Thread does not progress past ZMQ.context(1)

Question

I am trying to implement a simple pub sub example where I have a server and am publishing periodic notifications about uptime to clients.

This is being run as a part of a Windows service - bundled with InnoSetup and launch4j and Apache procrun/prunsrv.

The thread does not go beyond the creation of the context. What could be going wrong?

import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.Date;
import org.msgpack.MessagePack;
import org.slf4j.Logger;
import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory;
import org.zeromq.ZMQ;
import org.ocpsoft.prettytime.*;

/**
 * Notification service for updates to configuration in the logger
 * @author Aalhad
 */
public class NotificationServer extends Thread {

    private final Logger log = LoggerFactory.getLogger(this.getClass());
    private volatile boolean shouldRun;

    private PrettyTime upTime;
    private PreferenceManager prefMgr = PreferenceManager.getInstance();
    public ZMQ.Context context;
    public ZMQ.Socket pubSocket;

    public NotificationServer() {
        log.debug("Entered notification server constructor ......................");
        context = ZMQ.context(1);
        log.debug("THIS DOES NOT GET PRINTED ... it is as if we are blocking in ZMQ.context!!!");
        pubSocket = context.socket(ZMQ.PUB);
        pubSocket.bind("tcp://*:"+prefMgr.getNotificationPort());
        pubSocket.bind("ipc://powerlogger");

        log.debug("NotificationServer created");
    }

    @Override
    public void run() {
        log.debug("Entering run loop of Notification Server");
        setStarting();
        log.debug("Writing to tcp port: {}", prefMgr.getNotificationPort());
        upTime = new PrettyTime();        
        ConfigMessage msg = prefMgr.getConfigMessage();
        MessagePack msgPack = new MessagePack();
        byte[] sendBytes;

        try {
            log.debug("Going ahead and sending: {}", msg);
            sendBytes = msgPack.write(msg);
            pubSocket.send(sendBytes);
            log.debug("Finished sending msg");
        } catch (IOException ex) {
            log.error("Could not send first config notification",ex);
        }

        //On starts and restarts, we send the current configuration to our
        //subscribers
        String upSince;
        while (shouldRun()) {
            log.trace("In the notification loop");
            upSince = upTime.format(new Date(0));
            log.trace("============================================================== Started: {}", upSince );
            ConfigMessage cfgMsg = new ConfigMessage();
            cfgMsg.msgType = MessageType.UPSINCE;
            cfgMsg.message = upSince;

            try {
                // ..... code here to write the time into a
                // messagepack structure and publishing it 
                sleep(5000);
                log.trace("After sleeping in notification loop");
            } catch (InterruptedException ex) {
                log.error("Notification thread disturbed when sleeping.");
            }
        }
    }

    public synchronized void shutDown() {
        shouldRun = false;
        log.trace("Set shouldRun to false in discovery server");
        try {
            if (pubSocket != null) {
                pubSocket.close();
                context.term();
            }
        }
        catch(Exception e) {
            log.error("Interesting situation when trying to close the discovery socket when shutting down",e);
        }
    }

    public synchronized void setStarting() {
        shouldRun = true;        
    }

    private synchronized boolean shouldRun() {
        return shouldRun;
    }       
}

Answer 1

Found the bug. It was a simple issue of forgetting to provide the jar for the service when creating the installer. The logs did not show that the class could not be found.

Fixed.