Hi,
just to throw in an opinion of someone who's using http-tunneling in real world EJB
applications:
I believe that there are cases where the performance penalty for http tunneling is
purely acedemic e.g. if you take client applications for remotely administering some
server software. A pretty common task for us is to provide an application of the
above-mentioned type, that has to be able to communicate through server-side AND
client-side firewalls. It's much easier to develop a JFC-UI that communicates with a
server-side facade to an EJB Framework than trying to abuse HTML and servlets for
creating a user-friendly UI. In those cases, where the firewall environment is simply
GIVEN (anyone who has encountered the flexibility of corporate security policies
knows what I mean) you often just have the choice between those two options. There
the overall performance of the application that solves the problem (which is what
really counts) of http-tunnelled RMI or whatever is by orders of magnitude better
than the overall performance of the HTML-UI (on a WAN) simply because the amount of
data that is moved on each request is typically much smaller. Although I agree that
the evolution of standards for "real" communication through firewalls should be
pushed forward, I still think it would help to have a very simple standard for doing
things I just described, just to keep the real world from using proprietary solutions
(which we are at the moment) just because in their particular case tunneling is the
best solution, given the project's constraints. From our experience those cases are
not rare. The other thing I would expect of such a standard would be the availabilty
of different implementations to choose from. How many (especially of the low price
region) EJB vendors provide a tunneling solution? As far as I know neither ejipt nor
orionserver nor Voyager nor JOnAS do (BTW we are looking for one ;-). I'm sure if
people agreed on some kind of XML-RPCish mechanism, we wouldn't have to wait for
implementations for too long but I may be wrong.
just my 2c,
robert
--
(-) Robert Kr�ger
(-) SIGNAL 7 Gesellschaft f�r Informationstechnologie mbH
(-) Br�der-Knau�-Str. 79 - 64285 Darmstadt,
(-) Tel: 06151 665401, Fax: 06151 665373
(-) [EMAIL PROTECTED], www.signal7.de
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