Accessing JavaBeans Nested Properties: testing Spring, BeanUtils and OGNL

tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8255455458104156220.post-21513633852845089792007-07-15T09:34:00.000-07:002007-07-16T02:14:59.343-07:00Accessing JavaBeans Nested Properties: testing Spring, BeanUtils and OGNLOne our application needs to access properties from a javabean using reflection e.g. get(“property1”, object)… Rather than re-inventing the wheel, I thought that we should use a library. There are quite a few that do this kind of get/set properties… So the question was: Which One??? I know of: <ol> <li>Spring beans (2.0.5) <a href="http://www.springframework.org/">http://www.springframework.org</a></li> <li>Apache Commons BeanUtils (1.7.0) <a href="http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/beanutils/">http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/beanutils/</a></li> <li>my colleague Gerald mentioned OGNL from <a href="http://www.ognl.org/">www.ognl.org</a> (pronounced ‘like a drunken orthogonal’ to quote their documentation).</li></ol> So with 3 candidates… which one is the best performing? OGNL seems to be, by far, the most flexible and rich library, but does that means it runs like a dead dog? I limited the problem to accessing a property value: being simple, nested or as part of an array. The Test: I shall access 100,000 a series of 8 properties. The classes are: <pre> public class A { private int intProperty; private Long longProperty; private String stringProperty; private Date dateProperty; private B b = new B(); } public class B { private int intProperty = 5; private C c = new C(); private D[] d = new D[10]; } public class C { private String stringProperty; } public class D { private int intProperty = 1; } </pre> The Test creates one instance of A, that contains 1 instance of B which contains 1 instance of C and an array of 10 Ds. I hope this is clear… The set of properties to get are: "intProperty", "longProperty", "dateProperty", "stringProperty", "b.intProperty", "b.c.stringProperty", "b.d[1].intProperty", "b.d[7].intProperty". So… the results?<table><theading></theading><tbody><tr><td style="font-weight: bold;">Library</td><td style="font-weight: bold;">Total time (ms)</td><td style="font-weight: bold;">average per set (micro sec)</td> </tr><tr><td>Spring</td><td>1,783 ms</td><td>17.8 micro sec</td></tr><tr><td>Bean Utils</td><td>2,242 ms</td><td>22.4 micro sec</td></tr><tr><td>OGNL</td><td>50,293 ms</td><td>503 micro sec</td></tr><tr><td>OGNL Expression</td><td>1,595 ms</td><td>16 micro sec</td></tr> </tbody></table><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_H-RhdSKB1Go/RppQwccRzVI/AAAAAAAAAhE/fW8s0VNB8is/s1600-h/reflect2.PNG"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_H-RhdSKB1Go/RppQwccRzVI/AAAAAAAAAhE/fW8s0VNB8is/s320/reflect2.PNG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5087467522267139410" border="0" /></a> What does this tell us? OGNL is at the same time the slowest and the fastest library on my laptop (Lenovo, dual-core) under java 1.5.0_10. OGNL has 2 mechanisms, one is simply to call Ognl.getValue(“pathToProperty”, object) and the other one is to evaluate the expression upfront by Object expression = Ognl.parseExpression(“pathToProperty”) and then Ognl.getValue(expression, object); The second one is the fastest mechanism so, if you have the ability to ‘pre-compile’ your expressions, OGNL is for you… otherwise Spring Beans is doing a good job! The entire source code and Eclipse project is available <a href="http://objectlabkit.sourceforge.net/objectlab/reflection-test.zip">here</a>, feel free to comment and tell us about your experience. Enjoy!<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/8255455458104156220-2151363385284508979?l=objectlab.blogspot.com'/></div>ObjectLab/Appendiumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10408712629355326011noreply@blogger.com0