarFileURI = codeSource.getLocation().toURI();      }      catch (URISyntaxException e) {         throw new RuntimeException(e);      }      return new File(jarFileURI).getPath();   }   private String findPathToJarFileFromClasspath()   {      String[] classPath = System.getProperty("java.class.path").split(File.pathSeparator);      for (String cpEntry : classPath) {         if (cpEntry.matches(".*jmockit[-.\\d]*.jar")) {            return cpEntry;         }      }      return null;   }}

While this approach is non-intrusive and works out of the box in most cases, in large enterprise organisations, you are often limited extensively and work in a confined environment. My current environment loads files from a network file system and the following lines from the discoverPathToJarFile() cause the class initialization error

 jarFileURI = codeSource.getLocation().toURI(); 

returns

 CodeSourcefile://remoterepository/libraries/jmockit/0.996.0/install/common/lib/jmockit.jar 

and

 return new File(jarFileURI).getPath(); 

returns

 IllegalArgumentException: URI has an authority component 

We had been using JMockit for a while now since 0.991.0 version and the agent loading had always been a problem. In our original usage, we had to do two things. We had to create our own version of the JDK6AgentLoader as this class has package level scope and create our own JUnit4 runner which loaded the agent from a hard-coded location, as below

public final class MyJMockitRunner extends BlockJUnit4ClassRunner{   static   {      MyJDK6AgentLoader.loadAgent(hardCodedPathtoAgentJar);   }   public JMockit(Class testClass) throws InitializationError   {      super(testClass);   }}

Why the problem now?
What changed majorly between the two versions was, Shadowing the org.junit.runner.Runner class which in the modified version loaded the java agent before initialization of the class.

public abstract class Runner implements Describable{   static   {      Startup.initializeIfNeeded();   }   public abstract Description getDescription();   public abstract void run(RunNotifier notifier);   public int testCount()   {      return getDescription().testCount();   }}

So even though we are trying to load the agent in our custom Runner, the loading of the Runner class itself preceding the sequence and aggressively loads the agent in its own strategy.While this is a possible approach, I would highly criticize the usage of class shadowing for the following reasons

1. Open source API generally provide certain basic guarantees, and is generally tested extensively by the commnuity in different enviroments to ensure they work in the way they are designed. By shadowing a public class, you override this guarantee and for most common developers, the fact that they are using a modified class is oblivious. This can lead to late night debugging sessions and nightmares when things go wrong.
2. In this particular case, while only the tests that used JMockit should have failed, thousands of test cases across multiple projects failed at once. As a programmer, I always believe to lazily load resources and only when they are needed. But there is a necessity for mocking or not, the agent is going to be loaded whenever a Unit test is run. This is fundamentally wrong.
3. Any workarounds that had been applied to the library fail miserably with this aggressive approach to force your library to behave in a specific way.
4. While I agree that the owner cannot foresee all the environments his library would be used, trying to perform gimmicks under the hood on an open library could have been avoided.

Solution
While I've criticized the usage of shadowing a class, unfortunately the only solution that worked for us was to shadow the JMockit class that loaded the agent as below.

public final class AgentInitialization{   public void initializeAccordingToJDKVersion()   { MyJDK6AgentLoader.loadAgent(hardCodedPathtoAgentJar);   }}

Better approach
There are a couple of suggestions for the JMockit API to overcome the shortcomings described above

1. Please do remove the shadowed JUnit class and make the agent loading explicit. This is already the case when you use the JMockit.class as the runner.
2. While the auto detection of the agent is brilliant, there could be some hooking mechanism which allowed the developers to extend it with their own strategies.

Last but not least, there definitely was an obvious solution to the problem, which was to explicitly specify the agent path in the VM arguments. The issue we had in that was there were too many OS, at least a few IDE, a shared continuous integration server and many many ant build scripts that need to be updated. It would have been a far more involved effort to get all this modified and maintained than applying a code fix which worked "under the hood"