hi all,
there should be no doubt that I'm coming from the CORBA-camp :-)
I did not misunderstand what Marc was saying in his first mail. I'd just
like to see interoperability based on open working standards (CORBA, IIOP,
OTS, DTP, XA) in jBoss. There is actually a world outside the EJB sphere
with loads of "legacy " (i.e. working) systems (and wouldn't it be nice to
use those XA-interfaces of your favorite RDBMS?). It would also be nice to
be access to access another EJB implementation (e.g. IAS) from jBoss.
Please note that I'm not suggesting that jBoss2.0 FINAL should add IIOP /
CORBA OTS support. While I'd really like to see such an addition in the
future I'm also aware that its not realistic to think that this can be done
to the FINAL.
The EJB2.0 public draft 2 mandates IIOP-support and has transaction
interoperability as an optional part.
If jBoss is going to support distributed TX at all (even if we're just
talking about two jBoss server's in different JVMs) you'll need to come up
with some kind of solution.
I thought that neither RMI/JRMP (vendors like BEA had to hack JRMP to add
support for TX-ctx propagation) nor SOAP/HTTP/SMTP/whatever supported
(standardized) contexts? . Probably I'm wrong on this one as I have no
RMI/JRMP experience:-) As for XML/HTTP I think it's not the way to go on the
back-end side (i.e. once your inside the firewall).
Not standardizing on a common on-the-wire protocol (with support for
security and transaction context) will be a big mistake that's already been
done in CORBA 1.0 back in the early nineties. I guess that Rickard is
against agreeing on a common protocol. I think if you want total freedom
you're begging for isolation.
There is no standard XML/HTTP/... protocol yet. SOAP lacks lots of features.
If you look at SOAP it should also be terrible slow in comparison with a
binary protocol (like IIOP and I guess also JRMP?). I'll verify this in my
soon to be finished performance test suite (PETS). I should just be a matter
of switching between ZOAP and JRMP - right?
One thing that both Ole and Rickard failed to recognize: In my scenario I
used the term "multi" (should have written heterogeneous instead). Whatever
proprietary solution that you'll come up with won't do the job for me as I'm
seeking _interoperability_ between different implementations both on the
client-side and on the server-side.
I think that Rickards argument that you could still use jBoss as a client to
a CORBA server is good. I think that this will be more common than writing
CORBA clients against ugly RMIish IDL interfaces. However I still want to
hear your EJB-EJB interoperability story (including support for distributed
TX across different vendors)...
Cheers,
Per
