Anyone working on an improved integration of EJB Stateful Session Beans? Is it possible to integrate them at all based on the current JAXRPC specification? There seems to be no appropriate component of the JAXRPC API that could be used for the EJBObject.remove() method. Or may be setting the session.maintain property to false on an already "used" Call instance may be implemented so as to result in calling the remove() method on the cached remote interface? In other words: are the properties of a Call instance still writable after a connection has been established and associated with the instance? (I assume that that the binding instances returned by ServiceLocators internally use the Call interface. Actually, I do not know where this ServiceLocator layer comes from. Is it an Axis specific concept? I did not find it in the JAXRPC spec.)
I am also wondering what would be the best way to deal with the NoSuchObjectException as a result of a session timeout. My instinctive approach would be doing nothing and letting the user catch and deal with the exception. The user would typically deal with the exception by re-creating the service instance, which will result in obtaining a new EBJSession reference. An alternative solution could be to override in EJBProvider the invokeMethod method so that the session cached reference would be invalidated and the exception would be re-thrown. (It is clear that the user must be notified of the previously used session having become invalid, since the user may implicitly rely on state information associated with the session.) With the second approach a new remote interface to the stateful session would be obtained and cached automatically. Technically this is acceptable and even simpler to use than the first approach, but --this is my vague feeling-- it is likely to lead to some confusion by not exposing the semantics of session creation. I do not know, however, how the first approach could be translated in the ServiceLocator et al. layer. My guess would be that the user should regenerate the binding instance using the appropriate ServiceLocator.
Any comments are appreciated. (Please, do not treat me very harshly, if I am missing obvious elements in the axis implementation (or in the JAXRPC concepts for that matter): I am much more of a casual user than a developer of Axis. (That's why I am posting on the user list.))
Peter
