"Frank D. Greco" wrote:
> We're trying to build an app that sends a copy of all events
> to another instance of the app. A collaborative app...
>
> We now have this capability. We'd like to extend this
> feature over the web using tunneling.
>
> We are thinking of using a servlet to proxy the events to the
> "on our side of the firewall" instance of the app.
>
> Does this architecture makes sense? Someone told us that
> a servlet cannot make a persistent connection to the (external)
> app, so it would be very slow and exhibit "jerky" behavior. We'd
> have to build some sort of polling mechanism to get devices using
> servlets... which we'd like to avoid.
>
> Any comments are appreciated. Thanks.
>
I think this approach makes a lot of sense, because you can avoid firewall
issues by tunnelling through HTTP -- as long as the request / response model
does not get in your way. It also leverages the fact that request and response
data to a servlet need not be HTML -- you might find that serialized Java
objects, or data encoded in XML, work very nicely for you.
As for persistent connections to external apps, I would submit that a large
number of servlet-based apps maintain persistent JDBC connections to databases
(rather than connecting on each request), which is pretty much the same thing
as connecting to an external app. In many of these cases, techniques such as
connection pooling are used to improve the scalability of the architecture --
the number of connections in the pool can limit the maximum number of
simultaneous users (at a particular instant), but it need not limit the total
number of active users that are in between requests.
> Frank G.
Craig McClanahan
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