Dear EJB'ers,
My colleagues and I were attempting to model a telco application using EJB.
The application currently runs on a CORBA server and makes heavy use of
threading to perform work in parallel. Because of the programming
limitations in EJB (cf section 16.4) we are not sure that we can model this
application in EJB?.
This application creates customer's phone bills. For each customer, the bill
consists of the aggregation of the costs over all phones during the billing
period. The costs are contained in call detail records. These records are
stored in a partitioned database, spread across many physical disks, in
order to support simultaneous queries. The current application creates
subprocesses which more or less simultaneously queries all of a customer's
phones for records within a given time span. The result of each subprocess
is asynchronously returned to an aggregation function which waits for all
subprocesses to "report in". It seems like this aggregation function cannot
be implemented as an EJBean because, as a bean, it cannot spawn threads,
which is key to creating the necessary parallelism. The parallelism is
necessary in order to complete the bill in a reasonable time. Note that the
hardware of the system is set up for this task: multiple disks, multiple
cpus, multiple paths from cpu to disk...we need the software to take
advantage of these capabilities.
If we stick the aggregation function into, say, a CORBA server, then the
question becomes, why EJB? There is a lot of business logic at that point
(tax calculations, customized customer items, etc.) that seem beneficial to
express within a bean.
Thanks in advance for any insights...
Randy McRee
Sr. Software Developer
Tandem division of COMPAQ
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