At JavaPolis, I showed a couple of Ajax demos using Shale remote method calls. After the demos, I got to thinking...
The back-end stuff for remoting--AbstractListCompletions and company--is great. But I don't understand the requirement that remote calls must be made to Commons Chain commands. That requirement seems artificial to me, and induces another layer that developers must understand and configure just to make a remote method call. As it stands, to invoke a remote method call, you must: 1. Implement a Jakarta Commons Chain command. 2. Add an entry to the remote catalog for your command in chain-config.xml. 3. Invoke the appropriate URL using JavaScript. It seems to me that steps 1&2 could be eliminated if we got rid of the Chain command requirement and instead invoked methods on managed beans using reflection. Sort of a remote value binding. david
