Scott M Stark wrote:
> Good point and that is what I have gathered from futher reading. Is there a
> publicly available description of the proposed connector design?
Short answer: No, not really.
Long answer: ;-)
The J2EE Application Programming Model (APM), which was just recently
renamed to the "Sun BluePrints Design Guidelines for J2EE" (released
12/17, download from http://java.sun.com/j2ee/blueprints/ ) has a
chapter devoted to EIS (Enterprise Information System) access. See
chapter 6. There's some mention of connectors in there. The J2EE
spec also mentions connector, but no real elaboration on them. The
connector specification is still in development, and only available
to the folks working on the spec.
A connector looks a lot like JDBC. A connector plugs into a
container much in the same way that a JDBC driver plugs into one.
The connector supports defined interfaces for connection management,
security management, and transaction management so that the container
can interact with the connector. So if you look at how you would go
about writing a JDBC driver, and modelled your connector to support
similar interfaces, you would be headed in the right direction.
Connectors are designed to plug into a container, and a connector
supports the connection, security, and transaction interfaces so
that the container can interact with the connector to provide
container-managed support for those aspects. In your case, since
you can't plug your custom connector into a container (at least
not in a non-proprietary way right now), you would have to employ
bean-managed connection, security, and transaction management.
Your connector would need to provide the APIs for the beans to make
the necessary calls to obtain connections, log into your resource,
and start and end transactions, etc. These APIs should be modelled
around the current APIs for these facilities, where available (e.g.,
JTA).
Having said all that, some containers today provide proprietary ways
to connect to external resources (write connectors). If that
doesn't bother you, and your container supports it, you could write a
custom connector per your app server's specs.
Paul
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