Aspectow 4.0 Release Notes

This release marks a major milestone for Aspectow, the foundational framework powering the commercial Aspectow Enterprise edition. Notably, aspectow-console is now bundled by default to deliver the administration control plane for Aspectow Enterprise. Evolving from the legacy aspectow-appmon project, Aspectow establishes a robust modular architecture composed of three core components: Node Manager (aspectow-node) for clustering, AppMon (aspectow-appmon) for application telemetry, and Aspectow Console (aspectow-console) for managing Aspectran-based web applications across distributed environments.

✨ New Features

• Node Manager (aspectow-node)
  • Module Introduction & Cluster Mode Support: Introduced the new aspectow-node module to power distributed and clustered environments. It offers Direct Mode (static peer-to-peer 1:1 connectivity) and Gateway Mode (dynamic membership and routing using Redis), accommodating various deployment scales and network topologies.
  • Node-Centric Grouping Architecture: Shifted the logical group configuration from the application level up to the node level. Nodes now own group identities, and applications running on a node automatically inherit its node identifier and group attributes, maximizing operational control and monitoring efficiency.
  • Distributed Schedule Lock (RedisScheduledJobLockProvider): Provides a Lettuce Redis-based distributed lock implementation (SET NX pattern) via the ScheduledJobLockProvider interface to ensure single-node execution for scheduled tasks across a cluster. Supports releasedOnUnlock=false to prevent duplicate task execution caused by server clock drifts among cluster nodes.
  • Virtual WebSocket over Redis: Implemented a frame-virtualization relay mechanism over Redis Pub/Sub channels. In large-scale enterprise environments behind L4 load balancers or private networks where direct peer access is restricted, a single console gateway node can transparently route WebSocket traffic to any target node.
  • Remote Command Execution and Dispatching: Coordinates async control commands (such as executing Aspectran daemon commands) across the entire cluster or targeted nodes via RemoteCommandManager using Redis Pub/Sub and each node’s LocalCommandService, gathering execution results back to the console.
  • Token-Based Distributed Authentication: Introduced password-based encryption (PBE) tokens derived from a shared secret and verified using AES with randomized IVs. This secures command dispatches and ensures communication integrity between authorized console gateways and mutual nodes.
• AppMon (aspectow-appmon)
  • Group-Level Metrics Architecture: Solved metric fragmentation caused by volatile node IDs in auto-scaling or containerized environments. By aggregating and storing time-series telemetry data by logical group ID (groupId), Aspectow guarantees continuous, uninterrupted metric monitoring regardless of node scaling.
  • On-Demand Real-Time Log Streaming: Reduced network overhead by streaming logs only when an administrator actively views a specific node in the UI. Includes a keep-alive termination mechanism where nodes automatically cease log streaming if UI session signals timeout.
• Aspectow Console (aspectow-console)
  • Web Application Control Plane Introduction: Introduced the aspectow-console module, acting as a secure administration control plane for running Aspectran-based web applications, similar to Apache Tomcat Manager or IBM WebSphere Administration Console.
  • Integrated Management Features & Dedicated Control Panels:
    • Cluster Management: Real-time cluster node overview, remote scheduler trigger controls, and async command execution window.
    • Framework Diagnostics & Utilities: Anatomy explorer for inspecting live engine rules (Translets, Beans, Aspects, Schedules, etc.), configuration viewer, real-time AsEL expression tester, interactive APON ↔ JSON/XML converter, and path wildcard matching tester.
    • Security Asset Management (Vault): Key-vault interface for registering and managing encrypted PBE credentials alongside live encryption/decryption utility panels.
    • User Admin & Security Audits: Role-based access control (RBAC) administrator management panel and audit log viewer for login history tracking.
    • Observability Dashboard (AppMon): Integrated monitoring dashboard displaying real-time telemetry (traffic, TPS, error rates, active sessions, and logs).
  • Framework Introspection & Sensitive Data Masking: Live rule inspection via AnatomyService inspects internal engine rules while automatically masking sensitive parameters (passwords, secret keys, private keys, passphrases) with ******** during APON serialization to prevent credential leaks.
  • Security Governance & Vault Management: Provides VaultService to securely store, manage, and decrypt PBE (Password-Based Encryption) tokens (SIMPLE, PERSISTENT, and TIME_LIMITED modes) for sensitive system assets.

🚀 Improvements

• AppMon (aspectow-appmon)
  • Role-Based Selective Application Loading: Enabled nodes to selectively load and monitor only the applications matching their assigned group role (e.g., API Gateway, Batch Worker), optimizing memory and CPU consumption.
  • Flexible Time-Series Persistence: Hierarchically collects, aggregates, and rolls up metrics (traffic, error rate, active sessions) over time, backed by an enhanced MyBatis atomic upsert mapper (EventCountMapper.xml) compatible with H2, MySQL, Oracle, and PostgreSQL databases.