Chris Harris wrote:

> Of course, my original point was simply that you *could*
> implement the pattern, not that you *should*!

:) There's always the possible and realistic....

Anyway, you've given me some interesting pointers so I might recommend
we do a little prototyping to see what we're going to get ourselves
into. On friday arvo we got the formal go-ahead from management to use
J2EE 1.3 for the next revision (re-architect from a 2-tier to n-tier).
That should make it much easier for us to deal with these issues.

> Obviously, different JMS providers have different
> priorities and different levels of scalability. Some of the
> bigger players in the MOM space are capable of pumping
> 1000's of messages a second without too much worry,
> providing you are prepared to spend the money on hardware.

Hardware doesn't seem to be an issue. The pilot project for the new
development is using Sun's mid-range servers. Probably something like a
E4K5. The real system will be a E10Ks or maybe go with the new 15K
boxes.

Any of the app-server vendors on here want to pipe up with some
benchmarking data claims for their JMS/MDB capabilities? Might be a
chance to sell us your software ;)

> A UI with 5K bean references sounds like a recipe for
> disaster to me. Don't you use value objects? This is where
> using JMS gives the most value.

Unfortunately, not my decision. That's what the client wants to see. We
already use a value objects scheme to try to cache as much as possible
but the existing problem is refresh time and a (IHMO stupid) decision to
flush the client-side cache every 5 seconds! As it's my job to
re-architect the system I'm trying my best to convince them that it's a
really, really bad idea, but that's what they want to see. The biggest
issue here is that they have this multi-page JTable setup that
represents all of the catalogue data. They tend to sort it very often
(the old click on the column header action to sort by any column) so you
end up needing to make sure you have all the 5K objects available so
that if they change the sort order, the table refreshes in something
resembling reasonable time. Working with clients, the sorting seems to
be done about every 30 seconds or less (ie very high frequency) so we're
stuck trying to get decent UI performance in combination with the
back-end.

> make the changes to the cache. I'd be amazed if your update
> rate was that high, but then I don't have specifics of your
> application.

Biggest issue is the import/export combination. The application is a
"filter" catalogue engine that sits between the external parties and the
internal system. Thus a lot of things go in and out very fast (eg
conversions on the fly between different data schemas such as a SOAP or
XML-RPC based request). So when changes occur, it's very bursty traffic.

> poor thing couldn't keep up. We ended up being advised by
> the app-server consultant to "go round the app server for
> speed" and push into the database directly. Luckily we were
> able to do this (no dependencies on the objects).

We're trying to go the other way :) Basic problem of too many different
application types accessing the central data system to want/allow direct
access to the database (main reason for shifting away from the existing
2-tier architecture). However, we will be providing semi-direct access
for speed-critical issues using stateless session beans so hopefully we
won't kill things too much. Way too much interdependencies and
complexity on the data structures.

--
Justin Couch                         http://www.vlc.com.au/~justin/
Freelance Java Consultant                  http://www.yumetech.com/
Author, Java 3D FAQ Maintainer                  http://www.j3d.org/
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"Humanism is dead. Animals think, feel; so do machines now.
Neither man nor woman is the measure of all things. Every organism
processes data according to its domain, its environment; you, with
all your brains, would be useless in a mouse's universe..."
                                              - Greg Bear, Slant
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