Paul Hammant wrote:
> 
> It still won't help in your communication with Coocoon using RMI.
> Cocoon is not a block in it's own right *yet*.  I guess if it was it
> would also solve your problem.  I've talked to Berin about this and he
> thinks that it could, in the future, be a block as well as a WAR file
> deployable app.

This mail may be a bit off-topic, but perhaps it can help thinking along
different lines for communicating with Cocoon.

I use SOAP (via a self-written Cocoon taglib) to communicate with
Cocoon. The taglib is downloadable from my homepage
http://ulim.cocoonhost.com/ (however, it only supports Cocoon1).

In any event the taglib is a generic SOAP client that acts as a HTTP
interface on top of SOAP services. That means the clients do not have to
speak SOAP, they just have to speak HTTP. So you can write clients in
Perl or whatever language suits you - after all, why should programmatic
clients require a particular platform (language/library/runtime), when
interactive clients (webbrowsers) don't? I believe that programmatic
clients should enjoy the same freedom as interactive clients and
therefore speak HTTP.

The server-side SOAP services need to have the SOAP libraries available
(I use Apache SOAP), but no special code is needed - so you can take any
of your programs and let it run as a SOAP service without changing the
code. I have a fairly elaborate installation of SOAP services and
programmatic clients, who use them. The SOAP services can run on a
server different from the machine Cocoon runs on, as can obviously the
clients. The whole shebang has been in production for about a year or so
and proved to be maintainable and reliable.

I will eventually convert these SOAP services into Avalon blocks, since
Avalon is obviously a more robust and feature-rich platform than my
quick hack. But there's a couple of functionalities that I need for
that:

- a SOAP communication layer for Avalon/Phoenix
- an HTTP layer on top of the SOAP layer, so my programmatic clients
only need to know HTTP
- JMX or another management concept, so I can see how that ties in with
the SOAP stuff
- XML services like those in Cocoon, but more modularized

As we're running a production system under Avalon/Phoenix, I'm not too
keen on changing the basic architecture too frequently, so I'll wait for
a clearer picture on the above issues and meanwhile let my SOAP
installation do its thing.

Ulrich

-- 
Ulrich Mayring
DENIC eG, Systementwicklung

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