Sounds to me like his system is basically identical in most respects to the one I came up with for a virtual private exchange (sort of an auction server type system). We used SOAP::Lite entirely, each XSP taglib was just a thin wrapper over a stub API that called back to the application server running on a seperate set of back-end servers. The back-end servers in turn implemented a series of SOAP services that were very "bean-like" in there structure, though personally I think EJB is kaka in many respects, still the basic concept is sound.
In our case we created our own object system, though there are some pretty good ones like Tangram and SPOPS out there for perl already. You might check them out. I will warn you though, there are some real hairy things to deal with! Everything at all levels has to be basically sessionless because you never know when people are going to come and go. You can't really cache objects in memory on the application server since you don't have session affinity between it and the front-end (and even if you did you'd have multiple caches, one for each back-end child apache). Of course you could implement your own SOAP server on the backend that was a single process, but even then it would need threads and perl threads can't share variables as of yet, so its a pretty big stumbling block. Overall though it was a nice approach and worked well for us, though our marketing people were too feeble to actually sell the project properly, sigh.... On Tuesday 04 February 2003 12:25 pm, Pavel Penchev wrote: > Hi, > > I got interested in your post - I'm in the planning stage of a system just > like yours: AxKit as a front delivery toolkit and a custom application > server as a business logic backbone. Is Storable fast enough for complex > data structures returned from the RMI/RPC calls - results from database > queries, complex hashes, etc? I guess the app server servers some bean-like > perl modules - do you have a standartized skeleton for perl modules turning > them into "Perl beans"? I've met some very old projects in cpan that had > done some work in the bean direction. > > Are you planning to release the app server as open source ;)) > > Pavel > ----- Original Message ----- > From: Tom Howe > To: Robin Berjon > Cc: brian wheeler ; [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Tuesday, February 04, 2003 5:30 PM > Subject: Re: AxKit for web applications > > > Here at Deluxe Media Services we use AxKit at the front end (on our > webservers) and a custom perl application server sitting behind to handle > all our business logic. All database queries, data munging, session > handling etc is handled on the application servers. > > Every page requested is based on the same fundamental XSP page that > forges a connection with the application server. Additional XSP > components are then included where required to provide functionality on a > web page. These components use the connection with the application server > to send/receive object/method type requests. We have a simple RMI/RPC type > interface on the application server that now supports SOAP but the default > communications is a fast proprietary message using Storable. > > The advantage of such a setup is that > * we have an additional layer of security (keeping all business > data/logic away from the front end web servers) > * we have higher separation of code/content which makes it easier to > manage > * we have a more granular means of scaling our website > > The connection required for each page does have a performance hit but we > have not found it to be an issue and the fact that we can scale in a > fairly linear fashion more than makes up for this. > > Feel free to ask for more details if this is a route you are interested > in. > > Tom Howe > > On Tue, 4 Feb 2003, Robin Berjon wrote: > > brian wheeler wrote: > > > On Tue, 2003-02-04 at 01:29, Kip Hampton wrote: > > >>I personally favor using something like CGI::XMLApplication because > > >> the model fits the way I like to work, but nothing that baroque is > > >> required. Again, as long as it can return an XML document to the > > >> Provider when needed, it can be as quick-hacky or as over-engineered > > >> as the situation warrants. > > > > > > I've found that using Apache::RegistryFilter and Apache::ASP filtered > > > into AxKit makes for neat fun. > > > > I'm curious as to the performance of that kind of setup, do you have > > any numbers? > > > > -- > > Robin Berjon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > Research Engineer, Expway http://expway.fr/ > > 7FC0 6F5F D864 EFB8 08CE 8E74 58E6 D5DB 4889 2488 > > > > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Tod Harter Giant Electronic Brain --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
