All We currently have a J2EE application as follows. The application is a portfolio management reporting system. The client is a fairly heavyweight swing client that loads a bunch of data via ejbs (session facades) and then generates fairly complex reports on the front-end. All of the reports are live. As data changes, either because prices change with some market data feed or trades are done and updates are sent through the app server, the reports recalculate and the views change to reflect these changes. We want to lighten up the client and move the data load and report generation off of the client. The issue we have is where should these live reports reside. Should we make this "report server" simply another J2EE application not residing in the ejb tier but rather itself hanging off of the app server, possibly still managed via jmx? Does it make sense to make these reports themselves beans? and if so, what form of bean? they are fairly complex and the generated report is not persisted, though it may be shared in the case of a report based off of a report definition that is publicly readable. They are also asynchronous in that they respond to updates, suggesting an MDB if anything, but using ejbs while theoretically nice in that these are shared objects the view on which needs to be kept up to date across a number of clients might be like using a sledgehammer to break an egg... Right now, our implementation has these running on a separate instance of a jvm on the client tier, accessed via JMS DOF (Distributed Object Framework) which is on sourceforge and actually works quite nicely. If running on the server is the answer but not as beans, then what? If as beans, why beyond theoretically they are shared "components". At a glance, it would seem that the container should be the right place for managing these, we certainly don't want to rewrite ejb. By this logic, any object that is potentially shared should live as a bean, but where does it end? The other thing is, rewriting the report objects as beans could be substantial effort and it's unclear it would be worth it.
I'd appreciate thoughts on this, religion aside. Regards Eric
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