Introducing Spring Batch Admin

Spring Batch Admin provides a web-based user interface that features an admin console for Spring Batch applications and systems. It is a new open-source project from SpringSource. A milestone release 1.0.0.M1 will be available soon with all the features below, and we hope to get to a 1.0.0 final release early in 2010.
Main Use Cases
The easiest way to get a quick overview of Spring Batch Admin is to see some screenshots of the main use cases. The user interface is a web application (built with Spring MVC).
Inspect Jobs

The user can inspect the jobs that are known to the system. Jobs are either launchable or non-launchable (in the screenshot they are all launchable). The distinction is that a launchable job is defined and configured in the application itself, whereas a non-launchable job is detected as state left by the execution of a job in another process. (Spring Batch uses a relational database to track the state of jobs and steps, so historic executions can be queried to show the non-launchable jobs.)
Launch Job

Launchable jobs can be launched from the user interface with job parameters provided as name value pairs, or by an incrementer configured into the application.
Inspect Executions

Once a job is executing, or has executed, this view can be used to see the most recent executions, and a brief summary of their status (STARTED, COMPLETED, FAILED, etc.).

Each individual execution has a more detailed view (shown above), and from there the user can click down to a view of each of the step executions in the job (only one in this case). A common reason for wanting to do this is to see the cause of a failure.

The top of the step execution detail view shows the history of the execution of this step across all job executions. This is useful for getting a statistical feel for performance characteristics. A developer running a job in an integration test environment might use the statistics here to compare different parameterisations of a job, to see what effect is of changing (for instance) the commit interval in an item processing step.

The bottom of the step execution view has the detailed meta-data for the step (status, read count, write count, commit count, etc.) as well as an extract of the stack trace from any exception that caused a failure of the step (as in the example shown above).
Stop an Execution

A job that is executing can be stopped by the user (whether or not it is launchable). The stop signal is sent via the database and once detected by Spring Batch in whatever process is running the job, the job is stopped (status moves from STOPPING to STOPPED) and no further processing takes place.
Where to get it
There is a snapshot download attached to this article, or you can get the source code from subversion and compile it yourself. Snapshot builds also go up to S3 to the Maven repository every night:
<id>spring-snapshots</id>
<name>Spring Maven Snapshot Repository</name>
<url>http://s3.amazonaws.com/maven.springframework.org/snapshot</url>
</repository>
There are two JAR artifacts and a WAR sample (org.springframework.batch:spring-batch-admin-sample:war), all of which are in the Maven repository and in SVN. In the the case of the WAR download link from this article the JAR files are included in WEB-INF/lib.
To deploy the sample application just install the WAR into your favourite servlet container, or import the source code into STS and launch the sample with standard Eclipse WTP features (e.g. drag it onto the server or Run As… and run on the server). It uses an in-memory database out of the box, so you will get a fresh copy on each restart of the application.
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steve says:
Added on November 10th, 2009 at 8:24 amLink to Spring Batch in first line is broken, should probably be http://static.springsource.org/spring-batch/
Dave Syer (blog author) says:
Added on November 10th, 2009 at 9:30 amFixed the broken link, thanks (it used to work at http://www.springframework.org, so something must have changed).
Jay says:
Added on November 10th, 2009 at 12:46 pmIt looks nice, will give it a shot today. Thanks
Steve Mayzak says:
Added on November 10th, 2009 at 12:48 pmThis looks like the start of something great Dave, Nice Work!
chwlund says:
Added on November 10th, 2009 at 3:24 pmlooks very promising! this kind of admin gui and functionality for batches can be very useful for many enterprises!
dodol says:
Added on November 10th, 2009 at 10:17 pmHi Dave,
This looks very cool. Any plan to integrate this with authentication systems like LDAP?
Dave Syer (blog author) says:
Added on November 11th, 2009 at 2:17 amThere is no security enabled by default, and no plans to do that in 1.0.0 as yet because the target is really developers for this release. But the interface is RESTful so it's easy to add URL-based business-specific security with Spring Security. I'll write some more about customisation and extensibility soon (there's a brief run through on the website now) and probably use security as an example.
Timmy says:
Added on November 11th, 2009 at 9:05 amThis really looks really ugly, please do something about the usability and look and feel of the console!!
aki86 says:
Added on November 12th, 2009 at 5:03 pmIs there a way to point it at an existing job repository and try things out?
Dave Syer (blog author) says:
Added on November 13th, 2009 at 5:49 pmSure. It starts up with an in-memory database by default, but all you need to do is provide a properties file to change the database connection, or you can override the dataSource bean definition. The getting-started page on the web site has some basic instructions.
Michael says:
Added on November 18th, 2009 at 11:09 amThis is a really good thing for all the spring batch users…
Is this working with Spring Batch 2.0.3?
Will there be a way to restart a job at any previous step?
For exemple in our case we have two steps that are executed consecutively:
- 1st step allows to launch an external tool
- 2nd step allows to check the log file generated by this tool
What we would like is to retart a the 1st step instead of the last unsuccesfull one.
Thanks.
Dave Syer (blog author) says:
Added on November 18th, 2009 at 11:18 amIt isn't designed to work with Batch 2.0.x. The introspection pieces (if you don't register or launch any jobs) should work because there are no DB schema changes to 2.1.0.
There is nothing different about the step execution sequences in Admin – just a regular Spring Batch job. Your use case (start at first step) sounds like you don't want a restart, just a normal start. So that works. Or did I miss something?